TBPN Live - Delian Asparouhov, Michael Mignano, Chrisman Frank, Kennan Davison, Markets are Down, We Love Bubbles

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@TechnologyBrothersPod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(01:14) - Markets are Down (22:47) - History in the WSJ (34:10) - OpenAI's $12B Deal with CoreWeave (39:30) - CPG Takeover (51:20) - Meghan Markle's Netflix Show (57:45) - The Timeline (01:07:43) - Kennan Davison (01:23:33) - Chrisman Frank (01:50:30) - Michael Mignano (02:22:45) - Delian Asparouhov

Early light. What's so proud? Lee we hail. We're live. We're live. Welcome to TVP. And it is Tuesday, March 11th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. Even though the market's down, we are making the best of it. We are up. It's a golden era for short sellers. Yes. That's what it is. It's a bull market in put options. Yes. So rough times out there, but no matter what you're doing, you got to do it on public. Go to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry leading yields trusted by millions. Get on public, move your money around, do whatever you think is best to your own research

and make a play. You know what we're a fan of? Buying when others are scared. Yeah, that's good. That's what we do. Yeah. When others are fearful. There's blood in the streets. Yeah, when others are fearful. When others are fearful, we get greedy. Yeah, that's good. That's what we do. Yeah. When others are flood in the streets. Yeah, when others are fearful, when others

are fearful, we get greedy. Yeah, greedy, greedy when others are fearful. Anyway, moving on, we're talking about the market crash. Here's what happened. The Wall Street Journal is breaking it down the stock market yesterday. Trade threatens sent the Dow down more than 600 points. The Dow industrials dropped after President Trump said he would ramp up tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada. 50% shares of industrial and financial firms were among the biggest

decline in the S&P 500. All 11 sectors in the broad index were trading lower. Fears about a recession sparked a sell-off Monday with sliding tech shares spurring the Nasdaq's biggest loss since 2022. President Trump declined to rule out a recession on Sunday and said his economic shakeup would result in a period of transition. It was a really emotionally charged decline, said Katie Stockton, founder and managing partner

of Fairlead Strategies, but she added that this is more than just a brief pullback that we're going through new Labor Department data showed that the US had 7.74 million job openings in January up from 7.51 million in December slightly above the consensus for six point seven point six million openings so Unemployment ticking up too many job openings, not enough people getting placed in their roles. Big tech stocks recovered. They started to recover from some of their losses. Tesla shares regained some ground after the EV maker shed 15% of its market value on Monday.

I saw that account. I saw an account post. There's that iconic shot of what's the Chris Paul is the basketball player where he's like Chris Paul drills a three to close the lead close the gap to 40 points. That's that's Tesla going up 3% today after being down. It's it's rough out there. But we've said it before naturally aspirated V12 with a gated manual shifter in the next Tesla Roadster and it's a ten trillion dollar stock you heard it here first. There you go Verizon's not financial not financial advice But if you see them deliver a naturally aspirated v12 with a gated manual shifter We know that we will be going turbo long. We will be going turbo long We know that we will be going turbo long. We will be going turbo long

Verizon stock dropped more than 7% was the weakest performer of the Dow industrials Tuesday morning a company executive flagged heightened industry Competition at an investor conference so Monopolists complains about competition So a lot of a lot of reactions on the timeline a lot Gill here He says quote he puts in quotes most things are not as serious as they feel in the moment I don't know if that was about the market crashing, but it's everything It's all priced in I think so, but yes, I I was just workshopping a post Which was being greedy is low-key goaded when others are fearful. It's extremely stupid but you signed it. I love it.

What was the original format of that? I don't know. It was something funny. I like that. Yeah, just send it. Okay, anyway. This is just for the record. It's a Warren Buffett quote. It says be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful And so by low sell high Anyway, the Kobe, yesy letter Has a thread here on the real reason that markets are crashing and I thought we could maybe take a tour through this Over the last two months the s&p 500 and crypto have erased combined five and a half trillion dollars in market cap

I think we need a moment of silence for that. Yep This moment of silence is brought to you by public comm fantastic multi invest multi asset investing products trusted by millions Okay, that's actually the show enough silence We have we have just witnessed one of the most sudden shifts in sentiment since 2020 what's happening. Let us explain Let's begin with the timeline. Markets have known the trade war was coming since as early as mid 2024. In December, tariff threats ramped up.

We saw many all-time highs in the S&P 500 after that. Even after the trade war began February 1st, we saw more all-time highs. Since February 20th, the S&P 500 has raised a whopping 4.5 trillion in market cap. Yeah, just, I guess, quick comment here. Saying markets have known the trade war was coming is not exactly,

not exactly, like it's hard to say, or it's hard to basically position that as fact. This is stated as a fact, but this is clearly their opinion, right? Many people thought Trump would run, but many people also thought Trump was not actually serious about tariffs. And still in many ways, the market isn't fully pricing in tariffs because there's sort of this back and forth.

He announces something. He just announced 50% tariffs on Canadian aluminum products this morning, but who knows if that's real, right? There was like a day last week, I think it was Wednesday, where if you paid some big tariff bill, like at the end of the day, it was like, you shouldn't have paid it. Very chaotic.

So I think the markets, when you look at the last Trump presidency and what the stock market did then, I think the markets to date, the sentiment has just been Trump presidency generally good for the economy because he's a guy that cherishes the economy. Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing has become very oddly political. I mean, we covered it during the Trump pump post. Trump presidency becomes political. It's not that. It's that it is that for the first time in in my life, at least I feel like like small 2% moves in the market are driven by executive level.

Like the narrative is this is the this is the problem of the president. Like, yeah, like during the housing crash, you know, there's like a multi multi month sell down and a big recession and way over leverage. And then people start asking questions and they start asking questions about, well, who's responsible and impart the banks and part in deregulation, they go back and they find different different

pieces of legislation that might have led to this. Some of it came from the Bush administration, some of it came from the Obama administration. And then, and so it becomes like this bigger narrative, but this is a time where crypto pops and people will be like, oh, this is because of Trump. And then S&P goes down a couple percent and people will be, this is because of Trump, it's the worst thing ever. And it all just, my takeaway is that we need a president

who is just hyper-focused on the short-term stock market returns. And that's all they're doing every day. They're not thinking long-term at all. Like a high-frequency trader type. Someone who's just purely- It's like a crypto protocol founder posting. Exactly, which is just complete feedback into the market.

Trump is the closest president we've had to that. Very close, very close. But he's not doing is in many feedback into the market. Trump is the closest president we've had very close. Very close. But he's not doing enough. Even even he's put out statements like, OK, I don't really I'm not worried about the short term performance of the stock market. I'm trying to make America great again over some long period of time. No, I want him to say yes, I do care if the stock market went to to to 2% down. Interest rates are negative. Yeah, there's some angle here where he says in the first quarter of my presidency, the S and P 500 was X, Y, Z by the fourth. It it it'd you know, more than three X. Yeah. You know, so he's maybe he's positioning, positioning. He's really playing the long

game. Maybe the president should have some sort of, you know, how Elon had that pay package that was like, if he can get the if he can get the Tesla stock up to a certain amount he gets more of it he gets rewarded for high share prices is that the president should have that where like if the S&P goes up by a certain amount then they get to stay in power longer but if it drops then they get fired and then we get a new president and we get new hyper financialized hyper financial it's already kind of like that. Right. You see these senators that are just running up these crazy operating hedge funds. Yeah. And you know the more the more the better they do in the in the public markets the more they can invest into their campaigns which the more inside information they can get better investors. This is a great

virtuous cycles. Yeah. One hand washes the other. Yeah, that's what we're going for here. Yeah. All right, let's get let's get back into the way the NASDAQ is sadly just 8% away from entering a bear market for the first time since 2022. What changed so quickly the trade? The Kobe SE letter is arguing the trade war is simply the scapegoat. The real reason behind the market's decline is a sudden shift in risk appetite. We've gone from extreme greed to extreme fear in a matter of days. Positioning was so polarized that we have swung in the complete opposite direction. And long mag seven is the most crowded trade. Everyone agrees that tech is great and the AI narrative. And so everyone's

pumped into that. Where it gets even more interesting is that institutional capital exited before this decline in tech stocks. Heading into 2025 hedge fund exposure to mag-7 stocks fell to a 22 month low. Let's take a look at the divergence between the Nasdaq and fund positioning. On February 9th institutional investors built the largest Ethereum short position in history. This came as retail investors piled into crypto on the hopes of a US strategic reserve crypto is down one one institution Yeah went turbo long and that was world Liberty fi which heath. Yeah. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah What is it? Eric Trump was basically a theory and bull posting, you know like, now it's my opinion,

but now's a really good time to be stacking in there. Unfortunately, another moment of silence. Not if they didn't sell yet, but they're down hundreds of millions. You know, the whole like, oh, not financial advice, I'm responsible. You could get rid of that. A centralized blockchain that could fix, do price fixing,

would be cool. Step one is like basically a stable coin. To negative 10%. And then the fund rates, the Fed funds rate needs to legally be negative 10% forever. Yeah. And then maybe permanently, you could just legally mandate that the S&P grows at 10% a year forever. Yeah, just there's something there prices

Yeah, something exactly just we should workshop. Yeah, we should Maybe maybe throw it into a blog post Yeah Crypto is even more supportive of our thesis take a look at the bullish crypto developments that have happened over the last two months Even the even the US Bitcoin Reserve became a sell the news event. So what's changed? In December and many and to be clear many people said Trump launching a token the US Bitcoin reserve became a sell the news event. So what's changed in December. And to be clear, many people said Trump launching a token is so obviously the top because there's nothing,

there's really nothing, the US government can't launch a token, right? It would just be competing. I mean, nothing's off the table anymore, but competing with your own currency is not- Every time someone said, oh, this is the end of the road for the craziness in crypto. Yeah they've been pretty it very clearly felt like a massive yeah you know sort of

dying breath of a bull market and retail had just gotten hosed again and again and again throughout 2024. So all of the all the meme took a lot of people wanted to blame it on the non-alarm. Oh yeah. Because it on the nonia. Oh, yeah. Because it sort of pulled the wind out of Trump coin, everybody, you know, felt like they were losing a bunch of money or we're losing money. Yeah. But anyway, so so they go to this Apollo risk list. Apollo was predicting a 90% chance of tariffs coming in 2025. While they were also predicting a 0% chance of a US recession. Fear and greed indices in crypto and stocks have hit their lowest since the 2022 bear

market this month. Last year, crypto saw extreme greed levels of 92 plus, but now it's at a polar opposite of 17. Sentiment is the ultimate driver of price in any market, regardless of fundamentals. When sentiment shifts so quickly, outflows hit record highs and cause flash crashes as we have seen. How do you put the probability of a US recession

at 0% if you're Apollo? That is crazy. When the president is actively threatening massive trade wars and things that, I think, I think, any GEP hiccup and boom. Yeah, Bucko Capital had a really good post, which was basically like,

the president told me he was gonna destroy the economy, so I listened and sold everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's obviously an exaggeration, but there's some, there's some truth to that. Yeah, like the, like Trump can be, Trump can be sort of bullish. Like ripping a bandaid off. Yeah, but there's some there's some truth to that. Yeah, like the Trump Trump can be sort of a bandaid off. Yeah, it's not it's not Oh, this is gonna be all all sunshine and

rainbows. Although people were certainly talking like it was gonna be. So small cap funds saw 3.5 billion in outflows, mid cap funds saw outflows 2.1 billion sectoral funds saw 4.5 billion in outflows. Mid-cap funds saw outflows of 2.1 billion. Sectoral funds saw 4.5 billion in outflows. Once again, shift in positioning. This means that getting ahead of shifts in sentiment will be the most profitable strategy in 2025, they argue. VIX surges over 70% in one month. The swings are going to broaden. This is something that a lot of people have been talking about. Even Jeff Lewis. Markets are getting more aggressive. There will be more swings, more volatility, probably

more opportunities. Sentiment spreads faster is one thing, right? You can imagine a world where now, historically, you have your college friend group, guys that you just talk about random business, stocks, et cetera. You might get together with them once every six months. And they're like, oh, yeah, I'm pretty short the market right now.

And everybody goes and they go short. Now it's a group chat. And it's just sort of that sentiment spreads really quickly. We had a friend who went super long Tesla basically a month ago, exactly. It's down 40% since then. RIP. Yeah, yeah.

The idea of going to something like what happened in like the seventies where there's like languishing stagflation for like a decade or even post housing crash where the economy was in the doldrums for like years seems unthinkable because the swings are just so fast now with COVID down and up and then same thing with the interest rate crisis down and up so fast. Through technical and fundamental analysis, they've been trading

these swings, stocks, commodities, bonds, and crypto are highly tradable and they're arguing that you should sign up for their stuff. But anyway, kind of an interesting post, but packing McCormick had one of the best jokes of the day. He says, now would be the perfect time to go to hit go on the strategic NASDAQ reserve. I love it. What a banger. Yeah. And who was saying that if the US government needed them to manage, oh, it was Keith on the show. He said if we started a US sovereign wealth fund and you know, Kosovo was asked to manage some of the funds, he would do it, he would oblige as a patriot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here Keith, go deploy $1010 trillion become the next masa. Great. Great. I mean, the the the the steel man on the strategic Nasdaq reserve is like the original Peter Thiel thesis on like a cryptocurrency that's backed by hard hard assets are kind of like the MakerDAO idea, but for like, you know, non crypto companies and the idea that you could, you could have like something that looks like a tradable bond or a tradable ETF slice. And when I go to pay you, I'm paying you not just a dollar piece of paper that's maybe backed by gold, maybe backed by nothing. It's backed

by the cash flows of Apple, Google, Amazon, and every American business. Feels very stable, feels very hard to implement, but was always like an interesting turbo libertarian dream of the late 90s. Liquidity says, PE funds are the Chad memes watching public markets plummet while keeping their portfolio marks flat. Always nice to be in privates when the market's down.

Power Bottom Dad says, Elon is down almost $21 billion today. That puts him at only, checks notes, $113 billion richer than the next richest person alive. We did it, Reddit. I love it. So yeah, everybody's losing, all the billionaires. What do they call the super billionaires? Wasn't that the phrase the Wall Street Journal tried to coin gigabiners?

Giga would have been way better, but you know, they didn't get an air gig between trillionaire and the centi billionaire is confusing because some people use it for centi millionaire. Yeah, so it needs I think giga is the right one. Giga Giga billionaires over 100. Yeah. You heard it here for first folks. Garcia Capital says I can tell the bottom is close because traders are starting to share Bible verses. I haven't seen this yet, but maybe I'm not following enough. I don't follow enough. I really see this, but certainly sharing Warren Buffett quotes. Yes. He said, you know, he's known for saying, being greedy is low-key goaded when others are fearful.

Did you post that already? Yeah. Yeah, it was great. And a lot of people were saying, yeah, like, oh, like, you know, now is a good day to learn about dollar cost averaging. It's like, you weren't dollar cost averaging the last month. Like, now you're going to start? The most memorable moment for me as an investor,

where I really thought it was entirely over, like things were never going to come back, was seeing Ethereum at $800 and thinking, where's the bottom on this? Like what is the, because with cryptocurrencies, yeah, there's some network value and activity and all that stuff and fees and stuff like that.

But I was like, we got no cash flows here. And I don't know if this protocol is even going to exist in two years with this was when FTX had collapsed. Oh, yeah. It was just so much contagion. Very dark. And then of course it was like right when I thought that was the absolute best time to buy.

Yeah, what were the darkest moments? I remember the SUV crisis was pretty crazy. I remember just looking at my phone all night and just being like, whoa. And then the other one was the Sam Altman open AI drama over the weekend. That was like when he got fired and then went back. That was like, wow, I can't believe this is happening.

This is like history in the making. You were calling your second secondary's broker and like sell everything. No. Never. That was less of like a shock to the market. Yeah. But the SBB thing was clearly like, okay,

like the market is bad like rough anyway, if you're losing sleep over the markets Why don't you improve your sleep by getting an eighth sleep go to eight sleep comm slash TBPN? There nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. It's fantastic. It's a fantastic product. We highly recommend it. Uh, family loves it. What are you thinking? If we didn't have eight sleeps, our wives would be pissed. It'd be rough. They, uh, love them almost as much as we do. Um, it's a,

it's a cover that you put over your bed and it automatically adjust the temperature, uh, minute by by minute basically to give you better deeper sleep. I'm going to check my sleep score really quick. I put up mostly because I know. Phenomenal numbers. You got good numbers today? Yeah, I know.

You got good numbers? Let's see. I put up a 97. Ooh, I think you beat me. 94. But I'm back in this one of things. That's a good night for you. Yeah, it was a good night. You're getting dialed in.

It was a good night. It was a weird, you know, the last 30 days have been hectic. But it really is fantastic. People don't realize, like, you get into bed and you're typically hotter because you've just been moving around. And it cools you. And then it will raise the temperature

throughout the night so that you wake up warm, cozy. Ready to go. It is so crazy how fast you fall asleep and how fast you wake up with this thing. It's amazing. It's sleep.com slash TBPN. There's a discount there. If you use our code, go check it out. Come compete with us. Yeah. Yes. And it's your sleep scores. Anyway,

let's move on to some historical analysis from the wall street journal. They write today, Rolf Winkler writes, what the dot com bus can tell us about today's AI boom. This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nasdaq peak, but it wasn't all lost. I just gotta say, Rolf Winkler over at the journal, this time it's different, buddy. This time it's different.

Yeah. No, we don't know yet. It feels different because, you know, you got companies like Cursor and, you know, making windsurf doing, you know, millions of dollars of revenue per month when they're.com counterparties were doing, you know, millions a year, thousands.

They were doing, yeah, we're in the high. You go back and you find all these emails of them like being like, look at this chart. I went from zero to a hundred thousand dollars in revenue in six months. Of course I'm worth 10 billion. Of course. Everyone's like, I'm going to do it even faster. Zero to a hundred thousand revenue. Then I go, we have plumbing.com. Yeah. How it's worth at least a billion dollars by itself in the multiple is is all the difference here Anyway, there's some good history in the Wall Street Journal today 25 years ago this week the Nasdaq composite hit its Dot-com era peak after soaring more than 500 percent in five years imagine that ride. You're just sitting in the Nasdaq

5x in your money Mary meeker just going off going off taxing your money. Mary Meeker just going off. Going off. Its subsequent collapse was swift and brutal. Small investors lured by a promising new technology called the internet's lost, called the internet lost fortunes.

The economy stumbled. High flying companies like Pets.com, The Globe.com and Webvan collapsed. Today some investors are worried the same cycle might be playing out when it comes to artificial intelligence. Now, the interesting thing, I don't know about the globe.com, but Webvan was basically Instacart, very successful company now, pets.com, chewy.com, pet delivery stuff, $10 billion company for

a while. I'm not sure exactly where it trades now, but big company, lots of good ideas. mp3.com went public with just a domain business plan. No revenue Obviously Spotify's a beat beast of a business now. So yeah, the story of the comm to me is not Like wrong ideas Directionally, correct just bad timing that bad execution. Yeah today Some investors are worried the same cycle might be playing out when it comes to artificial intelligence Even if that is the case a big if there's an important lesson for investors from the dot com collapse. Ultimately, the early internet hype proved correct. It's easy

to understand the fear and echo of the dot com boom leading AI companies are valued in the 10s or hundreds of billions of dollars, some of them with little prospect of generating meaningful sales. That's not I mean, I don't know who exactly they're talking about. A lot of these companies have plenty of prospects for generating meaningful sales. There's obviously a ton of questions, but investors are racing to give the companies

still more money at ever having a founder on in 45 minutes. That's putting up insane numbers in his first month. Yep. So they're buying AI chips to fill out new cavernous data centers. I like that out new cavernous data centers. I like that term, cavernous data centers. Yet the dot-com boom and bust showed that big bets on ambitious technologies can pay off in the long run.

The five most valuable listed companies globally and six of the top seven architect companies from that era or ones that grew from seeds planted then. In other words, the dot com bubble had elements of what some investors call good bubbles that fuel rapid adoption of revolutionary technology. I wanna make a statement for the record that we have been pro bubble. Pro bubble.

We were pro bubble in the first episode of this show. Yes. And we're gonna be pro bubble in the last. Yes. And we're certainly not gonna fold now that Tesla's down 40% a month. It's going to take a lot more than that. So the journals separating out the idea of good bubbles versus bad bubbles, which I think

it's a good distinction to make. Bad bubbles are things that where people speculate on assets that don't make the economy more productive. Tulip bulbs, beanie babies, houses in the Arizona desert. Boom to bust. And they have some charts here. It's very difficult to be a radical innovator. SARS says Carlota Perez, author of technological revolutions and financial capital, the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages to create a world that doesn't

exist. Such innovators convince suppliers, workers, and financiers that they should march simultaneously toward an imagined future of clamoring consumers. While people race to cash in, ideas are tried, and infrastructure is built. Many fail, who nevertheless lay important groundwork. Famously, the fiber optic lines of 2000 were the equivalent to the electrical grids of the early 1900s. The railroad tracks of the 1800s, the canals of the late 1700s, says Perez. Busts followed those booms, yet the networks fertilized new markets. And so, you know, even if we build these massive data centers, we don't know what to do with

them, eventually we'll figure it out, which is why this is potentially, even if it is a bubble, elements of a good bubble. among them with a market cap of $2.7 trillion. The question of whether those investments will lead to productivity advances that power the economy or elements of a good bubble. The jury will be out for some time, but there are tangible advances already. Search is smarter, AI bots can write software code, cover letters, and more.

AI agents are booking flights, filing taxes, scheduling meetings, and acting as smart assistants that could boost productivity in years to come. Not that there won't be losers. Some AI companies are already melting down. Sequoia Capital's David Kahn has written of the massive revenue hole that AI companies need to fill to justify their data center spending,

which could lead to a speculative shakeout. Yet he's optimistic that it's huge. That's a great article, by the way. Oh yeah? It's probably worth revisiting at some point. The massive revenue hole is the one the journal linked to. Yeah, it's basically this idea of like, if you spending, I mean it's simple idea, you're spending all this money you have to actually make it back at some point. Yeah. But I mean, as we say,

you know, 99% of AI companies quit right before they closed the massive revenue hole. Yes. Before they hit it big. Many have said that. Yeah Yet, he's optimistic that a huge amount of economic value will be created as I To distinguish bad bubbles from good bubbles look at the assets the people are betting on says bill Janeway former vice chairman of war bird pinkus who has studied speculative errors the world banking system collapsed in 2008 when houses couldn't People couldn't afford were financed with risky mortgage mortgages sliced into highly leveraged Study speculative errors John I participated in that Are you gonna trust more build Janeway? Yeah has he ever had a NFT profile picture. Yeah, if you haven't been in the trenches of the speculative errors bill, I don't want to hear from ya

Where were you in 2021? In contrast, Janeway points to Tesla. Some investors think its shares are overvalued, but Tesla is using its windfall to deliver a future of electric vehicles, solar power, as well as self-driving cars and robots powered by AI. Many over-hyped AI startups may flame out, yet some will have had brilliant had already been invented. And when the smartphone revolution came, it was General Magic alums Tony Fidel and Andy Rubin who helped deliver it. Fidel helped develop the iPod and iPhone and Apple and Rubin founded Android, the startup behind

the world's largest mobile operating system. And so are you familiar with the story of General Magic? It's fascinating. It was basically this like dream team of like, all the venture capitalists came together together all the top technologists came together and they were going to build an iPhone essentially in the mid 90s, I believe and they So an early version of the smartphone was released in 1994 by a company called General Magic co-founder Mark Peratt Envisioned digital touchscreen phones, but his device arrived years earlier

There were no digital cellular networks poor up recalls to retrieve digital content of which there was little screen phones but his device arrived And so as hundreds of billions of dollars pour into AI some are calling it another bubble true or not Perez forecasts that AI will boost productivity as The first electrical lines did when they replace steam power General magic went bankrupt in 2002 its devices were so far ahead of their time that few customers bought them another prussian idea It was working on would also have to wait AI agents to build AI agents built to complete tasks for people the engineer working on that project John Geandrea now heads Apple for AI for Apple Interesting maybe they need some new blood maybe he's

Needs to hang his jersey in the rafters. He's been Certainly early to this stuff, but not rolling things out faster. My biggest complaint recently, we talked about the Genmoji thing, which is terrible, playground, which is bad. They still haven't replaced the voice dictation. Like, I'm used to decent voice dictation now. You use it a lot.

I use it a lot for ChatGPT. I go to ChatGPT and I click the voice thing, and it records it, and it nails it every single time, no matter what. And then every once in a while I'll accidentally hit the button on the Apple keyboard and it's just terrible. And it's like, Apple, that's not a security thing. That's not some crazy, it's so easy to implement Whisper.

It's like, there's open source frameworks. There's like, you buy a company. There's a million ways to just upgrade that and just make the existing stuff better. I was thinking about how funny it is that their Apple intelligence, you've seen their rewriting thing where you highlight stuff and then you have writing tools now. Have you seen this? Writing tools?

Where is that? Writing tools describe your change. This is an Apple intelligence. So if you highlight some text, you can go to writing tools and you can say like proofread it, rewrite it, make it friendly, professional, concise, like turn it into key points, turn into a bullet list, turn it into a table. Like it's cool, but it's weird because like there's already spell check and grammar check like running. And so instead of like replacing that with one system that runs over your text, now there's just two systems that are talking to it,

and they're like kind of fighting. One's like the old school, like, hey, we're just checking spell check here. It's like the metaphor is like there's a robot over your shoulder who's just kind of looking and saying, oh, you misspelled this, like, let's underline it with the blue line, you can click and you can change, right?

But then there's a separate robot over here saying, hey, actually, you wanna turn this into a list of bullet points Like I could do that for you And it's like I kind of just want one system that I'm interacting with that I'm like really comfortable with instead of like When I want this problem I go over here. It's very like fragmented anyway well Time is money save both go to ramp.com easy to use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place

Folks you got to get on ramp.com We launched our season 2 of the show our version 2 today we are now officially supported by ramp presented by ramp and We had talked about ramp But we had never We'd never shown a hand shake on that we were never in partnership with them little little teasers, but we never actually really told everyone that we were, yeah, partnered. We had never had a shot of us,

me grabbing a briefcase on marked black van and pulling it into a yellow Ferrari and driving away. But now that's really what makes it sort of official. Now it's clear that, yeah. We're in the- Great car too, underrated. We're in the pocket of big ramp. Yeah. Big ramp.

Big ramp, it's great. A lot of people have been talking about the potential monopoly positioning of ramp and big ramp. Yep, yep. But we're conflicted out of that. We are. We are. Anyway, let's move on to another big deal. Open AI signs a $12 billion deal with CoreWeave. They'll get an equity stake. CoreWeave, an Nvidia backed cloud provider, which we talked about on the show last week. They're filing to go public.

We had Nick Carter, one of the first angel investors in the company on the show, which is very cool. Um, they just signed a five year deal to rent AI servers to open AI, according to a Reuters report as part of the cloud deal, open AI will also get a stake in core weave expected to be worth around 350 million when the company goes public. Now core weaves already has a big partnership with Microsoft and they've signed deals to spend more than $10 billion renting AI servers through 2030.

And so this is the Satya Nadella I own. I also like to lease. I like to rent. I like to do everything. I'm a CoreWeave customer. It all just depends on what the flavor of the week is for me. I'm good for my 85 billion. So I have another article pulled up

here in 2024, Microsoft accounted for 62% of core weaves revenue, which is wild. Wow. Yeah, yeah. That's one of the main things that people are counting on in some ways. One is revenue concentration. Yeah. Are they too concentrated? Because if Microsoft says, hey, we're out, then the company's worth what, a 10th or something, or a fifth? But we'll see. Yeah. Yeah, and so in many ways, OpenAI

could have continued to access CoreWeave's underlying products through Microsoft. But now they're not. Now they're becoming their own company. They're leaving the nest, spreading their wings, becoming all grown up. They're even going you do have to credit you got a credit Satya and Sam for publicly you know right after everybody was like oh they're beefing they're they're they're not on the same team anymore they like

went and took a picture together this is probably three months ago at this point but no Jersey swap okay well so Well, so this barely counts. Yeah barely counts You got to do the Jersey swap if you're serious about you know, healing wounds exactly You know Zuckin Zuckin Jensen seemed like they're just really aligned they're not playing in each other's backyards at all It's like pure customer and Nvidia's never gonna build a... Doesn't Meta have a chip? They're like talking about it, but there's clearly still a huge Nvidia buyer.

Nvidia's not trying to do any, you know. Nvidia does have a cloud offering. So with the other hyperscalers, they're in some competition sometimes. Yeah, I think today actually Metta announced that they're testing a new AI chip with TSMC. So you were correct that they were respectfully just letting each other do their own thing.

But now Zuck is kind of doing the same thing. Was there a Morris Chang Zuck jersey swap? Maybe that should be the thing. I'm guessing. They must have, even if there's no photo there Morris Chang's Zuck Jersey swap? Maybe that's guessing. I'm guessing. They must have. Even if there's no photo, they probably did it. Jersey swap.

Jersey swap. The Financial Times reported. They're testing it. OK. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft cut back on some plans spending with Core Weave due to delivery issues and missed deadlines. Core Weave denied the report and said

there have been no contract cancellations or walking away from commitments and so that's the story of open AI Corweave and I feel like this IPO is gonna be pretty crazy because there's all these deals that are gonna get papered like right before and the the future in the future revenues and cash flows and contracts of these businesses like the entire AI industry is kind of deciding like, Hey, like we're going to spend like, you know what, I mean, the base case is like 250 billion in CapEx in the, in one year. Right. And so like, where does that pie get sliced up?

And so if you're a core weave and a couple billion dollars will materially move your, you know, market cap, then yeah, you're going to do a deal with OpenAI for 12 billion over a number of years and give stock away and stuff. So there's all these kind of like one hand washes the other type deals. Yeah. They're just to reiterate. So Core Weave, OpenAI is doing this deal, but then Core Weave is passing them back $350

million in stock. And it's very conveniently time with Core Weave's IPO, where the number one risk factor, like you said, is that the revenue concentration with Microsoft. Yeah, I feel like people will. My sense is that analysts will switch from revenue concentration, which is still going to be a focal point, to OK, you

have less concentration going forward, but OpenAI is losing all this money, and it's not the most reliable customer, and then they're gonna still continue to have to fight a similar fight. I do like this trend of if you spend a lot of money with a company, you get equity in it. I feel like with how much you spend at Arowan,

they should give you a size. They should cut you in. They should give you some equity. You're telling me. You're telling me. I go to their customer support daily, cold email, hey, here's how much I spent in the last cut me in think about a little little pre IPO yeah little pre IPO slice awesome I wouldn't even need it I don't even need the shares just let me let me get an allocation let me get an allocation around in the air

one I mean LVM a should cut us in with all the Dom we're buying to yeah, you know every company if you're a good customer Let us get it. Let us get a taste anyway, exactly speaking of stuff you can buy at Erawan, there's a tour of Food and drink startups in the information today taking through some D to C some Some consumer some CPG brands. I thought this is kind of interesting Strategic acquirers are starved for growth or cash rich and they need to innovate says John Lavert a managing director for consumer retail at

investment bank Solomon partners conflicted Possible position the guy who wants to sell all the consumer the upstart consumer brands for the most amount of money to do the strategic all the consumer, the upstart consumer brands for the most amount of money to the strategic. They have to do this. Conglomerates like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mars. You guys have so much cash, you gotta innovate. You gotta do it. Why not buy?

You gotta do it. Why not buy some of my clients? They've long used acquisitions to add trendier brands, popular with new sets of shoppers, and over the past few years, new food and drink brands have been able to grow sales quicker than ever using social media to reach shoppers cheaply and leaning into viral health and wellness trends. over the past few years new food and they should be nicely profitable on

tariffs and supply chain disruptions. Selling or offloading a big stake to private equity firms could be another alternative for brands that aren't able to find a strategic buyer. And so here are the eight food and beverage startups that might get acquired in the next year or two. Banzo. Banzo. They raised 31 million. They were founded in 2014. It's garbanzo bean based pasta. Cool. I used to eat a lot of this. Yeah. I still have it from time to time. It's pretty good. There is some concern. Is the pitch low carb, lower carb than pasta? No, it's just no gluten.

Oh, no gluten, gluten free, okay. That's sort of high protein. Yeah, in 2014 when they launched, this was ultra trendy, as they say. More recently, it has added products including high protein waffles. They raised $20 million in 2019 from investors, including private equity firm Prelude Growth Partners

and Danny Mayer's investment firm. Smart. They sell their products in 23,000 locations. Chomps, the line of meat sticks. I'm not a big Chomps guy. I mean, if I'm in like a random store, maybe I'll grab one, but. I think they're fantastic. Daily driver. Yeah, no, I like the idea. I'm in like a random store, maybe I'll grab one. But I think they're fantastic.

Daily driver. Yeah, no, I like the idea. I'm almost a daily driver. Yeah. My son is an absolute chomp fiend. OK. If I ever pull one out, he'll just come over and he'll just take it from me and just eat the entire thing.

I mean, they're looking really strong. It's been a long road, 2012. So I mean, they're going on 13, 14 years old. But in 2024, they did over on 13, 14 years old. But in 2024, they did over half a billion dollars in sales. And the last disclosed valuation was 200 300 million. And they raised 80 million. So well, well, they're in the money. Stride consumer partners looks great on this deal. They got meat stack meat

sticks, other snacks, founded by personal trainer Pete Maldonado. John had John had an idea this morning while we were working out to just have... I don't know if we should leak this, it's such a good idea. Pre-cut steaks, like imagine if you could buy like steak that was cooked in sort of more of like a bacon style like pre-sliced form factors you can just instead of going for a chomp just grab you know a little bit of filet mignon which is I'd like somebody in the audience to build that.

We'll definitely trial it. Well my idea was specifically like chick filet, but steak based. So you go to the drive through, and instead of getting some chicken nuggets, you get a bunch of steak, and it's like 50 bucks. Because steak, it's expensive. And there's no other items on the menu. Yeah, it's like, I mean maybe like, you can get a whole steak, or you can get's a steak, it's expensive. And there's no other items on the menu.

Yeah, it's like, I mean, maybe like you can get a whole steak or half a steak or little slices of steak. But like, basically the restaurant just cooks steaks all day and then you drive up and you buy steaks. The economy is a steak. Anyway, Chomps has proven it can scale up. It's on its own. The brand has already expanded to most major grocery chains. Whole Foods, Target, Kroger, Trader Joe's, as well as many convenience stores. And Maldonado expects it to hit a billion in retail sales this year. Wow. That is big.

Could include a strategic exit in IPO or we could continue to hold it for cashflow. Good Culture, I don't know this company. They did over 200 million. They're founded in 2014. They raised 85 million. Good Culture has been the forefront of resurgence. It's like a yogurt dairy health better for you kind of dairy esque brand. Cool. Do you know lesser evil? You familiar with this? 2004? Wow, popcorn. That's an old company. $165 million in sales. Uh, they raised 45.9 million Aria growth partners,

Valor equity partners in there. That's amazing because Valor's in like space X. Um, but uh, yeah, good team around the, around the board looking good, raised money in 2023, around $19 million. And apparently they are exploring a potential sale, but also seeking evaluation of around a billion dollars, that would be a relatively rich number compared to a recent to recent snack deals. In January, flowers foods said it would pay

795 million for simple mills, which sells gluten-free versions of snacks like goldfish and wheat thins, but had higher net sales. The trade, the basically trade of the early 2010s was just to go into a 7-Eleven or a gas station and make a better 4U version of every product. Every single product.

From meat sticks to wheat thins to goldfish, you know all these categories. It is kind of crazy that no one said Like let's just do that. They did everyone it was always like some random entrepreneur focusing on one single category There was no one who said like our business is we are going to create a better for you product in every single category. Yeah Some people focus. Yeah, some people tried to do that, but you can't remember any of their names. No, I agree. They didn't nail any of them. And it's also, that's the thing.

CPG, we talked about this on the show yesterday. CPG is so tangible that people assume that it's very easy. Oh, I'm going to make a cracker. I'm going to make this drink. And then you realize you actually have to, the best CPG companies either got super lucky, which is unreliable, or they iterated across 30 plus production runs to like dial in a product

and make it truly, truly great. And then they had to like reinvent it when they scaled up again. And it's just really difficult. It's basically blue collar entrepreneurship in that you have to go sit in grocery stores early on and just get people to try all your product. It seems crazy, but it's kind of what it takes. Liquid Death. I mean, this is another good example. Liquid Death, super unique go to

market, super unique branding. That's not going to come out of some hold code. That's just like, we need better for you in every category because Liquid Death is a very bespoke, like Liquid Death is not a brand that is goldfish, right? It's like, it doesn't translate. It's a very different thing. Liquid Death had perfect marketing market fit in a mass market product that they could sell everywhere. And they've executed that very well.

They've also been very aggressive in terms of raising capital. Science, which is an LA based sort of incubator that incubated it. They were also in Dollar Shave Club. That was like their first big outcome, I think in the DTC world. I was getting pitched. Yeah, I was getting pitched liquid death, you know, pre IPO round. I didn't sign any type of NDA I think it was that like I think it was that like close to two billion dollars I think that's completely unrealistic unless it was trading like a meme stock well they did

get some private credit money in they got a 55 million dollar working line from Aries management. Let's go. Let's go the best in the game Private credit fund as a partner for sure for the show. It's great And so we'll see it. We'll see where that goes Olly pop also very very popular. They're doing 400 to 450 million in sales. They've raised 90 and the last Disclosed valuation was 1.85 billion. So while pulling a Four or five X revenue multiple not bad They got JP Morgan's private capital growth equity fund monogram Rochana ventures low calorie low sugar sodas with added fiber

It's long been seen as a candidate candidate for buyout by a big beverage company. And they're in kind of a race against Poppy, which was launched in 2020. Just three years after Ollipop started, Poppy's doing more than 500 million in sales and has raised 30 million in funding. Yeah, so Poppy directly, they were also making sort of better for you ish sodas but then Ollie Pop was working so well that Poppy completely cloned their product down to the font. Wow. It was just a complete copycat but they to their credit they executed well and have grown sales pretty impressively. Yep. A buddy of mine is the head of growth.

I actually don't know what his title is now, but he was the head of growth for Ollipop back around their seed round. And he's a super well-connected, smart guy. And basically, back then, I would honestly ask him, I didn't really understand how hard Ollipop was ripping. This was like 2020, and I was like, are you gonna look and do other things? Like, do you want to be ahead of

growth for like a CPG company? Like your whole life? Because you had, like I said, he had all these opportunities and he had been there for a while already. He's like, no, like, we're doing well, I'm going to stay and like, I'm sure he's going to do like, really, really well from this. So and Cavu consumer partners is in is in poppy, which is Rohan Osa's fund, you might have seen him on Shark Tank. Good, good guy. I ran into him in Beverly Hills the other day. Anyway, if you're building a consumer

product, a food product, a beverage, you're going to need to advertise it. And where should you advertise it, Jordy? Out of the home, out of the home on ad quick, go to adquick.com. It's 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. And so start a CPG company and throw it on a billboard obviously we are obviously we are partnered with ad quick and right after we launched the video this morning with ramp we started going back and forth with Chris and Adam on the ad quick team about our video with them so there's lots in the works I'm excited excited. Very excited for that one. Iconic memes will be created, recreated.

Definitely. To celebrate out of home advertising. Yeah. And we wanted to celebrate some great out of home advertising. Durin put up a billboard that says, you can't have rocket science without rock science. Durin's a new mining company.

Very cool. And Jackson Moses here new mining company, very cool. And Jackson Moses here says, add the go hard. I love it, right outside the SpaceX headquarters. So beautiful billboard. It's time to mine. We love some billboards out here. That's actually insane, Alpha, that you can get a billboard right in front of SpaceX.

And then just take the photo, and SpaceX is right there. It's really good. Anyway, we gotta move on. We got 15 minutes till our first guest is joining Have you seen Meghan Markle's new Netflix show Jordy? I haven't but everybody's been saying this show is one of a kind the best ever But the second part is definitely one of a kind But I don't know people are saying it might be the show of the year. Well, I don't know

I'm not really equipped to judge this I don't watch a lot of cooking shows, but I watched like five minutes of it and it was Atrocious. Oh, it was really really rough really really right, but you know I Me dragging it is nothing compared to what the Economist did. It was one of the roughest articles I was laughing out loud and I said, I want to read some of it here because The Economist is one of those, one of those journalism outfits that has just an incredible command over the English language

and can body someone in the most subtle and beautiful ways. Basically, synonymous. Or not synonymous, like basically anonymously. Yeah, it's an anonymous writer and it's hilarious. So I'll read some of this. One scene is magical. Another is so pretty. Another delightful. Welcome to With Love with Meghan, Meghan Markle's new cookery and lifestyle show

in which she smiles at things in Montecito. In episode one, she smiles at raspberries on a cake. In another episode, she smiles at hydrangeas. She also smiles at bees whose hives she keeps on her property. Quote, when I think of honey, I think of bees, she says, in one of the many insights with which the show brims. Just like, wow. When I think of honey, I think of bees.

Just like, bees are the type of insights you're getting from this show. There have been doubts about whether Netflix was right. We talked about bees and honey on this show before. We did. And John didn't believe that bees. She's more of an expert than I am. John didn't believe that bees ate their own honey. They do.

Turns out they do. They do. There have been doubts about whether Netflix was right to fork out a reported 100 million in a deal with Ms. Markle and her husband Prince Harry for this show and other content. Such doubts must now be dispelled. However, Miss Markle is not just smiling,

she's on a mission. As she explains, she wishes to share some little tips and tricks for entertaining friends and elevating one's life such as perhaps make sure to member, little tips and tricks such as perhaps make sure to marry a member of the British royal family. Wow. We've been saying this. We've been married into royalty. Yes. Hot tip. That tends to help to no end or ensure you get Netflix to pay you a vast sum to show off

an immense property complete with a vegetable garden, beehives and chickens to lay fresh eggs. That helps too. This new eight episode Netflix show released on March 4th is more or less Martha Stewart for the 0.01% But aimed at the other 99.99% in it She offers independent indispensable tips such as how to make candles with your own beeswax or how to boil noodles with tomatoes Apparently first you put the noodles in a pan then you put in water Then you take off the lid then the water will evaporate, then they are done. At last, everyone had been wondering. Destroyed.

Destroyed. Like, it's just, this is such good, right? I love it so much. It's just, it's just so funny. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. He has not created a lot of fans. No, no. Decade. Miss Markle says that she is not in the pursuit of perfection, Anyway, it's a lot of fun. He's not the art a lot of fans. No Decade miss Markle says that she is not in the pursuit of perfection but in the pursuit of joy This is charming if not precisely the wording that some inside the palace use their descriptions of her tend to go a little heavier on words like abrasive bullying difficult and rude

But then perhaps those palace workers did not step to did not stop to smell and smile at the hydrangeas So funny Markle We're not far from yeah Montecito will come up will come up. We will show you how we drink Dom yeah proper etiquette if you're celebrating a podcast milestone. Yes. She had a podcast on Spotify. Big deal. And I heard through the grapevine that her one request

was that there was, quote unquote, no homework. No way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You just wanted to show up and do it. I mean, this is unsubstantiated rumor, but the rumor was that at a certain point She wasn't David center will love this we got to send this clip to him. She wasn't even doing the interviews So imagine it's like we're gonna have someone on we're gonna have Like a like an assistant ask them the questions record their answers And then I will come in once a month and record all the questions.

So I come in and I say, Barack Obama, what was it like being president? Tony Blair, what was it like being prime minister? And then I come in and say, you know, whoever else is on this week, Martha Stewart, what's your favorite recipe? I come in, I record those lines, and then they cut it together with the answers where that person got

interviewed by someone else. Insane. It's like the lowest effort podcasting. And that's why it's no longer a podcaster. That's crazy. David center of rolling over, just ripping his hair out thinking about the lowest effort podcasting you possibly do. Brutal. Anyway, the one my main takeaway from the show is that Montecito is beautiful. We should spend more time there and there's no better way to do that than on Wander. That's right. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Go to Wander.com. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Jordy, do you have a code for folks at home? I got a code for us. It's wander.com slash TBPN. You can use the code TBPN to get a discount if you're booking a trip,

and just by creating an account, you can get entered into a giveaway that they're just doing for TVPN listeners. So you're only competing with other brothers, which is kind of a win-win situation. So either you win a free trip or another one of your brothers wins. So there's zero downside.

Enter now and take a crack at it. I love it. Let's do some timeline. We have 10 minutes until our first guest. And I wanna kick off with a post from Bezel. We're going back to back with the advertisements today, but this is a great post. Sold and authenticated by Bezel,

all along and sonnet long one timezone reference 136029 two timezones day night indicators zero guesswork if you're crossing continents, this longer ensures you never call the wrong person at 3am. Beautiful watch flip it over and things intensify. It's manually wound l 141.1 movement is pure German engineering flex visible through a sapphire case back hand engraved balance cock 72 out our power reserve Has said there slightly because that sounds vulgar but it's just no that's just terminology

72 our power reserve and enough finishing to make any watch nerd emotional Fancy a long of your own good taste better news. We've got more hit the link in bio to shop bezels full selection This is screaming zuck to me. Oh, yeah, I just snapped this up. You might have yeah Private, you know clients they can't you know share yeah, but uh seems like up his alley Anyway, go to bezel go to get bezel calm shop over 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezels team of experts download the app scroll and have fun Should we move on to Lulu? I just got to say when we when we do our bezel Partnership video multiple we need a shot of both of us

Watches all the way up to the shoulder. Yeah, yeah, we gotta get the graph diamonds hallucination. Yeah, get one of those going. Couple of Pateks. Yeah, how much would it cost to just get a graph diamonds hallucination for two minutes? Depends on what the market's doing. You buy it and then you sell it at a higher price. You made money. That's smart.

Look at you. It's possible. Course coming soon. Course coming soon. Kugin's code. Anyway, Lulu, Masurbi Post posts just went to the DMV they've replaced the take a number take a dispenser with a person at a booth and you get a ticket you have to lie and to get a ticket you have to line up and when it's your turn ask the person to give you a ticket this is so so funny. AI, mogging,

mogging computers and artificial intelligence, you know? I mean, when Mid Journey came out and everyone was like, oh, this is gonna destroy artists. I was like, there's still courtroom illustrators who like draw pictures of like SBF sitting there and like, we have cameras. They could just take a photo.

Yeah. And yet like somehow that job like did not get destroyed by technology. And so there are plenty of jobs that are super resistant. I didn't understand third party DMV services until I was probably 22. Break those down. Well, pretty much there's only a handful of things

that you need to actually go to the DMV for and then the vast majority of them you can pay a third party DMV $50 to do it with just over text and they just send it to you. It's great. I bought a car recently and the title got registered under my name, but then the title never got sent to me. And I just texted my DMV person and they're like, Oh yeah, just like send me a hundred bucks and it'll be there in like two weeks. That's great. And I don't have to touch it at all. So huge alpha. My dad was a very practical, is a very practical, pragmatic guy. He goes and sits in the line,

but he's retired now. Yeah. So I always think of the DMV as a good example of, uh, gel man amnesia, which we talked about in the last thing is like, is very, very ridiculous over the top, like mental model, but, uh, gel man amnesia. I, I, I like it. Cause the whole thesis is like, once you realize that one thing is incorrect, like you're reading, you're reading an article in a, in a, like you're listening to this show and you hear us talking about your point of expertise and you realize we don't know what we're talking about and then you assume that we don't

know what we're talking about about anything and you're probably right. The DMV is a great insight into like how the government works in the sense that like everyone's like, oh man, the DMV is so bad and so inefficient, but I'm sure the NIH is fine or I'm sure the DO is fine. Or I'm sure the DOD works great. I'm sure the other arms of the government are fantastic. And it's like, no, actually, the DMV is par for the course. Your experience with the DMV is the exact same experience

you'll have doing business with the FDA, doing business with the DOD, doing business with any arm of the government. It's kind of all the same. But the DMV is the one that the average citizen interfaces with the most. And so yeah, anyway. Big news, Robinson Helicopter Company

has released a new helicopter. We've been waiting for this. They haven't released a new helicopter for a very long time. The R88 reveal trailer is now available to watch on YouTube. Go check it out. Cool video. You know, pull it up. We wanted flying cars. We got new helicopters from Robinson Helicopter Company. We wanted

flying cars. We already had helicopters. I mean, really skill issue. Why don't we just put wheels on the helicopters? Yeah. It seems pretty. Yeah. with little electric motors in each wheel. Yeah, be fine. Probably get up to like 3040. I really can you play this? Let's see. Yeah, I mean, I really feel like the whole flying car thing a lot of those a lot of those companies like we were talking about Kitty Hawk, the Google founders had trouble they couldn't get through all the regulatory. It'd

be very interesting to see someone try and take like a much more iterative iterative approach and just take a helicopter modify it and do just the minimum I mean, this is what we saw with the seaglider thing where you got to find the regulatory hack Anyway, I'll see hexes nice machine Nice machine 53 views to showing up. I mean the Robinson helicopter company. They have a check mark So they are verified on X, but they still posted a link got 3,000 views. Fortunately, we're featuring it here I'll try and get you some amplification and Yeah, send us more footage Robinson. We'll check it out. We'll review on the show

Yeah, we got to give them a master class in the vibrial. Yes exactly This should have been this should have been native. You should have posted it native. Could have had a banger. Could have had a banger. Could have gone viral. I don't know how we're doing on this, but let's see who we got. Okay.

We got a bunch of stuff here. Let's move on to Jack Rains. Let's do it. Jack Reigns went on the ad quick podcast. We love ad quick. We love. Let's go. Very funny. He was previously joking that only fans is the best way to get your message out. But now he's advocating for LinkedIn. He says with revenues higher than Pinterest, Reddit and Snapchat combined, LinkedIn is still ultimately number one for cringe. Number one. Number one for cringe. We've been getting active on LinkedIn. We are. Go follow us. If you go to tbpn.com, you can follow our LinkedIn account.

And we're starting to share. We're staying true to our ex-routes by posting the LinkedIn content like two weeks later. Standing, honoring ex, by posting the LinkedIn content like two weeks later. Yep. You know, standing, uh, you know, honoring X being where, you know, the everything app where we're the most important conversations happen, but LinkedIn, you know, you can, it's more like a greatest hits. I don't want to like, I don't want to pat ourselves on the back too much, but, um, we do that often and it's actually part of the brand.

So, um, but, but, but I, I do, do I do like the strategy of of just posting interview clips on our LinkedIn. It feels like the least cringe thing to do. Like we tried to take I tried to take one of my like like sound bites from the show and turn it into text and put on LinkedIn and be like serious. And it's just like didn't feel right to me for some reason. Yeah. I remember when we did our first launch video.

Yeah. The thing is, LinkedIn doesn't understand is humor and satire. So we did our first launch video and people's reaction when they would talk to me about it is they were like, super cool video, dude. Like, looked very serious. Yeah. Everyone is like, Yeah, it was ironic. Anyway, let's get away from the irony, get away from the jokes. We have to talk about this story. This has been Shaking Up Tech. Lamborghini just announced a $5,000 baby stroller.

This is huge for the pronatalist crowd, huge for the car. Yeah, this was a lot of people's final excuse. They were like, you know, I want to have children. I've been planning for this for a while, but all of the strollers are so cringe The babies are surprisingly heavy. Yeah carrying around once they you know get a few months old It's like carrying around a 25 pound dumbbell, you know everywhere, but you know, it's it's not even as easy to carry as a dumbbell I mean, I gotta say like Lamborghini really did not bring their

All it's super disappointing looks like a normal stroller to me Lamborghini really did not bring their design to this at all. It's super disappointing. It just looks like a normal stroller to me. The only thing is maybe it feels super, like something I don't like about strollers is because they're made of a lot of plastic. They don't feel always... This looks like there's some metal in there. I see some shine on there.

If they have carbon fiber accents. It needs carbon fiber. I would even like imagine if they had the rear view mirrors on it. That could be cool too. But I'm thinking sharp angles. I'm thinking like, you know, revanton. The one where they take the Aventador

and they make it even crazier, even more aggressive. So I'm going to give this a 4 out of 10. 4 out of 10. OK, well, it is 12.45. We should have our first call in. Ben, make sure we have pulled up the Zoom and see if we can have our guests join us. How are we doing?

Can you guys hear me? I can hear you. Awesome. How are you doing? I'm video on too, but totally. Fantastic. Yeah, we can see you. No, this is great. Oh, you can see me too. Yeah, we can hear you. Awesome. How you doing? Video on too, but. Fantastic. Yeah, we can see you. No, this is great.

Me too. Yeah, we can see you. Cool. So, Ken Davison is here from Icon. Big announcement today. Can you break it down for us? What are you announcing and give us a little backstory on your product, what you're building, how it's going just from the top.

Sounds good. Yeah. So we just announced a second round from Founders Fun. I'm the founder of Icon, and basically what we're doing is we're helping brands make much better ads with this thing we're calling the AI ad maker. And high level, what we do is we take someone's big content library, and then we turn it into hundreds

of ads. Cool. Do you have any good case studies or examples from companies that are using it? I think Ridge, wasn't Ridge? Sean Frank was on the show less than two weeks ago, and I think he was one of your guys' super early partners. Yeah, yeah, we built a lot of Icon with Sean

and then Ron and Otvi, and a lot of other folks in the community. Basically what we're doing is we're tackling like nine different problems at once. So we help with script writing. In that script writing, we're helping you like target a specific audience. And once you have that script,

we're taking your library and then matching it with that script so you don't have to do that by hand. On top of that, we also do analytics. We help you like keep an eye on competitors. Like we help you even like launch ads on many different channels. There's all these pieces of ad making puzzle that we're taking on and it's very manual today. So we're solving that.

Do you like competitive markets? Previously you started Skio. Subscription management with an e-comm is deeply competitive. I'm actually a co-founder of this company, Rora, and Rora was running on some other subscription management platform, but I actually messaged the CEO just before this, Brian Keller, and he said,

"'We're switching over. "'Skyo is just a far superior platform than the others.'" Let's go. So great review for Skyo. But my big question is, is you clearly love competition because to go into subscription management, dominate, and then come in and do icon, which is a very obvious idea,

and many people are trying to tackle it, but it's very difficult to do well. Is competition something that you're sort of seeking out in some way because you just know you can do it better? Yeah, definitely. As you said,, skill was a really competitive space. There's, there's at least 10 subscription apps and yeah, we, we tackled it with one, like a really like engineering first culture. Um, but two also just like a really like playful personality.

I think we, we really like try to be real, um, with our customer, um, rather than corporate. And I think that resonates really well with the community. And we're bringing a similar approach to tie con. We were working seven days a week. We're really like pouring our heart into this. And I think it resonates really well with with the type of customer we're going for. Can you break down in terms of where AI lives within the the ad stack? There's so many places from generate a script, generate an AI voiceover, generate a deep fake of a UGC customer or even the CEO or something like that,

to AI assembly and picking which clips go where. A lot of these could be done programmatically or deterministically. A lot of them could be done with AI approaches. What do you see working well? Where's the highest leverage point to inject AI? Yeah, so I think a really common mistake is thinking AI is just going to generate the ad,

and then you're not going to have to do anything at all. Really the way I see us is basically cursor for ads, where we're trying to take the editor, the creative strategist, anyone involved in the ad making process, and just make them lot faster, like remove the work they don't want to do. Right? So with the script writing previously, right?

I'm sure everyone knows this, but you can get some writer's block when you're trying to like pump out a hundred ads a week. Right? So one of the things we're doing is we're looking at your previously run ads where we're looking at trending like concepts on the internet. And then we're like doing all of that behind the scenes and helping you steer that. Like you're able to write in first or third person, you're able to like, say, don't talk, don't make a medical claim or something.

Like really it's up to the user. And as a result, you're just a lot quicker. Is there some sort of concept of like temperature? I remember in like the early GPTs, like you could kind of turn up the temperature and get a little bit crazier, because I feel like I could immediately imagine any of the LLMs kind of just like re-paraphrasing the same value propaganda again and again,

but maybe some of the value is actually, hey, let's think of new ideas that then we can test, and that's where like the real alpha is gonna come. Hey, we never thought to make this type of claim. It's not a medical claim. We didn't cross any lines, but we never really knew that that was what the customer wanted.

Do you have some sort of a way to dial that in? Yeah, yeah. So you're able to use our thing called adgbt. Very similar to chatgbt, but for ads. And the key thing with it is you can really just steer it in the direction you want to go. There are people who want 100 permutations of their winning ad. And the key thing with it is you can really like just steer it in the direction you want to go. There are people who want like 100 permutations of their winning ad.

That's a really common use case. We also have people who want to like just like do 100 different concepts at once. So it's really like pick your own adventure sort of thing. And we just help you do that a lot quicker. Got it. I have a question. So for the last five years, the meta on the meta ads platform has just been Metas really good at like finding you the right customers. So you should focus on creative

That's part of the opportunity that you have with icon Is there a world you do you imagine a future where meta tries to almost like move up the stack and and get down to? The area that you're in obviously,. Obviously, you're not afraid of competition, but how do you think about Meta getting into this game? Yeah, there's definitely some stuff that's more in the pocket, but what I can say here is that we're going to be platform agnostic. You can run ads on Meta, you can run ads on TikTok. Imagine 10 different platforms. I don't think Meta is going to, you can run ads on TikTok. Like imagine 10 different platforms, right? Like I don't think Meta is gonna like want you

to like run a TikTok ad or different platforms ad. Of course we can't rule that out, right? But there are like five of those like misalignments I'd say for Meta to be doing something like this and the other four I have to keep in the pocket but I'm pretty excited to partner with them and yeah, just see where this goes. Awesome, well you have to come back on when you can share on that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anytime I have an AI founder on, I have just a bunch of questions like, you know, what's hot, what's trending like MCP? Does that mean anything? Is that legit and real? What other like, what other kind of like foundational developments are you watching for the, the, the, give me a deep seat, take, give me a scaling, take give me whatever you got. Yeah. I wanted to bring this up in a few of our other trends of thoughts earlier. Um, one of the things that we're really like approaching this with is like, we want to like pick the best, like, like a model for the, the problem, right?

So one of the things we do is like U things we do is UGC lip syncing. It's not quite there yet in terms of replacing normal UGC. That's why we're taking existing content and repurposing it. But we've definitely got our eyes on it. I'd say Heijun, Tavis, there's 10 players in this space and we're just gonna like partner with the best one and we use a combination of them today already. So that's kind of the way to like think about Icon. We're taking like the best voice vendor, we're taking the best like video, like UGC vendor,

the best like writing, right? Like we're using a lot of like Claude underneath, but like with like a lot of code on top, right? So it's really picking events. How do you think about cost reduction at the infrastructure? You said you've gone from 0 to 5 million in ARR in 30 days. You're extremely profitable. It sounds like costs aren't a big issue at the moment.

You guys are running pretty efficiently, but presumably it will only get better. So it sounds like you're in a good spot. Yeah, yeah. I think another thing that's really fun about this is there's a lot of people in this space that are basically like operating on like 90% margin. They're really charging a lot for what they're doing.

And part of the reason we're being so disruptive here is we're charging like 10% of what they're charging, right? And I wanna like pass the savings to the customers as the costs get better underneath. Right. I think companies either are going to have to like adapt with their pricing or they're going to die. That makes sense. What what's the actual you're going for the record to beat every company ever on the one to 100 million ARR record, which is less than 12 months. Do you know the actual day? Are you just are you just going to do it in 12

months? Well, I'd like to hit it in nine months, like not leave it too close, but I will have to see. Is there a scenario where at the last on the last day you have to bump prices like 30% to hit the mark? Are you or you think there's enough customers out there at the the current pricing that that you can get in front of because I feel like e-commerce is very the top e-commerce founders and CMOs are all talking to each other there's almost like you know Sean Frank and Connor McDonnell have their podcasts I think I think like you know probably an important acquisition channel for you guys but but yeah, you seem pretty confident.

We'd love to do a check-in call in maybe six months and see where we're at. Throw the gauntlet down. I want to see that. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, part of the reason I'm doing this is it really pressures me and the team in a good way, I think. I don't want to let everyone down,

so it keeps me working pretty hard. But yeah, if you think about it, right, like we've got a business plan that's a thousand a month. It's only 8,300 customers we need to get to a hundred million. Right? And like keeping the numbers a bit more private, but we're more than a thousand already. So I, yeah, we'll see.

Six to nine months from now. Yeah, 8,300 customers. These are businesses. I mean, Metta has what? Like a million businesses probably advertising at a significant level. Yeah. It's not insane, insane penetration to get there. So good luck. I love that. That's amazing. Well, we'll let you get to your next meeting. I know you got to jump, but thanks so much for calling in. Please let me know when you have news or announcements next and we'll bring you back on. Yeah. Congrats on the progress in the new round. Talk to you soon. Cool. To move on with more timeline, Jordy, let's do it.

Let's run through a couple. Well, a lot of Gil has reported the Dropbox has converted from Delaware to a Nevada corporation. Uh, lots of people talking about the risks of being in Delaware. Interestingly, I don't know exactly what triggered this. We should get the Drew Houston, the Dropbox founder on to talk about how he's thinking about his business because Dropbox was one of those companies came out of YC, I believe. Yeah.

YC company got to unicorn almost dekakorn status was super legit goes public really big, but then just kind of stays. Well, they hired 300,000 people, right? No, that's DocuSign. That's a different company. The name. Yeah. Did you really confuse it? Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, X really? Yeah, I mean they were they were one of the hottest startups then have been kind of a what do they call it like a store value type company or you know if you bought you bought a thousand dollars drop box five years ago it's still a thousand dollars today or something in the stocks been kind of flat but yeah but I mean it's a it's a it's a fascinating founder story of you know building a multi-billion dollar company and not many people can say

that they've done it. I respect. I was wrong. X has 2,800 employees. How many Dropbox has? Dropbox has 2,200. They've been getting- 2,200.

And what does DocuSign have? Because Dropbox acquired HelloSign, which is a DocuSign competitor. DocuSign has 6,700. 6,700. Let's go. Hit the size gong for that. The size gong for DocuSign competitor. DocuSign has 6,000. 6,000. Let's go, hit the size gong for that. Head count's still cool. A lot of people says, hey, you shouldn't celebrate head count.

You know, it's not a real metric. I'm a job creator. Yeah, job creation. DocuSign is gonna get the craziest corrupt bargain from Trump, be like, well, you're employing half of America. Like, what do you want? DocuSign is gonna decide whether or not

there's tariffs or taxes. They're just gonna write the policy and it's gonna get ironed in because they're creating so many jobs. Every politician will love them. Yeah, there should be a founder that comes out and says, my entire mission is to create jobs. If we have 0.01 Yeah, that's and we can

hire more, you know, I will just keep you know dividing that point at one percent as many times as possible to just get each incremental employee dropbox fantastic story. You know the story of their viral growth to they were very very early at being very intentional about distribution baked into the product. So when you would sign up for Dropbox, they would give you like, you know, one gig of space to store files in the cloud. But then if I referred you, you would get an extra gig of space and I would get an extra gig of space. Right. And so it went super viral on college campuses. And they really did a good job of that viral marketing model that so many companies

tried to copy after Dropbox was successful, but it gets harder and harder over time, but it made a ton of sense. It's the same Gmail model that worked. Anyway, speaking of legendary Silicon Valley startups, changing things around. Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz is retiring. What did the stock do?

And I mean, young guy down 24 percent. Really? Oh, but it could be like a crazy day in the markets. No, no, no. But that's it was very clearly because of him, because of him stuff. But I mean, hey as a CEO You want your stop to stock to drop tremendously when you announce your retirement because that is your market value I wonder I am I wonder how much of his net worth was in Asana versus Facebook because he was a Facebook co-founder

And so you're looking at a trillion dollar company even if you got 1% You know, you're in the Multi-billions, I'm sure there's dilution and sales and stuff But still it's like it there's so many there's so many things where you know It's it's a it's a big big shoes to fill yeah, when you're on your second company in your first ones Facebook, but I don't know I use this on it for a while nice product and You know Dustin come on the show now that you're on retired Let's talk about what you want to do with all that money now that you're retired. We'll get you a nice watch on bezel. We'll get you an eight sleep.

Yes, so Trey. Nice wander vacation every once in a while. Trey in the chat. There were some Rolex leaks around their new 2025 models. Oh, I heard about this. And they're allegedly introducing a land dweller. Trey says it's a perfect watch for VCs. Really? Why?

Yeah. Well, obviously they just mostly dwell on land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're enough of a size lord, you start to be more of a sky dweller. That's great. But it takes a little bit. Okay. Do we have our next call in for this stream? I know we are going,

we're supposed to be going live at 1 p.m. I don't like doxing the guests to frequently. There we go. Hey, hey, my good to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Yeah, welcome to the show. It's great to have you, Chris. I don't know why I messaged you yesterday, or it was maybe the day before, but I was just like, you got to come on. John and I are dads. You're building products that our children will ultimately use. I don't know if they're quite old enough yet, but I've got a bunch of buddies that are on Synthesis for their kids and have said great things. I want to have you on. Let's start with a high level intro.

Who you are, what your company does. Set us up for the viewers and then we'll just ask a bunch of questions. Yeah, yeah. I think by the way it was like 9 or 10 PM last night that you messaged me. So yeah, definitely. Thanks for the advance notice. Yeah, that's good. But yeah, happy to come on.

I was maybe in a similar position to you guys. Like five years ago, my oldest son was two. I went down to visit the school at SpaceX that Elon had created for his own kids. He hired a teacher out of the fancy private school in LA and started his own school at SpaceX. And the guy he hired, Josh Don, became a friend of mine. And we ended up starting a company together to kind of scale up the best parts of that school. So we started during COVID. The initial product was this thing that really captured my imagination. I went to the school, which I was at a company, education company, called Class Dojo, which went from zero to a billion dollars.

I was the first employee there. And what they did at the SpaceX school looked a lot like what we were doing to build that company. The kids were just working together to solve problems in the form of games. And so we took that approach, put that on the internet and signed up kids from all around the world, kind of took off. So that was our initial product.

And now we have built an AI math tutor that I think is taking off pretty well and I think is gonna be a major part of every kid's education in the future. Yeah, company's called Synthesis. And yeah, that's where we are. Yeah, so right now you have this subscription. What does Synthesis look like long-term?

Starting digital makes a lot of sense, but over time is there desire to kind of almost verticalize and go into the real world, or what does that look like? I don't know about going into the real world. I think there've been some Silicon Valley startups that have been really well funded that tried to do the software piece and the real world piece at the same time. I think it's really hard to pull off both.

Like if you're going into the real world for schools, you're doing like a real estate play essentially. And, you know, I think when it comes to learning, you know, math, science, engineering, the fundamentals, these are, this is information. And so information can be transmitted through computers in a lot of ways, you know, better than a human can do it. And so I think that we want to reach a billion kids, then, you know, it makes sense to go

vertical but within, you know, software, like things that can be delivered purely software. Never say never, because it is attractive to the idea of opening up physical and personal schools. If we did something like that, we'd probably do something like an academy. I admire that the European soccer clubs, what they do is they'll have an academy attached to all their professional teams and they'll bring kids in at age six or eight. There's a guy who's a star now for Barcelona that they brought in at eight years old and now he's like 18 and he's just, he's amazing.

I think if you really want like incredible performance then you should do that kind of like focus on the elite. So we might do one of those in like every city for the kids with the most potential, yeah. We talked about a Teal fellowship for middle schoolers, you know, just like, you just go further, further downstream, get the middle, like you could basically be that guy of getting the middle schooler to like drop out of their like regular, you know, or elementary school and be like, come to the synthesis, uh, institution

academy and, uh, that's exactly, uh, if we, if we do go in person, that's what we're going to do. Okay. I think it's, it's, uh, that'll just make a lot of people, uh, upset, but I think it's actually the right're gonna do. I think that'll just make a lot of people upset. But I think it's actually the right thing to do. I think you can identify kids who have potential engineering talent pretty early, and if you develop that, this is what they do for sports.

And so if we're looking at people who can actually advance civilization, we should have something that's at least as serious as what we do for sports. What is, 10 years from now, what is sort of K through 12 going to look like? My sort of personal experience with school was interesting. I started at a Waldorf school.

That was like my earliest memories of school. I think I benefited a lot from it. But they didn't really teach me to read until I was in the third grade. And I was like conscious enough to complain to my parents and be like, mom and dad, I want teach me to read until I was in the third grade. And I was like conscious enough to tell, complain to my parents and be like, mom and dad, like I want to learn to read like the other kids. Like, you know,

so I ended up going to a regular elementary school. And then by high school, my father was actually a math teacher at my high school. And I hated high school so much that I like graduated early. So like my, and then, and then by college, I was just like focused on startup stuff. So my, I didn't feel like I had a great experience with my education.

How much better can it be and sort of what's your broader vision? Obviously synthesis can be a big part of a child and a kid's education, but you know, what is the full stack look like in the future? Yeah, yeah. That's funny. I also had a bad experience with my education and it's, uh, you know, it's, I got like, Psy-opt into, uh, you know, devoting the rest of my life to changing

the whole system because I hated it so much. Uh, so, so, so maybe it was similar to you in that regard. I think the big problem is you start with this original elite education is with one-on-one tutors. I don't know, but I don't think it was like eight hours a day plus homework with one-on-one tutors. I think you can learn a lot more efficiently than that. Then you have like the one-room schoolhouses, which again, kids are like working on the farm and then they come to the schoolhouse a couple hours a day, maybe a couple times

a week and that's it. And then all the parents go to work and the school day expands. And instead of just sticking to that, like, well, we'll teach a little bit and then we'll kind of have fun for the rest of the day, they just expanded the teaching to make it somehow encompass all the hours from like 8 to 3, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and homework. And I think what we're going to see, I think AI tutors are going to drive this. I think you could actually learn 20 to 30x faster. I don't think there's going to be a need for any homework.

I think kids are just going to use AI tutors to learn the fundamentals and hopefully a lot beyond that or what their interests are. My hope is the rest of the day is spent in ways that we can't imagine. There's just like in your life, there's an infinite number of things you can do and ways you can spend your time.

And the same is true of kids. So we should spend a little bit of time teaching them the fundamentals so that they can have good ideas and find what they're interested in. And then I don't know what they should be doing. My kids go to like a charter school two days a week where they build bridges, they do school plays, they do all these kinds of things that you're not going to do with. It's not just software and like it's not just reading. And so I'd love to see a lot more of that.

Our goal is like be the partner with every in-person school that does that. And you know, hopefully there's a lot of just local creativity and exploration, right? Because kids have a tough job, you know, they have to figure out what they want to do in life and that that's, it's a hard problem in the modern world. You, it's hard to say, like, I just, I want to be a doctor or I want to be, you know, something specific like that because careers get more and more creative. And so, uh, I think it's important for kids to have that time to explore. Can you take me on a little tour of,

of where the government's doing things that are great for education of the next generation, where things could be improved, how charter schools fit into that, how public funding fits into that. Just kind of like, what's your world model for public-private partnership in educating the next generation? There's some really exciting stuff going on now, which I don't know if it's because Ryan Delk from Primer on, but he's done some work in like kind of lobbying governments in Florida for increased school choice, which is like, so I think a lot of people don't know in California, for example, it costs like $20,000 a year

to put a kid through the public school system, which is just like an extreme amount of money. And that's a little bit higher than the national average, but not by much. And so what a lot of states are trying to do is say, you can take that money with you and go choose a different school. And so that creates like the government, whether it's usually like the local government collecting taxes, paying for the education. But then there's this fierce competition, right? Like somebody can open up a school right next door, bad schools can fail, bad teachers,

bad principals can go out of business and there's going to be a lot more creativity in that regard. I think that's maybe one of the most exciting things that government can do because I think then you would be as well served by education as people are served by grocery stores. And there'll just be kind of wild cutthroat competition and people trying to do interesting things to attract students and get results. So I think that's, that's one place where the government can do something really great just by letting the, you know, bringing this like kind of consumer mentality into what's typically been a government monopoly.

So schools could get, you know, you'd be as well served as grocery stores as opposed to what it is now, which is like the DMV, right? Yeah. Does all K through 12 education over time start to look more and more like a video game? Because one concern I have right now is that kids, when they're out of school, they're doing Roblox, they're watching TikToks, and then you put them in a classroom or you give them homework that's sort of built around this sort of old style philosophy around learning, which is like, you know, writing things down and, and, you know, here's this, you know, textbook and we're going to read a chapter out of it or things like that. To me, it seems like kind of an impossible uphill battle to try to get a kid to pay attention to that when outside of class or even on their phone I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question.

I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question.

I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question.

I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. I think that are, I know this is like on people's minds, I think they're less related than people think. I think TikTok and these things are addicting, but also school is just terrible. Like it was terrible when we were kids and we didn't have TikTok, right? So I think regardless of what's going on in the rest of the world, you want to make the tools for learning as effective and as engaging as possible.

It's a really tight balance that you have to strike when you're building products. For us, there's things like Duolingo, which famously, it's maybe really good at getting their early retention and engagement, but hardly anybody knows someone who's learned a language from Duolingo. They kind of focus all the way on the engagement and gamification and not so much on the effectiveness. And then you can go the other way where it's like, well, theoretically, if kids would spend a lot of time on this, they would learn, but they won't do it. And I think the right products, it's going to be just a balance of those kinds of things.

And I think if you get it right, something a lot of people miss is kids, they wanna learn when you really learn something, you rock a new idea, it makes you more powerful and you can feel that. And I think it's especially true in math, but I think that's true in all subjects. If you want them to learn something, it's because you're trying to make them more powerful.

I think what a lot of teachers do is say, well, this will become useful to get to the next level of school and that's not terribly motivating. What we try to do is just show you, these ideas make you a more powerful thinker in the moment and I think kids are pretty motivated. They're pretty motivated by that.

So yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question I really have today and would love to have you back on in the future, just as this sort of industry develops. But we had talked before when the Humane AI pin came out, I think everybody that was intelligent in the tech industry generally looked at it and said, this is not going to replace my phone, because it does a lot of the same things. It doesn't necessarily do them better. But our reaction at the time was that

this is not gonna replace my phone, but maybe this is a solution that my kid would use where like I want like location tracking and I want them to be able to easily call me, but I don't want them to be on a screen. Have you thought, and so as like all these AI pins sort of evolved, there was the rabbit, there was Humane, there were some others.

My immediate thought was maybe they're focused on the wrong user type. Maybe there's a market for this with kids who if you gave them something that they could ask any question in the world to and was sort of like this sort of companion, maybe that could be cool. Have you guys thought at all about

sort of hardware experiences? I know you're very focused on delivering these digital experiences, but has that ever been even a conversation? We haven't talked about it at all. My kids have the, it's not Apple Watch, but it's a knockoff watch brand that tracks it. They can talk to you and that kind of stuff. And I assume they'll be able to connect to the internet and use AI for questions and that kind of thing.

I think for learning, screens are extraordinarily powerful. You can simulate almost anything on a screen. That's underrated. I think people don't realize how amazing that is. There's a lot of Luddites who are like, there's just something about learning on paper, like reading a book on paper. And I just don't agree with any of that at all.

I just think it's like information. Information kind of flows. You can kind of do anything on a screen. So yeah, we haven't talked about doing anything in hardware yet. One kind of crazy idea I have is because a lot of people do homeschooling now. A lot of, you know, I've become, you know, close with some people who are, you know, fairly prominent who do homeschooling. And I like the idea for my kids as well, having like a booth

with like a screen and speakers and just something to like isolate the outside world where you've got the computer in it and you're going to go in there. You're going to go in this booth, which seems kind of dystopian it's gonna be for like an hour and a half a day right like lock the door everything else yeah yeah it's like a time lock on it of course yeah yeah you have to complete the lesson to get out get out well last last question for me let me flip that around I know a lot of parents are, obviously, they want their kids to be accelerated in STEM and math,

but there is the other side of socialization, and there's a big question, Tyler Cowen's written about this, how maybe in the future, intelligence is too cheap to meter. The real value is in connections being, we like to joke that we're trying to be golden retrievers, be very friendly, attractive and dumb because intelligence is gonna be too cheap to meter.

The AI can do the rocket science for me. But if I'm a friend that you wanna hang out with and you wanna chop it up with, we're gonna have a great time. So, but I mean, seriously, as a parent, I think a lot of parents do even worry even more about their kids like, hey, it's okay if you're falling behind in math

just a little bit, as long as you're getting socialized and becoming like an upstanding member of society. And so do you see AI tutors or AI calibration being able to communicate with a child and understand, hey, they're being a little antisocial or something like that in a way that a teacher could or maybe just an augmented or an additional layer there to see, Hey, this, this kid is, you know, actually engaging at a very mature level,

which is great. These are good signs. We want to continue this pattern of behavior. Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I think parents are correct to worry more about social skills, especially from a young age. How old are you guys kids? Are they, they're like 24 and then I've twin boys who are six months. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Three and eight months. Yep. Okay. Cool. So yeah, you're in that age now where like the social skills matter, I think up to like age seven. Yeah. It's like close relationships with the family and just try to spend as much time with them

as you can and be around and like reading faces. I think it's a mistake. We don't like actively recruit customers below age seven because if you think about how much processing it takes to learn how to operate in the social world and read faces, I think you just want to leave kids' brains open to basically spending all their resources doing that. Because if you get it, it's like speaking a language. You get that by age four to seven, then in some ways, you're set for life because you're going to be able to fit in with groups. And I think that's extraordinarily important. When it comes to education, I don't see that the AIs are

going to be able to do our thinking for us. I mean, that's like a totally different world. It doesn't look to me like we're on the path to getting that. I think LMs are really cool. I think you're going to want your kids to be smart and knowledgeable and able to think as an individual and also have those social skills to work with other people and solve problems together, which is humanity's way of super intelligence, right? It's like being able to work together in groups. So this is actually mirrors the structure of the company. Now the AI tutor is like the

leading edge of the product, but then we have synthesis teams where you put kids in teams, small groups to work together in solving problems. They're like video games, but they're not shooters or race games. They're like complex problems where you have to argue and decide what action you want to take under conditions of uncertainty, figure out what you got wrong and make the course corrections. And it's like meta problem solving skills. So I think if you want these outgoing sociable engineers, people who can do both sides of their brain, I think we can do that, right?

I think of course people lean one way or the other but I think we can get people up to like a really good standard on both of those and then that's just gonna make us Able to solve more problems and advance the civilization. So that's how I look at it I was a parent anyway work on the social service first and that's a fantastic Vision for the future. I'm very optimistic. I have one last last question Miss Rachel on YouTube, very popular, little controversial. Do you have any under the radar creators on YouTube

that just make, my wife is very good about having extremely limited, just like TV screen time. We don't do iPads in public or at home. Planes are maybe the one condition. So if I'm taking my kids on a plane, is there a YouTube creator that you recommend or you just like now put them on,

give them their AI tutor and that's that? No, I mean, at your kid's age, I think Daniel the Tiger, like PBS series is really good. Do you guys know that one? Alpha, I don't know. This is alpha. Yeah, that's the real alpha. That was great. It like teaches them little it's like I think it's like the Successor to mr. Rogers and he's like maybe like the same people so they've got like little lessons and it's animated It's okay for their watch your kids watch bluey. Oh, yeah, you ever seen blue bluey's great So that's what we would do when they were on planes and little kids like that. I would, I haven't

seen, I've got four of my own and just having seen the, um, I think YouTube, YouTube is quite bad and it seems to push them into the YouTube shorts, which are just terrible. And even my like five year old recognizes like this is bad. I shouldn't be watching this. What's up? Yeah. Short form is like slop and you know, you should avoid it at all costs no matter what age you are basically. Except ours. Except ours. You should definitely watch clips of this because we will be clipping this

interview and posting it out and you should definitely watch these shorts because they're educational. But. Door clips on X are great. Yeah. It's different. Yeah. But I'm sure if you swipe up on this on X, you're going to get some really good stuff. Anyway, this was an awesome interview. Thank you so much. We'll have to

have you back soon. This was fantastic. Yeah. Very helpful. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. All right. Cheers, guys. That's hilarious. The how much screen time thing is a great question. I don't know if you saw Peter Thiel got asked this at like Sun Valley. Really? Yeah, because they were saying, oh, you're the board member of Facebook.

Like how much Facebook do you think kids should use? So it was basically screen time. And he was like 90 minutes a week. And so I was just like, yeah, that seems like a good number to benchmark against. But then I was trying to think like, how can I make this? Gotta get your 90, son. Yeah, no, no, no.

Here's the iPad. Get your 90 in. Yeah, no, no, here's the iPad get your 90 in Mr. Teal Yeah, you gotta give those numbers up but no but then I wanted to make it like, you know Can I can I make it even easier to keep that number lower? Cuz you want to basically keep the numbers low as possible And I realize you just have to create a really brutal economy in your house. So we have a whole economy going now where you get stars for brushing your teeth,

doing all these different things. And all of a sudden it turns something that was like, the sticker economy is big. And so all of a sudden it turned from like, oh yeah, it's a Friday, I can watch this too. I am grinding for weeks for a movie night, which was like, it was just free before But he doesn't mind it that all of a sudden. I've just created this, you know Kafka esque

Economy around it that he has to work like weeks to get like a single episode a single like eight up eight minute episode But but it's worked fantastically the new economy feels the reward. It's fantastic I highly recommend it create a really a really arcane economy in your household for whatever your kids want to do It's great. Anyway, speaking of arcane Kafka esque economies. Let's move over to venture capital Wilma Nidus posts Paul Ferry founder of mate matrix partners. There's a little interview in this book Question do we have 20 minutes? What do we have? No, I'm done I have to quit but again if you want to call me next week or continue on, we can do it by phone. Let me just finish the point.

So why is this the best business? One, you can make a lot of money if you're in it for a long time. It's not a business that you can get rich next year or the following year or five years. It's changed a little bit with some of these mangoes, solo GP funds. Secondary. It may be 10 years and maybe 15 years, but if you continue to be successful ates, Sola GP funds. It may be 10 years, it may be 15 years, but if you continue to be successful at it, it's amazingly rewarding.

But more importantly, you're dealing with interesting people all the time. They're innovators that are people that are changing lifestyles in the world. You're dealing for the most part with people who have no net worth and you're helpful to them in building net worth for themselves and net worth for their employees.

And you can be in the venture business and be relevant for a very long period of time if you're good at it. More so than if you start a tech company, the people who started Stratisoup computer or Apollo computer were relevant and important people in the 80s, but nobody knows who they are today. Whereas people that were in the venture business to be relevant for 4030 35 years later, you're at the leading edge of product development or technology or capability. There's no other business like that. You're not collecting

the receivables for the hundredth time. You're not laying off employees. You're dealing with interesting personalities. So it's the best business. Sorry, we had to cut it short, but something came up and I have to attend this. I love it. Great. Fantastic quote. The only pushback here that some GPs would give you is the downside of having 20 to 100 LPs who are your customers in many ways and can call you at any hour of the day, 365 days a year to, you know.

Well, that's the most interesting thing, is that there's this bifurcation right now where at any hour of the day, 365 days a year to, you know. Well, that's the most interesting thing is that like, there's this bifurcation right now where a lot of funds are trying to do less LPs, higher GP commits. And then simultaneously there's the opposite, which is like, let's go public. Let's have any retailer, retail investor be able to yell

at us when the stock goes down because we had a miss. Yeah. But you know. Yeah, I've got a buddy who raised his first fund. It's $20 million fund. Yeah. 100 K is like the average check size. Yeah.

That means there's people that are way less than that. Yeah. People that are way more than that. But you do the math. It's a lot of people. I wonder how I mean, if if if General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz get out in the public markets, I wonder what the smallest fund to go public would be in like five years.

You think someone would take like a $100 million fund public? Spack it? Are there any? Just raise a fund, just spack it, sell your entire GP stake, deploy it all. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Stranger things have happened, who knows? Silly, anyway.

There's not? Let's move on to Near Cyan, big friend of the show. They are hiring for a social media influencer marketing lead. This seems like a dream job. Seems really fun. We released V1 of RN last week, and the response has been amazing.

If you'd like to lead our marketing team for an app that has already been redefining the relationship between humanity and AI, please apply slash DM near super smart I got early access to the app. I've used it and It's very cool. It's built on built on Claude but near is super opinionated and

That the little a little lore here we talked about this before but for anybody that doesn't know near The little lore here, we talked about this before, but for anybody that doesn't know, Nier developed some notoriety for creating an Nvidia-only fund. That's right. I think two years ago at this point, it turned out. I think you just can't sell it. Yeah, for 10 years.

Yeah, 10 years. So the whole point is that it's a 10-year lockup. That's really fun. And it's a cool thing. So far, so good. And yeah, I mean, we've featured N New Year's posts many times a lot of bangers Yeah, and this is just an underrated role in Tech because there's the historical social media manager role

Yep, that was like you have your little SAS tools and you know your scheduling posts out we exactly That's just not the way that social media works anymore. And we talked about this with the PMF Red Eye guys. Yeah, it's like, can you make a crazy vibe reel? Can you post a banger? Can you be truly in the conversation, get a bunch of fans, be doing frontline customer support almost, getting executive communication from the founders,

get the founders posting more? It's just 360 now Anyway, I wanted to move on to a little historical size gone because I want to have Connor zwick on the show from From speak do we have our guest in here? Okay. Well, we'll do this one after let's bring in Michael He's here. I got so excited with the size gong I was gonna I was gonna hit it but I can't do it. We can hit the size gong for Michael. Welcome to the show Welcome Michael. We don't have you up on

We hit it a little harder hit the gong a little harder There we go that works That was that's what I was going for. I was hoping we would break it. Welcome to the show. What's going on? You made it to Boston. Michael messaged me like maybe two hours ago

and says I might be in the air, but you made it. And you're at, where are you right now? This is the Suno Studio in Boston. Oh, cool. Very cool. This is where I guess they have like artists roll through and stuff when they're in town Yeah, so Boston a major is from is Boston a major music market or is it more so they're bringing in Musicians that are helping improve the models that they're making in the app in general

I think it is a market, right? It is a major market, but no, it's not like in LA or in New York, but this is where Suno was founded, right? The founders came out of MIT, Harvard. Obviously, as you guys know, there's a lot of machine learning research going on in Boston and Cambridge.

So that's where the company got started. But I think they had a really smart idea, which was when our artists are going through Boston, which most major artists do, they can use the studio. It's a place to do that. Okay, that makes sense. Can you introduce yourself to the street? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And give us your name, the man who needs no introduction. But you may love you. But you're not at that level yet. Of course, of course. No, I mean, I appreciate you guys bringing me out. Sorry, am I introducing myself? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, introduce yourself, tell us what you do now,

and then I have a bunch of questions about your career. We'll dive into it. All right, let's do it. What's up, everyone? My name is Michael McNano. I'm a partner at Lightspeed. I was the co-founder of Anchor, a podcasting platform, which is now owned by Spotify. I also recently co-founded of anchor podcasting platform, which is now owned by Spotify.

I also recently co-founded a company called Ovo, which is an AI education platform. Awesome. Yeah. Big fan of the pod. Happy to be one of the early guests. Thanks, Brad. I'm a huge fan of Anchor. I used it for some podcast test I did.

It must have been right when it came out. And I just remember thinking like, man, this takes so much of the headache out of podcasting. That's just You could upload it on your phone. I don't think what was the original vision you wanted people to be producing and and Producing podcasts on their phone and uploading because that was a button you could just kind of hit record and then boom It goes out to the RSS feed But it seemed like it almost became like a prosumer tool pretty quickly because the podcasting market, it's pretty bifurcated between like,

people start taking it seriously once they get any sort of traction, right? Yeah, no, the original vision for Anchor actually was not to be a podcast platform. It was very, very idealistic. We wanted to be a social media platform, like audio social media. Like think Clubhouse, but a couple years earlier. And what we learned is that social audio is really, really social media. Yep. Like think Clubhouse, but a couple years earlier. Sure.

And what we learned is that social audio is really, really freaking hard. Yep. You know, we took a crack at a certain format, take on it that we had, which did like fairly well. I mean, there was like, you know, there were spikes of growth here and there, but overall wasn't working. After a year, we like completely pivoted to another iteration of social audio. Gave that a year, didn't work. And then what we were hearing from all of our users is,

hey, we just want to use these tools to publish podcasts to Apple and Spotify. Yeah. And when we did that, it was just like instant PMF from that moment. So yeah, take us through the story of the of the company. How big did you get? You raised money, I'm sure, eventually exit. I want to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. And for a little bit of lore, when I was, this was 2018, I had just, maybe I was still

in college. I hit up Michael and he did a call with me. Didn't need to, had no real, I mean, it was much more beneficial for me. I was doing, I was working in I was working and doing a bunch of podcasts advertising at the time. But thank you. Thank you, Michael. You always remember the people that give you

30 minutes a day, however long it takes. But but yeah, I would love to hear the story again. Yeah. So so so my co-founder and I near Zickerman, we we built product at this company called Aviary. And this was around the time that like Instagram was taking off and people were realizing that you could take and edit photos on your phone

and it could actually look good. Obviously, you know, now that's just a given, like the camera is the phone. And you know, we sold that business to Adobe and while we were there, we got really into podcasts. And we were sort of like sitting around asking ourselves, like, how come nobody has done for photos? How come nobody's done for podcasts? What has just been done for photos?

And so that was like the original idea. Like, and of course, at this time, it was like 2016, everything was a social network back then, like Snap was exploding. And we're like, oh, of course, this should be a social network, right? We should have a feed. We should have a button right at the bottom of the app in the middle. And so that was the original vision. We raised a couple million bucks from folks like beta works and SV angel and ENIAC and all these, all these guys. And, and yeah, like I said,

we, you know, we, we, we had to go through a couple of different pivots. We raised, I think to answer your question, John, we ended up raising just under 15 million total. We were about 25 people when we exited. We sold to Spotify in 2019. Did you ever run into- They actually announced two acquisitions on the same day, Anchor and Gimlet. I remember that.

Yeah, I remember that. Which is like the cardinal sin of launches is like if you have two very interesting launches, you should just do them like, space them out, like, you know, get the full benefit of each. But I think, I launches, you should just do them, space them out, and get the full benefit of each. But I think, I mean, you could probably speak to it more than I can, but it seemed like Spotify really wanted to plant the flag and be like,

we are in podcasting now, so not just one acquisition, we're taking this seriously. Wait, quick question, did you ever run into Archie Archibong at Aviary? Yeah, of course. Shout out to Archie. I went to high school with him. I hope he's listening. Yeah, yeah, I'll have him set in his club, that's awesome. Yeah, yeah, he was out in Japan a bunch. Yeah, of course. I went to high school with him. I hope he's listening. Yeah. Yeah, I'll have to send him his clip. That's awesome

Yeah, yeah, he was out in Japan a bunch Yeah, that's right. Good guy. Big in Japan. Huge in Japan, honestly. I wanted to ask you about Where you know as somebody who sold your company to Spotify work there for a while and then now you have a much more sort of Now you're a venture capitalist, but still, I'm sure very opinionated on the Spotify product. How do you, where do you think Spotify's going? We had talked about this a little bit offline.

I'd said, and I'd even posted about this, of Spotify and YouTube have sort of always been on a collision course. Long, ultra long form became very important to YouTube. And then they became the biggest podcast platform. And in many ways, podcasts aren't just replacing radio. They're replacing TV. Yeah. Which is so it's super important to YouTube.

And it feels like a sort of critical battleground for Spotify. But I'd be curious to get your point of view on the overall battle between these, you know, tech tech giants, right? Spotify feels like a small company, but it's $140 billion market cap. It's a big business probably would be well beyond that if Apple Music wasn't, you know, rammed down everybody's throat. But yeah, I'd love would

love to get like a kind of general market perspective on that. Yeah, so taking a step back, and I should caveat all this by saying that I haven't been at the company in like three years. So this is a pure outsider perspective. But I think the big thing that Spotify has always done well and they've always believed in is this notion of bundling.

Like taking these products and these business lines that they have strengths in, and then bundling them with other new products, product lines and business lines. And that's honestly why podcasts were so successful for Spotify. You know, if you think back, back in the day when it was like Spotify head to head with Apple,

Apple had two separate apps for these things, right? They had music and they had podcasts, two separate apps. And that was a total gift to Spotify because Spotify could take the podcasts and put them right next to the music. So you never had to leave the experience. And that's really what kickstarted the whole thing. It's like they had a built-in audience of hundreds of millions of people that were one tap away from podcasts. And I think, you know, maybe to start getting to the question you're asking, I think that's how they've probably thought about video as well. And I think, you know, maybe to start getting to the question you're asking, I think that's, that's how they've probably thought about video as well.

It's like, Hey, we have people listening to music. Now we have them listening to podcasts. What if we bundle in video now? And that opens up a whole new market for us. So the obvious place for them to start was with podcasts, right? Like they have every podcast in the world already. Now let's get these people to add videos to these podcasts But you know again as an outsider you have to imagine the next step is you start to see other types video content on the platform

And even if they can start chipping away a few market share percentage points here and there YouTube's catalog. That's a big deal for Spotify So yeah, I think it's I think it's pretty smart move How do you think about the relentless march of the algorithmically curated feeds? In the podcasting world, I think a lot of podcasters are super, super happy that they're in the RSS feeds. And they feel like it's almost as strong as having someone's email address. There's a very high open rate. If you have that RSS feed, your weekly show,

you're dropping a weekly thing right at the top of their Apple podcasts app. But and Spotify has a similar feel right now, but you could imagine them going to something that's more algorithmically generated, more variance in the in the total views. You see this on YouTube where you know, Mr. Beast can be can be reliable. But for most other creators, it's like a banger and then a flop and then a banger and then a flop and we all feel this on X when we post. It's very high variance, but you can go really, really big because it's an algorithmic feed.

Your podcaster who's built on RSS, pretty hard to all of a sudden have one episode go 10X bigger, but the downside's very protected. Do you think, my question is basically like, if I'm an RSS podcaster and I'm thinking, hey, I want to go to Spotify, this is a little dangerous because I could see them going more algo feed in the future and then that introduces more volatility to my business. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. What's your read on that?

Yeah. I mean, I think the RSS feed is a very, very controversial thing in podcast land. You have the podcast purists that will live and die by the RSS feed. I mean, they will fight you to the death if you tell them that RSS is going to go away. But on the flip side, like it has lots of limitations. The RSS feed, like it's not like a two way channel, right? It's like very limited in terms of the functionality it can ultimately provide.

And, you know, I think there's probably no coincidence to biggest platforms now for podcasts Spotify and YouTube are not really RSS based anymore, right? They're all doing things that layer on top of the format that have nothing to do with RSS. And so again, I know like the RSS purists are, you know, probably want to want to murder me right now. But I just don't I don't know if the the format is viable long term as a solution. I think because like you said, you can't you can get massive massive distribution on YouTube that you can't get through just like a plain old RSS.

Totally. Yeah, the two things as a creator now, the analytics on the RSS feed are just obviously a joke. You basically get no analytics. And then with Spotify is a lot better. But then the distribution, which we're already seeing this with Spotify, we're growing our audience just by nature of being on Spotify,

versus that's not really happening on Apple. It's sort of us driving other sort of top of funnel growth. But anyways, it's the classic centralization versus decentralization argument, right? Yeah. And in most cases, I know people don't want to hear this, but centralization often wins. Yeah. Yeah. What's your take on the pivot to video for most podcasters?

We saw a big one today, Invest like the best now has video. I started on video with YouTube basically. I never really had a pure audio product. I think the first episode we did was video. We very much enjoy video, but is there any hope for a creator that just wants to stay audio only for the future? I don't think so because again, we're talking about Spotify and YouTube

being the predominant platforms right now. And we know that those algos, they need the video. They crave the video. I think users got wise to this. Actually, it was during COVID. People don't realize it was during COVID when before COVID, people were recording podcasts in studios, in booths, right? Similar to how you guys are now. But they weren't video. It's right, it was just like a microphone on a table.

And then COVID everyone went home and the way that these shows kept going was through Zoom and Riverside. So you get video for free. So all these podcasters got video for free and they were like, oh shit, if I upload this video to YouTube, I get all this distribution.

And now you can't go back. The algo craves the video. Craves the and now you can't go back the algo craves craves the video craves Talk to us about I'm gonna butcher the name oboe. I've only read oboe oboe So this is a company you basically incubated your co-founder, but obviously you're you're still a full-time investor Maybe talk about that dynamic and then what you guys are working on you see you're still a full-time investor. Maybe talk about that dynamic and then what you guys are working on.

Yeah, recently co-founded this new company with my former anchor co-founder, Neer Stickerman. He's the CEO. He's running it full-time. I am not full-time on it, as you mentioned. I'm a full-time partner at Lightspeed. Basically, the premise behind Ovo is very, very simple. We, the humans, you guys, me, everyone,

we have invested many, many billions of dollars over the past couple of years and making machines very, very smart, right. Through AI. And we believe with Oboe that it's time for the machines to make humans smarter. And so this is a company at the premise of AI making humans smarter. You guys have all heard a lot of the talk about, you know, hyped up use case of chat GPT has been, oh, that's going to be a personalized tutor. It's gonna help people learn Chat gbt is not really built for that. Yes. Yes, it's helpful for like one-off

Asks. Hey, tell me about this thing. Tell me about this thing, but John it doesn't know everything you've ever learned and it doesn't know what your interests are and it doesn't know what your goals are And you know, maybe learning a new language or learning about I don't know some Theory around finance or something and so that's the basic premise of what what oboe is solving We have a beta coming very soon if people want to be the first to check it out Just go to our I guess our X oboe labs at oboe labs I'm very very excited for it. And yeah, I think I think people are gonna really like this product And I'm very, very excited for it. And yeah, I think people are going

to really like this product. Yeah, and you dropped by the PMF for Die Cage to support the players recently. And they're working on a problem that's sort of adjacent. But yeah, maybe, and funny enough, just before this, we had the founder of Synthesis, which is an AI tutor. And so it feels like we're maybe, I'm sure maybe people have already done it,

but it's sort of a broader market map around AI and learning. Maybe they exist. It's kind of like we're in the app store moment, where there's a bunch of, we need to build products around this stuff. We have the new technology, but what is the dominant product factor, product form factor for each of these use cases.

And so it's a knockout drag out fight. Good luck out there. Yeah, what? I mean, that's, it's usually a good sign, right? Yeah, totally. A couple things going on. And consumers benefit. I mean, everyone benefits.

Like, you know, you, you, you, you, pace of iterations very fast. You get to test a bunch of things. You get to try new stuff all the time, everyone. And then, you know, at the end, a bunch of people make money, which is great. Exactly. How do you, how do you think about the pressure? So you're sitting on both sides of the time, everyone. And then at the end, a bunch of people make money, which is great. How do you think about the pressure? So you're sitting on both sides of the table, right?

You're an investor at Lightspeed, getting an opportunity to look at and invest in some of the fastest growing, most exciting companies in the world. You're on the founder side now. Meanwhile, the average founder is being inundated with content around companies going from $0 to $10 10 or zero to a hundred million dollars

in this super short period of time. Meanwhile, you at Anchor, you know, pivoted multiple times and iterated towards this idea and eventually had a fantastic outcome, but it wasn't this sort of straight shot linear. As a founder now and from the founders that you talked to, is there just sort of this extreme pressure around, I need to deliver faster results than ever.

And do you think that could have a negative impact on outcomes? Because when I think of Oboe, I think, okay, massive TAM, massive opportunity. This can be a $10 billion plus company. If you look at, you know, companies like Duolingo and things like that in the public markets, but I could imagine that you're going to have to sort of iterate in the same way. So what does success look like for you? And what advice do you give founders that are kind of facing that pressure to, you

know, put up ridiculous numbers in a really short period of time or be, um, you know, relegated to the, like, you know, uh, sort of not top tier, uh, company. Yeah, we actually, we actually talked about this in the, in the PM effort. I cage in the cage. The cage as one does. There are a lot of startups right now that are experiencing explosive revenue growth, right? It seems like every week that chart has a new line on it like zero to 100.

You know the chart I'm talking about. Yeah, 100 million ARR. Six months, two months, one day, zero days. Yeah. Something we talk a lot about at Lightspeed is high calorie ARR and low calorie ARR, right? There's a lot of cheap ARR growth out there, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that AI is very magical. People see these products, they're kind of blown away by them, and they're like, here, take my credit card. I'm happy to pay. But that doesn't necessarily

say something about how sticky these products are or how good they are or whether or not these users will actually retain. And so with a lot of these explosive high ARR companies that we've seen over the past couple of years with AI, it's not really a secret. You guys have probably heard this as well. Many of them are very, very churny.

They churn very quickly. A lot of trialing, a lot of like, oh, I want to experience very churning, right? They churn very quickly, a lot of trialing, a lot of like, ooh, I wanna experience this magic moment, take my credit card, but then I'm never coming back. And so, you know, the advice I gave to the, the case of guys at age was, I think we gotta remember to continue to pay attention to like the metrics that have always mattered, right?

Things like consistent user growth and retention and making sure like the retention that have always mattered, right? Things like consistent user growth and retention and making sure like the retention cohorts flatten out, they don't just like drop to zero. Cause I think people are getting like very, very hung up on this ARR metric, which is great. I mean, it's a business that can go from zero to a hundred and six months, phenomenal. But you can't ignore the traditional metrics

that tell you whether or not a product is good. And I think that's going to be really. Yeah. So on your side, are you, are you ready to, uh, you obviously started this with your former co-founder, are you guys ready for, uh, you know, I think you have like a good instincts here, but you, you must be sort of ready to, you know, do as many, uh, hopefully it's a one shot. You just nail it out the gates. But it sounds like you guys are ready to pivot as many times or sort of adjust the strategy as many times as necessary. Because it is such a big problem space. There has to be a there's definitely a billion dollar

business in here somewhere. But it still takes work to find that spot. Absolutely. I think you got to be willing to pivot. And by the way, that's what we see like, you know, in places like YC, these companies pivot sometimes like five times over the course of two weeks. The pivot is so important.

And you know, the other thing I would say is not only do you have to pivot, but you have to move faster than ever. I mean, the thing that I felt when I went in the cage with the guys was I've never seen people move this fast. These guys have been in there two weeks, they showed me what they're working on. And I'm not going to reveal it. They told me not to reveal it. But the the amount of progress they've made

in two weeks, I've never seen anything like it. Like they literally went from not having a line of code to having a very fully featured app, iOS app they're about to ship to the app store. Yeah, there's just never been competition like this before. It's insane. I interviewed this guy, Josh Moore, on my podcast. He started this app called Wave. Have you guys seen this app, Wave?

It's kind of like granola. It's like a note-taking thing with AR. It's doing like five million ARR. He built it by himself. Just like he had never coded before in his life. That's amazing. And he uses AI to not only teach him how to code, but to write the code and to check marketing.

And it's just the level of intensity and competition right now is unlike anything we've ever seen. That's fantastic. Switching over to putting on your investor hat, wanted to give you an opportunity, Lightspeed's big investor in XAI, and has been just one of the most active investors

across the foundation model landscape. I'd love to, besides the obvious, you just invest in Elon companies, and you tend to do well. What was more of, without going into, you know, go into however much detail you want, but like break, break down kind of the memo on, on the XAI thesis. Yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of what has been reported publicly, you know,

aligns with, with our, our thinking and our thesis. Yes, betting on Elon is a pretty smart thing, but more than that, it's the level of intensity. To again, bring it back to the speed and intensity that he and the people that he hires brings to the team. And so the first time we talked to that team and they were telling us about the data center that they were gonna build.

And again, it's been very publicized at this point. Yeah. We were like, wow, like if you could actually do this, you would, you would go from basically the starting gun to, you know, being at the same level or possibly exceeding open AI in, in a matter of months in terms of model performance. And, and then they went and did it like they literally did it in like three or four months.

And I think that type of intensity and speed and scale that only Elon and Elon-like companies can actually do, combined with the fact that they've got, obviously, this incredible distribution channel right out of the gate through X. And not just a distribution channel, but a really unique content set to feed off of the model. This model, unlike most other models, it has real-time information that they don't really have.

And that real-time information also serves as a surface to trigger usage of the product. Analyze this post, tell me more about this. So I think those are some of the factors that got us excited and the team has as far beyond delivered on what they said they would. So it's been really exciting. Yeah.

What you know, obviously you can't sure any details here, but should the broader market expect more foundation models or is it kind of getting to the point you remember in crypto was like, okay, we don't need another like foundation level. And then you'd see one and you'd be like, really, you know, like this one, this one built different or, or, or do you think that, uh, you know, the five or six major players, thinking machines, X AI open AI SSI, are those like the labs that, you know, you know, are those like the labs that,

we're sort of betting on, or do you think there's room for more teams there? The way we were framing this was like, if it is commoditizing, well, commodities are valuable. Oil is a commodity and everyone wants to drill for a well. Yeah, it's very capital. The more wells you have, the better. It's capital intensive. So get a bunch of wells.

Yeah, it's capital intensive, but if you put together a really great team, you can just start a new oil company and it's being worth something. Yeah. But yeah, what are you thinking about it? Yeah. I mean, I think a few weeks ago, a lot of people wanted to have the debate about whether or not DeepSeek meant that models were commodities and nobody should ever train foundation models again. I actually feel like that was the wrong conversation to be having. The way we think about it at Lightspeed is these companies are not just models. They are companies. They have distribution. They have customers. They have data, right? They have security, safety, like things that

enterprises actually care about. And so, you know, I think should there be more models trained? Maybe, but I don't think a model by itself is necessarily interesting. I think there needs to be a product and a team behind it. And so I think if you were starting a model, you know, if you're starting a company today, there's training a foundation model, I think you need to either bring something very, very unique to the table, in terms of what that model can do. Or you better have some other advantage in terms of distribution, or, or some sort of data that other players don't have access to that lets you jump up ahead. And I think that's an example of something Elon and the XAI team were able to do. They were able to build this data center in a way that no one else was willing to do to jump ahead. Yeah, that's a little bit of the way that we think about it and talk about it. Yeah, that's fantastic. You have any other questions? Fantastic. I think we covered everything.

It's been great having you. Yeah. We'd love to have you on. When you have news with Oboe, new investments, things like that, come on. We're all about conflict, right? So we want people coming on that have positions in the companies discussed on this show. Yes, highly conflicted. Yeah, so it's a-

No conflict, no interest, right? Exactly, yeah. That's our motto. Yeah, we'll have you come on, pump your bags, then we'll have your direct competitor come on, pump their bags. Yeah, yeah. Why not, why not?

Have you both on them same time? Shout out to the guys in the cage, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for supporting the players, and we'll have you back on here soon. Have fun. Are you gonna go play some music right now? Thank you for thank you for coming on this year for supporting the players and We'll have you back on here soon. Have fun. Are you gonna go play some music right now? Generate some music around with that that Gibson in the background. Yeah generate some music Honestly, skip the skip the Gibson. Wait, you're in Boston. Are you staying through st. Patty's day?

No, oh Get hammered on Guinnesses and throw up in the street like you're a Boston college student. Yell about your striped secondary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Be fun.

In another timeline maybe. In another life, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if my wife, hey, I decided to stay five more days to get totally annihilated. There's a big parade. There's gonna be green beer. There's gonna be green beer. I have to drink it. I have to do a keg stand in South East. I'm sorry.

Exactly. Yeah. She'll understand. She'll understand. Great hanging out with you. Have a great rest of your day. Great to see you, Michael. We'll talk to you soon. Later, guys. Talk to you soon. Cool. Michael's a man. We're informally doing a full deep dive on AI education today. Yeah. We got that.

We got Ovo. Now I want to go to Connor Zwick over at Speak. This is for language learning. Wait. You know we already did a size gong whole segment on this by the way. We did. So I think we should skip this one. Yeah, let's skip it.

But we do want to have them. I do want to have them on at some point. But yeah, little historical size gong. You know, you let's skip it. But we do want to have I do want to have them on at some point. But yeah, little little historical size gone. Yeah. You got to do it. You got to do it. Any any excuse to hit the go? Yeah, we'll take it. Well, let's go over to Sager and jetty. Good friend of the show. He's reporting he's getting a little political but it's fashion based politics. And so we'll cover it here on the show.

denied entrance to the chamber to the Senate chamber for Senator Jim Banks for wearing cloud runner running shoes with a full suit of tie he wasn't wearing proper footwear footwear and Sager says the way I feel reading this must be what it's like to get high on heroin because Sager has been beating the drum on we need our politicians to be well dressed they need to be wearing suits no more sweatpants no more hey dresses at least as nice as we do this show yes which John sometimes gets upset yes because I'm not wearing a jacket but I just like to wear a collared shirt sometime and do a little business casual It's it's too casual for casual unless it's casual Friday in which case we should be in Jeff Lewis tank tops

anyway Love love Sager highlighting that speaking of Jeff Lewis. He's the next post in here. There we go He says Jeff Lewis over at bedrock says things that go up only over 10 year time horizons Select individual companies led by transcendent entrepreneurs private and public Rock says, things that go up only over 10 year time horizons, select individual companies led by transcendent entrepreneurs, private and public tasteful ultra luxury real estate. I like where he's going with this land in select locations, select cryptocurrencies, select precious metals and select artwork. He says that is all.

I love it. O a great post yes so if you're in the mag seven yep rotate to select precious metals well if your mag seven company isn't led by a transcendent entrepreneur yeah because if you are led by a transcendent entrepreneur it doesn't matter if you're public or private you can still go up over a 10 year time horizon but otherwise get out and get into some ultra luxury real estate some crypto currencies and precious metals and some artwork. I Do it. I think we're getting up to speed with the ultra luxury real estate We're getting up to speed with the crypto and the precious metals. I think we're behind on the artwork So we should have them on to talk about that. Where's where's the bull market? There's always bull market somewhere

talk about that. Where's where's the bull market? There's always a bull market somewhere. What are it's great because you can find an artist that you like buy up all of their available, you know, works and then just start, you know, putting them up in auction, buying them yourself, you know, sort of market chandelier bidding. Yeah, are you familiar chandelier bidding? It's a phrase for when you are essentially bidding on your own, just to raise the reserve on a piece of something that you're auctioning off.

And of course, if you win your own auction, then you have to pay the fee. But the fee for the risk of pumping up the price, free of demand. I think that's just called market manipulation. Chandelier bidding, I just looked it up. Oh yeah, what is that? It's where the auctioneer pretends to see a non-existent, to see a bid from a non-existent part of the room. So you go, oh, okay, and we're going up.

So it's the auction house trying to pump their backs. Yeah, I got it, it's not you. But where you're talking about is even more real where I know people that, let's say you own 30 pieces of artist work and one of their pieces that's comparable to yours goes up for auction. If it doesn't sell well,

then your entire collection just gets marked down. Sure, sure, sure. So you might as well just buy a little bit more. So you might as well just buy it. A premium mark. Yeah, mark it up. Smart. Mark it up.

VCs do this. Yeah. They're like, all of the foundation model companies are worth so much because every time one comes to market, it's worth billions. And so, you know, the first one I invested in certainly has to be worth a trillion. Who knows?

Anyway, speaking of a company that sorely needs to acquire one of these foundation model companies, transcendental Apple plans, one of the biggest software overhauls in its history for iOS 19, iPad, iOS, iPad, OS 19 and Mac OS 16. If you love the photos app, you're going to love this. Looking to revamp its operating systems for a new generation of users. And Raj Vier says, I don't trust 2025 Apple to pull this off. They might just incinerate the greatest business ever created.

And Chris Horn says, yeah, I'm taking under on this. I don't know if they can incinerate the greatest business ever created, but they definitely need to try something new. They definitely need to get some fresh blood in there, take some risks. They could really make the software much worse, and it would still take a lot to actually compete

with them on the hardware. People don't like green bubbles. And yeah, the hardware is hard to make It's a very reliable product it connects to the wireless network reliably people forget that like You know a lot of the beauty of the Apple ecosystem is just yeah Like it finds the 5g tower or the LTE tower area It doesn't drop phone calls that often. Like that. Those are considered table stakes, but they could go away if you, if you get lost in something else. Anyway, um, Jared Rossner says huge opportunities for AI startups that no one

is talking about AI native brokers when broker transactions can be fully automated. Those markets context Jared. Oh, Hey, really quickly. We got Dalyan on the show. Oh hey how you doing Dalyan. What a pam. On launch day. Thank you. Great again. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. What's new with you. How did you how do you enjoy the weekend. You know Tahoe terrible place to ski great place to hang out with friends always you know sort of happy friends, always happy to be there and God bless Kugin's wife for being willing to carry two big Kugins inside of her once upon a time. Really hard one to do that myself. Well, I mean, she got a relaxing weekend. It was good.

It was all worth it. It was all worth it. You have twins. It was all worth it. If you have twins, twin boys, give me a third son. I'll take you to Tahoe. I actually didn't get to ski with you, Deleon. Are you good? Can you do back flips in 360s or?

I think I was the best skier on the trip, but I'm not quite at the level of doing back flips, but I do have many friends from high school, because I went to high school in Utah that are very back flip capable, including my little brother, Pavel's co-founder, Jeff Morell. He's sort of CEO out of New York,

not skiing very much, but a very cool skier. Where are you on the skiing risk curve? Do you ever scare yourself skiing? John and I were talking yesterday, if you're getting to the point where you're genuinely scaring yourself consistently, it's probably too far, but at the same time skiing, I was telling a story in December, I was in the Alps

and having the best run of the trip, got distracted for a second and fell like 200 feet, got a yard sale, did a yard sale, then fell like another 200 feet, but that happened once on the trip, that's maybe the most that I'm comfortable with. Where are you on the risk curve? You know, I think I'm very bad at the risk curve

and I should be better at that that given that I have a wife and You're sort of child But really somehow in skiing is not the place where it shows up Like I've ever had more near-death incidents in like the first quarter of this year than like, you know The prior decade basically combined and so it's when we think a lot about maybe I need to adjust my wrist curve But somehow it's flying because I just ski for so long that I know the downside of like I did all the crazy shoots and cliffs and all that stuff when I was younger. So like I don't feel the need to like quite go that crazy. But then yet again earlier this year, I found myself

in this place where I was just like I kept powder hunting. Where was I? Oh yeah, in Deer Valley. And I just kept going slightly more off piece and slightly more off piece and slightly more off piece until at some point I found myself going a little too fast up a cliff that I didn't know was there. I managed to catch myself but unfortunately like halfway down the cliff where I no longer had an option of like climbing up I just had like the rocks below me but not enough speed to clear them and so I was like well there is only one way out of this that doesn't involve like you know waiting an hour for ski patrol to like and grab me. And it's like, it's time to go rock skiing. Rock skiing.

Launched myself, skied across the rocks a little bit, went off, and I was like, I think I'm done for the day. So I think I've gotten better of my wrist curve. But yeah, this weekend, I purposely only grabbed super thin racing carving skis. Because I'm not even tempted to go off piste. The only thing that these things are capable of is carving. Are you having those near death experiences as a pilot?

You fly small planes. The pilots I know will tell me these stories that are just like the most harrowing stories about a single landing on just like what was supposed to be a casual trip. And they're like, yeah, it was raining and we lost connection with the tower and it was like completely pitch black and there was no lights on the runway.

So we had to land and the plane was like going backwards. There was so much wind. And I'm like, how does your wife let you do that? Where are you having near death experiences other than skiing? You know, every motorized vehicle that I found myself behind, whether it's in the air or not, I somehow have found myself in a bad situation over the past quarter.

I'm so deep in the doghouse that I'm putting myself through a remedial program of, I'm very good at the technical nature of the operation of the vehicle, but it's the higher level risk calculus of what situations I put myself into that is very poor. So my remedial program is I went and back to all my flight trainers, and I went and found the oldest one. Because as they

like to say, there are bold pilots, and there are old pilots, but there are not bold and old pilots. I think it's important for me to become an old pilot rather than a bold one. And I think right now sometimes I'm a little too bold. So that's great. Well, Mr. Keith out from South, South LA, which speaking of, yeah, excited to be in LA with you guys a little more often lately. Yeah, yeah, we're happy to have you. Well, stay safe. I wanted to run something by you. Obviously there's turmoil in the financial markets. We were pitching something called the yard sale theory of financial markets where basically every ski season the capital allocators go, they're speaking freely

on the ski lifts together. They know no one else is listening. They share stock tips and then the market crashes. And so if you look at like Theranos, it happened during ski season. FTX happened during ski season and Ron was discovered during ski season. What do you think of that or why do you think the market's going down right now? What's gone wrong? There is a historical seasonality to the stock market. I remember seeing something similar where it was basically the past 50 years of the steepest dry-downs of the S&P 500, something like 80% of them happened

between October and February. There's a component of that that I'm sure is also tax season related where people want a lot in gains versus losses at the end of the year, but not too closely coupled to it. I'm sure there's a component of it is people sharing stock tips and Aspen. There is also the presidential transfer, whether it's this this year or any prior year always happened at this time of Year which also introduces volatility and people don't like volatility the one bold sign that I'll say is I was just looking at this I don't know if you guys know this website true inflation which basically tries to do like a week to week Analysis of inflation just track and grocery store prices that are it as it is actually showing like a pretty steep drop Yeah, 15 months, and so I'm a little bit of a believer of the Scott Bessent, there is going to be a detox period.

Now, I think that some of the moves that the administration are making feel a little blind, and they clearly are sometimes pulling things backwards. You do the tariffs, you roll them back, you do a bunch of layoffs, and then some of those layoffs like in NOAA, I was just reading today like, they laid off a bunch of like the Noah commercial sent remote commercial sensing team. And then there is a huge sort of backlash. And so some of those people got rehired like a week after getting fired by you know, sort of Doge and crew. So there is a little bit of like, I feel like they're taking, you

know, sort of a chainsaw, which is not unreasonable when you need a scalpel because it's just like the scalpel may take too long. And you know, it only has two years before like Congress potentially flips and so it's probably a reasonable, you know So approach but I think that's what you're seeing in the market is dear God like the you know sort of president and you on are taking a chainsaw to the federal government and That's you know introducing some level of volatility. I like this. You know you've sure heard you know Peter say this a bunch But I love his, you know, analogy on what is the US President and it's, you know, they're the mayor of the United

States, but the dictator of the world. And they basically have infinite power over foreign policy, but actually pretty limited power domestically. And so there's so much of like the S&P 500 that's been propped up over the past couple years by just like insane amounts of foreign inflows, that he starts to become, you know, sort of very aggressive to some of our partners and allies, and especially in Europe. You'll start to see some of that flow out into their own domestic stock market. I'm not saying, I'm somebody that obviously comes from Eastern Europe, and I'm crazy anti-Russia, and so I don't necessarily want us to totally concede to Putin, but at

the same time I also think it's important for allies to finally get their shit together. Now, rearming of Germany, we've seen how that's gone the past couple times, so we've got to be a little cautious there. You never know, AFD, Elon being very pro-AFD, probably good. If AFD gets too powerful, maybe we're backson. Um, and so that's maybe a little, you know, sort of tricky. Um, but you know, the Germans probably, you know, could stand to be a little more, you know, prideful. Well, speaking of, um, uh, Starship, uh, theory for how long, for why it takes so long real quick before that, cause it sort of leads into this,

right as the Doge stuff started to get very intense and was sort of top of mind, NASA just happened to come out and they said Oh, by the way, there's an asteroid. That's it's basically it was there was like doubling every day Yeah, yeah, I gotta I gotta throw this on we keep this nearby It was like almost every day it was like doubling that the chances that an asteroid was gonna hit in ten years and I Was like this is just like it's 10 years out. It's particularly convenient, conveniently timed. Now we finally need NASA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was kind of the joke. But how do you have any insight into how, into why they could have had some, an event that's far

enough out that we have probably quite a lot of data on, that then there could be that amount of variance in such a short period of time around something as catastrophic as impact. I'm going to bring up a totally unrelated point and then answer your question. The totally unrelated point is China has now confirmed that they're going to fly Pakistani astronauts to the Chinese space station So for the first now, I'm not saying that Pakistan is like a huge, you know So the lover of the US or anything like that But I actually don't know too much about like the you know general foreign policy history with them

Do they like us versus China more? I mean China didn't basically invade, you know, their next door neighbor India But I know that they hate the Indians So maybe because of that, you know know the enemy of my enemy is my friend And so maybe more Pakistan likes China, but I think the interesting thing to think about there is that China is exerting soft power not just be like the Belt and Road initiative and like investing in the infrastructure But it's like you know come visit our infrastructure And I started to build up a coalition around that because you can imagine that eventually turning into you know Pakistani astronauts Visiting the Chinese lunar station and you know

I don't know if Pakistan's good at a lot of things But like maybe they're good at having you know sort of some of their folks go up there and be you know sort of lunar Miners that may have a very high death rate early on but you know, maybe they're willing to you know Sort of push for that so thinking about some of our you know, sort of enemies, you know coalescing around, you know So stations in space, potentially scary thing. We gotta think about what we do as America. On the asteroid tracking, I kind of buy it in that, man, it's so hard to track even on our satellite

and we know where SpaceX dropped us off and where things are going, and that's so close to Earth. The idea that we have perfect tracking on these asteroids super far out, there is, I think, a lot of statistical variability. And then you have to, the reason that there is increasing, increasing, and then set and drop is I'm sure what was happening is we have a bunch

of these sort of deep space radar, et cetera, different assets. One of them starts to pick up, hey, this thing is starting to get close. And then it may take some time for us to spool up a bunch of resources. You probably need the Earth to spin around a couple times. You have the Australian radar, et cetera, pointing at it.

And then we just get better and better. And then all of a sudden it drops down to zero. Every time. Because it really felt like every day it was a sort of doubling effect. And it's very possible that it was like the earth was just spinning around. We were getting another look at it.

Another pass. Yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, going back to Johnson. You know, though, that we did a test run on this. So NASA, actually, about two and a half years ago ago did a test run on what we would do if we had to deflect an asteroid. And so they basically slammed a satellite into an asteroid going crazy fast and then measured that they were able to adjust the course of the asteroid. So how does that work exactly? Is that like there's already a satellite up there and they just task it to move a little bit to intercept or is this like we're going to launch a new rocket with a new satellite on it specifically for this like

what's the trade-off there i think one of the things that helps with spacex and this is both true for like um space space like even stuff that varda you know sort of works on on the defense side because you know falconines are basically going up like every 24 hours now you don't have to think about this stuff as much as like fixed assets in orbit needing to be ready to go because the difficulty with that is like now you have to think about like the longevity, the maintenance of that asset, you have to sort of replace it because what people don't realize is like if you're up in low-earth orbit, it's not like you get to be up there infinitely because like there still is a little bit of atmosphere up there. So you have a little bit of drag and so if you're like 500 kilometers in the size of

a Varta satellite, you'll still de-orbit over the course of five years and basically come back down. And so with something like that, we could actually just like have the satellite basically ready and the size of a Varta satellite, you'll still de-orbit over the course of five years and basically come back down. And so with something like that, we could actually just have the satellite basically ready to go in a storage facility down here on Earth. The moment we know the asteroid is starting to head towards us, then basically go launch it.

And so they've demonstrated that now, in terms of the go launch the custom satellite and go send it directly at an asteroid and go hit it. And then in space, even though the satellite is so, so, so, so, so small relative to the asteroid the speeds are just so insane that like you're going at such a speed that it's like basically like a thermonuclear weapon getting like you know detonated on the asteroid at those speeds and you can actually like adjust this thing's course and

If you're like if you hit it when it's like seven years out even like a 1% adjustment is like a thousand kilometer You know basically like you know going off course in which case you like totally missed the Earth and so yeah, I don't think we need to be too worried about the Astro itself We've gotten pretty good at you know detecting that and you know now showing that we can deflect it unless you have What's called Neal Stevenson book seven eaves? Oh, yeah Goes through the moon yeah, then we're fucked well so so every guy You know thinks they could land a commercial airliner like if required right it's sort of like I could do it like you probably actually could given your experience as a pilot but if

we had an asteroid coming here it you'd probably secretly get a little bit excited because you're like all right yeah it's my time like needing that you know land an airliner as a pilot if one were to ask me what's your favorite situation, if you put me behind the cockpit of a 747 and you're like, Dell, you've got to land this thing. I would say, I would want to be in the northern latitudes at daytime on a very cold day in the winter with super clear skies. Why?

Because that's basically like the highest air pressure that you can basically get. So the atmosphere is very, and at sea level, so the atmosphere is very forgiving basically. You have like a ton of both lift, but then also when you sort of put your, you know sort of flaps in a ton of drag. It's basically almost like flying,

like the equivalent of like if you've ever seen an XKCD comic of like if we had humans on Titan, which is one of the moons of Jupiter, you could actually just go out there with wings and the atmosphere's thick enough that basically, we could just flap our wings as humans and fly. And so it's pretty surprising that a Delta pilot landing in Toronto in the middle of winter

on a cold clear day with super high air pressure, somehow flip that thing upside down, that is literally like, should be the easiest situation to sort of land in. So, we have to find that. Well, we need to give you the tinfoil hat and you can tell us what really happened. You gotta get it.

I mean, there's a lot of DEI accusations going up there. Maybe it's the Canadians are starting to try to fight back against the trade wars by making our planes flip upside down. Yeah, UFOs or something, who knows? Talk to us about SpaceX last week. The haters, the space haters were taking a victory lap. Yep.

What's your take on the situation as an entrepreneur who's building on top of SpaceX infrastructure? Obviously a big believer. Why is Starship so much harder than Falcon 9 on this? Walk us through some of the complexity there. Yeah, I mean, you have to than Falcon 9 on this. Walk us through some of the complexity there. Yeah, you have to remember Falcon 9 was in the early days, ultimately based off of technologies

that had a ton of heritage. There wasn't really anything that was that totally net new other than as they started to do the landing lags and the grid fins, right? And those were obviously very net new. And as we saw, it took them like, you know, basically on the order of remember, like the first landing was like 2014. When it really got operational, I would argue was like sort of like end

of 2019. So it was still like a five, five and a half year. And by the way, they were trying to land for like two years before that. So call it like two years of lots of failed tests, five years, even from when the first test succeeded to when it became operational. That was obviously in some some ways, a much simpler vehicle. It was smaller. It was based off of technology that had a lot of heritage. Everything from the metals they were using,

the way that the rocket engines were designed, there was a lot that already had a ton of heritage. As we flip over to Starship, those technologies just do not scale to the size of Starship, especially as they started to think about distributed engine architecture, they wanted to be able to reenter, et cetera. So Starship is both a huge leap in size,

but you're also discarding this whole history of aerospace that you previously were building on top of. And so the fact that they've even made it this far, this quickly is, I still think, astounding. Obviously, the company's a lot bigger. They have more resources. You want to push for, hey, they should be able to make faster know sort of faster progress

But I don't see it as any sort of like existential you know sort of risk I think it's just that the company's way more high-profile like in 2013 and 14 where all these Rockets were like landing and blowing up I don't feel like there was like huge news cycles around each one because Elon was like a loved lib You know that you know the media we know treated as like a darling versus like you know You know seen as a Nazi and so anytime anything ever so slightly you know, that, you know, the media, we don't treat it as like a darling versus like, you know, he's, you know, seen as a Nazi. And so anytime anything ever so slightly, you know, goes wrong, they're trying to, you know, sort of attack him.

I mean, even turned all the crashes into this like vibrial with like in the hall of the mountain king playing. And it was like celebrated by everyone. It was like, oh yeah, they blew up so many rockets. This is how progress happens. It's awesome. It was great. Yeah. And now it's like, I don't know if you guys saw actually Kiko Dunchev, who's the VP of launch at SpaceX actually just wrote,

you know, maybe it can be one of the tweets that you guys discussed at some point, but he just earlier today, like two hours ago, wrote this like super long tweet to like a random SpaceX fan Twitter account basically asking like what's going on? Why are things you're taking a bit, you know, sort of longer, et cetera. And if you want, I can even text it to you too, then I don't know if it's something you guys can do. Yeah, we should pull it up right now and maybe walk through it.

Yeah, let me text you the... I got it here. I found it. Oh, you got it, keep it down, chef, yeah, cool. It's like this long, super long rapai. But it was basically like, look, they are just flying a lot. So Falcon 9 has also had more issues over the past six months

than the prior five years combined. And I think you get it from his point. It's like, you know, sort of look, some of these boosters are getting a lot older. Also just like the sea conditions off of Florida have actually been pretty crazy. And so that's been more refurbishment. We're now starting to learn what happens when something flies 12, 13, 14 times in a row. And so we still have a long ways to go until Falcon Falcon nines are at the level of safety of like a 747. Remember with commercial aviation from when like the first jet to you know sort of airliner came on to when we basically stopped having deaths other than let's ignore

the DC thing you know which you know more has to do with like air traffic control than it does with the jet. It took us on the order of like 50 years for those things to become very very safe right like we basically had lots and lots of airliner crashes in the United States until 2012. And then they basically stopped or maybe it was like 2010. And we didn't have them for like 15 years other than this like DC thing. And so I'm sure Falcon 9 will get to that point. But like it may be like, you know, 30 years of finding all the weird edge

cases, atmosphere, this sea condition, this thing before these things are like as reliable as commercial jets, and they're more complicated than commercial jets are. Oh, one analogy that I like to, you know, sort of bring up that, you know, some of the viewers might like, people think think about like how expensive is it to go to space? Etc If you think about it on like a unit of fuel of like how much fuel you need to get up there The amount of fuel that would take for somebody to transport us from like London to New York on a 747

That's basically the same amount of fuel like hydrocarbon energy that you would need to get up to orbit Which it gives you a sense of like once on a per person basis. Yeah a per person basis At this point if you think about your like tickets to you know from London, New York It's actually mostly the fuel cost right like they've largely amortized the airframes over so many passengers and so many flights You're barely paying for that and so give you a sense of like what is the terminal cost of going to orbit? It's gonna be roughly like a cross-Atlantic flight is basically like how much it should cost on the order of 500 or 700 bucks

for an economy ticket. Interesting, yeah. Great. That probably unlocks point to point as well then. Like the SpaceX point to point, just using the rockets to get from New York to Japan as well, similar cost. Yeah, yeah, I mean obviously that's where it's like, okay, the rockets now have to be probably as safe.

Because the people they're gonna pay for that are gonna be the richest people in the world, they're also the most safety conscious. Which is what I always think about when people are talking to me is like, faster jets, et cetera. I'm like, man, people are definitely willing to pay for some speed, but rich people also really care

about being safe too. Totally. There's a little bit of this like, people claim, hey, I'm going to build the Tesla style. What was the first vehicle called? The expensive one? And then the roadster. Yeah, the roadster and the model S and the model 3.

The roadster of planes approach is a little harder to do. Like, the crazy people are more the small sort of pilots like me that are a little crazier. But I don't know that Mr. you know, Mr. Peter is, uh, you know, anytime soon. Yeah. Talk about Eric Schmidt going to relativity space. He's obviously been a big backer of the company. Uh, you've, you have some of your own opinions.

Uh, and then we'd love to maybe extract, have you extrapolate a little bit on context. We don't, we don't, we, we cover a lot of posts on Axe here, but we don't cover deleted posts, so. Yeah, that's probably, yeah, let's say there were some great deleted posts performing quite well, but you know, the team here is all about not making enemies, so I've gotta play it safe. The deep state, the deep state came for you. There's the problem with two jobs is you have twice

the number of people that are trying to get you to delete tweets, and so, yeah, I think I should have zero jobs that way. I have zero X people to get me to delete tweets. I can't wait for that moment when you're just running your family when he's running his family office from Mars and you can just say whatever he wants. No, but just generally even if people ask me to delete it's like so late that it like, dude, it's been up there for an hour already. Sorry, it's late. Just let it ride. Let it ride.

Talk about Relativity as a company that presumably would want your business, should it continue to make progress? Yeah, I mean, you have to look at it from our perspective, right? We have to sign launch contracts basically on the order of like two years out, because that's basically how long it takes us

to like supply chain, plan things, build vehicles, et cetera. That's how far out our customer contracts are. You know, we plan on, you know, call it roughly that two year cycle. And so if I'm signing a launch contract two years from now, I better have that, you know, vehicle ready to go. Otherwise, like my customer is going to be disappointed and all of a sudden I'm like holding up revenue.

And so from a commercial basis, it's like really hard to sign contracts with anyone but SpaceX right now, because no one's showing any level of repeatability. Like even though sort of Blue Origin has gotten to space, Firefly, Rocket Lab, et cetera have, nobody's matched like the consistency or the price of SpaceX and nowhere close to it, right? It's like, um, you know, there's, there's not even like, um, an obvious number two, even anytime soon. It's like for me to feel confident

in, let's say, a relativity, they would both have to launch like this year, they'd have to probably do it multiple times and multiple times next year, and then maybe at the end of 2026, I would consider signing a contract for 2028. And so, man, that's like a really tough business to take over. I think in 2017, the sort of consensus viewpoint in Silicon Valley was that launch was this commodity. There was going to be like, you know, four or five players. There was going to be very, you know, sort of low margins. And it wasn't going to be a place where you could generate many, you know, sort of venture

returns. And it's turned out that it's actually quite the opposite. There's basically one player, SpaceX effectively represents 99% of the market and has like insane profit margins on their launch business. It's something on the order of like, you know, sort of 50% you know, sort of gross margin is like the rough report numbers that I've seen publicly. And so, man, stepping in as Eric Schmidt into relativity, it's like one. My understanding is he's basically funding the company payroll to payroll.

That I always think is a really hard cultural place to be as a company because you're both on the brink of death, but then also you don't have an obvious death date. Yeah, this is emotional sort of, you know, you might feel great about the company one week and the next week. And the CEO is like, should I should I should hold a blog? Is it time? Whereas funding? Yeah. Like at least I'm funding for 24 months of runway and I can just try and do the experiment. Have good weeks and bad weeks, etc. Yeah, exactly. Like this is why I think a lot of these and you know, I want to see we're gonna have good weeks and bad weeks, et cetera.

Yeah, exactly, like this is why I think a lot of these billionaire funded projects where the billionaire has made it clear that they will backstop the company somewhat indefinitely without a clear end date, have never really worked because you don't have this clear, like I think what's become the magic of venture and how it's been staged out is like,

you have this very clear window, you have 24 months, you have to accomplish a lot, if you don't, you're dead and if you do, you get to march onto like the next window. And like there's a reason why Darwinistically, basically all the best companies in the last 20 years have gone through those windows. And the ones that tried to like avoid those windows basically haven't worked, right? And like we can list so many examples of this. Airship, Kitty Hawk, etc. There's been like so many of these types of projects. Yep. Larry Ellison has a farm. He's spent like almost like a billion dollars. He's like half a billion into it

Yeah, and it's like I think when people try to avoid this and sell fun Like I tell billionaires when it's like when you're going to start a company Don't do the backstopping thing still raise so much to participate alongside the venture rounds and make it clear that you'd like to invest in The company but predicated on like again hitting you know sort of these milestones and growth and so I think that I think it's really hard about this Eric Schmidt situation is like you're both totally decoupled from the like we need to hit milestones and XYZ period of time but also it's not like you know Eric has indicated I'm gonna fund this thing for multiple years you're sort of

like you know on some indefinite you know time period which is like the worst parts of both worlds and then also SpaceX just continue to succeed and there's other players like you know at this point relativity was thought of in 2021 let's say relativity was thought of as like the number two just because they had so much funding momentum Etc it's like you're not even number three anymore right like number two is obviously very much a rocket lab Number three at this point is firefly right and fireflies actually getting to space on some regular basis They just landed on the moon You know I'm sure it's gonna generate a ton of investor interest for them.

Even though their prior CEO twiddled some diddles and had to get booted from the middle, the new CEO, hopefully not gonna twiddle some diddles and block some rockets instead. Let's keep it folks in the rockets here. How closely do you track China's progress? Do they have anything that could be competitive with Falcon 9 in the next 15 years?

I'm assuming they're stealing all of our sort of trade secrets actively. But it still takes, even if you have the master plan and you know, even the schematics, it takes quite a lot to reproduce. Is there a Chinese Varta yet? There's an Indian Varta as of yesterday. Yeah, it's actually in thearda as of yesterday. Yeah.

It's actually in the latest white Combinator batch. No way. Props to them. It was a very cool launch video. OK, cool. That was awesome. Look forward to hopefully there being Chinese Varda and African Varda.

And I just want every continent. Aussie Varda. Russian, Russian Varda. It would actually be very bearish if you weren't getting copied at all. Exactly. Right. You want them to just. That's always my perspective. If you're't getting copied exactly. Yeah, you want that? That's always my perspective. You're not getting copied and your idea is probably not very good

So there are plenty of SpaceX copycats even today, of course on the Chinese side They don't have anything that is anywhere close to landing But they're clearly just willing to throw manufacturing and bodies at the problem where I think it's something like SpaceX has launched 27 times So far this year China has basically launched 19. So it's, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's like pretty close, I believe. They just, you know, are very good at manufacturing these things very rapidly and they're just pumping it off the line and just not dealing with reusability.

And so it's somewhat been like there's a couple of Indian launcher companies that have taken that approach too. It was like, we're not even going to try and do reusability anytime soon. We're just going to make these things super, super, super cheap. And then at not even going to try and do reusability anytime soon we're just gonna make these things super super super cheap and then at some point we'll think about reusability down the line and so the Chinese are definitely like if it weren't for SpaceX man there would be like red panic bells all over the place you know sort of God bless that SpaceX has actually succeeded level they have otherwise we would be like very far

behind the Chinese is there is what's the chatter within the space industry of, you know, we've seen plenty of, you know, undersea cables being cut. How worried is the average space founder generally, like how worried are they about sort of sabotage? Is that something that's sort of like a risk factor in a series C deck where they're like, you know You know, is that is that even the right question to ask? I

Would say like not too worried and it's not to say that it could happen or anything and we should underwrite this but it's like The the thing that would be really bad is if like Russia basically, you know nuked a low-earth orbit You know detonator through my nuclear weapon and you had a bunch of like highly charged ion particles, you know, basically orbiting around Earth at a much lower level than where you like the Van Allen belt is, because it would basically destroy everybody's Leo business.

Right now, part of why Starlink works, is they're low enough in orbit that the Earth's magnetosphere basically deflects the solar winds, so you're still relatively protected. If that all of a sudden becomes a very unprotected zone You have a ton of radiation man Everybody's economics basically just blow up actually one of the few that probably doesn't blow up is Barta Because radiation basically screws you on a day-by-day basis, and we don't need to be up there for very long

But anybody whose business case is built off of like being in space for a longer period of time Man if the Russians launch a nuke up there They'd be really hard. And I haven't seen any like how one would fix that problem if they did. Like I don't think that like there's even like a hypothesis for how to do that. Like maybe some like really big magnets or something.

But I don't even know that massive magnets up there. So I don't know. Like the Russians detonated nuke and I can see them doing it where like they just keep falling behind. They see Starlink helping Ukraine. They see that like, you know, the United States is like winning this, like, you know, new space race, you know, sort of 3.0 and like, you know, us and China are

leaving them in the dust and Putin is like dying breath. This is just like screw it. Nuke space. Cause it's like, you're not killing anybody, but you're just tanking all the commercial space economies. That'd be tough. Don't like it. Yeah.

It feels like most of the opportunities in space should be pursued by private companies. That said, stuff like thermonuclear radiation clean up in low earth orbit and like asteroid deflection are probably better suited for NASA and or sort of NASA private partnerships just because Varda, yeah, you'd be a good candidate to potentially save us from an asteroid but it's not a good business model where you're like,

okay, we have to like develop us from an asteroid, but it's not a good business model where you're like, okay, we have to develop technology, maintain it, carry this team, but then maybe you never have to use it across 30 years. It's not going to be necessarily a huge profit center. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're so religiously libertarian at Founders Fund that we believe the government has no use whatsoever. So there is the occasional need for something that is of the public good. And asteroid deflection and thermonuclear cleaning

is probably up there with that. But yeah, hopefully diplomacy is more effective than having to do the cleanup sort of part of it. Yeah, makes sense. Well, this is awesome. I think we got to wrap up. But thanks for coming on. Closing it out.

We'll have you on soon. Oh, yeah. Thanks so much for having me, boys. And congratulations on a phenomenal launch day. Look forward to say success of TV Hey, we expect a cameo on the next video. It's already in the works Iconic oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean look everybody needs an island vacation, but you know You had a face game because we used a clip from your call in. I wasn't talking about the tweet. You had two cameos I guess technically.

Yeah. Oh I had two cameos. You had two cameos because at 37 seconds, 38 seconds, you pop up for a second as an example of one of the guests that we've had. Double cameo. Well I like my first cameo bit. Your first cameo is good. But yeah, a little bit of an Easter egg. Fantastic having you on. Goodbye boys. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. That was great.