TBPN Live - Kushner and Iger Buy The Lakers, Grok 4.6 Launch, NVIDIA Nemotron | Darren Rovell, Patrick Whitesell, Harjot Gill, Jeff Huber, Soren Monroe-Anderson & Shaun Maguire, Andrei Georgescu

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

(00:29) - Kushner and Iger Buy The Lakers (11:46) - Grok 4.6 (15:52) - NVIDIA Nemotron (23:58) - Darren Rovell is a sports business reporter and industry analyst. Darren Rovell discusses the Lakers’ record-setting sale, the growing role of institutional investors in sports ownership, and the risks surrounding prediction markets, sports betting, and gambling-like commerce platforms. (43:13) - Patrick Whitesell is a veteran entertainment executive and investor who co-founded WME and now leads the investment firm Weitzel and sports agency WIN Sports. Patrick Whitesell discusses investing in creator-led media companies, his partnership with Alex Cooper’s Unwell, and how digital creators could reshape traditional Hollywood through authentic audiences, diversified businesses, and new production models. (59:09) - Harjot Gill is the co-founder and CEO of CodeRabbit, an AI developer tools company building automated code-review software that analyzes pull requests for bugs, security issues, and code quality problems. He previously co-founded Netsil, which was acquired by Nutanix, and has spent much of his career building developer infrastructure and observability products. (01:08:25) - Jeff Huber discusses Chroma’s growth and its new Zeitgeist shared-memory solution, which helps AI agents retain, retrieve, and securely share organizational knowledge. The Chroma founder and CEO also explains advances in agentic search, fast model inference, and context engineering, arguing that better memory remains essential to more capable AI agents. (01:16:08) - Soren Monroe-Anderson & Shaun Maguire. Soren Monroe-Anderson, a former world-champion drone racer and co-founder of Neros, discusses the company’s $250 million raise, rapid drone production growth, and expansion into interceptor systems. He explains Neros’ vertically integrated supply chain, modular hardware ecosystem, military and international customers, and recruitment of elite drone pilots and former special forces operators. Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on AI, infrastructure, defense, and frontier technologies. Before joining Sequoia, he co-founded Expanse, a cybersecurity company acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $1.25 billion, and previously invested at GV (Google Ventures). He has led investments in companies including SpaceX, xAI, Bridge, Decart, and Lightmatter, and is known for backing technically ambitious founders building foundational technologies. (01:32:28) - Andrei Georgescu discusses how Vivodyne grows human tissues at massive scale to test thousands of drug candidates without relying on animal models or human trials. He explains how the technology could reduce drug-development failures, support personalized medicine, and advance safer, more effective treatments. (01:43:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, August 12, 2026. We are live from the TDPN, Elphiome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance. The Capital of Capital. That's right. I'll tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.

These use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting in a whole lot. Some really interesting data out of Ramp. We'll go through the latest workings of R. Karazian over at the Ramp Economics Lab soon. But first, we've got to talk about Josh Kush. Bob Eiger, they bought the LA Lakers. They're buying the Lakers. He's done it again.

He's done it again. They said he couldn't do it. In the sauna this morning, I was thinking about the name Thrive Eternal. I think it's one of the best names for a fund ever. Yeah. Like Eternal is such a powerful statement and it fits the strategy so well. And it does, you know, people have been talking about this this morning, but it feels like with all of,

the technology disruption happening, it just feels like these sports franchises could be more durable than many of the biggest companies in the world today. Yeah. Well, we have Darren, Rovel, coming back on the show to discuss at 1130. Let me take you through. Yeah, and I figured out how to put on a suit. Yeah. Doesn't he look great?

Look at this guy. It's incredible. I cleaned it up. Yeah. I cleaned it out. Super clean. Looking amazing. Yeah.

Finally, truth be told, we, when we started the show, I went from, we started hitting the gym. We did a little bulking season. It was bulking season. And I added, I added some weight. And I basically, over the last. You added 45 pounds of lean muscle. You don't need to undersell it, Dorety. And you lost 20 pounds of fat.

Yeah. So I added a little weight. And I basically grew out of my suit slowly about two pounds a month. Yeah. For 18 months. It went exponential. And it became extremely uncomfortable to sit here, even though all these suits. Suits are beautiful.

That we had gotten made. But they got a little tight. I'm going to have to save them for one of an elderly man. Yeah, maybe. Because at some point, we'll shed the muscle. Cutting season's coming. We'll be lean max. Summer's only.

Cutting season is coming. Nine months away. 40 years. In 40 years. Yeah. But it's good to be back. Yeah. It's good.

Let me take you through the story. So everyone has the facts straight about this incredible deal for the Los Angeles Lakers. The headline is the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to American businessman Josh Kushner and Bob Eiger for a record-breaking price of $12.5 billion. Multiple sources have told this to ESPN. So Cushner and Iger made the offer to Mark Walter, who only last year purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers from the bus family at a then-record-val. valuation of roughly $10 billion. Walter, the CEO and chairman of holding company, TWG Global, officially became the Lakers majority owner last October after the NBA unanimously approved the deal.

The new sale will likewise require approval from the NBA's Board of Governors, which is scheduled to meet next month in New York. But looking at that picture, it seems like they've had this conversation with the relevant people. They're not some random businessman coming in from out of town. And the sellers under federal investigation? Yes. For some very complicated deals where some private credit transactions were put into an insurance firm that they own,

those affiliated transactions. If you originate the deal and then you put it in your insurance companies, on your insurance companies' books, you need to disclose this. Now, you can actually do this, Berkshire Hathaway, about 46% of their insurance assets, are related party transactions. So there's a way to do it above board. The allegations are that he disclosed that only 3% of the insurance assets were related party, affiliated transactions, but in fact it was much higher when you considered some of the other assets

that had made their way through a third party. Bit of a bad boy. Even the bad boy thing. Yeah, maybe. But, you know, innocent until proven guilty, obviously these are just allegations. He's just being investigated. And a nice little return. Yeah, and he's denied all wrongdoing.

But it does give you a little bit more context on what might be motivating a sale so soon after buying an asset that he was clearly optimistic about. So Cushner is the founder and CEO of venture firm Thrive Capital and co-founder and vice chairman of Oscar Health. He also is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law. Kushner currently owns minority stake in the Miami Heat, which he will have to sell to complete the Lakers deal, and was previously a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. Eiger, meanwhile, stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and has already made a major investment in Los Angeles sports. He and his wife Willow Bay became controlling owners

of the National Women's Soccer League's Angel City FC in 2024. The prospective new owners are already getting a warm reception from some of the biggest names associated with the franchise. Luca Donchick said, being a Laker means everything to me and I'm excited to get back to the court and bring a championship to L.A. I've gotten used to big changes

over these last few years, but I know that no matter what, there's no limit to the potential of this iconic franchise. I look forward to meeting Josh and Bob so we can get to work, building something special in L.A. together. You'll love to see it.

Magic Johnson chimed in as well. He said, Lakers fans, you couldn't have any, you couldn't have two better owners, Johnson said. I've known Bob personally for over 40 years. He has always loved the Lakers. and basketball, and he will bring championships back to L.A. So Magic Johnson is optimistic about this deal.

Weirdly, this is making me optimistic on L.A. overall. I've had a generally bad outlook. I have had extreme confidence that the weather is going to be very nice for a long time. But that's really been the only thing I'm willing to really lean on. But this is giving me a slightly more positive outlook. And you've been pitching Thrive on your new incubation, the pothole company of Los Angeles. The pothole filling company of Los Angeles. Huge opportunity.

It's really palis here for potholes. Yes, yes. Hiring the best AI research. No, I want somebody to do this. Figure out how to fix potholes. Yeah. Quickly. I think it starts with its own satellite constellation.

You have to put up 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit with cameras pointed directly at... Small, effectively missiles. Oh, missiles. Fired at potholes. Yes. And then a laser that sort of like melts the debris down to pull in the the hole. Yeah, it just kind of, you bring the molten asphalt up to space. It comes down,

warms up, and as it travels through the atmosphere, lands directly in the pot hole and smushes in, fills it in. But, you know, people are always saying, oh, why is, like, you go to L.A., every other car is a G-wagon. Well, you know why? Because the roads are absolutely terrible. You pretty much need something that's four-wheel drive. Yeah. Otherwise, you're going to have a bad time. I was talking to a, I was talking to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, to a a couple nights ago and he had blown out multiple tires in the last year

I've blown out multiple tires last year it's a it's a disaster so the pothole the pothole company of Los Angeles it's a bangor idea it's a bangor idea yeah I might become the Batman of potholes

just sneaking out late at night yeah look I could go out in the suit you could you could yeah like that guy who was cleaning up the FDNY corner call box. Like same thing. That's right. Hot holes in LA.

They're really, really bad. Every day I drive to work and I have to swerve into the other lane to avoid one on this one particular road that's just been a disaster for the last six months. Anyway, the last quote related to this deal. As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become the stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers. One of the most iconic sports franchises in the world, Kushner and Iger said in a statement. they said they have immense respect for Jerry and Jenny bus and intend to build on the family's legacy.

I don't know what you're laughing at. Compete at the highest level and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles, if approved the deal would give the Lakers their third controlling ownership of potholes. I think he got something. And Tyler says he's going to film the missions. This would just be absolutely riveting content. You're out on the 4.5, 2 a.m. just you and a nasty pothole and a little bit of traffic and a little bit of asphalt

slathering it in there right is that what you're doing well my big issue is when they when they fill in they just do a really bad job and so it basically creates a bunch of mini speed bumps and you get a sinkhole so then you just start a sinkhole comes and that's a whole other problem yeah that was crazy oh whatever happened with that in l.A it was really bad for a while I guess they fixed it I would like to um get somebody to throw on a tinfoil hat and pick out why a bunch of pipes started exploding everywhere around the city. Somebody's got to ask the question. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.

Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. There's a bunch of reactions hitting the timeline. Sag Harbor Capital says, while there are plenty of issues you can point out with sports investing, I think this actually makes a simple yet incredibly compelling case. Longevity.

Sports is a portfolio diversifier. Investment firms and wealthy individuals now view invest. in sports properties as a hedge against higher risk investments. Very interesting. Everyone has always said sports investing is just, it's a trophy asset. It's just because you like the team. But you're locking up a lot of capital. And when you're long AGI, the future, the most cutting edge technologies,

also building a portfolio with some things that are going to be around forever, no matter how many robots there are, makes a lot of sense. And so that balancing effect seems to be a new thing that's driving demand in sports investment. Do you agree with that? I do. Fids the strategy. Yeah, Spore agrees. If you truly believe in AGI, buying a massive sports franchise is actually one of the best financial decisions you can make right now.

And we've seen hints and rumors of this for a while. Anything else on The Lakers? We're going to talk to Darren in just 13 minutes about it. Get him to explain. It's going to walk us through the whole rule set. Yeah. Very excited about that. Anyway, apparently there's a solar eclipse going on right now.

Oh, is that going on right now? I saw a link to a whole bunch of different webcams that you can use to watch it. The last time, a couple of years ago, there was a full solar eclipse, not a partial one. And everyone who went said it was one of the most insane experiences of their life. So I would highly recommend it. Tyler. Yeah, so it's in Europe right now. Full solar eclipse.

Full solar eclipse? Yep. Wow. should have gone. I miss this one. When's the next one? What does it mean? What's the meaning, Tyler? What does it mean? It's a great omen for high beta AI stocks.

That's what I choose to read into it. Lever up. That's what the eclipse is trying to tell you. Anyway, let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for action. request and password resets. GROC 4.6

is roughly the same performance as Fable 5 Max at an 85% discount, 80% cheaper for input tokens, and 88% cheaper for output tokens. Pareto dominance as Gavin Baker. GROC 4.7 will be significantly better, as is a much larger model with the cursor and

SpaceX data included in pre-training. So the headline is SpaceX sort of jumped to the frontier, at least on these benchmarks. We'll see how this comes out, how people adopted. Obviously, Honestly, Cursor has huge, huge usage all across the enterprise, across businesses. GROC has been slower on adoption with a bunch of different pushback there. But the model seems to be catching up.

The teams seem to be jelling and things seem to be pretty good over there. We'll see how, I mean, I'm sure on X we'll see lots of people demoing examples of what they build with GROC 4.6. There's already some games that have hit the timeline. there will be a whole bunch more on benchmarks. Yeah, so seems incredibly impressive, excited to get reactions and get people's lived experiences with the model. Price wars have definitely begun. You know, we saw this with meta. We're seeing this with Grock now.

And then third, I would say trust in benchmarks has to be at an all-time level. low, right? There's been enough, you know, moments, releases so far where the benchmarks looked amazing, but then the actual lived experience is, you know, less significant. They also had a great launch yesterday. So they're building momentum. Sure. SpaceX is up almost 40% just in the last five days. That's a pretty good. Yeah, and I'm so curious, I wish you could figure out a way to parse out what's driving that. Is it the semi-analysis? Yeah.

Semi-analysis. That felt like Friday. Well, yeah, that was Friday at the close. It popped during the day, though, right? But then up 10% today. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was leaking. Yeah, maybe you when it-

It says SpaceX short sellers are running out of bullets as stock rebounds more than 30% off. We're running out of ammo. We're running out of ammo. I'm tired, boss. I can't keep buying. prices. I think I'm buying. You got to buy more. Michael Truel at cursor, founder, CEO, excited to release GROC 4.6. With each release, GROC is becoming a more capable digital

colleague. The age of work is upon us. GROC for work. It's happening. 4.6 is significantly better at difficult tasks and knowledge work. It combines opus class intelligence and polish with very low cost and high speed, which people love. Even just in the cursor workflow, the more iterative approach instead of having to come back a day later and see what goes on. There's a lot of value to that workflow in particular. GROC 4.6 is a very impressive test time curve on cursor bench and a league of its own. They did more mid-slash pre-training on the GROC 4.5 checkpoint and newer SFT stages with GROC 4.5 traces and model-based filtering.

Once again shows how important a good SFT checkpoint is. Interesting. Getting some more details on what's going on with GROC. They also launched GROC barque. We recently hired a new teammate. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign into your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. So I guess work isn't going to happen.

It's going to be Grockbot, which actually it has a nice little rhythm to it. I like Grockbot. Also very good results on the artificial intelligence index, joining the frontier at 61, strong, agentic performance. lower cost, obviously, and the model wars are upon us. NVIDIA is also joining the model wars, selling weapons to both sides, potentially. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, their open source model came out, but they also launched a model router, Nemo Switchyard to deliver faster, smarter, more efficient, agentic AI.

Switchyard. Switchyard. Switchyard's a good name. It's a good name. I like that. Kind of railroad connotations, which... Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah. Maybe. You've got to go through Ben Thompson stuff at some point. But interesting to see where this goes. I mean, it does feel like if you're a organization that has Nvidia chips, you have your own data centers because you're a mid-scale, maybe not a hyper-scaler, but you're pretty big. You know, being all in on the Nvidia stack and then using their model router could make a lot of sense. Like it's a logical place for it to live. And then you're, you know, it has more, it has more integration with the rest of your

NVIDIA stack because you have a whole bunch of GPUs rack for the lowest possible cost. If you're cost optimizing, you'll probably eventually have your own racks and your own Nvidia work, you know, data center, basically. Anyway, should we debate Anthropics watermarking? Or is our next guest here early? Should we bring in our next guest? Why don't you, yeah, dive into this. I don't know that I have a strong take yet.

Ben Thompson has a strong take on Anthropics watermarking. So the basic news is that you might soon be able to know for sure if something came from a human being or from Claude. Anthropics said this week that text and files generated by its family of AI models will be watermarked to let consumers know. Now, they won't be watermarked. Like, you'll still have to take the text and then go to their watermarking tool and validate that it was. that it was Yeah, Bill Gurley was making the point

that watermark, a traditional watermark on an image is very visible. Yes. It's just like immediately visible. Yes.

And so it's not actually, it's more like leaving, basically, we're going to leave evidence that this was generated. Breadcrumbs. Yeah. Breadcrumbs.

And so in theory, a LinkedIn could, or an X could integrate with an anthropic API to check the watermarks. But the interesting read on the, this is that this was actually implemented by the regulation in the European Union. So

Anthropic in theory could watermark, could only watermark text in Europe, but the EU has achieved their dream of regulating the world, according to Ben Thompson. And so they actually instead, I think the idea is instead of, instead of doing a last step at the end of the generation, to add the watermark in, it's baked much deeper into the model level, which means it will be watermarked whether you're in Europe or not. And so Ben Thompson explains a little bit on how it works. Obviously, they're not explaining too much because then you can avoid it easier. Yeah, it's so interesting, like, how much of their revenue is coming from Europe, given how compute-constrained they are. Like, was there, I wonder if they ever considered,

like, hey, let's just say, hey, if you're going to go forward with something like this, we're just going to exit the market entirely? But I don't think people care. I don't think Anthropic cares about watermarking. I think they're fine. I think it's nice. I think it's a good thing. And then also, I think business users don't care because they're like, yeah, I want AI generated

code all over my code base. I want it to be clean and efficient, and I want it to just do the job. And I'm totally fine with it. I'm not, that's not my business. And so I don't think people will be upset about this, at least in the enterprise. Ben Thompson points out that he is somewhat frustrated by this because even if you're using an LLM for proofreading and making individual changes in your text editor, like you just upload your blog post to Claude now and you say, oh, like, what could be better about this?

What's wrong with this? Did I make any grammatical errors? Did I make any spelling errors? If you go and implement those, there's a small risk. It seems like a very unlikely risk, but there's a small risk that even in just accepting those changes, you accidentally insert a little bit of the watermark in or potentially all of the watermark in. And then you don't get credit potentially because people will be like, oh, this is AI when really it was like the last step that was AI. We had a back and forth on this a little bit where I would read an essay by hand.

We would throw it into Chachapit to proofread it and it would put in a bunch of m-dashes in the earlier model. heavy on M-Dashes. And so people would just be like, oh, this is AI. And it was like, well, like the last step, but it's like, but does that matter? It does matter to a lot of people. They do care about that. But it's, it's odd. And Ben Thompson's point is saying, what the EU is doing is stealing the last thing humans have creation and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving the AI the credit. Even if you come up with a great idea, you write a great book. If you have AI, I edit it, if it has a watermarking feature, it will be watermarked, and people will be like, nah, it was all, well, it was the prompt.

And it's like, well, maybe there wasn't a prompt. Maybe there was a whole process that you went through to develop your idea, and then you took it at the last step. And so that's the source of frustration. At the same time, it does feel like there's ways to work around this. If you become more collaborative with the AI system, you can avoid the watermark by only using it at one certain step and then doing an editing pass yourself. People have been going back and forth of these all day long.

He says, the human that gave AI the text a proofread or even the prompt to generate writing doesn't matter to the bureaucrats in Europe. Everyone is worried about being replaced by AI. The EU is mandating it. That's what he says. He's got some harsh words. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, so I don't think the actual underlying, the way the water market is public, but presumably it's like basically during the sampling process. When you're like generating tokens, right, it generates some distribution.

over the tokens, like, which one is it going to select? And then it uses, like, a slightly different method than just choosing, like, the most likely one. Yep. And that way you can, like, see, oh, this is, like, less likely, so it's probably, you know, written by AI. But, like, if you basically have, you know, some essay that you wrote and you replace, like, one sentence, then, like, 99% of the tokens are still the same. Then, like, it's, like, it shouldn't mark the whole thing as being, like, AI written.

That doesn't make any sense. Like, only the sentence that you changed would be marked as AI written. Oh, sure, sure, sure. If you look at the new handgrave or whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't, like, say the whole document is AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It says, like, this sentence of AI. No, no, no.

These tokens are very... People think of a watermark as it's a binary. It's either going to say it's AI or not. In fact, you're going to get a percentage. I think people are going to just look, you know, like the peanut gallery online is going to be, it'll be very binary for them. Sure. Like if somebody puts out even an Instagram caption, they'll get dunked on even if it's one sentence, right?

Like, if you look at the Google synth ID, so Jimini has done, this for like a few years. Yeah. If you look at their blog that, like, explains how it works. It will, like, highlight specific, basically, words in the, in the blog or whatever piece of text. of it's like, okay, this is probably AI written. It's not saying the whole thing is, like, yeah, zero one.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think this is kind of, like, blowing it out proportion. Yeah, I don't, I don't think that many people will have a problem with it. How long till someone ships the Claude Watermark Remover app? I mean, somebody shipped a Pangram fighter, like yesterday, There's something where you take the text, you put it in this model, and then it reads 100% human to pangram, because it rewrites it in a style that pangram to can't detect. And so now the pangram team has to go figure out how to defeat that.

It's all a game of cat and mouse, I guess. But let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We've been keeping our next guest waiting for far too long a day. Ravel coming back on the show. How are you doing? Welcome back. We're doing. Big day.

Take us through the story, how you're processing it, what this means, set up the story of the Los Angeles Lakers. Changing hands again. Yeah, just as just a surprise, obviously. Teams just don't change like this. You know, I don't think, hold on, I'm going to get off my center stage. There we go. I don't want anything to follow me. Give me a second here.

There we go. I'm a pro. There we go. There we go. I don't want to. You know, Mark Walter clearly did not say, oh, I could get in now and I could make $2 billion quick. Yeah. I mean, it is amazing that in 2014 I was saying, oh, my God, bomber bought this team for $2 billion,

and now that is the profit that Mark Walter is making just from getting out of here. I will tell you this, because I know. your show well. I have never understood Guggenheim's insurance business. It's one of those things where I could never follow the buckets. It's buckets upon buckets upon buckets

and this going to this and this going. I would say it's purposely of fuscatory. And so the fact that there are third party loans apparently where they can't, they don't understand it, and that the report that at least Bloomberg had, that he had to, you know, get loans quickly to perhaps

make them kosher. Yeah. Does make a lot of sense, given my previous work with trying to investigate exactly how Guggenheim works. Yeah. So a little bit of motivation for the early sale. Yeah, for sure. And the other motivation for the early sale, you would think, is the NBA in general. The NBA is a hell of a lot more progressive than Major League Baseball, not to suggest that he would have lost the Dodgers.

But when you have the bomber situation, that investigation, that's in L.A. You have, I wrote on Twitter today kind of this world where people are going to become rich really quickly, but they also could become poor really quickly. We've seen that before. But I think that in the degenerate, you know, I think we wake up there, every morning and we're more in a casino than ever before. And that means that you're going to hear people buying teams for massive values and you're going to see a higher percentage of those people be poor in two seconds.

So while I don't think the assets of sports teams and the assets in general, obviously the macro economy is important, falling, I do see individual people falling and replacement people have to come in more than ever before. Yeah, I mean, we saw that just a few weeks ago, situational awareness, a fund, a hedge fund that scaled from $250 million to almost $50 billion, brown tripped very, very quickly in dramatic fashion. Fortunes are won and lost extremely quickly in the modern era. Very basic question.

But what are the kind of groups that can own an NVB. team. I thought it had to be individuals. Obviously, they can bring in partners on it. There can be a bunch of, you know, a bunch of, you know, co-owners. But then I was looking it up in like Madison Square Garden owns the next.

Like, any, anyone now, I mean, you know, they've recently even allowed, you know, Blue Owl has a home court ventures fund, you know, which became, when Blue Owl had their whole, you know, we're not giving any distributions and we're locking everything up.

Of course, people would say, well, you own 5% of a bunch of NBA teams, which wasn't convenient at the time. But, yeah, I mean, pretty much anyone can own anything now, even the NFL now opening up, you know. But listen, the Yankees and their Apollo deal yesterday, I think sports leagues are willing to have pretty much anyone as owners. as long as the value continues to go up. So does that...

You think we could see a hyperscaler just end up buying a sports team just as basically part of their treasury? It seems like a relatively stable asset. They get some potentially some halo effect from it. I think leagues will still be very careful as to who they let in just because they're worried about information as a whole.

They don't want things to come out, especially as long as a lot of these teams are going to still be asking for public financing for their stadiums. Oh, yeah. So I do think they, I know I'm contradicting myself, but I do think there are some caveats. And if they open it up to many people who are, say, invested in a fund who then have to have access to those financials, I don't think major sports leagues think that's interesting. So that's the only thing that I think is probably, like, prohibitive to all of that. Got it. So when you say information, you mean financial details about how that particular team operates. Because there's been teams.

Yeah, but can't you, can't you, you could certainly raise from a number of people and just have it be a condition that they don't get any information. Sure. Right. Yes. Yeah. But that would be hard if it's like, well, Microsoft owns the bowls. For example, I know a bunch of people that, would happily co-invest with Kushner and Iger

on the condition of like you don't have to tell me anything ever. I just want to be effectively be able to say yeah I own part of the Lakers. Sure. And that's a thing by the way, minority ownership it's ridiculous. I mean I can't believe people say hey I'm going to put a hundred million in and I'm going to own like an infantestimal part of a team I mean, it's like, yes, there is a trophy value, but there are seemingly better investments.

I will say, obviously, I have been wrong at every stage of, since covering Mr. 30 years, I've been wrong. If you want to pull all the videos, you can see me on CNBC saying in 2011, $450 million for the Warriors. That is crazy. And then the next year, the buck sell. And I even said in 2014, bomber for $2 billion. It was 12 times expected gross revenues. And this deal is now 20, probably 20, with LeBron leaving, it's probably 22 to 23 times gross revenues, 12.5 billion for next year.

Yeah. It's crazy. Someone under the numbers in the chat, most of the leagues allow up to 30% institutional ownership in individual teams. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. But I think that's going to, I think that will change a little bit more.

Again, I mean, there's not, there's, there's been relatively little that we haven't seen like majority Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds coming into American sports. I know that the monumental Washington capitals and wizards, you know, small piece in there. And it's obviously infiltrated European soccer football a lot more than it has. Well, yeah. And for all the existing owners, no one is probably sitting there owning one of these assets and thinking like, no, I don't want to unlock large institutional buyers for these assets.

Of course, there's a massive incentive to allow these much, much bigger buyers to come in. Do you think the trophy asset thesis is still driving the market, or is there something else going on? Because, I mean, I guess the trophies can just keep getting bigger and bigger as the pool of capital and the larger buyers come in and people are wealthier, so they need a bigger trophy. But it feels like there are other things afoot in the U.S. economy changes to, like, the big macro thesis around sports is usually like, we're all on our phones and that means we're craving. Experiential, right? And so I'm wondering if there's if there's some other way that we should be thinking about a deal like this outside of the typical, it's a trophy asset. Yeah, well, you have a lot of people who are interested in ownership because they're rich and no one knows who the hell they are. Yeah.

And that's obviously not the case with Kushner and Iger. Yeah. You know, one of the things that's not a surprise is Kushner and Iger. I mean, Iger's walking around forever. and he obviously was at the helm of Disney, which owns ESPN, and he's had a first look at, you know, everything in sports over the years. And I just thought they were going to get the Vegas team. I mean, they were looking at Vegas a week ago.

Yeah. So, you know, that just shows you how quick this is. You know, and Kushner and, you know, obviously what he's been doing. And always, you know, hey, every day you got to throw in a Trump connection somewhere. Sure. So what I'm interested in, though, and I'm known. But you said, you said, so I haven't been following the Vegas team at all or anything in the NBA. The opportunity that they'll be a Vegas team.

No, but my question was like, is it possible that they always wanted the Lakers and they wanted, and these were, this was going on in the background, and they just were using that the Vegas team? Not what I was told. They wanted a great team, and this happened over the last 100 hours. What is the shape of Las Vegas sports these days? I know teams have relocated there, and there's F1, but is there like an indigenous fan base that's strong enough? Is the indigenous fan base? They can't believe how big it is. Listen, I was there the day that he announced the Vegas Golden Knights.

And obviously their first year going to the Stanley Cup helped. I mean, that crowd is probably in the top five best crowds in hockey. Well. Everyone go, you know, people go there for road trips like they go when teams play, you know, the Raiders. You know, the Raiders Stadium, Allegiance Stadium is amazing, is great. They've won. You know, Vegas is very hard to win at, and people laugh at me when I say this. but, you know, eating has become the next act.

And it becomes eating versus Cirque de Soleil. It used to be eating and then show. Now eating is actually an activity. And so you're competing with eating over the last five years because of the chef, the chef brands and everything else else that's out there. And so I think they think, you know, the A's are really going to make a lot of sense. and listen, if you look at the knights and you look at where the Raiders are, I mean, 10 years ago you were concerned about gambling.

Now, Calci has you gambling on what flights are late. We've gone from, oh, my God, when I asked Gary Bettman that day when they said they were moving to Vegas, he said, oh, no, we're going to have, the odds will be off the board at the two closest casinos to T-Mobile arena we're concerned. And, you know, and now you look today and you look at the prediction markets and we're literally betting on toad races every two seconds. Are prediction? Is it a thing?

I mean, there's crazy. No, it will be though. I showed you that crazy Russian live streaming site where people play fake sports. Like, it'll be two guys sitting in a chair and they're playing softs. You can bet on, you can actually there, you can bet on how many. cars will go through a traffic light. I've seen those. Yeah, until it turns red.

I mean, listen, prediction markets are the dopamine that is going on, whether it's gambling, whether it's opening packs, collectibles, obviously, I'm close to. You know, my son, who's 12, is on a free-to-play app, and he's looking at whether, you know, Janus is going to sneeze during a game. And by the way, I don't see. say, don't play that.

I say, yeah, play that, play that and use your fake money. And when you lose 14 times in a row, that's a learning experience. And if you had real money, you'd be screwed. But I don't know. I mean, it's the prediction markets are the craziest thing that I've ever had to watch in my entire, you know, reporting, gambling life. Are prediction markets net good for sports in terms of the businesses of like the Lakers, there's more points of entry.

And so you wind up buying tickets and going in person or does it not affect or does it pull people away? Because no, I think until people run out of money. Yeah. You know, people people, people run out of money. These are these are, it's there. It's very, very addictive. Yeah. And it's, and it's, and it's, it's difficult to avoid because again, we need to be on dopamine.

We are degenerate nation. And this is in a way the perfect and most horrible product. Yeah. Interesting. We talked to a former head of the CFTC yesterday about it, about where the regulation might go, whether you're going to get some of those gambling addiction warnings applied to production markets. And what about what about calcium polymarkets market cap? And, you know, what if you're Andreessen Arwitz or how are you predicting, you know, if you're raising it a, $50 billion valuation.

But, you know, at some point, you have to believe that with the sports books and you get a complete proctology exam, if you're related to the sports books, and then if your cashier market, you get a free pass to do anything. You'd think that that would have to come to an end at some point. But I, and is that end when Trump is out of office? Yeah, who knows? Breakdown. What's, what's your updated view on whatnot?

We had Grant on the show. I believe it was on Friday. The business is growing like crazy. It seems like there's a lot of like traditional online commerce happening in this live format. You know, he gave an example of a guy selling fish doing quite well, selling fish. Yes, I love that example. That was crazy. That was inside.

Live fish. And that's like, you know, the example that people always would give. with China is like you can go on these Chinese live streaming apps and buy like mangoes and Kiwis and fruit and all the stuff. And we hadn't haven't really seen that at scale in the U.S. yet. But if you were going to put a number on it, what percentage of the activity on whatnot or what percentage of the volume on whatnot is like closer to gambling than commerce? 90%. I mean, I mean, I, you know, a, you know, a, it is so much breaking that I'm surprised that they don't have an insurance policy against breaking

by selling, you know, normal memorabilia, right? I mean, that they're, if, if, and this is, it's not as close to prediction markets, but if a bunch of attorneys general, you know, decide that they're going to go after breaking, you know, what not's going to go all the way down. And so, Break down breaking for us. It's like I buy, you're sitting there with a pack of cards. You're about to open it.

I can buy it for $10. And it's possible you pull a card that's worth $100. Is that how it works? And then people just spam that all day. By that by three. You put in, you put in 300 to win $3,000. Or you put in 700 and then potentially you could get nothing, which is, which then becomes a lottery rule issue.

And whatnot has done a lot more. recently to try to curtail it, but it's very hard to say that it's not gambling. And so I think they should be doing a lot more regular traditional eBay-type memorabilia sales. I didn't believe in them in the beginning because I confused the smallness of their transactions, that the average transaction, I think, was like $15, that they wouldn't be able to get a critical mass. And to their credit, they certainly have gotten that. people enjoy watching the shows. You know, they enjoy being a part of it.

But again, as they get bigger, I'm surprised that they're not investing more in traditional commerce, almost as an insurance policy. Well, thank you so much. We got to figure out if they're gambling on fish. Maybe. Because it's like, yeah, because like this fish might have caviar inside. You don't know how much caviar is inside. This is a real thing with fish. Five, five.

By the way, if anyone wants to have a great time, you should go to Oklahoma, where you can fish for paddlefish, which is pretty much a fish. When you pull it out of the water, it looks like it was on the Simpsons. Okay. And you can fish all you want, but you must give Oklahoma the fish. They will then clean out the caviar and then hand you back the fish. Oh, interesting. American paddlefish. American paddlefish.

Well, thank you so much for the tip. And thanks for coming on the show. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI.

Own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is Patrick Weitzel. He's the founder of WTSL here with us with his first appearance, joining in just a minute or two. There are some other posts in the timeline. But while we wait, let me tell everyone about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace. We're getting work done with AI agents.

Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest is with us here in the TDPLTLTLT. Let's bring in Patrick. How are you doing? What's up, boys? How are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time.

I'm good. I'm just in New York City. Can you see me okay? Yeah, you look great. I'm in this hotel room here in New York. You look great. There's a little bit of lag, but, I can hear you fine.

Yeah. So I can work. Well, let me. It's that hotel Wi-Fi. Yeah. I know. It'll get you every time. All right.

Well, sorry about that, boys. No, you're good. We can hear you fine. Okay. So, yeah, give us a little bit of an overview of your firm, the thesis, and then the recent deals. So the idea was, you know, when we took Endeavor Private, essentially what we, what that effectively did was kind of we dismantled. the company and essentially sold everything but our ownership interest in WME, the talent agency, and our position in TKO, which is now around 61%.

But everything else that we ran and sat on, we sold. And so effectively kind of eliminated the job. And going forward and looking at the next chapter, I didn't really want to start a new company. company right away. And one of the things Egon Durbin and I talked about made a really great long relationship with Silver Lake, everything we kind of did at Endeavor was really fueled by them and with their partnership. And so out of that, I talked to Egonne.

He goes, well, why don't we just keep investing in the field that you're in, you know, kind of entertainment, sports, content, the things that I've kind of spent my, you know, 30 years in. but on a much smaller level. So we just started with $250 million. And the idea was to make, you know, kind of $20 to $100 million investments and different things that were in our sector and help companies that I could have some influence on and help build. And so that's kind of what the whole thesis is around Wightsell, the investment company.

And then the other part of it is when Egon bought the Raiders, or invested into the Raiders, I should say, we had a WME at a football representation business. And per the league, you can't be a buyer and a seller. So I took that entire group out and started win sports, which is predominantly a football agency. We're starting and do a little bit of golf too, but it's really focused on building a really great dynamic football agency.

And we have also a handful of artists in there of clients, mine that I've worked with forever, of actors predominantly and directors that just have been a long-time clients, so they're also a part of it. But the investment that we put into Alex Cooper's company came from Whitesell. Got it. Awesome. What are the key ingredients to a great investment, great media company in the modern era where it's individual-led, influencer-led, podcasting, live-streaming, these types of things? What are you looking for? I think the reason why I was... attracted to Alex is, I mean, again, going back, you know, 30 years, the one thing that's always

the most important thing is having someone really talented and really special. And Alex, to me, I mean, obviously, her podcast, you guys know how big it is, how influential she is. She's a cultural powerhouse to, you know, kind of Gen Z women. And, but she's also built out already at Unwell, a really diversified company that is not only in these other sectors, but doing very well. It's in live events, there are consumer products. Of course, they're in content, both kind of scripted and unscripted. And that's at kind of the traditional media companies like a Hulu or Netflix,

but it's also, she's kind of started her own network of channels on YouTube and funding and producing content for YouTube, everything from microdramas or just reality shows. and that's gone exceedingly well on top it. And then lastly, an advertising agency, account for digital solutions for people, creative agency that Alex was saying yesterday that she thinks that by the end of 27,

that the revenues of that will exceed her podcast revenues, which is quite a feat. So what I thought was interesting is, yes, she's a big force as a podcaster and talent, but she really has built a company that I think can only grow in every one of these sectors that we're in. So that's what kind of attracted me to her. I think also the part about what you're seeing in this kind of creator economy is they can, for 30 years when we built our company, if you had someone who had an idea like Alex says,

you had to go to one of the traditional media companies, convince them to pay for it, and finance it, distribute it, market it. Now, of course, people like Alex and others have done it themselves. You guys know that very well. And didn't need to go to the traditional players. But in that, I think now you're seeing a bunch of capital coming to this space and are going to invest in it. You see people raising funds for it.

I think that what Alex has done is really, really hard. And so I don't think it's at the agency business, you do it at scale. I don't think this is a thing you can do at scale. I think there are going to be unique individuals and opportunities that can build multi-billion dollar media companies. And so that's where I think kind of where I want to spend my time. And I think I hopefully can help them think through the strategy, whether it's M&A or just and kind of figuring how to grow their content business or live event business.

Hopefully my kind of three decades of doing this could be additive. and fun. That's great. All makes a lot of sense. I feel like so many different investors have been so excited about the creator economy for so long, and have struck, despite that excitement,

they tried to invest in, the best thing to do is invest in the actual platforms, right? A decade ago, go invest in Spotify and, and, you know, Google or do the YouTube seed round. Things of that nature. But then all the other attempts, look back at like 2019, 2020, people were like, well, what if we can invest in the, in the sort of tools that these businesses are using? The problem there is that

these businesses will just like, they don't need a quickbooks for creators. These are just media businesses. They just use quickbooks. You can use Bank of America. You don't need a fintech just for your business. You don't need a creators don't need an Amex card. They can just use Amex or Ramp or whatever it is. And so it's come, it's becoming a lot more clear to be. And then even looking at investing in the early stage of creators, the best creators early on are scrappy. They figure out how to get an audience without a lot of capital. They can just turn on their phone and start recording. Maybe they hire an editor. And so they can ramp revenue pretty quickly. And I think what investing in this category is going to look like

is people like you waiting to see who these sort of power law creators are and then going in and investing real dollars once they've established, like, at least the beginnings of a, of a platform. Just because I'm looking at the early stage, I don't, there's a lot of early stage content creators that I'm bullish on, but none of them, the smart ones would take money because they're like, well, capital is not a constraint for my business. A constraint is like, how do I reach more people? How do I, how do I grow my existing business? And these businesses, at least on the advertising side, just generate a lot of cash. I think perfectly said, and I think it's all the more reason where I think there will be a lot of people rushing to this space and will, I think, make the wrong decisions because to what you just described, you have to get to this place. And where Alex came to us, it isn't like she needs the money. I mean, obviously, you know, it's well documented what her Spotify deal is alone. And, you know, and we'll and grow there.

Oops, what was that? That was an air horn for the Spotify deal. Cha-ching. And the serious, you know. Yeah, she's put up some huge numbers. Yeah, but the point of it is, but she's like, listen, you know, I need help. You know, I want smart people around us to help kind of grow it and think through exactly what you described. And what's interesting is the traditional media companies, they are kind of saying, listen,

we don't know how to get to this audience that you reach and we don't really know how to do creator stuff. So she's kind of going to, I think, be able to, if we do this right, go back and forth, have her own ideas, her own kind of things that we will incubate and do on YouTube, but also for the traditional media companies. And that's a kind of a hard thing to do because I don't know many people who can do both, at least that have come long historically. So, you know, and also she's, you know, her audience follows her as she should become a new mother.

And I think that's going to open up a whole different, you know, categories, not only consumer products, but other things that she can kind of get involved in that our audience is going through those same things. And I think there's just an authenticity to her and a connection that is real. And it always starts with that. You've got to have great talent to build these things. And she is very ambitious and loves it.

I mean, just loves what she's doing every day. So it's going to be fun. How are you thinking about flowback from the creator economy to traditional media to Hollywood? obviously we've seen the Netflix, the Spotify deals, but the more interesting trend that emerged this summer was around obsession and backrooms and Iron Lung,

these YouTube creators, these independent, you know, new filmmakers who were able to put up really incredible numbers at the box office. If we were having this conversation in two years and you told me that there was an Alex Cooper directed rom-com that put up 200 million at the box office, I'd be like, yeah, that tracks. But is Hollywood set up to embrace a new modern creator now?

Because in the past, it's always been, well, take six months off your current podcast to come do a Hollywood project. And maybe you'll make six figures. Maybe a million dollars is in the mail. And that's just not enough to take the whole podcast down for six months while you go do a project. Yeah, I think you're right. I think where you're going to see it is, and you reference those two movies, is what's happened with the tools, and this is not brand new, but like, you know, when Chris Nolan was 15 years old, right,

he either had to get his, like, you know, video camera out or go rent film equipment, if you actually wanted to shoot a short film, you'd actually go rent lights and cameras and all that. And so the kid today, whether it's just on TikTok or YouTube, that 15-year-old Chris Nolan, is doing that every day and getting really, really good. at making content and coming with ideas and very fast with the technology.

And that's where I think the next generation of filmmakers are going to come from. And we would use to go to film schools and not that they won't still come from film schools, but I think what you're going to see is the writer-director, creator in the film business and in television is going to come there.

And the power of both of those things when you kind of get the kind of virality of online and you can incubate things there. So I think part of what I think will happen with Alex is she'll have an idea that we'll do there. I'm just to start as a microdrama or something for YouTube. Yep. And it'll catch on like this. And then you're going to socialize it.

So by the time you go out, then you could go make it as a feature film or as a show for Netflix or whatever. But you've also got this built-in awareness. I mean, obviously you guys followed it. But Backrooms was, you know, massively well-known by a target audience long before it went out, right? Totally. And so I think that's where I think it'll land. I think the idea of like leaving your podcast to do it, I think it's still going to be risky.

But these other people are sitting here every day and making really, really good stuff, really good content. And so I think that's exciting. And, you know, we'll see long-term how Hollywood embraces that because ultimately, like, you know, where the role the studios are in that. And how does the studios compete? You know, he made that movie for $700,000. it looked really good, you know, for that.

And those efficiencies are only going to get better and better. Totally. Last question I have before you leave. I'm curious how you think about generating returns from an investment like you're making unwell. I'm sure you have a preference on it. You probably make back the original investment over the next few years. And on top of that, it's just you're in the money.

but is this the kind of thing that you and the team want to just own and help operate for 30 years? Or do you think that there's going to be in 10 years from now a bigger set of buyers that would come in and do majority buyout of these type of platform creator businesses? You know, it's funny. I talk to Alex about that. I mean, because obviously it's her company and how she decides to kind of grow it. And she's not really sure. I think she wants to keep doing this kind of forever. And I think one of the things that, you know, when we went through it, you know, we started

our own company, several that came and invested. And over time, as we bought other things, obviously our shares got diluted down and we owned less and less of the company. But the company became worth, you know, obviously exponentially more. But we still have controlled the company and had the governance of that. And so I kind of look at it in a similar light here. I think as long as Alex wants to do it, yes, I think there'll be room for other. capital partners to come in if they if needed and if wanted um but i think my experience with silver

lake uh is kind of like you know i got a bias to let's keep building something great as long as we can and the long as we're enjoying it and and then i think the you know the exits and all that will kind of take care of themselves but you know she started this company it's you know it is her so i i i think and she's got such a incredible work ethic i just think she's going to be doing doing it for a long time and you know just going to grow it and own it that's no that's my yeah she's done a fantastic job love it well thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us yeah likewise and congrats on everything you guys done thank you credible yeah um you know start this thing and you know the opening i deal it's just awesome and even down in l.a people are

watching you guys so um you know yes spend some more time uh i saw it i saw the bob iger thing today that was incredible. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of, that was the first thing that made me optimistic on L.A. in a long time. Everyone's like, oh, California has fallen apart. L.A. is a disaster. Bob and Josh are just like, we're dropping $12.5 billion. We're setting a new record.

We're going. It's incredible. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, man. Goodbye. Thanks, thanks.

Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, trade. and more with great customer service. Our next guest is from Code Rabbit. We have Hardjaw Gill, the CEO here with a big fundraise. We got to warm up the gong. How you doing?

Hey, folks. I'm pretty good. How are you? Welcome. Tell us the news. Welcome back. Well, he's been on the show before. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Have you? But it's been maybe a year and you didn't have an orange background. Can you up the volume, please? Sorry. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Well, give us the news.

Tell us what happened. I want to hit the gong for you. And then we have a bunch of questions about the business. Yeah, so we're pretty excited to announce like CDC round of funding. So we just ended up raising $143 million at a billion. Nice. Bill and a half dollar valuation. So officially a unicorn now.

Yeah. And in a short hour, like we started like two and a half years back. So it's been an amazing ride for the team. What's been the biggest? Just creating only $500 million dollars of value a year. Not bad. Not bad. Yeah, what's been the biggest driver of growth? What do customers like about CodeRabbit more than anything else? What is, what's the real growth vector? Yeah, we're pretty much like riding the wave of AI code generation here. So the growth is, it's a second order effect of growth of cloud code code X. As you know, like the biggest use case for generated BI has been code generation. And that's what's leading to the bottleneck downstream with code reviews now being a massive, massive bottleneck and a choke point. And that's where code rabbit is right now the market leader, like providing automated validation and building trust in these AI outputs.

And that's what is bringing all the growth to our door steps. Yeah, unpack a little bit about, I was just reading on Hacker News, the death of the mid-tier engineer. You either need a vibe coder who can just, you know, hammer prompts or you need a real experienced expert architect to make any headway. and the messy middle is getting much messier with endless code, huge PRs, huge code reviewing steps that are unmanageable without AI. What is the correct balancing act that a company should be pulling off to actually move quickly, not run up the budget, but still be able to understand their system and get a good result? Yeah, it's pure chaos right now. I mean, especially like the recent inflection point we have seen with these agents becoming more and more. capable. Like in the last, I would say, three to six months have been amazing with some of these

models like Opus 4,5 being so capable and being able to run for longer periods of time. And what that means is that the inner loop of coding is now fully automated. Like you can just go from idea to code without even going through like planning process of linear and Jira tickets anymore. Even linear famously data block was that issue systems are dead, which is a truth. Like now your ideas are just being translated to code directly. And it's not just the developers writing code. Now you are seeing, as you said, like product managers, even designers who are non-technical

in terms of coding capabilities are now actually opening poll requests. And on top of that, we are now seeing every company wants to be a coding company. Like now we are seeing Spotify release a coding app. Oh, yeah. I mean, linear is writing code, Notion is writing code. Data Dog wants to write code or sentry. Everyone's writing code, right? So what that is leading to is like a massive backlog of the code changes.

you now have to validate and understand those massive outputs and then ship to production. So the role of human has become more of a reviewer now. So every day you're waking up, you're deciding which AI task I take to completion. Where do I add my taste? And it's a taste thing. It's a judgment thing now, which is scarce now. So that's what we're helping scale. So what CodeRabbit does is it first of all fights fire with fire, essentially like you're making

cloud code fight with code rabbit in a loop. There's a lot of loop engineering aspect of it. Making sure your changes are all meeting all the guardrails or the premarge checks that you have. Then after that, we are helping the reviewers also triage and prioritize the work. So the nature of

planning has now shifted downstream because that's a joke point. And thirdly, we're helping the reviewers also understand the changes. So no one's looking at the code, which is the fun part. This is like the biggest inflection I've seen. Like when I'm not reading the code anymore. Expecting a reviewer to do that is certainly impossible now.

So what code rabbit is also doing is like raising the abstraction of understanding these changes. Like you're not looking at lines of code, but understanding the blast radius and the architectural impact of those changes. I have one last question, Jordy. Go for it. I'm interested in the opportunity internationally.

You're expanding how big is the opportunity in Europe, in Asia abroad, how focused are you on it? Is there a unique opportunity because other companies are maybe less serious about international expansion. And so you can be a more trusted partner, faster, accelerate there, or is it just the logical next step for your company to expand internationally because there's demand and pull everywhere?

Right. For us, like, we have always had, like, pull from all segments of the market even globally. Like when we started, like initially we went viral in Japan, which was so funny, right? Yeah. And even in this round, like, we are partnering with a partner in, like, one of the VCs who let that round atomico is a very large fund out of Europe. Yeah. BMW ventures invested in that round. So BMW has one of our early customers who believed in us.

So massive opportunity. I think it's a global opportunity, like the developers across the global. Sorry, we like cars. Yeah. I hope they're an M3, M2, M4, something like that. Di-A-8. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ideally.

The orders do go up. Yeah. On the I-8. Yeah. Anyway. Sorry to interrupt, but what was, what were people most skeptical about with, in regard, like during the financing process, obviously a bunch of, you know, sounds like a bunch of customers invested, they don't, they, they have a good deal for the product. But, you know, space, cursor buys graphite. I'm sure that was an accelerant to your business in some ways, but it also signals that, like,

these companies that are generating code want to do everything. And so I think you can, like I imagine a good argument is like, you know, it's helpful to have a non-lab review your code, you know, like a third party be in that flow. But how did you answer that question? No, that's a great question. I mean, this was one of the interesting fundraisers I've done. This is my third startup, by the way. I've seen all kinds of fundraisers.

This one, you can clearly see, like, there's a lot of anxiety in the market when it comes to the SDLC space. Like, everyone's, like, just concentrating their capital on a few model labs. Everyone wants to be an anthropic, for instance. And the other dynamic itself is, like, what does the future of SDLC look like? I mean, is code review step even needed, right? I mean, people are, like, completely on the fence on what the future of, I mean, you know, Like, Daio gets on the stage and says that you don't need software engineers anymore. So all those, like, anxiety had been there, which we had to, like, talk to the investors to make them understand where this is all going to land, where the stable ground is, and code reviews.

In fact, like, you bring up cursor. It's a great example. Like, what we have seen in the last three years, even the code editors are not future-proof. Like, the cursor started with tab completion, and then they got blindsided by CloudCode, which was almost like a Yahoo versus kind of a Google movement for them. On the other hand, the code reviews, the guardrails, they never go away. You can never have a scenario where you're going to take AI code and ship it to real customers without having any sort of guardrails in place. So the GitHub is becoming like a joke point for a good reason.

It's in a lot of distress, as you know, but that is kind of a sign of things to come. Like, that is the only place where you can actually take a look at the changes and then approve them. And this is kind of like an example that I'll give you from my first startup was in the observability space. I had seen kind of the same thing happened, where when microservices were taking off, cloud was taking off, there was a lot of chaos, so operators were kind of flying blind, and then Datadog comes in and defines this whole category of observability, right, and became a massively valuable business, like while AWS, GCP and they were all growing, but data dog also continued to become a standalone company.

Same thing we had seen with code reviews. Now there's a lot of chaos, explainability has become a bottleneck. Just like observability, now you have an explainability problem. So in a way, like Code Rabbit is now kind of becoming the Datadog of this new world. And very interestingly, Datadog is one of the investors in this sound as well. That's awesome. This is an analogy here as well. I love it.

Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Awesome progress. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Thanks, folks. Cheers. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike.

Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. is our next guest is Jeff Huber returning to the show. I think it's been over a year. He's the founder and CEO of Croma. And we got some good news from Jeff Huber. Let's bring him in.

I know we were keeping you waiting, Jeff. Sorry for that, running late today. How are you doing? Good. Good. Good to see you again. Good to see you again. It's been too long.

Give us the latest in your world. Take us through recent announcements, and then we can go all over the place, I'm sure. Let's do it. I think it's been a really interesting year in AI, in particular, you know, seeing how companies are more deeply adopting AI agents. I think, like, as we sort of reflect on, like, the biggest gap in AI, it still feels like memory is the biggest gap. I'm sure you all are trying to use agents all the time, and they're constantly forgetting how to do things, and they're not the right context. And so, yeah, we're announcing on the show kind of our solution to that.

Yes. Take us through it. What is Zeitgeist? Yeah, I think, like, in short form, there's probably a lot of sophisticated approaches to solving memory for AI, but in very simple form, if you can get AI agents just to be able to write things down, and then later find those things. You know, that's all you need. And in some ways, I think Wikipedia solved it 20 years ago. You can call it a revolutionary data model. It's just a wiki. And so, I think really inspired by, like, how OpenClaugh and Hermit agent have been managing markdown files. Yeah, I was about to ask.

Why not just a bunch of marks? down files, why not just take the open claw vibe coder Mac Mini guy and scale it up to the organization of a thousand people in the enterprise? It's a great place to start. As our team was adopting this technology over the last three or four months, we wanted like this shared memory layer for our whole team that knows everything about our whole company, really. And you've got to think about concurrency control and access control and versioning and lineage

and just a bunch of infrastructure things that matter as the data. just at scales. So as a concrete example, like there might be someone in human resources that's developed a skill to give people raises, but you don't necessarily want that skill proliferating across the entire organization. So otherwise, everyone's

just giving themselves raises left and right. Is that a reasonable example? I think so. Yeah. Hopefully the other access control systems would not allow anybody to give anybody a raise, right? But yeah, maybe more grounded, like what we've seen amongst our own team is that like now our engineering

team, the first place they go and they have a technical question is they ask Foundation, they ask Foundation that question. And Foundation has seen all of our Notion docs, all of our Google Drive docs, all of our coding agents sessions, which actually have so much high value casted information in them about how our team works, how they operate what we care about. But now it's spread. The customer supports constantly asking questions, sales, GTMs, asking you questions, would have become this repository of everything we know?

Yeah. Take us through the shape of the course. business, the launch of Chrome a Cloud, how that business is going, just overall demand for core products in and around the AI boom, because everything's sort of booming and every system's like straining. What's your experience been? Yes, we launched Chrome Cloud in late 2025. We now have close to a thousand paying customers on the product and tens of thousands of other users who, you know, will, you know, will. bring on board soon.

You know, I think like these lower level infrastructure primitives are cool, right? A core, core database, core search, core operations. They allow developers to pick it up and build useful applications. And we were looking at the market and seeing really what our customers were building. We realized there was an opportunity to meet them where they were. They were all asking us, hey, how do we build, how do we build wikis? How do we solve access control? How do we sell versioning just time and time again?

And so, you know, us just building those infrastructure primitives for customers to use allows them to, you know, focus on what that actually differentiates their business. Give me your, not your AGI timelines, but your timeline to just good search. I feel like I go into my Gmail and I search for something. It's still bad. And I want an LLM to be involved, but I don't want it to be as slow as a current LLM. I know I can wire it up to Codex or whatever and have it read through everything. But I don't want to wait 10 minutes, but I also don't want the current experience. And I feel like there will be emerging of these two.

But do we need to bake it into an ASIC? Like, how complex is it going to be until, like, you just show up to a website and the search function is magical and also as fast as fast as fast as far as. Yeah. I think there's a few different pieces of the puzzle. So number one is like having highly expressive, accurate and fast search throughout the database layer. Right. And the second piece of that is. like the agent itself and the model being really fast.

You know, one thing that we made a bet on earlier this year was a Gentic search becoming like the default. That really all searches will go through a model. This is what I think the bitter lesson means for search. Is that like, you know, you'll spend more tokens, you'll use more inference. That's how you get better at search. And so we released a model in the spring called Context 1.

It's a fine tune of GPTOS 20D. And that model on Cerebris today already runs at 3,000 tokens per second. And we were targeting, I think, you know, Tallis got bought last week. I think you guys covered that. You know, chat jimmy.com. The best demo. You were proof that names don't matter when the product is that. When the product is really technical and good.

The team is that cracked. You can name your product, whatever you want. Chatjimmy. We were shared an investor. You know, we were targeting context when running at like $15,000 or $20,000 per second on that chip. that I think like if you think about that's going to come right that's coming uh this year and that's going to change how we really rewire how people think about language balls yeah is there still um like even though the the the token speed is very quick in that example is there a delay to sort of like

fire up the chip like load load data into memory build the context window uh like do whatever you need to to actually get the once the inference is cooking i can imagine it being very fast but is there if you're dealing with something that's like a scale email product and you have millions of users that are going to be searching things randomly. Like, you can't store all of that in memory all the time. So, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what, like, what is the process there. Is that a meaningful barrier or not? I think fast inference, maybe sort of what you're implying here, like, fast inference does not solve, just sort of, or you, kind of to right information, the right granularity of information, letting it forget information successfully,

such that it can refocus. And so, I think it's been cool to see, like, Connix Engineering to some degree get folded back into the model, but also, as we've seen as of late, like, you know, really good harnesses, like the stuff from Prime intellectuals, like really good harnesses that are targeting specific tasks. You know, that is in some ways on this engineering. And, like, they can outperform frontier models, but I have huge margin. And so I think there's still a huge gains to context of engineering. Jordy, anything else? I got more questions, but we're running behind.

Yeah, sorry. Great to see you, Jeff. Let's not let it be so long again. Yeah, let's do it again soon. Congrats on all the progress. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out. Up next, we're going back to back again. Sean McGuire is doing. deals left and right. He said, I want an entire gundo. I want every gunned. Kind of like the Kushner of DeepTex. Just running around and everything. Look at this.

But we got Sean McGuire and Soren Monra Anderson from Niros. How are you guys doing? It's fantastic. It has to do to have a lot of money. Yeah. It's great. Jobs finished. Take us through. Take us through the deal. What happened? Yeah, I mean, overall this year has been super, super, super. strong. We've been growing like crazy, building the team, producing a lot more drones. We're up to about 1,200 a week in terms of production output. So things are going really, really well there. And we've also started expanding into multiple product lines. So we just started talking publicly about Bandit, which is our interceptor drone. And really, this round is fuel on the fire to go

expand to new verticals and make bigger investments into the core technology behind the platform. So, you know, core business doing extremely well, and now we're ready to take some big swings. How much did you raise? We raised $250 million. Led by Soura and ASTF. Let's go. All right. This is the third round.

We've either led or co-led in this company. You were early. Yeah, we led the seed. There was a pre-seed led by Ian Roundtree from Cantos. Got to give him a shout out. He connected me with Soren. back in the day. But then we also Sequoia co-led the B and co-led the C.

And so that is, I'd say that's Max Conviction, boys. Like that's up there. Yeah. Really, really cool. The thing I'm most interested in for you, Soren, is like, how is the American supply chain developing? How much are you guys having to take on yourself versus are there companies coming out of the woodwork hitting you up saying, hey, I can make this, I can make that? and you're vetting them. We heard rumors of an American drone motor company because those were in really short supply,

but walk us through what's going on on the supply chain side. Where are there green shoots? Where are you issuing like a call for new startups? Yeah, it definitely depends on what part of the supply chain, and it's pretty varied across. So we have taken the overall strategy of designing our core components in-house. We really specialize in the electronics design, so that, things like the radios and the flight computers. So when we're going and figuring out how to build these at scale, we're going directly to the chip companies. We're going to many different

boardhouses. We get a lot of control down at the granular level of these subcomponents and the materials going into these parts. We do a similar thing with motors where we're sourcing neodymium, non-Chinese neodymium, where we have a place where we can get that processed outside of China, and then we're also working with multiple motor companies, including one of the American motor companies that has started up recently. So I think because drones are getting so much attention, there are some really capable companies, you know, like Westmag is one of the motor companies that's making fantastic progress. We benefit from that, but we also know that we need to control our own destiny in many of these areas. So we are going very vertical in our design and our

manufacturing and the intent is to be multiple, like sourced, have multiple sources for all of these critical things. Problem number one feels like you're on the path, which is as a country, we need to figure out a way to make a ton of these as fast as possible. Second is maybe like capability and form factor and how do you basically push the form factor forward. Sometime between when the last time you were on and now, I saw a video of a drone where a fact effectively the whole body of the drone was spinning and it almost made it invisible. And it was very, very scary looking. It feels like there's a lot that can be done on the form factor side.

How important is that to the company right now versus just solving problem number one? Yeah, I mean, we're constantly iterating on form factor for Archer, basically figuring out ways that it can be a better product for the soldiers. these are really granular things. Like, for example, every time they train with it, they find this one little plastic part breaks. And so then you need to go and figure out how to change that plastic part.

That's a really, really specific example. But we get a lot of advantage by having now tens of thousands of drones deployed and constantly doing that iteration with the end users. But in terms of overall form factor, the biggest thing I would look at right now is Bandit, which is our interceptor.

So it is pretty much all of the same components from Archer, but in a new airframe with a different payload, it's designed for maximum speed versus really like maximum range with a heavy payload. And it's designed to go and chase down other drones. It's a great example of how we've built this ecosystem of these core components that we can produce at scale with a secure supply chain.

And now we're applying all of that to a new form factor. And we're able to go and chase down shot heads with it, which is something that we cannot do with the current product line today. Wow. Can you explain, like M5, sort of the buyer here and how the drone procurement process will change over the next few years? Because drones don't feed that you think like Air Force, they fly, but I'm sure the Navy needs drones.

I'm sure the Army needs drones. Recently, Space Force was built up, and that makes a lot of sense. for where space is, but you can see selling to the Coast Guard, selling to different branches of the military, even within. Are you saying we need drone force? We definitely. Maybe. Maybe that's the solution.

But I can imagine, like, the Navy SEALs needing something different than other Navy servicemen. And so how diverse will your customer base be within the armed forces, within the Department of War? How does it break down currently? Is there one buyer and then they do deployment and repurposing? or are you actually interfacing with smaller segments of the armed forces? Yeah, it's a great question.

So today we sell to every service branch of the U.S. military, but the Army and the Marine Corps are the largest volume customers. Navy and Air Force have less of a large quantity demand, at least for Archer, because Archer is really designed for maneuver forces, striking targets within a 20 kilometer radius. And that's really the specialty of the Army and the Marine Corps. However, with Bandit, the counter UAS system, that is, I think, very applicable to the Air Force with protecting air bases as one example.

But we design all of our products to be useful in many different domains. And in our business development team, they are broken down by service, but not by product. And so we really want the folks who are interfacing day to day with the customers. So this is our BD team and our mission success team. We want them to be really intimately familiar with the customer's needs and focusing on, you know, what does that specific service want so we can deliver them the best product. How are you thinking about lessons from the F30? John, let me just add to that. So, you know, you talked about a bunch of the American Department of War customers.

Sure. Soren has also already started international sales. So obviously these products are needed all over the world. And then with this next product, Bandit, the Interceptor product, you get into, like, we need to defend pretty much all critical infrastructure. And with the Iran war, especially what happened in the Gulf, it's not just going to be government customers. I think that if you're building a data center, you're going to have to buy interceptors, you know, like, and you'll do it in cooperation with your government. but maybe the dollars will come from, you know, whoever owns the oil rig, Exxon, or anyone. And just this problem is so big.

And it's gone, it's like already going beyond the traditional just Department of War procurement cycle. And we're seeing it just extremely strongly at Neros with their demand. Lessons from the F-35 program, some really amazing technology. also tensions between different branches for different features that might have delayed, might have caused cost overruns. There's a bunch of different ways you can tell the story of the F-35. But are you leaning more into modularity than another company might? Are there benefits and trade-offs of modularity at your current scale?

Or is there something where you're thinking, okay, down the line will need different products? So let's set things up now to be prepared for when that's. comes. Yeah, that's exactly right, actually. And we've started really trying to instill this in the engineering team, which is breaking down our systems by the logical component and subcomponent level and thinking about what is going to transfer to the next product and being really smart about what every interface between components looks like.

Neros, our theory of victory is building a component ecosystem and making it so every every new product is utilizing that. And so we just build this flywheel. A lot of companies have done this really well with software. Niros is trying to do this with hardware as well. And that is very clear as we're developing Bandit that we're able to reuse so much of the componentry. I will say that modularity is generally hard for mass manufacturing. Like you can take parts of a design, but actually having individual components is generally

harder for making a really mass manufactured product. But it is something that our customers demand, especially with components like radios. We've just seen that you have to be able to switch out your comms quickly. And as we redesign this next generation of the drone, we're doing a full ground-up redesign from what you see today. And that is going to be in service, partially in service of modularity, but also setting the requirement to be manufacturable at a million per year. So those things are somewhat at tension with each other, but we have to figure out the right

line in between. Sean, it's your third investment of this company. You have a ton of capital. Are you, in terms of your defense tech investing arc, are you in growth investor mindset now, are you going to be, do you expect to do fewer seed checks really early stage companies and focus on growth stage board seats, figuring out the public markets, doing later stage deals? or is there still an opportunity for early stage defense tech in your mind? Yeah, I mean, many people will disagree with me on this, but I am personally more in the growth mindset now. I think there are these moment in time, you know, these why nows that happen, that an opportunity

for the first movers to go just like build companies that could not have existed prior. And the Ukraine war was that for a lot of defense tech. And so like the companies that were started immediately. then or right before and are actually delivering value, you know, abroad in some of these active theaters. Like, they're just in a different level than the ones just getting started now. And I personally think it's going to be hard to catch up for a lot of these. I do think there are, you know, like, let's say there are 10 very successful defense tech company started in this decade or so. My guess is seven of them have already been started. We know the names. Maybe there's

opportunity for like two or three more. So I, like, I am. I'm open-minded and paying attention to the space, but, like, it's, is more active on the growth side. Yeah. And I got to say on that, Niros is still today a deeply underappreciated company. Like, $2.5 billion dollar valuation, that's cool and great. These guys, their revenue is growing at an insane clip, actually very efficiently from a financial perspective, which is very rare for hardware company.

they are actually having profound impact in theater right now in multiple places. And that caliber of company is very, very rare. There's maybe another couple companies in that group. But this company kicks ass. I love it. Great way to sum it up. Last question I have, how meaningful is drone racing as a pipeline for talent? Are there people that I'm sure.

I'm sure you have plenty of attention from that world, given the meteoric rise of Neros, is like what the IMO medalists are to Scott Wood? Is that what drone racing is for Neros? A little bit, yeah. Basically, our whole flight test team is insanely good drone pilots. And we've actually started going to the biggest drone racing events just to be there, have a presence, and show people that there is something. something that they can come and work on that is actually a real career.

Like drone racing is not much of a career, at least for the majority of people who partake in it. And honestly, I just wish it was bigger because it is such a fantastic source of talent. So my theory is that over time as military FPV is really growing, it'll eventually mean that the hobbyist FPV world will come along with it and we'll see more very, very cool racing events happening. I've got to add one more pipeline, which is, you know, now that these guys are doing very, very real deployments, they have a pipeline of former Special Forces operators joining the company. And I mean, for me, as a good American, that used to work in, in that world as a civilian, makes me very, very proud. So the drone racing is where Sorin comes from,

but it's really incredible to see these guys hiring a bunch of X-Mil guys. Yeah, there was the story of Palantir. A lot of guys used it and were like, let me go work for this company. did very well for them. We have had that happen multiple times. I'm sure. That is saying something good. Yeah. Are you the best drone racer at Neros currently employed?

Or have you hired somebody better? What percentile are you if there's a company happening? Oh, man. I'm definitely not the best and I'm probably not even the second best. I have not flown very much in a long time. That's because he's old at 23 and his skills are exponentially decay. Yeah, yeah. It's like Formula One.

Yeah, I'm washed at this point. I would say Levi, Levi's our lead flight test pilot. He runs the whole flight test team, and he was a professional pilot before. He's like the most naturally talented pilot I've ever seen. He's probably the best of the company. He also flies for a living, so it helps. Yeah, there you go. And for those of you who don't know, Storm was the world champion, you know, drone racer in multi-GP.

I've watched him in person, Ben, over there, and our team came in full. filmed you in the park in El Sagan Do. And it was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Because I'd seen a DJI drone sort of like take off and sort of, you know, like float away. Maybe it goes a little quick and sort of puts on this headset and is just whipping around this tree going as fast as you can. It was a crazy video. It was a lot of fun. But thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. Great to see you. Amazing progress. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider, user-favored agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes scale of scale, monitoring, and security.

Our next guest is the real liver king, not the social media influencer, but the CEO of the world's largest human biological data center. Fascinating story. Andre from Vivodine, welcome to the show. Joe, how are you doing? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a little bit. Sure. So Vividine grows human tissues at very massive scale. Okay.

So we can test drugs in humans without testing in people. Okay. And we do it at very massive scale. So many times the total amount of clinical trials run in the U.S. every year. And the reason for doing all this is the failure rate of drugs is huge. So 19 out of 20 drugs fail because, all the animal experience we've done just to translate the people. So we can cure, you know, cancer and Alzheimer's and all these things in mice and then they

fill in people. Maybe. When did, uh, humans first grow human tissue in a lab? Yeah. This is, uh, this is the first time we're able to grow, uh, like large pieces of human tissue. So hundreds of thousands of cells in each individual piece. And we're growing, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of these tissues at a time.

to test all sorts of different drugs and permutations. So it's a new development. Hundreds of thousands of cells. This is still microscopic or? Oh, you can see them. Yeah, you can see the little blood vessels growing in them. So it's like inch scale, centimeter scale. Interesting.

Have you ever had a rogue tissue? Yeah, I am the first rogue tissue. I crawled out of the sky back here. You know, here I am. What is the key unlock that allows? is this? Because I imagine that 50 years ago, there were scientists that were like, it sure would be nice to have a ton of human tissue to test drugs on. They couldn't do it then. Why is it possible now? So one of the things that made it possible is having the throughput to test all the different

formulations for like the medias and the protocols that we use to grow them, which the robotics, you know, by the kind of dog footing on technology, we're also getting better at. So it's, you know, with biology, it's like climbing a big mountain with a, with a, with a little valley at the top right it's the the kind of skill is like getting the ball up and having it just uh kind of nest there and that is when it kind of falls into what it would naturally do so gains the function it would normally have we can we can dose to these blood vessels that self-assemble and this tissue actually performs the function of its you know native organ counterpart yeah uh is uh are humans like sourdough like do you need a little starter you know like how do you actually kickstart

your tissue. Yeah. So we use, that's a, it's a very good analogy. So we use primary human cells, right? So we get them from like donated blood or, you know, biopsies of things like tumors. And we get the primary cells out of it. We're not using, you know, like transform stem cells or the old cell lines. Yeah.

They are primary human cells. And they are what kind of seed this process of the tissue cell. Yeah. So someone has a tumor. They do a biopsy. and then instead of just saying, okay, you can test one drug on it because if you kill this, you're done.

You can scale it up and clone it effectively. And then you can say, let's test 50 drugs on this and see what actually works. Yeah, 50,000. The search space is just so big, right? I mean, the kind of real problem, I think drug development is budding up against this. You know, over the past decades,

we've tried to find like single target cures, right? Yeah. We're diseased. So like maybe this resellable. or maybe this compound in the blood by reducing it or by increasing it, we can fix some disease. But things like cancer and fibrosis and Alzheimer's and all of these just like keep getting away from us, right? We might get a little bit close and then does nothing in people. And you imagine like if the, you know, the check engine like comes on in your car, the solution

is not going to be you turn a single screw. It's like a little more complicated than that. And so the hard part about drugging multiple targets and interfacing with biology like at the complexity that it has is how how do you search that space how do you know which things to bind and how it all works and to to to to build you address such a large shirt space you can no longer just be screening like it just runs away from me right it's it's a cliff of of of just like numerical climb yeah and so you have to do the inverse so just understand biology and back solve the things that you should drug to make it do the things you want instead of trying to drug everything and seeing what happens.

And so to understand biology at that level, especially human biology, we have to be able to test it. We read a story about the price of monkeys spiking based on demand from biotech companies to test drugs on monkeys. Where does this technology fit in the new drug development process? Because it feels like we're very close to like the computers being really good at testing a bunch of ideas, but then, of course, you go, what was it, mouse or monkey or something at some point? Yeah, mouse dog, monkey, right?

Yeah, yeah. And, but this feels like an interim step that could be before mouse models, or would this be a full replacement for mouse models, or would this be after a mouse model? Like, where does this fit into the, to the story arc of a new biotech company? So, you know, we're currently working with like the very large majority of the top 10 pharma and the majority of the projects that we're working on are things that do not translate from monkeys into people. Okay. So even the primates are not giving the same responses that humans are. Interesting. Or strange things are being seen in the primates that were not seen in the mice and dogs and you wonder like which one is it, right?

Sure. And so the instead of just jump in, you know, we have some cells in a dish here. some inorganic acid here. We're not, now we're in mice and then, you know, woodchucks and a sort of, uh, we just need to test on human tissue from the get go and replace this whole like outdated approach to, you know, maybe the mouse is going to tell us because all these drugs that are failing in clinic, right? These 19 out of 20, uh, like they are working in the animals, right?

They're safe. They're, they're, they're pretty efficacious, right? Um, so it's like, you know, we're like, fuck, where are our cures, right? Instead of, uh, instead of all these cures to the most of these. And so we are working from discovery all the way through to like supporting clinical trials with these tissues, both to do things that you cannot search easily enough in people and also things that might be too unsafe to searching people. Yeah. Do you have another?

What were you doing before this? How did you get into grown human tissue? Doing it for fun probably. Hobbies. Yeah. I did get into this. Yeah. Yeah.

So my, my, my, my, my background was in designing high throughput microfluidics. Okay. And then I met my co-founder, Dan, as my PhD advisor. And he had invented this concept of the organoid of chip of growing, you know, these, these functional units of human tissues. And we kind of came together and said, we need to scale this up dramatically and also improved, like the fidelity of these tissues and make them basically indistinguishable from what we'd get in a, in a deep biopsy punch.

Interesting. Fascinating. What is, like, what are the regulatory guardrails for creating, like, I just imagine, like, you kind of, if your company continues to gain traction. You're worried about accidentally creating, like, a Frankenstein type of thing. Well, yeah, like, I feel like that's the natural path here. And I'm just wondering, like, there's a lot of, like, moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding that. There will probably need to be. regulation surrounding that at some point and um yeah it just feels like that's probably the end state is just vats of of people living in this people um anyways i i isn't i'm not a big movie guy but the may the it's the matrix right where they're all pretty far away from the matrix i don't doesn't feel that far i see the i see the i see the robotic arm in the back yeah well the real movie is

the island yeah with michael bay is the island they clone a human and then the rich person can be like, oh, I need a kidney transplant. And they're like, well, we got a direct clone of you over there on that island. Let's go get that liver out of them. It's very, very dystopian. We can do this hopefully without the full person. Yes, yes, yes. And the FDA, you know, like the FDA is actually, I think among all of these cases where there's a new technology

and you're like fighting with the regulator to push something forward. the FDA has been you know has put out now like three modernization acts that drive the uptake of these animal alternatives right like given the failure rate and it really gets worse with biologics right like antibody based therapies and you know bi-specific antibody drug conjugates and all these like new modalities for drugs that are that are good because they're specific but they're specific to human you know targets sure and so it's even harder to test those and so the FDA has been an extremely strung pill wind actually in making these. Yeah. And then at some point, like, would, you know, would, would you grow a specific

individual's tissue and then test a wide range of drugs on that to figure out what was going to be most effective? Like, that also feels like the next logical step is personalized medicine. Personalized medicine. Yeah. Yeah. Take, take, that is what we're doing. or something. Okay. Yeah. So by definition, these cells have to come from someone, right? And so, you know, we are usually kind of broad across the different demographics that we test on both, you know, age, sex, race, and so on.

But ultimately, too, for various patient-specific diseases, cancers, right, as a great example. I mean, just imagine being able to, if you have a solid tumor. I mean, the island is like the perfect movie, right? You imagine, like, 50,000 phones of yourself and you say, all right, like, cool, survive. There's a lot of moral weight to that movie, though. You've got to actually watch the movie, I think. You're going to get in some hot water. We'll pick up the good parts.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, just the tissue in a petri dish. I think most people can get behind that. No brain. As soon as it's Scarlett Johansson walking around with emotions and ideas and history, it gets a lot darker. Most fascinating company we've had on the show this year, I think. Yeah.

Very interesting. Well, congratulations for the progress. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you. If you want to grow copies of yourself. No, when we hired Tyler, I made sure I was a perfect match on blood type and everything. So I'm pretty much good to go, but this sounds good for those who don't have a tie. Where are you based, by the way? San Francisco.

We're right in the Bay Area. Cool. Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you for having me. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and, I'm like, to sell in seconds online in store on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Let's head over to the timeline. Alfred Wallforce over at Listen Labs. He's been on the show before. Coming in with one of the hottest takes. Yeah, got some pushback.

He said founders, only send investor updates. Yeah. Give me the boat horn. When you're winning, Listen has sent to read its history. All fund race announcements. Nobody reads a bad update. helps. They just mark you is dying. I think your crazy voice sounds crazier than mine.

Let me check. Oh, it sounds about the same. It sounds about the same. Yeah, this is just, I think this is terrible advice. Really? Except if you're winning. That's great. I think it should be founders. If you're winning, only send investor updates.

Yes, I, I, I, I, I know, it's just such bad advice because I've had so many, I mean, I've had instances, like, kind of surprise and delight moments where I haven't been getting an update from a company in a year. And I just assume the company is, like, dead and dying. And then they pop up with an update. I had this happen where a company that I thought was fully dead, I didn't even want to, I almost felt bad asking. It was a small angel check. I thought they were dead until I got an update that I needed to sign something because they were selling for, like, you know, quarter of a billion. So, anyways, like, I, I just.

just think like investors, yeah, if you have 10 investors and you send a bad update, a lot of people aren't going to be able to help. But if there's a chance that one helps, then that's great. And even if you're not winning, you can show momentum, which is going to, like, updates are how you build trust. It's how people start to process, like, how is this team and this founder performing, even if they're not winning yet, are they making progress, are they iterating quickly? It's how, and if you're not sending any updates and then suddenly you need to raise more money, like you need a bridge round or something like that, the likelihood of getting that round done is much lower because you just don't have the, you don't have the trust.

People can't get a good read on like, okay, do I believe, do I have more conviction in this team today than when I invested even though they haven't figured it out yet? Okay. So I'm taking the other side of this with some real. reasonableness, maybe. I don't know. You can debate me on this. So do you think it's important to send investor updates when you're a pre-seed company? Like purely in the idea may as very early stage. The revenue zero every month. You're just sort of like, you know, out figuring out the first product. I mean, at that stage, it depends. Hopefully you only have like one or two investors.

Yeah. But it's still important to see, it's still important to see like a, It's valuable to see a snapshot. It doesn't have to be the, if at that stage, if I get an investor update that's paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs, I'm like super, super bare. Yeah, yeah. But it's still better to just have like even quick bullet points. Hey, here's what we're working on. Yeah.

We'll have another update in a month. Okay. So because Listen Labs is only a three-year-old company. And they raised their Series A in April of 2025. So, and he, and there's a, there's a rumored series. to see going on right now. And so if he sent three investor updates, that might be April of 2025, January of 2026, and August of 2026, which is like every six months, which doesn't feel like that

crazy of a cadence. It's like, yeah, it's not quarterly. It's not monthly, but it's a pretty regular pace because they're raising money regularly. So it's very different if it's like, okay, this is like a more, like less like hot time in the market. You're not going to be fundraising every three months. you're going to be raising money every 18 months, realistically, every 24 months. It's a harder industry.

And so as an investor with a series A check, I want to know, okay, how much runaway is actually left? Yeah. Because, but that's not the equation here. So a little bit of a unique, this post reveals a little bit more about the level of fundraising activity that you can only send investor updates and still be emailing all your investors every six months. Yeah.

So there's a little bit of that. Yeah. And a lot of this comes down to Alfred. Listen Labs has been crushing. Yeah. I remember when they first came on the show, it seemed like the company made a lot of sense. Yep. They quickly raised follow-on rounds from great investors.

I'm sure they're still doing well. You wouldn't post this if you weren't winning. Still sure they're doing well. But like just really, really bad, just really bad advice. It's not one size fits all advice. I completely agree. The other thing. Yeah.

And the other thing I would say is like, how do you know a company that's building in public is struggling? They stop building in public. No, yeah, that's true. They haven't, like, I've seen this like at least 10 times right now. Yep. You see the company that that's got all this momentum founders like, I'm sharing our, here's our investment in public. I'm sharing our best. Because they're just proud of it.

And they usually will string together like six months of that. Yep. And then they go dark. It's like, oh, what, what, you don't want to build in public when you're not growing anymore? Yeah, yeah. And revenue is declining or you were a thin wrapper, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah.

The other side of this is this nobody reads a bad update and helps they just mark you as dying. I think that maybe that's not 100% accurate. But there is like you're dying unless you're winning. Yeah. I think there is something where in investor updates, a good investor update can be a pitch for the company a little bit. And it can be an opportunity for the founder to sort of rehearse their next round's pitch with their current investors and say, okay, let me restate the vision, the mission, the progress, what we're doing. And instead of framing things as like, I need all these different things. It's more just like, I'm going.

I'm working. And then also there's the dynamic of sometimes companies stop sending investor updates because there's a tier one, like, partner on the board who's like shepherding the company and all of the activity really happens at the board meeting and maybe one of those early angels has a bigger stake in a competitor and so you don't actually want to share the update broadly but the board meeting is still happening there's still like oversight and infrastructure around the business and so in fact you're getting something that's bigger and more important than an investor update which is a board deck and a board meeting it's just not being shared to all investors yeah the other thing about updates is they just keep companies top of mind

I have a friend. I have a friend. He has a bootstrap company. He effectively sends a monthly update. Yeah. And it gets him so many customers because it's just at the top of the inbox. He's like, hey, I'm trying to connect to this company. Yep.

And people just loop him in all the time. Yeah. It's an amazing way to just stay top of mind. Yeah. That's happened a few times, like companies that I'm not even invested in, I get on the investor update list. And I'll just be getting it months later. The other thing is like if you're not updating somebody, like I had one of the 70-od angel investments that I've made. hadn't heard from them in a year.

And then they, they texted and said, hey, like, are you free to catch up? And the ask was basically like, will you, like, do a bridge round? Yeah. And it's like, yeah, if I, I can ask all the questions to try to understand what has happened between now and when the investment was made. But it's so much different to be getting, like, those updates in real time, seeing how they're dealing with adversity, seeing how they're building momentum as a company. And yeah. So anyways,

don't do this. Just don't do it. Don't do it in every case. Don't listen to Alfred the founder of Lasson Lab. I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm sure it applies to some companies. I'm fully, I can fully get behind not sharing up if you have a ton of angel.

What if you raise money every month? If you have a ton of angel. sending fundraising announcements. Does that happen? If you have a ton of, if you have like a really kind of crazy cap table, I think it can be, I think it can be fair to, and you're in a competitive category. I think it can be fair to say like, we're keeping these numbers closely held. Yeah, we're going to specific numbers or, uh, or even just say like,

hey, we're basically sending updates to people that have invested like more than a million dollars, right? Yeah. Or like, like, threshold. Yeah. But, um, anyways, very, very funny. very funny post. Put the timeline in turmoil.

Definitely got the people going. And we should have Alfred back on the show to get an update. Get an update. On the company. They must be crushing. This is the only thing you post when you're just on fire. Yeah. He must be ready to send another update.

What's churn? What's churn? Walk us through the funnel. Pull up the slides. I want to see them. Anyway, we got one last news story. It's good news for the gamers in the audience. If you're a gamer, the U.S. government wants you to consider

becoming an air traffic controller. You've had the practice. Now it's time to go into the real world and become an air traffic controller. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says a federal campaign specifically targeting gamers has helped the FAA

hire more than 2,000 people to train as controllers, putting the agency at 94% of its hiring goal with another 200 or another 2,000 plus candidates moving through the pipeline. Duffy launched the effort in April, arguing that the government needed to look beyond its traditional recruiting pool and that

gamers already practice some of the skills controllers need, including rapidly processing information, maintaining focus and keeping track of multiple things at once. You don't necessarily need a four-year degree either. The FAA accepts candidates with qualifying work experience, education, or a combination of the two, ideally a steam account as well. It's also a potentially lucrative career. The median air traffic controller earned $144,580 in 2024, according to the BLS. Well, the top 10% of air traffic controllers earned more than $210,000. Getting the job, however, is another matter. Applicants generally have to be U.S. citizens under 31 years old, pass medical and security screenings and take the FAA's three and a half hour air traffic skills assessment, which is designed to predict whether they

have the cognitive aptitude for the work. Those who make it through then undergo extensive training at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City before continuing their training at an air traffic facility. The recruiting push comes as the FAA tries to dig itself out of a longstanding staffing shortage, a government accounting accountability office report published in December, found that the controller workforce had shrunk 6% over the past decade, even as air traffic increased 10%. So the number of air traffic controllers relative to the amount of flights was decreasing really, really in a bad way. At the end of fiscal 2025, the FAA employed 13,000 controllers and shortages at critical facilities were already contributing to delays and cancellations. We've all seen the reports of those.

The problem... In the chat says being an air traffic controller must be like being a lifeguard for planes. Just MF's doing laps all day. Just shoot me instead. Speak for yourself. Some people like controlling air traffic. Yeah, it's the same thing as playing SimCity. I don't know. You think you could make it a...

Not for everyone. Not for everyone. No? But the few, the proud, the air traffic controllers. Do you think there's specific games that they recruited from? I mean, you have to imagine... RTS is better. Yeah.

I would go with a StarCraft player over a FBS player. All day. Yeah. I don't know. All right. Final post of the day. Hit me. Tyler, I want you to read it.

What does he say? Got a post here from Hamat over at light speed. Wait, oh really? Okay, let's find it. Let's see if your new app works, Tyler. Vermont over at light speed. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.

That's some good wisdom. The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline. discipline. This one every year it does. Crazy numbers.

Whoa! I did not realize that. Not every day you see a VC other than the ball putting up numbers like this. True. True. Very, very rare. He went mainstream.

Yeah. Very good post. He went mainstream. You're going mainstream. You're going mainstream with some advice for everyone in the boys group. If you have a boys group chat, take the picture of Adam Silver, Josh Kushner,

and send it to your boys chat and just say us. It's going. It's going to 3K for sure. It's going. It's going. It's ripping. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

Can't wait. Five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TBPN.com. It's been an honor and a privilege. And have the best Wednesday ever. Please do. Goodbye. We love you.