TBPN Live - Google I/O Reactions, Large IPOs Incoming, Figma's AI Assistant | Dylan Field, Brian Chesky, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Tae Kim, Immad Akhund, Marcus Milione

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN. A little preview there for you. It's Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultram, Temple of Technology, The Fortress of Finance. The Capital. The Capital of Capital. We're both in suits today. I like it.

Starting point is 00:00:15 It looks good. People have been saying... They can't tell us apart. Is that what you're saying? That. Okay. But people have been saying I need something like a swear jar. Okay.

Starting point is 00:00:27 When I don't wear a suit. Oh, okay. I'd like that. So, yeah, something to consider. Yeah. It should probably be a pretty big jar. 20 bucks to the opening I nonprofit. That's what you got to do.

Starting point is 00:00:38 No, we were in Unheard. I mean, we can pull up the full post later in the show, but it's funny. I mean, it's a good analysis of like, you know, what we've taken from ESPN, what works about live streaming. This is from Alice Key. My latest for Unheard is on why tech shows like TBPN are rerunning the sports media playbook, invented by ESPN and why it's working. And they said, where is it? They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad, but we don't always have matching suits. Usually, Jory's the casual one. But yesterday we were both casual.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Today, we're both in suits. We do still get the brother thing a lot. But I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, we have to react to Google I.O. Of course, there's a whole bunch of announcements, some really exciting stuff, some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to. We'll take you through it all. But first, we need to watch this video about humanoid robot. Ramp. Why is Ramp? No, I'm kidding. No. Song Drip Wu says, I'm crying. Watch this video. Let's get some sound. You got to go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You got to go to the beginning. Doing pretty well. Moving pretty quickly. A little bit of a, oh, catches itself. catches itself.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Not bad. Not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. Another one. I'm liking it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:06 And then, not good. And then I wonder what it's thinking, because you would think that there would be some programming. Oh, they got to cut the music. They got to cut the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your boys down. It just gets carried off like this.

Starting point is 00:02:25 It's so crazy. It's just carried off like this. Like, this seems solvable. This seems solvable. It's kind of, Do teleoperation takeover in that case or even just have like a if on the ground reset yourself by like doing a push-up? Like you could sort of hard code that, I would think.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Like that was a weird. I understand that I can't dance and walk upstairs. Like that is tricky. I understand why it fell down. But I don't understand why I couldn't get back up after it fell down. Anyway. Singularity is light. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:55 It's possible that the robot died from embarrassment. Yeah. Or maybe it was. It's damaged. It's possible, but as it hit the ground, it was just actually taken out. But I'm fascinated by this. I wonder how many, like, this video was taken clearly in, like, the third row of an auditorium. Are people going to see robot dance shows? Was this an introduction to a tech conference? Like, I need so much more context here to really understand what's going on. Aaron Chen posted the full, the first video, Aaron Chen AI. They had the chance to stop this. when the robot almost fell, but then it really fell, but the show must go on. So who will dance on the

Starting point is 00:03:37 floor in the round? Beware. Well, certainly solvable with enough time, but not quite there yet. If you're thinking of shelling out big dollars for a robot dance show, maybe make sure there's refund policy in case the robot absolutely collapses. That would not be good. Anyway, Google I.O. bunch of different announcements. Brandon Grell on our team posted on the TBPN newsletter, some reactions, sort of bucketed it into four key areas.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Intelligent eyewear. This is an interesting one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni, we talked about the videos. We played a little bit of that yesterday. Upgrades to Gemini LLMs. Those have been mixed reactions from developers.

Starting point is 00:04:20 We'll go through that. And then anti-gravity, which is an interesting place, with an interesting history. So let's start with intelligent eyewear. If you had to pick, Warby Parker, Gentle Monster. Have you heard of Gentle Monster before? I've heard of Warby Parker.

Starting point is 00:04:34 I know the story. I'm a fan of the business story. That's super familiar. I haven't worn glasses in a very long time, so I'm not really in the market. But the Warby Parkers, I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand. And I've also been impressed by the way they built that business. They were early to the D to C boom. And then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's?

Starting point is 00:04:53 Is that the same team? Or is that a different thing I'm thinking of? They were certainly, when I think of DTC, I think of Warby. Yeah. I think of Allbirds. I think of Everlane. Yes. But when you think of the last two out of those three, the market caps are sub $100 million.

Starting point is 00:05:10 Allbirds was trading at, what, $20 million or something, and then spiked because of the AI thing. But Allbirds, Everlane, not really sustainable businesses. Warby Parker, on the other hand, current market caps. Allbirds has pretty much been. brain a half. Billions. Allbirds has pretty much been down only. Down only.

Starting point is 00:05:30 Since the pump. The AI pump. On their neocloud, no surprises there. Well, have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes, how it's going,

Starting point is 00:05:39 building their neocloud? Did they get allocation? Are they rack in cerebrus? Are they rack in G. What are they rack in? And how fast are they getting power? It would be funny if Jensen ends up having to talk about

Starting point is 00:05:52 all birds on their earnings call today. Didn't they? There's a new. Yeah. Didn't they also like fully rebrand the name? It was it going to be like bird AI or all AI. Like they were moving on all birds still exist. Okay. But they basically kept the public and entity. Yeah. And that's what they're building. The neocloud there. So fun. Lots of fun. Warby Parker, resilient. I mean, in 2021 it was a six billion dollar company. Now it's a three billion dollar company. Not the best scenario, but surprising resilient, I think, in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct

Starting point is 00:06:29 to consumer, it was like either get rolled into a bigger company or go or like face the fate of the public markets. But Warby Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung. Google says we're partnering with Samsung, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections. And people are, this is I like, I love, like Futeronomics from Sam. Kind of crazy that you can wear your favorite mag 7 on your face now. You can. The gentle monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera.

Starting point is 00:07:05 I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording, but if someone wore these from a distance, also meta-ray bands have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So when you see ray bands and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking, oh, should I be looking for a camera lens? am I being recorded? But the gentle monster design, the silhouette,

Starting point is 00:07:28 doesn't scream technology. It doesn't scream wearable face camera. And so these are going to be a little bit more stealthy. Warby Parker's look nice. But the camera pump on the, you zoom in on the Warby Parker one? You know, it makes a lot of sense that Google's and the metas have to go and partner on different silhouettes. my expectation, my uninformed expectation is that Apple will just make Apple glasses, right? They will probably, it's hard to see them taking the route at least early on of partnering

Starting point is 00:08:04 and allowing another company to influence the design language. But it makes a lot of sense that Meta would partner with Luxottica. First, look at the camera bump on this. If you zoom in as far as you can, I don't know if we can zoom. in any further, but the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Interesting design choice.

Starting point is 00:08:28 I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in the real world. Is that true about Apple? I thought that they had a partnership. I thought someone, I saw this on the timeline, that Apple would be partnering with someone on frames. Maybe that was just a rumor. I don't know where it went.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Okay, so, yes. Oh, Apple has Carl Zeiss, which I guess is like a glass manufacturer. I don't know. Is, do they make glasses? Glasses? Carl Zeiss, AG, German manufacturer of optical systems. Oh, they make eyewear.

Starting point is 00:09:07 They have an eyewear collection. Founded in Germany in 1846. Okay. So, optician, Carl Zeiss. The Zeiss Eyewear collection. I don't know. But this was all from a joke from Abdu, says, Okay, so Apple has Carl Zeiss, Meta, has Raybans, and Oakley, Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.

Starting point is 00:09:24 Boring, which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some 3M safety glasses? Would you rock these, Jordi? I like this. You know what I'm talking about, right? You're working with a buzzsaw. I do know. Dust in your eyes. But these look cool.

Starting point is 00:09:40 These are sporty. I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit. Just go full clanker. Full cyberpon. Full clank. Yeah, full sign. You clank out. Full cyberpunk.

Starting point is 00:09:51 I think that's a, I think that might be the move. I don't know. For some company, a challenger company could potentially do that. Maybe friend or something. Anyway, what else? So Warby Parker traded down on the news, which Shiel Monot was surprised by. Why is Warby Parker down 14%. They announced a partnership at Google I.O.

Starting point is 00:10:07 That's been in the works for a while is because they aren't available yet. And our friend Rat King, Mike Isaac says, Okay, Google AI glasses with Warby Parker are officially coming for Meta-Raybans. Google also said it would bring Gemini two glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and the eyewear companies, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

Starting point is 00:10:26 The glasses, which work similarly to Meta-Raband smart glasses come with a camera, microphone. At what point does Google just buy Warby Parker? It's a $3 billion company. It's actually done quite well over the last six months. It's up 43% in the last six months, although it's been almost flat this year. I would say I expect that smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first, right?

Starting point is 00:10:58 If you already have to wear glasses all day long for your vision, why not throw some smart features in there? It's going to be harder to get someone that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation, right? Yeah. And so, you know, Warby Parker's, you know, done quite well. And it's been surprisingly resilient, but they have, you know, incredible distribution. And I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped at some point. I mean, deeper integration into a traditional, I don't know, like workflow. Like a lot of the Google I.O., we'll get into this, but it was talking about Spark, the personal AI assistant.

Starting point is 00:11:39 And when I think about... It's in Spark. It's an anti-grine. I know. I know. Oh, just look in Omni. Yeah, there's a lot of names. It's Google. There's a lot of products. You're referring to, of course, Nathan Clark's post. It's in Gemini. Just created an AI studio. Oh, it's for your personal Google account. For workspace, you need Gemini business. No, not Gemini Advanced. That's AI Pro now. Unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents, you do that in Spark, actually.

Starting point is 00:12:04 No, not Gemini API managed it. And it's the typical meme. But the interesting thing is that I do think, I think Meta-Raybans, it was always like, okay, you have a deep integration with WhatsApp, you have a deep integration with Instagram, DMs, maybe, Facebook Messenger. Some people are still using that. But in terms of, like, wiring into your life, there are way more people that see Google Docs, Gmail as, like, the central node in their personal life. Like, people think of, like, all the stuff I have saved on the desktop of my MacBook is, like, my core repository. A lot of people think, okay, for the important stuff, I'll put it in Google Docs or

Starting point is 00:12:48 Google Drive, and then most things flow through Gmail. Most things flow through IMessage. There are some people that just are like, yeah, WhatsApp is the number one screen time for me. That's where I really organize things. But meta doesn't really have this like knock on effect of like, oh yes, it's not necessarily an enterprise level productivity suite, but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple Mail, I message, I save my files and Apple files,

Starting point is 00:13:16 the cloud storage I use, my camera role is super important. So an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable, and an AI agent running through the Google ecosystem can be valuable. The meta smart glasses, it's a little

Starting point is 00:13:32 bit trickier to go and do anything because you're just like sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right? Yeah. But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these meta raybans. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse.

Starting point is 00:13:53 I don't know. Raybans are a very iconic silhouette and they do look good. So we'll see. We'll see how the response goes. I think from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground on the flip side. the Wayfarer is just such an iconic, it's more iconic than anything Warby Parker has produced, and that's just sort of the reality of brand building over a decade versus a century or something like that, however long, Rayban's been around a long time, right? Anyway, Genie 3, you can now simulate real places

Starting point is 00:14:27 by grounding Genie 3 experiences with street view imagery. Google is sitting on a mother load of real world data. I was always thinking YouTube was going to be so valuable for Omni and VO3, VO4 maybe in the future. I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very data-pilled. He seems a lot of the MagS7 CEOs seem very data-pilled. There's the story about Mark Zuckerberg, screen recording or logging all the computer use from all the meta-employees. These important trove of data are increasing in value, and Street View certainly seems like it's one. one of them. This is cool. I wonder how interactive this will be, how this actually

Starting point is 00:15:13 instantiates into a game. It's a great demo. What does it take to get? Yeah, or do they allow people to build games on top of this? Yeah. I just think about, I don't know. I mean, Demis has a background in games and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point or, or at least be able to like scratch that itch again. Famously, he wrote a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator. Very fun story. But again, when I think about roller coaster tycoon, which was not, I think, I don't think he was actually working on that game.

Starting point is 00:15:45 There's a similar theme park simulator, but we are moving back into the simulator world. But the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers often. When I think about the games that I've spent a long time with, some of them have incredible graphics, triple A graphics. Some of them have 2D graphics, but the mechanic is great. And so that is what gets me to keep playing back. The legend Bobby Chipman and the X-Chats says, can't wait for smart glasses to fully replace my monitors. Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. Meta-rayban display, certainly going that direction, the Orion. I've been surprised. Wasn't the first episode we ever did we were talking about Orion?

Starting point is 00:16:24 And they still haven't shipped it, right? I mean, they shipped the smaller version, the Meta-Rabund. been displays, which have sort of the call of duty HUD. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting, I was expecting, we've demoed the Orion headset. And it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. And I assumed that, you know, everyone was saying, it's really expensive, it's clunky, it's not ready for prime time, but, you know, look at how fast things are going.

Starting point is 00:16:51 In a year, maybe two, we'll get it. And maybe that's coming at the next MetaConnect. Maybe this summer we'll see it, but haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive pitch shift to AI CAPX might have taken a backseat. I don't know. I'm certainly hopeful. I like AR and VR. I think we're overdue for a new fun product.

Starting point is 00:17:12 I'm still waiting for the next Applevision Pro. Apple Vision Air, something just lighter. That's all I want. Cheaper maybe, but lighter. And same screen. Screen was great. Anyway. We know, John.

Starting point is 00:17:25 Gemini Flash. 3.5, looks pretty neat, according to Tenebrose, and extremely fast. But still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google, generally a pretty disappointing I.O. Now, what's interesting is that Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre-trained, felt like it had some of that big model smell, felt like it was really delightful to talk to. And I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here.

Starting point is 00:17:52 We're still waiting for the next iteration here. And also... Yeah, we're still waiting for pro. Yeah, pro isn't out, but people are speculating that 3.5 pro won't necessarily be a new pre-trained. And so it seems like there's a little bit of, you know, research being at odds with like the product cadence. Like Google I.O. is scheduled probably like two years in advance. And whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with the independent labs or the, the, the independent labs or the,

Starting point is 00:18:26 Open AI, Anthropic, the other labs XAI, like they're launching models very much like when they're done, and then they will like instantiate something that looks like a conference around it or maybe a video or a blog post, a model card. But if you're grinding towards a specific date and the specific model isn't quite ready, you come out with something that looks a little bit more incremental. People were really, really honing in on the fact that the cutoff date was January. of 2025, right? Was that the date? Or was it December of 2025? Either way, yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:19:03 I don't know how much cutoff time, cutoff dates matter because, you know, all these models, you know, can query the web and get update information. Yeah, overall reactions from developers across the board were not good, not good at all. Yeah, Perkosh here has it. Underememing. Cursor ranked it on cursor bench. It is below Composer 2. Is that a fair thing?

Starting point is 00:19:31 I mean, I'd like to see you rank another, another live stream on TBPN Bench. It doesn't match up, you know? It's like, no, I mean, they have, they have the other,

Starting point is 00:19:42 they have all the other, they have all the other frontier. And some of them are ahead of cursor's own models on cursor bench. It's just one data point. But yeah, yeah, yeah, but here's the other thing. It's four times,

Starting point is 00:19:53 it costs four times, it underperforms Composer 2, even though it's roughly four times more expensive. Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I feel like for a long time Google's positioning was, you know, frontier or near frontier, but best possible pricing. And this marks sort of a shift in the strategy, perhaps.

Starting point is 00:20:11 Yeah, overall, starting to make more and more and more sense why Google has put so much capital and resources behind Anthropic. Yeah. Rekh says, seems to indicate that deep mind is constrained by data, rather than compute for what they intend to do, hence the TPU sales. Rest of Google now shipping their org chart. Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit.

Starting point is 00:20:34 And there was some context on like, you know, we were asking the question like, will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area? Ali K. Miller shares one of the loudest applauses in the entire Google keynote. Nishtha put on the gentle monster plus Gemini glasses, tapped the side to summon Gemini, and all in one prompt said,

Starting point is 00:20:59 take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says Google I.O. 2026, and within seconds, the preview of the edited photo from Nanabanana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere, and so much is driven by voice AI

Starting point is 00:21:14 as the interaction mode. Very cool demo, impressive technology, but Greg's gadget says these companies truly have no idea what regular people want. Because, yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case, you need to be more creative with it for when you would actually use that

Starting point is 00:21:30 because this is a very, it's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality, but it lacks that like creative spark of like, yes, I did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time. Like if you're not doing a demo, I don't think, his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature, right?

Starting point is 00:21:50 Anyway, you wanna move on to something? Where do you want to go? What next? IPOs. SpaceX IPO. We're getting more details by the day. The other thing, the other thing that is, was going pretty viral. The last thing on I.O.

Starting point is 00:22:04 was that the Google anti-gravity team flashed a codex folder in their actual demo video. Gergley says, I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for anti-gravity. You can see people use codex on the anti-gravity team. Did no one double-check the launch video at the very least. Not a huge surprise. Obviously, Andy Gravity looks, a lot of people were saying, looks quite like Codex.

Starting point is 00:22:32 So clearly, they're inspired. I feel like it would be like a, they would have just rebuilt windsurf. I don't know. We'll have to see. No. But anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly they're using a ton of different models and products internally.

Starting point is 00:22:53 What was that drama with Steve Yegy going back and forth with Demas about like what teams are using, what models and stuff? There was a big back and forth, big dust up on the timeline like a month ago about like whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't and some of them are. And Demis chimed in and said like this is just complete wrong and everyone's using AI. I don't know. It goes back and forth. There's also people are benchmarking Omni Flash, which looked to make. when we saw the videos. There were a few like little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that

Starting point is 00:23:28 the firing order of the V8 was not correct. Maybe it was only a V6. Yeah, I was missing two cylinders. It was missing two cylinders. But it looked good to me. I don't know. But now people are actually comping it to C-Dance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions. Because I guess just like Hollywood can't file a lawsuit in China. I'm not exactly sure how that works. because CEDAN seems to be available in America. It seems like maybe... Oh, I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to U.S. copyright law for a very, very, very long time. And it also might just take, like, years to file a lawsuit, do discovery, actually go through and litigate.

Starting point is 00:24:09 Oh, yeah, you can just go, like, there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store. Yeah. And Nike has nothing to do with it. And yet all the products... They've been selling swatch APs over there for decades. Yeah, just ask, just as Rolex and Patak how they're... Sure, sure. Yeah, I've heard fake cars, too.

Starting point is 00:24:29 Like, you can get a full replica of like a G-wagon that's just made in a factory and then you could buy it, bring it over here, and you take it to a Mercedes dealership, and they're just like, this is not a Mercedes. But it looks like one, like, you know, to the millimeter from the outside. Internally, it's just, it's just frauding. Anyway, C-Dance 2.0 looks great. Omni Flash looks great as well. These are both, like, super useful.

Starting point is 00:24:56 We'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like, like at what point, like it still takes a long time to generate videos, very hard to get them right. The last 90, like we're at 99% fidelity, but when you click in, you start noticing little details, when will we be in a paradigm

Starting point is 00:25:13 where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video six minutes, 10 minutes like you would on you. YouTube, very computationally expensive, very difficult to maintain the logic. Like, what is the deep research report of Omni Flash? These eight second, ten second, twenty second videos are impressive, but not perfectly substitutable for a 20 minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into.

Starting point is 00:25:38 Some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine, they want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes. And so that's the next benchmark. We got to move the goalposts. Anyway, SpaceX, IPO. The prospectus is incoming according to Zero Hedge as soon as May 20th. That's today. We will see Goldman lead left.

Starting point is 00:25:58 This was a surprise. Michael Grimes has worked with Elon for a long time at Morgan Stanley. There was some back and forth. He went back to Morgan Stanley. There was a question about whether or not there would even be a lead left because there's such a big IPO. Maybe they all share equally. Obviously they're all going to make a ton of money off of this. So good news from start to finish.

Starting point is 00:26:15 But it is interesting that Goldman was selected. Do you have a soundboard cue? you want to play? I'm always ready, John. Okay. Katie Roof has a scoop. The scoop athlete of the century, Katie Roof. Has a scoop on the biggest venture returns ever.

Starting point is 00:26:31 Founders Fund and Valor are set to make more than 60 billion in gains on the SpaceX IPO. Sequoia, more than 20 billion. Yeah, was this somewhat of a reaction to D1 getting a lot of credit earlier in the week, right? they're set to to generate roughly 20 billion in returns and maybe some of these other funds thought to put their hand up and say

Starting point is 00:27:00 I don't think that at this scale like there are so many LPs in these funds that are getting updates and they've been they've known the numbers for a long time they've known the ownership, the holdings and you do some back of the envelope and you get some pretty huge numbers will be

Starting point is 00:27:18 Very interesting. Huge for Sean McGuire, huge for Luke Nosek and a lot of other folks over at Founders Fund and Antonio Gracias at Valor and all the other Founders Fund folks. Yeah, look, Sequoia Founders Fund. They needed a win. They needed a win. I mean, you go back, like, you know, these investments were made like 2004, 2010. Like, it was not obvious. Certainly there was no Starlink narrative when these were made. There was no space data center narrative.

Starting point is 00:27:44 This was a rocket company that was blown up rockets left and right. and not quite getting to, you know, massive business. You really had to be a believer, and they were. Yeah. Packy was having some fun on the timeline. He said, Megaphons are too big to generate returns. They're basically just big collectors.

Starting point is 00:28:05 And, of course, they're printing. Yes, they are printing. Well, we have a very special guest joining us today, the CEO, the founder of Figma, Dylan Field, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TUPian. Dylan, great to see you. Hey, great to see you.

Starting point is 00:28:23 Thanks for having me back. Too long. Great to see you. First question. Are you alive or are you dead? Very alive. Very alive. Very alive.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Very alive. Yes. It is such a white pill. I mean, how have you processed all this? I guess we can go into the business and the product and the financials, but I'm more interested in just like the mindset, the emotional journey. like, how do you stay sane? Is it an advantage to have been building this business for so long that you can draw on other experiences?

Starting point is 00:28:56 Like, what has the process of going through all of this been like for you? I mean, what's the quote? When in the age of AI, those who stays sane when? Oh, I like that. I think that's pretty accurate. And, yeah, I think that is the right question. I'm going to attribute that to you. Yeah, we're going to attribute that to you guys.

Starting point is 00:29:16 mine. But really, I think it's super important. You have to have an even mind about it. And, you know, I know that you guys know this, but social media, not reality. It is. It is not reality. We see this all the time. Yeah. All the time. Yeah. And the thing that I've been thinking about this week is how AI generated design is seemingly becoming as easy to clock as the, as AI text. It's not this, it's that. It's not this than that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:50 I feel like people kind of, like, right now, I mean, the entire market is just going through like rolling stages of AI psychosis and everyone's having it a different ways, right? So like if you do like equity research, you're obviously going to go through a period of AI psychosis because you can just like type in a few words

Starting point is 00:30:11 and get like what looks like, you know, days, weeks of really, really great work and sometimes it is great work and if you're a designer, a web designer, and you can type in a few words and get what looks like

Starting point is 00:30:26 a great website instantly, you're also going to go through that period and you can just see these sort of like pockets of AI psychosis all around the industry broadly. But it does sort of like fade at some point and then if you're able to stay sane you know, through those periods and not let yourself succumb to it, you can get excited about the

Starting point is 00:30:49 potential and benefit from it, but not lose your mind in the process. And I think like we were seeing that with, you know, early on with Chachybtee and like writing, right? Before it was super obvious to clock. And then we were seeing that with design specifically where, yeah, when you can just go and just generate stuff, design that looks like good design. I'm not saying. it is good design. And I think we're kind of coming out of that now where you can just instantly clock when something was generated

Starting point is 00:31:21 and sometimes for a specific type of asset or use case, it's totally the right move to just generate something quickly. But I think we're already in a period right now where if I go to a startup's website and it's clear that it was just like a one-shot prompt, that says something about the company could be good, could be bad, we don't know.

Starting point is 00:31:46 Jordi, I think you're absolutely right. But seriously, I mean, it's just the balance. Oh, thank you. I think it's the balance we had to strike with the thing was design and design agent launch today. And what we tried to do was make it so that we can really help you bring the context from your file into the agents context window. And with that, do things that maybe are what will be most helpful for the

Starting point is 00:32:20 designer in the moment. Spawn agents to do explorations, variations, do the sort of rote tasks that are more boring. So things like design system maintenance, for example, how do we make it so that you're able to do that way faster with the business design agent than you would if you're just manually clicking on all these variable names or manually change a bunch of components or text translation or any number of things. And so, you know, it's been really fun to kind of explore how does the design agent work and where can we make it better? Because there's so much more we can do to handle more of these tasks that, you know, designers are able to elevate themselves and work at a greater level to actually push aesthetic past AI slop to actually actually

Starting point is 00:33:09 push past, you know, the cliches and get to real innovation, solve real U.X problems for users, rather than making it so that you just have to go do this boring tasks to just get through and unblock people or unblock your team. And I think that the design agent will really help there and bring more of it into the canvas where then you can share and collaborate with your team or with other agents. So I'm excited for where it goes. And I think today's really big and kudos to the team because they've been working really hard, making so that we're able to take all the advances with models and elms and apply them to design. You know, getting these models to speak design well has been non-trivial and very cool.

Starting point is 00:33:56 That's awesome. I feel like a lot of software engineers who are interacting with coding agents are experiencing, like, incredible amounts of, like, bloat in the code. and there's questions about like, are you introducing, are you laying really shoddy foundation that will come back to bite you later? And a lot of people say the answer to slop is just more slop. But in the design context,

Starting point is 00:34:21 are you feeling pain from Figma users? Slop or Slop? Where design systems, or are you at least designing the agentic design tool in a way that is aware of that potential pitfall in advance because there is a world where, you know, oh, the drudgery is taking my website and, and, you know, doing design iterations for every single possible viewport or device. And if that gets out of sync, that can be very complex.

Starting point is 00:34:57 At the same time, if you wind up, you know, instantiating all that, and then it doesn't tie together, you could wind up with some sort of, you know, misalignment. and it could be very difficult to manage in the long term and you could wind up with like bloat. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that it's different context for sure when you're in a sort of code base and you're using cod and it's over-claiming and making stuff up or you're using open AI's chat to BT models.

Starting point is 00:35:26 5.5 is amazing, but like definitely overcompulsifies things. And, you know, these teams will deal with the sort of problems are being identified and they'll fix them and figure them out. But overall, I think it's a different sort of class of problem than like when you're in a design file. And really, part of your mode is exploration. If we can help you with that exploration, that can be useful for the user. And in terms of semantics, I mean, the way that you represent a component or, you know,

Starting point is 00:35:58 the way you apply auto layout even, these are all examples of things that we've had to get more rigorous around how do we build e-vals for this to make sure that we're doing things in a way that is both clear and opinionated but also doesn't get in the way of the user. And I think the worthy year for us has been e-vails and probably for the industry. And so there's so much on the eval side that we have to always be improving on. And part of the feedback that we'll get from this beta will be towards where have we missed the mark and what do we need to do better. And I think there's lots of room to grow there. I'll also say that I think that when you look at products like weave,

Starting point is 00:36:40 there's so much potential to not have necessarily this pile-on effect, but rather to explore more with AI. The outputs of the models are like clay you can mold. And it's like, how do you take stuff? I mean, that might be a one-shot slop that's generated, but then actually apply it across multiple models in a pile. pipeline in order to actually figure out a way to make it into what you want. And sometimes the best way to do that is to get on a canvas and use your hands. Sometimes the best way to do that

Starting point is 00:37:13 is through a workflow you define. Other times it's by going back and forth with an agent. I think you have to be very smart about what you do when. And it's our responsibility as a tool creator to give you all the options. What are you excited about in terms of using AI to help augment the creative process because when I think of part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like I don't right now right now it's hard like a human still has to have like the fundamental kind of idea right and and you we know that because you have to like type it into a box right you need to you need to do the typing still so we're still we're still necessary there But when I think about iconic startup brands, I think of linear.

Starting point is 00:38:06 I think of some of what, like, cursor has done over the last couple years. I think of, like, Figma's brand, where there's so much work that went into just, like, coming up with that, coming up with, like, the concept and the look and feel of the brand. And then, like, way, way more work in terms of, like, instantiating that brand across every possible surface area. And part of what I think is exciting about this moment is like we're potentially entering into a world where you can spend more time just doing that like heavy creative work coming up with like a concept that can stand out. And then once you create a system, then you can like much more rapidly scale it across again all these different surface areas, whether it's like digital products, web, you know, email ads, etc. How are you thinking about like augmenting and giving creative superpower? on that brand building process when you're kind of coming up with coming up with like the idea. Yeah, I think there's so much we can explore and do there. And using design systems effectively is hard. We certainly have not perfectly nailed that. I think we've done much more on the maintenance side. And we have a lot more coming on the execution side of how do you put the design

Starting point is 00:39:20 system you've created together so you can fully productionize that. And it's one of the things that we are looking at from so many angles, and it is critical context to be able to figure out across code, across design, how do you use this effectively? But brand, I think, is where on the weave side, we see even more exploration with these workflows and people being able to define workflows that are more canonical and then branch out from them. And I think we'll see the same with assistant and with the Figma's design agent as well. And I also think that this idea bank, content bank, can be established and added to over time and by more people.

Starting point is 00:40:04 And what we're seeing with the last quarter of results that we announced is that more people are starting to use Pigma in the organization. Thank you. They're fantastic results. Thank you. But the breadth, I think, of the use. usage expanding is a huge part of that. And the more that you can get it to a point where people can come in with their ideas,

Starting point is 00:40:27 contribute to the conversation on a canvas, collaborate with others to refine, doesn't mean that these like sort of non-designers who don't know all the conversations that are being had about the UX or the brand are going to be the ones that are bringing the idea that's the idea they're going to ship to the table right away. but I do think that bringing more voices into that conversation and more viewpoints only helps. How do you think about the concept of gelman amnesia in the context of like staying sane in the age of AI?

Starting point is 00:41:01 Because there's probably non-designers who use Gen A.I. tool and are like, oh, wow, like designers are cooked. And then there's real designers who use a Gen A.I. tool and say, oh, there's, you know, yes, it's maybe 99% of the way there, but the battle is to get to 99.999, maybe 100% of what you can do. And it feels like in staying sane. All outputs, right? If you ask AI to generate you something around a topic you know really, really well,

Starting point is 00:41:30 it's a different feeling than a topic that you're just learning about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that basically folks are in a place where they learn by comparative cases. And the more that they're, see great examples next to sort of output that's not as good and they can learn why, that's ultimately where you see folks then push further and, you know, they can then take it on to do more an area and evolve their skills and their judgment and their sort of taste or not.

Starting point is 00:42:06 But I do think it's really important to have those conversational loops going and also get your arms around as a design leader. What is happening in your organization? Because what we're seen is more people prototype things and then there's like this latent fear of oh no what are we going to ship and is it the thing that is sort of like a random exploration that someone thought was real or is it something that is like gone through our cycle and is ready to go and is like very well thought out and in general the other thing that I'd mention is it feels like there's a lot of tunnel vision right now I think that there's certain models that kind of went, oh, it's learned from 4-0 and, you know, are sort of synchophantic.

Starting point is 00:42:53 And doing that, especially for engineers, and get very latched onto an idea. And then it's kind of like the AI psychosis sets in. And you're like, this is the best idea ever. And you're fully tunnel vision towards creating it. And you can show massive progress, but are you going the right direction? And I think it's really important to steer and to actually be building what you need to build and to think, not just wear a thinking cap. So that is something that I think is critical right now. Yeah, I completely agree.

Starting point is 00:43:26 Yeah, there's been a bunch of great takes about that. Help me, if I meet someone and they have the next great app idea and help me pitch them starting with Figma as the front door to, the experience. If they're a non-designer, but they're also non-technical, and they're hearing about Codex and ClaudeCode and those like CodeGen tools versus starting with a design, starting, and having the design be the place where the idea person sort of instantiates their app or their product. And then, yes, there are agents and they might use different tools for, you know, spinning up backends and doing other things. Why should Figma be the front door to build Yeah, I think that as you're exploring an idea, part of it is thinking it through and actually

Starting point is 00:44:20 understanding what is it that I want to build. And you should not just start in a figma, you should go talk to users. You should go think about like what is it that I'm trying to build? What are my goals and the problems I'm trying to solve? So that might look like starting a sketchbook or a doc or in live conversation. I think there's a lot of people that have not asked that question to the LLMs. and jump straight to, wow, I spend seven nights

Starting point is 00:44:45 staying up all night, I'm cutting this thing, and it's addictive. It's fun. It's addictive. It's fun. It's addictive. Like, will it get rid this time or not?

Starting point is 00:44:54 Yeah. Variable reward. Yeah. It's a bit of a sphiners box. And so, but then I think going from there to be intentional about, okay,

Starting point is 00:45:02 I know what problems I'm trying to solve. Let me think through the solution. Figma provides an excellent spot to do that with in conjunction with, you know, brainstorming tools like Figg jam. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:11 or document editing, spec editing. And from there, I think when you've got your direction, you know what you want to build, it's a great time to use our MCP. Go bring it into code or go bring it into make. And make itself, well, you'll see a ton of evolution on surface ahead. We've already had a lot that we've improved. And you'll see even more in the weeks and months coming.

Starting point is 00:45:35 And then I think that's a great spot where you can go back and forth because sometimes as you build it out, you realize that actually there's more to explore and define on the design side. So use the best tool for the job. But I think don't be tunnel vision about there's one direction and that's the only thing that can work. That's where you'll fall into traps. Yeah. Last question for me, huge revenue growth, massive success on the financial side. I'm interested in going a click deeper and trying to understand what is working the most.

Starting point is 00:46:09 because it seems like there's great retention among big clients and customers that are using Figma at scale across a huge organization. There's also new entrepreneurs that are a team of one and they might be using Figma. There's almost like consumer use cases. The heaviest users of coding agents are heavily using Figma because they're making more software. And they need to add stuff to it. I mean, I look at some of the stuff we vibe coded and I'm like, okay, like, it's time to level up and have Figma in the flow if it's not already. Even because you don't want some, even like the dashboards, like these things need to be designed at some point. As they grow and scale, the first, like most basic thing, it could just be a CLI, but as soon as we start building UIs and multiple users, like, it gets more complicated.

Starting point is 00:47:00 But what is driving the growth? Is it both is one more of an opportunity for you over the next few years? Like, what are you most excited about? I mean, I think we're seeing growth kind of across the board right now, and we're very thankful for that. But our eyes are always in the future. And, you know, the same things that I've said when I've been here in the past and I think have become their own memes around design being the differentiator and design as the layer above code, as code commoditizes more and more. Design is, I think, increasingly the battleground. This is where everyone is going to really duke it out to figure out what the direction is that they should explore and what they should go build.

Starting point is 00:47:45 And we need to build for that world, a world where design representations, code representations can live together, and a world where, you know, you don't have to make these false tradeoffs between direct manipulation and AI or, you know, being able to explore broadly or make fast progress. like both is the answer and so that's what we're really building for right now. Exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Have a great to rest of your week. Great to see you. Good to see you all.

Starting point is 00:48:15 And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. See you. Up next, we have Farras from Socket back on the show to discuss a series C by none other than Thrive Capital will bring in Farras from Socket from the waiting room to the TBP and Ultradome. Get that gone ready. Welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:48:34 How you doing? What's up? Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me back. I think last time you were on, we'll see you soon, and here you are. Give us the news first. What happened?

Starting point is 00:48:44 Yeah, so Salkin announced it's $60 million Series C at a billion dollar elevation. And again, it's a big day for us. Absolutely massive. Is what you do important right now? Yeah, you know, you couldn't have really asked for a better, you know, perfect storm.

Starting point is 00:49:05 You know, you have just the confluence of, you know, AI, cybersecurity, and all the different attacks we've been seeing, and we kind of built the perfect product for this moment. And it's been something that we've been building towards for, you know, it seems like it's okay, you know, we just, we had the right thing right now. But the reality is, you know, we've been building towards this for, you know, four years plus. And so, you know, it's an overnight success that took four years, right? There we go. I love it. Yeah, what was the key unlock for the new round? growth needed the capital for specific expansion, just the broad tailwinds of the industry,

Starting point is 00:49:41 people looking forward to more demand. What's changed in the business? So the business is just inflecting. You know, every year I feel like, you know, okay, this is great. You know, certainly we're going to get like a regression to the mean or something, but it just keeps accelerating. So over the last while, you know, we've had 500% plus ARR growth over the last 12-month period. And it's just, it keeps going. So I think it's kind of, we're seeing kind of three-d-forces converging all at once here. We have this kind of like perfect storm between, you know, AI generating more code than ever before.

Starting point is 00:50:20 You've got developers and increasingly non-developers, too, that are, you know, pulling in open-source dependencies and third-party code at like an unprecedented velocity. And you have more code being written than ever before, both by humans and AI agents. And the kind of maybe counterintuitive thing is it actually brings in a lot of third-party code. And that code is really vetted less than it's ever been before. And that's kind of like the first thing. The other thing is you've got the frontier AI models like mythos that are finding thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major operating system and open source library. And so the total volume of vulnerabilities in code is exploding right now. And it's going to keep going as we start to throw this.

Starting point is 00:51:03 these models against, you know, this backlog of code that's been out there for a long time and has a lot of vulnerabilities. And then kind of the third piece is that the attackers have really started kind of realizing that they can exploit the software supply chain to get into companies. So they're not really like coming in through, you know, finding vulnerabilities, but they're actually kind of realizing if we go into an open source component, that's actually an easy way to get into an organization and not just one, but usually thousands of organizations that all use that same component. So it's this like perfect. storm of all these factors right now.

Starting point is 00:51:35 So walk me through how your business model interacts with the open source community, because when we see things like mythos, finding a bunch of bugs in open source repos, you know, we hope that everyone will just submit bug reports early for the good of the world. But I'm interested in like the economics of patching open source if there's a really important package out there that maybe doesn't have a Linux foundation behind it. Like how at some point, like at the very least there's inference costs. Who's paying to patch all of the open source software that so many different companies rely on? If you go to a big company, they pay you, they might patch like their dependencies.

Starting point is 00:52:21 But how does this all flow together into an actually safer internet? Yeah. Well, I've been in open source for, I think over 15 years now. and I maintain a bunch of open source packages and have a real soft spot for the open source community. And so let me tell you, they were suffering under an enormous burden even before the current AI trends have kind of made it even worse.

Starting point is 00:52:49 They don't get much support, whether financial or just in terms of the number of people working on this really critical infrastructure is super low for how critical it is. And so we started seeing a lot of AI tools being used to create these slop PRs, these slop issues. And that was already kind of causing a burden. And then now you have the various frontier labs that are finding with their models,

Starting point is 00:53:14 are finding a lot of vulnerabilities that were there. We're always there, but the community didn't know about. And I will say they're doing a good job of providing a patch along with the bug that they've identified. So they're doing a lot of the work for the maintainer. But it still takes effort to review the PR. and the thing that people don't realize is when you accept a pull request as a maintainer, you're not just kind of, it's not this one-time cost.

Starting point is 00:53:37 You're actually accepting the burden kind of indefinitely into the future to maintain that code and make sure that that code is secure and is kept up to date with all the other changes. And so I think what we're going to see and we're already starting to see is despite the kind of best efforts of the Frontier Labs and they are making a good effort, you know, maintainers are going to fail to actually accept these patches. And so we're going to see a lot of libraries that may have a vulnerability in them that literally have, you know, effectively, you know, code sitting on GitHub that anyone can look at and use to generate an exploit against that vulnerability. And that's, there's not going to be an easy path for companies and for, you know, developer teams to go and actually patch their libraries because there's no version they can upgrade to because the maintainer is just sort of sitting there on that patch and hasn't, hasn't accepted it. So it's creating this real risk where, you know, like there's more volumes than ever before. And there's not really like easy paths.

Starting point is 00:54:32 And so this is actually something we try to solve. So we built a solution to this called certified patches. And what this is is basically kind of a deterministic way to kind of one-click make your vulnerabilities and your open source code go away. So we use a whole bunch of AI and kind of produce these patches that make the volume go away without any work on the part of the developer. There's no kind of burden of upgrading packages. You just sort of in a click, the vuln is gone from your dependencies, and you can kind of keep the rest of your code and your application the same. And so it's really kind of a quick fix to the problem that we hope is going to be part of the

Starting point is 00:55:11 solution. And by the way, we're giving away all the critical patches to the community for free. So we can try to disseminate this widely to as many people as possible. Are you finding any companies that are completely asleep at the wheel? Or is everyone like giving this a necessary? Who should I have today? No, I just want, like, I imagine, like, part of why the business is growing so quickly is this is like a hair on fire problem, concern. Every single day, right?

Starting point is 00:55:39 You're seeing these, like, vulnerabilities or issues pop up. And so I would have to imagine that every software company online where the technical leadership there uses the internet, which I would imagine is all software companies are, like, pretty, like, leaning into this problem. but do you ever do you ever like I'm curious even from like an outbound sales marketing standpoint are there people that are like oh this just like not that important for us right now or or or would like a no be like we we have a solution it's with someone else we okay so we've met one company that has literally no software they they produced toilet paper and they didn't have no one of business no yeah so I I think, yeah, I think that it's become a universal problem.

Starting point is 00:56:32 When we started, it was kind of this like maybe more niche problem where people said, okay, you know, I got a lot of other problems that are more important than this. And we initially had a really good uptake of the product in the cryptocurrency community because they have a lot of software supply chain risk. And when these hacks happen, it's kind of an irreversible thing for them where they like lose all their funds. And then I would say kind of the AI labs were the next to pick it up and sort of, you know, SF tech companies realize that the kind of people that are ahead of the curve. And now it's become, I mean, it's like a top, I'd say top one or top two concern at like nearly every company we talk to. It's a board level concern a lot of the times now.

Starting point is 00:57:15 And CSOs and heads of engineering are being asked to figure out like what is our solution to make sure the next time one of these things happens were protected. And the next time is probably going to be like, you know, tomorrow. Like it's so, it's become so for, it's literally like, you know. Yeah, every day. Yeah, literally our end of quarter was, you know, at the end of last month, we, you know, we already were super busy. And then there were three major software supply chain attacks that happened that same day. It's, it's wild. It's like more than we've ever seen and it's totally unprecedented.

Starting point is 00:57:44 Was the GitHub issue that I saw a supply chain attack or was that something else? I saw like a couple posts, but I didn't get to dig into it. So I don't think they've released that information yet. Yeah, there's definitely been some speculation. I mean, the timing right now, every time a company gets popped or their source code leaks, it's the first question that people think of now. And the group, I believe, that claimed responsibility is this team PCP group that has been responsible for a lot of the attacks. And so, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we learn, but I don't think, you know,

Starting point is 00:58:15 that's something that we know right now, and I wouldn't want to speculate. Yeah, I wonder if there will be movements to, you know, find like the compute infrastructure for team PCP at some point or like the hackers because at a certain point you would imagine that they're well they don't I mean some of this a lot of this is still social engineering right so it doesn't doesn't they don't necessarily need you know a country of geniuses yeah data center they can just couple dudes with phones who knows well congratulations on the progress thank you so much for coming on the show thanks for keeping us all safe we'll talk to you soon oh thanks guys have a good one goodbye We have Tay Kim from Key Context, the hottest substack on the internet. We have Tay Kim in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV can Ultram. Tay, how are you doing? Hey, guys.

Starting point is 00:59:02 Off. Here we go. Kicking it off strong. Ooh, good, good fit. You know what we need to do? We need to figure out how to do a, like, real-time recognition of the face, face-tracking, and then land the glasses on the correct. On the correct.

Starting point is 00:59:21 face. For next appearance. We need AI for that. Yes. Maybe before we get into AI and different companies, I'd love to just know how a key context is going, how it's been like since we last checked in. How is life? It's much better.

Starting point is 00:59:41 It's going great. I think the last time we talked was March 30th and the market was right at the bottom. Yeah, that's right. Greary, everything was going terrible. Yeah. You never worried, though. I did not. It's a truster.

Starting point is 00:59:54 I tripled, quadrupled down on here. And that's CPU shortage. Yeah, you do. By memory box. Yeah. All those ideas are up 50 to 150%. Oh, that's pretty good. I said, I think 13,

Starting point is 01:00:08 after 14 ideas are solidly in the green. I joke that like showy O-Tani numbers with like three, four great. It's not going to last, but it worked out. I mean, we trusted in. The actual... Shohei would love memory stocks. Yeah. I think he would.

Starting point is 01:00:25 I'm sure he... His financial advisor is long HBO and stocks, I'm sure... Yeah, yeah. I read some report that in South Korea there's folks who are liquidating insurance plans to go long S.K. Hynex. It's a huge, huge moment over there in South Korea.

Starting point is 01:00:40 And everyone's making fun of these Koreans for being long memory stocks. But, I mean, we're talking single-digit P multiples, probably a lot, triple digit growth. I mean, I quoted this Michael Dell thing where he spoke to a Wall Street conference. He says, 25, 25.

Starting point is 01:01:00 That's the thing you need to know about memory stocks. AI accelerators have 25 times more, like AI GPUs from Nvidia, two years from now, going to have 25 times more memory per GPU. And there's going to be a need for 25 times more GPUs. Wow. So he said, multiply 25 by 25.

Starting point is 01:01:18 to get 625 more revenue, etc. And layer onto the fact that four years ago, all these memory companies saw their revenue, you know, get cut in half. So they didn't expand capacity. It takes three to four years to expand capacity. So we're going to see like mega pricing power. Like we haven't seen anything yet. These stocks are going to keep going higher and their revenue rates are going to be astronomical.

Starting point is 01:01:47 So everyone makes fun of these careers. Koreans were p.e. For p.e. Stox growing at triple digits. That's pretty crazy. This cycle is different because there are only three companies that can make the H.B.M. Memory. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:59 Don't make fun of the Koreans. Don't. Don't. The pullback that you pushed to, that you mentioned, like the, when they were beaten up, was that the post-crypto slump when a semiconductor equipment and GPUs were being used to mine crypto and then there was a pullback there? Is that what we were referring to? Like, what is the prehistry?

Starting point is 01:02:18 Why were these stocks beaten up? So in 2022, like we had kind of a tech recession. All these tech companies were laying off people. Even in L and VDIA had these 50% drawdowns. The whole, you know, everything was, it's almost like the post-COVID kind of overhang. Yeah. Where people bought too many digital computers, electronics.

Starting point is 01:02:41 Yeah. And there was too much overcapacity. And so what was, yeah, what was, what was Nvidia doing during that? 50% drawdown. Were they buying the stock back? Not really. In India's, they buy a little bit of stock back, but not really. And back then, this is a different Nvidia where, like, data centers 10% of the revenue and gaming is 80%, 90%. Now it's what, right?

Starting point is 01:03:04 Where data centers nearly everything. What happened with Nvidia back then is everyone's mined their GPUs to mine Ethereum. And then Ethereum did the whole proof-to-stake group of work thing. So demand for GPUs collapsed. that Nvidia had like a terrible quarter where they missed by like $2 billion, which was a big number back then for that. That's a rounding error. Back then it was 20% of their revenue and the stock got hit hard.

Starting point is 01:03:29 Yeah. So what are you looking forward to from Nvidia this quarter, this year? What are you watching? So we had like two unbelievable quarters, the last two quarters. And I expect another great amazing quarter. I mean, Jensen is out there saying GPU consumption is through the roof. on Monday, he said AI demand is far exceeding supply and capacity. So I think the numbers are going to be great.

Starting point is 01:03:53 And this is without even China. So, I mean, the absolute scale of these numbers are mind-blowing. We're talking like 80% growth on $80 billion number, $79 or $80 billion. Just think about it in three months, right? So the absolute scale. And the stock is like almost as cheap as it's ever been. Like it's fading at 19 times forward below the S&P 500, which is growing at like, like 10%.

Starting point is 01:04:17 Nvidia is growing 80%. So this dichotomy where Nvidia is becoming more and more undervalued. And we could talk about why. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to know. Is that just because they're the largest company,

Starting point is 01:04:30 $5 trillion, it's hard to wrap your mind around a $10 trillion company. So every year we go through this cycle the last three years during this whole upswing up, everyone says, peak is here. Invidia can't grow anymore. And then it keeps growing

Starting point is 01:04:45 at some ridiculous growth. So the skepticism, the only reason why it's trading at below market multiple is that the AI skeptics believe that the peak year is nearer. There's going to be a no growth. Is it AI skeptics or is it TPU and Traneum enjoyers? That too. They believe that competition is coming and they're going to gain market share. I kind of laugh at that. And the numbers that people put out there for the competition, it's like a rounding error.

Starting point is 01:05:14 it's like a small, low single digit number compared to what Nvidia is going to grow in the next few year. And what people keep forgetting is, like, if you actually look at the numbers, I mean, Nvidia has a trillion dollars in orders, right? They're the ones that have locked down all the memory. Like, I met someone, a guy at GTC. He's an optical startup,

Starting point is 01:05:35 and Nvidia locked up all the capacity for lasers and optical, right? So, Nvidia has the supply components with memory, wafer, optical. So they're pretty much only a game in town if you want to actually buy AI GPU capacity. Like TPU gets headlines, but I mean $5 billion is nothing when you

Starting point is 01:05:54 compare you to a trillion dollars. So they have the volume. They have the great power per watt numbers and metrics that basically if you're doing inference Nvidia GPUs, even they cost

Starting point is 01:06:10 a lot more upfront when you actually do the inference, performance for watt is excellent when these are a Rubin. So, yeah, how did you grapple with the question of whether or not Nvidia is a car? There are competitors. You said low single digit percentage of the market, but AMD is getting its act together. Intel's maybe back in the game in a few years.

Starting point is 01:06:32 You have Traneum and TPU. Competition is rarely a good thing. Is Nvidia a car or not? Okay. Obviously, it's not a car. talking about how you... I would have loved to be in the room with you while you saw that segment. You're just like taking your computer smashing.

Starting point is 01:06:53 I think I was tweeting about it. I think I wrote a piece on it. I wrote like, you know, four or five hundred words about that podcast. I don't know if we want to go into that podcast. But, you know, they're going to be 80, 90% of the market. Maybe they'll lose 10% of the market share in two, three years. But 80, 90% of a market that is growing, you know, 50, 70% percent of the year. The hyperscaleor KAPX numbers went up huge. There's like 780 billion going

Starting point is 01:07:20 to a trillion dollars next year. The market believes with NVIDIA's valuation, that NVIDIA is going to stop growing within the next year or two. But the overall market, I think, is going to keep growing at 50 percent at least. If it grows 50 percent in the next two or three years, and VIA is going to grow. Even if they like maintain market, and I don't believe that's true, I think they're actually going to maintain or even increase market share. But even if market share goes down 10%. I mean, the numbers are just insane. And I don't think Nvidia's going to trade at like 10, 12 times earnings when they're

Starting point is 01:07:50 growing at 50%. I mean, that doesn't make sense to me. So I think it's going to re-rate higher. And the key thing here is the stock, stock buybacks. Because that's like, if you guys remember during the whole iPhone, like when the iPhone five and six came out when they actually had the large screen iPhone, Apple was trading at P.E. is 7. Like X Cash.

Starting point is 01:08:11 Like people thought Android was going to almost. like the same thing. Like, Android's come in and destroy the iPhone market share when iPhone went on this generational run with the large screen iPhones, right? But a big thing that Apple did was they started buying back stock, and that's when their multiple started going from single digits to 15 to 20 to 30 times. And I think what, and they already kind of hinted at it, but I think Nvidia is going to start buying stock buyback in size. They said 50% of their free cash flow in the next 12 months. They're a little bit cryptic on if that was after or for prepaid the prepayments they have for the inventory and suppliers.

Starting point is 01:08:47 But I think we're going to get some more clarity tonight. And if they actually put numbers, maybe it's this quarter or next quarter, if they actually put the actual, we're going to buy X hundreds of billions of stock in the next 12 months, I think the P is going to re-rate much higher. So as soon as we get visibility that next year is going to keep growing at 40, 50%, or higher, I think it's going to be higher. and the year after that, you know, stock should go on top of the re-rating from the capital returns. Gavin Baker was on our friend Patrick's show this morning.

Starting point is 01:09:22 He was making the point that it's possible that TSM could prevent a bubble, just given that they are not investing in CAPEX as aggressively as, let's say, Jensen might want them to. He said, you know, basically said what you're saying, which is, that Nvidia could sell a trillion dollars of GPUs, you know, pretty much immediately if they, if they had the supply. What's your, what's your read on that? Do you think that TSM is complete? Well, so I think I've been, I mean, I've been following chip the industry for, you know,

Starting point is 01:09:57 30, 40 years. So, yeah, I'm very good at reading. I'm very good at reading the T leaves. And I've noticed that Jensen and what TSMC, what the CEOs have been kind of hinting at, that their tone has changed in the last two, three months. So TSM just reported their Q1 earnings. And if you read the transcript, it's pretty obvious that they're just going to raise capex on a different order of magnitude for the next year and the year after. They said their capx is going to be much higher over the next three years than it was the last three years.

Starting point is 01:10:31 And basically, and all the stuff they're saying, you know, they're saying, and Jensen's been going out there during these speeches and Q&As. He's confidently saying the supply issues in two, three years, are going to be on a different level. Like, even with memory, he's saying all these component issues that we have now in two, three years, I think he even set down to Dworkesh podcast interview. Two, three years, this all will be, like, less of this issue. So I'm confident that TSMC, memory might be a little problem-like, but TSMC wafer-wise, you know, it's going to be dramatically higher over the next two, three years. But even if they raise cap-bocks, it feels like there might be.

Starting point is 01:11:07 like a, I don't know, a speed bump essentially because if they triple capacity and that takes two years, but everyone's sort of pricing in or expecting 10x a year or half an oom a year. There's a mismatch there. That's a, but what I'm saying is right now, the Nvidia valuation is trading like it's growing at 10, it's going to grow at 10% the next year or two. If they grow at 50% the next two years, I mean, that's definitely, you know, Like, TSFCs is going to raise our cap eggs. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:41 So it's like the numbers are way off. Yeah, yeah. I'm more just thinking from a broader market perspective. The 10x is not going to happen. Yeah. But, you know, 50 to 75% the next three years, I think that can happen. Yeah. And stocks will go much higher if that happens.

Starting point is 01:11:59 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That 10x is, you know, it's not software. I mean, this, you know, you have to actually move physical animals. Yeah, that makes sense. How do you think InVIDIA will be positioning China exposure, China opportunity? That was an interesting point of debate on the Dorcasch episode. Yeah, I mean, I've given up on China. I mean, at GTC, JTC, Jensen said, you know, he got approvals on both sides,

Starting point is 01:12:24 and then weeks later, like, that, you know, fell through again. Like, it's, forget China. It probably isn't going to happen. There was also another report that gaming GPUs were incrementally banned in China. I just think, like, you can't rely, temper your expectations. I don't think China's going to happen. Not relevant to the business case or the valuation, but potentially important to like the geopolitical story?

Starting point is 01:12:52 I think it's just going to be the status quo where Nvidia is not going to be able to sell to China. And anything that happens is incremental upside, but it's not going to be a huge number anymore. Even the stuff that is allowed is a limited number. the way the U.S. has, you know, approved the licenses. China is the one that's saying, no, we're not going to let you sell right now. Like, it's been going back and forth between China and the U.S., you know, who bans what and whatever.

Starting point is 01:13:17 But even the incremental numbers, even if China starts approving, it's not a huge number the way it was in the past. So I would temper expectations on China. It's just, it's been so back and forth and unreliable the last couple years. Yeah. What was your reaction to Google IO? I'm actually pretty negative on Google right now. And they're basically non-existent in the whole coding agent stuff,

Starting point is 01:13:45 which is the one that's growing exponentially right now in terms of coding agents and everyone's paying tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. And now Codex for OpenAI, they're adding a million users every few weeks. Google anti-gravity is nowhere to be found. No one's talking about on Twitter. Anyone that talks about it says they don't like it. So the hottest thing, which is coding agents, that's going to automate things and do actual work for an enterprise is the biggest market that's taking off like a rocket. Google isn't there.

Starting point is 01:14:19 So, I mean, Google Cloud is doing great. Yeah. Did you – did seeing yesterday, did it start to make more sense to you why Google had been committing so much? so many resources to anthropic. Like, do you feel like that's... Yeah, so I think they see... At the time, at a lot of... You know, at the time,

Starting point is 01:14:41 everyone was like, wow, I wonder how, you know, Demas feels about this. Of course, Demas is an angel in Anthropic and obviously, you know, thinks they're a great company and they have a good relationship. But at the time, it was like, wow, what, like, they have this new model incoming.

Starting point is 01:14:59 They have this massive compute advantage. they have this massive distribution advantage. They have massive data advantage. They have every single advantage. They have this huge head start. And they can just vend it in everywhere on all these platforms from Google Workspace, which is like a massively underrated distribution point to the Google docs and sheets and basically everywhere.

Starting point is 01:15:23 Like every single possible advantage in an incredibly talented team and exponential demand for tokens and it was still somewhat surprising to see them invest that much in a competitive lab. And they're benefiting with Google Cloud

Starting point is 01:15:44 getting that business. But I think long term strategically I think Google has to be very careful and I think Microsoft is experiencing this with Open AI. Once the value accrues to Anthropic and OpenAI they're going to be the power players four or five years from now and be able to

Starting point is 01:16:00 to push people around. I mean, we saw that when Yahoo literally used Google as their search engine, right? Google was nobody. Oh, yeah. And Yahoo put it on their homepage and powered their search engine. And then Google became the power player in a few years. Same thing with Netscape and Yahoo. I mean, this is like history repeating itself.

Starting point is 01:16:19 Netscape was everyone used Nescape. I don't know if you guys were around then. But Nescape was the browser, right? And the reason Yahoo became powerful is because you clicked on that. little thing on the right on the home page and it drove people to Yahoo, the portal. Then Google took off because they started using Google search engine inside Yahoo.com. So I think all these companies have to be careful. If you help open AI and anthropic become super powerful and they have the best models.

Starting point is 01:16:52 And this thing is all a flywheel, right? The more people that use it, more people that use cloud code, you know, Anthropics can get smarter and make the better version of Cloud Code, same thing which actually be. And if you let Gemini kind of like lose the market right now, like an Anthropic gets all the business and all the revenue, like Google starts losing power in the whole tech ecosystem. Yeah, it's almost like the whole industry is on a merry go round, but they're, you know, it's like a Spider-Man meme with like, you know, guns. Everyone's kind of just like going around. Yeah. What are your expectations for the SpaceX IPO? What does that do?

Starting point is 01:17:30 to the market, they sort of jump straight into the Mag 7 in terms of valuation. Are they going to suck up liquidity? First of all, it's really tough to tell without the S1. Yeah. We'll see the version, you know, all we have is like these spot leaks and Starlink and that now with, you know, selling the AI compute a classist to anthropic. I mean, the valuation is extremely extremely high. even the D1 capital guy who's up you know Dan Sunheim

Starting point is 01:18:02 yeah he was interviewed on Oshanish's show and you could tell if he just read his body language he's like wow this is a really high multiple I mean go back and listen to it even he even though he's going to benefit from it like he's like wow this is really high yeah so I mean a lot of SpaceX investors were happy with you know investing at 60 billion, but it was doing 10 billion revenue and had great margins.

Starting point is 01:18:30 And it's a completely different business, both on the valuation side. And, and, who goes to them? They saw stuff that, no, I mean, like, you know, the launch costs going down. And Starlink coming out of nowhere and adding billions of, you know, unbelievable telecom business, total, because of the market. That's great. But, like, 1.5, 1.75 trillion off those Starlink revenue number. Elon's earned the, what was this from Gavin Baker?

Starting point is 01:18:54 He was saying, like, you. Elon has just always delivered for shareholders, and that means that he can marshal unlimited capital at all times. And I'm just, you know, I'm just hesitant, like, you know, at those extreme valuations, that's less upside for a retail investor. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, hard to imagine, like, the Tesla scenario. Yeah, the passive indexes, if they go in at that price, that valuation,

Starting point is 01:19:19 like, on the next downturn, it's just, I just, I just wish Anthropic went out first. Sure. Because the numbers are dramatically real. I mean, Open AI probably is accelerated right now with Codex 2. Yeah. And, you know, that will help things a lot better than, you know, than SpaceX. Oh, sure, sure, sure.

Starting point is 01:19:40 Yeah. Interesting thing right now, looking at valuations of the Mag 7, and then you add SpaceX in there, and then you add, you know, Anthropic and Open AI. And SpaceX will look, potentially make entropic and open AI look cheap on just like a... Revenue. revenue multiple basis. But then it still looks very expensive versus, let's say, like a meta,

Starting point is 01:20:02 sitting at $1.5 trillion with one of the best businesses of all time. I did want to ask you about meta, your kind of updated mental model. They obviously had a big painful round of layoffs today to be able to afford their inference bill. I'm joking there, but it does seem like they're effectively whatever they're saving on comp they're just sort of reinvesting into AI AI both CAPEX

Starting point is 01:20:34 but also their their inference bills how are you thinking? Yes, ask me the same question six, seven weeks ago and you know, they reported an unbelievable court. I mean, they're growing at 33 percent. Like,

Starting point is 01:20:47 crazy amounts of profits. Like, there's market skepticism that they could do well in AI models, but there's also the plan B. You could say the same thing about what happened with Elon and XAI. They were able to, there's so much demand in this Megatrend hypercycle that even if they falter a bit, they could sell compute capacity to the highest bidder that's out there. So I wouldn't count meta out.

Starting point is 01:21:15 I actually think, like I said, their core advertising business is more durable than the Google search engine right now, If you go, it's filled with ads everywhere, it's not a great experience. And a lot of that traffic is going to shift over to AI chatbot. So if you actually look at the numbers, meta is their core business, it's very durable, has competitive advantage. It's still growing like a weed. I just wouldn't count them out. Yeah, basically, as soon as they either have an AI breakthrough, or they pull, back on AI, the stock has to

Starting point is 01:21:55 re-rate, right? Yes, yeah. I mean, that's the same thing happen with the Metaverse stuff. Yeah. They start cutting back spending, you re-rate higher because all those losses don't hit the income statement.

Starting point is 01:22:10 They look tiny now. Yeah, it'd be so wild to think about what Meta's stock would be doing right now if the Metaverse debacle had never happened because the Metaverse was like this high-conviction bet on a category that was just way too early,

Starting point is 01:22:26 and yet AI doesn't feel... I think you're right. And yet they feel like late on AI. I think Mark felt late, or at least clearly felt behind enough to sort of 10X of seriousness. So I think it would be... Yeah, I think they're a little more skeptical

Starting point is 01:22:43 because of what happened with the metaphors where they spend tens of billions of dollars that has pretty much gone. Yeah, yeah. Becoming a Neo-Cloud is a weird outcome for a hyperscaler that could totally have a cloud platform, but has not historically. And you would imagine that there's a whole bunch of hard-won lessons

Starting point is 01:23:03 that Azure, GCP, AWS went through organizational decisions, structures, just key people in place. It feels hard to spin up immediately at the same time. There's neoclouds that are scaling revenue extremely quickly every day. So I agree with you that it is a possibility. but a whole set of new challenges, if that's the direction it goes. That's the worst case scenario, right?

Starting point is 01:23:26 Yeah. Like, they want to use the AI compute capacity to make their internal businesses better with the ad personalization and monetization and create this stuff. And actually, I've been playing around with OpenClaw for the first five a few weeks ago. And, yeah, I've been using WhatsApp,

Starting point is 01:23:44 and that's the future. Everyone's going to have a digital assistant. It's like so amazing. I ask it to give me the top 20 stories is powered by the latest version of Codex. It goes out there, searches every day for me, and emails me the top 20 stories I should read. That's cool.

Starting point is 01:23:59 And it's really smart. You guys should try it. It's actually amazing. And the thing I'm thinking is like, why can't meta do this? I mean, they have this meta-a-i that's not powerful. But, you know, having this little channel for my little T-Bot, I call it, T-Bot, and all he does WhatsApp it and say, do this, do this, find this for me,

Starting point is 01:24:18 everyone's going to have this. This is the basic thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the big headline token number from Google was that a 7X token production across all of their services. That actually seemed a little low to me, given how broad the surfaces are and how crazy the models have gotten in the last year. But I would expect to start seeing that out of meta because now when you go to Instagram and you search, it gives you a little AI overview. And obviously they have the meta AI app. And I would imagine that there's more AI hydration happening across the ecosystem.

Starting point is 01:24:51 And this digital assistant thing is going to be like open claw. Like I was skeptical until I tried. I'm like, oh, my gosh. So meta should be all over this because it's on there. And probably with the Raybans. They'll do it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great hanging out.

Starting point is 01:25:05 Great to see. What do you do for Nvidia earnings? Do you just like turn off all the lights in the room and like just like sit there? Case of beer, nachos. Big screen TV. Is it more like a Super Bowl or like a job? I wish like we should bring back those bar crawls. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:25 They did it once. And then it stopped. Like we should bring that back. Too much of a top signal. This is going to be the number one most valuable company for a long time. Yeah. Like sorry, Alphabet. It's not going to happen.

Starting point is 01:25:36 Yeah. So we should bring those bar earnings parties back. That sounds great. Well, we will talk to you soon. Have a great day. All right. Thanks, guys. Good to be again.

Starting point is 01:25:46 Before we bring in our next guest, I want to actually pull up this Wall Street Journal article, see how SpaceX is about to eclipse every other Blockbuster IPO. Scroll down on this because they have a beautiful visualization of IPOs over time. You can see the first graph. These are IPOs over the last seven years ranging from zero billion dollars raised, probably $10 million, $100 million, all the way up to $2 billion. Continue to scroll down and you'll see what. what happens as the blockbuster IPO starts stacking up. You get Airbnb, who we're talking to the founder of, just in a few minutes, arm, cerebrus, Uber and Porsche, and then as you keep going, Saudi Ramco comes in at 25 billion, if you keep scrolling down, and then eventually, SpaceX comes in to dwarf them all at 80 billion to make everything else look like a flat line on the chart.

Starting point is 01:26:42 Absolutely blockbuster IPO and should make for a ton great takes and analysis. And it'll be a fun, fun day on the timeline when SpaceX goes public soon. We're getting the S-1 any day now. Well, our next guest, Amad from Mercury, is here with a big funding announcement. So we'll bring him in from the waiting room into the TVPN Ultram. Amad, how are you doing? There is. Yeah, great to be here. Am I not going to get the dong? Oh, you'll get the gong, but you've got to give us the news. Tell us what happened. You've got to give us what happened. All right. Jopi Jha, there we go. How much did you raise? Yeah, we just raised

Starting point is 01:27:16 200 million 5.50 because of the TV's leading. So excited about the answer today. That's fantastic. What was the traction that unlocked

Starting point is 01:27:28 this new fundraising round? What was the catalyst? You know, we've just been kind of grinding away for the last, what is it, seven years since we launched. The night success.

Starting point is 01:27:39 Seen lot of growth in Q1, especially about 2.5X RQ1 last year in terms of applications. I don't know if you've seen the stats, but there's been a lot of new business formation, a lot of companies being built using AI. So obviously we hear about like these big startups in AI, but there's also just like normal businesses being built with AI being a big

Starting point is 01:28:01 catalyst. And we saw, yeah, big increase 2.5X over last year, which in last year was a big year for us. How are you reaching those customers? Like what are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses? Because they don't exist. It's hard to reach out to them before. you have to be very aware. The other crazy thing for us is we, most of our growth is organic, but even the percentage organic has been growing for us. So even though we're

Starting point is 01:28:24 growing, we're getting more and more organic, which, you know, it was unexpected. And the other big channel for us is LLM recommendation. So, you know, if you go into your favorite LLM and you say, what bank should I use for my startup? Mercury is often the recommendation. So

Starting point is 01:28:40 that's, yeah, we try to deliver the best customer experience possible and because people really love Mercury, they tell their friends about it. And that's like a nice library for us. What is like 90% of the reason that you guys are recommended so highly by LMs is just because people recommend Mercury so highly?

Starting point is 01:28:59 Like I can't be, like I'm just trying to get at is it like your team was like, hey, we should really optimize this? Or it was just sort of like. Yeah, I think it's really hard. Like there's a whole thing called GEO, which is like all about optimizing for LLMs. But at the end of the day, you know,

Starting point is 01:29:13 if it's on Reddit, it's on air, Like, if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feeds into the algorithm. Yeah, it helps to have been doing press for years. There's a huge advantage to being in business seven years. Not so long that the articles are about the downfall or like how you're a dinosaur. All the coverage is that it's new and interesting and valuable and worth checking out. And so that surfaces. How are you thinking about going deeper in those LLM recommendations and sort of like the

Starting point is 01:29:43 agentic commerce of actually opening an account. Is that something that's on your horizon to integrate that? Yeah, so it's kind of interesting thinking about like the LLMs using Mercury. So we actually launched Mercury CLI. We launched that was a month or so ago and we launched an MCP actually in December. Yeah. And our growth on like those is like through the roof. So in tons of people are using Claude Code or Co work or Chat GPT to connect to Mercury.

Starting point is 01:30:08 And then, you know, I think the, well, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, they're kind of running their whole business and their life in AI now. And, you know, if you can put in creating an invoice or like approving a payment and it's all done within your existing workflows, that's really powerful. And I think if you, there's a fly rule between like if you build great tools that AI can use, it actually recommends those tools even more. I mean, that's partly why like, you know, people like Superbase and like those kind of tools. Yeah, then how do you deal with the tension of like you could build a dashboard visualizing, uh, payments that are made into a bank account over a period of time. You could also expose an API that allows me to suck out all the data and vibe code my own dashboard the way I like it.

Starting point is 01:30:54 There's probably demand for both. Do you just have to do both? Do you pick a lane? I think for us, it's like do both. So we're building both kind of the CLI and we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and those those services. but we also have another team that's working on and we just launched Mercury Insights which summarizes your transactions gives you like kind of AI insights on end lets you talk to your transactions and then later this year we're launching Mercury Command

Starting point is 01:31:22 where you can do kind of complex workflows like hey I just hired someone set them up in payroll and create a card and do all of that without me having to kind of click around all of the kind of Mercury surfaces and I think number one I don't know exactly where the world's going to go right like maybe everyone's going to be using

Starting point is 01:31:40 AI assistance to do everything or it's going to be a combination. So we want to service both of it. And B, you know, if you think about like the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, even whether it's like a mobile app or like searching for all your transactions,

Starting point is 01:31:56 whatever is, you know, Mercury's been far ahead. But if AI keeps changing the world and like, you know, the people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we want to be at the forefront of that. And, you know, that's going to increase the spread between like what people get from Mercury versus what they get from the incumbents.

Starting point is 01:32:12 Yeah, I was reading an article in The Economist a couple weeks ago about stable coins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or like maybe just a stable volumes through the earlier part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stable coin-related features

Starting point is 01:32:35 in FinTech broadly? Yeah, I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. I think if you're in the US and you're sending money to a US business or you can use consumer you know, why is ACH all of the cards, all of that works pretty smoothly. If you're paying money internationally or

Starting point is 01:32:52 you know, you're not in the US and you want to have like a stable currency. That's where USDC and these other stable coins are doing really well. So, you know, we don't currently support it natively but lots of our customers use, you know, some of these kind of stable coin services. And we'll probably have kind of at least payment features

Starting point is 01:33:09 that are based on stable coin, especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for the US banking system in the US. I think it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer. Is, oh sorry, Troy. Why was this year the right time to get into payroll? You know, we've been expanding our services. Obviously, we're known best for banking, but we've had a corporate credit card for three years and that's going really fast. We have a billpay an invoicing solution and over time I really want mercury to be the place that you do most of your business finances, right? It's kind of annoying. Like if the money's here and your users are here and

Starting point is 01:33:51 your finance team is here, you know, you want to have all of that kind of in one place. So, yeah, we made an acquisition and payroll. We acquired a company called Central. They're running, we're continuing to run them and we're going to, over time, make it more like a fully integrated mercury payroll solution. But yeah, payroll is like a big category. It's kind of annoying right now when you're using a payroll provider. You have to send money. It's kind of sits around for four days before it shows up on your employees.

Starting point is 01:34:20 And Central has done a really good job with kind of AI first. Like they have this whole interface where you can do a ton of things in Slack. And we're kind of taking some of that learning and putting in our own kind of command launch. Yeah. Is the AI boom helping you sort of rethink product roadmap expansion differently than a few years ago? Like when I think about neo banks, FinTech, modern technology-enabled banks, I think like you could eventually do auto loans, mortgages, consumer, you could do all sorts of the insurance.

Starting point is 01:34:55 There's so many different products in the financial technology world. I know that there's incredible value to focus. At the same time, there's this foundational unlock in being able to move very quickly into new markets. How are you wrestling with that tension? You know, I think number one, we want to talk to our customers and see what they really want. I don't want to invent things that they might want kind of thing. It's definitely accelerating. You know, I think the two vectors are like, hey, it accelerates software development.

Starting point is 01:35:26 It doesn't necessarily make like kind of the more financial, like it doesn't make lending that much better, faster or whatever. Maybe you could underwrite a little better, but there's still like kind of limitations. But you can build software, especially new software, much quicker. So definitely thinking about that and like we're already seeing an acceleration in kind of new software launches we're doing. I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is, you know, interfaces tend to get cluttered over time, but AI has a decluttering effect. Like you can kind of personalize it to someone's need. And like, you know, I really think the future is people are not trying to do a specific thing, but they kind of just talk about a problem. They're like, hey, you know, I just

Starting point is 01:36:05 need to make payroll, like, you know, help me think it through kind of thing. So you can go like a level above, like solve the problem rather than like be like a feature, which I think like has a decluttering effect to interfaces. That's good. Yeah, so it's so amazing. I just think back to, you know, 10 years ago at this point, like starting to to build companies and just, seeing how many things I expected to be intuitive. Like I expected my bank to be able to help me pay my employees because like the function of a bank is to like hold money and let you do things with it. And yet obviously, you know, took, took some time for you guys to enter payroll and then all these all these other things like just just the concept of getting an invoice wanting to pay it.

Starting point is 01:36:50 Like you really should be as simple as like dragging it somewhere. And then that's it. Right. And so there's all these things that like right in this moment, there's going to be an entire generation of entrepreneurs that only knows this completely frictionless business finance and I'm very happy for them. And I'm happy for all of us that had to go through, do it the hard way for so long. Yeah, when I started Mercury, that's actually what got me excited that like after you build a bank account, there's so much more to do after that. You know, I really didn't want to, this is my fourth company. So I really didn't want to do like this thing where you build the thing and then all you do is like incrementally improve it

Starting point is 01:37:27 a little bit over like a decade. Like I really wanted to do something where like the start is just a start and it's kind of a platform to build a lot. So I'm exciting, excited that we're like finally like getting to build that kind of multi-product strategy. Last question. Deployment pays for angel investing. Are you accelerating it? Are you decelerating? What are you doing on the angel investing side? Maybe I'm a little old school, but like when I think when the valuations are the highest and the hype is the highest. You should not accelerate. You should like, you know, we saw 2021. Like, I'm trying

Starting point is 01:37:59 to keep like a continuous pace. Like, I think it's total. Don't you know this time is different? Yeah. You know, I think that like there's reason for the hype and there's really exciting companies being built. But I think it's going to be even more fun when the valuations come down after the hype dies down.

Starting point is 01:38:15 And you can like then deploy it. You know, it was crazy. No one was deploying in 2022 and 23 when like it's the same companies at like a massive discount. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, the smart funds were, and a lot of great companies made it through, grew even bigger and are bigger than they've ever been as you are. So, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon.

Starting point is 01:38:37 Yeah, have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. There have been a number of AI images hitting the timeline. One was of Peter Thiel eating ice cream in Buenos Aires. He has been spotted at a chess match. I think that image was not AI. This one is AI generated by Kat McGee, but it still sparked a bunch of funny reactions.

Starting point is 01:39:00 One of them, the question you need to be asking is, what delicious ice cream is almost nobody eating? Of course, the, Minchip is, uh, is, is Minship properly rated or is underrated? Uh, minchip might be underrated. I think it gets thrown in with the chocolate category. It's sort of a second fiddle to the vanilla strawberry chocolate. Always always a mint chip kid.

Starting point is 01:39:22 I like mint chip. I was always strawberry. I like strawberry ice cream. Question. But I think as you zoom in on this AI image, you can tell that it's AI. It's just too crystal clear, too well lit for, you know, someone to snap a picture unnoticed in Buenos Aires at a, at an ice cream parlor. This would be, this would require professional lighting to get something like this out of a camera on the fly if you saw someone. Zero to Yum is what they say.

Starting point is 01:39:52 Anyway. Question, John, that I was asking you this morning. Yeah. Do you think it's better to rest on your laurels or sleep at the wheel? I think I have my answer, but I'm here yours. I think in the modern era, sleeping at the wheel is increasingly safe because of self-driving cars. You can be sleeping in a waymo. You can be sitting in the front seat.

Starting point is 01:40:20 I don't know. Do they let you sit in the front seat of a waymo? I don't think so. Maybe if there's a fourth. Yeah. Can you... Not behind the wheel. Not behind the wheel. But what if I'm in the back and I wiggle my body through the front two seats, sit in the front? It'll stop the car.

Starting point is 01:40:35 They're going to come on the phone. They will. Stop. Okay. Well, then it seems like it's increasingly difficult to sleep at the wheel. And so perhaps resting on your laurels would be the better option. I think so because it allows you to... One, it's obviously comfortable.

Starting point is 01:40:49 Yes. Quite relaxing. Yes. But just because you're resting doesn't mean you can't get back in the game. Yeah, also, resting on your laurels implies that you have laurels to begin with, whereas sleeping at the wheel, you just have a car. Yeah, I think it might not even be your car. It's also very Lindy, right?

Starting point is 01:41:05 People have been doing this for thousands of years. Sure. Imagine a Roman emperor resting on laurels. But they weren't sleeping at the wheel. They hadn't invented the wheel. They barely invented the wheel. I think they had the wheel. Well, they would ride on top of wheels.

Starting point is 01:41:17 They had the wheel. They were planning to reinvent the wheel. No one had a wagon that had a wheel that would steer the wagon. That's true. You had reins. They would take the horse by the reins. Isn't that the phrase? Take the bull by the horns?

Starting point is 01:41:32 What's the reins idiom? There's some sort of rains idiom. Anyway. Yeah, no, I think personally... Resting on your rolls implies that you have laurels to rest on. Sleeping out the wheel means that you just got behind the wheel of some car. You could be in a sudden death situation. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 01:41:48 Much risk here. High risk here. High risk, low reward. Yes. Almost very, very... Plenty of people rest on their laurels and just fade into obscurity. They aren't met with a true downfall if they're resting on their laurels. But sometimes you just rest, recharge, get back in the game.

Starting point is 01:42:03 Ideally, you avoid both. Ideally, you avoid both sleeping at the wheel and resting on your laurels. Imagine just a bunch of laurels in your driver's seat and you're just sitting... You could be doing both at the same time. That is the riskiest possible scenario because they're going to be the most relaxed. highest likelihood of, you know, careening off the road. You want to avoid both. You want to avoid both.

Starting point is 01:42:24 What do you think of this desk? Herman Miller launched a gaming desk. People are saying it's tasteful. A tasteful gaming setup for once. They thought it was impossible. You personally find pretty much all gaming setups tasteful. Extremely tasteful. It's a big part of your culture.

Starting point is 01:42:39 I love a gaming desk. I don't know. The thing is that, I don't know, watching this video of the coil gaming desk, it doesn't scream that tasteful to me. It seems like a minor upgrade. Probably the best gaming desk out there seems very functional. I also, I don't know why there's a back panel there. I don't know what that's for. Is that for passing wires through perhaps? But how would you rate this gaming desk? Is it tasteful? I like it. I like the red coil. I like a pop of color. Okay. A little color in there.

Starting point is 01:43:17 I love, that's, that color red is one of my favorite color. Maybe it's a, yeah. I have a, I have a. What is the coil for? Oh, it takes the cable down so you can plug it in because it's adjustable. Almost certainly power. I feel like they could just thread that through the leg and it wouldn't even be there. But I guess it adds a pop of color.

Starting point is 01:43:37 The chat is saying over designed. Overdesigned. We'll see. Herman Miller, Herman Miller has a whole gaming division, I suppose. Anyway, you got to remember, this is from Will Depeu, you got to remember that there's some guy out there who's the Michael Jordan of steel processing. He's on a generational run right now. Everyone sees their niche at the center of the world. So many greats you'll never hear of. The Michael Jordan of steel processing, we got to find him, dig him up, get him on the show. We've had the Michael Jordan of acquiring rare parcels of land in Montana on the show. That was fantastic. He's got to be pretty excited for this upcoming. round of IPOs. Data center buildouts? A lot of, I don't know. Anyway, a lot of those IPO. We can come back to the land, the land strategies, uh, because we have our next guest here, Brian Chesky from Airbnb, back on the show. Only a few weeks since we talked to you last. Welcome back. Thank you so much

Starting point is 01:44:31 for taking the time. How are you doing? Hey guys. How you doing? Good to be here again. Great to see you. We're not in. I'd be better if we were in a blimp right now. It'd be better if we were in a blimp, but we're one show closer to hanging out and a blimp together. Uh, give us the update. What's going on in an Airbnb world? So we announced a few things. The first thing we announced is a whole bunch of new services, probably starting with grocery delivery. A lot of people love that Airbnbs have kitchens. So now when you book an Airbnb, you can have groceries waiting for you in Airbnb. A number of people tell us that if you go to Rome, it's hard to get an Uber. So now there's going to be somebody that can welcome you at the airport and pick you up and take your

Starting point is 01:45:06 Airbnb. We also announced finally car rentals, a long time coming. And so now you can get a car rental on Airbnb. And we also announced that we have now a boutique and independent hotels. If you book a boutique or independent hotel, we are creating a price match guarantee. So you see a lower price anywhere else. We will give you the difference back in our credit

Starting point is 01:45:26 and we'll give you another 15% towards the next booking of anything on Airbnb. So those are just a few of the things that we announce. Really, the basic idea is just continue to listen to customers, continue to listen to our guests, listen to our host, and just keep them spanning and perfecting the service. and trying to make it be a bit of an ecosystem of other developers and other apps.

Starting point is 01:45:46 Yeah. This feels like the fruition coming to reality of, like, a lot of the pitch that you gave last year. What was involved in actually getting to this point? How much of this is predicated on new software development, new product initiatives versus partnerships with existing areas? Like, a lot of these feel, like, they touch the real world. So it's not just an extra line of code or an extra panel. button in the app. Yeah, it's a good question, guys. The app that most people see is maybe

Starting point is 01:46:19 something like caught 20% of Airbnb. There's also a host app, but again, most of the work about Airbnb is what happens in the real world. And I think I said last time that we spent a lot of time. Imagine like you're living in a one-story house, and then suddenly a bunch of people want to move into your house, and you have to add like a second, third, fourth floor. But you didn't build the foundation for a four-story building. And so what we had to do over the last few years was kind of rebuild the foundation. It really was only built for homes. It was not built to do other things.

Starting point is 01:46:46 Amazon had this problem in the late 90s. They were built on ISBNs for books, and they had to basically take their website and turn into a bunch of primitives. So we basically already done that work. To give you an example, it took us 16 years to finally expand beyond homes. It took us two years to develop service experiences.

Starting point is 01:47:03 It took us eight months to develop groceries, and it took us only two months to develop luggage storage, airport pickups, and car rentals. So basically, looking at the, the time to launch from conception or launch, we can now have an idea and put it into a market sometimes within like a couple weeks to a month. And what that should mean is instead of announcing one or two things a year, eventually we can announce dozens of things a year. Yeah. Cars,

Starting point is 01:47:27 why, obviously a hard thing to do, but I'm sure people have been asking this for, you know, decade now. Why did you choose at some point not to maybe listen to your customers? Why are you you, why are you making those? Why was, like, why was now the right time? Because it just feels like such a, you know, such an obvious thing. I'm booking a trip somewhere, you know, give me one click to add a car. Obviously, there's more that needs to happen on the back end, but why? Yeah, another great question. And I asked myself that, like, why didn't we do certain things sooner? And if I could, I would have. You know, I remember that one of my early investors said starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane

Starting point is 01:48:11 in the way down. I never realized when I started a company that I never realized, I thought if you hire thousands of people, suddenly you'd have all these extra people to do all these extra things. But when we are in hypergrowth, we basically just had most of the people just trying to keep the lights on. And we really struggled in 2010s during our hottest moment to really expand beyond our core business. We tried in 2012, didn't really work.

Starting point is 01:48:35 Tried in 2016 didn't really work. We finally thought we cracked it in 2019, and then suddenly the pandemic hit, we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks. We said, oh, man, we don't have time to do this right now. We got to go back to our core business. So we've kind of had three different starts, and we tried it before. We just never really were able to stick the landing. I think this time we finally can. So, yeah, people have been asking for this for more than a decade.

Starting point is 01:48:58 In fact, 15 years. 2011, we began thinking about it. And now I'm happy to say that hopefully going forward, we won't have to wait 15 years for another. service. They'll be coming really fast now. Yeah. And how is it working under the hood? Are you partnering, like, is this a also kind of like sharing economy play? Are you partnering with car rental services or both? I imagine you want to offer people. Yeah, it's going to be a mix of things. There's not really a lot of global providers. So we're going to be working with a number of different partners that can

Starting point is 01:49:30 fulfill this. Some of the services like bounce, like we don't do luggage storage. They have 15,000 and locations, almost as many of there are Starbucks. So that's more like an app store integration. And then sometimes we have to build services first party with their own host because they don't offer it. With car rentals, we're basically able to partner with a bunch of companies. No one company covers every geography in the world. We're in more countries than Coca-Cola.

Starting point is 01:49:53 So you have to patch a bunch of things together. I think over time we'll probably get a little more. Countries and Coca-Cola? I think that. We were, at least the last time we checked. What is Coca-Cola doing? They're asleep at the wheel. I know.

Starting point is 01:50:07 Come on. What they do? You go to founder mode. I think we're in every country, but North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Belarus. Maybe there's one other. So we're just about anywhere in the other country. Yeah, the other thing with cars that, as I was just like thinking about that, as kind of Turo came on the map, the one of the, and I love cars.

Starting point is 01:50:30 So I was always, I thought very briefly of, well, maybe I should get a bunch of cars that I like. and maybe turn it into a little business. I quickly realize that it's like fundamentally a wildly different business because if I have a property and I put it on Airbnb, even if people are staying in it at 365 days a year, if I buy at the right price and in a great market, it will continue to appreciate cars are the exact opposite. And it's just like a wildly different financial equation.

Starting point is 01:50:58 And so it always made sense to me just from that lens where the supply side is like incurring some like heavy heavy costs associated with actually like supplying you know providing that supply versus on the Airbnb side you know again you're you can get a bunch of rental income and not not occur any you know significant losses associated with the asset yeah I mean I think that's a really really good point and usually people's second biggest asset after their home is their car and so I think now we have people's time, we have their homes, we have their cars. We would like to move to a lot of different other categories. Over time, I think you'll see a couple dozen other categories coming over the next

Starting point is 01:51:40 year or two on Airbnb, essentially building this entire ecosystem of services. But you're right. I mean, I think maybe one way to think about Airbnb is like just getting more capacity utilization out of assets. You know, anything that's empty, it could be further monetized. And the world could be a bit more efficient. It could be cheaper to own a car. It could be cheaper to own a house if you could defer the cost by sharing with other people. That was basically how it started. I couldn't afford to pay rent. But that doesn't limit it to itself to homes, as you mentioned.

Starting point is 01:52:07 It could be anything. Cars, it could be boats, it could be equipment you have laying around. It could be kind of anything. How do you think about the previous services that have tied into Airbnb? Was there ever a power law distribution in those any few services? We've talked about, you know, fitness trainers when you're in. a town or private chefs or anything that can add to an experience, a kayaking tour, a hiking tour.

Starting point is 01:52:35 Yeah. Was there a power law distribution in those? Are you seeing breakout successes? Yeah. In those, like what's the shape of that side of the business these days? Yeah, so basically we learn two things with these services. I'll talk about service and experiences. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:49 There are three services. We launch a 10, three breakout hits. The three breakout hits are photography. A lot of people want photos on their vacation. And obviously, if you're a family of four, like, you're a family of four, like, you're a One of you is not in the photo or you're giving your camera to someone else. And you want to remember these trips. So having a professional photographer take your photos for 30 minutes, it's a pretty

Starting point is 01:53:09 reasonable cost. That's very popular. Chefs are not as popular in very urban areas, but like, let's see you go to Lake Tahoe. You have a big kitchen. Maybe you have groceries. Maybe you don't want to cook. A chef could come over. There's not a lot of restaurants there.

Starting point is 01:53:22 And then the third one's massage, especially again in vacation rental or villa destinations. Massage is very popular. Other than that, it's really geography by geography. So we see like in Sal Yolita, it's a different kind of experience than, say, in the Caribbean. So it really depends geography by geography. With regards to experiences, we're seeing a couple things. Number one, no surprise landmarks. People, the first time you go to a city, you want to see a landmark.

Starting point is 01:53:47 But the thing we learned is the second time you go to a city, you don't want to see a landmark. You want to experience food. And the third time you experience a city, now you want to get inside access. So a big thing we learned is, is this your city? your first, second, or third time to city, or do you live there? And depending upon the answer to the question, depends on the type of experience we offer you. This was a nuance that we didn't really appreciate the first time around, and now we do. And I think my prediction is the thing that will make service experience is really big is people will start booking them in their own city.

Starting point is 01:54:15 That's when the TAM goes by a factor of 10. Not to say it will be every day, but it just makes it a lot bigger TAM. Yeah. Yeah, just clicked for me that, you know, one of the challenges of all the marketplace, like photography, chef marketplaces, massage. All of them, I can't even really think of their names, even though there was like venture-funded companies in those categories, because the second you hire a chef, they're literally preparing you food.

Starting point is 01:54:42 You immediately develop, like, trust and a relationship. And so if you book, find a chef in your hometown, you're talking about disintermediation. You're going to have this massive disintermediation risk. And also, like, dis-economies of scale. If you're just the private chef booking company, very hard to support the entire operation in the back office, but Airbnb is big company.

Starting point is 01:55:02 This can be one of many features. And the features that you build can be flexible. It's like, yeah, I want a photographer here. I want a chef here. Yeah, yeah. You bring up two points. I'll run up both points. So one thing is most services,

Starting point is 01:55:16 there's not even one app in the world. So if you want to get a massage in United States, you might use an app like Zeal, but if you want to get a massage in Korea, I don't even know the app. It's probably a Korean company. And if you want to go to Brazil, it's going to be a different company.

Starting point is 01:55:27 So it's not even possible for most people to know which app to use and which country. And so being able to aggregate all that demand is great. And these apps, these developers love it because we basically are their international expansion strategy. Much of these companies, the hardest challenge they have is growing internationally. And we say, well, we can choose your brand to a global audience. Well, now let's talk about locals. Yes, if you're going to do a repeat service, we don't want to charge 50 and 20%. we're going to have to decide a business model.

Starting point is 01:55:56 And maybe there is no commission, or it's a very, very low commission. And maybe the value there is just, we make your life easier. And I think this brings up a larger point, which is we don't need to monetize every experience on Airbnb. The best things have a great relationship,

Starting point is 01:56:11 add value, and know that there's enough high value assets we can make money on, and we don't need to try to get every last dollar. We just really want people to love our service. And as you know, we generate quite a bit of free cash flow. So, you know, we're one of the more profitable companies as a free, thank you, as a free cash flow standpoint. So we are able to pass a lot of value onto customers. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, that framing as like a concierge for the world where, like,

Starting point is 01:56:38 if you're staying, if you're staying at a hotel, like the concierge is not always thinking, like, okay, this person wants something to do today. How do I get the maximum amount of value out of them in this moment, right? Because then you'd always send them to, well, why don't you eat at this restaurant on the property or why don't you do this thing on the property, but just like actually taking a positive some view and just know that like you want to be core to someone's experience wherever they are in the world, I think is. I like concierge for the world, by the way. That's like a very good slogan, actually. Coinage. I love it. It's all yours. Maybe this is a little random pivot, but the total solar eclipse is happening August 12th, 2026. I want to know it feels like

Starting point is 01:57:21 it's driving a lot of travel broadly. And I want to know, like, do these special events, I got to say, first of all, like, I feel like every time there's, like, one of these things, it's like, this will never happen again for 600 years and then it happens in, like, two years. No, no, no, no, no, it's a very specific band. There's something that happens every single years, but there's a lot of things. Yeah, so a couple of years ago, it happened in Texas, and the, and this time, it's happening in Greenland, Iceland, Portugal, and Spain. And so there is a lot of travel and I've heard stats from other companies. I'm just wondering about these like big events. First, like how much do they show up in the data? How how much do you see them? And then second,

Starting point is 01:57:57 like, what are you doing to like amplify and get the most out of these, let your customers know? Because you frame this as like sometimes the best experience is like when you know it's the first time visiting a place, second time, third time. But at the same time as a user, there's this tension between I love it when a company knows something about me before I have to fill out a form. But also it gets a little creepy if they know too much about me and this like this weird tension where I want you to know, but I don't want you to tell me that you know and I don't want to fill out the form, but I don't want you to spy on me, but I sort of do want you to spy on me. So walk me through all of that. Okay, so yeah, two parts. I'll do the solar eclipse and then we'll talk about essentially personalization without being creepy. Maybe it's the point. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:38 Okay. So on the solar eclipse in 2024, I think it was the spring or I don't know when it was in 2024. We were able to see a heat map. So yes, you saw on the data. And we were able to see a heat map. of the exact path of the solar eclipse, and you can look at a heat map of all of our bookings, and anyone that was in that line of the eclipse, you saw a massive increase in bookings. When the Tower Swift Erez Tour came out, you could literally follow the tour

Starting point is 01:59:02 from the data on Airbnb. When the World Cup came in Paris, sorry, the Olympics came in Paris, 700,000 people stayed in Airbnb. That's like eight, nine Olympic stadiums were the people. In Milan, 200,000 people stayed in Milan, Cortino for the Olympics earlier this year, the World Cup's coming up in Mexico, U.S. Canada.

Starting point is 01:59:23 We're expecting that to be the biggest event in Airbnb history. You're actually hitting on a really key point. Maybe the reason Airbnb exists is this weird phenomenon where people list their homes for an event. Most people have only attention of listing one time, but about 50% of the people continue hosting. And so it's kind of a hook. And a lot of people are like, I don't want to host, but they do it once.

Starting point is 01:59:46 They make a bunch of money. they realize it's not weird, and they keep doing it. If it wasn't for this phenomenon, there may not have been an Airbnb. We used events to grow. So that is basically a core part of our strategy, whether it's Coachella or Lalaplusa. Airbnb Futures.

Starting point is 02:00:00 I should be able to go buy, I should be able to go see events that I know are going to happen, Olympics, World Cup, and basically buy and then resell. I'm kidding. Oh, and then I want to answer the second part of, I think, John's question,

Starting point is 02:00:15 which is personalization without, being creepy. So right now, I think most websites and most apps don't really ask you questions. They infer things, right? They think that if you ask somebody a question, that's friction. And so for 25 years, this is Amazon, this is Instagram, this is basically every app, including Airbnb, we're mostly just looking at what you click on, what you book, your prior behavior, and we try to infer based on that what you want in the future. I think going forward, we're going to go beyond that. We're going to do two things. The first thing I'm going to do is we're going to ask you questions.

Starting point is 02:00:50 That's what an agent does. An agent asks you questions. So your concierge for the world should ask you questions. You went to a travel concierge, but they didn't ask you a question. That'd be pretty weird. So I think that's the social contract. The app is more conversational. We're going to get more information.

Starting point is 02:01:05 But the other thing is designing preferences. We found that people are fine giving us their information if they know why, where it's going, that it's vaulted, and what we're going to do with it. So we're going to develop a preferences panel. Like we announced today that one of the things I'm most proud of is the design of a privacy page. Most people, they either don't care of the privacy page and the people that it's like their entry level work, or they make it, sometimes maybe make it purposely hard. But then ultimately that erodes trust.

Starting point is 02:01:33 So we're making preferences. I want to basically build a preferences library where we show you, here's all the stuff we know about you. Do you want to edit anything? Do you want to add it? And here's what we're going to show to whom. And you can say, show this to the host. This is only available to an agent. This no human can see.

Starting point is 02:01:50 It's vaulted, but the app can see it. And eventually maybe it's encrypted. So that's kind of where we want to go. 2034 total solar eclipse in Egypt. You can stand at the pyramids and watch it book your Airbnb futures. I'm going to go and offer cash today. You should start buying property all over Egypt. Last question.

Starting point is 02:02:11 What's the last major fitness or health unlock that you've had? and then we'll let you go. Oh, very good question. Fitness or health unlock. Could be a habit, could be a supplement, could be anything. Great question. Sleep protocol. Actually, okay, if you're sleep to, I've been taking creatine five grams since I was like 17,

Starting point is 02:02:34 but I read that they did some studies that if you didn't get a good night sleep, you can take up to 20 grams of creatine and you are nearly as alert as if you got a full night's sleep. And I don't know, it seems to work. And so if you don't get a good night's sleep, instead of taking a normal dose of creatine, take a much higher dose. The only other thing I'd say is for those listening, I'm a big fan of compound movements. I think the most important exercise if you only do one is the squat. And I, sorry, Brian. I don't mean to laugh at you. We have these sound effects. So John, talk. It makes a sound like this. Can you push? It makes my voice sound like this. Johnny was doing it to you during that last step.

Starting point is 02:03:17 And it sounds ridiculous. Yeah, I really like compound lifts. Compound lifts. That's good. That's exactly how I'd want to be able to say it when I'm saying about it. By the way, before we go, I just want to tell you something. Please. Are you guys still interested in doing the Blimp experience?

Starting point is 02:03:33 Absolutely. Yes, 100%. We're ready. We packed our bags already. So we've been talking to brands. We've been talking to people. And I want you to know that we're going to make this happen. I'm very excited.

Starting point is 02:03:42 We're going to make it happen. The team is pumped up right now. Everyone's fired up. We're fired up. Congrats to the whole team on the, on all the new releases. Thank you very much, guys. Great progress. It's always fun.

Starting point is 02:03:54 Have a very much, you know. Congratulations. Goodbye. First chat guests. The first Chad guest, very fitting. So unfortunately, the chat effect, the guests cannot hear it. Only, only you can and the two of us. But we're going to keep using it strategically.

Starting point is 02:04:14 it's really good effect. I was so skeptical when you lost these buttons. I was like, can we get the comedic timing to work? Will it hit? Turns out we can. Yes, it's working beautifully. Well, our next guest, get that button ready because I think we're going to be using it again.

Starting point is 02:04:32 It's Marcus Malone from Mented New York. Did I say your last name correctly? Or did I mispronounce that? Bodge. It's Millioni. Millione, I'm sorry. Yeah, I've been getting Malone my whole life. So it's fine.

Starting point is 02:04:43 I'm used to it. It was written sort of tiny on my sheet. Dude, it's incredible. It's an honor. It's an honor. It's an honor. Way overdue. Yes.

Starting point is 02:04:51 And then following your journey for a long time now. You've been absolutely on a tear. And yeah, we're excited to have you. Since it's your first time. Yeah, zoom out for us. Zoom out for us. You know, all that stuff. All right.

Starting point is 02:05:06 So I don't know how far back you want me to go. Let's go all the way to the lax days at least. All right. So I played lacrosse in college. I played at St. Joe's University in Philly. After I graduated, I was working at a smaller regional bank doing commercial real estate debt until like a year or a few months into COVID. As COVID started, minted kind of spawned after I was posting on social media, Instagram, TikTok. We're just doing your own accounts?

Starting point is 02:05:44 first or were you thinking like I'm going to I'm going to build something or was it experimental like what was the actual flow um well I was a little bored during COVID I was at my parents house I thought I was you did love regional banking what's yeah we love regional banking here um yeah so I thought I was taking a long weekend in my parents house and COVID would like blow over over a long weekend and then um so I just started posting about things I liked me and mainly around like fashion and fitness on on Instagram and TikTok and then the brand kind of spawned out of that. Yeah. What was the first format? Direct to camera, like scripted, unscripted, just yapping, get ready with me. Phone in front of my face. Yeah. I guess that was mainly TikTok. And then

Starting point is 02:06:33 Instagram was more just like outfit photos. Okay. I like putting outfits together. Yeah. Yeah. And then what was growth like linear? Was there a key turning point? A lot of times like with my YouTube, I started a YouTube channel during COVID, very similar story. And for the first year, it was like a thousand views.

Starting point is 02:06:50 And then I cracked the code on one video, correct structure. And it started, it went, I think I got 60,000 views, which was like an insane takeoff by comparison to the thousand views that I was averaging.

Starting point is 02:07:02 And I credit that a lot to, I had the editing dialed, I had the script out, but I really got like the structure and the title and the thumbnail all like packaged up so it like could fly. And I'm wondering like what the, what the process was like for growing on on TikTok and Instagram. I mean, I kind of viewed it as a reps game. Yeah. I told myself at least on like the short form video stuff since I had no background

Starting point is 02:07:24 in. I was like, I'll just do three videos a day for 365 straight days. And by that point, you know, you start to see, you get feedback from like the analytics. And so after a certain point, you're like, okay, well, this did well here. Let me like, you know, you know, try some variation of this next time. But really, yeah, it was just like a reps game. I would try any sort of video style. But a lot of it was just talking. And I think at that time, there was a lot of like, it was still a dancing app, right?

Starting point is 02:07:52 Like people were just doing dances. And I wasn't doing dances. I was trying to just provide some form of value to the viewer. And you see it a lot more now. But at that time, it was kind of like not as prevalent. So I think it would help. Yeah, I think it. you, I mean, I think of you as like the, the, a new generation of like founder-led company,

Starting point is 02:08:14 which there was like, you know, great companies have almost always been, uh, well, every company started by a founder. But, uh, but, uh, you're like the first generation that was this, like, hyper online, you're in public, you're, you're building your personal brand. You're building your personal brand as well as like, you know, people are following along, building the company. Also, like, your own journey as like an athlete and doing those things together and just having this like hyper presence where historically a founder, even if they were pretty online, they might pop up and do like an interview every few months and people would be able to tune in there. They might post like post a little, you know, somewhat actively

Starting point is 02:08:56 on Instagram, but it wasn't like three video, three like medium form videos a day for a year kind thing. And I just feel like that built so much momentum because there was like multiple things to latch on. People could latch on to like, how are you, how's your actual running going? Like I, you know, remember video after video where you're like pushing yourself super, super hard. And then there's also like some people can latch on to the business side, which you're like giving people behind the scenes and really making people feel like a part of building that, which has ultimately led to where you're at right now. You had this drop this week that, uh, I hit you up yesterday. It must have been extremely chaotic. You guys sold out so quickly that you were you were

Starting point is 02:09:41 going back through like trying to identify like bought like people that were botting it to resell. Yeah. Take us through. But like before we get there, like kind of the key moments along the journey, you start out, you're just making videos at what point were you like, oh, I can quit. Like when did you quit your job? I got to make some money off this. Yeah. So it was like month eight of kind of after we started started January of 2021 and then by month eight we had kind of had four large releases under under my belt and it was starting to become too much to try to juggle between real work and not like letting anything like slack there because obviously that paid the bills but i remember talking to my dad and trying to figure out okay what's you know a good

Starting point is 02:10:30 exit plan. And so we came up with like a revenue number that we would hit over the next three months. And if we hit that, then you know what? We're going to take the jump and, and quit our job. And so then very next release, we hit it in like five minutes. And I remember being at home and being like, well, I guess we're just going to put into two weeks. Well, that was part of what must have been nerve-wracking quitting, right? Because it was a drops-based approach. And so you have super spiky revenue so it's you know you're thinking like okay well if this drop goes well and this drop goes well and this drop goes well doesn't feel like a paycheck every two yeah it doesn't yeah it doesn't feel like it's streaming in no i mean you're also you're betting the farm like

Starting point is 02:11:10 the entire time every single drop i was just run the bank account to zero dollars on production um and hope that it went well i guess at any point like it could have blown up in my face and gone to zero yeah uh so that that happens uh what what when you when you're looking back, what was the next, like, significant moment? You're like, okay, this seems like a real business. People like what we're doing here. I would say that following Christmas, like that December, so 12 months in, we had, like, the largest release of the company's history.

Starting point is 02:11:44 It was, like, going into Christmas season and holiday season. And we released, and I remember being, like, so blown away by the number on the screen, but then also realizing, like, okay, all this inventory is in my parents' garage. and we have to ship all this out as fast as possible. Yeah. So I need all hands on deck. I've got like I've got my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad. Like everybody is there packing.

Starting point is 02:12:11 And I'm like, this is going to take us two days. It's like no problem. And it took us like six days of packing every day like through Christmas. Might have ruined Christmas. I'm not even sure. But it was so new. Everyone was so excited. Like, I mean, obviously toward the end,

Starting point is 02:12:26 we were definitely getting on each other. But it's so new and exciting for everybody that, yeah, kind of just, it was a blur. And then this whole time, like running is blowing up. Running got cool. You clearly thought it was cool before you started the brand. But I think a lot of people realized that maybe it was cool, you know, around 2022. Is that like when you felt like it was really becoming part of popular culture and in a bigger way? It was, I mean, yeah, it was really becoming part of my life then, too.

Starting point is 02:13:00 I think I probably started in 21 and then really picked up and wanted to start racing. What were you running from? Honestly, a lot of different things, probably, now that I think about it. But, yeah, I mean, like, it started like everybody else. You sign up for anath marathon. You're like, okay, I got a train and I'm going to give myself a time goal. And then like anything else, it's a sickness. And then it just gets worse and worse.

Starting point is 02:13:24 did you start do you still feel pressured were you feeling pressure to be the best runner out of your customer base like i mean like i feel like you you're you're you're kind of running two races you're building a business and then uh i can imagine it really gets in your head because you start sharing some times that you're running and then you know you're competitive and you want to improve walk us through that that yeah i mean The beauty of posting on the internet is that you get to hear commentary from everybody on the internet. So I always approached it as if we're going to make a performance running apparel. I better have some half respectable times.

Starting point is 02:14:08 I'll never be elite. I may never be sub-elite. But I at least put in the time and effort and try to run fast. Yes. And then at what point did you start getting approached to do, you know, big partnerships like this drop this week? Because these type of things are typically, you know, brands need to like meet in the middle. The best partnership, right, is like a win for, you know, it sort of like legitimizes the rising brand and then makes the, this maybe the more legacy brand like, you know, cooler and more relevant. and and uh but timing matters a lot for these things yeah i i think it was toward the end of

Starting point is 02:14:54 2022 um so we you know coming to the end of our second year i got an email uh from jason over at salkany who kind of heads there uh it's called energy but uh partnerships and it was really cool i mean the the email started out just lifestyle because at this point the brand wasn't as heavily focused on the performance running piece and it was a lot more menswear and jewelry and stuff like that. So he wanted us to work on a lifestyle shoe that kind of fit into that world. And then when they brought us up to Boston, I kind of pitched the idea of, well, we should do a running shoe too because we run and we're also making performance apparel. And so it was lifestyle first. then the running shoe came and then now we've had two running shoes.

Starting point is 02:15:45 And then how are you thinking about beyond running? Like, are there other categories that you're particularly excited about? Or do you want it to be a brand that can exist anywhere that you're kind of like idealized customer goes? Yeah, I look at, I mean, an athlete spends a lot of time outside of sport. And so I think that being able to provide products, like as I call them, off court is important. But from like a performance sporting side of things, I think we're really focused on running right now. But I'm interested in a lot of the endurance sports. You know, cycling is very interesting.

Starting point is 02:16:26 But for right now, just the running piece. How are you thinking about like growing the business? It's such an interesting like origin story because it's not. I was in business school, I raised money, I went to a design firm and set up an EDTC website. Like that era existed. And there were a couple companies that made it through, a lot of companies that we've talked about that didn't quite make it or wound up selling off at a discount. And it feels like at some point, if you're not already there, there might be like a crossroads of like, are you going to take a run at being, you know, the next Nike, raise as much money as possible, retail footprint. all over the world and like go crazy or, you know, more, you know, family business, compound slowly,

Starting point is 02:17:15 grow, grow, grow, do things tastefully. And there's obviously like a whole, you know, a whole gradient of pathways in between. But what, what feels natural to you? It's hard to say. I mean, like we're bootstrapped now in year five. And obviously like, take it all the way. Let's have the gone for that. Take it all the way. We're hitting the gong for that. But gone for the anti-fundrabs. You love to see it. So obviously, like, you know, it caps what you can do

Starting point is 02:17:48 and how big you can do certain things. But, I mean, in my mind, I want the brand to be as big as possible on, like, a global scale. I don't think when you're trying to build something like that, going slow and building a really strong foundation is a bad thing. You know, I don't think us being almost handicapped in the bootstrap way from a money standpoint. Yeah, look at the last, look at the last, you know, month.

Starting point is 02:18:13 You had Airbnb pivot to being, or sorry, Albers pivot to a neocloud. You have Everlane, you know, sell to sheen. Examples of high growth. If you're doing anything like cool in apparel and you're executing well, you're going to go grow quickly. But high growth appears to be entirely at odds with like building a last. consumer lifestyle brand. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a playbook where you just turn on the meta ads faucet and just like throw money at it, right?

Starting point is 02:18:51 But, I mean, we do very, very, very little advertising at all. I mean, we're really just, I would say 99.5% organic. And that feels like a really nice, strong foundation where if we want to turn on, the paid advertising, it just makes our life a little bit easier because we're building a brand that people know and you're not just like getting fed ads all the time and then you end up buying it and you have no real like affiliation with the brand. Yeah. And the worst CPMs you'll ever have are when you're, you know, there's no brand awareness. Like every year you delay that. It gets, the economics probably gets stronger and the tam gets even bigger. How are you thinking about bots?

Starting point is 02:19:34 What is it do not buy decoy listing? Explain to me, like how all this fits together in the modern era. Yeah, so I mean, when their shoe is anticipated in that way, like we saw it with the Speed 4, which was the first shoe we released, we got slammed with the bots. And, you know, it's people submitting orders for 30 pairs. They want to resell them a lot of the time. and so this time I took to Twitter before the release and called upon people who either bought it in the past or our current botters to try to get a little focus group together to figure out how I could jam up the bots. So I'll give you the sauce on what I did. I had those two decoy listings on there because I guess the bots don't look at the

Starting point is 02:20:25 screen. They're just going right to check out. And so I had those be the correct listing, naming structure, everything. And then the real listing, the one with the green border, had none of the real terminology associated with the shoe on the listing or in the kind of like the metadata. And it seemed to work. I would say like 99% of the orders were manual. Some people did bought it, but it was very easy to catch and then go ahead and cancel those orders. Wait, what was on the decoy pages, though?

Starting point is 02:20:58 You should have sold like sand for like a thousand, you know, like $200 a pound. We had it so that the shoes were like 10,000 pounds. You couldn't get a shipping rate because they were so heavy. So you would get to check out and then the whole thing would break. Oh. That is brilliant. It's really clever. I feel like this cat and mouse game is going to go on forever.

Starting point is 02:21:19 Yeah, it's such a, yeah, having like hype and way more demand than supplies. is like that, you know, it is a, is a blessing for a brand, but it is such a, it's such an interesting challenge because you want to get your product, you don't benefit at all from shoes selling it two, three times, whatever it is in the secondary market. And so like your entire focus has to be on like, how do you get the shoes to the actual people that are a part of building this brand with you? And it's, um, there's probably like a, has anybody built like software to help with this. It's a pretty niche problem because most brands are like, we'd be happy to sell out with bots immediately. But it feels like there's like a software product there. You can go the

Starting point is 02:22:06 raffle route where like, you know, you can collect entries and like pre-charge cards a dollar and then if they win the raffle. I think like people like the idea of first come first serve. And if you get in there, you enter your card information, you get past the age capture, like you are rewarded with the shoe. And the raffles I've, I in talking to a bunch of people who buy sneakers and are a part of of that stuff, they, it just takes a lot of fun away from releases like that. So try to keep it as pure as possible. How are you thinking about Nvidia earnings? John, John, you're laughing, but Marcus has a dedicated account where he just talks about Markis. Yeah, but he's been live with us while the earnings dropped. I know. Does anyone

Starting point is 02:22:55 have any numbers? Yes. Beed on top line and bottom line EPS of 187. Revenue came at 81.6 billion, double B and the stocks down 2.4%. No, it's popped back up maybe? I don't know. It's jumping

Starting point is 02:23:09 around. Just as TAYCAM predicted. Plan trust are over there. Nvidia earnings live. Are there any IRL events that are small right now that you think have the seeds or

Starting point is 02:23:24 showing promise of becoming the next, you know, run club. Like we went through like the Padel and pickleball booms and I'm wondering if you're tracking anything that feels like could be a source of communities in cities, something outdoors or I don't know, anything in that realm that's like run club shaped that's really small right now but shows like, oh, there's some deep interest there. That might go somewhere. I don't know where, but it's. at least showing popping up on your radar now you know i i don't know if i'm like the best answer

Starting point is 02:24:01 to answer that question i i'm not too sure i stick to running yeah i see people go on group bike rides okay seem like a lot of fun you know you go on a 50 mile ride you stop halfway get a coffee and like a donut with your friends and then you bike back and it's like you know you're exercising you're out in nature that i don't have a bike so i can't participate but if i were to do another group activity outside it would probably be that jordy's been getting really into the larping the live action role playing where you dress up and go to the park a full suit of armor and you just thrash on each other with swords i haven't i haven't been getting into it personally but i've been sending you videos of there's there's some i'll send i'll send you after this there's um there's uh yeah john has a helmet

Starting point is 02:24:45 he's ready to larp uh there's this account where they have like uh larping like pretty high uh pretty high pretty high-scale larping going on where they're hitting each other legitimately so hard, I'm like, you're going to give each other concussions, but it seems like it's fair play. Not with this helmet on. I think I've seen some of that stuff.

Starting point is 02:25:05 That might be a good, maybe we get like a little tech version of that going. How big is the team these days? Three people. And then my sister's part-time. That's a lead. She does the customer service and she's the goat, but yeah, three full-time.

Starting point is 02:25:18 That's amazing. Three full-time and all, all in house, like in office in New York. How, how, like, what is, how are you thinking about supply chain? Like, you're making a lot, you're making some stuff in New York from, from what I recall, but I imagine you're making it all over. Yeah, a lot, a lot of the performance stuff is made over in China. You know, the shoes were Indonesia.

Starting point is 02:25:46 That's a, that's a, that's a sockney factory. So that's not us. Jewelry, Italy. I mean, we're kind of spread out. but we have a lot of good manufacturing partners. I would like to bring some more of those pieces here to the U.S. I think it's just we're not super agile, you know, as a company. So switching a factory overnight isn't really possible.

Starting point is 02:26:09 And there's a whole like resampling and reproducing process that would need to go into that. So we're focused on like catching up to the fashion calendar right now, because right now we've been behind since day one. We've been behind and we kind of release when we can. But this year we will catch up to the calendar and be, you know, releasing products in the proper weather. Is that a double-edged sword? That would be good.

Starting point is 02:26:38 It's like, hey, we have a winter coat in August. Oh, we've done it. I've done hoodies in the middle of August. Yeah. Wait, but is that a double-edged sword where like if you're the only hoodie that's going on sale in, in the summer, like at least it's like not a noisy time and you're not getting crowded out. And so maybe there's a benefit or silver line. No, it feels bad.

Starting point is 02:26:58 It feels bad. It feels bad. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. That's funny. When you say like the calendar, are you just talking about the seasons or are there specific moments where all the brands, you know, sort of coalesce around like, this is the day or this is

Starting point is 02:27:16 the week when like fall collections go on sale or like how, how precise are we? being because I know that there's a whole fashion runway show circuit, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if there's a real cycle to it or a logic. Yeah, I don't think it's that crazy for like the performance stuff. I think you want to hit like spring, summer, fall, winter. And even that is a little more relaxed. Like you can kind of do it based off when people start training for certain things or how the weather is shifting. But, you know, there are times, uh, if you want to do stuff around the, the world marathon majors, then you kind of have to like prep for that. And a lot of those start, you know, November, October, November.

Starting point is 02:27:55 So, yeah, I mean, depending on what you don't want to hit from like an event standpoint, that kind of shifts stuff because it does get cooler then, but you're still releasing, you know, obviously tanks and stuff that you're running in to stay cool. But yeah, I mean, spring, summer, fall, winter for the most part is good enough. Yeah, that makes sense. Are you a nominative determinism guy? The chat thinks you're basically a millionaire. Marcus millionaire.

Starting point is 02:28:18 Marcus millionaire. Yeah, I don't know. I guess on paper, yeah, the company would be worth, yeah. That's fantastic. Well, congratulations. All the progress. Yeah, great to finally have you on the show. And yeah, just congrats to your team of three on accomplishing what would be difficult for even a team of 300.

Starting point is 02:28:41 It's super impressive. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate both of you. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, great to see. Thanks for hopping on. Talk soon, dude.

Starting point is 02:28:47 We'll talk soon. Thanks again. Jensen, Wals. Talked about the quarter that NVIDIA just had. He said, the buildout of AI factories. Boo. The largest infrastructure expansion in human history. Yay!

Starting point is 02:29:03 Is accelerating at extraordinary speed. Yay! Not a fan of the AI factory terminology, but good that there is progress being made. Agentic AI has arrived. He says, doing productive work, true. Generating real value, true. And scaling rapidly across.

Starting point is 02:29:21 companies and industries. Also true. Lots of good stuff. Invita net income, it rose to 42.96 billion. They almost hit 43 billion. Not too bad. A year earlier, they were doing just 18.8 billion in net income. Huge, huge increase. Really wild. Printing. Definition of printing. All good news. The stock is sort of up and down. basically flat, but Nvidia revenue jumped 85% to 81.62 billion from 44 billion last year, the company said. Shocking. Yeah, great stuff.

Starting point is 02:30:04 In the timeline, you know who, I mean, Steve Wozniak crushed his commencement speech. We have to debate this to see, was he actually a good communicator? Is he setting the tone correctly? but we should still play the clip of Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, at Grand Valley State University, because he talked about AI, and unlike Eric Schmidt, he did not get booed off stage. He actually got cheered for his comments. Wait, this was, uh, who was it, Tyler?

Starting point is 02:30:39 Steve Washpniak? No, no, no, no. I'm a big fan of Steve Wozniak. I love the Was. Shots fired. Let's play the clip from Grand Valley State. university on Instagram here. Can we play this from the beginning?

Starting point is 02:30:55 It might loop back, but he's doing bits. He's getting laughs. You all have AI. You all have AI. Actual intelligence. Oh, mic drop. Kneeslapper. Hey, playing to the crowd.

Starting point is 02:31:12 He knows the audience. He knows the audience. We're trying to figure out how to make a brain, software or hardware, synapse, and I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain. Takes nine months. Yeah, knee-slapper, but he knows the audience, he's delivering the right thing. Is he AGI-I-pilled?

Starting point is 02:31:35 Is he super-intelligence pill? Probably not. But it is, regardless, I think it's potentially the right framing for the crowd. It's knowing the audience. And that is a way to bridge to. a broader conversation about AI, a broader conversation about how humans fit into a post-AGI world. I don't know. We'll have to go watch the full clip eventually. Let's close it out with this video from Tyler that we can pull up. Okay. What is this? This is the video I was referencing with with Marcus.

Starting point is 02:32:08 I'm very concerned about these gentlemen. Okay. And what they're doing. Pull it up. Pull it up. What's happening? Let's get like this is This is insane contact. I mean, the helmet is getting dented. I think this is brain damaged. Not an issue. Skill issue. They're really hitting that, aren't they?

Starting point is 02:32:32 Run it back one more time. He's just, this is just wrong. They're taking it too far. Look at it. I don't. I don't see how you leave this without a concussion. But we'll try it out after we do.

Starting point is 02:32:58 We have the gong ballot. That seems like it would do some damage. Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. It has been the honor of our lifetimes to podcast with you today. We hope you have an incredible evening. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Spotify, sign up from the newsletter, tbPN.com. We'll see you tomorrow.

Starting point is 02:33:22 Goodbye. Bye.

TBPN Live - Google I/O Reactions, Large IPOs Incoming, Figma's AI Assistant | Dylan Field, Brian Chesky, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Tae Kim, Immad Akhund, Marcus Milione

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