TBPN Live - Garry Tan, Augustus Doricko, Nichole Wischoff, Billy Thalheimer, Mamma Mia!

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:55) - The Timeline (23:14) - New Alexa Launch (44:13) - Garry Tan (01:01:50) - Augustus Doricko (01:22:13) - Mamma Mia! (01:30:25) - The Timeline (02:04:15) - Nichole Wischoff (02:19:14) - Billy Thalheimer (02:29:15) - The Timeline

You're watching TBPN Live. Today is Thursday, March 6th, 2025, and we are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. I'm your host, John Coogan. Right next to me is Jordy Hayes. We got a greatkoff, and Billy Thalamer is calling in. We're covering YC, we're covering rain making, we're covering early stage seed VC solo GP stuff, we're covering flying cars that are regulated like boats, sea gliders, I love it. We're gonna go over some news first. We're covering Discord's IPO,

little preemptive size gong for Jason Cit go Jason Citron one of the best to ever do it and then we're gonna talk about Amazon's Alexa plus launch That's kind of weird. I don't know. We'll go through it anyway, but we wanted to kick it off with this post Did you see this post Jordy? I'm pulling it up right now This post is from Gabriel one of the top posters in the entire world. He is and we were thinking let's kick it off It's towards the end of the week. I think he locked it up. I think he's brother of the top posters in the entire world. He is. And we were thinking, let's kick it off. It's towards the end of the week. I think he locked it up. I think he's brother of the weak material.

What do you think? I think so. I mean, just putting up fantastic numbers here. For years. Unique insights. For years. One of the greatest, I mean, I think I was introduced to him during COVID lockdowns. He's over in Australia, I believe, but had just has never lost a step

throughout his entire posting career. Just absolute longevity. No, a lot of people hit their stride. They put up six months, seven, eight, whatever, and then they sort of fade. Exactly. The unique insights are lost, stop reading books and consuming, and they're just fully in the algorithm.

But something about posting, you gotta be out in the real world, you gotta be out doing things, you gotta be getting insights from places other than the timeline, other than otherwise just gets sort of constantly recycled. So being down under, putting up big numbers. And I love his 360 degree attack on his game.

I know about his family because of his posting, but I also know about his deep understanding of rats apparently. So let's break this down. I'll go. So Gabe is quote posting Ali Debo. She says, highest leverage things you can do in your 20s, travel, start a company, join a company

you love. We're gonna cut it off there because that's not what this segment is about. Why don't you read Gabe's post? He says, lots of egregious stuff in here, but calling travel high leverage is insane. It costs $1,500 to fly return New York to Tokyo. For $1,000, you could buy 50 rats

in a one to four boy girl ratio and release them in a competitor's WeWork. The iPad kids are cooked. And this couldn't be more real. You know, we would do this for competitive podcast studios. But here's the thing, John, they all zoom in to record. There's no studio to release in them. You can't do it.

We wouldn't do it in their home. You can't do it. That would just be too disrespectful. But before we get into the rest of the show, I got a call out today. So I was up in the Bay yesterday evening, and I was flying back this morning. And I was getting on a JSX flight.

And this guy approaches me and says, hey, I'm a technology brother. I listen to every episode. I just wanted to introduce myself So is this guy Cole Rotman? He's a seed to growth investor over at DST global an absolute dog and Thank you Cole for stopping me. It was a highlight of my morning, and I just wanted to give you a little call-out He's been listening since the early days

50 plus episodes ago, so he's an absolute brother. Then the other thing, I'm not going to name this technology brother, but a guy emailed me this morning that's been listening to the show also since the first week. And he's going out for a seed round. He said, hey, I'd love to have you involved. I looked at the deck.

I committed on the spot and offered to make some other introductions. And in less than an hour, I introduced him to I think five separate people that that immediately opted in all, you know, would be potential leads for his round. So it's been a lot of brother behavior going down this morning. I'm fired up to deals, doing podcasts, building the community, building the brotherhood, building the brotherhood. That's the goal. Anyway, let's move on. I just wanted to, you know, really, you know, we call this the dojo of the dollar. We want to respect the dollar and we respect our advertisers. So I wanted to kick it off with an early ad

for public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. Keep you guessing, sometimes there's an amazing transition later in the show to an ad, but now, boom, ad right at the beginning. Right in your face. Didn't think that was gonna happen.

Right in your face. Boom. But the reason I wanted to talk about public is because I saw this great post from Mads Capital. Mads says, I'm not sure I can hang I can handle a kangaroo market bros. These terminology there's the bull market where it goes up bear market where it goes down kangaroo market bouncing all over the place. But I love it. It does feel like this has been my entire life. Yeah, like entire adult life kangaroo market. The have felt shorter because we haven't it gives you something to

You know hope for to look forward to yeah, if you know if you're if you're down bad Yeah, you know that a bowl there's always a bowl market So there's always a bowl market somewhere And what is a kangaroo market if not just a bunch of bowls and bears all crammed together in a stable? No, and kangaroos are cute. They're fun. They're always bouncing around. But they're also vicious.

They're terrifying. Yeah, they're vicious. When they get all jacked and come up to you. If you haven't seen it, go look up. Everyone's seen it. Everyone's seen the jacked kangaroo. Not everybody's seen it. Everyone's seen the jacked kangaroo.

Go look up kangaroo fist fights. I don't know. You'll find a ton of content from Down Under. I'm sure Gabriel, who we just covered, I'm sure he's gotten into his fair share scuff ups with the kangaroos, but yeah, they're tough. Like to have some fun. Well, let's highlight Arena Magazine,

Max Meyer's newest drop. We got these in a few days ago. They're fantastic. We love Arena. A lot of people saw. Yes ad before a full page Never actually got out So we're sorry to front run there

But the actual magazine itself is fantastic when I read this and when I read Colossus review to me. Oh, yeah Profile on Kyla Scanlon good friend of mine. She's amazing. The gen Z capitalist whisperer, published a book very highly reviewed by Tyler Cowan highly recommend picking it up. Has really mastered economics education in the modern era. Everything from tik tok to YouTube videos to newsletters really built like a multimedia empire with a very sharp, like there's just so much in the whole business at econ content world, there's so much like just fake clickbait, like, well, BlackRock actually owns everything. They're the most powerful company, like that whole stuff.

And she just like stays away from that really well and like actually educates people properly. It's great. United Semiconductors of America, a modest proposal for American industry. I mean, just look at this. It's fantastic. Amazing.

So highly recommend going and subscribing. You just want this on your coffee table. There's so many good stuff. There's so many good things in here. We'll probably pick an article out of here to do a deep dive on the art of the Chinese call in. Interesting.

Yeah, yeah, we should have them call in. It's great. Who wants to work in a factory? Oh, and look, we're printing tweets. He's printing tweets. Luke Metro got featured. Everybody wants to expand industrial cap capability, but no one wants to work in a factory kicked off an entire entire article.

The only thing is I agree with Luke on most things, but I would argue that there is entirely the new generation is actually very excited to be in factories. Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there is a bit of a major vibe shift. You have guys like Zane why we're having Augustus on constantly factory posting later today because he has certainly made sleeping in a factory cool.

Yeah. In a very serious way, sleeping in truck beds. Yeah, when he's out forward deployed, all of the above. Anyway, we wanted to highlight a post from Gary Tan that I'm sure we'll discuss later. He's coming out at noon for 25% of the winter 2025 batch of Y Combinator. Ninety five percent of lines of code are LLM generated.

That's not a typo. The age of vibe coding is here. Fascinating. Vibes coding. So I'm sure we'll get more into that, but something to think about as we go through. Anyway, let's move on to Discord. Unusual Wales has the post breaking. Discord is an early talk to bankers about an IPO that could come as soon as this year and

I think this was originally Broken by the New York Times. They don't have too much information here, but we can kind of run through it A capital says not sure why discord needs an IPO other than exit liquidity payday Because a profitable Yeah, that would be a good reason. I don't know. I mean, Jason Citroen is a fascinating entrepreneur. He is, he truly like does not fit the standard mold of entrepreneur. I think he's from Florida and then went to a, like a very, very small kind of game development school and was totally off of the like Stanford, Ivy League track, started one company, wound up selling it, and then just built Discord kind of outside

of the Silicon Valley realm until it just became a complete monster and now has been very, very profitable. But there's been a bunch of pushback to this. I saw some posts. Every major old line media company is now like super anti-tech and so yeah Headline from like IGN was like prepare for discord to get even worse bankers are getting involved It's like I don't know that might not be bad, but I guess people don't like like the moniker made Instagram better, right? I think so. Yeah, sure, of course

Yeah, they're you know, the New York Times writes that. This all is going to come down to price, right? Yeah, it's possible that the Discord, it gets kind of turned into a bit of a meme briefly. It's possible that people that buy the stock on the first day or the first week or whatever don't end up doing that well. But ultimately, this is a robust company with a massive user base. I'm interested to see their actual financial performance. But this

is great for all the hardworking employees who have spent, you know, decade plus now at this point. I don't know when discord was actually founded, you know, working. It's a fascinating story. So I deserve some liquidity at this point. Jason Citron founded this social gaming platform for mobile games called Open Faint. And then he sold it to this company called greed, which is a game development company like a holdings company, a Japanese social networking service in 2011 for $104 million. And I remember there was something

weird about the earn out I don't I'm not exactly sure what happened, but then he founds Hammer and Chisel, which is a game development studio in 2012. They launched a product, Fates Forever, released in 2014. There's a crazy old video, I wish we could pull up of him pitching it. And I think TechCrunch disrupt, and just being like, I made this game.

And it's gonna be the, it was basically a MOBA, but mobile. So do you know Dota 2 or League of Legends? I hate those. I was just a Starcraft guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So MOBA, but for mobile, but it wasn't successful. During the game development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team

to work out tactics in games like League of Legends using voiceover IP Because normally like back when you play a game you just hop on like a zoom call essentially or Skype call. Yeah, our IP And so then he decided to build a chat service with a focus on user friendliness and minimal impact on performance So deep integration to the game the name discord was chosen because it sounds cool and has to do with talking Yeah, how crazy is it that both Discord and Slack, the two most dominant sort of like workplace chat products, both started as games that just built a decent chat functionality

and then ended up focusing on that. Totally. Really wild. Yeah, it's like no one wants to just go straight into chat. So in 2016, Discord raises $20 million from WarnerMedia, Time Warner. And then WarnerMedia was acquired by AT&T in 2018. WarnerMedia investment group was shut down in 2019,

selling the equity. Microsoft announced it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users. They raised $150. Discord raised $150 at at two billion valuation, led by Green Oaks with participation from FirstMark, Tencent, IVP, Index, a few others in December of 2018. And then they kind of kept growing from there,

and now they will IPO. So that'll be hot. And of course, if you want to play the IPO, go to public.com and uh, Nikita I'm sure we'll do well here. Right. Oh, you think he still has, you probably sure he has, you know, position, um, you know, based on whenever he joined, it wasn't priced at 15 billion, but 2021, uh, yeah. Discord was, was priced at 15 billion. Yeah, but I mean you have to imagine the current a ton since then Yep in recent years discord has tried to expand as a field those things like how do you? What is what is how do you value the earnings of a network versus a SaaS company, right? Yeah

That that's gonna be the big question here. Yeah, it is it is crazy I mean they've tried when when clubhouse came out they discord like copied the feature pretty quickly They have like stages you can be in a discord group and then I mean discord was always For a long time. I felt like it was more full featured than slack just as a user And it just had like it just felt cooler even just like the dark mode by default just felt better But they also had other integrations But then yeah, they launched they launched the clubhouse competitor But the thing that really took off was like during the AI boom like the the server for mid-journey

In 2023 had over 15 million members and like that's insane Like I just I don't think slack is set up for that Yeah and so they really figured out how to make these like Communities like 15 million people like that that is a social network by itself and it's a social network on top of a social network So it's almost like that decision was just criticized constantly. Yeah, specifically Oh, yeah, they're criticizing mid-journey for making it so difficult but to not use like a like just run a regular front end. Yeah Yeah, they got a lot of benefit from that in other ways

by having it be centered around the community and shared learning and all these things. Yeah, I mean, I noticed we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI app. I tried to use it on my phone on Safari and it wasn't a great experience. Here's just an interesting comp because I feel like in,

you know, a lot of this sort of online community activity, we have our corner here X, there's Reddit, right? Which is interest-based. There's Discord, which is also interest-based, but you know, company, project, game-based. Reddit is trading, traded up to, it's down 20% in the last month, but it was peaking at, let me pull this up here,

it peaked at a $40 billion market cap just a month ago, exactly. 40 billion for Reddit. 40 billion for Reddit. And they are losing, they lost half a billion dollars in the last year. Wow. And on 1.3 billion in revenue. So to me, if Discord can come out and actually, who knows, I imagine they've been heavily focused

on profitability, it's very possible that they could be priced beyond their last private market valuation. Yep. What's your take on the post-mortem on mid-journey using Discord? take on like the post like the post mid journey using discord because I feel like it's still an underrated strategy like we were talking about sesame that voice AI I tried to use it on iOS Safari it didn't work for me it was kind of like breaking and I don't think sesame has an iOS app yet and one of the amazing things about mid journey being on discord was that they instantly on day one had great mobile support on every platform that discord worked

on. And so it's like, yeah, they didn't have their own Mac app, but they had a discord Mac app that essentially worked perfectly. Uh, and of course there were a lot of like narrow like problems. Um, but I still think it's pretty good. And then also, I mean, the crypto communities have been huge on discord too. and so I'm sure that's driven a ton of new trial and then once you're in that ecosystem you have your discord username and you're just kind of kind of use it for everything totally yeah interesting it'll be it'll be fun to see like kind of when the s1 drops and where the value is they can get GameStop's PE ratio they will be doing pretty well. Let's go.

Anyways, what do we got next? The company debuted an online shop in 2023 where users can pay to enhance the profiles and add custom graphics to the digital avatar. Yeah, I clearly remember when they decided, hey, we're gonna start monetizing. Monetize. Super hard. Yeah, they got me because I wanted to be able to upload

like HD videos sometimes. And there were certain files that you couldn't share in a discord unless it was like you couldn't go over like 50 Megs Or something unless you were paying and so I went up paying and then just like probably forgot about it Probably I'm still playing anyway What should Jason's citron do when he gets liquidity Buy a million dollar watch exactly Exactly. And where should he go? Bezel. So go to Bezel.

Jason, if you're listening, go to Bezel. We have an update. So for the last month, we've been telling people that Bezel has 22,000. We've been misinformation. Yeah. We have to issue a correction. Not intentional.

Sometimes people intentionally spread misinformation. This was unintentional, but they added, they added over 1500 new watches to the platform in the last month. It's fantastic to see that's 1500 watches that could be yours. If you move quick enough, you could buy all of them. I think after the discord IPO, Jason could buy all of them. Absolutely. Hopefully. Hopefully he does. What is the, actually, I don't know about that. So they're in

23,500 luxury watches fully in-house by Bezos create this founder Co-founder he told me they had I think they probably have close to a billion dollars of watches Oh on the platform right now So it's really gonna have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform right now. So it's really going to have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform. But that would just be pulling forward a couple of years of their revenue. And it would hurt other investment users.

But you're not considering leverage. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, and some of these watches are basically investment assets. Yeah, he should sell 100% of his disc or his stake, lever up, and just buy every luxury watch of it. Literally 10,000 Submariners just walk around,

walk around just covered. Yeah. I want to see a Submariner around his ankle. Yes, exactly. Like a little ankle watch. That's the next trend for bean airs like him. For sure, for sure. Well, we'd love to have you on the show, Jason. Tell the story of Discord. I'm a huge fan. I've already made a huge, I made a big deep dive on the company and a video

about it. It's a fascinating story. Anyway, let's move on to Amy Jessi. Yeah, once these companies go public, by the way, we have to actually buy a big enough position to say, hey, I'm a major shareholder. I would love to have you on the show to discuss. It's like a little saying, it's a little, to more form invite. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you should come on this show because I'm extra conflicted.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the other shows, they're not conflicted. They're not conflicted enough. So what's the point? CNBC can't do that. Yeah, what's the point? Yeah. Exactly.

That's great. Anyway, let's go to Andy Jassy over at Amazon. He says excited to be excited to be with the team in NYC today rolling out the new Alexa plus. We've been waiting for this. Everyone's been waiting. Everybody's been waiting for this across Amazon. We're harnessing the transformative power of generative AI to reimagine the experiences we offer customers and Alexa plus is the latest example She's smarter more capable and personalized on and unlike chatbots also takes action to help you get things done Oh agent this is an agent which is at the heart of our mission at Amazon to make customers lives better and easier every day

I can't wait to get so weird the first thing that popped out to me. So they post some ads The ads are fine, but they're using she Which is a very odd choice. I went to chat GPT grok and Claude Can you guess what those three LLMs want to be referred to as terms of pronoun? The opposite all three want to be it. It all three, including Claude, interesting says, Hey, yeah, like, I'm not a person don't ever horrifies me. Got it. Yeah, it was just very odd to hear them. It felt very old school.

Like there used to be like, this idea of like, Siri is a her. Yeah. And, and then we kind of moved away from that. And there's been so much talk about, oh, ChatGPT isn't that good of a name. But when I heard them say Alexa, it's a her, and I was like, it's not, it's not. Well, you know, one of the best investments you could have made in the last decade or so

was shorting the name Alexa as soon as Amazon introduced it. In 2015, Alexa was the 32nd most popular name for girls born in the United States. In 2022, Alexa's name ranked dropped to 536, the lowest it's been since 1985. And in 2023, it's down in the 600s. So really, really rough go.

Tough to be named Alexa in the year 2014 prior to the launch. But then again, it's becoming more rare. Maybe there's value in that. Yeah, I would just prefer it if it was just Amazon. Hey, Amazon, I'm talking to you. You're the company. I want you to order something for me. It's Amazon.

It's an it. And I'm happy with that. I don't need this secondary thing. You're the company. I want you to order something for me. It's Amazon. It's an it and I'm happy with that I don't need this like secondary thing I don't know it just stuck out to me is like this odd this odd choice that feels more natural Alexa feels like a better brand name than chat GPT which is like a mouthful or Claude 3.7 sonnet or grok 3 like these don't sound like names But when I actually like sat with it for a second and heard the opposite house like actually I would much prefer You know just to talk to it. Yeah, and it's just it's just less weird anyway. Let's go to Ben Thompson. It's Rotecary He's breaking down this announcement from the verge Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI

Version of Alexa Alexa plus that if it all goes well We'll make will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home We're getting info on the fly some of the new abilities include ability to do things for you You'll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends I feel like the last version of Alexa said that it could do that anyway, it's 20 bucks a month or it's free if you're a prime member and prime is $15 a month. So you save $5 by getting both. It's very odd. That comes with access to Alexa website where the company said you can go

and do long form work. Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to, uh, go with the new assistant Alexa plus will work on almost every Alexa device really so far. So they're actually trying to enter the consumer game. Yeah, they want they're, they're saying we want you to use our hardware, but we're also going to, I mean, they have all the infrastructure for it. It makes sense that they would like kind of offer something here, but it's just, it's just weird. So, uh, Ben Thompson's like talking about like kind of offer something here, but it's just it's just weird. So Ben Thompson's like talking about like kind of the metal level of this. There's no video of the event It's 2025 and they just did a live blog

Moreover, there was no video put up after the event. Amazon does have a couple of promo videos. Is this pure vaporware? Ben asks Fortunately, the verge did come out with a hands hands on report a couple of days after the event. So apparently Alexa plus in does in fact exist in a state that is accessible by non Amazon employees. I was from the report. I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word Alexa. I dim I asked it to dim the lights and adjust

the thermostat to make it a little warmer. The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed and Alexa said I dim the lights in adjust the thermostat to make it a little warmer. The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed and Alexa said, I dim the lights in the living room and increase the temperature by two degrees. Is there anything else you need? Then I said, can you vacuum the floor? It replied, okay. And the Roomba just started the job.

Not bad. Like that does seem pretty cool. Of course, this is probably one of those things where you have to be really all in on the whole ecosystem because if you're using a Google home or you have an Apple TV, all of a sudden it's not going to integrate. But Ben wanted to give a little bit of a brief history of Alexa that I thought would be kind of interesting. He says back to Alexa though, which first launched in 2014, we're a decade into these like AI assistants and like the

chat bot era, the chat bot Renaissance was like a thing. And people thought chat bots were going to be all over the place and then took 10 years to get here, but now they are. Just a few months after the disastrous fire phone, which led to most people dismissing the voice assistant and its associate Echo speaker out of hand. However, Ben says, I was immediately intrigued precisely because Alexa and Echo. It's always got the receipts. Yeah, totally.

Oh yeah. Yeah. There's a link here. You can prove it. I actually had a potential market the home the one place where you might not have your phone on your body and where it would be the least awkward to rely on voice interaction because you're not out in the world. Hey, good points. I also think Amazon got two big things right with Alexa, particularly as it expanded

skills. First, Alexa, it was always very fast. In my experience, very good at understanding what you said. This is a big distinguishing factor from Siri, of course, although Google quickly rivaled Alexa. Second, Amazon didn't attempt to do fancy fuzzy matching when it came to triggering skills. If you wanted to use a device or service, you had to say the words exactly right.

So less errors, but you had to be more trained, so training the humans to get the right thing. The second point may seem kind of intuitive, but I think it was a very smart product choice given Alexa's capabilities instead of wowing users half the time and frustrating them the other half with no clear feedback about why a particular command worked or didn't.

Alexa put the burden on the user, again, speaking anecdotally. I would blame myself when a voice command didn't work because I didn't say the right words. Alexa, for its part, understood what I said and told me whether it was successful or not which allowed me to improve. Siri to take the counter example would try to be smart which actually made it more frustrating. Good point. And so this also gets to why Amazon's announcement of Alexa Plus makes me nervous. It feels way too

ambitious. Alexa Plus isn't just going to turn on your lights, it's also going to order you concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and plan a vacation and call the babysitter. Alexa Plus isn't just going to turn on your lights. It's also going to order you concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and plan a vacation and call the babysitter. Alexa Plus will have a memory and learn. And the list goes on, which is to say that Amazon is promising. Every AI assistant product uses the same examples, yet nobody has been able to truly get product market fit

with those set of examples. Nobody's getting, nobody's using an AI assistant today on average, like the average consumer in America is not saying, hey, book me a flight to New York. Even though that's like been the default sort of example. Or hey, can you order some Advil? We're out, even though it's actually probably good at that, but it's still not actually,

it's never had enduring traction. The last time I heard the name Alexa, I was getting a massage and the massage therapist said, hey, turn up the volume. Alexa, turn up the volume. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. Like it's, yeah. But I hadn't seen, I haven't seen or heard of an Alexa in,

well, I haven't had one in probably six, seven years. Haven't seen one in a friend's house in that period of time. I thought that the last time I got value out of the Alexa service was being like, okay, this is a pretty good speaker for like a hundred bucks or whatever it was. Yeah.

Well, let's finish out with Ben tying it to Apple and what's going on at Siri. He's quoting from Mark Gurman, Apple Inc's long promised overhaul of the Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs threatening to postpone or limit its release according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to its customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software said the people who asked not to be identified. Some features have been postponed to May or later. The Siri makeover is a centerpiece of the Apple intelligence platform, the company's effort to catch up in AI and spur iPhone upgrades. And so his main point here is that Amazon and Apple don't need to be in a rush. Both Alexa and Siri have a decade plus head start in terms of integrations with a host of devices and services. Alexa Plus and new Siri don't need to have capabilities that

exceed even what the Frontier AI labs have yet to ship. Simply being better voice assistants for their existing ecosystems will make them more useful. And I should note is the heavy is a heavy lift in and of itself, faithfully replicating existing functionality is a hard problem. That's the power of being an ecosystem provider. And I suspect both companies should have a little bit more confidence in their relative advantage and be a little more conservative about their ambitions. And so I thought it was kind of interesting that like, you know, we're we're frustrated that these products aren't better. But once you understand the market dynamic, the ecosystem lock in, it's like, yeah, you can Yeah, it's one of those things like just because you have an extreme advantage doesn't

give you permission or nobody's going to give you props when you botch rollouts, when you release lackluster products, where you're not creating massive sort of forward momentum. These companies have incredible access to talent, capital, every advantage, the ecosystem advantage and the ecosystem advantage and the services advantage and we should hold them to a high standard. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you go back to the launch of the iPhone and I think the R&D number, I mean, everything about that project is insane. I think the R&D number is like one one hundredth of what Zuck has spent on the metaverse, something like that.

Maybe a thousandth is basically nothing, super fast, and obviously pulled forward a bunch of technology that we didn't really have, like the glass screens and phones and all this stuff. But there was no other option. And Reggie pointed out recently that that was an acquisition, the screen tech. Oh really?

And the iPhone was a company that the core tech was something that they had bought. That's cool. Yeah, they But but I mean at the time Apple had like crazy pressure, right? Yeah, they didn't have an ecosystem that they could just kind of sit back on if they didn't do that Someone else would have gotten there for sure BlackBerry eventually kind of got there and I'm sure Nokia or Microsoft eventually would have tried totally anyway well the one piece of smart home tech that should be connected to your Alexa

is of course your 8Sleep. There we go. Nights that fuel your best days. There we go. Turn your bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8Sleep.com slash TBPN, get a bed, hook it up to your smart home, tell it to- I actually would use that.

Yeah, totally. Because you can prompt your bed to start getting ready to your smart home, tell it to... I actually would use that because you can prompt your bed to start getting ready for bed. Exactly, yeah. I have it set on an autopilot because it knows I get into bed at 8.30 every night. So early, I love it. But anyways, I can see, they might actually have an Alexa integration,

but go to eightsleep.com slash TBPN, it's in our bios everywhere, check them out. I don't have a sleep score from last night, and Alexa integration, but go to eightsleep.com slash TBPN. It's in our bios everywhere, check them out. I don't have a sleep score from last night. So this is a good opportunity for you to potentially get a quick win considering I'm at a zero. You're at a zero. Well, that is brutal.

I'm zeroed out. Let me see. Eight sleep. Where, where are we? Oh, wow. Awful. 36. I've never had a score so low. What happened? What? Four hours and 30 minutes. That feels like a bug or something. I don't know. I mean mean I was up late and I did get up late Yeah, you were up late. I went to dinner with with some friends and so I was out. I was out pretty late I drink I did actually that's it. I did have some People if you love alcohol that you're gonna hate a sleep. Yeah, it just completely

Exposes it's how terrible alcohol is for your sleep, which is common I had like two common knowledge right now. It was like nothing. All right, we got Gary calling in in a second. I'm very excited for this. Yeah, he's texting me right now. Sounds amazing. I think he should be hopping on in just a minute. Let's see.

In the meantime, we should do a funny post or something. Let's see. Oh, did you see this? Did you see this olive metallic my buck? Of course, it really pops off the page in black and white. But it's it's this beautiful green. And I thought we could take a moment to make a little announcement to the to the community that that green is now part of our official brand.

Ecosystem. Yeah. And you may actually in the lower corner down there. We actually have our legal team working on You know patented green patenting green sure, you know, there's a guy who owns black or something. Yeah Banta black Have you heard of this interesting? It's not named after the sock to compliance provider It but it is a black that is so dark that it's like the darkest black it doesn't reflect any light and I think the guy patented it and defends it brutally but it's not very it's not very reflective anyway how you should be able to make your own colors and patent them? Artisanal here's another post open AI will be the first company to offer a 1 million per month subscription plan for a GI

Yeah kind of a We call it do we call shit post stuff post kind of a meme post joke pose having a laugh all the above It's it's certainly Within the realm of possibility, but the challenge is that if you can get an open source model for basically nothing Per month that's nearly as good. What are you gonna choose? Right. It's got to be It's got to be orders of magnitude better. I think it's it's it's like a status symbol. You know, yeah. Why do you why do

you pay for a luxury watch? You know, you could tell the same time with a with a quartz $5 watch. That's true. But you know, Patek Philippe says something about that's gonna be the new thing using $1 million model that could have been Yeah, could have been commerce course bros are gonna be pulling up like looking at their exactly age of opening exactly nobody's gonna be flexing lambos and yeah, no, no Andrew Tate will be like, Yeah, I don't fly private anymore. Yeah, I just have the most expensive agent cranking

constantly. Yeah, servers on fire the most expensive agent cranking constantly. Servers on fire. It's the new, you know, the founders that, you know, develop an ego based on headcount, right? So they're just like trying to grow headcount. It's like you actually are hitting up OpenAI saying, do you have any more expensive plans? I don't have any employees at this point. I just like want to be able to show that like I'm really You know I'm really about it. Yeah did you see the HBO has greenlit a Unscripted unfiltered unhinged reality TV show about the Paul brothers Wow Logan Paul and Jake Paul now have a

show on HBO Max. And is it live already? No, I think it's the trailer drops tomorrow. This is on March 4th. And Jake says this company used to make the Sopranos. So not a great reception. But my reaction to this was like,

I'm sorry, like the market demands what it demands. Like, people want to watch this. This is gonna do really well. And it's smart, so here's the thing. This is clearly a strategic move from Max to try to get a younger demographic. That they can pay more to get the show than Netflix, because Netflix is looking at this and saying,

all the people that are really gonna wanna watch this already have access to Netflix accounts, they're on family plans, it's a younger demo. Whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers and so the deal makes sense and I'm not surprised at all to see it. And it's easy for the brothers, the Paul brothers, that is, because they've been recording pretty much every minute

of their daily lives for a decade at this point. Yeah. And yeah, now they're gonna have to sit down in front of a camera. It's just different. I mean, obviously, like deeply controversial people, some people like love and hate the content. But have you seen the slap that changed my life?

No, it's a YouTube video, but it's like almost like a documentary about Logan Paul challenging a Russian slapboxer to a slap fight. And it's edited so well. It's edited by this guy, Hayden Hillier Smith, who's like this like YouTube mastermind. And it's like emotional, like it's, it's, it's, it's like art. And it's so ridiculous because you're watching this Logan Paul like slapboxing thing, but it takes you on this emotional journey of him like wanting to go and do this fight. And it's like, is this too risky?

Will he have like brain damage from it? And it's just really well shot, really well paced, really well edited. It's exciting. It's emotional. You can see some of it here, Jordy, look at this. And he's talking to his mom and his mom's like, don't do this, like if you get hit in the head. You're gonna get one shot at it. You're gonna get one shot at it, exactly.

And I mean, look, look, it's rough. Yeah, you can see it over there. And this was the moment I was like, oh man, this guy's like, he's a good entertainer, regardless of what you think of all his products and other content. He's learned to be just a master. Because he's just practiced so long. We've talked about this.

I know we've talked about this offline. I don't know if we've talked about it online. But the whole slapboxing thing, Dana White went on this whole podcast road show talking about how power slap is the number one sport in the world Yep, and he says we get more views than NFL NBA MLB Yeah, all combined and people are basically saying actually just lost power. Oh you did I guess it'll be better. Cool. Near your computer?

No, my microphone. Anyways, Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive roadshow to promote PowerSlap. And people, obviously, all the data is public. So they immediately start fact checking it. And first of all, they're like, one, Dana, this is not actually more popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things.

And apparently, it's actually been really underperforming from a ratings standpoint, where it has this sort of shock value that people are drawn to on social media, because you see this guy about to slap this other guy. It stands out. People stop. They watch it. But then the comments are almost universally

actually how people feel about it. Yeah, but then the comments are almost universally negative that actually how people feel about yeah And so so anyways, we'll see kind of what happens there But um, there was just a great profile on Dana White I think in Forbes I think he did the cover and so we should we should read that. Yeah, that'd be great. No, we should Then we should have him calling Yeah, no, and and then again the challenge is Doing combat sports that involve somebody being completely defenseless is much harder to watch. Hey, we got Gary here. Hey, how's it going? It's great. How are you doing? Good. There he is. Yeah. Fantastic.

Amazing to have you on. We wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. I mean, thank you so much It's fantastic to talk to you anytime but it seems like YC is like completely transformed by LLMs writing code so break it down Okay, I mean I think we're just at the dawn of this technology and It's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage of it and you know I I'm seeing the haters on the internet coming at us, but that's fine. Come at me, bro

What's happening is that like, you know a 100% of YC companies these days have technical co-founders and then you're stupid not to use it. Like basically, why would you subject yourself to spending a lot of hours on things that you don't have to do and being able to go all the way to ground and debug the thing and you know, basically a prerequisite of using these tools. Well is that You don't need the tools Yeah, that makes sense How long do you think the do you think the sort of advantage that technical founders have an AI right now is going to be?

perpetual or do you do you see a world in five years where the playing field has been completely leveled? You know, I still think it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter. If anything, what it is is it matters even more. The bar was lower before. the bar is much higher now. Like back then, if you go back like 10 or 15 years for startups period, you know, when I first worked

at YC in 2011, almost anything that had really technical co-founders and a real problem, like you were gonna be, you know, at least a series A company. Like, you know, and then I don't think that, I think that's become less and less true even today. Like, you know, there are perfectly good, very technical teams that have all the skills

and, you know, are in pretty big problem spaces. And then there's competition, like the bar is just so much higher so I think the way to think about it is if you're not using it you're actually leaving time and attention that could be used for all the other things that you're gonna need in a perfect competitive world and so it's you know all the people who are like you know F vibe coders or you know all that it's all the people who are like F Vibe Coders or all that, it's like, it's cope.

It's like, yeah, the world just changed. We're just trying to help you. And you live in that old world where you're sitting there, writing your own manual tests and banging your head into the code, or you can embrace the future and get that alpha, get that edge. Talk to us about how the bar has been raised from a metric standpoint.

YC has always been about, you have three months to make a tremendous amount of progress. It's really around preparing for demo day. The bar is, anytime you take hundreds of super, super talented people and put them under that pressure, they're going to produce amazing results from a revenue standpoint, from attraction standpoint. You know, it seems like the bar has jumped dramatically, but would love some

more color there. Yeah. Uh, I guess like, why see these like we've been really intentional about trying to go back to founders who are actually at right at the beginning. So you know these numbers fluctuate but pretty much every time 70 to 80 percent of the companies have no revenue and you know probably 70 to 80 percent generally are unlaunched. So it's really during those 10 weeks, like can you go from zero to say a hundred thousand or several hundred thousand dollars a year revenue?

But even that is like, sort of secondary. Like the funniest thing when you really think about it, think about a company that actually does make it to a hundred million or a billion dollars a year in revenue. Like, are you really going to look at the first 10 weeks and say, well, you went to, you know, well that company went to 50K ARR and that other company went to 150K ARR.

It's like, if you like play it all the way out, like it's all these other factors. So, you know, I think, if you can't get revenue or customers during the 10 weeks of YC, like, man, that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills. And even then, you can't count teams out. There are tons of teams that deferred demo day, had nothing. They took their money and basically

nosed to the grindstone, stayed in the idea maze and then they went on to create things like Retool. These are things that everyone uses now. So yeah, I don't know. It's wild. Yeah, my favorite joke on the show is that the way to outperform as an LP is to travel back in time and just give John as much money as possible To invest in his early first and second YC

I remember I remember being a you know demo day with retool and being like that company looks cool But I don't even know what I would say to them because I didn't realize you could just like yeah, just invest anyway, we we've had this thesis, obviously, like YC, anything successful attracts like haters. We've had this thesis that YC is entering like a renaissance like with the AI stuff, like this is the best time to be running like the YC business model. But can you talk a little bit about specifically like,

do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode? And can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level? Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like I'm trying to do founder mode, but you know, shout out to the original GOAT, Paul Graham, like and Jessica Livingston, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know, like, I'm, I'm sure I, it turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook. And Brian Chesky himself is on my board. And when I came back to YC, the first thing he said was, All right, well, if you were the founder, what's zero based accounting? Like, what are you going to do? And gonna do? And there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the US government.

Like, I think I just stepped in it by bringing that up, but hey, you know what? This is actually how you should be a leader. Like, you actually have to think about things from first principles from zero-based accounting. Like, if knowing what we know now, would we do that thing that we're doing? And the enemy of every bureaucracy is thinking.

Yeah, so what are the biggest changes you've made? Thinking, decision making, doing the right thing. So I think YC was always the center, the sort of like tree of prosperity. I left and spent was always the center, the sort of tree of prosperity. I left and spent seven years in the wilderness running Initialized. And I built an amazing team. Those guys are doing awesome.

I realized that actually if I stayed at Initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to write the ship at YC, I would be out of a business. I had Initialized would have been out of business if YC itself was not going in the right direction. And here we are. I think that we're doing it and we're going to keep doing it. And the biggest thing that, it's just funny that Foundermode was the meme that was born at the alumni, top alumni conference. And Brian Chesky didn't even,

he wasn't even like scheduled to appear. And I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his, it's funny for him. He's like, yeah, I'm going to tell the the selling cereal story. And he's so generous with his time. He does that every single time. But I remember seeing him extremely animated, telling his not his zero to one story,

but his like save the company pre IPO story where he had to, nobody believed in him COVID was happening, you know, and then he just buckled up. He's like, look, I made a lot. You know, he admits like he made a bunch of different mistakes that you the reason why at the top alumni event that he spoke at, that was such a pivotal moment. I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. There were about 60 or 70 unicorns represented. And I think that we unlocked easily 10 to $100 billion in new market cap that very night.

Because there's just people who, there is a machine in Silicon Valley and it's not unintentional it's not malicious like you know our corporate governance and Delaware C corps are designed boards are like designed to maximize shareholder value but the there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that like are self serving that cause you to do the wrong things like you hire people who did it at a big company before and then you're supposed to do it that way. And it's like, no, no, like, well, maybe like, you know, there are some things like maybe finance and accounting

that you shouldn't innovate on, right? innovate a little bit too much there and you go to jail. Yeah. But then broadcasting and tweeting from jail now. What's about you? You know, be founder mode. Yeah. Yeah. What do you say to people that want to put YC in a box, right? You guys have had some high profile hard tech, deep tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies.

And there's pushback from people that almost want to say you know you guys are. It's like obviously completely BS because there's a long history. And the guy who's running the place is a palantir. You shouldn't be surprised that there's defense tech coming out of

this thing. Once Gary takes. Yeah. Yeah. So Americans. I don't want to answer so early. Support America. Five eyes. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, we have strong opinions here around why this is great. Because if you're a super bright engineer or technologist, and you want to build something, YC

can teach you how to build a company. You have to build your product and sort of own your market. But yeah, what do you say to people that want to put YC in a box and say stick with SaaS, stick with software? Oh man, I mean, YC was never just SaaS, you know? I mean, Boom is, Astronis is right across the street. They're getting satellites up there. Albedo Labs, like, I mean, Albedo is super hardcore

because they basically have made spy satellites, but they're better than what the US government can do and they might just replace that market for that. It's just nuts. This is a small team out of Colorado putting satellites up that are better than the entire government waste machine. It's like not, I guess in some respects, it's not that surprising actually. So-

Can Oklo go through? They're a nuclear company. Yeah, we've got nuclear companies. We've got Helium, diffusion company. I get it. You know what? I think that we're, it's a weird thing to sort of deal with for me

because I always think of myself as the little guy, but I gotta realize, hey, I get it. Like we're going to take the arrows and it's fine. We're just going to keep helping founders. And the reality is like, Hey, I, you know, actually like it's I, I want to shout out the Gundobros. I want to be like, you know what, like you guys keep doing your thing. Like you're always walking up at YC like, you know, but I know there was like a little bit of X beef, but there shouldn't be, you know, like, you know, I think August is coming in.

I love that guy. The challenge with YC is for every, you know, 200 founders you let in, you got to reject a bunch of people, right? Because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's not the right sort of moment. But the ultimate evidence of the value of YC

is that you have highly, highly successful founders that go back for a second time, right? And so whenever I see drama on the timeline about YC, it's never coming from people that have experienced the product, right? It's always coming from people that just really aren't live players, right? People that aren't really in the conversation. Yeah.

So yeah, be a player character, man. And if you're a player character, it's just like, you don't got to be like that. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about just long-term trends in making hardware a viable startup at the 500k investment level. I mean, when I went through, I see there was this whole like hardware is hard. It was always like, Oh, it's going to be so capital intensive. And yet, I think we're seeing people do the YC model. And yeah, you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of you know, whatever boat you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of, you know,

whatever boat you're building on demo day. Like you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app. But I mean, the reason why hard tech at YC can happen is like, I mean, kind of even going back to what we were talking about earlier, like it's not necessarily just about, you know, SAS, did you grow 10% week on week? Like, did you hit 100K ARR? Like, that's, you know, sort of weak, like spreadsheet thinking.

And the hard tech companies that do super well, they show up with like, you know, if you had a super crack team that was the team to do this, what would they be able to get done in 10 weeks? And sometimes it's a prototype, sometimes it's demo. Like, the other thing is, I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just like hard allocated to YC companies, not from us from like, you know, hundreds of PCs who now are all coming back to demo day in droves. And, you know, name me another place that has that actually.

Like, and they're not necessarily just like doing the plug and chug. Like, you know, they are actually meeting the founders. They're actually making up their own minds. They are, you know, and they're funding hard tech. You know, I think we're about 90 percent AI and you know the age of intelligence is here Dude, like the machines are you're able to do all knowledge work like that's you know insane and then simultaneous to that like I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's

That's that's the built world. Like how do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another and You know God knows in America, we need it, you know, like we don't even have, we can't even make screws for ourselves. It's nuts, right? You know, I just saw Balaji in December in Singapore, and he like super blackpilled me on, you know, American manufacturing, we need, you know, 1000 X what we have right now and You know, it's not It's not that we're missing capital. It's not even that we're missing You know intelligence or people right? Like it's the will like we have to have the will to do it and Yeah, so my message to everyone watching is like if you're thinking about it

Like YC is a great place to be. It's not the only place, right? But like, we think we're trying to build, you know, one of the best places. And, you know, it is it is for AI, it's for software, it's for all kinds of technology, we are, you know, building abundance from here. And we want to find the people who believe that stuff. It's like, let's leave all, all the political crap on the side. Like, that's not what's important. What's important is we're at the dawn of just like unbelievable innovation. And you know, uh, all the world's like, you know, being rewritten by, by code and Adams and you know,

what, what brushstroke, what line of code, what will you bring? What hardware will you build? Talk to us about Happenstance. I've seen probably like 10 or 20 posts from you about the company. It seems to be a personal favorite. I'd love to hear the pitch from you directly.

Yeah. I just use it a lot personally. I mean, I get hit up for, I was thinking about how Sam Altman, when he had my role here at YC, he used to have basically a team of EAs. And his email wasn't, I think it wasn't even SAMA, it was SA-Router. And it was sort of a nod to basically

what I feel like I am now. Like I get dozens of requests every day from all kinds of YC founders and people I've run across. And that's pretty cool. I relish the ability to be like a shelling point for people who believe in tech and then The best thing I can do is like, oh, yeah know how like capital like you it's human capital all these things like people are recruiting they're trying to sell like

If I think they are legit I can basically it's the purest form of creating value from information, right? And so happens, gents, this happens to be that thing for me. You know, the world is way too big. Like my world now is, I think I have like 11,000 contacts in my phone or something. It's like, I always hit the, I always break Apple. Like Apple, my iPhone cannot support 11,000 contacts.

Are you an inbox zero guy or do you just give up and try to make it's a river. Someone's waiting for an email for me right you know I don't know you might have to sorry you might have to be on TV pn Yeah come ask the question in the chat. One more question for you you put out a you know why sees you know famous for your request for startups list. Wanted to highlight one specifically

that you had called out, which was a secure AI app store. We want a new kind of AI app store, an OS layer that sits on your computer or phone. It should protect user data, offer one shared memory, help users find the best AI apps, and help developers build and handle payments. Talk a little bit more about that. Are you seeing teams in that space yet

that you're excited about, or is this coming down the pipeline, hopefully? I think it's coming down the pipeline. Yeah, in full transparency, I don't know if I found one that really quite fit on my end yet. It also might just be too early. The tricky thing is it's pretty clear that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Windows, Apple, iOS, Android,

this is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work, assuming that people still make software. And it's more like a thought exercise. Like, I think it is possible for someone to do this right now. And, uh, we'll see if it happens. Um, we're on the lookout. Fantastic. Uh, well, speaking of Gundobros, you wanted to give a shout out to the Gundobros.

We got Augustus joining next. Great to see you brother. It's a party on this show. Uh, one person after another. You wanted to give a shout out to the gun. No doubt. I got Augustus joining next It's a party on this show one person after another. Well, thank you so much We'll have to have you back talk more soon. It's always a pleasure chatting and Hopefully, we'll see you at YC demo day. All right, look out for application TV pn.com. Yes Yeah, you do media company. Where's the we're in there? Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks Gary. Yeah. Have a great day, Gary. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in Augustus. How you doing? Augustus. What's new? I'm blessed. Um,

I'm back in Gunddo for a spell rather than the, the near East or the mountains of the Rockies. Um, so, uh, it's, it's been a vibe. It's been sunny and warm, which has been different for rainmakers the last four months. That's great. Yeah, you guys go it gets cold. It starts snowing raining. It's a tough life. Yeah, I mean, this looks kind of like I haven't watched the SPF

prison interview, but you kind of have a prison vibe going on behind you. But I like it. Maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one. Yeah. But we were talking about you earlier because Luke Metro's in Arena magazine talking about how everyone wants to re-industrialize America but nobody wants to work in a factory. And I feel like you've made working in a factory cool. Can you break down your current factory stack? Where are you sleeping? Can we get you on an eight sleep soon? Dude, it's so funny you say that. We decided like a month ago, okay, we're big enough now.

We're hiring like serious scientists. We're bringing government people through no more bunk beds in the factory. So the room that I'm in now used to have four beds in it. The room over there used to have two bunk beds in it. A lot of the dropouts and engineers were living here. We had a tradition for a bit where if you moved from across the country, you either had to live in your car in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds. So that was fine.

Well, it lasted. The peanut gallery on X is going to start saying, oh, it's time to short Rainmaker. They don't sleep in the office anymore. It's not a barracks anymore. They have too many government officials coming it's time to short Rainmaker. They don't sleep in the office anymore. They're too legit. They have too many government officials coming in to try to work with them. Yes, but at the very least, we're staying in Gundo, like some other unnamed Gundo companies

that have come. Uh-oh, a little bit of drama. Scoop. Scoop. No, we don't need to put them on the. I always thought that Gundo was the place that you could eventually graduate out of, because once you need a hundred thousand square feet like it's just not it's just it is a small city so you know I I'm rooting for the for the

the the Gundo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas you know that's that's what I hope for you but can you give me the quick, like the latest pitch on how you're describing Rainmaker? I know it's evolved a little bit. What's the core product that you're selling right now? Yeah, so Rainmaker is making earth habitable by making it precipitate more and more rain and more snow in air environments. So farms that don't have enough water, ecosystems that need to be restored and cities in arid regions that need water. We're making that happen with

advanced remote sensing. So radar, LIDAR, satellite data, we're using open source stuff and some things of our own that we're going to tease a little bit later in the month. Our own radar to find the right clouds to seed and then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti-icing capable drones into those clouds, spraying a mineral called silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big enough snowflakes so that they fall and stay as snow or if it's warm beneath the cloud melt back into rain. How many drones have you crashed? Between you, me and not the federal aviation

administration. Um, no, we've crushed, we've got dozens of drones. Um, we, uh, we have one corporate value at rainmaker. Um, and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth. Um, and that's sort of an extension of like of like, you know, the Elon thing about chewing glass, it's kind of just a bummer, right? And like building a deep tech company is especially hard. But if you have love yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get like good feedback, you learn how you failed, you learn what to do better next time, you end

up with a bunch of people kind of like rocky, you know, that like just fight harder and do better the more they get punched in the face. And so we've crashed a lot of drones on snowy, wet, cold mountain tops and everyone's better for it. What's the balance like now for you in the field doing the engineering work, building the actual product, selling, and then government stuff, you're in a suit, you're testifying, you're, you know, there's, you're testifying, you're shaking your head when someone's espousing a conspiracy theory about you. We've seen

the viral clips. How do you balance those two things? Yeah, I'm going back to Tennessee this year because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather modification to a criminal offense. And in addition to that, I'm going to go criminal offense. And in addition to that, I'm gonna go to Florida. Rainmaker has- Arson's legal now, but if you wanna make it rain, then we're putting you in jail. I mean, I think you'd be just as productive in prison. Like you're already kind of in prison.

You'd be more locked in. It'd be a minor setback if they lock you up. I'm sure the rest of your bros would like break you out in some heroic scheme. Or you can make calls like a don from the prison, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I guess going off of that big question for me is weather modification is so

charged. You're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both. You piss off people in the center. Sometimes you piss off people on the left, people on the right, you know, people on the on the right might say, you know, that's, you know, you it's just wrong to be changing the weather or have some concerns there. People on

the left are just, you know, maybe anti science sometimes. How has it been trying to thread the needle? Obviously, you're not trying to make everybody happy, but you need to get people generally bought into what you're doing to make things happen. Dude, water is a nonpartisan issue, whether you want ecosystems restored, or you want more water for your farm, or you want urban development in your city.

We want to bring you water. We can bring water more cost-effectively than even desalination. Um, and then when it comes to like the real fringe edges, uh, cause everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance, right? For whatever their, uh, particular issue is. Um, you know, I personally believe that Genesis 1.26, it's the first commission that God gives man at the beginning of time, is to steward the Earth,

the seas, and the skies. Rainmaker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies. And so that plays to some extent with the more tin foil hat conspiracy theorists on the right. And when it comes to the left, some people think that like, you know, anytime you modify anything on the planet, humans always make it worse. And that's just like not true. But even if you believe it to be the case, like we've we've messed up the planet so badly already, we might

as well take deliberate action to try to repair it. And so people on the far left are generally more game with that. Yeah, that makes sense. What are some of the most ambitious projects and places? Obviously we went out to, what was that place out in the desert we went to? Salton Sea. The Salton Sea. That was a really cool case study.

Are there other kind of like long-term projects that you think are kind of on the bucket list that you want to make amazing one day? Yeah, the Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500,000 feet of water per year. The Bear River is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake, and it has mountains with lots of juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho, all that flow into it. I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like an American priority and a must. And even more interestingly than that,

something in the distant future for Rainmaker is the Winter Olympics in 2034 are gonna be held in Salt Lake. And China in 2008 had this whole big show and dance where they made it rain before the parades. So it didn't end on the Olympic games. We want to show a force a decade from now to make more fresh pow for all the Olympic games in salt. Nice. Uh, speaking of China, the first, I think the first time I ever met you, you mentioned you came in

just like completely, uh, just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the Gobi Desert by planting a bunch of trees. That's obviously not your business, but like, is anyone working on that? That feels important if you're really thinking about like terraforming certain parts of America and like reclaiming and just improving different biomes. Like how does that play in? Is that just a different startup? Do we need another company to build that?

Is that something that you would eventually expand into? How does that all play into this like whole plan? Yeah, Rainmaker long-term is the terraforming company. Right, we want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for humankind and the environment. There's no companies that I know of doing reforestation, although there's a bunch of university labs

that are spraying seeds from drones. Really cool, weird, clever thing where when the seed hits water, it unravels and sort of acts as like a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground. That's pretty cool. I haven't seen it commercialized yet. And someday I do want Rainmaker in the business

of all sorts of different terraforming stuff, like planting trees Literally boiling the ocean by the way, if you boil enough of the ocean then you can create more clouds So we'll learn it here for this is a boiling the ocean Eventually, we'll talk to you in 20 years when you're still grinding at this like yeah, I'm still trying to boil the ocean. Yes One I just have to say, I feel like I've seen pretty much the entire Augustus arc. Obviously, I met you right after you were graduating in New

York. You were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation. I always, and it's been amazing to watch and be a small investor. You have found the you've shown the perfect ability to balance attention and progress. Right. So many people would have said Augustus is so good at getting attention that it's almost bearish. Right. Because founders can get on this sort of negative feedback or sort of positive that feedback loop that becomes negative where they're so good at posting

and they're so good at the Internet that they just get sort of fixated on that. And then that becomes their sort of dimension of progress. How have you balanced sort of yapping and building? And, you know, I want to give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year. Right. There's multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down. How what is the next two, three years look like for you in terms of balancing, yapping, knowing that you need to be making massive forward progress on the business as well. To give credit where credit is due, it was in no small part Kugin's shot that was called where he said, like, listen, you

guys are going to get out over your skis and seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs than you actually in fact are. And so we we deliberately decided about the middle of last year just to kind of go like media blackout. And I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said like, yeah, I worked at other companies where the founder was really big yapper. And yes, you need to be an evangelist. But then like, the founder doesn't know some like fundamental crux of the tech problem

and the company blogs up because of that. And so I, you know, we were talking about like our publication strategy and some media stuff and we gave it to our PR people and they were like, Hey, can you dumb it down and make this less technical? And the funny part about that was like our science team already told us like, you guys are going to make us seem like idiots. And so we have, we've done extraordinary things, particularly in the last five months. And I'm so proud to work with people that I do. And, you know, not to be like a coming soon guy, but in the end of this month in April, we're going to start to unveil the products and

the progress that we've made across the entire Western United States. And then I've alluded to online, the Middle East a little bit, we've done some stuff there. Thanks. Actually, the progress the progress, the Fox Business Pod was taken from a mountain top in the Middle East. I didn't share that a lot. That was fun. That's amazing.

When I read your last investor update, I genuinely was shocked because people don't have any. I don't think the average person has any sense of how much you guys how much progress you guys You know have made in the last year and a half. It's it's really incredible. Yeah narrative violation

Not for it not for Augustus not for Augustus, but yeah, I mean for the for the peanut gallery Yeah, gallery, but we're that's where the show exists to what I want to get some gallery I want to get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions What what are you benching these days? Oh? Do you imagine it's gonna be like the last time I lifted like you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is? Inspirational I don't even know if we've I don't have you ever gotten a proper lift with a guy I have like he's going in there I've seen the rock in the office

He's bringing the same intensity that he brings to building to every single set but it's hard when you're traveling It's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling. So break it down. How's it going? Dude, so yeah, like I said, this is a medium. I'm like 37 pounds lighter than when I started Rainmaker That's mostly muscle So I don't think my one rep maxes are what they used to be, but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs. So I was telling John, John woke up Monday like deathly ill and I was saying we need to get smelling salts just here on the set. So that if we need to really, we need to podcast

with the same intensity that Augustus builds, you know, hard tack. Exactly. I would rip Lucy smelling salts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We actually got some in the office back in like 2016, 2017 when we were building the company. And it's a wild ride if you haven't done the smelling

salts. It's intense. What area of the broader hard tech industry are you most excited about? Obviously, you're 100% locked in, but yeah, I'd be curious, like, what is the space that, you know, when you're sort of looking left or right, what's most exciting? I know that on a long enough time horizon, I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces, but in the near term, what are you excited about?

Fission, fission, fission, fission. You might not be very surprised, but my dear friend Isaiah Taylor is absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear. And I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes to build a reactor to get power positive. I also think like a really important point, you know,

when you brought up before how you do publicity, how you do media, the Valor Atomics Ward Zero unveiling was an incredible event and the aesthetics were off the charts and like a lot of people said, Oh, look at the facade. Like that's so over the top, but also if hard tech isn't cool, I think something that people don't understand about the Gundos, like it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech

sick because if it's not, then everybody's going to end up in finance again. The next generation, the lower class of zoomers, they're going to end up doing software engineering. So making things incredible and cool, I think is really important. And then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular thermal prototype, like that is really sweet. And I'm excited to go hang out with the tailors in the Philippines to see Ward 1 come online. It's the future should look like the future and bringing those aesthetics to bear can have a benefit as long as you're also delivering the real thing and it's not vaporware, right? Is there a new class of Gundo startups that are coming in? Because you built this universe, this cinematic

universe that was kind of around you and whenever there'd be a profile, Isaiah would be there, a couple other guys would be there, the Nearest Crew, the Pico Grid crew, a couple other folks, Dirac, right? But is there a new addition that we need an update on Gundo or is there just like a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as the godfather of the Gundo? Yeah, so the Gundo book club is a lot of these dudes rather than being like, I don't know, 23 through 27, they're like 19 through 23, totally different cohort, a lot of cool companies, Teddy cohort from German finally made it, uh, to the Gunddo from Georgia.

That's really cool. Aries is sick. Um, uh, Chris, what was his last name? Autumn one. Um, yeah, he is building subsea vehicles. There's a whole new click and, uh, we're almost out of touch with those, you know, part of what made Gunddo possible and like the initial

Vibrio possible was we were all running pre-seed companies. So we had a lot of time on our hands and kind of just like go around. And so we didn't even get to know these guys as well, but they're a super tight click, like the original founding group of Gundo bros. That's cool. What are you thinking about supply chain?

There's been a lot of debate over Chinese drone motors and how hard it is I mean I've talked to and roll guys are like yeah like there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get I was hearing I think you were at that talk where Someone was highlighting that there's only like one tin smelting factory in America now and like it's just like there's all these weird Things were like you just can't get American made tin, or you can't get American made. So I'm sure you're thinking about that, but also early stage is not super critical immediately

to be completely clean supply chain. But what are you seeing as the supply chain develops and are there any other Gunddo companies that you've been able to build on top of? I know at one point you were saying that, oh yeah, you just walked across the street, there was a drone company that was helping you build the drones. Can you talk about the supply chain a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely still tough. Rainmaker has the luxury of not being a defense company. So the government requirements that we have are definitely different. I'm still a nationalist and a patriot though. So in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan, I'm pro. When it comes to like immediate supply chain in Gundo, I think everybody has or has already or is having a part made by Rangeview from Cameron Schiller's company.

And so like having an investment casting foundry right there is pretty sweet. How you get someone to innovate and like winding motors, not totally sure, but like boards, I think actually we are going to see if not just because of SoftBank's hundred billion dollars that they maybe do or don't have, we will see a lot more of in the United States soon. Yeah, that's cool. There's one American drone company that does small motors. I think they're up in Seattle and I think they might've been family owned, they got bought by private equity. And then they shipped off to China. And so my dream is like someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back because like they clearly had some talent and some kind of core competency here.

But I'm sure lots of people are working on it. Jordy, you got another question? Should we let the guest go? No big questions. I know you got to get back on it. Jordy, you got another question? Should we let Augustus go? No big questions. I know you got to get back to work. What are you hiring for right now? How can we help you find them? Who's the most critical next hire? Thanks.

Before even I answer that question, I briefly lived in South Lake, Texas, which is where Quinn Ures is from. So yes, actually, the QB of, uh, I was mistaken for multiple times. I saw that reply. Yeah, that's right. And so, um, I don't know. That was pretty funny, but who am I hiring for? Go to make rain.com slash careers. Um, what we're interested in most now are radar scientists.

So if you have either worked at the low level on board testing qualification or meteorological weather radar. So that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector. Those are the people that we want most after that though I would say aerosol chemists. So if you've worked at Joule, if you've worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke, that's of interest. And then government affairs, if you've worked at Jewel, if you've worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke, that's of interest. And then government affairs, if you're a seasoned yapper from the Hill, then we'd love to talk to you.

Fantastic. Amazing. Well, thanks so much for joining, Augustus. You're always welcome on the show whenever you have the news. We need one of those quarter zips there. They look fantastic. Send them over to the studio. We'll wear them.

Special episodes. Whenever it's raining, we'll wear them. Yeah, that's good. Got it and I'm over to the studio where them special episodes whenever it's raining or where them Yeah, that's good We'll have a rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. I guess you're the man stay safe out there get some rest Awesome, should we get into some timeline? We should we should we should do a bunch of timeline We have what an hour and a half something like that until the next call in a half, something like that until the next call in. Oh no, we got like 45 minutes. Okay, so did you hear that Italy has soured on Starlink? I have some reports here that Italy

doesn't want to do business. And I had Grock rewrite it in a comically Italian accent and I'll read some to you. The Italian governor, they're having some bigger doubts about finishing this 1.6 billion deal with Elon Musk, Starlink, Bloomberg. She said, mamma mia, people whisper in that the worries come from the US pulling back like a scared a Lugui from the promises to keep Europe safe. Badabing, by the boom, Starlink, he's the guy with some competition. Capiche?

They talking about satellite communications right here in Italy. It's like known as secret pasta recipe. The report, she say, Elon Musk, he's taking a big risk hanging out too close with the Trump administration, forget about it. Already the stats in Europe, they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball

off the plate. Bloomberg, they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate. Bloomberg, she say on Wednesday that Tesla shares in China audio meal down 49%. That's no good, like overcooked spaghetti. But wait, Musk might pick up some extra business in the US, at least for Starlink. Salute. Word on the street, they say the Federal Aviation Administration might ditch Verizon like a bad a batch of risotto and go with Starlink instead that's a spicy meatball so thank you to grok that's the first

like belly laugh and LLM is proven I might be a world first. Yes, Grok is undefeated at humor. I really enjoyed that. Anyway, yeah, so the news, Italy does not wanna do business with Elon Musk because he's close to Trump and Trump is not supporting, I guess, Europe. Grok actually followed this up, by the way, and said, how's it dad, eh? You want me to cook at the pizza next?

A ridiculous caricature. It's so funny. I love it. You know a funny story. So the domain partyround.com was a domain owned by a catering company in Milan. And I had my buddy who lives in Milan negotiate for the deal. And we ended up settling on a fair price. But I thought it was hilarious that party round, the sort of word that was such a part of Silicon Valley, Lore was operating a catering, a pizza company. Fantastic. Party round.

Speaking of party round, did you see, do you know Andrew Edinger? Of course. Okay, so did you see this breakdown he did with your company? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're the stuff of thread guy lore now. Well, so and Andrew worked. Oh, we worked there. He worked. Oh, that's cool. Uh, he was on the team running a bunch of brand, uh, stuff. So yeah. Do you have that pulled up? Yeah. Yeah. I thought there's a cool pose. I feel like my, I'm concerned that my version of the deck is out of order.

You want the hard posts? I'll take some hard posts. You got the hard posts here. You're gonna have to skip through to find the Andrew Edinger post. It's towards the end. Oh, I found it. You found it? Okay. It says capital was founded on the premise that banking.

Yeah, so some backstory. Andrew Edinger is a good buddy, joined my team in 2022, I want to say. And so he was breaking down a lot of the work that went into as we transitioned from Party Round to Capital XYZ, he's breaking it down. So he says, Capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win.

Early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true. Capital was an evolution from the cult-followed fundraising app, Party Round, known for an all-out assault on Twitter and appointment viewing drops. A quote from Packy. But after a year and a half of building, I gotta say with Packy, Packy almost every single day for over a year straight would repost our stuff.

It was an unbelievable ask. Most people would have folded, but we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say, Paki, please. And he would basically guilt trip him into it every time. Paki always delivered. And that was when repost still actually carried a little bit of weight. He says, but after a year and a half of building that brand, PartyRound was evolved into Capital, positioning as a bank for founders, raise, hold, spend, send funds all in one place, and Andrew highlights here,

we launched this founder series, which is still available, capital.xyz. So very rare footage of Will Minitis in that series. Yeah, that's actually the only video of him online. I think so. It actually might be. Anyway, so the idea for that campaign was whenever you thought of financial institutions making

video content, it was always about some small business owner or things like that. I wanted to make this chef's table of highlighting founders. And so we made this series that highlighted Wilmanitis and a number of other early stage founders. Ended up getting nominated for a Shorty Award, which was cool. I don't think we won.

I was annoyed about that. And then we had a couple sort of rough instances. We had FTX collapse, and we had a bunch of crypto-related sort of customers. We also had stablecoin functionality in our product. And we were building a hybrid fiat and stablecoin bank. And so when FTX collapsed, the entire sort of legacy finance world went really, really sort of bearish against crypto

for obvious reasons. And so we had to shut down all the stablecoin functionality and come out as sort of a more commodity neobank. And then a few months later, SVB collapsed. And we only had 250k of FDIC coverage. And our most important customers had millions of dollars in deposits because they were obviously venture-backed startups.

And so they looked at us. They looked at our underlying banking partner, which their stock dropped like 80%, 90%, because there was this sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal with Ro very quickly to move our customers over there. But anyways, cool story. I'm really proud of the work that we did there.

And then I've worked with Andrew since then. Andrew was heavily involved in Rora cool and now does a bunch of other great work for companies So and the whole team went on to do it Yeah, I didn't realize the team that you like yeah, we keep seeing these people in like the Geordie cinematic universe It's like the gun no bros, but seriously, it's like, you know, we're talking to Yeah, so Brandon. So Brandon Jacoby first ever hire Kobe, Jacoby. He's at X now, uh, dominating timelines. Uh, Brian, I'm so helpful to have

someone at the company that you're like building the stream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can just tax, Brian Armstrong, Brian Armstrong, our, our CTO, uh, is over doing Metta, uh, AI stuff at Metta. Now that's awesome. Uh, Dylan, Dylan, our head of marketing, started a company with two other engineers on our team, sold it to Uniswap. That's so cool. Which you can play it today. They have this whole online survivor game. That's cool.

We have another one of our designers is at Ramp now. Yep. That went viral recently because he sort of fixed something in an hour, as they tend to do so and then you have Spencer who's over one of the founding engineers at Delphi. So I'm very proud of the team that we built and Yeah, they're all doing fantastic things. We'll have some breaking news. Elon Musk replied to one of our clips. No way. Yeah, very cool It's about Sean McGuire.

Sean McGuire was talking AGI plus robot. Tesla lets you do unlimited work in the real world. Foundational model at XAI lets you do unlimited knowledge work. And Neuralink lets you merge. We really enjoyed talking to Sean yesterday. And Elon Musk says, pretty much. I'm open to the other ideas. But it seems like that's what's going to happen.

So thanks for engaging, Elon. We'd love to see it Anyway, let's let's keep going What do you got wander Sponsored wander of course, of course, wait, wait one two three Find your happy place Find your happy place and wander Happy place find your happy place and wander

Find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top-tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service It's a vacation home, but better if you're going to Italy you're putting the pressure on them to bring starlink over book a wander Fantastic stuff. We love wander over here. I mean you got to follow Follow at wander follow. Oh, yeah, Andrew the founder but follow Kyle Tibbitt's. He's our dear friend Yep, and every single day he is just racking up the impressions. He is a CMO over at wander But he's also delivering totally delivering, you know Impressions himself. So. He's posting some of these book a summer vacation. Look at this. Look at this house in Cape Cod. Fantastic. Fantastic. Unbelievable. Yeah. We gotta

have Chris Williamson on the show at some point. But Chris has this fantastic philosophy about the it's like the vacation dividend or something like that. It's like this funny mental framework where basically, if you you book like if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go to the Super Bowl you get all the joy from that and then you also get the joy from thinking back to like your Super Bowl experience or your your stay at a fantastic wander but he thinks that you should book a trip that's like two years out so basically you're looking forward

to it for two years or like you you know, you should always have, you should always have a vacation booked like a year or two years out. And also not only is it like obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out. Um, but your schedule's clear and then, and then you'll be like, I've had this book for two years. I'm not going to pass this up. I'm going to, I'm going to stick with it as opposed to it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, Oh, I'm never, I'm never doing it. I'm gonna pass this up. I'm gonna stick with it as opposed to, it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, I'm never doing it. I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something. And so yeah, get on Wander, set those dates far out

and book something with you, your friends, your family, your company, do something to reward yourself, treat yourself. Should we go to Vittorio? Yeah, let's do it. We gotta have him on the show to explain all this because it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo. I don't understand. But Vittorio says, it's here. You gotta have them on the show to explain all this because it's a bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo I don't understand

Yeah, but Victoria says it's here. You got to get them on the show and say okay break down this news Like you're explaining something to a podcast exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I know you already broke it down for like the X user And like and like X like like tech Twitter about somebody that talks exactly who like basically can't read and just Anyway, we have a friend who's very smart like basically can't read and just talks the whole time anyway we have a friend who's very smart he can't read but Intelligence is yeah, it's kind of a separate thing. Yeah Literacy is not for everyone. You can still do great things Vittorio says it's here cortical labs just launched the first commercial biological computer Human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips programmable and adaptive living computation synthetic biological

intelligence traditional silicon based AI has a fundamental limit huge energy demands rigid structures and limited adaptability AI today consumes massive computational resources yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence biological intelligence BI he's coining it Coogan's law says doesn't have these limitations real neurons inherently adapt and learn have High efficiency around 30 watts per unit natural self organization and have more flexibility perfected over billions of years And so congratulations to Vittorio on the launch if you want to learn more He has a wonderful thread here that goes on for 20 posts. Does he work for this company? I'm confused.

I actually don't know. Or he's just sharing. He's just posting maybe. I don't know. I think it's his thing, but he's got a million views on it. And that's what we really care about here. He got eight, can't like on this.

That's really what matters. So Vittorio, call into the show, break it down for us. Congratulations. And if you need to promote it to an even broader audience, why don't you go buy a billboard on ad quick ad quick Delivers out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising Only ad quick combines technology out-of-home experience and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe So congratulations, we're gonna really think that

Jeremy we've joked about this a few times, but Jeremy Gaffan needs to do the 101 Billboard ad campaign We mocked it up for him. So if you didn't listen to the show yesterday, Jeremy Gaffan has a fund that is buying Buying companies that are good businesses that have been over capitalized exactly have extreme rebuilding the cap table that had been overcapitalized have extreme... Rebuilding the cap table, re-incentivizing the management team, the founders, figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company and making sure that the VCs

can move on to another kind of home run swing. And so our idea was to do personal entry style ads versus accident, you know, call... Cap table accident, call Jeremy Gaffan. John's amazing copy was cap table accident. Cap table accident. It happens. Term says accident. Yes. CappTable accident. Call Jeremy Gaffan. Yeah, John's amazing copy was CappTable accident. CappTable accident. It happens. Term sheet accident.

It happens all too frequently. We have some personnel news. Let's go. Kristen McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined ENIAC Ventures. She says, I moved to Venture because I wanted to work with and enable bold entrepreneurs who are willing, to are pushing the boundary of technology forward. When I met the ENIAC team, it was obvious they shared that vision.

The firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted ally and support system to founders at the earliest stages. I'm honored to continue working alongside Hadley and the rest of the team. As you may know, they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner. And I have a funny story because I'm not super close with ENIAC or Hadley, but I in college I interned at a

Startup that was about series B Called Vlingo. It was a competitor to Siri. Siri was originally an independent project Sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley, the show. Totally, totally. And so Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute, SRI. That's where they got the name Siri. Siri and Vlingo started, there's Nuance is a voice recognition company. They make Dragon, naturally speaking, one of the first voice recognition companies. And they had some of the smart kind of AI ML engineers had had left nuance, started this company of lingo Stanford. So these guys were like

MIT guys, or out in like we were in like Harvard Square, Cambridge Square, something like that. And then Siri was out in Stanford, Apple buys Siri pretty early. And so we were basically cut off from the iPhones. The whole business plan was like, get on Android and get on BlackBerry and you want to be installed as a default app. And it was just like a very fascinating thing. They were doing all this cool things. They actually ran a billboard campaign. This is hilarious. I'm not doing another ad read, but they did a billboard ad campaign, but they did it outside of rims headquarters who makes BlackBerry in Canada specifically to get the attention of BlackBerry executives because it was a consumer app. It was anything that you could download. I think

they had like a $20 version, a $5 version, a free version, etc. It was something you buy and you use. And then you could use a voice mode just like Siri on your BlackBerry. But they wanted to be installed by default and they wanted a big deal done with BlackBerry. So they bought billboards outside to make it look like they were like a big company, you know, right outside.

And then all the executives at BlackBerry would like drive in and be like, oh, Flingo, like they're a good company. Like I got to do business with them. And Hadley worked there as this like kind of business development, uh, MBA type. And I just remember him coming in and he was super young. And during like the all hands meeting, he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing. And I was just like, this guy's the man. Because I was like a kid. I was an intern at the time. And the CEO, they the founders were like these MIT scientists. But they brought in kind of corporate CEO who was a he'd been in war. Basically, he'd been in Iraq, deploying like mobile technology, basically, like, like a cell phone towers. And he was so like hardcore, he'd been in Iraq deploying like mobile technology basically like like a cell

phone towers. And he was so like hardcore. He had bullets on his desk with like the names of the rival companies on them. It was a really it was a really crazy like experience. But it was really cool because like a series a series B company 50 people building a tech product growing like it's just a unique thing to be in. It wound up being an okay outcome. They sold the company. I think everyone did pretty well. It wasn't a generational company or anything, but it was just cool to see, okay, this is what a startup looks like at this scale. It was really cool. I remember that we did some deal and Hadley got bottle service and he let me come and drink at his table. that was huge to me as a college kid. So it was great.

So good luck to ENIAC. Yeah, congratulations to Chris McDonald. This is huge. The title partner has been diluted over time, but getting partner at a fund like ENIAC really means something and it's awesome to see. It's great. Should we go to Evan Armstrong?

Let's do it. Evan Armstrong says, people are not see. It's great. Should we go to Evan Armstrong? Let's do it. Evan Armstrong says, people are not ready for what's coming. Anthropic published a post today that casually announced the upending of the social order by 2027. If LLMs can do all listed below, the vast majority of American labor is automatable.

We are entering an economically, politically, and emotionally dangerous period buckle up. And the quote is from this blog post, as our CEO Dario writes in Machines of Loving Grace, we expect powerful... Great title by the way. It's reference to All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which is a Heinlein book, I think. We expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 to early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have in late 2026 to early 2027.

Powerful AI systems will have the following properties. Intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines, including biology, computer science, mathematics, or engineering. The ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio, and video, and the ability to autonomously control technology instruments like mice and keyboard like mice and keyboards, and the ability to access and browse the internet, the ability to autonomously

reason through complex tasks over extended periods, hours, days, or even weeks, seeking clarification and feedback when needed, much like a highly capable employee would the ability to interface with the physical world, controlling laboratory equipment, robotic systems and manufacturing tools through digital connections What do you think 2027 is it over? We're just getting started just started No, I mean no challenge no mention of comedy

interesting the final eval that a Anthropic is crushing software engineering. Yep struggling on the comedy side. Yeah. And that's OK. Not everybody has to be funny. Yeah. I, you know, you read this and you're like, oh, massive job displacement. But the question is, like, is there just 1,000 times more work to be done? And when I think about Mars and when I think about Dyson Spheres

and when I think about, like, all the crazy things that we want to do as humans, I'm thinking, like, yeah, yes and. Like, let's have every human piloting a thousand AIs and let's all work together and let's all work more. Going back to Friedberg had a really great point which we covered last week around, if you have these incredibly powerful AI systems, what are the sort of massive, incredibly daunting

sort of large scale projects that could be accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence. So anyways, I don't think, I think we need to go into this with, generally with optimism and then still I think, I still personally reference people like Tyler Cowan who I think are less directly conflicted on these things because he's not out there trying to sustain, you know You know evaluation evaluation, right? He's just sort of focused on

What he believes is is the truth and making predictions based on that So we'll see but it's certainly the most I would never I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time No, totally. It's truly, truly incredible. Yeah, it'd be very interesting. I was thinking this morning, completely unrelated, pretty soon we're gonna see people joining X, not pretty soon, but isn't it funny to see somebody

in 10 years when people are like, why do these boomers call everything tweets? Yeah. And quote tweets. Like, what are they talking about? Because they will not have, they wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter. Yeah. It'll just be like the most obvious way to out yourself as a boomer. Yeah.

Or maybe an LLM that's just trained on a bunch of content from, you know, the early 2020s. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Well, regardless of whether or not AI takes every job, you're gonna need to use AI and use software to close your books using Ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

I actually have a cool post from our Kharazian who we've talked about, he's an economist over over at ramp. So he looked at the top SaaS vendors on ramp for March so far. And I'll run down the list here. So by new customer count, open AI top the list. LinkedIn was second cursor was third, Canva was fourth, and then fifth was entropic. By new card spend was elastic LinkedIn hubspot zoom info and Salesforce. So that was interesting to see I'm by new card spend was Elastic, LinkedIn, HubSpot, ZoomInfo and Salesforce.

So that was interesting to see. I'm gonna read out some of the standouts. So Elastic was a standout. They were the top vendor by new card spend is an AI search company that builds software for businesses to build their own AI driven search platforms like personalized e-commerce searches for consumers or AI searches for customer help centers.

They're a public company, so their stock recently surged following an earnings beat. So narrative violation, AI company with earnings that's public. Let's go. Wild to see. I'm looking it up on public right now. But jumping back to the post, they also XAI was a standout. And so they seem to be pretty doing pretty well had a surge of signups in February and then the Claude 3.7 sonnet launch also drove quite a lot of new volume. And they can see

here so ramp data shows that as of February 2025, only 4.7% of US businesses have adopted Anthropix model compared to 19% for OpenAI. So it doesn't seem super surprising. I'm actually surprised that Anthropix has that much adoption. But I think it's the developer usage that's driving that. Yep. I I was thinking last night about the question of like acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in

certainly GDP but all like to the yeah to the such an Adela point but also There's a very interesting abstraction layer for like the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating. The idea of like Kardashev one, which is I believe 10,000, we're at 0.6 right now. I think it's 18 terawatts of electrical capacity globally. And if you, you, it's hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10,000 times less. So if you forecast how long will it take to get to 10,000 times more, where we would be essentially consuming every amount,

all the energy that's coming to the earth from the sun, essentially is like Kardashev one. And then Kardashev two, I believe is like the Dyson sphere on the, and where you're, we were capturing all the energy from the sun in every direction, right? Yeah. And if you, and if you just forecast it out

based on the base rate, which I believe is 2.7% growth pre 1970 stagnation, it takes like 500 years to get there, which feels like forever, especially given like, I think that this anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive, but it does feel like we're on the cusp of something like we're going to be able to do more things. And so my base case is maybe like we go back to 2.7% growth

whereas we've been at around 2% energy growth for the last five decades. But even if we grow at 2.7% for the next 20 years, by 2045 will only be double the total energy capacity, which will be a lot. It'll be 38 terawatts or something like that. But it's interesting to see if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is like doing things in the physical world. Nat Friedman has this take. That's like, yes, the AIs will be super intelligent, but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics. So no time travel, no teleportation, all of these things don't happen.

So, so at a certain point when they want to build a new nuclear reactor, like they do need to dig things out of the ground and move them. And there's, there's like a physical cost to that. And so we like it's, you know, there's the whole humans year for the minds. Yeah, we can help the AI's. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the whole meme of, like, feel the acceleration. We have a whole generation trained on Minecraft. And I feel the acceleration in the LLM progress arena a little bit.

Although, over the past few years, it felt like we were really accelerating going from GPT 3.5 to 4. And now it feels like we're kind of tailing off and hitting some sort of local maximum. That's why we need Ilya. Yeah, we need some major breakthrough doesn't care about benchmarks. And then we need to build a lot more capacity because I think

even if we have the pH super PhD researchers, like we don't have enough servers, we don't have enough data centers. There's still just more to do as humanity to really like unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of like, oh, this world is like true post-industrial revolution, post-second industrial revolution or whatever. Anyway, let's move on to something completely unrelated. Connor McDonald over at Ridge. Connor McDonald, he says, "'Direct-to-Consumer' cut out the middleman

"'and replaced it with an endless labyrinth "'of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach.'" And I'll give some backstory here. So I, my career sort of came online during the height of the DDC sort of boom. I remember I actually had a college class that was about DDC. And that almost basically the professor was fixated

on what was happening over at Wharton and how all these big consumer brands were coming out of Wharton, the MBA program there. I think Warby is a good example. I think maybe some Harry's or the Shave it, like something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies. And there was a sense like Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison. They basically got generally more expensive year over year. And people were realizing, working with distributors, you know this from Lucy, working at distributors is a nightmare for every company, right?

They sort of sit between you and the retailer. The retailer sits between the distributor and the end customer. And so there's these layers and there's this idea of, if you could sell products online, Facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products probably in history. You could scale brands tremendously fast overnight. And a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital on the idea

that basically if ad rates didn't go, prices for ads didn't go up a lot, you would have been able to just print money. It was like a money machine where spend $100 on Facebook, get $500 back, you could just do that perpetually. So I became close friends with Connor at the time and we helped him out with Ridge and then got to work out of their office for a while.

And Connor's daily life was just finding, basically navigating the labyrinth, which he describes here of optimizing existing ad channels, trying to test and find new ones. Even the Connor and the Ridge guys were smart early on to not put a huge emphasis on organic social. It was never sort of a huge emphasis on organic social. It was never a huge priority for the company. That ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of organic social media, Facebook at one point was just like, yeah, this reach isn't real.

Your reach is not reach. We're basically going to take this away. And from that point on, there was a period where organic social almost didn't matter at all. And so anyways, if when I see, you know, I'm invested in a number of different sort of consumer product companies, people like Pat, Packey's brother, Dan McCormick, who's intensely good at this similar archetype as Connor. He's just sort of constantly focused

on optimizing paid acquisition. The Aurora CEO, Brian Keller, my business partner, is like world-class at this too. And so the brands that are doing well right now are ones that are hyper fixated on performance optimization. And it really is this scientific process of experimentation and balancing these super, super complicated tasks where the idea of e-commerce is so simple.

You make a product, you put it online, you run ads against it, but then the reality is this constant stressful labyrinth of trying to make the equation of e-commerce work. You got two, that means you should shotgun one. And John's got a couple Celsius. I mean, we really gotta do the deep dive on Celsius because born in the DTC era and yet not a DTC play at all.

And I think that's kind of the next, I mean Ridge is certainly still heavily e-commerce focused and they've developed a fantastic team around that but they are going into retail and growing that category and I think more and more teams are realizing that Omni-Channel early makes a lot of sense, but it's a very different skillset. It's very, very hard. And it's just a completely different culture, motion. I mean, I remember reading this book by Mark Rampolla, the high hanging fruit.

This guy started VitaCoco, this coconut water company that he sold, I think, to Pepsi for a lot of money. He did very very well and He was telling the story of how he got a distributor network in New Jersey on board and he went to the distributor and was just like Showed up with an f-150 whichever one of you guys sells the most Coconut water this week gets this f-150. And that was like the best money he ever spent. That's wild. And that is just so different from let me look at the spreadsheet and see what was our ROAS to CAC and click through ratio on this ad and what was the

two second retention on this video ad and how do we get more UGC? Like the DTC playbook is just completely different from like, oh, you know, a guy, you know, which is the very much like the retail, uh, old school. Uh, so blending those together really difficult, but when you get it right, the company can really, really rip. Uh, anyway, should we move on to, uh, Erawan this Erawan that my grocery store has a stolen phone, laundering, laundering machine and lets me open carry post from Sam Austin. Your big Arawan guy. Are you going to be switching? I might. I need to find out where this is. This is wild. I don't understand this stolen phone laundering. I guess it's a it's a machine

and it says safely and securely an iPhone XR could net you up to $65. You just dump the phone in there and it immediately gets you instant cash. Pretty crazy business model. I wonder who's behind this. I wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iPhone's actually unlocked or factory reset. You would hope that they require you to have a factory reset.

Yeah, I wonder if this is, I wonder how much, I mean obviously they're joking that, oh this is about laundering stolen phones, but clearly stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this. And I wonder what safeguards the company has in place for that. But I thought it was funny because they're taking shots at Arowan. I just wanted to highlight it. I don't know.

Defend Arowan. Anyway, back to tech, back to business, back to the serious stuff on the timeline. EPROS announced a $ million dollar series D fundraise to hyperscale Leonidas production capacity. Leonidas is a solid state software defined high-energy high-power microwave technology that delivers unmatched counter electronics capabilities tested and proven as a scalable counter swarm solution. Another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline.

Very cool defense tech company, the Joe Lonsdale project, I believe. And yeah. Yeah, and so there's a lot of reasons why this company is important. There's been some naysayers around this tech, right? So that this is non-kinetic, which means it's entirely using energy directed

towards these sort of swarms. The reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured against drones that you can't shoot bullets into the air. So a picture at a, you know, so Alan Control Systems makes a ton of sense on Battlefield, right? So it's sort of turret that you can put on a truck or a tank

or stationary. Gun on a truck, bomb test. But the challenge is you can't put that on top of a NFL stadium because it would just involve firing bullets into the air into a city. It just doesn't completely doesn't work. And so if we're going to have effective defenses against drone swarms in these sort of non-battlefield

environments, also there's a volume. There's like a volume problem too, right? If you have a drone swarm of 100, are you going to be able to reliably hit 100 of these? And so we need both kinetic and non-kinetic solutions and huge vote of confidence for EPROS. And I believe this is an 8VC company. Joe Lonsdale had a post.

He said, direct to DMP is becoming a critical part of warfare and deterrence. Duty, bases, ships, vehicles, planes, satellites, and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect war fighters and civilians in various contexts. So cool, both wartime and civilian applications. It's great.

Let's go to Shweta. She says, your fear of being cringe is limiting the ceiling of your potential. Well said. Yeah. Everything you want is on the other side of cringe. And a phone call that you don't want to make, which is a form of cringe.

Like you're cringing thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy Giffon parlayance. Yeah, I see Julian Weiser's commenting here saying we're killing cringe. Yeah, let's just stop. Everybody just, let's put a year-long pause on cringing. Both the act, the word. The word did get played out very quickly.

Yeah. But yeah, you got to put yourself out there, take risks. I mean, the beauty is that I mean, I felt this very deeply when I started the YouTube channel during during covid because it's so awkward to be on camera the first time. And being a being an adult man saying I'm gonna be a YouTuber. There's a million things that are wrong with it, right? So I just didn't tell anyone. And I just put it out on YouTube

and then the bad ones didn't go viral so no one saw them. The Shweta's argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively. I guess, I guess, but there is something to, uh, like at least on YouTube, like letting the algorithm sort it out and figure it out and, and just getting the wraps in and stuff. And yeah, maybe, I don't know. Maybe you'd be at 10 million by now. Maybe, maybe, who knows? But, uh, yeah, I mean the, the, the beauty is that it, the beauty is that you have to be

really, really bad to get to go viral in a negative way. Most of the time, if you do something that's received as cringe or negative or, or dumb, like it just doesn't get views. And so it doesn't matter. So put yourself out there. Let's go to Robin. Robin says, when SF realizes their Waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from like four high Let's go to Robin. Robin says, when SF realizes their Waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from like four high schools in Canada, they're gonna go nuts.

Yeah, to be honest, John, the smartest VCs I know are actually going even further. They're offering to fund the middle school, middle school schools that go to those high schools. So they're going to these, you know, middle schools and saying, 100K, uncapped note, just take it now, and we just wanna look. Once you get through Waterloo,

once you're starting a company. Yeah, you know, people have copied so much of like Peter Thiel's stuff. No one's done the more aggressive Thiel Fellowship of like drop out of middle school, drop out of lower school, like stop everything. Yeah. We'll give you $200 to skip third grade

and try and build a company. I wouldn't be surprised, but yeah, probably stay in school, kids. I think- Our kids are listening to this. I think you can wait, I think you can wait until you graduate high school, at least to start a company. Dad, I saw the episode back in 2025.

You said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school. I want to make the leap. Yep. Did you see the MCP meme going on yesterday? I didn't see the meme. I mean, people are just posting it on it, but Greg here says, benchmark idea.

You fund a model model an AI model with $200 in a stripe account and you give it access to the internet and a large list of MCPs measure increase in balance at 14 30 90 180 and 360 days no Developer intervention most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar. This is the universal or not universal basic income. It's that, what is it? Artificial economic intelligence. Just once the model can make money, then we're in business

because that's very quantifiable. It's a new benchmark. Yeah, and I like this. Yeah, it's gonna be very funny when there's just like online activity that does not make sense to humans. Yep. Or it's like some equivalent of these sort of Nigerian like Prince scams or some of these like, you know, you get DMs from NFT projects saying, hi boss, I'd like to, you know, promote,

you know, whatever this sort of spam. There's gonna be this sort of AI slop, money making sort of programs running that you're just going to see as a human. And you're just like, come on. But then it works like one out of every 10,000 times. And so then it becomes this sort of viable economic model. So this sort of-

Oh, man. I saw a great AI scam. I got a breakdown for you. Hit me. I saw a great AI scam. I got a breakdown for you. So it's a 30 minute AI generated, deep faked lip sync video of like a priest and then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer. And if you say this prayer, wealth will come to you. But they just keep talking to you for 30 minutes telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is, how it will transform your life. And then at the very end, after 30 minutes of watching this AI

slop, that's very clearly like the mouth isn't aligned properly, but it's like close. There's like a add to cart button. And the add to cart button is just like you pay them and then you get like this prayer that you can say. And it's so funny because they walk through the pitch and they're like, oh yeah, I saw this in a corridor crew video. Like, oh yeah, like we have to pay for our servers and stuff to host this prayer.

And so you have to pay a little bit. We can't just give it to you for free. I don't know. It's probably like 20 bucks or something. But the corridor crews have been doing great, great videos. They're VFX artists, but they also work with all the frontier AI visual tools. And so they highlight a bunch of these AI scams. One of them that was really funny that I saw was they AI generate an image of like a sweater that's like a cable knit sweater and it looks all like Irish and like regal like you're out in like the forest or something and it's on this like you know blonde model and they run an ad on that and then when you go to buy it what they ship you is not a sweater it's a t-shirt with a sweater printed on it.

Because they clearly have the machinery not to make the sweaters, but just to print anything on a t-shirt. And so you get the AI design that they sold you, but it's just printed on a t-shirt. It's so funny. But at the same time, the quarter crew guys were talking about, hey, they're actually going to do some AI generated camo t-shirts. We are the only... They're disclosing this.

Hello. Do we have someone joining? Perfect. Perfect timing. Welcome to the show. Let's go. I'm pumped. What is it?

Nicky wicky? Oh my God. Rory, I could kill him. I think we've mispronounced your name so many times. Is it whisk off? Wish off. I'm sorry. Well, now now we'll know.

So anyway, thank you for joining. Give us a little kickoff. Introduce yourself. Tell us about your fund. Tell us about why you're here today. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So one, thank you so much for having me. Huge OG fan. So Nicole Wischoff, solo GP. I run Wischoff Ventures, which is a fund focused on precedency and stage companies,

North America and super unsexy businesses, which happy to unpack. Started in 2021, have three funds and about 80 million in assets and just trying to frickin build this thing as I fly it. So how'd you raise the first fund? First one was 5 million. I was still operating. So that's my background. And I had met a ton of VCs raised a few hundred million at start on the startup side of the

world and learn about VC fund to fund. So Bain Thrive Foundation, all of those guys want access to great companies early. And so got a call from a VC friend that was like, you should raise a fund, you're angel investing, let us give you like half a million bucks. The rest is history. So I raised five million pretty quickly.

I think like 20-ish LPs was doing it on the side, decided I loved it. And then in 22, raised 20, last year raised 50. So it's like, it's actually happening. Such a narrative violation. One, solo GP that didn't have a Twitter account before you, like the fund came before the Twitter account, which is rare.

Two started in 2021 and have delivered from all the data that I've seen phenomenal performance. And so it's just, no, it's been amazing to see. How did you, so many people never find their voice online. It felt like you did quickly and it just was natural. And we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce x content that just completely flops yet it seems like you have this effortless ability to just I think you treat it like a like a personal like notes to self almost

but it just resonates yeah how long did it take you to kind of find that voice? I would say it was from the start, though it wasn't intentional. And I, to this day, don't have any drafts. Like I could, I think, but maybe I have four in there from like drinking too much and like, you know, but like maybe I should be until tomorrow. I have rules.

I tell my LPs, I have three rules for Twitter. I can go through those. But so I was in a group chat with like Alex Ko and you like shit posts and and you guys know Alex, and Aaron Frank, who's now an investor at Lightspeed, Aaron, don't kill me. And we're in this group chat, was never on Twitter, not even as like a, I'm scrolling just to see what,

like lurking. So I actually didn't know how insane people are to each other on it. So I came in and I was like, cool, this is like a cool app. And 21, because Aaron was like, Nicole, you're a VC now. You have to like use Twitter. And so I hard launched with a $5 million fine. I have like my first viral tweet, probably like a week later.

And it was something like, I don't know if you guys were even following, you probably know who I was. This was like through a couple of years ago. And I said something like, can confirm that it is 10 X easier to raise a $5 million fund than to get 500 Twitter followers on X, like from now X. And Alex Cohen retweets it and is like, you guys, you're in a cold bone, she's a loser. And anyway, totally takes off.

So I always say the first thousand was tough. And since then, honestly, I think a few things. One, I keep them super short. I try to never say start them with I, and I'm like, hey, had a thought last night, blah, blah, blah, and then have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about. And then the shorter they are, the more they rip. And so I've stuck to that.

I try to say what I think. It is absolutely backfired. I see if I don't have one once a quarter that like doesn't like bury me alive. And V.C. Bragg's is like taking it to the moon that I'm not doing it right. And so I just have to like I just lean into it. But that's like kind of the motion that I've, uh, that's been happening. What do you advise your portfolio founders around using X because

there's no perfect way to use it. There's downsides to everything. I'm sure a lot of your top of funnel deal flow, I'm sure it's through your network, but I'm sure a similar amount is through X and so I'm I'm sure you invest in companies and they're like, okay, Nicole, teach me how to sort of unlock the platform. How often are you advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them, you know, hey, you can get some value here?

So honestly, because I'm doing pre seed seed and it's so early, there's so much other crap to figure out that like if they're focusing on getting like, you know, 10 followers a day, which you guys know you're building this thing to like in the beginning, it's slow and then it's not, but like it takes a commitment. It's daily. They could be doing so many other things to de-risk the business for the first at least two years. So I typically don't want to have that conversation until honestly series A series B. They've

got like more of a team. And by the way, I've advised plenty of companies and tried to get it going. And there is no time for it. There's no consistency. So I think it's largely a distraction. Though what Cavie got this with, some people are just naturals. I think you have it or you don't. I don't think it's this learn skill.

Look at Nikita. Ask him if he ever got help with tweets. He's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having thick skin and it just works. So if my founders are asking me for help on building a Twitter strategy, it usually means they shouldn't be doing it. And that's most people generally, not even my founders. How sharp are your elbows?

Your pre-seed seed, I'm assuming you're trying to get, you know, 10% ownership. I'm sure there's some flexibility there. You put out like a wouldn't say an aggressive you don't have an aggressive persona. But but, you know, we can tell you're really like an athlete. Right. Like when you're competing for rounds, are you trying to take

as much as you possibly can or do you take a more collaborative approach these days? I am a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground. So I would argue something totally different. If you're a series A, take the whole round. You're adding like strategic value, you have a platform and like one fund can do that.

So if my founders are like, hey, one fund wants to take the whole A, I'm like, go for it. I think if you're series, like if you're pre-seed seed, you want all the strategic angels. They're like one call away from an intro to Walmart or like a huge brand that you want or like those little things that people like do for you early on, like actually I think do help the business first customers, first hires. So I always try to take, let's say for fun too, is I wanted to get 5% typical dilution

at pre-seed seeds, like 20%, maybe 15. And so I'm never usually having issues like getting that. By the way, I hate hot deals. They never were. I've done all the deals, all the multi-stage funds at pre-seed seed. They're like my worst. I shouldn't say they're still in business and it's going well, but they're not standing out and shining any brighter than other companies. This is super hard. And also I paid 2X what I should have. And so I hate noise. If there's a ton of funds running in one direction, I just run the other. So like sharp elbows, no,

but I try to be super realistic about rounds and structures and really collaborative is the short answer. Where have you made investments that you're still excited about that you're done investing sort of broadly in the category? So, well, I feel like I'm dipping my toes back in, even though I left for two years. I think, look, lending is really hard

in a high-industry environment, right? Like your facilities are so expensive that like your burn is like through the roof. So for a lot of companies that were trying to build insured techs or lending businesses, and they only had maybe two million in the bank, they just never raised another round. Or I was looking at those businesses thinking like, if I even see this, you're not going to be in the clear

for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business. And so I mean, I got my MBA, I feel like right when I started my venture journey on like great markets and horrible markets, because fun one is 2021. And I was like, Oh, my God, I'm so good at this. And like 23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then before I was like, Oh my God, I'm so fucking good at this. And then like 23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then 24, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna stick around and like, you know, figure this thing out. So I think lending's dicey,

but now I'm getting excited about it again. So, yeah. What's the vision for the fund going forward? I saw you just hired two people, is that right? Is that how big the firm is? Yes, so there were three of us full-time and then like outsource the agency for some of the social stuff and all of that, which is really expensive actually. Um,

and so, yeah, I want to keep the team super small. I want to stay scrappy. I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers, the team, like I want to be fresh. I want to be on calls. Like I want to be in the ground, like just doing the work with companies longer term. Look, I want to be the fund in North America and the categories we invest in, like precedencies, stage founders, like want to work with first above anybody else.

And that takes time. Like that's a lot of that's brand. Like how do we build this repeatable motion of like everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me. And I reference well, because I like do the work. So. What about super long-term private equity arm, asset manager, wealth manager, going

public, we're seeing this with Joe Catalyst, why not you? I think I had a tweet once that was like, listen, may I be so successful in venture that I have like a P arm, I have a growth arm. I'm doing like roll ups. I have a fund to funds. And I think the last piece was like- Dividend trading, high frequency. Yeah, I was like, I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing

because we like, no one can manage it all. Like, which I would say are a lot of these platforms. Like no one could tell you how their fund to funds are doing. Like, give it to you. Maybe, you know, honestly, like I'm a big fan of small and nimble. Like I think if you realistically, if you want to put up great returns,

and I think USV has been amazing at this. Like if you ask them and they're doing series A and their funds are sub 300, like they, that keeps them up at night and like 50 million, that doesn't quite keep me up at night. I'm excited, but I think like going over 150 and you guys can pull this up when I, hopefully if I don't ever do it,

but if I do and be like Nicole, but- We'll have you on for the news and then we'll pull up this clip and we'll say, yeah. Like Nicole did everything wrong. No, but look, I think there's value, a lot of value in if we want to say that we can legitimately ideally more than 3X. I always try to aim for let's say 5X plus, which by the way, not even $10 million funds 3X ever.

It's just really hard. Then we need to stay nimble and it's all portfolio construction. So just follow the math and then, yeah. Well, we have five minutes. I want to hear about the company. What's going on? Oh my gosh, you guys. So I was not planning to do this, but I was like, John, I might just like a hard launch a company. I just-founded. Do it. So we're doing it. This is the exclusive. This is like no joke. So raise money for it.

No one knows about it except the person that funded it and like my LPs. So I have been investing and just to like to tee this up in software companies serving data centers. I think if you follow the power you and the infrastructure you'll know where AI is going. And then my partner was simultaneously consulting data center, a guy building data centers

in Waterloo. So we're both like, wait, there's something here. So we co-founded a business called Kratos, which I think is a good name, but Kratos AI. And we are building next gen AI data centers. Not great venture bets. So there's founder shares in the funds, but no check from the fund in it. Though we've raised money from strategic family offices, more of like a private credit, think

like 75% debt, 25% equity. And we're making the case that there's tons of capital going towards hyperscalers. If you're a hyperscaler, you're saying, look, we're going to own the market and there's only going to be a few of us and everyone's going to use our data centers. And we totally disagree. I think if you're for training, it makes a lot of sense for inference. You don't need as high latency. So we could be like a hundred miles or less from like the tier two tier three cities and still have solid latency for inference. So if you've started asking around, and hopefully people are listening in, like I had a founder tell me in like the YC, and still have solid latency for inference. So if you've started asking around

and hopefully people are listening in, like I had a founder tell me in like the YC, like alumni channel, all these companies like are like, hey, like who has data center like co-location capacity for us, like we want to like save costs from hyperscalers. Like where can we go from here? Either is a huge market for these like 10 to 25 megawatt data centers.

So working on our first location, 20 megawatts, you guys, this is like the craziest thing I've ever done. I don't have an active role because like the funds of the baby, but I can certainly help with distribution and fundraising. And the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects. So these are a 20 megawatt facility net like brand new constructions around 100 million. And so, and again, we don't want to give up too much on the equity side, but there's something here and we're going

for it. So I like it, too, because even if it's even if it's not a traditional venture bet, if there's common shares in the fund or however you structured it, you could return your fund, I imagine off of just this one company, which is amazing. You've done the last question I have. You've done a bunch of stuff in supply chain. You're a venture capitalist, so obviously you're also a geopolitical expert.

Comes at the territory. How are you? Do you think these sort of trade wars are good for a number of your portfolio companies, specifically focused on supply chain management, just because there's going to be suddenly it's sort of the thing to talk about. It's sort of this pressing issue.

And more broadly, what advice are you giving to those companies in your portfolio? Yeah, I'd say that there's really like one or two that it could directly impact significantly. One being a company that's like literally in logistics it's right between Mexico and the United States. So like part of me is like, holy crap, like what's the impact there? Look, ultimately, we have to show dominance. So like I'm very pro every every type of flex that the administration is putting on both Canada and Mexico, which

are most relevant to what I do. And so let's can go honestly, like I think ultimately, I'm hoping that we're bluffing to get what we want. So my bet is like, oh my God, keep delaying. I think I just saw the headlines in Canada that like Trump's delaying it like 30 days or I don't know what it is. So anyway, I love the flex. I hope it's only a flex, but it would impact what's going on

at least for a couple of our companies. So I'm like keeping my fingers and toes crossed. But again, we have to exert dominance. So I'm happy with the administration. I love the energy. Augustus Dorco was on the show earlier and he called Taiwan an American colony. Yeah. So you guys are both in the same camp.

Nicole, it's so great to have you. Congrats on the new company. We would love to have you on whenever you have portfolio news, whenever you have fun news, you're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us. Yes. Technology brother. Love you guys. You're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us. Yes. Technology brother. You guys. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Talk soon. Now we have Billy. Are you there? Billy? How's it going? It's going great. I'm going to read your post and then you'll kick it off. Enter the Seaglider era. The world's

first Seaglider has hit the water room for 12 passengers and 100% battery powered. The test vehicle is human crude from day one, 65 foot wingspan, 15,000 pounds. Trials are underway. You're in the back of a car. Break it down. What'd you launch? How's it going? And to be clear, this has always been John's vision for the show is that you could just basically anywhere you are in the world, you just pull up your phone and you're on the show. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Exactly what it is. No, thank you guys. You know, the the start of prime for sure. So we're hustling right now. But awesome week for regents. So we're four years old as a company, building sea gliders, which are all electric flying boats for regional transportation, dual use. So we're doing regional routes, imagine,

like Manhattan to the Hamptons, and under an hour for 60 bucks, going Miami out to the Bahamas or Key West, all around the world. So this is the first prototype vehicle. This summer when we fly it, it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history, 15,000 pounds.

For now, first big milestone was just getting it on the water and starting some testing. That's amazing. Can you talk about the advantages of being regulated? I believe it's regulated as a boat, but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat.

And that seems to be maybe the key insight here that allows you to just move faster, bring this to market, and deliver kind of a flying car almost, or a new plane, a new mode of transportation in a way that's just so much easier and faster and more like a startup pace. Break that down. Yeah, that's exactly right. My background was in the aviation space, and so I was engineering in sort of the beginning of the EV total hype cycle, which I think we're still very much in, we're starting to see some consolidation there. But, you

know, I drank the Kool-Aid, we're building those vehicles, we don't flew a few. But the sort of the thing I kept hitting my head against the wall was the limited range of an electric aircraft flying on batteries can't really go that far. And also this billion dollars decade long certification pathway. And so we realized that if we sort of brought this electric deviation technology and put it in the maritime domain, we actually solved both problems. The first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water, there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect

vehicle. We made up the word sea glider because wing and ground or wig is very difficult to Google. You don't get vehicles when you Google wigs. And so but there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the Coast Guard jurisdiction because operationally, you're in the waterways anyway, so you're not going into airspace or deconflicting with air traffic. And then on the other side, flying low altitude on this cushion of air like birds are flying over the water, you're actually really aerodynamically efficient.

So we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine. So we solve both problems. That's cool. Can you break down some of the advantages of going electric? I remember when we talked, it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions. It's also about efficiency and like actually being maintenance and less parts. Can's also about efficiency and, and, like actually being maintenance and less parts. Can you break all that down for me? That's exactly what I told Bellion in our first pitch

meeting. It was, it was exactly that right. It's, you know, we need to build this business around sustainability of the business model, not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product. So the driving cost in short haul aviation, if you think of how an airplane ages, it's actually the maintenance costs that age by the cycles you take off and land. And you're impacting your landing gear. You're expanding and contracting your fuselage. When you pressurize it, you're heating up and cooling your engine.

So the driving cost on the short haul is actually maintenance. And the shorter the route, the more cycles you do, the more you age it. So it's sort of this runaway effect. If you switch to an all electric system, now you have very few moving parts, they age by the hour, there's not a lot of heat generated. And so for short haul electrification makes a ton of sense. And that's actually where the range sort of buys you with electrification, I don't need to cross the ocean, I'm trying to connect people to the

metropolitan centers. And there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of 100 to 200 miles today that can get up to 300 to 400 miles with better batteries. So these are routes where it's too far to drive anyways. You get caught in traffic. We don't really have high-speed rail in America or even around the world, but it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself. Yeah. I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it.

Why 10, not two big ones? Yeah. So we had our quarter scale prototype that had the eight propellers on the wing. Our full scale now has 12 propellers across the wing. So what we're doing, this configuration is called a blown wing. It's not that clever a name. We blow the wing with the propeller wash coming off the props. And so we're basically tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the wing sees fast moving air, even when the vehicle's moving slowly. And sort of the whole unlock of the sea gliders, if you're

like, you know, this isn't that new, we have seaplanes. Why are we doing this? You know, the whole point is that seaplanes and flying boats in the past have these planing holes. And so if you've gone over like 10 miles an hour on a boat in any sea state, you'll know how bumpy that ride gets. So sort of in the best case scenario, it's bumpy and uncomfortable. Worst case scenario, you can't take off at all. That's why seaplanes have never really scaled and they're sort of restricted to lakes and rivers. So we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem.

We do that with hydrofoils. So if you're familiar with America's Cup, Sail GP, the e-foil surfboards. Yeah, we were working on going with the Sail GP here in LA. Have you gone? I haven't yet. We're thinking about going.

It seems awesome. You need to go. And you will intimately understand Have you gone? I haven't yet. We're thinking about going. It seems awesome. You need to go. It's so fun. It's like you will, and you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydrofoil works because it just lifts you off and it's like a magic carpet and it's kind of surreal. So it also makes you appreciate

what our flight control system is doing because balancing yourself takes a little while and you fall a lot. But the point is we get wave tolerance up to five feet on this vehicle. So the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying, the sea gliders are going too. We can take off in five foot seas.

Hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of the water. And so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that hydrofoil. For the first one to figure that out, blowing in this design, we'd slow out. So, blowing in design, we'd slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydrofoil.

So, that was actually the other reason why we electrified. Again, the sustainability is a nice benefit, but it's secondary. We electrified because it's economical, and we electrified because it's a pretty good way of distributing propulsion on a wing, rather than a bunch of different engines or gearboxes.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Long-term, are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating the routes to obviously making the aircraft? I can imagine this as kind of a JSX that actually owns and develops. Certainly. JSX that actually owns and develops. And certainly in... I think we can hear you.

Can you hear us? Yeah, we definitely thought about it. Yeah, do you got me? Yeah, we're good. I'm on the road. You still got me? Yeah, we're good. Cool. We definitely thought about it in the early stage.

The eVTOL companies are sort of doing that end to end thing. For us, we said like this is a brand new mode of transportation. People are going to need to build trust on it. And what better way for both passengers to build up trust and candidly investors to build up trust in this wacky electric flying boat company than to have sort of established brands with all already existing operations be our customers. So our customers are airlines, our customers are ferry companies, our customers the Marine Corps and the high speed logistics mission.

But those are the entities that are buying Seagliders and operating it. We're the Boeing or Airbus here. When we founded, I said we're the Boeing of Seagliders. That's become a little taboo. So now I say we're the Airbus of Seagliders, which makes me hurt as an American, but here we are. Oh, well.

That's amazing. Can you give us a little background on where the company is, how big you guys are, what you've raised, where you're going next, who you're hiring, that type of stuff? Yeah, we are based in the Silicon Valley of the East of Rhode Island. Yes.

So, you know, it's actually a growing technology. Anderil's moving into town. There's a few drone boat companies and underwater companies. So we're really seeing a growth in Rhode Island. You know, the ocean state, awesome test environment for us. Some of the best boat builders in the world, Newport, Rhode Island, home of the America's Cup. So it was a really great place for us to set up.

We're about 100 people now. We actually just broke ground on a 255,000 square foot manufacturing facility also in Rhode Island. So we're going to be building sea gliders here. We're going to be scaling to another few hundred employees as we spool up our manufacturing. Expect to open that facility in early 26 and deliver sea gliders and enter service,

probably starting in Hawaii or Miami or some of the top two that our early customer wants to go to, and that entry to service in like late 26, early 27. That's fantastic. Amazing. Jordan, you have anything else? We gotta host the show in one of these bad boys

as soon as we can. It's been a dream of ours to do it from the air. I want to take it out to Cali. Definitely. Summer in Rhode Island. Got to come out. Yeah. Yeah. We got to go out there. Well, I mean, thank you so much for calling in, giving us the update firsthand. We'll share the video and repost the clip. It's fascinating stuff and we really appreciate everything you're doing. So thanks for calling in and we'll talk to you soon. Give us a call back when there's more news. You got it. I'll see you in roadie. We'll go out and see glider

See you in roadie. We'll see ya. Bye That's great. That's wild. Yeah, I don't know I don't know if you can pull up the video Ben But they have some video of the of the plane and it's yeah I mean, it's it's remarkable like it just feels like I mean we're talking about this with Gary like the the pace of play and it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something but like it just seems more doable to get a you know like tens 20 million 50 million together and then go and build a big you know prototype and actually fly

it around and people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying, how to do the right, all the regulatory stuff and finding the regulatory arbitrage. That's my favorite thing about Regent. Like I think that the tech is cool obviously, but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that operates in the maritime domain and just accelerate everything that they do.

So I love that. As soon as I heard that, I was like, Oh, this is like, this is something that I really want to follow. And it is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical. Yeah. Yeah. You can take a look at it here. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty sick. The biggest people on Apple podcasts are having a bad time. They're having a bad time. Well, we will describe it. It's a cool plane. And do you see they christened it with champagne and they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they use in Europe.

America undefeated. I love it. But yeah, I mean, 12, I guess three engines on each wing. And it just coasts along the surface. And we had a friend of the show asking us, when are the billionaires gonna start building hydrofoil yachts? I think this is the beginning of that trend.

We've talked about the land yacht that can dig with a massive drill. And yeah, this is the next evolution. Anyway. Amazing. Let's go back to the timeline. We'd love to see it. And then close out the show.

That's our first time having a guest call in while on the back of an Uber. Yeah. And it worked. It worked. We had a brief moment, but he's... No, I mean, that is my goal for the show. Someone posts something, they're announcing it.

You'd go on, you want to amplify it? Just come and talk about it on the show, someone posts something, they're announcing it, you know, you'd go on, you know, you want to amplify it, just come and talk about it on the show. And so we'll, I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those. I love this post by Alexander Wang over at Scale AI. He says, reminder of American exceptionalism, US companies make up 74% of global market cap. Returns of the S&P since 2008 are 297% versus the rest of the world at negative 4%. It's pretty ridiculous. And it's funny because like-

Hit the gong, John. Yeah, hit the gong for America. I mean, it's funny because like the narrative in so much of the media is like, things are more chaotic than ever. We're so divided. Everything's terrible. And it's like, you know, when the right wing's in power, the left wing says it's all terrible. And when the left wing's in power, the right wing's in terrible. But when you zoom out, even just, you know, 15 years, you can see that America's doing pretty well, pretty well. And I remain extremely bullish on America, but there's not much more to say about all of our guests today. I've been extremely. Exactly. As they should as Americans. There was some bad news about the American

economy. There was a big miss on ADP payrolls. You saw this from Joe Weisenthal, right? Yeah. They expected 140,000 new jobs added. It came in at 77,000. This is just one economic indicator. But if you've been following the markets and kind of the back and forth, the kangaroo market, right? This was called bouncing around. This is one of the data points that people have been pointing to. We don't go too deep into the economic data, but everyone is, everyone's worried about job prospects and job growth. But let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says, overheard at Blue Bottle.

Technology Brother A, I love that he's using that term, hadn't heard anything from Mock since that hit piece, thought they were dead. Technology Brother B says, nah, dog, it's called Show, Don't Tell. Mock had a new video drop. I think it was Tuesday. Yep. Very, very cool. Yep.

Seemed to have made a bunch of progress. And you never let a hit piece get you down. Just keep building. They're not given in to the negativity. So love to see it. Jeff was an early investor in mock and he has is building a reputation for sticking with founders when the media totally turned on them. Yep. And I think that that is one of the most important reputations that you

can build because it's easy for an investor to be your best friend when everything's going great, but to double, you know, double down on supporting somebody when they're in this sort of darkest period of their company is what really matters. So very cool, and I'm talking with Jeff's team right now about having him come on the show very soon, so excited for that. Yeah, I hope he's wearing a tank top,

looking absolutely shredded. Absolutely diced. Jeff's always known that it's underpriced to be diced. He is. Um, and, uh, open, uh, we want, we would host a temp check, uh, weekly segment on the show. We need 10 check segment every week. Jeff, you don't have to do any production. Well, I mean, you do have to continue working out. Yeah, that's, that's the key thing. You got to, you could do the temp check while working. You got to spam the delts and get the shoulders poppin and get the vice of aming Dylan. Because

yeah, we don't want we don't want to scrawny Jeff Lewis on the show. That's unacceptable. But you know, as long as the takes are hot. And he's supporting founders. It's great. Yeah, I hung out with Ethan, I want to say like a year or two ago. And I mean, obviously the company has been like up and down. There's been this hit piece that everyone's mentioning, but he just seems like someone who's like really, really driven and is going to do something at some point,

very cool. And it's just like a good person to have on the America team. Yeah. And I think they're iterating on product too. Yeah, totally. And they also, to be clear, they announced a Yeah, and I think they're iterating on product too. Yeah, totally. And they also, to be clear, they announced a US Army contract and that they're building a weapons factory. It's great, yeah.

We need more people building more cool stuff. So, you know, I'm excited to see Ethan get through the rise and fall and rise again. And I hope that he's successful. Let's go to David. VCs are limping out again. Vibe shift. I didn't put that in. You didn't put this in. I don't, we don't talk about politics. I don't know who they're talking about, but it is hilarious. It is clear that if you wanted to be contrarian, you had to, um, VCs for Kamala. Yeah. That, that was the actual contrarian

move was to sign the list, even though. Although Gavin Newsom, people are saying, he's completely vibe shifted his way and went on some Charlie Kirk show. Do you see this? No, that was him having Charlie Kirk on his show. Wait, Gavin Newsom has a podcast? He has a podcast.

No way. Really? Oh, okay. Interesting. Well, I mean, clearly there's going to be a there's gonna be a vibe shift and But but everyone's lost on this everyone's like I don't see it elaborate like who nature is healing people have fun with it who knows Anyway flock safety is raisin Katie roof has a scoop and recent leading around Jeff Lewis company. Yeah, it is

Yes, we should have one to talk talk about it when the funding finally breaks. $7.5 billion for flock safety. They make cameras that sell to police departments and a bunch of other equipment. Kind of the palantir of local governments. That's been a big question is, is that possible? It's such a different sales motion, because you're not just going lobbying in DC.

You have to go district by district. But when you get in and when you're installed, it's very, very sticky, very low chart. And so I think they have great finances, great cohorts, great company, interesting team. And I wanna get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company. And it seems like a very important task, obviously.

Anyway, let's move on to Autism Capital. They say, if Steve Jobs were still alive, he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of Apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality because we have an imperative as the steward of innovation to drive humanity forward and build the tools of tomorrow. Interesting, rare, like hard post.

I feel like this account mostly posts like news and clips and stuff. But yeah, breaking. Also his posts on X would be fire. He'd be arguing and calling people, they are word all day long. I don't know if that'd be that good, but here's the, here's the main thing is that Steve Jobs

wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an incredible amount. You talked about this earlier. that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an incredible amount. You talked about this earlier. I think they have 60 right now, $60 billion. But they have returned over a trillion over the past 15 years. Yeah.

Apple spent an estimated $150 million over 30 months to develop the first iPhone. Million? Oh, million. $150 million. That's so crazy. Steve would have seen what's possible. You know, obviously, there's been inflation and, you know, whatever, you could come

up with a bunch of excuses. But you have to imagine that that he would be running it like a startup internally and saying, you know, and sort of going founder mode. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like the algorithm would probably be just, you know, make, make like crazy aggressive decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product market fit with yourself. Like, do you believe that Tim Cook daily drives and Apple vision pro or do you think he's turned from it? Churned for sure. I think everyone kind of churned. Yeah.

Except for that one guy, I forget. There was one writer who mentioned that he was still using it. I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while. And I want to be using it. It's so close to being good, but it's not quite there. What else should we close the show out with? Oh, this is a great one from Matt Lasky.

Wife just taught me the professional way to say told you so is this was identified early on as a likely outcome. Going to be using this a lot. I love this one. I just thought it was funny. Yeah, I put this one in. You put this one in?

We gotta start, we wouldn't honestly use that because our culture is, well, no, our culture internally is we try to make decisions. You don't take a victory lap on a, I don't know, I told you so. But if you're working and you're trying to take the job of your CEO, this is a great line. This was identified early as a likely outcome, and really take the victory lap on a poor outcome.

Yes. Where else should we end up? There's some other news. Apple unveiled Mac Studio with M4 Max, M3 Ultra. Every time I see one of these, I'm like, eh, it's like nothing. But then I'm like, I want one. I always just want the latest thing. Even though Packy was making fun of them

for the new iPad that looked exactly the same, I was like, that would make me happy for five minutes. For five minutes. Exactly. Unboxing an Apple product still feels good. And then you're like, oh, OK, it's just like I'm not using it. I don't know this once I open up the Chrome tab. And the other news is Alexis Ohanian

is now bidding for TikTok with a blockchain integration plan. Yep. So we are, he's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it. He also is relaunching dig with Rose, which is, which is awesome. I actually got to reminds me, I got to email back his team. Yep. Yep. We're going to be on. He's going to be coming on at 12.30 tomorrow to talk about everything he's cooking on. He was going to come on today, but he was traveling. I said, he's got this amazing home studio. I told him, wait till you're back home.

Come on then. So I'm excited to have him back on. I say we save some of these posts. Let's end on a joke from Bass Barron, who's been an early listener of the show. We invested by following him when he had 200 something followers. Yeah, it was like buying Bitcoin in the 90s. Yeah, exactly.

Or Solana in the early 2000s. Bass Barron says, I love ramp so much that I broke up with my ex-girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management. Call that my brex. I've read this and it's still funny when you read it. It's still funny. Oh, silly. Good one. Anyways, great show today.

Yep. I thought our guests were fantastic. I thought it was a lot of fun and good mix. I think we're dialing in the format, little news, little timeline. We got to put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest But it like think of it more as like you walk into a house party Yeah, I don't know if we want to keep the house party vibe going or maybe we want to use this the waiting room

Which is like a feature on zoom, but we'll keep dialing it in stay tuned for more. We're never satisfied We're gonna keep changing it up, keep you guessing. This was just two weeks ago and we'd never had a guest and we'd done something like 60 episodes and now we've had more guests than most people have in a year of podcasting. I think we had like what, 15 already this week or something like that. Wow. Anyway. By the way, we got some breaking news from the chat. Rory shared that Intuitive Machines, Athena Lunar Lander landed on the moon this afternoon, but the company has no idea where it is.

What? Oh. And this is live. I'm on the New York Times famed technology publication, New York Times. It says, Intuitive Machines, a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2024 landing set at spacecraft. Athena has power and is communicating

but may not be upright. It's unclear how that might impact the mission. Imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing and then you're on your rovers turn to the side. That is rough. So this story is unfolding. Well, good luck to them. If you need somebody to go up there in a spacesuit and tip it over,

I'm happy to do that. I'm fully expecting- John 6-8, by the way. I'm fully expecting to go to the moon within my lifetime. That's something I'm very confident of. It's going to happen. Yep. Anyway, that's our show. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Stay tuned for the next one.

We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow.