TBPN Live - Figure AI in WSJ, Russell d'Sa, Quaid Walker, Alex Dhillon, Robin Langtry, Everett Randle, Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

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You're watching TVPN. It is Thursday, April 10, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We faced a terrible DDoS attack, likely from a nation state, but we did sort it out. Sorry for starting a little bit late, but we got a great show for you today.

Thank you to Ben and our team of engineers for getting the service back online. People always ask us, why is your team so big? Why do you have just shy of 75 people working on the show? This is why. Because it's real business, it's serious, and you need the neckbeard site reliability engineers. Really.

That's right. You need full stack engineers. You need back end, front end, everything. I'm looking at Ben right now, and his neckbeard has actually grown out meaningfully in the last hour. Yeah. Oh, a couple of a couple prompts a couple prompts will do it not yet. AGI 2027 maybe we will have reliable live streaming by then I don't know about paper clipping but we'll figure it out anyway. Well it's good to

be here John I'm excited for today's show. Let's run through some news we want to start with this Wall Street Journal article about figure AI and interestingly about the Wall Street Journal, two different headlines on the internet version of the Wall Street Journal. They say the $40 billion startup mystery shaking up Silicon Valley. And in the print edition, the headline is, hottest AI startup makes bold claims, but earns little.

So aggressive, a little bit shadier on the- A little more mysterious online. A little more shade coming from the print edition. But we'll see. We'll review this. There's some information about figure where they are, what progress they've made, obviously about how they're running their fundraising process. $ billion's big number. Gotta back it up.

So we'll see. We'll dig into this. I'll dive in. So in February, a little-known startup promising to build futuristic robots set out to raise new cash at a nearly 40 billion dollar valuation. The pitch, Figure AI would put more than 200,000 robots across assembly lines and homes by 2029, solving an engineering challenge that has eluded hardware developers for decades. It has a long way to go. Figure had no revenue last year and just a few dozen robots in production, according to documents shared with investors in recent weeks. The documents show Figure has signed BMW as its first commercial

customer and predict it will generate 9 billion in revenue by 2029. Now is that 9 billion from BMW or is that just they figure generally predicts that they will generate 9 billion? No, the figure is predicting this and they're putting it in their investor materials. Got it. Okay. Yeah.

Big number, but I mean to justify a $40 billion valuation, that makes sense. Also, I mean the justify a 40 billion dollar valuation that makes sense Also, I mean paying Little over 4x, you know 2029 revenue here. Yeah. Yeah 4x which feels cheap forward for year forward revenue of the year 2029 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's because the forecast and forward forward revenue would year would typically mean like the year ahead. So forward revenue would be, yeah, I'm paying a 5x multiple on this year's full year revenue.

This is forward, forward, forward, forward revenue. But who knows? Hopefully, it's extremely high margin revenue when it comes in because even if the margin's less than $2 billion in cash, well, it's rough. On March 24th, Figures founder, Brett Adcock, wrote that his startup was the number one most sought after private stock

in the secondary market, which we talked about on the show, and he shared a list that put Figure above SpaceX and OpenAI. We were a little bit taken aback by that. Yep. We talked to Christian Garrett about that, about how those lists actually get generated, and whether or not, like, how much faith you should

put in a list like that. It turns out that, I guess, with modern word processing, kind of anyone can put together a list and screenshot it. And so I think there were some questions about, you know, was this from just a word processor? or maybe it was generated with AI? But I would hope that it was generated with AI. Yeah, but certainly a list where we're at the top Yeah, exactly pretty effective. Well, it makes sense AI might be biased towards AI Companies and secondary so it pushes that up to the top. Yeah

be biased towards AI companies and secondaries, so it pushes that up to the top. How much a startup decided it could raise money at a price tag that would make it among America's most valuable private companies as confounding investors across Silicon Valley? Had Adcock leapfrogged the likes of Tesla and Google in developing autonomous robots? Or they wondered, was this a sign that the AI bubble was hitting its peak? And so there's been a lot of chatter in Silicon Valley around this company.

Adcock, and they give some background, Adcock, a serial entrepreneur, has been posting frequently on social media about how much interest there has been in figure shares and touting the BMW partnership as proof of the three-year-old company's rapid progress. Adcock didn't respond to requests for comment. In a March 31st post where he shared a video

of the slender humanoids working on assembly tasks for BMW, Adcock wrote, this isn't a test, this is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Turn up the music. Turn it up. Put it to 11. And yes, it does.

So they dig into the BMW deal. And this is a big question of, you know, if you're a hard tech company, going and getting a partnership with a big company is often a huge milestone. Huge milestone. It is important. And so guess what? The journal actually reached out to BMW and they confirmed some details. So on April 1st, a spokesperson for BMW

actually said that three of the robots were at its facility for technical evaluation. Only one is used at a time, but the robot has practiced picking up and grasping parts during non production hours in our body shop But the thing is that because this is this came out the statement was made on April 1st It could have been April Fool's Day and they could have been joking because there could be thousands of thousands But it's hilarious to to to April Fool's on the journal

let's tell the Wall Street Journal that we only have three that are just kind of moving some stuff around and Actually, the entire car is built by figure we fired all the employees, but yeah, you know since you called us on April 1st We're just joking around about it. That's possible. That's very Yeah It is it is that's the nature of April fools. I got fooled Fooled me. I felt like it was terrible. I got fooled. Tracy even fooled me. I fell for it. It was terrible. I got fooled multiple times. I, there was some- You know it's April Fools,

but they still get you sometimes. There was some founder who tweeted like, oh, there's a hit piece in TechCrunch coming out of my company. It's dropping tomorrow. And I made a note of it. And then the next day I was like, hey, I didn't see that piece drop,

but if it comes out, you should come on TBPN and we should talk about it. And I'd love to dig into it as long as it's not like a complete smoking gun on you And he was like it was April Fool's John. I was like yeah, okay. I fell for that. I'm sorry Anyway, so the following week I guess this post April Fool's the BMW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant that there were now More than there were now more than three robots on site, and they were being used in non-production

and live production situations. That's great. I mean, that does seem like a huge milestone for humanoid robotics, that it can be used. Again, all this stuff is, I'm fine with a smooth gradient of progress. I'm fine with just a robotic arm doing stuff. I'm fine with teleoperation.

I think it's fine to go up the learning curve or down the learning curve, whatever. A lot of the big questions here are not around the potential of humanoids. Yes, although there are some question around the form factor. The questions are around the price tag totally being at 3.9 billion, totally 30 sorry, 39 and a half billion. Yep. Which at the time when it was announced was more than Ford Motors, which I believe they had roughly 180 billion in 2024 revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you see what One X is doing. You see what that creepy European humanoid company is doing. And they're both very modestly valued.

And so that puts a level of scrutiny on those companies. That's just wildly different. Like the Wall Street Journal isn't even asking questions of investors about that, because it's like, I don't know what 1X's valuation is, but I imagine it's much lower. And so when 1X, they did a video with Jason Carman where he was folding laundry, it was tele-operated.

They were pretty transparent about that. That came out that, oh, they're doing tele-operation on humanoid robotics. Which is still very exciting. It's awesome, oh, they're doing teleoperation on humanoid robotics. Which is still very exciting. It's awesome. Yeah, it's great. We love teleoperation. Who doesn't want to be driven around in a teleoperated waymo?

That's fine. It doesn't matter. Sure, there's questions about how does that scale? What are the economics of that over a long period of time? But it's fine, in my opinion, to gather training data that way, scale down the learning curve, all these different things. So one of the big questions and one of the issues, and potentially one of the reasons why the journal would pay attention to this round, is that the investors investing

in the round are not the typical big names that you see in these multi-billion dollar rounds. So one of the funding rounds' biggest investors, Align Ventures, has spent weeks marketing the round and looking for smaller investors to buy in at the startup's valuation. According to a term sheet and other documents, the smaller investors would pool their money into an SPV,

reducing the amount that Align itself has to put up for the latest round. So Align, to our knowledge, doesn't have anywhere near the capital just on standby to lead a round like this, but they are doing an SPV into the round. Yeah, it's also an interesting valuation for the amount that's being raised.

You know, the standard round, 20% dilution, 15% dilution. Mira Moradi, 10% dilution, she's raising a billion dollars at 10 billion. Two on 10. Two on 10, yeah, so 20%. He's raising $1 billion at $10 billion. Two on 10. Two on 10, yeah, so 20%. He's raising $1.5. You would expect this to be $10 billion, $15 billion, maybe $7 billion.

Even Anderol's most recent round, I believe, was roughly a 10% to 15% dilution. Two something on 20 something. And so yeah, 10% just seems to be like in the ballpark. This is much less than that. And so that takes some pressure off the fundraising that Align has to do, but it's still a lot of money to raise if you're not managing a $20 billion venture fund

or growth fund or something like that. So in many ways, a bet on Figure AI is a bet on its founder. Adcock launched a series of companies since he graduated with a business degree from the University of Florida in 2008. He sold Vetteri, an online hiring platform. He co-founded in 2018. Then he moved to California and co-founded Archer Aviation, a maker of electric-powered air taxis.

Archer went public in 2021 via SPAC. That company is also developing futuristic technology and he's yet to generate meaningful revenue. Adcock left the company in 2022. And I'm interested to, we're having the founder of ZipLine on to talk about drone delivery. And I'm interested to hear how the flying stuff market, flying car market, flying drone market,

these clearly bump into each other. I'm interested to see how he landed on zipline strategy and how it differs from what Archer is doing. That was the same year that Adcock launched Figure AI. In the early days, Adcock took online AI courses and had books about robots scattered about his desk. Former employees said he hired robotic experts, raised 70 million in venture capital and unveiled its first humanoid robot in 2023. And so getting up to speed about the industry that you're going into.

Just a little over a year ago, they raised 675 million in funding at a $2.6 billion valuation in which they raised from OpenAI's fund, they raised from Jeff Bezos' family office, as well as Nvidia, so really a who's who of hyperscalers. You know that online course thing sticks out,

he's sitting there taking online AI courses, and people say, oh, he should have already known this stuff if he's building this industry, he's's taking this, he's doing this company. But like, that's pretty common. Like when we, when we decided to start a podcast, we, we, we took a ton of online courses about podcasting, how to use a microphone, how to talk, how to make jokes, how to do all these different things. And so I think that's, I think that's a little bit of narrative violation that you have to

know what you're doing before you go into the industry. That's right. It's very, very common. So anyways, Bezos, after investing, actually visited the company's facility and Figure was in talks with Amazon on a partnership. Amazon obviously employs a lot of people. Over time, you can imagine they would employ some humanoids.

Employees, Figure worked on a demonstration where the robot could lift heavy objects. A few months later, Adcock told staff at an all hands meeting that figure and Amazon had decided not to move forward. And Amazon had bought Kiva robotics, which is a robotics company, but, uh, it's like these, they look like Roombas basically. Then they kind of slide around on the floor. You've probably seen these videos. It's really cool. And it makes a lot of sense.

And Amazon's obviously super dedicated to robotic automation. And interestingly, they've been in this Centaur model where they're both hiring more and more people every single year and also employing more and more robots as they've scaled the business. Yeah. So. Yeah, one of the reasons that

Figure has been top of mind is some of the claims they've been making around their end-to-end robot AI. Yes. Which they built entirely in-house. They had a partnership with OpenAI. OpenAI invested in Figure. They broke off that collaboration earlier this year and then announced their own. Do you have any sense of what they're kind of claiming around the new AI? When I heard about the OpenAI partnership, I thought it made a ton of sense because clearly OpenAI passed the Turing test.

It's a great chat bot. They have great whisper models for voice to text basically. And so when I think about, I want to communicate with a humanoid robot, I want to be able to talk to it. I want it to be able to understand me at a level much better than what Siri can do. And I wanted to take that text

and be able to throw it in an LLM and then look up stuff for me, talk to me, but then also trigger different actions for the humanoid. So if I say, walk over there, I'm fine with an open AI partnership, transcribing what I said, sending that to an LLM, and then triggering the robot to do exactly what I said. Now, this phrase end-to-end, and then triggering the robot to do exactly what I said.

Now this phrase end to end, I think is going to become something of a hot button issue in robotics and humanoid AI, just like teleoperation has been, where we talked about this with One X, we talked about this with the Tesla CyberCab and humanoid robots, the optimist event where, uh, the robots that were serving beers at the, at the Tesla event were tele-operated. And so you would be talking to a real human who would be moving,

triggering this stuff. Uh, after that, there's actually an interim level, um, where some of the robotic decision making and actions are dealt with through AI. So the best way to think about this is to go back to how self-driving cars evolve. So self-driving cars, the first step was let's use AI just to understand the world and create a 3D representation of the world as quickly as possible. So you're just doing image recognition one frame at a time and seeing, okay, there's a cone there, there's a stop sign there.

But once you have all that data, you basically import that into a video game and then you're writing deterministic code for how to actually plan the path, how much acceleration you need, how much braking you need, how much braking you need. And that's usually written in C++.

Just for example, I know it was at cruise, but essentially that's written as like business logic. If stop sign, apply pressure to the brake. Now Tesla and what George Hoss is building at Kama, they have all wanted to go quote unquote end to end, which means that the only data that goes into the self-driving car is the camera feed, and the output is brake pressure, and you've taken all the sensors,

and you just output the steering and all of that. And so, Elon made a big splash a couple years ago, saying that Tesla was going fully end to end and in that presentation He was like, yes, it's all machine learning code now and one of his engineers was like well Look like there's still a lot of C++ involved Elon Like let's not go that far and make that claim because that's not quite right But it is awesome that both in the in the world model like the world, and then also the planning, they're two different teams at most of these companies.

The planning process of understanding, okay, there's a parked car here, I need to go around it. Like that is done with AI as well. And so that is basically Brett Adcock's claim when I hear he has built an end-to-end robotic AI system. It's that there is no C++ code or Python code sitting somewhere that says, if beverage, grab with hand action number seven.

Yeah, so the big question here, the thing that's exciting, is has Brett and the Figure AI team had a breakthrough that Elon and Waymo and many of the other companies haven't been able to achieve with billions and billions of dollars. Because if Adcock and the team had, then it's very possible it'd be worth this crazy price.

And that's exactly what happened with OpenAI when the transformer architecture and GPT-4 got so good that it passed the touring test. Before that, we did have this kind of, it wasn't end to end, but you could have chatbots, right? But what did chatbots do? They would take in your text and say, oh, okay, he's asking about booking a flight. Let me run the booking flight code and give you, you know, when you chat with like American Airlines, you can tell that you chat with like American Airlines,

you can tell that you're not talking to an LLM. You're talking to a, if this, then that statement. And, and that transition is what allowed open AI to like kind of bust the world open to LLMs. And if they did this, it is groundbreaking. And it is, it, it, it's, it's incredible I Mean it really it really is it really is And it is and I I think the more important thing is that Most people who are really deep in AI believe that end-to-end systems that are reliant on Insane scale and just hoovering up tons of data and then crunching it down This is the bitter lesson that we talked about with Rich Sutton

The bitter lesson is look you can do all this crazy stuff where you, like there was a critique of Waymo that they had a cone guy for a while and his whole job was just to write algorithms to detect cones. But if you just scale up all the Tesla data and say, oh yeah, we have a million cars feeding us hours and hours of video data and just train it all on a model.

The model, the deep learning, we'll learn what a cone is better than that algorithm ever could. And so you can pull that out. And so getting to end to end on any AI driven system is almost always the goal. And so Brett understands that that's where he needs to go and that's where he needs to build. And if they've done it, it's remarkable.

Yeah, totally remarkable. So anyways, so in recent months, unsolicited emails from investors claiming to have access to figures funding round have been popping up in inboxes around Silicon Valley. They all offered a chance to grab a stake in a pre IPO AI robotics company. People investing as little as $100,000 could participate, one of the offers stated.

One email pitched an investment through Parkway Venture Capital, one of Figures' main backers. It said there was an effort to raise more than $80 million for a special purpose vehicle that would get to own Figures shares in the $39.5 billion funding round, with figure robots on the production line at customer number one, BMW, and given the valuation being placed on Tesla's rival Optimus humanoid prototype, this valuation is not as crazy as it seems as face value. Yeah, there was always this thesis of like, if you believe in humanoids, and I think a lot of people do, how do you get exposure to that?

Well, the only game in town right now is Tesla, and that's this crazy business with so many cars and tariffs and China and all these different things and batteries and so much stuff. So yes, there wasn't a pure play product for this and and that could be part of what's driving like the narrative around this stock essentially So so one investor received a notice in January that he could acquire figure shares from a former employee at a steep discount He reached out to adcock who responded that the proposed sale was fraudulent And that he could invest in a future fundraising round. According to messages reviewed by the journal, soon after a representative from figure messaged the investor and

asked how much he wanted to pitch into the series C round. The investor asked for financial information that could help him make that decision. The company provided access to a data room that contained videos of ad cop adcock talking up the company and investor presentation showcased images of robots doing various activities, including working on a car assembly and pouring a glass of milk.

What the presentation didn't include was audited financials or projections. This is an interesting strategy. I was thinking about this. A lot of founders, they get bogged down in the fundraising process when, oh, I think Sam Lesson was saying, the deal goes to die in the data room.

No one's ever built conviction in a data room. So, you know, if you don't want to bother with a data room, but you still need a link to send someone, maybe what you wanna do is just like, go to your Twitter feed, your X feed, hit Control P, print it, PDF it, throw that in there, and then when the investor shows up, they just get to see your bangers.

Yeah, one thing is clear, Adcock is an incredible marketer and some of the footage just coming out of Figure broadly has been really astonishing and powerful. Yeah, I think that's the- And so I can see why he would lead with that. Yeah, I think that's the lesson for anyone who's working over there at Figure.

We talked to Scott Wu about this, things are moving so fast, the company's growing at an incredible rate, they have a new office, you know, we talked to Scott Wu about this, like things are moving so fast. The company's growing at an incredible rate. They have a new office, new campus every few, every few weeks, it seems, new, new videos, new breakthroughs. And so, you know, to those folks who are working there, I would just say like, take pictures, you know, you're going to want to remember this. They're going to write books about this company.

They're going to make documentaries about this company. And so you're going to want to remember that. So take pictures, look at the state of things and just witness. Just witness everything. Yeah. I think that's the goal. Yeah. Yeah. You really Yeah. Yeah. This is this is history. And there's going to be books written. So you're gonna want to you're gonna want to witness this stuff. So anyway, that's that story. I'm sure we'll be digging in more. We'll see what other people have to say and what else is going on in the humanoid robotics.

You know, we gotta have the 1X founders on and we gotta get someone from the Optimus team on. We should do a humanoid day. We should, we should have everyone on. All of them. That'd be very interesting. Back to back to back to back. They all have different angles.

Like I think it's powerful if you just pick Elaine and not say, hey, we're going to replace all human labor in the world right away. Sometimes you can start just aimed to do laundry, just aimed to do dishes. Some of these tasks that are maybe less exciting, but still equally powerful and have tremendous potential. And you know, we also got to get some humanoid benchmarks

on Polymarket for sure. I mean the logical one would just be you know Brett Eidcock's back to his last company he took Archer Aviation Public. I'd love to see you know figure IPO percentage on polymarket. I'm sure there's a lot of other even just like those the amount of humanoids deployed at BMW. I don't know if that would be auditable in a way that polymarket could work against and resolve the market. But having some sort of humanoid benchmark on polymarket would be fascinated as track, at least in, at least in terms of like, uh, uh,

just sentiment in the market would be very cool. Anyway, should we move on to, we get a lot of questions from folks about how to encourage other potential listeners to tune into TBPN Live. And we have a little script for everyone. Yeah, so this is like something, it's not quite a battle card, right? It's not super condensed, but yeah,

if you're out there and you're talking to friends, if you enjoy the show and you wanna kind of share it with a friend, you might get some pushback, right? You might get some people saying, well, I already listened to some technology podcasts or I already listened to business podcasts. And so why don't we run through this live? Do you wanna kick it off, John?

Yeah, why don't you play the prospect, I'll play the sales rep and I'll try and get you across the finish line. Exactly, yeah. So kick it off. No, you're the prospect, I'll play the sales rep and I'll try and get you across the finish line. Exactly, yeah. So kick it off. No, you're the sales rep. So just so you're aware, a lot of listeners ask how we differ from other podcasts.

One key area is integration. Unlike other podcasts, TPPN Live connects all business and technology news together into one seamless three hour daily stream. Does that sound like something you'd find useful? Possibly, but I already have podcasts I regularly listen to. I'm not sure I need another one.

Okay, so that's understandable. But before we dive deeper into TBPN Live, could you tell me a little bit more about your current listening habits? Specifically, where do you find the biggest challenges or bottlenecks in staying informed about tech and business news? Well, honestly, I spend a lot of time scrolling

through the X timeline and other social platforms just to catch what my current podcast might miss. It can be pretty time consuming. Exactly, that's a pain. That's a pain point we've frequently heard. It sounds like your current podcasts aren't quite keeping pace with your needs, forcing you to supplement with fragmented sources

Roughly, how many hours per week do you spend doing that additional research? I don't know. I estimate about five or six hours each week John. Oh, okay Well TBPN live is designed specifically to reduce that research workload by at least 50% Potentially saving you hours each week workload by at least 50% potentially saving you hours each week. How would you feel about having that extra time back for more strategic activities or even engaging more deeply with our insightful content? That sounds good, but I'm a bit concerned about the amount of advertising. I'm currently subscribed to premium podcasts behind paywalls and they have fewer interruptions.

I completely understand that concern. Many listeners initially feel that way until they realize that the quality and relevance of the companies we partner with for advertising. Could I quickly share an example of how these partnerships have provided value to listeners similar to you? Sure. I'd be interested in seeing that. But again, my current podcast lineup already seems pretty good.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Your current podcast lineup already seems pretty good. Absolutely, absolutely. Your current podcast sounds solid. Many listeners who've switched over were initially satisfied too, until they realized TBPN Live offers unique features. Would it be helpful if we briefly compared the scrolling news ticker we have

at the bottom of our live stream, a feature that's exclusive to our podcast? Actually, that might be interesting. I'd like to see how it works at least. Great, how about we set up a quick demo session podcast. Actually that might be interesting. I'd like to see how it works at least. Great. Why how about we set up a quick demo session tuning into the TBPN live stream together. I'll tailor the experience specifically around your concerns about fragmented research and show exactly how the integrated stream and ticker could streamline your daily news consumption.

How does that sound? Sounds good. Let's schedule that. So that's just a great way to get someone on board if they're on the fence. they're not ready to take the leap. Yeah. Just right through that. Great way to at least set up a demo. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Set up a demo with them, for sure.

Yeah. You really want to go full SDR mode for us. You want to have the discovery call with them, handle the objections, create some counter-arguments. Ideally, if you know what they're listening to, create a battle card. Yeah, and a lot what they're listening to, create a battle card. Yeah, and a lot of the techniques in here, you can actually leverage in your own business,

in your own sort of day-to-day life, in terms of winning and overcoming those objections, like you said. So really great work here, John, and hopefully, I think it's gonna convert a lot of prospects for us. Yeah, convert some prospects, and help grow the listener base. Yeah.

Let's run through how Elon Musk rescued X from the brink. New report from the Wall Street Journal. Diving deeper into the X and XAI merger. A crowd of investors gathered at Morgan Stanley's New York office to hear X's sales pitch, eager to get a piece of debt that Wall Street had once shunned. Cell phones were no go at the January event and the audience was told to stay seated until X chief executive Linda Yacarino and others had left the room after brief remarks and without taking audience questions. Banks

had planned to sell three billion dollars in bonds at 95 cents on the dollar but ended up selling more than 10 billion at even higher prices It was a testament to X's ability to bring advertisers back to the platform helped in no small part by TBPN no by Elon Musk's proximity to President Trump. I Obviously, we can't you know claim victory 100% of the time But I do feel like we are shifting the timeline and making X a better place.

Hopefully, I mean that is kind of the goal is to bring, to shift X back towards more tech and business content, really pull people back in. And fun fact, we had a listener, or we had a guest on the show who didn't have an account, had never used X, signed up, hosting, bangers.

Great content. Yep. Fantastic. Also underpinning the debt sale was a possibility that X would one day merge with a hotter ascendant company, Musk's X.A.I. In private meetings with Wall Street, X executives said there was a good chance that the social media platform might eventually merge with Musk's artificial intelligence company, which makes the Grok chat bot. The billionaire has said he never lost money for investors, but for a long time, he looked like he was going to with X. After Musk bought it in 2022,

advertisers fled over content moderation concerns and his loan soured as revenue fell. One month after he took over, Musk said the company, formerly known as Twitter, was on the verge of bankruptcy. I don't know how this was true. I think it was, you know, in part said to, I don't think he obviously would have ever

let it go bankrupt. I think it was mostly meant to inspire the team to grind harder and grind harder they did. They did. So late last month, Musk posted on X that he was merging the company with XAI in a deal that valued the newly combined company at more than 100 billion.

Folding X into a larger companyAI in a deal that valued the newly combined company at more than 100 billion. Folding X into a larger company competing in a global race to develop sophisticated generative AI tools could open the door to raising money at a valuation considered impossible just a few years ago. The merger caps a string of events, some strategic, some fortuitous that helped Musk announce a deal before Trump's tariffs effectively closed the market for deals. It is crazy that he's never taken a down round, but it's kind of underrated that-

I don't actually- is it down round or that he just always eventually got higher? I mean, I guess like- Because X did raise a down round, right? No. Or no, I guess it got marked down internally. Marked down internally, which is not his doing. Yeah. Like anyone could do that at any time. Internally, I guess it got marked down internally. Marked down internally, which is not his doing. Yeah. Anyone could do that at any time.

Internally, you can mark it down. People have definitely panic sold and lost money, but he's never done a primary round and ended up not returning. But I think the lesson for actual entrepreneurs that aren't maybe in his shoes is that if your business is at all humming along and doing something, even though Twitter rebranded as X

and went through a dark time and really was facing a lot of pressure on the revenue side, Elon was extremely quick to right size the business and get to a place where it was not burning as much money. That seems clear. We never heard rumors about, oh, Elon had to put in a billion of his own money, right? And I don't think never heard rumors about like, oh, like Elon had to put in a billion of his own money, right?

And I don't think that happened. And so what does that mean? It's like, yeah, the whole business shrunk, but it continued to exist. And so there's a whole world where if you move quickly, whether it's post SBB crisis, and you know you're not gonna be able to raise up around, and maybe your own VCs have essentially like marked you down,

if you're at a big enough scale, they might have actually done it. If you're probably just some seed or Series A bet, they probably didn't remark you. Yeah, Fidelity was the one that marked it down. Yeah, Fidelity has to do the remarks. I imagine a lot of their traditional investors avoided the markdown because they never lost faith.

No, no, no. I'm almost certain that the big venture capital firms do not do markdowns in that way, the same way as Fidelity. Yeah. Although, if Fidelity puts something out and says, hey, we have marked it down and we're trading at this level or something in some secondary market,

then there might be pressure from the big VC firms to pull that valuation into their own marks. But it didn't matter because they're up again, baby. A spokesperson declined, no one's talking to the journal about this, but we still got some interesting facts here. Musk borrowed 13 billion to complete his 2022 take private of Twitter,

and the loans quickly went bad when advertisers paused their spending. He tried to persuade concerned brands to return, at one point offering steep discounts and threatening advertisers that they would lose verification if they didn't spend enough. The company's revenue fell to three billion in 2023 from about 4.6 billion the previous year.

And the thing is that like, yeah, that's a huge drop in revenue. But when you think about like, most of the R&D has been done on X, right? Like the apps, you have to keep them alive and you do have to launch some new features, but like they're kind of humming along. You don't need to do a lot on user acquisition.

Like the people that are addicted are addicted and they're gonna stay, I'm never leaving. And so you really can run it with a smaller team and when you have three billion in revenue, which is pretty high margin, because it just adds, you have three billion to kind of slosh around and keep this thing going. That's a lot of money to keep a website going in an app.

That is what it is. It's a big one, but it doesn't have any crazy, unexpected massive costs if you run it effectively. And that's kind of what you're talking about. Yeah, and these companies, again, were always so heavily intertwined. X had a big position in XAI. Yep, yep, yep. And XAI paid X for data. They would

have employees flop back and forth. And then staying on the revenue thing, X's revenue dropped again in 2024 to about 2.6 billion. It ticked up in the final quarter of the year according to people familiar with the matter. So it might be turning around, but it's gonna take a while to build that back up because a lot of people have left to go to other platforms, but it does seem like even, Twitter and X have reached their nadir, in my opinion,

in terms of sentiment. And the people who wanted to leave have left. The people who have stayed are staying. The advertisers who wanted to leave have left. The people who have stayed are staying. The advertisers who wanted to leave have left. And so, yeah, it's still producing single digit billions in ad revenue and monetization, and that's great. Musk and his advisors had long thought about bringing X and XAI together, but after the election,

those plans accelerated according to people familiar with the matter. To do that, they knew they would have to successfully execute several Transactions in the right order and get a little lucky But Musk is a pretty lucky guy With Musk's with Musk ascendant after the election X took a new approach to ginning up the new new ad spending in December a lawyer From X called a lawyer at advertising conglomerate interpublic group

Hinting that it's recently announced 13 billion dollar deal to merge with rival Omnicom would face trouble from the Trump administration so he's putting the pressure on them. Other advertisers started to raise their spending including Amazon.com in January. Amazon's an interesting one because I mean obviously huge huge advertiser but very direct response and very product driven, and that's a little bit hard for the mindset that you come to X with, because it's a reading platform, it's almost like an education platform. It's not the same experiences as Instagram,

where you're just browsing different visual elements, you see a product, it makes a ton of sense, and I think that's why Ben Thompson's always argued that Instagram. Your explore feed now is just probably the Hennessy, what's it called? The Cadillac Escalade V, Hennessy Edition, which has a thousand horsepower. The explore feed of just like, and the reels is just different videos of that. Yeah.

You can't get it off your mind. No, no. Once you've figured out it exists. It has been interesting. I'll sort of... I find that my YouTube feed moves much faster than my Instagram feed, but my Instagram feed eventually come catches up.

So I'll get into cars. I'll be watching Doug Dumuro on YouTube and my YouTube feed will be flooded with that. And it'll show me all the different like, oh, here's Vin Wiki. Here's, you know, uh, all, Whovi, all the different car YouTubers will kind of flooding cause Google picks up on it. Instagram, I don't use as much, but know, Hoovie, all the different car YouTubers will kind of flood in, because Google picks up on it.

Instagram, I don't use as much, but eventually we'll learn, hey, we showed him one car video, and he seems to be more into it than before. Let's keep it going. But again, on X, even though I do post about cars every once in a while, in kind of a joking fashion, X hasn't figured out how to serve me ads. Plus, I pay for like the most premium version

that gets rid of all the ads But even when I didn't I never saw that turning the premium off turning the verification off just so I can get the full flood of ads I Wish you could be on the highest tier so you could pay X as much as possible yet still see ads Yeah, get them that sort of incremental. I like that revenue. Yeah, I like to I mean for a while You could like pay for the check mark, but then turn it off.

You should be able to do the same thing with ads. Pay to remove the ads, but then check mark, put them back. Yeah. But maybe you need a non-account just for that. Anyways, I'm excited to see what this combined entity does. Yeah. A lot of work to do still. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about it before. It makes a lot of work to do still. Yeah, I mean, we talked about it before.

It makes a lot of sense in a bunch of different ways. From real-time data, when you go to Grok, you're going to want to know about things. All the data gets sucked into X anyway. And so it makes sense from a data strength perspective. And also just as a distribution vector for Grok. It seems like every major foundation model company has found a dance partner, and Google has google.com.

And they're searching and they're sending generative responses into the Google search bar. Open AI has been able to get everyone to download the Open AI Chat GPT app. It's in my home row, and they've done a great job at that There's been talks about Oh perplexity might like merge with someone or anthropic might merge with someone or partner up with someone So the X AI X X and X AI deal makes a lot of sense in that context

but if your business is is collapsing and Advertisers are leaving and you need to cut costs get on ramp time is money save both easy use corporate Cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place Ramp ramp and we have our first guest of the show Alex. Welcome to the studio. How you doing today? One second we are bringing him in from outtake AI we will give you a little how you do big news this week What's going on? Thanks for having me guys, I'm pumped to be here. Thanks so much.

Thanks for coming on, busy week for you guys. Hyper scaling and announcing the raise all at the same time. But before we dive in, introduce yourself and the company and yeah, whatever backstory you wanna give for the audience. Yeah, of course. Well course well first off thanks for having me guys. Back story I spent five years working at Palantir I worked across a lot of crazy different stuff as one does at that company. Worked abroad I was in South America I was in Eastern Europe eventually started to work on really deep core product things. Towards

the end spent a lot of time on what we effectively are experimental product team. So zero to one new product bets. Worked directly for the PoundTruth CTO, Sham Sunker, absolute goat. A shout out to him. Also one of our angel investors. Amazing. Yeah. And then, yeah, towards the end, as everyone sort of became

obsessed with AI, it was really obvious to me that we're going to live in an increasingly schizophrenic internet. What you see is not necessarily what you get online anymore. Especially the way I think about it, is the cost to be a shitty person online went to kind of $0 over the last three years. You got infinite text, infinite images.

That stuff is awesome, super creative. Just obviously there's bad people out there that are gonna misuse it. And I wanted to do something about that. And that's really what Outtake is focused on. We try to preserve authenticity, identity online. Go deeper there. Who are the kind of companies that you're working with today

and will be working with? I'm sure some you can share, some you can't, etc. Yeah, it's funny. In cybersecurity, there's a lot of sensitivity around what you can and cannot share. But we've been lucky to work with phenomenal places like OpenAI is one of our favorite customers, really pushed us when you think about the kinds of cybersecurity threats that they might be dealing with. Really, anyone that has a brand big enough to really matter is a brand that can be misused, right?

So a fun side effect for us as a company is like our customers are intrinsically people that matter because they're the ones whose names and brands are being misused to manipulate people, right? Yeah, can you talk about, so I feel like everybody's been aware of this threat around AI impersonation, some of these voice models, even video models at some point are getting so advanced

that it's becoming a big threat. Can you talk about, it feels like we haven't, we haven't faced Armageddon yet, but I'm sure part of that is the work that you guys are doing and the work that these foundation models are doing. So can you talk about what's actually happening in the market?

Because I have the sense that you see this tip of the iceberg where you're getting spam on iMessage or you're getting email spam or you're getting some phishing attempt, etc. What is all the work that's going into this to make sure that you're only seeing that tip of the iceberg? It doesn't feel like we're completely flooded yet, but this kind of phenomena is scaling.

Yeah. To your point, I hope we never see Armageddon. I think there's this gradient of sophistication, as you pointed out, where the average consumer deals with spam texts, maybe some shitty emails, and hopefully not people have talked about the idea that your dad is giving you a deep fake voice call and whatnot.

But we haven't necessarily seen that. Interestingly, a lot of the attacks on the other end of sophistication are actually really targeting enterprises. And it kind of makes sense. It's like, that's where the money, that's where the data is. And so what we are seeing is the quality and volume of, let's say, inbound email phishing attacks has gone up considerably.

And then this just goes back to the idea of the cost to do that dropped a lot. Right? considerably. And then this just goes back to the idea of like the cost to do that dropped a lot, right? And so enterprises are like dealing with an absolute flood of attacks at the moment. And there's a variety of attacks, right? So there's like, you know, there's the good old email security stuff we just mentioned. There's just a lot of stuff around social engineering generally, right? It's like, here, let me throw together a fake website and then use that to like DM people, to send emails via that. Or let me just get the customers of that company, let's like, here, let me throw together a fake website and then use that to like DM people, to send emails by that. Or let me just get the customers of that company, let's say, I'm gonna use a random name

that's not connected to us. Let's say it's like, I don't know, the Bank of Canada in some way, right? It has a website that's gonna now be used to scam Canadian citizens in some way. Yeah, the sophistication is like really, one phrase that I always come back to is like, it's not

only that grandmothers are the ones being scammed, it's actually grandmothers can become scammers now. And it's right, because it's like, it's just easier than ever. And that's actually the real issue. It's like, sometimes people

talk about large language models, and they're like, oh, like, it could teach someone how to like, clone smallpox. And it's like, yeah, dude, sure, maybe, but like, it could immediately today tell you how to, you know, pen test someone's website and try to get into it. And so it's just like the barrier to entry is just so much lower than it used to be

for all sorts of cybersecurity attacks. Can you talk about like the the scale of, you know, some of these like phishing things? Like when I think about everybody in tech is used to getting Coinbase style fishing, like, hey, give us a call. You had some issue. And I just think about, OK, if that works one out of 1,000 times.

It's the best business ever. It's the best business ever. Is part of the reason that these issues are scaling so rapidly is just because it's super profitable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the like one way to think about it is we've all seen the tremendous growth of like AI outbound companies. Right. They've done really well.

It doesn't take a leap of the imagination to understand that, like that same sort of like well intended outbound can be misused, right? And so maybe one way to like paint an idea of volume is like just as the volume of AI outbound has increased on like legitimate use cases, where I'm sure you and I both deal with a ton of LinkedIn inbound or email outbound. It's basically been one for one

on sort of the darker side of it as well. What about the stuff you guys are doing with creators? I know in the announcement you said that you guys are working with SciComm, the team behind Human Lab. What are you seeing creators dealing with in terms of impersonation as these models have advanced? I mean, creators were some of our first customers, right? And it's actually because they were the ones, the first ones to feel the pain. I mean, to some degree, maybe you guys deal with this, right?

Someone might make a fake handle of your account. It's happening, yeah. Yeah, fake versions of your profiles. There's a lot of value in impersonating you guys, whether it's a financial endorsement, a startup endorsement, just pretending to be you for recruiting and something. Basically the creators were the first ones to hit because they were the most chronically online, right? Is the short answer there?

And in the early days when the models needed more data to train on, they were also the ones that had the most data available. I think what was really fascinating for us as a company is, especially since almost the whole team came from Palantir, we had a lot of reps at selling to large enterprises, government, and incredibly secure environments. And so creators ended up being this great launching pad for us where we built a product really, really fast

and then went up market really, really quickly. Can you talk a little bit about recent AI model progress? I don't know if you read this article on less wrong from Zero Path, but just to summarize it, it said recent AI model progress feels mostly like BS. This is from a founder who actually built an AI driven pen testing company and they said they kept upgrading to the latest and greatest model it would completely destroy the benchmarks But then they weren't getting real-world results and this was a question about benchmark saturation I could imagine that to your point about like the script kiddies are better than ever basically because pen testing is democratized now or

hacking or scripting is democratized but in terms of the work that you're doing, how important is AI model progress to all that? And what is the shape of the curve that we're looking at? Is it sigmoid or are we going acceleratory to the moon? That's such a good question. It goes back to my sort of like greeting to sophistication response, which is like, you know, surprisingly, as we talked

about, we're all dealing with that flood of texts. Clearly it's working, but people keep doing it. And so we all agree that like, even if we paused all model progress, that would continue. And so my general take is like, the models are already at a point where they're having serious social engineering attack effects. Now, as you go up that gradient of sophistication, for example, the pen testing founder, he might have a very legitimate argument where it's like, hey, sure, there's all this hype around progress,

but I don't actually see a model being able to autonomously hack a website, because maybe that's at the further end of the sophistication. But I guess my claim is that like, it's something like 85% of critical data breaches happen because of social engineering attacks. It's almost like machines are easy to secure these days. Like, there's a massive multi-billion dollar industry that has all of cybersecurity that focuses on that. I think one of the big contrarian things about Outtake

was it was really two things. It was like, one, hey, if machines are pretty secure, let's actually focus on securing the humans. And then two, traditionally enterprises will like stop at securing themselves, right? So they'll say, hey, I have my corporate perimeter and then my VPN and everything in there is really buttoned up and that's great.

Historically, cybersecurity companies have been kind of, I think, gun shy of stepping outside their perimeter and saying, hey, no, I'm going to go search for threats out in the world, like arbitrary websites, social media, wherever it is, and we're going to go look for those threats and proactively tackle that. That's intrinsically difficult because you're trying to influence the thing that you did, you know, it's not part of your org. Our ability to like do that and actually do the really hard work to get there is really what helped us stand out. Is the only answer for a bad guy with an LLM

a good guy with an LLM? And what I mean by that is that, you know, captchas are not, they're deterministic essentially, and yet they can thwart a non-deterministic attack from an AI. You could imagine Arc AGI puzzles becoming the next CAPTCHA. Or in your view, do we need just to stay, is it a probabilistic on probabilistic combat from here on out?

I love this question. Okay, so yeah, one of my biggest anxieties is that generally, to your point, captures are broken, which like, hey, we passed the touring test a while ago. For some reason, we just blew past that and don't talk about it enough. We are blowing past what effectively was the modern version of the touring test, which is captures. There is clearly, in my opinion, not enough panic about this, which is why I was so pumped

to tackle this two years ago. We spent a lot of time thinking about this. Anyway, to get to your actual question of probabilistic versus probabilistic, I think I was so pumped to tackle this two years ago. And we spent a lot of time thinking about this. Anyway, to get to your actual question of like probabilistic versus probabilistic, I think there's a few answers. I'll hint at the future of outtake a little bit. Some of it's still, parts of it are still in stealth, but I think a lot of what we do today

is what you're talking about. It's probabilistic versus probabilistic, and we're thinking about, hey, here's the harm we're seeing, and like, can we go practically discover and remove it, right? The other half of it though, candidly is like, there's probably- Can you talk about, briefly,

can you talk about the agentic approach there, which is basically like, you're sending good bots around the internet, finding these sort of social engineering impersonation attempts, and then basically acting like a human would in terms of being like, reporting this content, basically flagging it, being very specific about it.

But maybe could you dive in there around like, yeah, why yeah, yeah, why why this this sort of a genetic experience is important when you're not building when you're building out in the sort of like dealing with threats in the real world out on the Internet versus internal. Yeah, excellent point. I think one of the other reasons that I was so excited to take a bet on this space is, candidly, this whole space is full of a graveyard of companies that were services companies.

So it intrinsically was a task so difficult that only humans can do it, meaning, let's say we're protecting, again, the Canadian bank. You need to have an ability to go proactively search for every place that do it, meaning, let's say we're protecting, again, the Canadian bank. You need to have an ability to go proactively search for every place that you think the threat might emerge. You need to be able to adapt to the idea. Let's say that bank sells mortgages in the summer. The search terms that you use to find the scams that might occur because now they might

be mortgage scams need to adapt for the season. Now you and I as humans can get to that pretty quickly. Historically, models were not going to just infer the season and then figure out the latest trending scam for this particular customer. We are able to do that. And so it's like having agents that are thoughtful about how search occurs from period to period

really, really matters. The other thing is deciding what is considered harmful for that particular customer. There's a lot of nuance there by company. I mean, celebrities is a great example, right, where it's like there's fan pages. You don't want to remove that stuff. And so there's a lot of nuance in how you determine harm. Again, a reason why you would train a team of people to be like, hey, this is what we consider harmful.

There's a lot of moat in, frankly, figuring that out. When you use Outtakes product, there's an aspect where our users effectively train our models to explain what they consider risky. And then the final bit is taking over the actual remediation steps. Everyone talks about legal AI. I think we've built one of the most effective legal AI workflows, where we go out and interact with third parties to resolve external issues. Can you talk a little bit about the actual monetization or value capture here? I could imagine if I'm a bank and my customers are getting scammed, it's not exactly a bug bounty that you're, but you are creating value for me because my customers are going to be happy,

then they're going to be unhappy with me if they get scammed, even if I had nothing to do with it. If you go out and shut one of these rings down, how are you getting compensated? It's a great question. The way we think about it is traditionally, so I guess good for us, the customers were thinking about these problems, right? They were just relatively lower volume historically, right? So like, if you look at the chart of like sort of digital attacks happening on let's say social media, websites, etc., it's flat, flat, flat. And then 2022, 2023, it starts to go exponential.

We positioned ourselves well. We saw where the puck was going and said, okay, great. All the people that were already managing that low level of attacks, they existed. They just were a cobbled together team of cyber security analysts and occasionally lawyers. And every large organization had someone thinking about it. But they could sort of manage the one to 10 attacks a week, right? They were expensive though because they're very high hourly wages for these folks. And so when the volume spikes, it becomes untenable to use that old system and then

it became really clear that Outtake could step in. And so to your point about value capture, it really became a question of like, hey, you would be trying to manage this. You would be trying to have these folks work like 24-7. They obviously can't do that nor want to candidly and slash you wouldn't be able to afford it. So let Outtake come in, do a 10x better solution at one 10th the cost. And this is a really good deal for everyone involved.

Can you talk about, we had Ashkay on, chief architect at Palantir. Yesterday, we were talking about the sort of forward deployed meme. Have you taken anything from that approach? You obviously were a forward deployed engineer all over the world. Do you end up talking to these big platforms and they say like, can you guys please come and just post up in our office for a week and figure this out? Or is it, you know, less intensive than that?

No, I think the forward deployed meme is there's a lot of truth to it. The reality is if you want to if you want to go do something meaningful, you need to go sit by the customer and make it happen. A lot of our best product insights have happened because me or another engineer were actually on site and said, okay, here's how we thought you were doing it, but in actuality, you need to do it this way. So yeah, forward to play engineering, huge fan. Love it.

You got anything else? This is great. Yeah, I wanted to know a little bit about mechanically, Yeah. Love it. You got anything else? This is great. Yeah. I wanted to know a little bit about like mechanically, how do you shut down a ring of scammers? I remember reading this book about Paul LaRue. I don't know if you're familiar with this guy. He's called the mastermind. People think he might've created Bitcoin.

And back in like 2004 or something, he was, you know, those like spam emails you get that are like, oh, magical pill, you know, pill mill stuff. He was the one sending all of those. And he leveled up so high that he would get a website shut down instantly, spin up a new website. But then he went even further and bought a registrar so that he could register like new domains for free. And you couldn't shut him down at the registrar level Not just like he had his own like TLD basically It was crazy. And so some of these some of these like rings are extremely sophisticated Is there a moment when you transition from?

Okay, my AI agent is just like sending a little cease and desist to Okay, we're getting in touch with with the authorities on this one because we discovered a major, major organization here. Yeah, okay. I have to be careful about what I can share publicly. Sure, sure, sure. But yes, like, sure. Yeah, we saw it with the Mark Rober.

Mark Rober busted some fraud scheme in India, right? I don't know if you're familiar with that one, but maybe just tell us some historical stories of how this works. Yeah, yeah. So to your point on the mechanics, the traditional way to deal with all this is purely legal, right? You put together, let's say, or it depends on the exact type of attack, but generally

everything you said is spot on, which is like cease and desist letter, maybe a complaint of the domain host, the registrar, et cetera. That was a key ingredient in the early parts of that take. I think the big differentiator, in addition to all the agentic stuff, is we've thought really deeply about how do we become the platform that is trusted by domain registrars, hosts, social platforms, et cetera, to be a high quality source of reports, right?

Like that is incredibly, incredibly important. And I can't say too much, but like, yeah, we've invested a lot of engineering resources in that direction as well. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thanks so much for joining. This was a fantastic conversation. And good luck to you.

Hopefully you bust some massive scamming ring soon. Yeah, every day, I'm sure. But yeah, your new cybersecurity correspondent, thank you for all the helps. He's already been finding people impersonating us. It's great. So appreciate your hard work and the whole team and congrats on the new round.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks guys. Talk to you soon. Talk soon. Yeah, I actually have gotten multiple times people set up fake John Coogan accounts, copy everything, copy every tweet and then block me so that I can't see it. And the worst part about it is that I don't think that many people are falling for it,

but I get so many DMs from people being like, there's a scammer that's impersonating you. I'm sure you've seen this. And it's like, yes, I have seen it. And then I have to go hunt it down and report it and stuff. And so it's just like annoying getting like a flood of texts being like you're you're being impersonated. You got good friends.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you if you've let people know. But in the future. Yeah, I mean, still send it to me. But definitely just report it and try and get try and get the account taken down. If it's out there floating around. Next up, we got quaid coming in the building. Watches and Wonders is done. and it's been a busy week with all the tariffs and so we want to get a breakdown from him about how the watch world is reacting to all the tariff chaos. He's been in Switzerland called in from Watches and Wonders late night last week and now that the show is over we're gonna get a

full deep dive. Also want to talk to him about how, um, how the news breaks around, uh, different watch news and how the, how the media cycle works. So Quaid, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me guys excited to be back. Are you back in LA? I am. It's funny. The, the last time I bowed in the tariffs dropped, I think the minute I hung up with you guys. So. Yeah, yeah, it was 4 p.m. that day, our time. I was in such a haze, I think I texted you, Quaid, I was like, what's the reaction over in Switzerland?

And you're like, not good. Not good. But now, you know, we've seen things, there's been a pause, there's been ups and downs. Well, there's still the 10% there's been ups and downs. What? Well, there's still the 10% base tariff. Yes. Correct.

So what was the whole journey throughout Watches and Wonders? Very funny timing. Good to be there on the ground. Take us through the reaction as things developed and where the heartbeat of the industry is right now. Yeah, I think you can split the conversation kind of between the primary market and the secondary market and so I'll intentionally walk through that.

On the primary side, I think all the meetings I had the day after chatting with you guys, the tariffs dropping, there was a lot of like the Spider-Man meme pointing at each other like not really knowing what to do right now. And I think you can split the reaction from brands kind of by the type of brand they are. You have like the giant massive brands

that everyone knows like the Rolexes and the Pateks and APs of the world. And their reaction is decidedly different than some of the brands that sit kind of in the middle of the market. For every brand that isn't these like very, very, very top-tier elite brands, their focus was how quickly can I get product to the US?

And whether it was functional products, watches, that are just parts, like they just wanted to move everything to the US as possible from most of the meetings that I was having. On the larger brand side, I think they had the luxury of sitting and waiting and seeing what was going to happen. You saw the Rolex of the world and things like that take their time. And the initial answer that I got from secondary feedback from authorized dealers meeting with Rolex that week was the large feedback that

Rolex tended to give in that moment was like, we don't want to pass this on to the customer, but we're not going to eat the cost of these tariffs either. So we're just going to hold off. And the main focus point was, we'll make it harder to buy outside of your local markets. Because I think a lot of the authorized dealers in the US are all of a sudden saying, what happens when all of my core customers decide that it's actually cost efficient to prioritize that flight to Paris. Oh, interesting. So, buy that watch there.

Buy it there. So, the thinking was, how do we keep it in the local markets? Unclear how they're holding that out, right? That's really tricky, yeah. That's what was happening in the primary market in the moment. On the secondary market, in the US particularly, I think you saw a lot of dealers think it was an amazing moment for a second where all of a sudden the inventory that was just being in their lots in the US was much more valuable than it was a few minutes before the terrorists

were alive. And so on the secondary side, you saw it really came down to what type of dealer and what your economics are. If you're a dealer that happened to have a lot of inventory and you don't have a hard time stocking that inventory, again, you have great sources. You had a lot of folks that just saw deals come through in an increase and they just sold them. Like they moved product and that was the name of the game. And then you saw a lot of other dealers try to opportunistically jump their prices 10 plus percent to all of a sudden increase that value.

So we saw the best weekend we've ever seen after the tariffs in the sense that there was a huge increase in demand and everyone was out trying to buy those watches. And then the prices, I would say, a lot of them are 10, 15% more than they typically would. We haven't seen a lot of the craziness, like no one's pricing in selling at 30 plus percent to try to match the 31% move. And then since they announced the 90 day moment, I think things have chilled out a little bit. We're

still seeing pricing being up 10-ish percent on a lot of the sales that we're seeing come through. But it's really interesting to see what dealers are going to do. I think it's a question of if you believe that 31% is going to hold. And if you do, I think you're starting to stock up right now. If you don't believe it's going to hold and it's purely a marketing chip, then I think you're kind of sitting and waiting out and seeing what happens next. Were there any American watch manufacturers there just like popping champagne like the Hamiltons or the RGMs just being like, I've been waiting for this.

I'm finally going to catch up to Patek. Not a ton. It was, it's very, it's very Swiss centric while you're there. But it certainly would be a good moment to be, but it was like a lot of these brands were lamenting because especially on the independent side like they had just opened up New York boutiques or they had just signed the lease in LA or whatever it is. And so the question was how do we get product there? And a lot of the independent and smaller brands the answer kind of became like I'm willing

to forget the US market for a second. Like can I come up with other skews in Europe that make up the revenue I lose in the U S or can I just incentivize, especially on the six figure plus pieces, can I incentivize an experiential moment where I take my best collectors and I organize a trip where they come to Geneva and hang out with me as the CEO and, and they buy the pieces there. Yeah. And is that, uh, I mean, obviously that's like probably not completely kosher with the tariffs,

but watches are unique in that if you buy one and you throw it in your suitcase and you're wearing it as you come across, how would they ever know that you bought it while you were on that trip, right? That's just the nature of the game. Yeah, I think most people, they buy it, they strap it on and they walk out.

Yeah, makes sense. What about, so one of the big concerns of the last week is that even for example auto manufacturers that make cars in the US a lot of those parts come from overseas and specifically China for the Holy Trinity brands are they making every single individual part in Switzerland I they I've seen those claims thrown around it almost is inconceivable. But it seems to be the case that they're not dealing with the same reciprocal tariffs from China

or anything like that. But I'd love to get your point of view there. Yeah, I think for most of the brands that we're talking about, everything's made in-house. And even a lot of the brands that are using generic movements, like they're buying generic Swiss movements for the majority case, and these $10,000 AOV plus.

There are a number of brands though that will manufacture or use parts in other places, and then yeah, they'll be here with those tariffs, 100%, especially on the, I hate to say the word cheaper, but on the kind of cheaper model. Less expensive. Less expensive is the right word. You're right.

What about any further thoughts on the Land Dweller? Were you surprised at where it's being priced on the secondary market at all? Where is it being priced? I think the steel is roughly sitting around high 30s, low 40s. Is that correct? Yeah. We actually haven't seen any come through yet. So I'm yet to see like a transaction

or a listing on Bezel for it. So kind of waiting to see where that lands. But yeah, I mean, double retail, I said that last week, I think that wouldn't surprise me at all. Since I spoke with you, I had a chance to like see it in the metal and put it on my wrist and play with it a little bit.

And, and, uh, I liked it a lot. I didn't think I was going to like it as much as I did. Frankly, I didn't want to like it at all, but, um, it's just, Rolex has this thing where they, they, they drop a model and it's just always good. Like there's a, there's an executed finesse and everything that they make happen. And, and sometimes it's fun when it doesn't work out maybe, and it always works out. So it's, it's quite nice. I like the Rose build example better. Yeah. But, uh,

what is the base price at retail for a Rolex land dweller? I think, I think this bill example is 14, 14, more than double. And then, uh, when the first one comes through, can you talk to me a little bit about like how you think about that deal on bezel? Are you going to push that person to do an auction? Is that a better move for someone who was sitting on the land dweller who's thinking about selling it or should they just try and price it through the normal marketplace?

I think like we'll leverage the auction probably to do it. We did that with the cupidus too. Like we sold, I think we sold, if not the first Cubitus at auction, one of the first to go, Cubit Eye to come out of the auction. And I think we'll do the same thing on the land dweller side. The fun thing is like the folks that are buying the initial examples of the land dweller are doing

so exclusively to be one of the first owners of the land dweller. And I think it's like that is the, you'll pay a premium for that certainly. Same thing happened with the Cubitus and any of these and these kind of new drops. If you want to be courtside wearing this watch

and everyone know that you got it first, then obviously you're paying a premium for that. I don't know where it's going to settle though. I imagine the premium for the initial examples will be certainly over double retail. But then like, is it gonna be evaluated like it's in a Royal Oak kind of like very hyped? Is it gonna settle to be similar to a Datejust

where it trails, it's a little bit above retail, but it's not as exciting. I don't know, it kind of splits the middle there. Obviously I'm leaning more towards the hype train, but. Yeah. The thing that makes me think it potentially pretty sustainable is just, it's a great looking watch and it seems to wear really well. I think I saw the picture you posted and it just looks great. It's hard to, it's hard to not like, even if you're not a Rolex guy traditionally.

I liked it when I saw it. What's the sentiment around Patek right now? Yeah. I felt like the general react, that felt like the reaction to the Cubitus couldn't have been worse online. I mean, like so many people just didn't like it. I think it looks fine.

It wears well, but like what's the feeling around the brand, you know, last week? Yeah, I think like it was cool to see them double down on a lot of traditionally interesting Patek models. There are deviations from the sports models. There was a really badass Calatrava that came out in platinum with the salmon dial, and it's incredible. It was my favorite watch in all of Watches and Wonders to see in the middle.

And they came out with a 40 millimeter Cubitus, which I think is a very fresh take on the Cubitus. The other one is just quite massive and doesn't really feel right in the wrist in my opinion. I think the vibe against the Cubitus is like similar to Rolex, Patek tends to not miss. Like they kind of bat a thousand when they do things. And I think everyone wants these big brands to catch an L

so they can talk shit about it and feel like they're able to say that. So I think the Cubitus paired with a bit of an interesting take that felt maybe like it was overly modernized from a marketing campaign, like didn't sit well with a lot of early collectors. But yeah, I don't know. I think like I put the 40 millimeter one on.

I liked it. It's like they make great watches. It's a little bit angular and I'm a bigger fan of like a 5711 Nautilus. But, you know, if I was allocated one of those things, I would certainly wear it and I would rock it. Love it. What any interesting takeaways around the secondary market? You're on a panel specifically about the secondary market. Was there anything?

I'm curious what your major points were and anything else you kind of learned from other people that may have been on the panel or just that attended the event. Yeah, it was, it's really cool to hear like how the brands are thinking about the secondary market and how the difference from how we're thinking about it. And just, I think where it's going, I think it's, you know, we entered the space when the secondary market from a brand perception was,

was kind of like, Oh, don't, don't, don't dip your toe into it, buy primary only. And now to see that, you know, I was in a panel next to Vacheron Constantin, I was in Sotheby's and you have, you know, a bunch of representatives from all the top brands at the panel. It's quite cool to see that these primary brands are now embracing the secondary market as something that's quite interesting. And I think it allows customers to feel comfortable interacting with the space as long as they're asking the right questions and they're making sure that they're focusing on authenticity and they're buying from reputable sources. And so it's

been awesome for our business because it allows us the avenue to double down on our initial goal which was just make a really, really safe, comfortable experience to transact in the secondary market, lower the barrier of entry to buying your first watch, but also just generally if you don't want to wait in a wait list, come through and transact and buy the things you want. And that's why the tariff conversation was super interesting for the secondary market because if the premium from a lot of these pieces from the secondary market because if the premium from, you know, a lot of these pieces from the secondary market to retail is close to 30%, all of a sudden, if a primary market watches 31% up from a cost perspective,

that delta is certainly meaningfully decreased. Do I actually wanna wait on a wait list any longer or should I just buy one that's available on the market in the US? Of course, sellers know that and they're pricing it up 10%, but it still makes that difference smaller than it was. And so all of a sudden, maybe it's not as appealing

to wait two years to get that Royal Oak versus just buying it right now and getting it when I want it. Never wait, never wait to buy a Royal Oak, always buy one just immediately. Just do it. How does, I'm curious, how does influencer marketing work in the, you know, for a company like Rolex, I'm curious, how does influencer marketing work

for a company like Rolex when it feels like there's just this permanent stream of images coming out from the most influential celebrities in the world and whenever I see one of the pictures because I've been involved with influencer or creator marketing forever, I'm always looking at the image, I'm like, does this athlete always roll out of bed and want to wear a Rolex? Like does Tom Brady always want to roll out of bed

and wear like the Rolex Submariner of the day? Or is there some type of sort of transaction happening behind the scenes, whether it's free watches or it's totally possible that they just love the watches and there's enough of them out there, but I'm curious if you have any insight there. Yeah, it was a big influencer marketing year for Rolex. Prior to Watches and Wonders, they hinted that there'd be a massive announcement and we were all spiraling because a new model,

are they launching a new platform? What's going going on? And they just announced Leonardo DiCaprio as an ambassador. And they dropped the whole like Rolex family page where it talks about like all aspects and touch points of creative entertainment, sports, whatever, the dominance they have on like really influential people. And then it'll be- They call their family page a celebration of human achievement.

And it's so funny, because I didn't see the announcement about Leo, but Instagram just serves me pictures of celebrities wearing watches. And I'm always just like, Leo doesn't go anywhere without a Rolex on. And it seems like now it's like, OK, yeah, he's contracted. Basically, be like, don't leave the house without a Rolex. And everywhere he goes, he's just getting photographed.

And it's just sort of like that natural marketing. Yeah, and it's funny, because Leo was a tag guy for a really long time. There's that odd story where in Wolf of Wall Street, he's wearing what looks like, I believe, it's like a vintage GMT Rolex, but it's actually a tag core that they had intentionally made to look like it was an old 80s stock market look and watch, but it was a tag.

I think the interesting part, you mentioned Tom Brady. Tom Brady was an IWC ambassador for a really long time. I love those brands. I think it's a lot easier for those guys to be a Rolex ambassador than maybe another brand they don't wear as much. When you ask the initial question of like, do I feel comfortable wearing this everywhere? I would love to be a Rolex ambassador. I think they're very lucky because the tap and tap into the brand that everyone wants to wear a lot of the most. Same with the APs of the world. They have a lot of amazing ambassadors

there. But yeah, I think there's undeniably a set of collectors that don't want to be ambassadors because they want to wear a diverse collection. You saw the same thing, I remember sitting down with some early investors in GOAT, and they capitalized that on the sneaker space where you had athletes and folks that didn't want to just wear Nikes when they stepped out. They wanted to wear a more diverse set of streetwear and shoes and whatever it is. And Goat became the business that allowed you to catalyze that and wear multiple things.

I think the same thing is happening in the watch space and that's why I'm so excited to build consumer brand around the secondary market. You can get to a place where you can have a watch sponsorship but it's more of a brand around the secondary market, if it's like you can get to a place where you can have a watch sponsorship, but it's like more of a secondary oriented one. So you're making a statement that I like wearing watches, but I have a diverse collection. I'm not necessarily bound to one specific brand. That being said, not a bad gig to be a Rolex ambassador.

I think it's pretty good. What are some of the known unknowns in the watch industry for the rest of the year? What are the things that we might expect announcements around but we don't have the final details on if we wanna be completely dialed in from going into the next Watches and Wonders?

What should we be tracking today? Yeah, I think like the immediate term known unknowns is like kind of a general like I don't know what's gonna happen with tariffs it's gonna change everything from from that perspective or is it gonna fizzle out and everything's gonna go back to normal? So we might so we might concretize that by saying something like if we see an increase in Rolex's stated prices on their website that would be a reaction to the tariffs right? Exactly yeah like those prices in Rolex's stated prices on their website,

that would be a reaction to the tariffs, right? Precisely, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like are those prices gonna be passed on to the consumer? And I think the consistent known unknowns that are always fun to posit ideas on in the watch community are like what's coming next, what's being updated next. We were talking about this via text before the episode,

but there's a very cyclical process that exists every year for a lot of these major brands. Rolex pretty much exclusively drops models that are in catalog in Watches and Wonders. So all year, the Watch community is throwing out their ideas, making renderings of what's gonna happen next. The introduction of the chat GPT image product has been, you can see,

because you're seeing all of a sudden, like anyone can render a green whatever, GMP or whatever makes happen. So, and so the way that typically works is a lot of the investigative Instagram journalists in the watch space will look at what Rolex has trademarked or patented. Like Rolex trademarked Land Dweller a number of months before dropping Land Dweller and everyone knew that,

but it was like I didn't know what they were gonna do with that and then you'll get renderings of the watches that are coming out and you don't know if that came from someone's Photoshop file or if that's real., and then go tie this home with the influencer marketing like federal war a land dweller somewhere Swiss Alps And dropped it on Instagram and it looked unintentional but I'm sure it was intentionally, you know very much planned But so I think a lot of the known unknowns are like what's coming next? What's going to be dropped and then and then what's gonna be discontinued and replaced

Changes the market significantly. Yeah, that's very fun. Well, it's such a fun market to follow. It's so interesting It's it has all the drama of like Oh speculation about the next iPhone with the fake renders Except the iPhone hasn't changed at all and so no one really cares anymore, but it's like within in the watch world It's like we're going from iPhone 3gs to iPhone 4 like every single year So thanks for coming on and chatting with us great to see you quaid you two guys. Thanks. We'll talk to the insight Our official watch correspondent. Yes back super important next coming into the studio We have Robin from avvalanche talking about nuclear energy and fusion in particular.

I had a chance to go up to Seattle with Ben, actually, and do a whole tour of his facility and see how he's building a, probably, I don't know, maybe the smallest nuclear energy product. It's pretty small. It's almost the size of a battery. Like you can kind of hold this thing. But fusion, not fission, much safer.

A whole bunch of trade-offs there which I'm sure we'll get into. And I'd also like to talk to him about some of the deregulation efforts that are happening. And there have been some announcements and executive orders, a lot of speculation about what might happen. Even Keith Herboy was talking about long-term looking towards energy

deregulation as a potential driver of innovation. We talked to a few people about how energy production is growing 20% a year in China and 0% in the United States. We don't love that and so I'm excited to talk to Robin and see if we can bring him in the studio and chat don't love that and so I'm excited to talk to Robin and see if we can bring him in the Studio and chat with him about how everything's going Robin. Are you there? I Think we're trying to get audio can you talk again? Can you hear me now? We can hear you. How you doing? Awesome. I'm doing very good. How are you? I'm great Can you start with just quick introduction the company and then the announcement?

Sure, so we're avalanche fusion. I like to say we're trying to build the world's smallest fusion machines So we're trying to do a very SpaceX style test fail fix approach to fusion try to be really capital efficient The fusion machines we're building in our lab today are about 12 centimeters in diameter. That's the plasma core. And yeah, raised a 40 million series A in fall of 2022. That was not an easy time back then. And we've been sort of in the lab grinding and improving these machines ever since. And so we've kind of made it to the point where we have something interesting. And so the announcement that we're doing today is we're announcing our new test facility,

which is going to be in Eastern Washington in the Tri-Cities area, called the Fusion Works. And so what the Fusion Works is, is it's basically a facility where you can come test different, you know, fusion technology. So we're going to provide the neutron generators with our fusion machines. We're going to have a broad scope radioactive material license, including the most advanced capability to handle tritium that's available commercially. And so you can kind of think of this like a wind tunnel facility for fusion. So if you have some blanket technology, you want to come test and see how it does. You can bring it to the FusionWorks and we'll hit it with neutrons from our machine. So if you have some blanket technology you want to come test and see how it does, you

can bring it to the Fusion Works and we'll hit it with Neutrons from our machine and you can go qualify your hardware and then off you go. So I think I'm really excited. I think it's sort of like the next level and sort of expanding the Fusion supply chain workforce, all that kind of stuff. And then we've got some really great partners we're gonna be working with in the Eastern Washington as well. I remember talking to AJ at Hermia's

building hypersonic planes and one of the main hiccups to their progress is just getting wind tunnel time. And so I haven't heard of anyone building a wind tunnel startup, maybe that's a good idea. Can you talk about where you're seeing demand, who you were talking to that made you realize

that you needed to build a facility that would service a broader swath of the Fusion community? Yeah, so funny, should they mention that? So like AJ and Hermia just recently announced their heat facility, right? Oh really? Which is like, basically, so what it sounds like after that conversation, what they did is they went

and built a hypersonics test facility themselves. Makes sense. And, the herbias announced with, I think it was a couple of weeks ago now was basically they're opening up their test facility to the rest of the DOD because there's a shortage of hypersonics testing. That's great. So it's kind of, it's kind of like, duh, like if you spend all this money standing up this like unique thing, um, you know, if it's operating 24 seven, obviously it's gonna be a much better facility and you probably don't have enough work to operate this thing at that cadence.

So why don't you open it up? You can bring in some revenue while you do that and you can make this really awesome facility that's just sort of like grinding day in, day out, getting really good at what it does. And so it turns out that idea applies to aerospace and hypersonics and I think it's also gonna apply to fusion at the end of the day.

Yeah, it's gonna commoditizing your compliments. Okay, I gotta ask, I gotta ask, new presidential order this morning, zero-based regulatory budgeting to unleash American energy. There was a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo in here, but it seems important. What's your take? Would love your take.

Yeah, I read that this morning. I kind of love it. This idea that every now and then a regulation is going to come up for review and it needs to justify its existence is kind of awesome. I can give you an example of how it applies to fusion. So, you know, tritium is regulated at the state level. If you're an agreement state.

So like we're working with Washington department of health to get it licensed, but the NRC has this rule that if you can't account for 10 curies of tritium in your system, you have like 30 days to report it as an incident to the NRC that you've like lost 10 curies of tritium. And to give you an idea of how small that is an exit sign has like 25 curies of tritium. So, you know, here you are running your fusion machine if you can't account for 20 or 10 curie because it got like absorbed into the walls and it's self shielding so you can't even measure 20 or 10 curie because it got like absorbed into the walls and it's self shielding So you can't even measure the x-rays from it. You just don't know where it went. Yeah, uh, uh

That's a big deal and you need to report that as an incident But like if someone like throws an exit sign in the garbage and nobody knows where it went like nobody cares, right? There's no like what do you mean? What do you mean by agency like, like an LAD exit sign or like, what's that? What, what do you mean by exit sign? Is that something like, like an exit sign above the door, right? Like let's say there's a fire, there's a fire and the lights go out and you have this glowing exit sign. Those are powered by 25 curies of Tridium. No idea.

Yeah. And so like we decided a long time ago that people being able to see how to get out of a birdie building in the dark, the safety associated with that was worth the very small risk of having tritium in these exercise. I had no idea. We decided human safety over some very unlikely chance. They're going to freak out Jordan. He's going to avoid every exit sign he sees now because he's super paranoid. They're made with microplastics too.

Oh no. Right. Yeah, that's hilarious. Can you give us a broader picture? So there's no agency out there investigating missing exit signs, whatever one goes missing, right? That would be like silly. And so, you know, I think this NRC 10 curie missing thing is an example of a regulation

Maybe made sense at the time Yeah But man if it had a sunset clause and had to go defend itself like everyone infusion hates this one. Sure, sure, sure unanimously like I feel like this was an example of something that probably should die and yeah, you know this Executive order is a way to get rid of some of that stuff. I'm all for it. At the same time, it seems like my kind of novice understanding of it is that on the fission side, we are highly regulatory constrained and there's,

there's high regulatory risk and relatively low, high regulatory risk, relatively lower science risk in, in fusion, we're higher on the science risk and lower on the regulatory risk. Is that the right frame to think about it? And can you just give us a brief overview of how American scientists broadly

are thinking about progress in fusion? We hear papers go viral, oh, it's solved every couple of years. We're trying to get to net energy created. Where are we on the path of progress towards, uh, you know, this amazing, uh, fusion future? Yeah. So, I mean, we've demonstrated ignition or Q greater than one using lasers like hitting, you know,

a pellet of, of deuterium tritium with lasers and making more fusion energy in than the laser energy that went out. That's awesome. And so there's a bunch of fusion startups that are working on laser approaches to doing fusion energy. There's another crew that are working on like magnetic confinement or combinations of that. That's like what I would consider what we're doing essentially.

CFS, Helion, or Zap Energy, or other companies that are kind of doing that. They have not hit Q greater than 1 yet, but we're all building machines that have a chance at doing that in the next couple years. And so I actually think it's going to be really exciting. There's a chance that one or multiple magnetic confinement fusion companies are going to cross Q greater than 1 during this administration. And those machines look a lot closer to what a fusion power plant is gonna eventually look like than sort of the laser fusion techniques.

And so if that happens, and I think there's a good chance there is, that's gonna really change geopolitics around energy. And you're gonna see this like amazing, you know, rush to kind of try and commercialize magnetic fusion confinement, which is going to be super exciting. To give you an idea of like the regulatory split. So right now, there was a decision about a year ago that fusion machines are going to be licensed like

particle accelerators, and specifically on the radioactive materials they produce. And so what that does is that pushes the regulator you work with to the state level, if you're an agreement state. So in Washington state, it's an agreement state. We work with the Washington Department of Health to license our fusion machines as particle accelerators. The process is essentially we design our radiation vault and do all the calcs with that. And then we apply for a particle accelerator license. They come in, they review it, they do a tour,

we show them what we've built. They have some suggestions on how to improve it. And then a month later, I get like a letter in the mail from the Washington Department of Health with my particle accelerator license, which I hang on the machine and now I'm licensed. So that's like pretty great, especially for like, you know, at the point where we're building experimental machines.

And then you contrast that with what Fission has to deal with. It's like many, many years of regulatory work working directly with the NRC. It's a really, really tough process. And we haven't actually even licensed any of these small SMRs that we're trying to like build here, right? So I hope that vision gets some regulatory relief in this administration. They definitely deserve it. We should probably talk about Texas and Utah that are suing the NRC to try and get regulatory control over small modular reactors. Yeah, Can you break that down for us?

I saw a couple of founders tweeting about that, but I didn't really have full context. Yeah. So I went to this investor event in Dallas, Texas, in December that Bollerion Ventures put on. And Rick Perry was the special guest speaker there. And I almost think I was in the room when this got decided, but like Rick Perry's advice to all the Fission people in the room was you should join up with Texas. You should sue the

NRC because there's some clause in the in the regulations that say the NRC has the right to regulate large power plants, but it's not clear if they have the right to regulate some of these smaller things because the risks associated with them are so much less if something goes wrong. And so I like, you know, Brett Kugelmas was in there from Last Energy and he's like one of the main parties to the lawsuit. So I feel like I was like an observer to history when the fission community decided we're going to sue the NRC and get them out of Texas. And if they succeed and Texas becomes the regulator for SMRs, that's going to be really exciting in terms of their

ability to innovate and go faster. Yeah. Can you talk about the positive sum nature of sort of nuclear broadly? It feels like it's been so hard to build in the space that everybody just generally wants to see people be successful in the space. So maybe it actually creates a dynamic where... Yeah, you don't see energy companies suing each other, they're suing the government, which is very different than what's happening in AI and every other startup. I don't see a lot of spying going on like we do in B2B SaaS seems like a lot friendlier community It is I mean the fusion people definitely, you know kind of get rid by the vision people's like if only you could solve your science blah blah blah

But you know, I want I want my vision siblings to to you know, do awesome I think there's room for both vision and fusion I think my personal belief is that fission is going to go bigger, like hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts, and fusion is going to be really great from the kilowatts to a few megawatts. And fusion is going to be really great for mobility and stuff. So like autonomous vehicles, fusion-powered,

like an Android dive XL or something like that, I think that's going to be a really great application for fusion in defense and space. I think the Russians are the only people crazy enough to put a fission reactor on like an autonomous vehicle. So I don't think that's a thing that's going to happen with fission. But I think, you know,

I think if you have sites where there's people around like guards and stuff, that's a great use case for fission. And it's good to scale like nobody's business that they can get the regulators, if they can get some regulatory reef and get some reasonable regulations there. So I'm really excited to see what happens over the next couple of years. Can you talk a little bit about lessons from the past two decades in in rocketry and specifically lessons learned from how Elon and SpaceX approached building rockets versus other players in the space And the decision to go more modular smaller higher iteration speed

I I've talked to you a lot about that, but I'd love to hear you kind of retell that story Yeah, yeah. I mean, the idea that like, so like I was at Blue Origin for six years working on New Glenn, it was super exciting to see it fly in January for the first time. And so like one of the things we learned there was like the importance of size, right? If your rocket is too big, all of a sudden, there's only like three suppliers in the whole country where you can get castings made. and now you're at a nine month, every iteration takes nine months, right? It's just too slow. So, you know, that was the thing that we really tried to bring from NewSpace is like, you don't necessarily know what the final answer is, but you need to be able to try things and you will try things quickly and have low

barriers to build things and test things. And so that's, that's sort of the key takeaway I took away from New Space. And we're trying to bring that to Fusion, right? Like very low barriers to test. We said at the beginning of Avalanche that we want a physicist to be able to go from like, I have an idea to testing it in a week. And we've actually achieved that a couple of times.

Like someone had an idea on Monday. They worked with the mechanical team to design it. And then we fabbed it on, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, broke vacuum on the machine, implemented it, pumped out over the weekend, and then off we were going testing on Monday. Like we've hit that cadence a couple of times and it's really kind of exciting to see that happen. And I believe that's how you solve really hard engineering and technical

problems is you try it and you iterate on the thing and eventually you're going to find something that works and then off you go. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about the pipeline of talent in the Fusion community because it feels like there's a lot of like thankless PhD tracks that are more theoretical but again I, I've been to the facility. It's a lot of wrenches and hammers. It's a very different culture, I imagine. But what has that been like scaling the team and getting people to adapt to kind of the different style of experimentation and work? Yeah, that's a really hard one, right? There is not a lot of places you can go to learn how to do fusion. And so what we've taken is a very broad approach.

Look, we'll teach you fusion. We'll teach you plasma physics, but you bring your mechanical engineering degree, your electrical engineering degree, right? You know, we love people from Blue Origin, SpaceX, Tesla, who've kind of worked in that kind of an environment that like go fast, try stuff, iterate, stuff like that. And then we will teach you the plasma physics, don't worry about that, and then we'll turn you

into a fusion engineer if you will. So I think that's kind of how we're going to have to do things for a while until sort of the universities catch up and you can take a degree in fusion earring if you will. And you know, I would love to put a couple of fusion reactors on campus at some universities so programs can get some experience actually operating them, and building them, and running them. But that's maybe something for a future. Yeah, there are.

We'd like one for the studio. Yeah, bring it in the studio in case the power goes out. We'd love that. Yeah, I mean, there actually are some small nuclear reactors, some fission reactors at MIT, I believe, and some. Yeah and some and they work on them and they produce a small amount of radiation and there's a little bit of risk but it's much lower than Chernobyl. That's what people don't realize, they're all over the country. Oregon State U has one, I've been there, like I stood on top and like looked down at the fission. Washington State, WSU has one.

Last question. They're called trigger reactors. Okay. So they're used basically for nuclear engineering programs to teach. You have like basically students like undergrads running these things. That's awesome. They're licensed by the NRC as nuclear operators and stuff like that. I have one last question.

I mean, we saw, everyone saw Oppenheimer and everyone knows the progression of the fission bomb to the fusion bomb. If these, if your devices really get baked into society and autonomous vehicles, is it even possible to turn it into a weapon? I know obviously we'd want to be careful, but from a science perspective, is it just impossible? No, it's a, from a science perspective, like what, is it just impossible? No, it's a, it's a vacuum chamber, right? And it needs to have very, very deep vacuum to maintain the plasma and do the

fusion. And so we actually had a machine break on us when it was running. So we had this cathode that was held on with the set screw. It was like one of the first janky machines we ever built. And this set screw came loose and the whole Rod cathode fell through the bottom hit the window and like ended up on the floor of the factory somewhere And the whole thing is just like imploded and spread glass all over the thing But like nothing bad happened like I was just like why is the cathode on the floor? What's going wrong here? I don't understand

If you shit it's gonna be very safe. Uh, you know, some of the conversations I've had with the DOD is like, well, well what happens if I shoot it? Like with like, like with a gun, it's like, well, same thing with the cathode, like it'll implode and then it'll stop and that'll be the end of it. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. The, the, the real problem is just getting it to produce energy and that's a, that's the path you're on. It's hard enough, right? Yeah, yeah, it's hard enough.

It's hard enough to make it use the battery. Can you, before you leave, could you give us a one minute rant around when Fusion is really working and we have these sort of small, I don't know exactly, sort of like cooler sized devices that can create energy. Where are all the places that we're going to put them? Black Mirror just dropped. I want to hear the white mirror version.

I understand the DoD applications. But yeah, is it backup power? When Hollywood, if they even make movies then in person, is it for your house? What are all the different use cases that you're excited about? Give us the Adam Punk future. I want to know the Adam Punk future. The practical one is they're probably going to be containerized and they're probably going to just be shipping containers all over the place, powering a neighborhood. That's probably what's

going to happen. Everyone wants this containerized one to five megawatt form factor, it seems like. So that's like, probably what's going to happen. But like the atom punk like future would be like, you're driving around and you've got one in the trunk of your cyber truck. And like, you don't have to like, you know, supercharge if you're going to Eastern Washington, because there's actually not that many charging stations, you could just like, flip on the fusion reactor and go go on fusion power I've driven around San Francisco in the DeLorean with a plastic 3d printed fusion reactor last year a deep tech week I'd love to do that with a real one someday That'd be fantastic

Well, we'll talk to you soon congratulations on the launch. Yeah, congrats. Thanks. Cheers. Bye. Take care. Hopping on next, we got Russ. Is that right? Yes. From LiveKit.io. That's right. That's right. Coming into the studio, we got our next guest joining.

Some big news today. Big pivot from watches to fusion reactors, but that's the nature of the show, folks. We're men of many talents. We keep you on your toes. Keep you on your toes. We'll do dedicated days where there's one theme. Some days, you just get a tour

of the entire technology industry. So, welcome to the studio, Russ. How you doing today? I'm good, I'm good. All right, so you're saying that I'm following fusion reactors? Is that the- We're following fusion reactors, and immediately before that,

we were talking about fine watches made in Switzerland. So we got a little bit of everything today. Taking us on a whirlwind tour. I don't know if I can follow Fusion Reactors, you guys. I'll try my best. Well, we're excited to talk about voice AI. Yeah. But why don't you introduce yourself and the company,

and then we can talk about the news and go from there. Sure, yeah. So I'm Russ. I'm the CEO, co-founder of a company called LiveKit. LiveKit. So LiveKit. What we we started actually is an open source project. So back during the pandemic. You know, if you think about all the technology that Zoom has underneath, we started an open source project that kind of built something similar

to all the technology that underpins Zoom, but as an API for any developer to integrate similar type of technology into their app. So you could connect any two people or any number of people on the planet kind of instantly with less than 100 milliseconds of latency over video and voice. Fast forward like about a year and a half, two years, and we built a demo when ChatGPT first came out, where you could talk to it instead of text with it

using LiveKit's infrastructure. And a few months later, OpenAI ended up finding it, wanted to build a voice interface to ChatGPT, and we started to work pretty closely with them on voice mode and then advanced voice mode after that. And kind of almost by accident, I guess, we got pulled into this AI space. Voice AI was not a space back then. Yeah. Happy accident.

Yeah, I remember our Series A, which we closed at the, we closed the first tranche at the end of 2023, 2020, just at the start of 24. And everybody was just telling me that, hey, this is cool, but voice isn't going to be a thing for three to five years. And then, of course, GPT-4.0 happened and can you steal man at all? Why speech to text is still bad on my iPhone? I just really wanted to be good. Is there a voice guy? He's always he's always he's

always using live kit unknowingly. I worked at a voice AI company in 2010 or so. Oh, really? Twilio, yeah. It was Dragon, naturally speaking. I do, yeah. Dragon eventually acquired this company. And it was direct competitor to Siri, Apple bought Siri. And Vlingo was purchased by Dragon.

And their primary is such a funny startup name. I think I remember Vlingo, actually. Yeah, Vlingo. It was a good company. I think it was a good exit for everyone involved too. And their primary target was BlackBerry. And their whole goal was let's get pre-installed as BlackBerry. But there was a lot of chaos in the market at the time with it was a $20 app.

Then they had to cut their pricing, do an ad model, all these different things going on. But I'd love to know, like, just if you were in charge of Apple, how would you improve speech to text? Speech to text specifically, like transcribing text? Oh, well, anything in voice agents or just improving the customer experience broadly, like surprise and delight, right? Well, you know, it's one of those things that I think is funny.

Like people talk about hallucinations as this bad thing. Yeah. But in a lot of ways for like kind of this speech to speech interaction model where you're talking to an AI, hallucination is a feature. So if you remember like your Alexa or Siri, like when you were talking about this, you know, 2010 2012 You go and you ask it a question and it's just going through a bunch of like a decision tree And if it hits, you know a dead end and it can't answer the question it just doesn't do anything or it says I can't answer the question and so

The the second that it can't do something you expect it to do all of a sudden You you know, it's such a punishing user experience. You just don't want to use the thing anymore and you stop using the thing. But with kind of these new models that actually hallucinate answers into existence, even if it doesn't know the answer, it tries, you always get a response that comes back from the model.

And for voice interfaces that actually can be more of a feature than a bug. It also helps that these models just know. Yeah, it's funny because it's human, right? So if you're having a conversation, John asked me a question, I don't know the answer. I go, well, is it this thing? And you're like, no, it's this thing. But for some reason with these older generation of models, it was very annoying to go down

that wrong path. Exactly. And it's always the same answer. It's like, I don't know, or I can't help you with that. I can't help you with that. Or I'll search Google for you, or whatever. And so I think that just having these LLMs that have ingested the entire internet

and can always generate some plausible answer for everything, whether it's 100% correct or not, I think that that just makes the user experience so much better with these kind of modern or contemporary voice agency you interact with. So, I think the other thing I'll say related to the Apple stuff and that's improving very quickly is the latency.

So like we have a lot of providers out there now, Grok, Cerebris, folks like that who can run inference much faster than even a year ago for some of the model providers. And now like LLM inference can actually be done in less time than generating speech with TTS. And so I think like getting that latency end to end down to 300 milliseconds or 500 milliseconds on average for turn latency, that kind of helps

you cross this uncanny valley for voice AI. I mean, should we be thinking even faster than 300 milliseconds? And is there any efforts that you've seen to bake some of these models down into silicon? We've seen what Etched of these models down into silicon? We've seen what Etched is doing with putting the transformer architecture on silicon. You could imagine that once mid-journey gets good enough or kind of hit some peak that

they would just bake it down into silicon and we would just have image generation models, you know, ASICs essentially like what happened with Bitcoin. Is that the future here? Not that you would pivot into hardware, but maybe you would like then your software into a hardware provider at that level. Well, so we like, I mean, we partner with like folks like Cerebris and GROK. And so we allow you to kind of plug in their models and plug in effectively their hardware accelerated inference.

And so we're, we're compatible with that world. I think on the inference side You can definitely I think it's going to continue to push as low as it can get There there's obviously some limits, you know, it's a trade-off between Kind of capabilities and level of knowledge and how fast you can kind of kind of you know run that that pass through The model to get the result out. So there are trade-offs, of course, that follow the laws of physics. But there's also kind of diminishing returns

after a while. To give an example, I once built this Cerebris demo. I used a Lama 7b or 8b. Lama 8b. Have to remember these numbers on the primary accounts. But Lama 8b hooked up to Cerebris, and I got a bunch of feedback on that voice demo that the model was responding too fast.

And can you slow it down? And it's kind of going off the rails a little bit. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean, on that note, is there a kind of like at inference time fine tuning that needs to happen on the voice agent's side to give the human listener the appropriate interaction? Like some people wanna have, you know, this really fast back and forth conversation,

and I'm like, just get to the point, I'm just trying to book a flight, can I just like, just give me the information as quickly and condensed as possible. Other people might prefer an agent that speaks slower and really draws things out and gives the full context and then lets them answer and kind of ping pong back and forth that way.

Is there any movement towards like that level of fine tuning that you think might happen in the future? Is it already happening? I don't know. Yeah, it's already happening. So I think that there's kind of two different flavors of this. And you can kind of combine them together over time. So the first one is that if you've interacted with like the real time models, like the ones that are so there's OpenAI real time API, there's Gemini multimodal live API. There's a few others coming out as well. And for all of these models that natively understand audio,

you can actually tell them to whisper or slow down or speed up or act hyper. You can give them an explicit signal of the style or the way that you want them to communicate with you. So that's already available and possible with these models. Then there's another part of it, which I think will come in the next year or two, where the model will implicitly be intelligent enough to pick up on what your pacing is or your state of mind is just based on the way that you're talking and expressing

yourself. And also if we weave computer vision into it, it might see you and understand from visuals, okay, this person is stressed or this person seems like they're in a hurry or this person is calm and relaxed and you can kind of tell that by your body language and by the way you're speaking and it can automatically adjust you in the same way a human would be able to. You guys work with a lot of the biggest companies in voice already. OpenAI, Speak, CharacterAI, you're working with Tinder, I see, really broad swath of companies, Spotify, Oracle, things like that.

Are you seeing as many startups as you would like sign up and start building in voice AI? It feels like a category that for if you go back like five years ago, people were really excited about voice, but then you had these sort of like high profile companies that didn't quite work, but you know, maybe in many ways they were just too early. So what are you seeing on the on the startup side in terms of new companies being formed specifically to leverage voice and liveKit and the underlying models? Yeah, we're seeing probably about, you know, we're doing like thousands and thousands, many several thousands of like signups to the cloud product or commercial product.

And most of those, the vast majority are startups and growing companies. And out of those, probably around 75% or so, 80% of those signups are voice AI companies that are building voice agents. And so the way that I kind of see the market segmented to a degree is that you have the large AI labs and they have popular consumer apps. And a lot of them are building kind of open-ended voice agents that you can talk to about kind of anything, right? They're assistants. They do question answering.

They do therapy for mental health, all kinds of language learning in the case of speak. And then on the other side, you have these kind of pockets that are what I call kind of voice native systems. And those are really anything you pick up the telephone, uh, to, you know, when you call someone on the other end, uh, call a business, there's someone that answers that line and they're either, you know, doing patient intake at a hospital. Or they're doing loan qualification or insurance eligibility checking.

There's a lot of these kind of business process flows where these are their pockets that are like really large in nature. So customer support is the one that gets talked about a lot, right? Like some of the markets at Sierra, Decagon and folks like that are playing in. And so for all of those systems, we're seeing tons of startups flood into those spaces because it is now viable to take an LLM and have like a voice stack like LiveKit, for example, that's hooked up to that LLM. And you can build like an automated version of whoever is picking up the phone on the other end.

Well, yeah, and I think the thing that I'm excited about, everybody's gotten on one of these robo CX calls. And I've had the experience in the past where I just say talk to a human until I get to a human, because I know they're not going to resolve the issue the way that I want. And I'm like the annoying guy to the robot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do feel like there's a point here quickly

where the AI can be considerably better than the human on the other end because they're not tired, they're not in a bad mood that day. They just have high energy because they're code. There's going to be a flippening and it's going to be like, oh, I'm talking to a human. Robot, robot, please put me on the robot. Throw me on the robot. I was on a customer support call with Comcast the other day and I

Was talking to a human for sure and they were trying to look up something for me And then they started asking me if I'd ever seen the snow and if I'd ever spent time in the snow and I was like What and where do you live and I'm like, California? They're like, so do you experience snow in California? I'm like well in Tahoe, yeah, I guess. But it was so weird. And I was just like, am I talking to an AI right now or is the human? And if it's a human, I kind of want the AI. And yeah, it's very bizarre. Awkward. Can you tell me about some of the more like nuts and bolts, uh, enterprise customers you're working with? Uh, I see this case study from playback.

We actually had the CEO of playback on the show, uh, live streaming for sports makes a ton of sense Do you know exactly how they're leveraging live kit and how you can? Kind of give us a more concrete example of like their infrastructure basically yeah for sure so playback They're also gonna integrate You know AI into that flow as well like a voice-based commentator or whatever that can watch the game and provide an overlay for fans. But they use us for a pretty different use case. In that case, they, they have these kind of court side cameras at like NBA games, MLB games and all of that. And these cameras are,

you know, the way that you watch sports on TV. And so one interesting part about, and this is kind of like a deeper technology thing, but one, if you've ever watched like the Super Bowl or the NBA finals or any, any sports game on a TV and then like you're texting your friends about it and they're watching the game or there's someone in another part of your house that has a game on, on a different TV, you'll notice that you're not synchronized. Like you're seeing plays before they are, sometimes up to 30 seconds or a minute before.

And so the technology that we use for live broadcasts of sports games is not true real-time technology. Not everyone is synchronized. In the same way that in 1969, when the lunar landing, everybody saw that at the same time, because there's a server that is sending these broadcasts out over TV antennas that are receiving these things. It is truly a shared experience. So Playback, what they do is they ingest the video feed from these cameras at court side or at the MLB game.

They're ingesting it using LiveKit. That goes into a single system, and then LiveKit's cloud network effectively, everybody who's watching that NBA game, for example, we are effectively shuttling those bytes from that camera in a synchronized way to every single person that's watching that game. So when like Steph syncs a three, everybody who's watching that game through playback is seeing that three get sunk at the same time, able to truly have a shared experience of watching their favorite team play the game together,

cheer together, all of that stuff. And so playback is effectively using us for the backbone of all of the audio and video kind of transmission that is going on within their application. Makes 10 cents. Before we let you go, we should probably talk about the news today. Yeah, yeah. You guys had a bit of an announcement.

Why don't you share a little bit there? Yeah, for sure. So kind of how I mentioned at the start, right? We started as an open source project, connecting humans to other humans. But now we have found ourselves kind of operating at a very large scale, connecting humans to machines. So using voice and computer vision. And so we closed a Series B today that's led by Altimeter Capital. That's awesome.

Let's go. Let's go. That got me sweet. Yeah, yeah. So we closed that round and now we're really going to be able to do it. Congratulations. Yes! Yes! Let's go. Let's go. We love BG. Yeah, yeah. So we closed that round. And now we're really going after voice AI.

We're building an all-in-one platform for anybody, any developer to build a voice agent. Give us the stats. 1 million, 2 million. How much did you raise? 45 million. 45 million! Let's go!

I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. 45 million, folks. I'm not going to submit as to that. Congratulations. 45 million. Let's go. I got to do 45 hits. I'm not going to submit to that. Congratulations. Amazing milestone.

I think clearly a five-year overnight success. Yes, yes, classic. Classic, classic example. But it's cool. I love these stories where you work on a really hard problem and then discover like the most powerful application years later. So congratulations to you and the team.

It's great to have you on. You can be our new official Voice AI infrastructure correspondent. You love that line. I'll just make a clone of me, and then that will be your official Voice AI correspondent. Cool, guys. That's perfect. Thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank Cool, guys. That's perfect. That's perfect. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

Yeah, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Have a great one. Take care. Talk soon. Cheers. And next up, we got Ev Randall coming in

from Kleiner Perkins. I love how there's always like, you can always go niche enough to make somebody a correspondent. Yeah, exactly. Hyper, hyper niche. Anyway, $45 million, that's a great round. There are so many funding rounds happening. Now that we're in the thick of it,

I'm realizing, wow, the money is flowing in Silicon Valley. It's great. But we will get a full market update from Ev, hear what he's seeing over at Kleiner. Actually, cross paths with the Mid Founders Fund, two years ago, maybe two and a half years ago. Great dude, wrote one of the most probably banger memos during the Zerp era, all about Tiger global and crossover investing.

And I want to follow up with him on that, but I think we have him here. Ev, are you there? Welcome to the studio. Hey guys, Jordy Coogan. Great to be here. Longtime friend of the pod. Finally, dude, it shouldn't have taken have taken this you're in our original pitch deck Because you posted like how can I go long which hilariously caused a lot of problems for us because someone created a fake pump dot fun token about us and Everyone would say oh they endorse this and we're like we did not we just by the way I didn't get rich off that so that no, I have a bone to pick with either the creators

of the coin or you. I don't know which one. Don't even joke about it. It's just, it's bad no matter what. Don't even joke about it. If you say anything, they'll make a token. They will turn it into a coin. Anyway.

But it's great to have you. Thank you for the early support. Why don't you, John gave a little introduction, but why don't you introduce yourself? Yeah, yeah. What are you working on most recently? What's interesting? Yeah, of course. Yeah, so I'm a partner here at Kleiner Perkins, KP, obviously one of the

more storied firms kind of in venture capital history. As a firm, we've led early rounds of companies like Amazon, Google, Genentech, Sun Microsystems, more recently companies like Rippling, Figma, Glean, Harvey, and many others. Ventures evolved dramatically, obviously, over the last five years, but especially over the last decades. And I think what made KPE special back then is what makes it special now is that we're a very small team. There's 10 of us total on the investment team.

And we all just care very deeply about the craft of venture founders, company building, and we want to keep it a craft. So we're fully multi-stage. We have an early stage fund. We have a growth fund. We announced a new set of funds last summer that were $2.1 billion in total size. We can do seed through pre IPO. I personally help head up our growth fund.

So I spend the vast majority of my time kind of on series B and beyond investing, but all of us invest across the venture and growth funds. So I've led, you know, our investments in companies like flock safety, huntress, a cybersecurity company, captions, uh, involved in our investment in rippling and a few others soon to be announced. How would you, how are you processing the tariff news? Were you just texting every portfolio founder like, Hey, have you seen this? Sending them a, sending them the screenshot of the NASDAQ 15%

about this. Hey, wait, can you fix this? Hey, hey, what are we doing about this? Is there a memo coming? Is there a black Swan memo? Are you going to get in the black Swan memo game? Give Sequoia a run for their money. Sequoia has pretty good market share of the, of the black Swan memo market. And so it feels like you know it feels a little too mimetic I'm a little too killed still to do something that mimetic yeah well but I mean how have you been processing it do you think it affects tech do you think it affects any of I mean like immediately the reaction

was like all this all the NASDAQ was way down but at the same time like even semiconductors were you know on day one kind of excluded. Was there, is this something that all founders should just tune out or is there something here to pay attention to? I think it's probably both, right? Like I think Mike Mignano from Lightspeed had a good tweet or post today or yesterday

where he was like, I'm getting a lot of questions from maybe it was LPs about the tariffs and they have to realize, you know, I invest in companies that aren't going to exit for seven to 10 years. And so there's like something about the like duration of the asset class where, you know, something like economic turmoil that happens today, if you're investing in the venture asset class isn't going to necessarily impact like your exit because ultimately the founders and the board and the management team have some control over when they exit.

And so you can kind of theoretically wait a little bit for a better environment to either IPO or sell or whatever you wanna do to get liquidity. I think at the same time, the underpinning, the undercurrents of what's going on, especially politically, are immensely relevant for startups and tech, like obviously everything around Taiwan and just like semiconductors generally. And if that escalated, how bad it would be for not only technology companies,

especially in AI, but like just our day to day lives, like I think our day to day lives would pretty much come to a halt. And I don't think that people really have an appreciation just for how permeated, you know, semis and other critical materials and inputs from places like Taiwan are in our day to day lives. So I think it's of critical importance. But again, it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, well, what are you gonna do about it? Unless you, there's very few, there's very few companies or folks that can actually have an impact on this. And so I think for most companies,

the best advice is always just to go heads down and- Well, yeah, let's talk about one of the immediate impacts, which is the IPO window, which was so briefly opened, feeling like it's slam shut. I love when it's open personally. I wake up, I get out of bed. Yeah, huge fan of open windows. Huge fan of open IPO windows.

Now it's like, you know, but for Klarna and StubHub, you know, they've been waiting around. Moment of silence for Klarna? Yeah, moment of silence brought to you by Ramp. No, but yeah, I don't even know if like, you know, Circle gets out at this point, but at some point you can imagine the companies that end up going out are the ones that have to go out.

And then that just becomes a vicious cycle where they maybe underperform because they're not these sort of best in class companies. And then it's like, well, it's really shut now. We're not going to touch it. But what's your kind of read on that situation? Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, before this all kind of blew up, obviously, it

was unfortunate that there was like four or five IPOs kind of on the shelf ready to go right when this blew up. And so it seemed like, ah, we're opening things back up. And then immediately some Black Swan event happened, ah, we're opening things back up and then immediately some black swan event happened and it kind of shut it back down. But for a full almost nine to 12 months before that, it was a solid environment. It wasn't IPO-ing in 2021 where you could go

and SPAC for 50 times ARR or something, but it was not a bad environment. And I kind of have a slightly orthogonal take on the IPO window, which is there's this kind of rock and hard place situation for the IPO market, which sums up to one, do the IPO markets want you? But then also just as important, do you want the IPO markets? So on the first one, I went and counted this morning the number of public software companies

on the Maritech kind of software compar this morning the number of public software companies on, you know, the Maritech kind of software comparables index that they run, that currently have over $500 million in ARR, which is like an incredible achievement. And right now there are over 80 public SaaS companies that have more than $500 million of ARR. So if you want exposure to some trend or idea,

and you want it to be a big company that is profitable, there is very likely a public SaaS company that can give you exposure to some trend or idea and you want it to be a big company that is profitable, there is very likely a public SaaS company that can give you exposure to some theme or trend or idea that you want that already exists. So it is much, much harder today to have an IPO that bankers, long only public funds, like the people that make the IPO machine work, it's much harder to have an IPO that they're going to care about. Like you probably need to be free cash flow positive. It probably helps a lot if you're closer to a billion dollars of revenue scale than even 500 million dollars, which is already incredible.

And you need to have some unique angle or something that's really cool or unique in the story, like the qualitative kind of framing of your IPO that's special. So I think like one, that's like that's already hard enough. And then on the other side, in terms of like, do you want the IPO markets? I think what we're seeing out of several of the very, very best tech companies is that they've gone to pretty drastic measures to not IPO.

And I think there's like many reasons why you'd not want IPO. So SpaceX obviously is kind of the poster child of this, but then you saw Stripe, obviously do that really large kind of the poster child of this, but then you saw Stripe obviously do that really large kind of like RSU catalyzed round at like $55 billion, I believe it was. Databricks, obviously in Q4 did a mega raise for the same reasons. And the asset class has grown so much that if you're an amazing company, compounding your intrinsic value at 25%, 30% a year at scale,

you can raise practically unlimited capital. Like Databricks raised 10 billion of equity. They did a multi-billion dollar debt raise too, but 10 billion of equity in like, I think it was probably like three months. Like it didn't take very long to raise an unbelievable amount of equity. So the fund sizes have gotten so large

and the amount of capital that's available for these companies is so large, as long as you're one of these like top top 10 companies that if you don't want IPO, you don't have to. I think there's several reasons why you wouldn't IPO. The main one or one of the main ones is that you can be a lot more aggressive on M&A. Databricks for example bought this company Tabular. I think the reported valuation was two billion and it was also reported that they were either

pre-revenue or close to pre-revenue. If you're Snowflake and you're a public company, you probably can't buy a pre-revenue company for $2 billion. Your stock probably goes down 20% the next day. I almost said F-ing, but I think this is a PG show, so I'm not going to cuss. But the stock probably goes down 20% if you do something like that. That's an extremely strategic acquisition that Databricks is able to do because it's completely founder controlled. No activist can buy 10 to 15% of your stock. No one can mess with you.

So I think there's good reasons to do it. And the only thing that you have to figure out if you don't want IPO is you have to give employees liquidity. Like you have to give employees regular opportunities. We love when employees get liquidity, but what about if you're a, you know, just a $2 billion fund and, you know, you're trying to show DPI to your LPs. And are you seeing these sort of funds that, you know,

like KP that there's now funds that are like effectively like four or five times larger, and then these sort of crossover funds that are effectively like four or five times larger and then these sort of crossover funds that are getting involved. And are you seeing more, like do traditional venture funds like KP ever try to sell into these rounds that are intended more for employee liquidity?

Is that a potential future if companies are just staying private? Yeah, I think we're just now in the early innings of this, but we are 100% starting to see it. We certainly have not done a continuation vehicle is the most common term for this, like a CV where you can sell essentially a slice of your fund. Commonly venture funds have a a 10 year life and then sometimes you can have an option for like two years of extension.

And then after that you're kind of supposed to have the capital returned and everyone can move on with their lives, hopefully much richer for it. And SpaceX has been a private company for what, 20 years now? Over 20 years now, you know, over 20 years. And so I think the most common vehicle for this would be a CV where you sell either like a bundle of company, like a slice of your holdings or like a slice of your fund. And you're starting to see that,

like several funds have done that. I think NEA has done it in the last year or two and you're seeing more funds do it. We certainly haven't done that before, but I think as an asset class, we're gonna have to start coming to grips with the fact that the liquidity timeline for these amazing companies is very different than it used to be.

And it's actually really flipped on its head because it's almost like the better the company, the longer they wait to IPO because they can be private, you know, again, compounding their value at 30 plus percent IRRs for much, much longer than they used to. And so obviously you can sell in these rounds. Like I think, like obviously SpaceX is extremely liquid. Stripe is pretty liquid.

Databricks I think is very liquid. There's some names that are very liquid, but it's only the best names where that exists. And so if you have a portfolio of names that are good, but not like SpaceX level call it, then your best bet is probably one of these CVs, which is, um, which is very, very common in private equity. Um, but as venture kind of becomes more, more institutionalized, um, we were going to see a lot more of them for sure.

Speaking of DPI, it seems like you got some mathematical formula behind you. Can you break that down for us? Are we leaking alpha right now? What's going on? Yeah, just copy paste that and I get your returns? Yeah, I was trying to figure out the equation for DPI. I've been searching for a long time. That's the first one. The second one, I was also trying to find the equation for DeLion's gross margins on his investments.

Oh yeah? That one actually might be harder to find than the equation for DPI. Yes, a little Easter egg for the team that I worked with. How do you and the team decide if something is in the wheelhouse or not? Obviously, 10 people on the investment team. I'm sure you get pitches all the time where

you're excited about the entrepreneur and kind of their vision, but maybe feel like it's not right in the wheelhouse. But clearly, you're doing flock safety to these other sort of app layer companies, clearly willing to kind of look everywhere for opportunity. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I love to say that there's a lot of people talk about Conway's law, which is like you ship your org chart and as it relates to how companies mature and ship product over time. And I love to say that Conway's Law exists for venture firms for sure, which means that

you invest your org chart. And it's very hard to have an investment strategy or a portfolio construction strategy that doesn't match the size and kind of scope of your team. So for our team, seven partners, 10 total on the investment team, what that means is that if we want to be company builders, if we want to be involved in our companies, we can't do that many investments per investment professional. We need to really stay concentrated and stay tight.

I think you also see this at my previous employer founders fund. You see these headlines where they're doing massive, massive checks into really high quality companies. And I think it's because it's also a small, really lean team that has the trust and a high degree of relationship with really strong founders. And I think we approach, especially growth investing with the same model, each of our growth funds is typically only 10 to 12 core investments. And so every single investment that we're looking at needs to have something very unique or special about it where we can look around the table and say, this is going to be a company that we're talking about on TVPN in 10 years as one of the top five companies in the world. Like it has that potential every single time. Can you take us through a little bit of a retrospective on playing different

games now that it's been, I guess, four years in two days, April 12th, really 21 you dropped playing different games or why Tiger is eating your lunch and your deals. Uh, this cycle, it feels like we haven't, no crossover funds have really made a name for themselves, but at the same time, Databricks is doing bigger deals than ever. There must be new pools of capital coming in. What does the late, late, late stage look like

and how is it changing? Yeah, so it's funny. I actually dropped a sequel to playing different games, like very quietly. I initially wrote it in 2022 and it was one of those things where like, I think it's like solid, but it's just nowhere near the banger that playing different games was. And so I had a lot of like sequel anxiety about it. And so I just like, kind of like quietly put it out there.

Cause I'm like, ah, like at my thoughts should probably be out there. But it's called game over question mark and you can go read it on my sub stack. And I think it's held up pretty well since I wrote it in 2022. And I think the overarching message from that, and I use a Game of Thrones analogy in playing different games, so I'll use one for this too. There's a part in Game of Thrones where, spoiler alert, if anyone hasn't watched the show,

where Roos Bolton for a while is this lord who's kind of one of the big bads, he's one of the show where like, Roose Bolton for a while is this like Lord, who's kind of like one of the big bads. He's one of the main bad guys. And he gets killed by Ramsey Bolton, his son. And then you realize like, oh my God, this guy is like so much worse. And it's like, he has like the scope of his destruction is like so much greater than like this guy was actually

kind of a pedestrian bad guy. And I think the kind of version of that, that happened to our asset class is that obviously people saw Tiger kind of fail the marshmallow test of like, they went too far too quickly and kind of stretch the bounds of what you could do and definitely paid the price for it. But instead of Tiger, you know, continuing to be this large platform, you now have like four other platforms that were actually established in those days of 2021. And so it's like, okay, yeah, like you don't have Tiger, but like how big is Andreessen's last fund and how big is General Kattas last fund and how big is Lightspeed's last fund? There's like four or five of these folks that have like filled that gap and continued what I think is like a secular trend towards platformization in the asset class.

I think that to your specific point around like our crossovers kind of like coming back into venture and playing in the asset class again, I think the most important thing here is that like venture means at least like four or five different sub-asset classes, right? Like venture includes growth, but then like investing in it and in you know, in propic at 62 billion and investing in a hundred million ARR company that's growing like 20% at like eight times ARR company that's growing like 20% at like eight times ARR, both of those are called growth investing, but they're like as different as you could get

in every single way. So like our crossover is doing venture again, I think yes, but they're sticking more to their knitting like is like D1 Capital doing series B's like no, but there, you know, I know several crossovers that have invested like majorly in the big labs, for example. Was there any investments that Tiger did

that you wish you did? There has to be some, right? Cause like, I remember FTX was like spraying money like crazy too, but then they invested in Anthropic and like they kind of made it all back in one trade, right? So do you, and Tiger hasn't, I don't have a full list of their investments or anything like that. But do you think

it's possible that in the fullness of time they just did OK or did they actually light money on fire? You know, it's funny. I mean, this is probably just a rumor. So this is, you know, assume this is total hearsay. But I had heard that there was like

maybe an internal like, you know, justice for John Curtius trend at Tiger where he did push for them to get into Databricks and that's gone really well and it's a truly generational company and it's probably going to be an amazing investment for them. I don't know their full investment track record and returns, but I do think there is a potential where I don't know if Databricks is a $500 billion company, you end up with like a pretty good portfolio even though you had a bunch of strikeouts. Like I think if you look at someone like Neil

Metta's track record, it's like, is his hit rate like 90%? No, there's like a ton of flame outs in there. But he's just invested in situations where he's put, you know, 400 in and gotten 5 billion out. And it turns out like if you just do that, even at the growth stage, like the power loss still exists and you still have an amazing track record. So, I mean, there are huge investors in Waymo. This is Tiger, would love to be in Waymo, I think. I mean, it's like an unbelievable technology company.

Obviously, they're huge investors in Databricks. I'm sure there's lots of investments like that for them. Yeah. That's fascinating. Well, this was a really great conversation. We'll have to have you back really, really soon because I'm sure we could talk for two hours about all of these stuff.

Yeah, let's make it a regular thing. Yeah. This is great. Anytime, guys. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for the alpha. Talk soon.

Cheers. See ya. The little jab back at Dallien is perfect. It's great. Yeah. Chef's kiss. We're not going full like Jerry Springer yet, but we like a little bit of drama on the stream.

Yeah, it's good. When the SaaS companies are spying on each other, we're covering it. When the Wall Street Journal's putting a robotics company in the truth zone, we're covering it. That's right. And coming up next is just a great story about Zipline. We got Keller coming in the studio to break down the news

that Zipline, the drone delivery company that has been Coming to America. Around for a long time, although not operating on American shores, went and found a less regulated environment delivering life-critical medical supplies and blood, I believe, scaled their business, did all the R&D risk in a low regulatory risk environment, and is now ready to come back and have some really amazing partnerships. They so we're excited to invite Keller onto the show and give us a breakdown on what zipline is up to these days. Keller, welcome to the studio. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks so

much for joining. I have to say first, fantastic launch video. There are so many launch videos these days that, I mean, I'm suspect number one in propagating this type of content that's, oh, let's pull Top Gun footage and, let's put Freebird over it and we're hard tech and it's us welding. And there's a lot of that and it's really cool, but it was getting a little played out

and you went a very different direction with this announcement. And so I just really enjoyed the launch video but can you take us through exactly what you're launching what this means for the company and where the company stands today? Yeah, day before yesterday we officially launched our next generation service in Dallas so as you mentioned you know ZipLine has been operating these autonomous delivery services

across eight countries over the last 11 years. But really, this is the first time we're seeing like major metros start to launch and scale in the US. Our first customer is Walmart, and we've already announced a number of other partners like Chipotle and Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, and a lot of the biggest health systems in the US who are all relying on this technology to automate and accelerate their deliveries from businesses or hospitals or warehouses directly to homes.

Do you feel like this opportunity is under hyped today? It felt like there was a time when drone delivery, maybe it was, I'm sure it was when you started the company, you believed in the vision, but then it actually took years and years and years to get to the point where we are today, which is like, it's a reality, you're partnered with Walmart, I'm gonna be able to drop a burrito on John's backyard if I want.

I mean, you guys started in 2014, right? So complete overnight success. Yeah, 2013 really. 2013. Yeah, yeah. We love a 10-year overnight success on this show. So congratulations. 10 years in the making.

You're going to be a household name soon. Everyone's going to be like, oh, yeah, you just did it so quickly. Maybe I should get into that market. Maybe I should get into that company. Hopefully it makes sense. But I think there's this trend in technology where people get excited about the potential of an opportunity.

And then the reality sets in that it's really, really hard to do. And then there's this period where it gets less attention, and actually is good for you because there's less people going into it. And then now I can just imagine a future where we're just seeing zip lines everywhere in the sky. So yeah, talk about your maybe excitement today. I'm sure it's more than ever. Yeah, I mean, I agree, and excitement today. I'm sure it's more than ever. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And there's so much to say on that front.

But I think there is this obvious hype cycle curve of extraordinary excitement. This is coming tomorrow. I mean, when we started, the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world was on 60 Minutes, promising that they were going to be doing drone delivery to every home in the US within two years. And so we always assumed we would be a fast follower to them.

We thought they were going to lead and we would be a fast follower. Had you told me that 10 years later Zipline would be crossing a hundred million commercial autonomous miles, would be the largest autonomous system on earth of any kind. And that big technology company would be less than one one one ten thousandth of the scale. I mean, what has seemed impossible? And, you know, that big technology company would be less than one, one, one 10,000th of the scale. I mean, what has seemed impossible? I think that the main takeaway for me is that, you know, that 10 years, because then you have the hype and then you have the trough of disillusionment, I believe is what it's

called. And I think for especially for hard tech or hardware companies, that trough of disillusionment might be like five to eight years. And so for us, it was really important to walk rather than talk. It's really easy to talk. And then maybe that's, you know, apropos of what you were talking about

on the launch video side, John. But, you know, yeah, if you just focus on walking and focus on these small use cases, I mean, you know, we started by delivering just blood to 21 different hospitals. It was such a very narrow, clear thing that we needed to do. And we're also willing to do very unfancy things like operate in countries that are hard to get to and get our hands dirty

and figure out really hard, unfancy problems like how do you operate in all kinds of gnarly weather? Rain, thunderstorms, snow and icing conditions, these are hard problems. It's probably a bit similar to autonomous cars in that way too, you know, that there's a lot of hype and then the reality sets in of what it's going to take to make these systems work at scale. Can you talk a little bit about the regulatory environment? It seems like you probably couldn't have just gone straight to the American market because of the regulations, but you found a way anyway. And I love that. Is is that actually a bull case for the regulatory

regime in America working as intended? And we should have companies that can go test things elsewhere and then bring it back when it's mature and the technology is ready. Or are there specific regulatory changes that you'd like to see over the next decade to either spur more innovation or just make what you do easier? Yeah, it's a good question. When we were launching, we really had this sense.

It was such an unclear regulatory environment with regard to what we were proposing. You know, we thought someone would build an automated logistics system for Earth. That seemed like a really important idea, but it was so unclear from a regulatory perspective that I think we really just concluded, we have got to go do the most obvious life-saving thing imaginable,

because that would maximize the chances that we could, you know, I mean, it was both powerful because it was an amazing mission, and because it would maximize the chances that we could innovate and get started and operate in the real world. And so we needed a public health care system to do that. We didn't want to work with a whole bunch of, you know, health or skelter health systems, which you can have in the US, but that'd be good if we could have a public health care system. And so that immediately caused us to go to certain parts of

the world. And then I think also, there's just a lot of, you know, people think, oh, the regulatory environment must be so different in Africa than in the US Actually, not true pretty much the same regulatory regime when it comes to airspace because planes fly back and forth between them So you need the same rules I think the difference was finding a government that behaves more like a startup a small agile government that is willing to Make decisions and exhibit more like, yeah, just executive decision making. So those are really the things that made Rwanda such a powerful place for us to get started. And it was about six years later, you know, at that point we had about 50 million commercial

autonomous miles and zero human safety incidents. That's the moment when we thought, hey, this is a good time to bring this massive data set to the FAA and kind of help them see like this technology is ready for prime time, it's safe. Once we did that, it then took about five years from then until, you know, where we are today where, you know, ZipLine is the only company in US history that's been awarded full permission to fly beyond the ZipLine site in all 50 states. So I think part of it was building that data set, showing that it can be safe. And then part of it was working directly with the regulator in the US to help make sure

that the US doesn't fall too far behind in this core area of new technology. The immediate benefit as your network rolls out, I love the idea of just being able to press a button and get an item in minutes. It's obviously been a dream, I think, for so many people for so long. Can you talk about some of the second order effects that you're anticipating? We're here in LA.

I can imagine a lot of traffic on the roads is just like items being delivered. And it just so happens that it's a human in a car right now. And so when Zipline rolls out here, I can imagine that there would just immediately be less congestion. But that's just me making a bold potential prediction. But I'm curious how you think about it.

The cool thing is we're already seeing this. I think people don't necessarily appreciate how massively instant delivery has scaled in the last five years. And it was obviously accelerated by COVID. But we're going to do five and a half billion instant deliveries in the US this year alone. And we're using three to four thousand pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to your home that weighs five pounds.

That's so much. something to your home that weighs five pounds. So, you know, you don't have to be a physicist to realize like, this is actually a bizarre solution. You know, we're essentially, we're using technology that's a hundred years old to solve a problem that's like five years old and to serve a market that's growing super fast. So we think it's super obvious that, you know, if you want to deliver something fast, that weighs five pounds, you probably want to do that with a vehicle that weighs 50 pounds, and you want the vehicle to be electric and autonomous.

As soon as you realize that, then I think the future, you know a secret about the future most people don't know. The other thing is, if I'm ordering delivery, it's like, do I really want this person to have to go to CVS and get Advil? Technically, it's a form of employment. They're opting into it. But it's like, oh, I'll just do it myself.

It's been a hassle. But when it's fully autonomous and it's literally like an extension of the service that I'm using to get the item, it's. You'll use it a lot more. And actually, just on that front, the customer behaviors we're seeing just in the last year in the US are quite mind blowing. I mean, first of all the customer behaviors we're seeing just in the last year in the US are

quite mind blowing. I mean, first of all, you know, I may have thought, oh, maybe it'll be these like tech adopters and some of these, some of these, you know, I don't know, you know, nerdier. No, no, it's like moms and grandmas who are like our power users. And you know, more important than that, when you talk to you talk to them, and we have we have users who've ordered 300 times in the last 12 months. So this is like a part of their daily.

It's way different. It's like, you know, I was talking to a woman who said, you know, she's 78 years old. She orders, you know, she goes to the grocery store once a week, and then she orders about three to four, she orders from Zipline three to four times a week. And, you know, as I was, you know, as I was talking to her, she's like, yeah, you don't get it. I mean, this saves me like five hours a week.

It's totally priceless. There's no way I go back to the old way of doing things. When the weather is bad, you know, I don't want to risk my health or I like fall down and get hurt. And she had a lot of friends who might, you know, either single moms, who it's not as easy to get out of the house or, you know, older people who it's not that easy to get out of the house or, you know, older people who it's not that easy to get to the store. I mean, I think people underestimate. Yeah, you make it super fast and convenient.

This is something people actually use every day, not every week or every month. Yeah. Even just thinking parents, right? I think every parents had the experience. It's bedtime and like you realize there's no diapers, whatever. And so then it's like, well, are we going to get the kids and go to CVS or whatever to get diapers and they don't have the brand? So I can just think of so many use cases where it's just like, oh, yeah, we're all going to delay bedtime by 15 minutes. And Jordy, as someone who has a one-year-old and three-year-old at home, these kinds of

systems operate 24-7, which is also also pretty game changing relative to the way we currently think of logistics. It's a really big deal to have something that is always available whenever your kid happens to wake up or isn't feeling well. Yeah. On the, on the topic of the evolution of the actual technology that you're building, I always thought the name was interesting because obviously it's a metaphor for a zip line that just goes from one place to another. But then you were catching the drones with something that looked

kind of like a zipline. And now you have the mothership drone dropping a smaller drone with something that looks like a zipline. How, I guess, when in the evolution of the company did you come up with the mothership and baby ship? I don't know what you call it. Like system. The delivery zip is what we call it. What do you call it? We call it a delivery zip. Delivery zip. OK. Yeah. So how did you how did you come to the the pairing system?

And why is that important? And what's the evolution of the technology been? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good question. So first of all, you know, the blind spent 10 years operating these kind of more long range systems at platform one, you can actually see some of them sitting right here, waiting to out and begin making deliveries and wing, right? Yeah, it's a plane. And so this aircraft can fly 300 kilometers on a single battery charge.

So it's all about range and serving like very rural hospitals and health facilities for platform to, you know, is becoming obvious to us that home delivery is, you know, it's by far like the Holy Grail. I mean, that's what automated logistics really has to solve globally. And the most important thing is you want to be able to deliver quietly, like silently. You want to deliver silently. It needs to be extremely safe. You need to be able to deliver gently and with dinner plate level accuracy. It's kind of how we describe it. That's actually super hard to do.

And you see a lot of other companies talking about... You don't have to stress that. It sounds very hard to do. Well, if you see the way other companies are talking about solving this problem, a lot of times they're talking about descending an octocopter of death. It looks like a lawnmower within 10 feet of your home it's incredibly loud it's incredibly disruptive to your neighbors it's not really a part of like we think you know new technology it needs to be part of a beautiful serene world that we would like be proud to hand to our kids and so you know the big advantage of

designing the system in this way is that the aircraft is staying a hundred meters in the air. The aircraft is first of all designed to be extremely quiet. And then on top of that, it is far safer because it is staying far away from you, your family, your pets. Only thing that's coming close to your home

is the delivery zip, which you can see behind me. This thing is inspired by Eve from Wall-E. If you guys have heard of it. Yeah, I was gonna ask, was there specific sci-fi that you and the team just love that you kind of reference? Anyone really into solar punk? Have you guys heard of solar punk? Oh yeah, of course.

Yeah, I think that really to me is, nobody talks about that. And you know, so much of, I mean, a huge sci-fi nerd and obviously so much of it is kind of apocalyptic and the robots are out to kill you. And we're like, like well what if in the future robots are trying to save your life you know that's that's a different take and I think came across in the video the video was very saturated very orange very like sunny day and it was just so pastoral and lovely I really like that as like a different vision of the future is cool and to and to Jordi Jordy's point, you know, I think that, uh, these kinds of systems, people, people are often like, Oh, it's going to be so loud. And it's, you know, the star, the sky is going to be darkened with drones.

It's like, it's kind of funny. It's the same way people actually originally felt about cars. If you go and like read the, you know, if you read the newspaper articles from like 1910, people thought, you know, cars were going to be the scourge of cities. Um, but I think the reality is actually know cars were going to be the scourge of cities but I think the reality is actually this is going to take a lot of delivery vehicles off of the roads this is going to reduce traffic in our neighborhoods this will reduce pollution in our neighborhoods improve air quality it'll reduce noise because these systems are ultimately much quieter than cars I think there are a lot of you know pretty exciting advantages when you just yeah I think I think the

the you know the world 10 or 15 years from now can actually be far more beautiful. We can hand space back to humans. Your kids could be playing hockey in the street again, which I think today you just don't do anymore. You don't want the, between all the cars zipping. Could you talk about any thoughts, ideas around larger

payloads? We've seen airship startups emerge that are basically building big blimps that could deliver something closer to. Kind of a competitor to the cargo ship almost. Yeah, the cargo ship or some of these bigger. But even the flying car startups that are trying to ferry individuals around, I'm sure

you're loosely aware of the technology there. Yeah, in many ways, doing these ultra small drones with super precise delivery feels a lot harder than just lifting up basically an airship bus and going from point A to point B. But is that at all, I'm sure you guys have thought about it. Any immediate thoughts? The market that Zipline is focused on, instant delivery, is one of the biggest markets on earth and it's just such a huge problem. And keep in mind, really today it's only available

to rich people in the US. It's way too expensive. Even just in the US, it's not universally available, not to mention the seven and a half billion people who don't live in the US globally. We actually think that as you automate, as you decrease the price, as you expand access and make it universal, we're going to continue to see 10 or even 50 action growth in instant delivery globally. Whereas 5.5 billion deliveries might seem like a lot in the US, we actually think there's

probably demand for 50 billion deliveries, instant deliveries in the US. So I guess long story short, we've got our work cut out for us just focused on logistics. I think, you know, we deliver this, this system delivers an eight pound payload. It's designed to deliver an eight pound payload. Eight pounds is actually a lot. You know, that's like a big grocery bag.

It's dinner for, you know, four to eight people, depending on what you're ordering. And I think ultimately these kinds of systems, if you can get a system that can do say a billion, you know, instant deliveries of these kinds of packages, it is actually likely that you would be able to then scale that autonomy stack up relatively easy to carry humans, for example.

I think carrying humans is a far harder problem, and it'll be interesting to see where that plays out over the next 10 or 15 years. Well, last question, and then we'll let you go if you have time. I would love to know about, obviously, everyone's thinking about tariffs and whatnot, but how are you thinking about scaling up manufacturing? It seems like you have product market fit, you've solved the regulatory risk, the technical risk. What's next in terms of scaling up manufacturing?

Are you building like a gigafactory for these things at some point? And is that just like an entirely new challenge that you foresee on the future? ZipLine has always manufactured everything in the US. And so one of the advantages, obviously there's this huge competition playing out between, you know, it's kind of great power competition between the US and China. And I think that a lot of that competition

is going to revolve around key areas of technology and everybody's talking about drones. I think the current perception is that that China dominates drone manufacturing. And that is true for DJI quadcopters that are plastic and take pictures. But the good news is there are a few companies that are completely focused on manufacturing in the US. There are US companies driving different classes of vehicles. Anderil would be another good example, Nero's. And ultimately, Zipline isn't even, it's not even because it's more efficient from a global supply chain perspective to manufacture in the US,

which in our case it is, but actually the most important consideration is if you're a truly innovative company, you want manufacturing and engineering to be right next to each other. Like zip line, so I'm actually downstairs at our headquarters, this is now kind of like an engineering prototyping space, about a third of a mile away, we have a very large factory and we're scaling that to build about 55,000 aircraft

a year in their first full year of production. You guys should come visit if you want. But I think that, and by the way, that's in South San Francisco. So I think people are often surprised that you can achieve that level of scale in California. You're doing the re-industrialized meme. You're doing it live.

Yes, exactly. I love it. But it's just all about engineering and manufacturing together. The ability for engineers to go get hands on their own parts to start to understand, but how does that part actually get built? What does quality look like? Um, and to be able to rapidly change parts of the assembly

process if necessary, um, to achieve reliability, safety and cost. These things are so much easier to do if you do them all in the same place. So I have so many more questions. You go, but I have one more. Um, uh, are there any like huge developments in either open source technologies, you see all this development with AI that's getting better and better, or even just partners? For a while there were companies that were thinking

about drones as we'll build the operating system for drones and we'll vend into a company like Zipline. Have there been any other key partners or technologies that have really, you've kind of built on the shoulders of giants, so to speak, or has it really just been like, you gotta build everything from scratch? Yeah, it's interesting. I hoped that what you just said would happen,

and in fact, when we started, we were using a lot of off-the-shelf components. We used an off-the-shelf IMU, off the shelf GPS system. We used, we were using something called RTK differential GPS. We were using, even for the first few months, we were using off the shelf autopilot. All of these systems kind of failed. And I would say it's actually very similar. When Tesla got started, they were like, oh, we're going to use an off the shelf Lotus Elise chassis and an off the shelf battery pack that we're buying.

We just combine them together. We're going to have a good product. Turns out like they were wrong, like to actually build a great electric vehicle. They had to design the battery pack from scratch. They designed the entire car around the battery. Zip line found itself in a very similar position where no one is building electric aircraft at commercial scale. Zip line is the only company that is operating a full fleet of commercial aircraft at this scale.

And so it means we had to design the battery completely from scratch. We had to design a flight computer completely from scratch. We had to design the motor completely from scratch because ultimately what all of our customers care about is just teleportation. They just want something to go from point A to point B fast enough to save a human life.

And that means we have to make it safe, reliable, cost effective. And the way to ultimately do that has been to design every component around the use case really. And so that's- Well, it's amazing too that you started in this like ultra high stakes use case, which is blood delivery, where if you mess up, there's massive, the biggest consequences.

And then now, every other American can get their burrito or their cheeseburger reliably with the same reliability as, you know. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. Well, we'd love to have you back on soon. This was fantastic. It's so fun to watch the strategy play out. I'm just genuinely so excited.

I'm so excited. To be a DAU, a Zipline DAU. So. I think you're gonna be more than a DAU, three times a day. Yeah. Jordan's gonna be doing 1,000 deliveries a day. As soon as you get Erewhon on board. Hourly average user, HAU.

Yeah, hourly, yeah. As soon as you get Erewhon on boarded, it's game over. You're gonna be profitable. Don't worry about it. No, I just don't think, I don't think this is priced in yet, to be honest. It's not priced in. I think worry about it. No, I just don't think, I don't think this is priced in yet, to be honest. It's not priced in. I think it's gonna be, imagine people shopping,

the whole drunk shopping meme. It's not just instant delivery. Oh yeah, it's gonna be amazing. You want food or groceries. It's like, imagine being able to see an item on an Instagram shopping or whatever, get an ad and get it 30 minutes later. That's going to change everything.

It's going to change everything. This is so awesome. I'm really excited for you. So congratulations on the overnight success. Thank you for your service. It's been so easy. Thanks for the 11 years of hard work. You make it look easy.

But yeah, we really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all that with us. This is very fascinating. Thank you, and seriously, congrats. Thank you guys, really appreciate it. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Bye.

Amazing company. I would almost invest in that company at any price. Yeah, who is in this company? Because they've just been grinding for so long, and it must be super capital intensive, so there's probably a pretty deep bench. Not a lot of very well-known funds Sequoia. Okay Google Ventures

Sometimes Another angel another 10 trillion to the Holy Trinity. What are you now? Of course, of course Anyway, that's great. Yeah, Sequoia got in the Series A. Let's see it, you'll love to see it. Anyway, let's move on, let's do some timeline and then get out of here. We started late, so we're ending late.

You already heard from Quaid at Bezel, but I just wanted to let you know that at getbezel.com, your Bezel Concierge is available to source any watch on the planet. This is an interesting fact that people might not know about Bezel. So they have auctions, they have prices, like buy it now prices, but also you can chat

with a real person who works for Bezel and say, I want this exact watch, maybe I saw it in a movie, maybe I'm hearing rumblings about it at Watches and Wonders, you can tell them this is the one you want, and they will actually go out and source it for you and bring it to you which is great. Anyway, let's move on to the OpenAI announcement. Starting today, memory in chat GPT can now reference all of your past chats to provide more personalized responses drawing on your preferences and interests to make it even more

helpful for writing, getting advice, learning and beyond. Seems like a nightmare because I've been lying to chatachipiti for about three years now about my expertise. Well, every time, because of the prompt engineering, I'll always say like, you know, I'm interested in trains, but treat me like a train expert. I work in trains. I actively own trains. Because I want a prompt engineer to give me like

the best data. And so now when I talk to it, it's gonna be like, as a train conductor, you probably wanna go with this train. I was lying. I wasn't actually a train conductor. Explain this like I'm five. Yeah. It's like, Oh, you're five. Oh, I didn't know you were five. John Coogan, the five year old. Oh yes. Like as a five year old. So now I have to go back into Chad GPC and tell it, forget that I'm five, forget that I have to go back into chatgp and tell it forget that I'm five forget that I'm a five-year-old Industrialist who owns trains and Let me tell you about my real history and get you up to speed on the real memories that I want you to say

But obviously this is very cool product release makes a lot of sense They go on in this thread saying in addition to the same memories that were there before it can now reference your past chats to deliver Responses that feel noticeably more relevant and useful. This happens a lot because you have so many different chats going, you want to reference another one, and you have to go in the search bar, copy, paste, obviously that's a product feature.

And this is a testament to OpenAI expanding from nonprofit research foundation lab into product consumer tech company. No, and this is the thing, people have been saying, oh, the models have no motes, et cetera. This is an evidence of emerging mode. This is one of the motes that will come up. And I'm sure other foundation models

will build this and copy this, but the name of the game is staying just a little bit ahead forever, and that's what Google did, and no one ever pivoted to Bing, because Google search is always just a little bit ahead. Well, if you want to stay ahead, you should get an 8 Sleep.

Yes, you should. And let's do a quick score check here I think I did pretty well I was gonna cover eight sleep during the f1 breakdown but we'll have to do that tomorrow because charlotte Claire is an a sleep ambassador and we love f1 I got a 94 little low on the time slept 96 you you have an uncanny ability We beat me by like two points. How much did you sleep? I slept six hours and 49 minutes brutal I slept. I mean I slept eight hours and eight hours in 11 minutes. You put a big numbers, man But I get in bed at like seven. Yeah, you do you I gotta get to bed earlier I got it's it's it's so the key to sleeping well is like you have to go

To bed when you don't feel like going to bed Yeah, and then you actually get your eight hours. Yep, and you can go to eight sleep comm slash TV pn. Yeah Anyway, there was an interesting interaction between John Carmack Quote tweeting someone named Evan about SpaceX Devon says I'm going to call it right now. A lot of stuff is gonna break on this mission talking about a new SpaceX mission. It's by design, it's as part of the plan. Don't get upset, I'm not saying SpaceX plans to fail, I'm pointing out that SpaceX has taken an ultra important principle from software engineering and realized it applies to all engineering. Feedback beats planning.

This is a good good lesson and that you see is why SpaceX doesn't do things the NASA way. The NASA way was to gold plate everything, plan and test and plan and test and generate mountains of paper detailing every contingency with every scenario plan. SpaceX just shrugs, says it's unmanned and sends it. Half the time it blows up. That's the whole point. They don't actually want it to blow up, of course, but they're anticipating that it might. That possibility is part of the plan because one rocket blowing up or crashing is an actual

End-to-end test this beats many many man years of planning and plotting the key realization here is that knowledge only comes from empirical Observation everything else is just speculative the sooner you get into that feedback loop the faster you run it the more iterations You can do in less time This means while others are planning and speculating you actually learn something the more iterations you can do in less time. This means while others are planning and speculating, you actually learn something. Relevant data is the most imprecious thing in the universe, and it's worth blowing up any number of rockets to get it because rockets are just stuff. They're just made of stuff and you can always get more stuff. You can never get more time. It's a great insight. It just means we're doing it cowboy style. And the post is good, you should read the full thing. But John Carmack endorses it and says,

I have never seen it expressed exactly like that, but I wholeheartedly endorse it. Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was no grand plans, follow the gradient of user value. And I was chatting with John Carmack years ago on Axe about this, talking about how just getting the VR cost curve down just every single head set just slightly lighter, slightly cheaper, slightly better. Like that's

what I wanted. I was pitching like I pulled up this video of the N64 and you turned on the N64 with put the Goldeneye cartridge in turn on the N64. This is like way before your time. But you turn it on and it would just blink on and you'd be ready to play and it was it was crazy there was no login screen no off no no intro no credits it was just turn it on and you're just playing it was amazing and and I was like they need to get there for for VR he you know agreed and gave some other feedback that was really interesting but Interesting speed of execution stuff anyway Speaking of VR if you're trying to sell VR headsets all over the world

Maybe you're a big screen VR you got to get on numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month It's sales tax compliance. It's do that easy. Yeah, thousands of companies rely on numeral You can go to numeral HQ to get onboarded. They'll do a white glove onboarding. They are just absolutely fantastic over there. 25 states are now taxing software sales, John. I didn't know that. Did you know that? No.

Yeah, actually you did. I did because I said it yesterday. Well, Vittorio says... Thank you to Numeral for supporting the show. Vittorio says, it's so over. They automated Italians. I saw you put this in there. I like this. You put it in the show notes. I like it.

Did you see the hand movement? It was crazy. I think Vittorio is Italian. He's Italian, yeah. He's having fun. But very interesting art installation. Good viral video. Lots of fun.

I like this one from Framer. Thanks to AI, every meme can be turned into a cartoon easily. And it's so funny because you remember, I joked about this early on. It was, yeah, we, there needs to be like, you know, South Park meets Silicon Valley where something happens on the timeline. It just immediately gets turned into a cartoon. And we kind of looked at that and we we were like, it's funny to do. Seems really expensive. But super time intensive.

So we wouldn't do it. Super expensive. It wouldn't make sense. It's just like, at the end of the day, it might just be a viral video. It's not really something we're looking for. And we have a friend who's already using voice AI to make these like.

Incredible deepfakes. It's crazy. Incredible deepfakes. And they're very funny because they're not funny because of the AI. They're funny because he put so much thought into the punchline and how it leads into the punchline and he's so creative with it and it's really his life's work.

And it completely copies the accuracy of the voice he's creating. It's really, really good. And so this Framer thread's interesting because not only do they share this video of the Paris Olympics, that crazy break dancing video, but Framer actually breaks down exactly how to do it so you can kind of follow along

with all the different prompts. You go into chat GPT, turn the images into cartoons and then obviously change those into videos. But it was remarkable. It's a very watchable video and I think this will be part of like the meme stack going forward when an iconic event happens It will be an instantly turned into a cartoon

You'll be able to enjoy it as anime if you want But the real creativity will come from that human insight of what would be particularly funny to do in a in a cartoon setting Can be very funny Anyway, let's tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions, go to public.com to get started. And thank you to public. They are the ones that power our ticker down at the bottom. Stock market goes up, goes down.

Without them, that ticker would be down immediately. It's all driven by what the hosts of the All In podcast are tweeting, apparently. Every time they tweet, it seems to go poorly. Somebody takes Sachs' phone away from him. But it's going up, it's going down. Today is not as bad as other days. We had a pretty big dip in the middle of the day,

but we're doing okay now. Yeah, I mean we almost hit the circuit breakers today, but we didn't, so I guess that's a win. Any day where there's not circuit breakers is a Dom Perignon day in my opinion. It's great. Should we talk about the OpenAI lawsuit? This is kind of interesting.

This is developing. So Elon has sued OpenAI, I believe, and there's been kind of back and forth about Elon being a co-founder of OpenAI, putting a lot of money into the nonprofit via donations and then not getting equity in the for-profit when that conversion happened and the investment started rolling in. Now OpenAI is suing Elon or counter suing and OpenAI newsroom writes Elon's non-stop actions against us are just bad faith tactics to slow down OpenAI and

seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit. Today we counter sued to stop him. He's been spreading false information about us. We're actually getting ready to build the best equipped nonprofit the world has ever seen. We're not converting it away." And so that's an interesting take basically saying like the nonprofit is not going away. That actually isn't new. Sam did address that in that. It's new positioning. But it's new positioning. They haven't said. It's getting out there.

Yeah. And so if you think about it. They've never been really leading with, oh, we're actually making the best nonprofit ever since founding. Well, yeah, because the VCs are like, well, look, we don't care about the nonprofit that it's going to continue.

We only care about the for-profit. But obviously, if you're a nonprofit and you have some insane equity position in this like banger consumer tech company, that's going to be very good for funding your nonprofit. And so what will the nonprofit do? Probably continue to work on AI safety and AI research and all this stuff, which I think can be very valuable. And so they want to make it loud and clear that the philanthropic efforts at the OpenAI nonprofit

are not going away anytime soon. And you can expect for them to keep fighting. So hopefully that all just resolves. My take has continually been mom and dad are fighting. Let's try and get them to sort it out and build a glorious future together with amazing chat GPT and grok Functionality for all of us to enjoy. Yeah, I feel like if grok and chat GPT actually sat down just the two chat bots They could resolve it with enough back and forth. Well chat bot arena. Yeah

Yeah, hopefully not to bot center only one can leave They should be able to like, you know do enough iterations on the situation to run a million simulations. That's actually kind of the scenario laid out in AI 2027. There's this whole nationalization push. And the three scenarios that are proposed are essentially, one, the government just says says we're nationalizing you. We're taking a complete control because we're afraid of, you know, runaway AI. The other one is like the, the open brain,

the leading lab kind of like turns inward and kind of goes offshore and really fights it and doesn't, doesn't, you know, get nationalized, but they actually advocate for the third, which is the kind of a truce. And a deal gets broken broken gets brokered and the government winds up working very closely with the bleeding lab But the lab is not entirely nationalized and and that's kind of what you're describing where yeah we will will better AI models that can go and do crazy simulations and Get to more reliable truces that actually might be a great outcome

Yeah, instead of instead of this, you know dystopia where everyone's fighting everyone's suing each other constantly It's like no actually everything's just balanced out because we have a million PhD lawyers talking at all times to make sure we have the perfect deal struck at any moment. That's right Who knows? Anyway scale AI founder Alex Wang proposes a national AI data reserve to bolster US data dominance. I don't know what this means, but it sounds awesome, John. Let's push it forward. Aiming to secure a competitive edge over China in the AI race.

Very interesting. We used to have gold reserves. Now we've got big data reserves. Yeah. I wonder what that would look like. I mean, certainly like sequestering some of the data and protecting it seems extremely valuable since DeepSeq seemed like it was completely reverse engineered

from Chachi Petit. Esoteric PDFs with forbidden knowledge. Yes. I think Nat Friedman should be the one on the case. A national AI data reserve should be the scrolls cannot be ingested into the next LLM training run. They must live in Nat Frieden's house forever. Anyway, there's some other news,

but first let's talk about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. This is a vacation home, but better folks. It is just delightful.

Yeah. Just delightful. Brad Gerstner, who recently led the round that we discussed on the show today, says Google is holding the line on CapEx. As I said tonight on CNBC, tech CEOs are ready to run. That's why today's tariff clarity was critical to maintaining our leadership in global AI.

Smart targeted tariffs plus a trade deal with China plus a tax deal will extend US national advantages. And so this is on the back of Google CEO Sundar Pichai reiterating their 75 billion dollar capex guide for 2025 despite the tariff uncertainty. We've been hearing that Microsoft might cancel a certain, it was kind of a big hit, like, because it was like, I think it was framed by that one poster, it's like, it's so over, Microsoft canceled a $1 billion data center,

this is so terrible, and it's like, well, they're still spending 74 billion then. You know, it's like on CapEx, like, the capacity is going to increase, maybe they're slowing down a little bit, but it still seems like, and then also, like, there's just the dynamic between all the hyperscalers that none of them want to get caught You know flat-footed here and so and there's also the amazing story about Zuck being like yeah, we did reels We got caught back. We caught we got caught flat-footed on reels. We didn't have enough AI data centers to train

flat-footed on Reels, we didn't have enough AI data centers to train Reels recommendation algorithms at scale for a billion Instagram users. So we built out a Reels training AI data center, and then we were like, let's just do two of those. And it worked out perfectly, because then they were able to train Llama. And it had LLM functionality all over the place. And so I think every Mag- 7 CEO has to be taking that

seriously and thinking about, well, yeah, maybe we don't want to get over our skis on CapEx, but we got to be in the game. And that means double digit, high double digit billions of CapEx every single year. We're scaling our CapEx here at the show as well. We are scaling up. Well, let's close with,

is there anything else you want to do? We're good. Let's save this next piece for tomorrow. I think so it's important I think we should give it some real I agree attention. Anyway fantastic show some really great interviews. I had a great time today and Just thank you for listening and thanks for dealing with the cyber attack that happened on the show earlier at 11 We had to start late as we fought off. Just an absolute nightmare for Ben and the whole team. They were stressed, but they got through it. And they're feeling good. And I'm sure tomorrow will be a banger episode.

So tune in right at 11. On the dot, we're going live. You heard it first. We've been pretty good about going at 11. Yeah, we used to be all over the place. So the general trend line is more accuracy, more professionalism on this show. And so thank you.

If you've enjoyed the show, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Fun fact about Spotify, you can't just go leave us five stars there. You gotta click listen to the episode on Spotify. Let it play for a while. You can put it in the background low and then it will let you leave five stars.

Spotify knows, don't spam us and but we're gonna get through that We're gonna get through that. Thank you to ramp polymarket public bezel numeral ad quick eight sleep wander for sponsoring the show We are entirely corporation supported. Yes, we will never forget that. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day. Alright folks. Bye cheers