TBPN Live - OpenAI’s $1T Buildout, Trump–xAI Alliance | Delian Asparouhov, Garrett Langley, Matan Grinberg, Francis Pedraza, David Paffenholz

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

(00:28) - OpenAI Plans to Bring Ads to ChatGPT (25:45) - OpenAI's Trillion-Dollar Buildout (42:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:31) - Delian Asparouhov, a Bulgarian-born entrepreneur and investor, is a principal at Founders Fund and co-founder of Varda Space Industries. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges and strategies of transferring industrial processes, like semiconductor manufacturing, to the U.S., highlighting the TSMC Arizona project as an example. He also touches on China's manufacturing capabilities, the importance of co-location in production, and the complexities of reshoring industries to the United States. (02:02:46) - Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, discusses the company's mission to eliminate crime through innovative technology, including the deployment of drones to enhance public safety. He highlights the effectiveness of their solutions in assisting law enforcement, noting that Flock Safety's technology has contributed to solving approximately 10% of reported crimes in the U.S. Langley also emphasizes the importance of community engagement and transparency in implementing these technologies to ensure they serve the public effectively. (02:30:49) - Matan Grinberg, CEO and co-founder of Factory, an AI company specializing in autonomous software development agents, discusses the company's mission to bring autonomy to software engineering through their model-agnostic "droids," which have achieved top rankings in the Terminal Bench benchmark. He emphasizes the importance of addressing the entire software development lifecycle, including tasks like code review, documentation, and testing, to prevent bottlenecks and enhance overall efficiency. Additionally, Grinberg announces a $50 million funding round from NEA, JP Morgan, and Nvidia, highlighting the company's growth and commitment to advancing AI-driven software development solutions. (02:40:54) - Francis Pedraza, founder and chairman of Invisible Technologies, discusses the company's recent $100 million fundraising and its profitable scaling to $134 million in revenue last year. He highlights Invisible's unique approach of building custom AI applications for enterprises and governments, contrasting it with traditional SaaS models by offering end-to-end solutions rather than just tools. Pedraza also emphasizes the company's commitment to AI training, noting their ability to hire thousands of experts weekly to enhance model accuracy and performance. (02:50:11) - David Paffenholz, CEO and co-founder of Juicebox (PeopleGPT), discusses how his company leverages AI to enhance recruitment by identifying hard-to-find talent through large language models that analyze diverse data sources. He emphasizes the increasing importance of hiring the right talent in an AI-driven world, noting that as AI amplifies individual productivity, securing top-tier professionals becomes crucial. Paffenholz also highlights Juicebox's flexible pricing models, including per-seat SaaS subscriptions and usage-based fees, with aspirations to move towards outcome-based pricing in the future. (02:59:23) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN! Today is Thursday, September 25th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, The Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Good morning to everyone in the chat. Good morning to Gold Rock or Gov, John Techno Chief, of course. The post of the day is Alex Heath. In sources, I printed it.

He says, scoops. He's scooping. He says, Open AI is planning to buy. Open AI is planning to bring ads to chat GPT. Also, in a message to employees, Sam Altman says he wants 250 gigawatts of compute by 2033. He calls OpenAI's team behind Stargate a core bet like research and robotics. Doing this right will cost trillions, he says. Well, hopefully he can save time and money with ramp.com.

Time is money saved both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We go. But I was thinking about what Sam Altman's projections have to say about the buildout of AI. We're in pretty crazy times. Certainly lots of people are comping it to 1999. Lots of people are saying 1996, if they're bullish. The exact year matters a lot.

I mean, even 1999, I feel like there were still... Some people are saying this time is different. 18 months, you know. But, you know, the technology is even more magical than the internet, potentially. And, of course, the internet already exists. So it's easier to scale revenues, as we've seen. And so my take on this was the AI deals are getting crazier. Obviously, this week we saw Nvidia is going to invest $100 billion in OpenAI,

which in turn will be used to buy Nvidia GPUs. But we aren't fully in 1999 mode, even though a lot of people are saying that because Big Tech just has so much cash to fund the build out. And that wasn't quite what was happening in the dot-com boom. In the dot-com boom, there was a lot more leverage. The price-to-earnings ratios were crazy, 10x higher on median. And so we're not in the crazy, crazy debt era. There's a little bit of that going on with Oracle, but it's not as huge.

The debt-to-equity ratios aren't insane. yet. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly players like META have tapped the debt markets, right? They did an offering with Blue Al, but it is a small, you know, it's a some minority percentage of their earnings. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Oracle went out this week as well for a $15 billion. Converbal debt offering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. offering. I'm sure that'll get filled quickly again because it's a, uh, uh, feels relatively low

risk even though, even though they're, they're forecasting well beyond what a traditional public company would be doing. Yep. Uh, and so, but the, the nature of the deals is getting more unique. It's different. I mean, we're, we're seeing letters of intent now, uh, which is just a very fuzzy term. Or investments being announced that are still in discussion. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And video opening eye investment. If you read the print at the bottom of the it was a non-binding letter of intent. Yeah, they're basically saying we're talking about this. Exactly. This is like the framework for the deal. Usually you go the opposite direction. You get the leaks. Then you get the actual announcement once the deal is fully signed. The deal signs and then the press tour starts.

But now we're putting the press tour a little bit earlier. And I keep coming back to YC Demo Day because at YC Demo Day, the letter of intent is often pulled out for companies that don't quite have the ARR or the DAUs to justify whatever they're trying to fundraise. And I wanted to revisit a story from YC Demo Day, my favorite YC letter of intent story, probably Boom Supersonic. extremely we've had Blake on the show multiple times an extremely ambitious project to bring back commercial supersonic aviation basically bring back the Concord Boom was one of the first hard tech companies

to go through YC there were a few at the time this was the Sam Altman era again and they didn't really fit the current mold they couldn't show a graph of DAUs or ARR obviously because they were they hadn't even built planes yet they were building like plans to build planes there's only so much you can do in three months

It was a founder bet. Yeah, it was a founder bet. And Blake also... This guy was a product manager at Groupon. Yeah, exactly. He's got what it takes to take us back to hypersonic. Yeah, yeah. So it wasn't like he could just...

It sounds like I'm joking, but I'm totally not when you see Blake's level of conviction and his inability to not go supersonic. Yeah, but it wasn't like he was like former Lockheed and was spinning out some technology that immediately could just like piggyback on the... shoulders of giants immediately like he had yeah exactly he had to really build stuff from scratch and put the puzzle pieces together and one of those puzzle pieces was a massive LOI and so he stood on stage and said you know you're going to think this is a sci-fi project you think this is a moonshot project but the one thing that I can tell you is that I have an LOI it's

non-binding but it's for two billion dollars and so that was what went on the screen I think around there. And he had gone to Virgin, talked to probably Richard Branson, and Virgin had optioned 10 airplanes in a non-binding LOI, and the deal value was roughly $2 billion. And so if it was fully exercised. Now, boom's... I think people generally believe this is a kind of business. It's like if you build it, there will be demand. Exactly. There will be demand from the airlines. There will be demand from consumers. But having the LOI, like, means something. It shows that you can go in that room and convince them that if you build it, they'll buy it.

And then that leads to investors being saying, okay, well, I will back you. And so Booms had ups and downs. They had a down round. A lot of YC folks came back in, invested in the company again just to keep it going. And Blake's still at it. He's getting regulatory approvals, which we saw, and building planes one at a time. he's actually flying, and as loose as non-binding LOIs can be, they still help pull forward the future and can be a useful tool in making everyone around the table feel like there's mutual

buy-in because everyone's at least said, if this happens, I'm in. If that happens, I'm in. And if everyone commits and if the capital partners commit and the customers commit and everyone commits, then the thing should actually happen. And so the boom story for me underscores how unclear the path of technological development can be. Sam Altman is now guiding toward 250 gigawatts of compute at Open AI by 2033, which is a staggering number. We saw a post, which we'll get into, a single gigawatt data center, as many football fields long, visible from space. It basically terraforms the Earth. And while many people are writing off Sam's projection is merely attempting to win the contest of saying the biggest number, his projections aren't entirely new to the

world of AI compute forecasting, Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted a single training run cluster around 100 gigawatts coming online by 2030. So three years earlier, one third the size. Just two years after, and then Leopold predicted in 2028

that there would be the first 10 gigawatt cluster. 250 gigawatts by 233 lines up with that, but wow, America will look dramatically different if that comes to fruition. In 2023, for reference, two years ago, the U.S. was producing an average power in total for everything, not just

AI, of 485 gigawatts. And so Sam is saying that just open AI, if everything else stayed the same, would be one third of all power consumption in America for that entire year in 233. Now, obviously, everything else is growing, and there are other labs, and you would imagine that Amazon and Anthropic keep up and Google and DeBind keep up. And so it will be an entirely new chapter of the economic story. What are some of Elon's promises again or goals? Yeah, I was talking to Tyler about this because I, so I mapped out the power projections. This is straight lines on a log graph, of course.

Leopold is the taller bars here. Jordi, you can see this. And Leopold is projecting logarithmic growth, which is exponential growth. growth. This is every tick on here is an order of magnitude bigger for gigawatts. And you can see Leopold is projecting a straight line on a log graph, basically, exponential growth continuously based on how he's mapping out the few dates that he gave. He didn't give projections for every single year. Sam is actually, it's so funny because the Sam story is framed as like 250 gigawatts by 2033 this is so insane but he's actually sort of guiding towards deceleration like you can see

sam's sam's darker bars here he's being humble he's being humble relative to he doesn't want to you know yeah relative to some other folks in the category so uh tyler what yeah what did you find did you see anything from the other labs yeah so i was trying to figure out like what all the other labs are doing like what they look like on that graph um so none of them have have done real kind of projections like no one has said like okay by 2035 we're going to have 250 gigawatts anything like that yeah so so for meta zuck the big number that you could use for this is his um at the at the white house dinner 600 billion through 2028 yep um and so it's an aggregate number yeah but you have but like they're only doing 50 or 60 now and so to get to 2028 that's only three years away so you

have to do 50, 100, 200, 400, something like that. It has to ramp really fast. Yeah, I was trying to figure out, like, what does that actually mean in, like, gigawatts? Like, what is the actual, like, price that you could, like, how many could you get out of? Convert the dollars to a lot of it. And so, basically, I used, I looked at Colossus 2, which is maybe the one gigawatt. Yep. And then estimates are, this is, like, very, like, non-accurate.

This is totally guessed, but, like, maybe somewhere around $15 billion to build that. Order of magnitude 10 billion something, 10 to 20 billion. Let's keep it super vague for a one gigawatt. Yeah. And so with 600 billion you can do like maybe like around 60 gigawatts, 50 gigawatts? Yeah, like something in that. If you were to just copy and paste a bunch. Yeah.

But that's, I mean, that's like Elon, like, Elon precision. Like this is the fastest of all time. Like it took them like six months to get to 300 megawatts, which is like, double the next fastest build-out, which was the Crusoe Open AI one. Yeah. So I think it's probably, that's a little aggressive. And Zuck's number was at the end of 2028?

Yeah, it was through 2028, I believe. Yeah, I mean, the end of 2028 for Sam and Leopold, they're more thinking around 10 gigawatts, I think. So interesting to see if Zuck's projections kind of outpace what's there. I don't know. And you guys saw today, Core We've had Open AI expanded their contract to a total contract value of $22.4 billion. 22.4, okay. 6.5 billion.

It's a deal for ants. Just spraying and praying. Yeah, what else you get? Another thing you could use besides Leopold is the AI 2027 numbers. Yeah, I was wondering about those. So if you look at those, like, once you get to 2027 after that, the numbers like explode, it's like, oh, yeah. That's a fast takeoff. It's like 30 trillion on data centers.

but but through uh 2026 2027 it's like around like 500 billion a year and that's like 500 i think it's like 650 in kind of the end of 27 so like you could imagine we're like reasonably on track for that considering meta's alone is doing around 600 over yeah through 20 yeah if you aggregate all the labs yeah so i think that's like really reasonable so yeah it's hard i mean people are like if you look at the timeline everyone is like okay we're at the top like this is so bare but if you look at a lot of people who are like super bullish on AI, we're still broadly on track, I would say. Yeah, this is what, uh, what Rune was saying, how like everyone, all the richest people have voted and they've all said, we're going all in. We're putting all the chips on the table.

It's not about immediate ROI. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, like, if it's funded with cash and equity and not too much debt, there's a world where, like, you take the hit of maybe some stagnation and you get through and you are more of like the Amazon story. than the next star story or I forget whether. Yeah, I always forget the names of the companies that went away. Even in the bear case, it's like there's the book, Boom by Byr and Hobart, which is like, bubbles are good because broadly, like, they don't affect like the normal economy because it's like all the, it's like.

It's the most risk on. Yes, the interesting takeaway from Boom was that the common narrative is that like retail gets hurt the most in a bubble, but in fact it is not retail. It is the wealthiest that get the biggest haircuts because they are the most leveraged at the peak of the bubble and they have the most wealth to compress. Whereas the average American through the number of bubbles that Bern-Hobart analyzed is not super levered long

the most risk-on asset at the time of the top. Jordy, what were you going to say? So there's a company called IREN. Oh, yes. The company pivoting from Bitcoin mining to being an AI data center company. Their stock is up tremendously. Andrew Wilkinson hit the timeline a couple months ago at this point. I think it basically like said, I read it as financial advice,

but he was basically making his case. The stock is up massively since he came out and made the case for why he thought they were undervalued. The current share price is $48. dollars it's up uh let's see exactly it's up from around like i guess 17 18 i think when he more than double and tripled so it's up massively he's now calling for another 7x because he says iron uh is about to control more power than the hoover dam uh 2,910 megawatts a 2.9 gigawatts um and uh so anyways he's now calling uh for the company to

yeah again 7x again he thinks that $300 per share could be a layup yeah he lays out a potential bear case right given that he says if nobody wants if AI turns out to be a nothing

burger and nobody wants irons power land data centers and servers that could be bad unable to if they can't really capitalize on the demand because they just don't have they're not that data centers aren't aren't configured to the level that they need to be to be great assets for either hyperscalers

or other AI companies. So lays out some potential downside scenarios. But I do wonder if we'll see some of these companies that are trying to take a crack at actually competing with the hyperscalers as like a cloud, you know, serious cloud providers. I do wonder if some of these companies will get to the point where they have a lot of energy,

but they basically just have to sell to another more sophisticated player that can actually take over and turn it into, you know, help it realize its potential. Yeah. The chat is asking for an update on TBPN merch if it will be available for our most loyal soldiers in the chat. So we got to send something up. Yeah, we got to figure out how to make this happen. We, the first run of merch, we didn't want to sell it. We had never made merch as a company before, and it didn't feel right to,

sell something that is not our core competency. But we had a meeting yesterday talking about the next run of merch and getting that available by the beginning of this coming year. So stay tuned. And thank you for your patience. We got to get restream on some merch. One live stream 30 plus destinations. They make our stream possible every day. Multi-stream and reach your audience, wherever they are. I had a friend that asked for some advice. If you're making money, during the bull run, what should you do if you feel like you're at the top? What's the safest portfolio for a young person these days? Rotate into watches.

Watches. Go entirely into Swiss. I mean, like, if your comparison is NFTs, like, yes, like the watch market did actually draw down post-NFT crash. And there were people that converted NFT earnings into watches, and they probably did better. I feel like the, what was it, the Rolex market sold off by like 30% or something. But, I mean, a lot of NFTs went to zero. Still above retail and for most while. But yeah, I mean, it feels like the, like there is a,

there's the existence of a risk curve and the, the, the companies that are trading at the highest, you know, you just have to go back to the basics of the Warren Buffett stuff of like company with no earnings, trading it tens of billions of dollars. That's going to be the most dangerous. most punished in a down economy, whereas a hyperscaler that still has enterprise licenses and a huge ad business is going to fare better, even if they get a haircut. We saw this with meta during the last cycle. I mean, they traded down a huge amount, almost 50% off the metaverse highs, but built back up pretty quickly on the next wave. And then, of course, you know, you got gold, you got Bitcoin, you got real estate, you got plenty of things. But what, uh, what, uh, what, uh, what? You got gold. You got Bitcoin. But, um, what,

what would you counsel someone in their 20s making decent money to do with, you know, excess earnings at this point in time? I don't know. I think that the young millennials, Gen Z, are overly obsessed with investing. It's all that a lot of people can think about, and it ends up being a massive distraction from just getting better at your craft, your career, and just increasing your earning power. So I think the number one, I mean, I talked to the guys on the team about this. We're obviously talking about different private companies, different investments all day long on the show. And so it's easy to get kind of fixated and get kind of FOMO around this stuff. But anybody knows if you've made a sizable investment or, you know, if you've made an investment ever that's like double-digit percentage of your net worth and it's trading liquid, that can be just such a-

emotional roller coaster. Yeah, just such a massive distraction. from what, uh, what you should be focused on, uh, in your 20s, which is just increasing your skill set, building your, building your network, like figuring out how you can increase cash flow. So I don't know, you had a, you had a, well, yeah, my, my, my take was, um, there's huge alpha in not even picking the correct asset, but just setting up your life so that the money actually gets into the asset before you can spend it. Yeah, and so when I started making money in my 20s,

every time I would get paid, I would go to the bank. I would take out something like $1,000 of cash and put it in a safety deposit box. And that just built up over time. And I realized that if I was out on the weekends, I could not access it because you'd have to physically go to the bank to get the cash. And so I realized that if you're out with friends and they're like,

oh, like, you know, should we, you know, spend all this money on whatever. If you have it in your checking account, you're like, yeah, no problem. If you have it in your savings account, it's like supposed to be in savings, but you can just click one button and move it over. I remember being like a teenager and realizing that your savings account was like literally one transfer away from checking. It's ridiculous.

Wow, this takes a lot of willpower to actually make it savings versus spending. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So if you build up a literal horror. of treasure. Hey, it's incredible psychologically because you open up that safety deposit box and you can physically see the wealth growing, which is incredibly enriching. It's incredibly satisfying. And it makes investing very much addicting. But even just going into your payroll provider and route, like usually you can route your paycheck to a some sort of investment platform, maybe public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset

investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions. And then you can set up like automated buys on ETFs if you like the mag 7, if you like gold, if you like Bitcoin, like whatever you want, you can have automatic investments happening so that you're not spending all your time trying to become like a hedge fund. Ideally, unless that's actually your life's work. The service that you would have liked is somebody, you go and you give them cash. Yeah. And they even, they use a movie cash to show you the pile. They take that. They actually invest it.

That's a good service. But to access it, you have to go physically. You can go look at the cash. You can... The physical key was really, really great. It was... I've never had one of those. Yeah, safety deposit box is underrated.

Underrated. Do they still make those? They do, yeah. Really? You still have pretty much everything. No, no. Like a mouse, you have a little... It is somewhat rodent coded to just be hoarding,

dragon coated potentially. You know, to hoard your pile of gold. Or could kind of cool and mysterious if it's all over the country, you know? Like you've got a little stash in Dallas, you know, a little keep some in the bay. Yeah. What do you think, Tyler?

I actually know a lot of friends who have like a Bitcoin like wallet, and then they have the seed phrase in like different safety deposit boxes all over like the state. So they have to drive, it's like four hours to drive to every single bank. That's diamond hands, baby.

They're not paper handing anything. And so if they're just continuing to contribute to that, The trick is that the cash flow typically comes in like monthly or every other week installments. And so, you know, how do you actually set up that so that it's happening on a regular basis, but still inaccessible? That's a little bit tricky. Maybe someone can build it.

Maybe someone can use Privy, our wallet infrastructure partner, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. barely AI says looks like Nvidia and Open AI will be paying zero investment banking fees for their $100 billion partnership to hit me with the

so sad for the investment bankers we talked to Carrie no interest he was telling us. Let's Wall Street in. Cut Wall Street in. Come on, break us off. Break off Morgan Stanley. Make break off Goldman Sachs. Those guys need to break. It's really impressive. I mean it's just these sound and a matter deals at this scale is

very cool. Yeah. I mean, that's what everything is. We talked about this with NVIDIA, like, spending like a few million dollars lobbying in Washington, but Jensen's there. And founder to president, founder to founder, like that's the nature of these deals. It's always the nature of these deals. You got a, you got a price in the Gulf Stream expenses with the, with the lobbying. You can tell more about how a company is doing in D.C. by where their Gulf Stream is parked than their lobbying budget for sure. Where's the Gulfstream part?

Has it been at Marlago? Has it been in D.C.? That's what's moving the needle these days. This screenshot says, Altman and Wong negotiated their pact largely through a mix of virtual discussions and one-on-one meetings in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.,

with no bankers involved, according to people close to the talks who declined to be named because they weren't... This was a multinational deal. It was. They were going all over the world. London, they were probably talking about it in white tails. Remember, they were in white tie and D.C., who knows? They might have been chatting to each other.

I don't think they were both at Hill and Valley, but they might have been there overlapped at something or other, maybe the inauguration. The arrangement calls for Nvidia to invest $10 billion at a time in Open AI. $10 billion slugs. They have $60 billion in cash and cash equivalence right now. So they can, without generating any more free cash flow, they can just keep paying that.

Would, if you were Jensen, would you, would you lever up massively? Maybe. Become just entirely indexed to each other, right? I mean, it's happening. Say, if we go down, we're going down together. There's more news about the AI Kretsu that's coming together. Open AI partners with Oracle and SoftBank for five new U.S. data centers.

Seven gigawatts is announced. And what's crazy is there's still, while they're doing this. They're doing deals with Broadcom. They're doing deals with Oracle, with CoreWeave, right? Microsoft still, I mean, they're buying from everyone. It's a, no one wants to be GPU poor in 2025, going into 2026. You want to be, you know, keeping the GPUs cool, not on fire, not on fire. So Wall Street Journal says Open AI laid out its vision for a vast one trillion billion billion.

I think it's better if you're scaling GPUs but keeping them on fire. If they're not on fire, then your partners are going to be looking and saying, hey, you don't want cold GPS sitting there, idle, just eating a hole in your balance sheet. You want to be maxing those tokens out getting paid, showcasing the development of a central park-sized complex 180 miles west of Dallas. This is from two days ago by Berber Jin in the journal. Open AI unveils plans for seemingly limitless expansion of computing power in Texas Prairie. Startup showcases ground zero of air. AI boom and its plans to shepherd one trillion in infrastructure spending. So the trillion dollar number is getting thrown around for the first time because Stargate was originally 500 billion and now we're up at one trillion. Is that right? Yeah. And remember even at 500 billion, Elon was basically saying, hey, nobody involved here actually has the cash to do this. So wait until these stocks run up and Oracle's up 300 million. Larry says, hold my beer. I'm good for my 10. Hold my green juice.

I'm here for, I'm good for my half trillion. But yeah, once you get to the trillion dollar range, you're approaching the GDP of, you know, some serious countries, right? Some serious countries. Opening eye just closed, it would ultimately need more than 13 times the computer, the computing power of its first nascent site, which is rising out of the Texas brushland. Frenzied construction here has turned a sea of red dirt into eight hyperfutable.

futuristic data centers, bringing online roughly 900 megawatts of capacity, more than 6,000 workers labor on the project each day, including electricians, plumbers, and steel welders, alternating between two 10-hour shifts seven days a week. Wow. They are, they're, what is that, 2 to 10, 7, 2.10, 7, 2.m. to 10 p.m. 7 days a week, something. Yeah, people in the data center business see people with computer jobs saying, oh yeah, I do 999. six. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if they have two shifts, 10 hours, does that mean they have two crews that are working 70 hour weeks? Or are people taking days off? Are they rotating their shifts so that you get the day off every couple days? I think they would get into pretty hot water. I don't think you could like run and say you're working seven days a week forever. I don't think employment law works like that. Gray towers of gas turbines have dotted the landscape since the spring offering backup power on a tour with reporters Tuesday. Oracle and Open AI executive showcased the 1,100-acre site, calling it the largest AI

supercomputing complex in the world. Outside, workers wearing dust masks and sunglasses shuttled around in buggies trying to shield themselves from the 100-degree heat. One of the buggies flew a flag that said, Jesus is the answer. 1100. Not very AGI-I-pilled.

I thought we were getting God in a box. What's going on? Just, L.A. Zer Udikowsky shows up. He's like, no, no, no. Like, they're building God here. You're building God. You're doing the thing.

Like, what are you doing here? There was literally nothing here a year ago, said a news who works on the OpenAI computing team. They also announced five new data sites, data center sites across the U.S., built with Oracle and Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank. It said the new facilities would help bring online nearly seven gigawatts of power, enough for almost 8 million homes, enough for a lot of API calls from Devon, from cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Company executives made it clear that the Abilene site was just the beginning, noting they envisioned a need for more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity

to meet the explosive demand for chat chpti, which now has more than 700 million weekly users. I was laughing about, you know how in the chat GPT, if you fire off pro, like GPT5 Pro, kind of thinks for like 20 minutes and everyone's saying like oh yeah this is good like we want the agents to be reasoning for longer and longer I feel like there's an opportunity for some startup just to be like we've cracked the code our model reasons for two days straight so send us your request and we'll get back to you in two days and the agent just like is pretending so it's just

yeah it just has a progress bar twiddling at some until the last 20 minutes and then just starts going no no no of course what you do is you is you have the loading bar there And then secretly you have a human doing the work, and you have a human just like dealing with this. Well, I think the thing is like the longer, the longer the period, the higher the expectations. And I just don't know that I don't, I think that I guess the thing that I would want to know is like if you're running a deep research query for 20 minutes and then if you decide to run it for two days, how much better is it? If it's 10 times better, could potentially be worth it for different types of tasks. If it's 30% better, is it worth the weight? Yeah.

There is a world where you just route it to the human. There's also the world where for the really low. Don't encourage this. People have already gotten into trouble. Yeah, they have. The other funny idea is like for a lot of the, there have to be a certain, set of queries that just get asked the same like every single day and they should just store those in a database and cache them because if like you have to imagine that every single day someone is

asking like just going to chat gpti and lighting the GPUs on fire to just ask like what's the capital of illinois you know or what's the capital of californ you run a deep can you run a gpt like pro deep research report for what is the capital you can do it for anything yeah you can you can You can go to deep research and fire off 20 minutes of compute and say, what is the capital of California answer in just one word? And, like, it will just think for 20 minutes and then spit out Sacramento. It won't think that long. It, like, thinks based off how hard it is. No, deep research will continue.

I just said, what is the capital of California answer in one word? And it's deep research? Yeah, it's doing a deep research query. Let's see how long this takes. Okay. It's not going to come back in two minutes. It's going to cook for 10 minutes. All right.

I was a little bit late, but I just started a timer. Okay. So what do you think? Also, there's like a sense where like the like embeddings of facts is basically just the model already. Like you can just think of a model as like a compressed version of the internet. Yeah. At least like non-reasoning models. Yeah.

So it's kind of like. But wouldn't it be even more compute efficient to just do fuzzy lookup of of these questions and see if they sound? Bond in the chat says cash-based retrievals are everything. Oh, yeah. But apparently not here because GPD5 Pro. It's not fully implemented.

Okay, okay. It reasoned for 47 seconds. Okay. And it... This is pro. You didn't do deep research, though. I want to see you turn on deep research and do it. Well, this is the pro which is research-grade intelligence.

No, no, no. That's not the deep research. And you do you thinking? No, no, no. You need to click on the little plus button next to the chat box. and then check the box on deep research. Do they still have this? I don't know. They might have deprecated this.

I think it's still there. It's still there. Okay, I'm doing a deep... You're doing deep research. No, no, this is good. This is good. Just to confirm, are you asking for the current capital of California or are you interested in historical capitals as well?

Let's see, current capital. Tell it to also design a website in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and develop. and teams build great products together, get started for free. While we're waiting for that, let's keep reading from the journal. Each gigawatt of capacity is expected to cost roughly 50 billion, Tyler. 50 billion per gigawatt, that's the number in the journal,

meaning the company is laying the groundwork for at least 1 trillion in infrastructure spending. Demand is likely to reach closer to 100 gigawatts, one company executive said, which would be 5 trillion. which is roughly the GDP of Germany or Japan yeah GDP of Japan is four trillion Germany is 4.6 good luck good luck Germany in Japan you're getting left behind you're part of the permanent underclass now it's over for you I feel bad for lighting the GPs on fire for this it says it's got it I'll confirm the current capital of California for you and get back shortly and it's it's cooking like this is the real

pitch for the I'm getting my money's worth Brandon Jacoby in the chest is breaking. Jordi discovers the UX issues of every foundation model company Fix it, Brandon. Yeah, yeah. Aren't you doing consulting now, Brandon? You've got to get in the

trenches. Yeah, all these folks are. If the labs haven't hit you up yet. If someone who spends 10 hours a day studying this stuff. It's reading Wikipedia. Just like how many drops of water did this use? How How many fish had to, like, go find some other homes?

It stinks. It should come back and it's like, thought for 15 minutes, made two species extinct. Lit seven gallons of diesel on fire. Okay, it's checking all the sources. It's good. I like a detailed report. I like to know that the AI did its job. Don't just sit there, clanker, and riff off cash-based retrieval.

I want the deep research every single time. Even for one word fact. Even for one word fact, I want you to be sure. I don't want any hallucinations. Well, I mean, this is a tough question to do. A lot of people that aren't from the West Coast or the United States would say, yeah, what's the capital of California? Yeah, San Francisco.

I was using this as an example about Washington. I must have been like seven years old asking, like figuring out that Sacramento was the capital of California. And I thought that was the funniest thing ever. Yeah, it is hilarious. All right, it got it. It thought for 101 seconds. That's not that long for deep research. It went for four sources.

It did 19 searches. So this is why I can't trust. You know, everybody keeps screenshoting these Google Trend reports. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that Google has figured out how to exclude AI agents. Because this just did 19 searches for a single fact. Yeah. And so if you're looking at.

the growth of queries on Google, you would think, and if a lot of people are asking this kind of question, every single keyword is going to be spiking. Well, if you want to get your brand mentioned in chat GPT, you've got to go to profound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You can get a demo. I don't think we've figured out the final form of what financing for compute looks like, said Sam Altman. But I assume like in many other technological revolutions, figuring out the right answer to that will unlock a huge amount of value delivered to society.

And delivered to opening eye shareholders. For sure. Yeah, it is an interesting question because Dario was talking about how each training run looks great by itself, but when you put them all in one structure, it looks like you just have this never-ending money pit because you spent $100 million in a training run,

you made a billion over the next. two years. You spent a billion on a training run. You made 10 billion over the next two years. You spent a hundred billion on a training run. You make a trillion over the next two years. And there's a question of, okay, how long until it just completely maxes out? Are the diminishing returns to these things? But even if the trends hold, you still wind up with this like ever-growing money pit that should act as like some sort of slowing down force. I think when you dig into this quote, I don't think we figured out the final form of what financing for compute looks like. The question is, like, will the this actually be a novel financial instrument or it will be remixing something that Wall Street has used in mortgages? Maybe it's debt. Maybe it's that. Who knows? GPU-backed securities. The Tuesday announcement made it clear that SoftBank, once seen as a formidable OpenAI funding partner, has scaled back its ambitions in the data center buildout, which the Wall Street Journal reported in July. Three new sites, one located near Abilene, another north of El Paso and New Mexico, and a yet-to-beknownst Midwest location combined with an expansion to the Abilene complex will be capable of delivering

5.5 gigawatts of capacity. Those will be built by Oracle, the other two smaller sites, one in Lordstown, Ohio, and the other near Austin, Texas will be built in partnership with SoftBank and generate 1.5 gigawatts over the next 18 months. The first completed data center called Building One painted a pristine white that contrasts with the reddish dirt surrounding the site is larger than two Walmart supercenters. It doesn't feel that. big to me, but certainly huge. Entering. Yeah, the 1100, they said 1100 acres earlier in the article.

That's under two square miles. It is, yeah, it is cruising how compressed. It's, obviously huge when you're walking around, but, you know, we're not in, okay, we're losing Yosemite over this. Yeah. Yeah, we're not in the, you know, in the full tarot-acre range. I mean, Elias Outscouver told the, what it was, the San Francisco Chronicle, that we could, he could imagine a future where the entire,

higher earth is covered with solar panels, if the trends continue. Gabe in the chat says, shout out to Lordstown, Ohio factory used to build Chevys. This is your thesis or take re-industrialization is happening. It is. It's a lot less jobs, and it's data centers. Yep.

But the white pill there might be that if we can build big data centers really quickly, in in uh you know at the scale that traditional infrastructure projects would have taken 10 plus years and we can do that in a few years it could create a precedent where somebody could decide you know what i'm going to build this this new rail line in two years is a is a walmart super center center really one mile long uh k sbs rollover saying that um that the uh that the building's two miles long well no i was I was saying the site is 1,100 acres total. It's not a, which is like 1.7 square miles.

So obviously massive, but I don't think the building itself is anywhere near that. Well, fiberline snake across the data centers and underneath the ground, allowing the AI chips called GPUs in case you were wondering. The Wall Street Journal's got you covered to talk to one another and complete request more quickly. Proponents of infrastructure booms say it will bring hundreds of thousands. of jobs and revive American manufacturing. In January, Open AI unveiled a $500 billion data center project, Stargate, we know about this.

The reality is more mixed, while data center providers provide plentiful temporary construction jobs. Far fewer people are needed once they are built. Abilene Mayer said residents had mixed feelings about the site and its power and water usage, though some of the concerns have been assuaged. An Oracle executive said there will be roughly 1,700 permanent jobs on site once the construction. I think the things that ends up being a little bit yet disappointing is these projects get announced and they're saying we're going to spend $20 billion here and then we're

going to create like a thousand jobs or we're going to create 300 jobs and that is very significant. That will be good for the local economies in these regions but not it's not hey we're replace, you know, we lost 87,000 manufacturing jobs last month. I think it was. We're not really making a dent in that. Yeah, it takes a lot. There's more news on the job displacement stuff from Ander Carpathie. He has a good post breaking things down. But first, let me tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You'll start for free. So, Andre Carpathie says... That's debating, by the way. What is the chat debating? They said, uh, Jordi is

a Cadillac guy. I'm a Cadillac guy. John has a... Somebody said I seem like a Dodge guy. Hellcat, SRT. I love it. Yeah, not quite. Never had a Dodge. I had a Ford Raptor, which I loved. It was not super practical, but it was a car that I wanted as a child, so I had to get it at least once.

Yep. So, Andre Carpathie says, AI isn't replacing radiologists. Tyler, do you remember that? this prediction? Yeah, was this Hinton? Hinton, yes. Years ago, this was,

this was, what, 10 years ago now or something? Yeah, because this was based off just like image classification. So this was like early on, like CNN's. Like this was probably mid-2010s, I assume. So the expectation was that rapid progress and image recognition AI would delete

radiology jobs, as famously predicted by Jeff Hinton, now almost a decade ago. In reality, radiology is doing great and is growing. So what's going on here? Obviously, image recognition is fantastic. These algorithms are remarkable. And there's been a ton of progress. So Andre Carpathie says there are a lot of, in his opinion, naive predictions out there on the imminent impact of AI on the job market. For example, a year ago, Andre was asked by someone who should know

better if he thinks that there will be any software engineers still today, like a year from now. Like, this is how accelerationist this person was. And Andre says, spoiler, I think we're going to make it. This is happening too broadly. This post goes into detail on why it's not that simple using the example of radiology. And I thought this was really, really interesting. And it obviously applies outside of radiology. So first off, the benchmarks are nowhere near broad enough to.

reflect real actual scenarios. So even though you can classify cancer in a radiology environment with a whole bunch of training data very reliably, there's still tons of edge cases where having a human in the loop is advantageous. And then just in general, the job is a lot more multifaceted than image recognition. Like if you just think about the job of a radiologist, it's not purely just look at image detect cancer, look at image detect cancer, look at image detect cancer, look at image. Yeah, can you imagine if you were getting, God forbid,

somebody's getting, seeing, going and getting, seeing a traditional office of a radiologist, and they're just watching a television screen that's reporting, telling them that something is wrong with them and using a voice model to explain it. And then it just is like, No, they're just in hinge mode. Swipe right if it's, if it's cancer.

Swipe left if it's not. And they're just sitting there swiping all day. Obviously, that's not the job of a radiologist. There's so much more. They're doing research on what's changing, integrating new information, talking to different patients about all the different signals, what they could be doing, what they could be putting in their body, how are they feeling, what medicines they're taking.

There's a ton of different stuff that they're probably involved in. Yeah, anytime anyone gets any type of lab or report from a doctor, the first thing you want to do is talk to somebody that's an expert on that, your doctor, and have them explain it to you, the implications, et cetera, good or bad. And then he highlights deployment realities. So regulatory, insurance, liability, diffusion, and institutional inertia. Like, it just takes time to roll these technologies out. But the last one is super interesting to me.

He cites Jevin's paradox. So if radiologists are sped up via AI as a tool, a lot more demand shows up. And so if all of a sudden the cost to get a scan or the time that it takes to actually do the scan drops, everyone will say, well, I want to be scanned all the time. I want to be on top of any sort of development medical that could be detected by a radiologist. And so he concludes by saying, I will say that radiology was, in my opinion, not among the best examples to pick on in 2016. It's too multifaceted, too high risk, and too regulated.

When looking for jobs that will change a lot due to AI on shorter timescales, I'd look in other places. Jobs that look like repetition of one rote task, each task being relatively independent, closed, not requiring too much context, short in time for giving the cost of a mistake is low, and of course, automatable given current and digital capability. Even then, I'd expect to see AI adopted as a tool first where jobs change and refactor, more monitoring and supervising than manual doing, et cetera, maybe coming up we'll find a better and broader set of examples of how all of this is playing out across the industry.

About six months ago, I was asked, I was also asked to vote if we have, if we will have less or more software engineers in five years, exercise left for the reader. What do you think he meant, Tyler? What's, what do you think? More. Of course. Yes. He thinks the number of software engineers will increase.

but they will be using AI as a tool to lever. Yeah, I wonder if anybody's done a study on how many more developer, people that have done software development this year versus last year. It has to be significantly more just because, you know, if you're using Replit now, right, you are a software engineer, right? It's the, somebody might want to get technical and say, oh, well, if you're just prompting, you're not really, software engineering, but how different is that from somebody getting their start and like

copying, pasting, you know, lines of code? Wow. We got some news about TikTok that China has like more or less signed off on the deal and it has sent Larry Ellison slash Oracle skyrocketing on Polymarket to an 89% chance of acquiring TikTok. This will be an interesting story to see where it actually lands. Of course, you can go to Polly Market if you want to keep monitoring the situation, as always. Can we talk about this new

Elon lawsuit? Yes, new Elon lawsuit. Elon Musk is Andrew Curran is on the timeline sharing. Elon Musk is suing Open AI again. Second suit. This time for alleged

misappropriation of trade secrets, intentional interference with prospective economic relations and unfair competition. So they say the desire to win the artificial intelligence race has driven opening I to cross the line of fair play. Opening I violated

California and federal law by inducing former XAI employees including Shue Chen Lee and Jimmy Freiter and a senior finance executive to steal and share XAI's trade secrets. The copy and again

this is from the complaint. This is from the complaint, right? The lawyers are not using ChatGPT for this. It doesn't seem like it. This is handmade by hook or by crook. OpenAI clearly will do anything when threatened by a better innovator, including plundering and misappropriating the technical advancements, source code, and business plans of XAI. What began with OpenAI's suspicious hiring of Xu Chen Li, an early XAI engineer who admitted to stealing the company's entire code base. Wow. That's a bold thing to admit, has now revealed a broader and deeply troubling pattern of trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, and intentional interference with economic relationships by Open AI.

Open AI's conduct in response to being out-innovated by XAI, whose GROC model overtook Open AI's chat GPT models and performance metrics, reflects not an isolated lapse, but a strategic campaign to undermine XAI and gain unlawful advantage in the race to build the best artificial intelligence models. What do you think, John? This is why lawyers with English degrees are MVP's, according to Gabe. Yeah, yeah. Wordsmiths, word cells.

It seems like we are in the territory of like economic warfare, lawfare, who knows what this, what actually comes a best. Elon's blending the Chinese way, the way of the engineer with the American way. Yes, the lawyerly society is coming out in this case. Yeah, I mean, easy, you know, obviously innocent until proven guilty with. Xu Chen Li don't know if this is true or not that he admitted to stealing the company's entire codebase would be crazy and a totally unforced error if he actually did something like that. But...

Well, no matter what, you want to stay compliant, you want to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage, risk, improve trust. Continuously, Vant's trust management platform takes the manual work out of his dirty compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I wanted to revisit this internal tech email because this is an important cornerstone of Elon's battle with OpenAI. So on September 20th of 2017, Elon Musk sent an email to the OpenAI team. The subject was honest thoughts.

And he said, guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own or continue with Open AI as a nonprofit. I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay, or I'm just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup. Discussions are over. Interesting. And it's gone back and forth because here he's sort of predicting.

So in hindsight, he somewhat probably feels like a fool for essentially providing free funding for create a startup. And it's been odd because the ask has never. I mean, at least that I've been aware of, Elon's never just asked for pro rata equity based on how much he put into the nonprofit. I think that creates crazy tax and legal implications, but that feels like what the fair

ask would be. Like you were throwing out like if you put in a hundred million and you just assume that the round that would have been done at that time would have been a billion, you should get 10%. Right? And here's 10% of the common or the preferred or whatever. Remember,

nobody, like it seems like they hit a standstill with the for-profit conversion, right? Because of Elon's lawsuit, too. Well, partially, but also people are, you know, the governing body, the nonprofit governing bodies of California were not super excited about the transition. Yeah, and so Matthew Berman was going back and forth with Elon, because Elon took shots at Anthropic. He said, winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.

And Matthew Berman said, hey, Elon said the same thing about opening I. and Elon said, no, I never said that. I told everyone who asked in the beginning that I thought the probability of Open AI beating Google was 1%, infinitely different from 0%. Good point. And then Elon says, after the defense of the ancients,

the Dota 2 win, I raised the probability to 10% that they would catch up. And Matthew Berman sort of responded and unpacked the screenshots saying, first, I'm a big fan of everything Elon has done to push society into the future, but I re-read his emails with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman,

and it really seems like he told them they had no chance of succeeding relative to Google on January 31st, 2018. So after that previous email we read, Elon told, Elon told Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, Open AI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google. There obviously needs to be an immediate and dramatic action, or everyone except for Google will be cosigned to irrelevance. And it's played out very differently.

They played their hand very well. They got the consumer application that hit product market fit out faster than Google. Only by a couple months, like the Gemini app dropped, I think in February or March, just a few months after ChatchipT launched. And the models have been neck and neck. It wasn't, was it Bard that dropped? I forgot Bard was the response. But I feel like, the way I remember,

the timeline is that the chat GPT website comes out and everyone realizes that just talking to an RLHFLM is a great experience and magical and interesting and passes the touring test. And Google had a bunch of models Palm and Bard internally, but they'd never really push them out in a meaningful way. And it seemed like ChatchipT kicked Google into action and led Google to actually like product ties a lot of their research that had been more test. and shared internally. Tyler, do you have more context there? Yeah, so it was barred that came out right after Chedebtee

and Gemini was like the following. Yeah, so they still had to do a rebrand, which is tough because then you have to reintroduce the product. Obviously it's grown a ton and we've seen that the empire strikes back. Not a lot of that happening in the United States necessarily but certainly international. Sort of an

iPhone Android story happening all over again. Anyway, Magnus Carlson tells Joe Rogan about how he treats chess as a hobby. He never wants it to feel like work and prioritizes fun and enjoyment. The thing is that chess has always been a bit of a

hobby for me. He's one of the best chess players in the world, of course. This is how Magnus Carlson works. Once it starts to feel like work, then it's harder for me. Turn your work into fun and enjoyment. You'll never work a day in your life. He might get 14,000 likes

on X, like Dylan. Yes. And Daniel, Growing Daniel says, having known him for a while, I think Elon Musk is probably one of the least self-disciplined people on Earth. He just really enjoys problem solving. So he just bounces around from one project to the next. Mogging them, yes. Of course, Growing Daniels co-conspirator now runs, Julius.AI.

What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. loved by over two million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier. Bayes Lord says, anyone who's naively calling bubble right now has not internalized the physics of our world.

Most of them are simply ignorant about AI progress and its implications. Of course there will be fluctuations, but of course we could stumble, but history marches on. And he shares a chart of the world GDP over the last two millennia. And it's interesting because, like,

you can take this in a few different ways. you can kind of look at this and say, okay, nothing ever happens. It's just a kind of a smooth, exponential curve. But I'm looking, I'm seeing a hiccup there in like the mortgage-backed security crisis for sure where GDP shrunk globally or something happened. But it's helpful. It's helpful. Isn't that 2007, 2008, right?

You know, you remember being, I was, you know, basically a kid at that time. and it felt like I could sense the doom and dread in the adults, right, around that time. I mean, from my perspective, I was completely caught off guard by the mortgage-backed security crisis. Like, it was because I wasn't following the market. You didn't have capital. I wasn't monitoring the situation. Yeah. You didn't have capital to deploy buying.

I lived in a house of the mortgage, so I was certainly affected. And, but I didn't. But if you could go back in time, you would have, you would have, you know, raised and deployed a fund into single-famines. But I wasn't, I wasn't seeing top signals. It was like, I was introduced to the crisis. Were you in college? I had, I, it, the crisis, I graduated in 2007, so. From college?

From high school. Oh. No. From high school. And so the, when I arrived, I chose to study economics because I wanted to understand the crisis more. And so I was reading the Wallsard Journal, trying to understand. And I was introduced to like the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which I believe happened in 2008.

Lehman Brothers collapse when did that happen the bankruptcy September of 2008 and so I graduated in 2007 and then so it must have been like sophomore year so things were like melting down my freshman

year but it was kind of slosh of Lehman is that good is that good did we not like Lehman I mean it was it was a very complicated crisis to dig into because it was all these layered financial instruments mortgage back securities and then collateralized debt obligations.

So they would take one mortgage. They'd take a whole bunch of mortgages. This is the famous Margo Robbie in the bathtub scene where she explains that you get a whole bunch of mortgages. You bundle them up. You securita. You slice the different tranches of debt so that the best mortgages are in the AAA.

But then as you keep reslicing them, they kept getting re-rated as, oh, well, this is the best of the previous bad stuff. So that's good. And the best of the worst is, the best and the rating agencies had a really bad time throughout the because eventually like the economy pulled back everyone got over levered people were buying multiple homes and there was a whole mood in 2005 2006 2007 that like average people like the the example would be you know

when the when the Uber driver is pitching you on Cardano like it might be the top that type of thing like when, you know, your barber's telling you about the latest NFT drop, like, watch out. The analogy then was people were saying, like, I'm making more money just owning my home, and my home equity is going up by more than my salary. So, like, I bought a $500,000 home. I make $100,000 a year, but my home, my banker just called me and said, your home's worth $600,000 now. And the home prices were going crazy.

And so obviously there had to be a correction. and it crashed the entire global economy and you can see it in the data today but of course as we zoom out further we will you know see less line keeps going up the line keeps going up well DTC is cyclical

but ever evolving the back and forth locked in shares this chart or this meme drop ship bros convert to supplement bros which switch to dropship bros which convert to supplement bros which go back to dropship bros and back to supplement bros

Supplements continue to be the economic engine of the manosphere. Weren't we talking to the CEO of Numeril, Sam, and he was saying he owns a supplement company. Yeah, he started a gummy supplement company back in the day. He's like, it's still doing well. Anyway, Numeral. Sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. If you're a drop ship, bro, if you're a supplement, bro, you've got to pay your taxes. You've got to get on Numeral.

Great, Dan McCormick's company is on numeral. Yeah. He's a supplement, bro. Lucy is on a numeral. Christina Cordova is quoting our interview with Christina's over at Linear, of course. But we asked Brett Taylor yesterday about the triple-triple-double-double debate and how maybe that's not good enough anymore. He said the faster you grow is sometimes correlated with lack, with a lack of a moat.

I'd rather bet on a durable, high-quality revenue business and happy customers than just raw growth. Christina says fast ARR can be fragile ARR. Earned ARR tends to be sticky AERR. Not all growth is created equally. I think Linears, obviously, they're a partner. I'm somewhat biased, but of course they've earned their. Just for those who don't know, Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues.

and product roadmaps, but continue. Use the tool, love by Open AI, Merk, re-tool, ramp, scale, anymore. But linear is a perfect example of, like, great growth, but steady, and just systematically earning the trust of pretty much every important new company in Silicon Valley over the last however many years.

I think they're... Yeah, earned ARR. Yeah, it does feel like there's... 2019, yeah. There's like C-A-R-R reared its head recently. It's kind of gone out of favor, but contracted ARR. Basically, you have some sort of LOI or some sort of trial that you're counting into. Yeah, I mean, the people that are abusing the ARR the most right now.

It's totally disrespectful to the gap metrics. Well, and I'll just say it's the company is doing data labeling. and services for labs, right? Is that ARR? All the companies that exploded out of... I don't think that many of them are actually quoting ARR numbers, though. Are they?

Are you kidding? Almost every single one of them is saying, yeah, we got to 100 million ARR. Oh, really? We did this or that. I thought it was just like, we did 100 million. Because if you were just saying,

I did 100 million, then that's true. No, and they're saying we're at 100 million ARR. Sure. And they're using it, I think, as like, annualized run rate. but if you dig into the business, it's like they might have 40% margins because they're actually having to hire labor. Well, the margin is separate from, like, ARR with that margin is completely separate from ARR with that churn. Like, because I would, I probably, if you're underwriting it

at a high multiple, you probably want to pay for lower margin, lower churn than higher margin, higher churn. Because higher churn means that like if the business stops growing, it's going to start shrinking, whereas if you have 40% margins, but super low churn, you're super sticky, it's like, okay, well, then at least the business will continue to grow. You're not building on a leaky bucket. You know, you're not getting all the juice out of the bucket. You're only getting 40% of the juice since we're mixing analogies now. But, you get the blender out, but, but I mean, obviously these two metrics are linked and you obviously want, you know, high margin and extremely steep revenue.

But if you're a company like linear and you see some, which has like true AR earned ARR, and then you have companies out there saying, you know, throwing out these numbers around ARR, but they're reselling, reselling GPU credits or something like that, it's kind of, you know, stolen valor, right? Stolen Valor, potentially. True enterprise, you know, contracted. Yeah, yeah. where you're like you could you know stop the growth strategies stop the sales team they could stay

home and you're and you're still printing yeah that's the that's the that's the gold standard of enterprise software that's why we love that's why we get up every morning uh we got to pull up this video uh from paula rambles there's this guy on ticot who video calls chatypt shows that objects asks how much gram then weighs it uh before we pull up this video let me tell you about the generative video platform for developers. Fall, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop, and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand cluster.

You can get access to our soundboard by going to tbpn.com slash sounds, which is brought to you by our friends. So let's play the video of this guy on TikTok. This is my hand. How you call this thing? Yeah, I see your hand there holding onto that pet. Okay, pen.

How much gram is the pen? How much gram? Look, how much gram? Well, it's a little tricky to guess the exact weight. Yes, guess, guess. All right, I'll take a guess. For a pen that size, it's probably somewhere around maybe 500 to 700 grams, give or take. If GPT-5 is smarter.

No, no good, no good. Hey, it's all good. It's all good, man. It's not good. No worries at all. It's just a bit of fun guessing away. I'm worried, I'm worried. Look, I have this oil here. How much gram? We're on a guessing roll. So for that little oil can, I'd say it might be somewhere around 300 to 500 grands, depending on how full it is.

But let's see how close we get this time. You say 300 to 500? Man, I want accurate thing. You know what I meant? I get it. You're looking for something spot on. It's a bit of a challenge with that a scale on my side, but hopefully that at least gives you a decent range. this two ganana how much gram oh you've got a mocha pot there nice those little coffee

how you call it how you call it that's called a mocha pot it's basically a stove top of moka pot how much gram mocha pot so a mocha pot is usually pretty light I'd say maybe around 400 to 600 grams

depending on the size but of course you'll know I hope you're right what's the number I hope you're right bro like cheap it 55 is worse and worse than GPD 4. Definitely here to do my best, and I appreciate you rolling with it.

Yeah, this is your punishment, man. Talk with him. Hey, green cocoa. Any idea where the mayo's hiding? Maybe it's just chilling out behind you in the fridge somewhere. What's the deal with the ketchup in the mail? Any condomin gossip we should know about? They just talk? No. That's hilarious. That is not a Rocco-Bassalist, respecter.

You should be doing that. That's very rude. That guy's absolutely cooked. Did anyone see exactly what the numbers were? How close was it? No, I was saying like 30. I was seeing 35 on the day. That can't be 35 grams, right? It needs to be.

I have no idea. I'm worse than GPT5 for sure. If you asked me how much that pan weighs, I have no idea. Anyone have any idea? I have no idea. Who knows? Anyway, HBO Mac says nice. We still got a couple of months.

Scroll down on this chart. This chart is charting 19. 98 to 2001. Like, what? This is just the NASDAQ and it's just following perfectly. Like, what are we doing here? This is crazy how the correlation here is, like, insane. Is this on the same, like, time scale, too?

Or is this, this is just a wild, wild chart that this is so similar. It lines up scarily accurately. But it's just so weird because, like, if it's this obvious, you think it would be priced in, you think people would pull back or do something, but who knows, we'll keep monitoring the situation. It will be interesting. Let me tell you about turbo puffer. We puffin.

We puffin. By, serverless vector in full-tech search from burst principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Jordy loves his puffer fish. This puffer is used by linear notion. Breaking. WPP.

Wait, one thing on this chart, to be clear, I think it's tracking very closely, obviously. You single out individual, you know, kind of points on the chart, and it's a little bit ominous. But at the same time, like, Amazon went public in 1998, right? So, like, you can do a lot to kind of, like, if you're the chart smith here, to kind of, like, pick the dates to try to align it properly, right?

so yeah um i would i bet you could align this to just other bubbles throughout history and find similar patterns right that doesn't really help though i mean that i'm just saying like this doesn't yeah i mean i'm just i'm just saying like yeah no no it does feel like it's like if you started somewhat selective in 1990 you said okay the dot com bubble began when amazon went public yeah right then this doesn't line up at all, right? Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, you're kind of just selecting. I mean, yeah, I don't know.

They're like overlaying it deliberately as close as possible, but this does feel like, the crazy part is that the previous earlier sell-offs, the dip in 2023 to now is like that peak in valley, that peak in valley seems to match as well. And then even like you can see earlier in 2025, we got the tariff sell off, and that kind of tracks what happened in 2000, in like the year 2000 exactly,

or maybe 99. Lots of people. Yeah, but then again, was there, like, I don't know, I don't know. Well, don't worry. Even if we wind up in the slothicillusionment, we'll be slopping it up in the trough of disillusionment, grinding to the plateau of productivity one.

We'll probably end up in a position where, like, we're only going to eat fast, casual slop bowls until we When you're in the trough, you eat the sloth. Until we get out of the bear market. You get the slop bowl. Somebody had a great, I got to pull up this comment on Spotify. Someone's asking how much the gong ways.

Gong, how much gram? How much gram? And Aqua says mania is a crazy. So Mika Flaus on Spotify says, is, wearing the white suits on an off day to rally the bull. Ultimate top signal might just be poking the bear. Well, I'm in a gray suit today. I'm feeling neutral about the market.

Could go up, could go down. Who knows? But we'll be monitoring it here. In other news, breaking from us, TBPN, WPP Media has signed Michael Mirafloor as global EVP. So congratulations to Michael Mirafloor. He has been a fantastic champion. Massive pickup. hopefully wore his TBPN hat to work today.

Hopefully he's not in the chat right now. First day of work gets a corner office. Yes. puts TBPN on the big screen. Fired up. Why not? Fired up. Leave it on in the background.

Congratulations. But big pickup. Yes. And excited to see what he cooks on there. Always enjoyed his commentary and excited to see more of it. Paul Enright says in 2021 Mitchell Green from lead edge capital. Of course, Mitchell is a friend of the show. We got to have him back on again.

I texted him this morning. He said to Paul, this year will be remembered for the GPs that sold stock and distributed capital to LPs versus the ones that raised funds called capital and made new investments. It was a wonderful observation. I will never forget. Now it feels similar in some ways. Why not both? Why not distribute capital, sell some positions, and raise some new funds? Yeah.

I don't know the dynamics of that, but that does feel like the, the ultimate wizard move is to raise a massive fund at the top, don't deploy it, sell a bunch of positions, get out of the other stuff, basically just be sitting on a massive cash pile when you reach the trough of disillusionment and then monetize the plateau of productivity. Deploy into the trough.

Well, you saw this chart yesterday, somehow like one of Andreessen's slides from a fundraising debt. Newcomer, baby. Leak master. Oh, yeah. He got two decks. So A16Z returned 15 billion, or generated 15 billion in returns, including their recycled fees and carry in 2021. That was, you know, biggest year on record by quite a lot. Huge return.

That's got to be a lot of Coinbase. And who else got out? I think it was like Solana, Avalanche, right? Some of these big. There were a lot of stuff. I don't know, yeah. But Coinbase was a huge position. Yeah.

And, I mean, they deployed in all these different rounds. And then I believe Coinbase went out and was probably distributed at something close to $100 billion market cap. So something, something there. Andrew Curran has more updates on Elon Musk's reuniting with the Trump administration. Andrew says their friendship is slowly being reforged, Open AI, Anthropic and Google. already have similar agreements in place. Open AI and Anthropic charge $1 access fee. Google charges 47 cents because it's president is the 47th president, right?

Isn't that it? That's interesting. That's cute. Elon is charging the government 42 cents for access to GROC. This is a hitchhiker's guide reference. Finally, a competition for who can say the smallest number. It's been a lot of who can say the biggest number. You want to be on the barbell, the extreme end.

charging the least and raising the most. Apparently, that's how business works. Most KAPX, least. Have you seen The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Have you? No. I thought it was just a book. They adapted it into a movie.

The movie's pretty good, but the book's probably better. Have you read the book? I did read the book at one point. Yeah, the book's great. But 42, of course, is the answer to the universe, all things, everything. It's a fun, fun reference. The Trump administration will offer artificial intelligence, intelligence models from Elon Musk's XAI to federal agencies through a new partnership under the agreement with the GSA, which oversees technology procurement.

Agencies will get access to models such as GROC4 and a new fast version called GROC4FAST. The deal follows a similar agreement with the other folks in the space. Automating state government processes is one of the most promising applications for technology, fueling the battle to be the most popular tool for federal workers. All four of the AI companies also each have $200 million. contracts with the Defense Department. Sort of interesting that... All four? Yeah.

So the government clearly wants an oligopoly here and is like we're not going to really pick winners, which is crazy because Dario has been very outspoken about the Trump administration. And Elon's obviously been fully in the Trump administration's camp. Google has been a little bit quieter and has leaned left in the past, Open AI. Sam Altman was kind of stayed out of politics, but then has been at dinners and was at the inauguration. And so you would expect, based on, like, the news of how close the foundation model lab

CEOs are to Trump, like just how many photo ops there have been, how many, how close have they been? You would expect a massive contract for Elon and a very small contract for Anthropic, and yet they all got $200 million equally. It's interesting. Just like they're clearly focused on having balance amongst the AI Foundation. I want to see the usage. in the in the in the in the in the in the government broadly and in the dod what are people using i mean

everybody gets a 200 million dollar contract is unlikely that that they're going to be like super evenly leveraged right yeah i wonder if they would use them for specific things i mean you would hope that like you know they're using clod code over there for something and they're using chaty pt for knowledge retrieval and stuff and then they're using Gemini for the things that Gemini's great nanobanana i guess the government is just hey you don't need to come in for DMV photos any... $200 million for great memes. For gray beams?

Great memes. Oh, great memes. Yes, exactly. But you would hope that... You'd hope that the government's using AI all over the place and they need an actual contract to make sure that it's provisioned and hosted in the proper way. Anyway, fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2.

You can start a free trial. Lulu is chiming in about Rick Rubin. says, I mean, just look at him. Can't media train this? Austin says, the Beastie Boys, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Strokes. Rick Rubin has worked with all of them. Why is no one talking about Rick Rubin? Why is no one talking about Rick Rubin?

He's worked with all of them and is considered one of the greatest producers of all time. His process to creativity can be described as looking for clues. He has such a unique aesthetic with that massive... Always has the blue blockers on. Those are blue blockers? Yeah. I feel like blue blockers are normally orange orange but I guess those are just a dark orange that I'm seeing

like the light shade yeah okay well what was else is going on your post here there were some accusations accusations earlier that somebody was doing a paid post the post was deleted so it was Mike Isaac at the New York Times

picked up a device called a brick which is a little NFC chip that they see you see everyone's seen this on Instagram right where it's supposed to like brick your phone so that you don't be distracted and so you have the willpower just once to attach this to the back of your phone it kind of magnetically attaches and it puts your phone in a do not disturb don't show me any of the addicting social media apps turn off everything let me focus let me cook let me cook let me lock in And so apparently, according to the original post, Mike Isaac, picked one up off of an Instagram ad and said he actually loves it.

It's helping him write. Of course, he writes from the New York Times. He needs to lock in and write a lot. He can't be distracted. He's also a prolific poster. Can't be caught on the timeline mid article when he's on deadline. That's right. So he posted about it and a –

Another poster accused him. infused him of doing a sponsored post without disclosing it undisclosed ad and if you know the new york times standards and who mike is he's published a book that got turned into a movie or tv show like he's probably not doing spawn con for some d to c like you know electronics company undisclosed it's just like so much risk to so little reward like like the post that of him saying like oh i got this brick and it's great like it didn't get that many views. It's not like Brick would be like, oh, yeah, we're going to sell 10,000 of these things off of this. Let's pay Mike Isaac $100,000 to post this, you know, organic content, this fake content. He just, he likes technology. Yeah, he likes technology. People like to post

things that they test out. It covers consumer tech. Not, not everything is SponCon. But I thought your post was hilarious. She said it's time to come clean responding to this allegation. John said, you need to admit that Brick paid you to dunk on this organization. organic post to drive more impressions. This post is brought to my brick. I do think there's something funny where you could potentially run some sort of like anti-astro-turfing campaign as a brand where you pay a bunch of of influencers to accuse organic UGC of being paid. And it drums up way more attention. And so I was riffing on that.

But on this show, we don't do. disclosed partnerships. We do disclosed partnerships like our partnership with Adio. Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. When we read an ad, you know we're getting paid for that. You know we're not doing it for free.

We're not doing it for the love of the game. We're doing it for the love of the game. We do love in the press sales. Nobody loves SaaS more than us. That's true. That's true. Let's keep going. There is a lot of stuff going on. This was a really funny

post because it gave me a total jump scare. I was talking to Brandon about it earlier. Ben Podgursky. Sounds like a podcaster's name, potentially. Ben says, this is correct, but we should take it to the natural conclusion. He was, I guess he was quote tweeting, Rune, which we'll get into. But he says, like the Habsburgs of old, the USA should look for synergistic MNA, not through immigration, but with entire polities. In this case, the obvious answer is merge South Korea in as the 51st to 57 states. That's not the obvious answer to me. When people talk about growing the United States, they talk about Greenland, they talk

about Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Fiji, like the U.S. Virgin Islands, like there's so many different territories that are like more closely aligned with the United States than just going all the way over to Asia and just picking up South Korea. But Ben makes the argument. He says merging South Korea in would resolve a wide range of defense, industrial trade, and demographic crises. South Korea would not have to hem and haugh about building their own nuclear shield. They'd be an inviolate part of the United States from the U.S. from day one would have

massive shipbuilding capacity, vastly improving national defense. And U.S. companies could friction-free contribute in the one spot where we genuinely have a technical contribution, small nuclear power systems. The U.S.'s relatively healthy demographics could gradually backfill South Korea's catastrophic demographics. Maybe we could even teach them how to have kids again. The free flow of labor would allow Korean workers to train U.S. workers without insane visa shenanigans. South Korean would be neither, is neither unduly liberal or conservative relative to the United States. Small couple, I like the thought exercise, a couple small potential problems here would place the United States

directly on having a shared border with North Korea and be right across the yellow sea from China. It is such a wild move, but he lays out a thoughtful case. It's a cool idea. I mean, maybe it's no coincidence that the most respectful TBPN derivative show-inspired show is from Korea. That's right. Those guys know how to do it.

Also, I love, have you ever had Bim Bop? No, I don't know what that is. dish in South Korea. It's like rice and protein. Have you ever been to South Korea? I have not. I've never been there. Have you? Have you ever traveled anywhere in the world? Yeah. Where? I've been to Ireland. Oh, okay. Jobs finished. Moving on. Ireland. World traveler. Fuck of the Irish.

So this is all all kicked off by a ruin post. He said, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the theme of the Dan Wang book, who we had on the show, And the general elite consensus now is that industrial process is a technology that lives in the heads of people and that it was a mistake to let so much, quote-unquote, low-value industry be offshoreed due to the tacit loss of process capital. TSM, Arizona, which makes the most complex and valuable industrial production in the world, was a massive success. This was a huge surprise to me. I did not expect the TSM build out. Everyone was saying, like, it's impossible to airlift TSMC. but they wound up producing four nanometer chips at great yields on par with Taiwan, merely years after striking ground for the first time.

This involved a generous federal subsidy and importing thousands of the great Taiwanese semiconductor experts, despite unions trying to quell Taiwanese immigration and some culture clashes. In the United States, aquilers of whole teams with process knowledge in their heads is very common. Zuck acquiring some of the greatest talent from other AI labs for massive numbers is just one example. of this, also seen in the full self-driving wars between Uber and Google, which was interesting because that is, of course, about the Anthony Lewandowski case that ended in a lawsuit that landed Anthony Lewandowski, I believe in jail for a little bit, but then he was pardoned, and so he got out. But this, it was more, I feel like it was more than just process knowledge in that case,

because it was specific patents. And I'm wondering how much, how much of a line you can draw between knowing a specific algorithm, knowing a specific, something patentable, an actual process, power, process, knowledge, but it's certainly an interesting analogy to dig into. So Tesla plus Apple plus Big Pharma acquires industrial process companies all the time. America is very capital-rich, able to levy literally hundreds of billions of dollars for machine intelligence CAP-X. We can afford to acquire whole groups of foreign talent for prices. that are unheard of to them in their home countries.

TLDR, aqua-hiring foreign process knowledge for massive sums should be one of the primary goals of any re-industrialization effort. Special visa categories should be made for to scoop up whole teams of Sen Gens best. The raids on the LG battery plants in Georgia are the exact opposite of what we need. Ability to tolerate new arrivals is a technical edge of American capital to be able to assimilate foreign knowledge into domestic industrial processes at a scale. I was hearing a story about how the I think what was it the Manus team relocated to Singapore and there's a world where they relocate to San Francisco set up in the benchmark office

satellite office yeah I mean there's there's there's something there I don't know how important their process knowledge is but certainly it worked for TSMC I don't know how many more of those projects need to be done Taiwan seems to be in a uniquely precarkey precarious position, whereas a lot of the South Korea tensions seem to be a lot lower. Like, there's less geopolitical risk in South Korea. So there's less of a, we need to move SK-Hinex to America. But Tyler, do you have any thoughts on this post? I'm sure you saw it.

What do you think? Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. I think politically it might be hard to do this. But I've seen a lot of similar arguments just for like normal AI researchers in China. Yeah. We should basically have some kind of like visa that just like imports them like instantly. And then it's like the, I assume the salaries over there are not comparable to like MSL level like $100 million. Totally.

This is the real, this is the real AI paper clipping. It's not that you get turned into a paperclip. It's that you get operation paper clipped into a different country. And we need to avoid our best getting paperclip to a different country. And we need to be potentially paper clipping other national champions. I wonder if there's something to do in. in AI, not just AI, but in the process power around solar. Because we've talked to Casey Hamer about this.

It feels like the vast majority of the cheapest solar panels come from China. We're maybe not, we don't have a national champion there yet. We're not catching up. But fortunately, we have a guest who might be able to get us up to speed on this. We have Deli and Asperuhoff from Founders Fund. He is back from paternity leave. He's in the Restream waiting room. And he will be joining us in the TBPN Ultradome.

in just a minute. Let's bring Delian Asprey-Hav. How you doing? Good to see you. What a voice. Daddy's home. Daddy's home, baby.

Oh, there we go. How much wag? How is it being a father of multiple now? Yeah, I feel like you blow up your life once, and then after that, you kind of, you know, sort of figure it out where it's just like, yeah, you got the infrastructure, and that's why God gave you multiple hands is, you that one baby per hand. Yes.

but everything's good everyone's happy and healthy everyone's back to normal oh yeah oh yeah i mean she's still like a you know sort of month old so you know still requires uh you know some work but yeah in the great scene thing happy healthy very grateful that uh you know all things pretty smooth yeah well once once once uh when she gets to two months you know it's cake you know put her to work she can come on she can come on tbPN we've got in your place we've had three members of your household live on the show we need the force it's true well actually got your brother too so That's true, five. The Asperuhoff clan is dominant.

I want to least 10 Asperovs on TVTN by the end of the decade. Yeah, what are your parents up to next week? We'll get them on. Really quickly, I want to get a general update on what's going on in your world, but I would be interested to hear your response to this debate that was going on on the timeline yesterday from Roon about TSM, Arizona, being a good, a good example of airlifting industrial process from one place to another. He kind of ties it to the acquisition of whole teams at MSL, America, having, being capital

rich, being able to actually afford to go and say, here's a hundred million dollar offer to some great researcher come to America potentially, and it gets into the, obviously there's a whole bunch of immigration stuff going on and cultural stuff, but did you have a reaction to that? There are other industries where it seems like we need sort of a TSM-Arizona-like project where we're just going to an international company and saying, do what you do over there here. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the reason that people are discussing this so much on the timeline lately is because of Dan Wing's new book, Breakneck, where he breaks down basically the, like, at least his argument is that, you know, China is the engineering society where the sort of

lawyer society and everything, basically, you know, so stems from there. which I think is probably a little bit I like a lot of parts of his book that actually particular argument is probably one of my less favorite you know sort of parts Parsick is like look there are things that China is obviously you know sort of very good at I think I was hearing your last

cast talking about like you know mass production of solar panels they're obviously like phenomenal at that type of like commodity cost curve relatively complex but not deeply complex type of manufacturing right They've stepped up from, like, you know, the early days of Shanghai being, you know, sort of toys and knickknacks, et cetera, obviously now into like, you know, mass consumer electronics, unit trees, obviously, like by far the best, you know, sort of humanoid robotics company. And then obviously in solar panels. But there's, you know, I think some limitations to their approach. Like, you know, when I think about it from like the aerospace perspective, look, a Falcon 9 rocket landed for the first time a decade ago now. The Chinese basically, like, stole the IP in planes that and clearly have something that is like the equivalent to a Falcon 9.

And they're still basically doing the early days of like, you know, Star Hopper, which was, you know, backer grasshopper, I mean, which was like the SpaceX project in like 2013, I want to say. That was just doing the suborbital little like hop ups and downs to practice for Falcon 9. And so I do think they like have this limitation when it comes to like deep, deep systems engineering and requiring some creativity that they like miss out on. And I think that's why you've seen them partially succeed in semis, right? They're good at the like, you know, sort of last general. of semis and, you know, sort of reshoring that to China. But I don't think you've really seen any progress on them, you know, sort of, you know, domesticated cutting edge, you know, sort of semis. TSMC, Arizona, you know, is at least a very subscale version, you know, of, you know,

of being able to do actually some amount of cutting edge domestically. And I do think it, you know, sort of shows that there's just some breakdowns and down wings argument where, like, we are able to import that type of, like, I forget what he calls it, like, industrial process or process knowledge in the United States and even develop it ourselves, right? The other area that obviously, like, we do quite well on, you know, it's not the perfect company, but like, look, like the, you know, 99% of commercial airliners in the world are still developed by the West, right? You know, Boeing and Airbus and continue to be, and it's not obviously that China has really been able to displace that. You know, the only other areas that I think about actively that you need to be, you know, sort of reshored. Some amount of it is like, hey, if we want to, you know, to compete against China and Taiwan, it is going to be almost certainly like a mass scale production, you know, sort of game more so than anything else. and so when you think about like mass scale drone manufacturing mass scale metal cutting mass scale like fighter jet production that's something that like we're obviously behind on even like the munitions right like you know Ukraine has shown that like you know artillery is back to being relevant again it was not relevant at all in any of the Middle East conflicts but now with like continuous you know internet coverage and continuous basically you know spy satellites you know you can actually justify basically just like you know any time that you're you know enemy makes a move you just artillery shell all the crap out of them and that's actually like back to being you

you know, sort of relevant on the battlefield. And they are far better. They have these, like, you know, lights off, you know, artillery shell production facilities that basically just, like, are 24-7 fully roboticized, you know, produce, you know, way more than the United States can. And so I don't know that those are going to be necessarily, like, the equivalent of TSM where you're, like,

taking somebody's pre-existing industry and, like, dropping it here and that, like, there's not an obvious place to go import from, basically, for that type of stuff. So I think we kind of solve that on our own, and obviously founders fund were making some investments, you know, in that space, obviously, you know. Isn't it true, too, that in China, like, yes, there's flagship lights out factories that are truly cutting edge, the kind of thing we just don't really have here in the United States, but yet still the vast majority of manufacturing in China is just a lot of labor, like, you know, assembling cheap components? I'd shift it. I think that's like a, you know, sort of decade out or a decade old sort of, you know, sort of thinking where it's like, yeah, the reason that China won for a long time was because of just of just.

just like the labor are, but cheap cost of labor, when you talk to people- But I'm just saying like with the truce, like we can't buy the, like, when you talk about China's advantage of just being able to produce overwhelming mass, right, across every different sector, there's certain key areas where they are just light years ahead

and then it's, they're still getting this massive benefit of even the components that get made that go to the lights out factory to be assembled, you know, but, with robotics like there yeah when i think about like their advantages in like you know drone manufacturing it's mostly due to automated facilities right like it's not because they like you have a bunch of like you know sort of mass assembly super precise small hand you know sort of laborers or something like that it actually is because when you think about like the PCB boards

largely basically fully automated the like you know propellers that they make largely fully automated the battery lines largely fully automated and so yeah i just like when i think about like the edge that they have in drones, yeah, there's maybe some amount that's like, you know, sort of this like assembly edge, but like I'd put that at like five to 10 percent of the edge, like 90 percent of the edges that they like have such deep process knowledge across all these individual, like different, you know, basically like subcomponent sectors and a lot of those co-location. Now arefully. Say again?

Like co-location effectively. Yeah, and the co-location is just, you know, sort of wild, right? And this is also the sometimes the problem with like this stuff in America when we like try and re-imported, it's like, you know, the Chips Act, one of the biggest battles was like, the, you know, the size of funding required support from a broad set of senators and congressmen, but then by default, they want, you know, sort of jobs everywhere. And so it's been more difficult to fully, you know, sort of centralize all of the, like, you know, reshoring of semis in the United States into a, you know, sort of a single location. Like, you know, Arizona's

definitely, you know, sort of been impressive. But, like, ideally it's not just the, like, Fab. At some point, you want to do, like, lithography there and a bunch of other parts of semis centralized there. But, like, in the United States, we actually kind of have a bit of a chips hub, obviously still some amount at Silicon Valley. Austin's become like a, you know, sort of really big area. Ideally, those would all be in sort of the same place rather than so spread out. And so it is just harder given that we're not like China that's willing to sort of like put their finger on a scale to a single, you know, city and just be like, you are going

to become like the guitar producing city and everything is going to be, you know, sort of base there. We don't, we don't do that. Need a new guitar executive order. It does feel like we're starting to do that with the neoclouds, with some of the big data center buildouts, Abilene, Texas. this, like we're marshaling capital. But that's still led by individual dealmakers going and talking to these local governments

and figuring out, can we do this here? Okay, no, I'm going to go across the state line over here. I'll do it over here. Sure, they're chasing. Yeah, we're just much less top-down coordinated. But, like, at the same time, I think you're starting to see, like, the faults and the brakes in that system, you know, in China. And Dan Wing talks about this user as well, where it's like, look, you know, they clearly

still excel in certain areas, but they've also, like, I mean, like, think of it. about it even or the course of the time that I've been at Founders Fund. In 2021, like, the number of unicorns being minted in China was starting to approach, you know, the United States. And there's like some real risk and fear that it was going to supersede. Now, four and a half years later, you know, the Chinese venture capital ecosystem is effectively, you know, totally negligible. And so, you know, I do think that they've, you know, done these and Java on like, you know, sort of prioritizing the industries that matter the most. But also their like capital markets are, like, you know, sort of way worse than they were, you know, sort of four and a half years ago.

So, you know, they have re-imported a bunch of, you know, sort of Chinese nationals from the United States, back a scientist into China, you know, pretty good. But they've also, like, lost, you know, something on the order of, I forget what the number was, but like 25,000 Chinese millionaires, like, are, you know, exporting their capital. They lost the Manus team. The Manus team's over in Singapore now. They might be working out of the benchmark office soon. Yeah. Well, speaking of benchmark, I thought it was interesting. Actually, Bill Gurley posted earlier game-recognized game. And it was a quote from the CEO of Xia who said, we bought three Tesla model Ys for disassembly. and research inside Xiaomi earlier this year. What a great vehicle. And, of course, they're announcing, like, effectively a copy cap. But it's insane to just say.

Game recognized game. It's game. It's game copies game. Yeah, it's just, it's saying, saying the quiet part out loud is wild. I think also, by the way, since I was last, I was last on, was when I have been poking the benchmark bear, literally basically, like, since, like, you know, a week or two after joining Founders Fund. And I remember early on, I got a call from, like, one of the partners at FFF being like,

hey like look just so you know you're definitely making some enemies over there and i was like okay and then they're like but i wouldn't necessarily like it doesn't feel right to tell you to like take these things down because like at the end of the day we are founders fund and you are critiquing them for firing founders and that is our whole ethos so just know that what you're doing is definitely creating enemies and you're creating risk so anyways i've been poking the bear for like five and a half years and then it was just so glorious to have like finally an official response from tecton and it was just like it was an alley-youp it was the perfect It was like, how dare you not basically, like, you know, control, you know, sort of a company's choice and, you know, capital provider, like, why are you letting them take Chinese capital? And I was like, oh my God, this is perfect. This is like the, you don't even realize how wrong you are because you don't even realize that what you're saying is why aren't you with a venture investor telling the founder to run their fucking company. And that's your critique. And I remember reading it. And I was technically supposed to be on this like one week like Twitter or whatever like, you know, detox. But then like, you're on on Twitter being like, I'm supposed to be.

be on a detox right now but I'm about to go on a bender. I know but I got like five texts from friends being like how have you not responded to this yet and I read it and I was like oh my god yeah fuck this detox for like definitely fucking going in and it was just like it is I think either my top or second best day on Twitter in terms of joy provided for me like like true like existential like identity level like as much as like a child's birth like that is a level of zero user regretted seconds like the least the least the least the least the least least regret. You would compare it to, yeah, holding your daughter.

It is, like, it is, yeah, I think roughly equivalent. The only other day that I've had that was that good was the, like, the day after the FTX blow up, and I was the first one to really find in screenshot the Sequoia blog post about him playing League of Legends and getting that out. And it was just, that was just, that was incredible. It was just, it was, it was like, I got to break news. Yeah. I got to, like, poke fun at a competitor.

I forced them to, like, have a response to all their LPs about it. They had to, like, take down that blog post. It was just, like, oh, that was like a true. Weren't you also better than SBF at League of Legends? Okay, I mean, like, the AOC is better than, yeah, at, like, League of Legends. So, like, the bar is very low. I just like... But at least you got to respect some of the highly convicted investments in Anthropic, Robin Hood,

you know he was a gambler but you know yeah dude he was a good gambler i mean like he just you know played the line a little too hard but like yeah there's a world where like yeah i forget who is telling me this he was somebody that was basically responsible for like brokering the like ftx like bankruptcy etc so they're like uh you know wall street whatever you know sort of type and they basically were like if he had just lasted another like six months the book like would have been totally fine he wouldn't have got liquidated and today if he just held these investments that he made from like back then he would be richer than Elon like he would actually just be the richest person on the planet what and so it's just it's

wild to think that he was like on a knife's edge. That's crazy. I don't, how is he putting up? I haven't seen that actual number. But I mean, I guess it makes sense with like the various positions he had, yeah. I think it was like assuming that FTCS continue to go. It's ever a his answer. Best possible scenario.

There were like, I mean, again, some of those, you know, moves were just like, it's like in the anthropic position. I forget it's like now like $25 billion. I mean, the guy was insane. I don't know if you remember, but he went on Tyler Cowan's show, conversation with Tyler. And Tyler asks him, would you, flip a coin where there was a 50% chance of humanity being completely wiped out or 50% chance

that you double the prosperity of humanity, but it's 51.49, the good outcome. And he was like, I would flip it a hundred times in a row. And it's like, that's insane. Like, that's not how these things work, but he was like, the expected value is positive, so I must take the EV positive bat. And it's like, no, no, no, no, please do not flip that coin. Like, you're going to wipe us all out. It's like 99% of The best part of SBF having to go to jail is Dustin Moskowitz finally shutting the fuck up about EA. Thank God.

We can stop talking about new only net EV positive things. Yeah, it's wild. Well, speaking of net EV positive things, is it no longer net EV positive to invest in a company that's growing revenue triple, triple, double, double, double, because I have a lot of friends

that have been doing that. Previously, I'm about to IPO my company, but now they're thinking of shutting down because to the best venture capitalists. Delian's a fan of zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, thousand X. But yes, I want your reaction to the state of the software markets. It's sort of an ebb take a little bit.

Have you done a pure SaaS deal this year? I did just do like a like basically pure vertical AI SaaS. Let's go. He couldn't resist. He had to do one. He had to do one. Can't help myself. Vertical SaaS.

Underrated. Criminally underrated. He literally talked to every VC. It's like, you just go, go invest in the foundation model layer, go invest in hard tech. Leave this, leave the vertical stats for me. That's great. Yeah. But yeah, overall thoughts on the triple, triple, triple, double, double, double being, like, out of, like out of date with how fast the foundation model companies are growing.

I had this interesting thought that it's like, you could be running a janitorial company. And if you have a foundation model as a client and they're growing 10x, you're going to be cleaning 10 times as many toilets. Your revenue is going to be 10xing because they're 10xing. And if you're just like are a barnacle on the side of the massive whale, you're going to see massive growth. And I wonder if like that, like what that means. We're investing in the barnacle economy. The barnacle economy. But in general, like, you know, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think with this stuff all the time from like the, you know, space perspective too, where like, you know, you can get diluted into this world where it's like the space economy is growing. it's only a bunch of other space startups, like, you know, trading revenue back and forth. You can like prop that up for like quite some time, trading a dollar back and forth, but at some point it needs to connect into like the rest of the ecosystem, right?

And so, you know, I think there was some, you know, memes and jokes going around, you know, sort of yesterday about the like, NVIDIA, Oracle, Open AI, whatever, 100 billion investment, et cetera. And it's literally just like the same dollar effectively going, you know, sort of in circles over and over again.

And that can, you know, sort of work, but like that can also blow up. And we just, and I think we talked about this in maybe even in the last interview, it's like, you have just this crazy dynamic where, you know, the percent of GDP being invested in this category is like, you know, the equivalent of like at the railroad bubble, et cetera. But a lot of the companies that are doing this have like these cash flows from other very large businesses that are driving

towards this, right? You know, Zuckerberg, I think gave the quote where he's like, look, I would prefer to like, you know, waste hundreds of billions of dollars. Miss spend a couple hundred billion. Yeah, spend a couple hundred billion rather than lose the machine dodd race. And so it's just like the level of it's just like nothing we've ever seen before in terms of like the super cycle of, you know, sort of capital going into this, maybe that has the ROI, maybe it doesn't. When I think about it from like the investor perspective, I mostly think about it from twofold, which is like how you should analyze any business, which is basically like quality of revenue and like, you know, you know, in terms of like durability of durability, like durability,

the margins, you know, sort of on that revenue. And so I'll maybe provide like one example that I think is very strong and one that I think is like a little weaker. You guys have had, you know, sort of Melissa, you know, John Luda, you know, sort of wife on for cybernetic labs. I think of that as a great example where she has really great revenue growth, and I believe it to be very durable in that most of her revenue growth is coming from things that are totally decoupled from the insanity of like, you know, NVIDIA, open AI, et cetera, circles, like it literally is janitorial companies, right, effectively, eight back, plumbers, et cetera. Those people's revenue, their growth, et cetera, like is completely like economically decoupled.

And so in some ways, then Melissa's revenue is completely economically decouple. from the entire AI hype wave. And so when I think about like, oh, okay, let's say imagine a world where all of a sudden, like, you know, the Mag 7 decide to like, you know, reduce deployment into data centers and like foundation model training by 100 X years or next year, which companies are affected by that. Okay, well, like, core weave, I imagine is like going to be affected by that. Oracle, definitely going to be affected by that. Open AI, anthropic, definitely going to be, you know, sort of affected by that.

Yeah, you look at how many companies are now indexed to Open AI, right? You have Broadcom, Oracle, SoftBank, CoreWeave, like, these are... There's a lot of them. A lot of them. And I think as an investor, you have to take a little bit of like a bifurcated strategy where it's like it's, I think it's a generational index. And this is, you know, if there's one thing that I admire about Peter the most, is he just does such a great job of even though he has lots of biases, particular, you know,

preferences, et cetera, on one sector, another founder, another. He's very willing to vary, I feel like soberly analyze the, just like broad macro world and identify, hey, even if like I don't love, you know, whatever boring SaaS opera, et cetera, or like the AI stuff, you know, you know, maybe might not be real, still be willing to like analyze it from a purely investment perspective and like take it on and obviously we've, you know, done decent, you know, sort of checks into this field versus like I literally like find my biases so strong that I can even like, I can't even motivate myself to even spend time on it, you know, to like, you know, analyze it as an investor.

So that's where I think about the, you know, sort of durability perspective. And then there's like the margin, you know, sort of perspective, which is like how much, you know, competition is there, right? You're seeing, obviously, in these foundation models where just, like, the token cost continues to go down, the margin never seems to really be improving. And a part of it's like, there's a bunch of, you know, companies in capital that's going into this. And, you know, some of the, like, let's say, like, AI for, you know, whatever, you know, coding has maybe a bit of a similar dynamic where it is like, you know, a bunch of companies that are working on it, the foundation models working on, et cetera. I don't think there's going to be like 15 AI for

Plummer, you know, sort of companies, right? And so this is where Melissa, both has this, like, great durability and great margins. And so, I think you have to take this kind of bifurcated approach as an investor, which is both, like, invest into the, like, index effectively. Now, our approach has generally been invest mostly into the thing driving the index, e.g. Open AI. And then you're like, you know, sort of counter strategy is invest in things that are totally decoupled from the index and, like, super far away.

And then basically, like, nothing, you know, that much in, like, the, you know, sort of messy middle in between. And to go back to, like, the, you know, whatever, you know, 332 or whatever it was, I do think that in both categories, yeah, I do think, there's a merit to it where it's like the growth rates and EV growth in these companies just do look very fundamentally different and the bar is definitely higher it's just been like I admit like it's been very remarkable to watch Melissa and her company grow at a rate that just like yeah it's I just like I you know if you

had told me you know right to distribution of where you think Melissa's revenue growth is going to be like when she like started the company this isn't like the 99th percentile you know and I think it just speaks to how much of a wave this can be and I think Peter talks about this where it's like the internet wave happened but then it still took like 20 years to get the internet integrated into the rest of the economy. I think you're going to see the same thing, you know, sort of here where like there might be not as bad of like an AI bubble crash, but the like implementation period still may take might be more accelerated because just generally society is moving faster, but it may take 10 years

and it's companies like Melissa that are getting it integrated into like the broader, broader society. Have you seen any companies where they've done a good job? They're still in founder mode. They're, they've grown like a base of business that then when the AI, story came, they could actually act, they could act on that in a way that it wasn't like, you know, they're a public company and they need to go through this massive transformation of how they bill, but they can just add AI on top and then they're actually growing new quality revenue. Are you feeling that at all? What are you pointing to?

Let me figure this out. Sorry, I'm having to. Oh, yes, yes, yes, ramp. There we go. There we go. Ramp.com, there you go. Ramp.com. You know, great company that has done a great job of, like, look, they obviously, like, were growing very well before any of the, you know, the AI boom. But, like, I just remember this very particular. I think they've announced this now, so I'm not, like, revealing anything, right? They have their, like, you know, AI agent, you know, basically product.

But I just remember the board meeting where Kareem and crew presented, like, the vision for it. And I was like, oh, this is like what a very competent, but, like, larger startup that is still fast moving, knows how to adopt things. does in this world, where it's basically like, yeah, like, look, we have a bunch of people that obviously use what is a very, like, beautiful interface that automates a lot of, like, you know, finance work, but it still requires people to go in, set up these rules, engines, do some amount of tagging, et cetera. We're just going to, like, basically start to offer for, you know, some of our beta customers

that are going to try this out. We're just going to, like, effectively screen record what they're doing and start training AIs on that. And it's like, I just can't imagine, like, both if you're a net new company being like, I'm going to make AI agents for the CFO suite. It's like, well, but there's like a whole set of things you have to do. You have to have the corporate card. You have to have travel expenses.

You have to this expense policy, accounting. Integrations into the ERPs, integrations into like their tax. It's like all these systems that you need to build that are like more web 2.0 or whatever, you know, sort of systems. And only when you have that and you have a ton of usage on it, like can you then actually start to train the like AI agents on top of that usage, right? And so I do really, I've admired that a lot in ramp. And so that's probably the one portfolio company that I've seen the strongest in. And then the second is this other portfolio company of mine, Sword Health,

that, you know, had been doing this, like, basically, you know, AI, sort of physical, you know, sort of therapist. But most of it was that basically you had these, like, sensors that were strapped on your body. You would go through your physical therapy routine. And then, like, PT would basically then review your movement, data, et cetera, and, like, message back and forth to you and adjust it. That was a very obvious area where, like, they literally had years and years of training datasets on how their digital PTs were basically interfacing with patients. They basically, like, significantly up the ratio. I forget the exact number, but, like, my guess would be something on the order of, like, I remember when the company started, it was, like, 12 patients per PT. I remember by like 22, it was like 1 to 100. And I think now it's something

on the order like 1 to 1,000. And it is largely like the like, you know, AI, you know, sort of wave that has enabled them to do that. And especially because it's like this text back and forth literally with like a, you know, sort of physical therapist. But again, if you were starting from scratch, being like, I'm going to make AI agents for physical therapy. It's like, kind of hard to do like just that. The physical sensors, the distribution with like Fortune 500 health systems, et cetera. Yeah, we had a company on, I think a couple days ago called FileVine that raised $400 million, they were for 10 years creating just workflows for different law firms. SAS for law firms. They have all the workflows, time tracking, conflict checks, et cetera,

document storage. Now they can just add AI in a bunch of different places. And maybe they don't have their own foundation model, but like maybe Claude or Open AI models become good enough, right? Yeah. Give us an update on space, defense tech, stuff that, that's happening in D.C., it seems like there's a ton of deals there, but they're two orders of magnitude smaller than the AI sometimes. It's like a billion-dollar deal for Palantir in the UK, and people are like, I just heard about a hundred billion-dollar deal over here from NVIDIA, but there's some amazing stuff happening.

What's been top of mind for you in space or defense or D.C. generally? Yeah, I mean, you know, sort of big macro story for the next five days is it seems like we're very likely headed towards a government shutdown. I think we've talked about this in some of prior sort of appearances. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of people furloughed, RIP. You know, we've talked about this in prior. Can you imagine if we had a precedent like that in the private markets where companies just routinely like, yeah, we're out of cash, we're talking with the board, but everyone's furloughed.

Everyone's furloughed. Just probably it'll be like five days, maybe like 40 days, you know, whatever. Imagine like Xi Jinping coming out and be like, oh, yeah, sorry, like we couldn't like, you know, with my finance minister, agree on a budget. And so we're shutting down the CCP for like, you know, it's just like, it's so funny to be that like they so badly want to assert America. And our system still has us regularly shutting down for extended periods of time unable to find the most basic facts of like what should we be even like prioritizing and allocating towards. And we still kick their ass. We have the best capital markets.

We have the best nation, the best freedom, the best fucking technology in almost every single area. If you're a career politician, it must feel so good to shut the government. Oh, my God. What I feel bad is, like, now that we're so, like, at Varda, so deeply integrated in all these government programs, it's like, there's a lot of people that just, like, end up having to, like, continue to do their job, but, like, they just don't get paychecks. And it's like, and some of these people are, like, friends of mine now that, like, have worked in technology and are over there. And it's like, yeah, like, you just kind of have to make sure that you have savings because, like, rent still keeps going.

You're kind of still expected to work, but you literally just, like, don't get paychecks. And at some point, you get some amount of back pay. But, yeah, the reason we're marching towards it is, like, look, we've gotten into this world. We're like, you know, I think it's something like four of the last 20 years we've actually passed like our budget on time. So the fiscal year for the government basically ends, you know, basically end of September every year. We effectively for many, many of the last 20 years, we never end up, you know, basically actually figuring out what the budget should be. So we go on these continuing resolutions. But when you're in that state and you're doing everything so last minute, it means much more regularly.

We have shutdowns or shutdowns are happening, you know, sort of more often. And so this year, it's the, you know, so Dems and Republicans going back and forth on like, you know, basically how much should be based just off the big beautiful bill. you know, how much, you know, should the, you know, sort of dems have to, you know, sort of fold on, you know, some of their asks around, you know, a lot of it is, like, healthcare spending, you know, basically related. And at least right now, like, tone in D.C. is, like, there isn't an obvious, like, you know, going to be a path forward over the next week or so. And then Speaker Johnson isn't even necessarily, like, releasing a schedule on when he's

going to call everybody back to even, you know, sort of, you know, fix it. So it's an interesting place where, you know, CRs and shutdowns generally favor incumbents, right? And so, but what's interesting, though, this year is, like, now a bunch of the net new tech companies are kind of the incumbents, right? And so, you know, if you were Anderol in 20, whatever, 18, government shut down pretty painful. If you're, like, Andral in 2025, yeah, I mean, you prefer for, you know, budgets to keep going. But, like, you can actually probably even continue to beat plan, et cetera, even with, you know, sort of government shutdown. And so mostly what it makes it painful for is some of the, like, you know, next gen, you know, companies that have been starting in, like, the last year or two really. you know, sort of painful.

So at least as somebody that's closer to an incumbent now rather than a two-year-old company, I don't mind the government shutdown, you know, so that much. If anything, it kind of gives me, like, more room to, like, you know, get away from some of the, you know, sort of C, series A, series B companies. So, you know, Mr. Politician, you know, shut down away and, you know, we'll keep flying capsules. It's also, you know, if the government shuts down, then if it restarts, it'd be a bullish catalyst.

Send us to new all-time highs. It closes out with a white pill. What's the best new development happening in defense tech space? Any positive news aside from the government stuff? The shutdown's kind of disappointing. Will you be buying the Unitree IPO? That's depressing. You know, I'll get my question. Here's what's depressing is it's going out at $7 billion. What does that say? If they're the leader and the market says this is a $7 billion company and we have companies that are worth $40 billion. if you look at Tesla, what premium does Optimus give to Tesla? We're clearly valuing the potential of humanoids more than at least the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This is kind of related to how I think you could use Unitary for Peace, where if I were to provide like sort of the analogy, what Apple is to Foxcon, you ideally need some U.S. company to be to Unitary, where it's like both the U.S. government and the CCP are not happy with the Apple

Foxcon relationship, right? The US government is not happy that Apple does so much of its manufacturing with our primary adversary and would like them to ideally push to relocate more of that to more allied nations like, you know, Vietnam, India, etc., which they're starting to do, and do more of that in the United States. The CCP is not particularly happy that Foxcon puts in all this work, technology, process, et cetera, ships out these iPhones, and then that just ships a ton of profit dollars over to the largest company that's owned by their adversary. And so both sides are super unhappy with the relationship. And yet the relationship has now persisted for like over 20 plus years, right? And so I think there is the downside case of unitary succeeds, you know, a lot in China and

just makes like humanoid like, you know, soldiers that like end up, you know, invading Taiwan. That's like the downside scenario. The upside scenario is unitary becomes a contract manufacturer, but like an American company has way better foundation model, AI controls, you know, sort of robot, whatever operating system in design and uses unitary basically as like the manufacturer. and then you basically get into this like unhappy wedding on both sides in a way that actually makes it even less likely that basically China actually only only downside is a sci-fi scenario where there's a backdoor into the you know millions of humanoids that get deployed into the US and yeah yeah but my iPhone's not going to get up at night and stab me in the chat

I mean it could explode and it's in your fucking you know I mean like look like you thought the Hamas fucking like you or pageers were bad let me fucking tell you there's like a little bomb in each of these and like you can explode like just government officials you know could be could be tough yeah I asked for a white pill that was and I got a black pill close but we'll get you next time Delian thank you so much for hopping on taking the time great to see you congratulations we will talk to you soon later boys we heard him talk about eight sleep you can enjoy an eight sleep if you go to eight sleep dot com get a pod five a five year warranty 30-night risk free trial free returns free shipping how did we do last night I got cooked

I got a 78. I got a 76. I got a 73, so you beat me. Okay, okay. There we go. Our next guest is from Flock Safety, a founder's fund portfolio company, actually. We have Garrett Langley.

I'm very excited to come in from the restroom waiting room. Garrett, how are you doing? I'll let you take the info. Welcome to the show. Good. How are you? Doing great. We've been super excited to have you on first time.

Why don't you give a quick introduction for anybody? that's been living under a rock yeah or hiding under a rock maybe um but uh yeah garret langley started a company called flock safety with a couple friends eight years ago and we catch bad guys um we will help local law enforcement make just around 700,000 arrests across the country this year um all violent nonviolent crimes what was the uh what year how quickly what was the time to first arrest yeah just It's 160 days. So we were in YC, and it was horrible because we had built this product. We had a couple neighborhoods using it.

And we were like, Demodee is going to be a bust. Because like, yeah, we built a camera, but like, what else? And I kid you know, the week before, this guy broke into someone's home, stole a nice road bike, DeKalb County, Georgia, made the arrest. And so we went on Demodea. We had one slide, and it was his mugshot. And we were like, we build cameras that do this. Please invest.

Wow. You already had the mugshot. Yeah, yeah. Better than like, you know, we got 2000 MRR. MR. R. Yeah. Real world results. That's great and feels more, you know, more critical than ever with everything going on in the world. What is, what have you guys been up to lately? Yeah. I mean, so we're in live and just over like 6,000 cities now. So pretty well deployed in building a lot. So we got into the drone business earlier this year, kind of at the end of last year earlier this year. We've now got drones flying all over the country, just kind of launched that also for the private sector. So it might surprise you that private enterprise spends north of $30 billion a year on unarmed guards. I think drones are

a pretty good alternative. They're cheaper, they're more reliable. And so now, like if you're And unarmed guards are effectively just providing like a deterrence, right? They're not meant to engage, but they're just trying to show that there's, that you're not, you know, you're not alone, basically, right? And so drone can play a similar role and potentially even a better role if it can follow a bad actor or something along those lines. Yeah, I know exactly. So, me, you think about like a retail example, which through the Bay Area, this happens a lot. stolen car car gets stolen they drive it to a home depot to target we know that car is stolen today we just notify 911 and you know depending on what city you're in a couple minutes or 20 30 minutes

later 911 shows up now with our drone that drone can get automatically dispatched off a rooftop out of a box completely remotely kind of teleoperated you've now got live video streaming to local law enforcement inside their vehicle this is the vehicle this is the person they're going into the store, they're leaving the store, whatever may be. And so it's kind of the way to think about it is we just treat drones like a camera that can fly. So we're pretty good at building cameras and now these cameras can fly and chase bad guys. Can you give me some timelines on when, you know, the average American would be seeing just drones flying around, what scale we're going to see that? Are you bullish or excited about humanoid robots or wheeled robots? We've seen what

Starship Technologies is done. There's a whole bunch of companies that are putting, you know, more like simpler robots on the, on the ground. Like what's the actual path and what kind of timelines are you kind of operating against? So, I mean, the good news is that these drones fly high. So we fly 400 feet up in the air. Okay. So if you're not looking up, you're not going to hear it.

You're not going to see it. Wow. The other thing is our drones can cover up to probably 3,000. 30 square miles effectively. And so the sheer number of drones you need actually isn't that many. Sure. So I think about a county near me, it's the largest county in Georgia. I think it's just over 500 square miles.

They're going to get 20 drones to cover the entire county. Wow. And that's a couple million people. Like you're never going to see these things. So you would probably wind up either partnering or building yourself, like something that looks kind of like a cell phone tower, has charging infrastructure. or maybe there's a human that goes out there and fixes parts if there's does it even need to look like that or can you just put it on a roof of like a Walmart

even better fire department fire departments are legally required to be equa deployed in us there's a federal regulation of the density of fire departments which makes them a perfect place to also put drones so you put them on top of a fire department they're fully autonomous they live up there it's got HVAC it's pretty cozy place to live as a drone and then someone clicks a button from a computer just like you guys are drone flies and then it can track the car locks in trucks the car the human it's locked in you can do multiple drones to one operator um so even in a county like the one i'm describing with 20 drones you know if i need three or four operators at all times but like they're covering 500 square

miles like insane coverage yeah talk to me about some of the other robots uh robotic dogs wheeled four-wheeled robots humanoid robots like when does this well and and before that like talk about autonomy timelines because if you're flying 400 feet in the air at what point like there's not a lot else going on up there i imagine uh you could build these to be pretty fully autonomous pretty fast yeah i mean the the autonomy is already there um the issue is the f a regulation it's like right now we are legally required to have a human click a button that says launch drone and then they need to have a part 107 license that says they can fly and they're like an actual that's a pilot's slice uh it's a it's an easier version it's maybe 20 or 30 hours of you know

studying okay specifically for commercial drones yeah yeah and i think it's good but the autonomy's there um and the f a has done a great job over the last few years of kind of like trying to catch up they were a little slow for a while they're catching up now and they're making better decisions like they're now allowing us to fly multiple drones with one operator used to be it had to be one-to-one it used to be able to see the drone now you don't have to be able to see the drone so in the case of that big county that person sitting downtown they're flying a drone 50 miles away and i think that makes a lot of sense so the autonomy is there it can autonomously track the car stick to it so you can avoid a high-speed pursuit but the f a is going to make sure that

it's safe and i agree like safety is the most important feature we sell yeah Yeah, how much of a big thing. It feels like high-speed chases are like definitely a bug, not a feature, right? Because it creates an entirely new danger, right? Hey, let's get, we've got one guy that stole a car. Let's get six cops driving super fast, yeah. Super fast. What can go wrong?

Yeah. It's probably thrilling, though. Yeah, I think it's like probably one of the highlights of the job. If you're like in a journal and junkie because like you're driving 90 miles an hour trying to like chase someone. No, it's definitely a bug, and I think most elected officials would agree as they've started to ban it, which creates all types of new conflicts. So I think high-speed pursuits are a really good one. I think the other thing that we've been surprised by is the reduction in service calls.

And let me try to expand on that. When you call 911, the average response time might be 30 minutes. And a part of the problem is it's just slow to drive. So we'll get there faster because of that because we don't have to wait in traffic. The other issue is that a lot of the times you'll call 911 and say, hey, these two guys, are at a street fight and then 20 minutes later those guys are gone we still had to send an officer they still had to look around maybe they go into the gas station and grab a gate raid because they're thirsty and all of a sudden like we've wasted hours of this officer's day so one of the beautiful

parts of the drone is actually it gets there faster and it can also remove that call for service from the backlog so that for actual critical incidents we get humans there faster as well i think the other Another one that I'm pretty excited about is we have a number of colleges that we work with that are using drones to help escort females at night back home. So you can call 911 and be like, hey, I don't feel safe. Like, it's really dark. I just left this party. And you don't feel great, I think, as like a 19 year old maybe doing that because now I'm going to get in the back of a patrol car. Now in a couple of colleges we work with, they're pushing this out.

Like, hey, you can always call 911 and a police drone will escort you home. And we'll have a video, we'll have eyes on you. So that anything starts to look suspicious, like we're on top of. it. And I think there's just a ton of use cases that we're just undercovering now to make drones just a more bigger part of our daily life. If you run the economic calculation on the 30 square miles for one drone and there's cost to service that and batteries versus do some sort of deal where every stoplight has a camera on it and you have sort of coverage, 360 cameras on every single corner. Is there an economic calculation here that makes sense where

the drone's more efficient or is it just more flexible? Like what are all the tradeoffs that a city or you think of? Yeah. So the way we think about it is there's a certain cost per citizen that a city is comfortable paying to eliminate crime. And we do think you can eliminate it. Like you can't eliminate emotional crime like crimes of hate, crimes of passion, but the capitalistic crime. Like there was a really funny no jumper podcast a couple weeks ago where the guy was like those effing flockers. They're making it too hard to commit crime in San Francisco.

And I'm like, that, that, that's the ball. Because, like, that guy knows. On a podcast. On a podcast. Wow, he called you flockers. That's hilarious. It's brutal. Yeah, it's just about, like, it's about making it so that.

You know you've arrived and you can still do it, but it's not economically viable. Random podcast. That's amazing. Yes. That's product market fit. Getting called out on no jumper for stopping crime. For stopping crime. So when we look at that, though, and like, you know, the,

The probably the most deployed city we have is spending about $22 a citizen per year with flock. I think that's pretty reasonable. That's actually not that much money. It's a lot for that city. But I mean, as an individual, I believe that city is going to solve every single crime that happens. I don't think that's too much of a burden. But I do think it's about, you think about building a cake. You've got to have different layers.

You don't want just all cake, all icing. You want cameras. You want cameras that fly. You also need software. You need trailers because there's more of a deterrence. So I don't think it's a one-size fit all, but for us right now, we kind of see that deployments where you're going to cover your perimeter with cameras that track cars. You're going to have that kind of PTZs, penciled zooms for your major intersections, and they're going to use drones to kind of cover the whole city or county as an overlay. How do you back to Permanoids?

Sorry. Oh, yeah, yeah. I know, we're going to get there. I really want to know. Cosper citizen is probably really expensive. We're seeing stuff from Unitry. There's companies in America. Optimus is far away.

Just give me your humanot take. Sorry. So my human intake is like as it stands today, they're just way too expensive. So if you think about like an average retailer, some of them make a lot of money, right? If you think about like a big box retailer, they might generate a couple million in EBITDA per location. But then you go to some, do you kind of go down market to, you know, an Ulta, Sephora, a dollar general. Their box profits just like not very high. They have a lot of locations, but their individual stores are actually not very profitable.

They can't spend more than a couple thousand dollars a year per store in safety. I just don't see a world where other humanoids or dogs work there. And we're seeing that unfold as well where bigger footprint locations just have both more assets and more dollars. In my conversations with retailers in particular, the kind of two-wheeled approaches have been laughed off. they get stuck in a corner they get kicked over the dogs are seeing more efficacy and I got to imagine

like a biped like humanoid is going to be the most effective because that just sounds really scary yeah well now and you see those videos you can't kick them over they come right back up it's crazy talk about a scary situation you're trying to rob a place you try to kick it over and just stands back up and just looking at you

just like what next it's going to be like dark dark web tutorials yeah dark web tutorial yeah dark web tutorial of like how to get it's to stop. Yeah. Like all of a sudden the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the bippers that bring, like, it's so sci-f. Like, you have to cut these two cables on the back and.

It's going to be wild. Sorry, Jordy. Yeah, I was just curious about, uh, just like how you think about product prioritization because I imagine when you get in working with these cities and police departments and they start using your products and getting value out of them, they just start coming to you with, like, more problems. both like hardware software, but it feels like the drone opportunity is big enough that, you know, it's probably hard to, that you have too many opportunities, then you

can probably pursue all at once. Yeah, I mean, I think we took the company from one skew to eight skews in the last 12 months that all have a lot of sites and nine figures of air are. Great. Yeah, I agree. Congratulations. Yeah, the pipeline is there. The air are growth.

It's kind of wild. This will be our first quarter, I think, where our core business won't be the biggest product line, which is kind of weird. I think that's a good thing for us because we're not decelerating on that side. It's just other products are really attractive. But I think it is, you're right. Our bigger concern is the market adoption, not our ability to build. I mean, this is a kind of enterprise-y type buyer where they're just only going to adopt things

so quickly. So even on the AI front, we have a lot of ideas, we've built a lot of interesting products. they're really nervous to adopt too quickly. And I think the example I always give is maybe you're trying to book a hotel and you call the hotel and you realize you're talking to an AI agent, but you're kind of like, I don't know, this is better than the alternative because I'm just trying to book a hotel. I don't know, man. I think when you call 911 and you're in the middle of a violent situation, I think there's something warming about knowing there's another human on their side trying to help you. You have to say they can't be augmented with AI, but I think that's like a much more challenging. societal question of what do we want humans to do and what do we want

AI to do and we are being conscious to not make that decision for the hundreds of millions of Americas we help keep safe yeah just as a taxpayer I would imagine that I would want the person to pick up but I'd love for the calls to be transcribed and then AI to find patterns between what's happening and insights and analytics and all there's also something strange like if you if somebody's calling 911 to report like a drunk somebody that's obviously drunk drunk drunk driving. It's like you're taking up bandwidth from somebody that is a human that could be going elsewhere. It's like for, you know, maybe it's like you should, there should be no dial time

is a clanker immediately picks up and says, what's the problem and then routes it either to a human or if it's less like, you know, if it's not like immediate, you know, some violent act is taking place. It can actually be solved by a voice, you know, voice model. And I answer the right approach. But yeah, I think it's going to answer your question. Like we're pretty focused on doing three things for our customers. Solving more crime. Right now, there's about a 40% clearance rate for killing someone.

So you've got almost 50 chance of getting away with homicide. That should be zero. You should every single person that kills someone should go to jail. Nonviolent crime is even worse. We don't solve cases faster. It takes way too long to solve crime. And then we want to do more with less. Like most people, I don't know if you all remember, our grandparents, our parents,

it was an admirable job to go into. policing to fire. This generation doesn't have view it that way, which means 80 plus percent of police departments are understaffed against their budget and it's not getting better. And technology is going to fill the gap. Yeah. People have compared you to like the Anderol or Palantir, kind of like, I don't know, American dynamism companies or whatever. People have compared you to good businesses. But I'm interested about, we talked to Shamsankar, CTO, Palantir, about some of the, of the difficulties of deploying software into governments. And he gave the example that one time they built a beautiful piece of software, exquisite system, and they went to deploy it.

And the team on the other side of the government that was firing it up was trying to run it on a computer that had like, you know, 128 megs of RAM instead of like a gig. And so that was kind of the dawn of the Ford deployed engineer. And I'm wondering if you have any unique solves on how to deploy systems, how to deploy software, if you like the forward-deployed model or something else, like what's working for you at actually getting your solutions into the field? So a really similar example. I remember distinctly, we were like launching this product and the designer has a beautiful, you know, MacBook and this HD retina display.

It's beautiful, right? Super expensive setup. And she's designed this like super slick thing. And I was like, great, Mariana, like, you should go like field test this. So it's like, this looks dope. like let's launch it yeah and she gets into a patrol car and it's a panasonic tough book it's a 13 inch screen it's 1280 by 1024 resolution and he's using it while he's driving 40 miles an hour and i'm like this the product's not going to work like we've got to go back but that is literally

our we've got i don't know hundreds of thousands of d a us using this product now and they're very happy but that's their normal use case they're driving they're on a tough book like it's a tiny screen it's low res it's old and so like you're pretty much treating it almost more like a mobile app but like with a distracted teenager as your customer and that's been pretty difficult because we want to build these like super high fidelity you're just sitting at a desk all day doing your job and like our customers are in the field all day um so that one's been pretty pretty tough and then i also think the other burden we've done a good job of going around is just IT in general yeah like i city IT is really tough to work with they're really tough to kind of just like get get going

so we tend to build everything we can to avoid IT. There's some pros and cons to that, but so far, I think it's been mostly pros. How does that actually work? I imagine, is it just like you're only looking for, like, user licensing or like Oath or something? Like, at some point, you have to plug into the IT systems a little bit, I imagine. Well, so it's a good example. Historically, everything in our world is on-prem. Like, we're one of the first cloud.

only solutions in this market. And early on, that was painful because people are used to buying a piece of software. They install a desktop application. That installation requires IT support. And so building everything in the cloud, which for this, for y'all, it's like, well, obviously, it was a very contrarian take seven years ago. And now it's moving. But I mean, we have a customer that just a few years ago moved off of paper records.

And they had filing cabinets. Like, imagine if you report a crime, they're like, hold on, we've got to go find that file. that file. Wow. And this is a big city. This is a city with millions of people in it. Yeah. Just got off a paper.

And I think in Maryland, in 23, the cloud became legal. It was legalized cloud. This is our legalizing. This is, we're going to protest for legalizing the cloud. Yes.

We love the cloud here. If you need it, if there's any cities that have still banned cloud, we will. And we hate paper. We are, we are, the show is presented by Ramp, of course. And we are strong in favor of paper and going to the cloud.

Agree. But literally, we didn't do business in Maryland until 2023 because it was illegal to be in the cloud. Yeah. Did you ever get a test environment with a tough book and a car that a designer could actually go and drive around the parking lot of your office or anything like that? No, we make all of our employees go do ride-alongs. Okay. Yeah.

It's so much fun. Yeah. Because you get to see the whole product in action. You get to meet the customer. You get to go catch some bad guys. It's a pretty fun way to spend eight hours. Yeah. How are you thinking about data privacy, where data lives?

There's obviously so many advantages to being cloud-based, but then you have some citizens who might say, wait, why is my image with this private company? I'm a taxpayer. I don't have a vote at your board meeting. I have a vote at my city council. How do you grapple with all that? What's the mood on the ground in various cities?

What are the dividing lines? I'm glad you mentioned. So our general stance is we don't write the rules. We create the levers for local politics to dictate. And so data retention is the easiest one. In some cities we work with, data retention is seven days. And every single data we capture is purged after in seven days. But then in some cities, like Dallas, it's a year.

In New Jersey, it's five years. A state legislation for five years. I don't care. I live in Atlanta. I think we're like at 30 or 60 days here in Atlanta. And that's up to the local politicians. politicians to decide like what makes sense for them. The other thing that we do that's pretty unique is every single action in our system is audited in perpetuity.

So whether you're downloading, you're searching, you're doing something that's stored. So the city manager, the Internal Affairs Bureau, those groups can actually say, hey, has anything nefarious been done? That's a big concern of people. So those two things tend to be a pretty good levers for letting local politics dictate versus, to your point, no one elected me to the police chief of America. I just built a camera at my house. I want to pitch you a startup idea that Blake Scholl,

the founder of Boom Supersona, he was thinking about doing this. Have you heard this story? He was thinking about building something before he started Boom, probably right around the time you were starting flogged. He wanted to make a smart stoplight that would have a camera on it and it would see, hey, there's no cars here. Why do I have a red light? Switch them.

feels like it would improve traffic flow it's a you know a situation we've all been in you're sitting there at the red light there's no one coming the other way flip the switch why is that is that a good idea is that something you could do is that something any company could do like what's the market structure

of the stoplight industry do you need to do some sort of private equity roll up walk me through your if you were putting on a VC how would you interpret that pitch my pushback on that pitch is to show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior who's getting promoted who's making more money if we fix traffic?

I don't think anyone, right? Opportunity cost of the workers. It's all diffuse in the economy. No, but this is the, but don't you think, don't you think a mayor could run on, hey, we have a lot of congestion here, we have a technology, you'd have to do a study or something to show that you could reduce congestion

if you had smarter traffic lights. It feels like someone. Mayors don't, mayor's going to let it on two things. Yeah. well paved roads and low crime that's it so many things that matter like so i mean i think the product idea makes a ton of sense yeah but i just go back to like one of the only reasons why because you mentioned andrel yeah when we were pivoting the business into local government trey stevens was like do not go sell to police it's a horrible market we tried it at palatire

it's not going to work it's not going to work it was like well no like i'm a little bullish He was an investor. He's an investor in the company. It's kind of, it might work. And what I didn't realize is systems like Palantir are too many steps removed away from solving crime at a local level. And like, Flock had coincidentally built a product that solved crime right away. And so for a police department, crime is equivalent to revenue. So we weren't helping them save money.

We're helping them generate revenue. And like, that does get a sergeant, lieutenant, a police chief promoted. Like, it gets a mayor reelected. And that would be my pitch to Blake is like, we've got to find a way to make this relevant to a mayor. And like just a little bit less traffic isn't going to move the needle and have them move off from having no technology and no cost structure. Well, he's busy building supersonic jets. He's got a good thing for now and for now. But maybe that's the next thing he works on.

I have a second startup to pitch you based on your answer to that question. Automated road paving startup. I go to the mayors and I say road paving gets you paid. and gets you in the job like would that work is that a good idea how would that play out if you thought that process through what what advice would you give to a to a road paving entrepreneur there was a yc company doing the little i remember this yeah yeah yeah walk me through your your thought process so i actually think that's a great idea we're working on something tangential to that um so one of the biggest issues is that to do what you're describing you have to know where the potholes are and cities

have no idea where potholes are and they rely on you calling 311 which I'm sure you both have done many times and say hey I'm just calling it to report a pothole yep no you don't and that that also costs the city on average like eight dollars per call on the 311 so it's a really inefficient system okay and so what we've been able to do is train our cameras to look for potholes and so now we can actually report back general road uh road conditions yep and that is the beginning of them be able to say hey now we can actually be intelligent about where we should send people to go repave. And I think an automated robot that does the paving would be even better.

But yeah, I love that idea. I think I'm in. That's a $25,000 check. Fantastic. Well, you know where to reach him. He is, of course. Oh, last, last, did you, uh, wanted your reactions? Uh, we had a guy named Riley on yesterday who made a find my parking cops.

Did you see that? Oh, that park was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. He's a little internet. He got shut down and it back up. It got shut down. Very quickly. I was impressed with San Francisco's reaction time on that. They shut it down, like, very quickly. But it's good fun. Yeah. I'm a fan of it. I think most people don't pay for parking because most of the time you don't get a ticket. So. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show. This is going to be fun. Great to get the update. Yeah. Congratulations on in the progress. And thank you for everything that you do. Yeah. Come back on anytime. Yeah. We'd love to talk to soon.

Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you. A man with 10, nine figure businesses. Yeah, if you want to reach people in cities, you've got to go to adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And before our next guest joins, we did need to acknowledge that Mark Leonard has stepped down from Constellation Software. Very sad news for health reasons. We hope he's okay. Interesting timing basically called the top on...

Yeah, we talked to Kerry, no interest on the show. You can go pull that up if you want to hear our conversation with him about these private equity software, enterprise software roll-ups. Mark Leonard was mixed on AI, sort of unclear on how it would affect the business long-term, but the market did not like it. And the stock fell off, and the stock has fallen again on this very sad news. So we are, of course, sending him our best. The health reasons that he is stepping down for are unspecified at this time. so, but please send your thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers.

Mark Leonard. And we have our next guest in the virtual waiting room. The TBPN Ultradone. There he is. Suit it up. Matton. How are you doing? Hello.

I'm doing well. How are you guys doing? It's been too long. Yeah, we've seen you before in the TBPN. He's back. Welcome back. It's a pleasure. Give us the news.

Give us the 140 characters and the company refresh everyone and then give us the news. Absolutely. So I'm Maton, CEO at Factory. At Factory, our mission is to bring autonomy to software engineering. What that means more concretely, we have built droids, which are autonomous software development agents, and more importantly, I'm here to tell you that they are the number one agent in the world. As we just released today in the Terminal Bench benchmark, which evaluates tools like ClaudeCode,

OpenAIs, Codex, CLI, Factory is number one, and also number three and also number five. Like any model you want, factory is still number one. No matter how you slice it, our droids are simply the best agents in the world. So I decided to share that. What's the secret? What got you there? Is it pre-training, post-training, a bunch of RL stuff? Is it a data fly wheel?

Like what's driving the growth? Yeah, great question. So I think one of the biggest things is that most, if not all of the agents out there, are built for one model in particular. So, you know, Claude Code is built to work with the Claude model. OpenAI's Codex is built for the GPT models. There are some other tools out there that aren't from the research labs that are focused on really fine-tuning their agent harness for one given model for any given step.

But what we've done with our droids is make them fully model agnostic, which actually makes them more performant in the long run. It's kind of similar to if you were a human engineer and you only, let's say, studied one coding language, you would actually be a weaker engineer than if you studied all of them. It's somewhat analogous there in terms of how we've built these droids that now allows them to be the most performant with any model that you put in under the hood. How are you viewing the market and the customer landscape, automated software engineering that feels niched down from years ago, which was just the transformer-based LLMs can write code? But as we actually dig in, we see that the needs of a Fortune 100 customer are maybe different than a mid-market company. which is different than a startup, which is different than an SMB, which is different than

a solo vibe coder, solopreneur. Where are you seeing opportunity in the market? How bifurcated is the market? It seems like you've wanted to be very general on the model side. Are you also trying to be general on the customer size side? Yeah, great question. I mean, I think the thing that a lot of the other tools have missed is the fact that the further you go into the large enterprise, the less overlap there is between software development and coding. So, for example, if you're a solo developer, your software development is basically just coding. You're not really doing code review. You're not doing that much in the way of documentation or testing or design docs.

And so where we focus and why we call droids software development agents as opposed to coding agents is that we focus on that whole end-to-end software development life cycle, which is really where a lot of enterprises are missing. Like there's a study, there's the famous study that came out from MIT that said something along the lines of 95% of AI adoption efforts are failing in the enterprise. I remember. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, it kind of makes sense.

Like, if you think about software development as a pipeline, you guys, I love hitting you at the surprise sound effect. We'll get some more positive. We're not bearish on you. It's just a funny study. That was good. It was perfect. It was just too good.

But, you know, software development is a pipeline, right? And if you focus on only one part of that pipeline, namely code generation. Yeah. And you expand that. I used to be a physicist. I don't know if you guys are big on fluid mechanics, but opening one part of a pipe and doing nothing to the others, you don't actually increase the throughput.

Sure. You just create new bottlenecks. And so the reason why a lot of these efforts are failing for software development is they're focusing on just coding, but then that just punts the problem down to testing or code review or documentation. And that's why a lot of the other tools out there aren't seeing kind of the adoption and the real business outcomes that we are with the droids. How do you see coding agents fitting into the consumer world?

This might not be your business at all, but I noticed that I've seen incredible results just from asking a question that you could hit deep research with. But if I ask it to Claude Code or Codex, it can build an entire HTML web page with JavaScript widgets and bar charts, and it just produces, it instantiates the information in a much cooler, it's interesting way. And I'm wondering how you're seeing crossover from advances in automated AI coding into a consumer world

where they might not even know that they asked for code, but they got code. It's already happening a little bit when you hit O3 Pro, it'll write some code to give you the answer. You don't even see it unless you unfurl the reasoning tokens. But how do you see that playing out

in like kind of the mid to long term? Great question. I think this is something that people aren't yet fully aware of, but this is actually the very first statement of our announcement, which is the best agents for software development are becoming the best agents for everything. And the reality is because basically every problem can be broken down into some sort of software development problem. And you can actually take it from Anthropic themselves.

Literally yesterday, Alex, Albert, the guy who runs dead. Devral at Anthropic tweets out, you know, the best coding model will be the best model for many types of knowledge work. Code is how computers operate. Anything you do on a computer can be done through code. And this is really why Factory being the number one software development agent is really going to then lead to a lot of other tasks. And we're already seeing this in the enterprise. So we sell explicitly to developers, but already PMs, designers, even people on the operation side, so like finance, biz ops, that sort of thing. We find that they're like sneaking their way in, even though they didn't actually, you know, put any budget towards

it, and they're starting to use droids kind of behind the back of some of the VPs of engineering. And this is really something that we've expected because of this fact that code is really the language that computers speak. And if you want a computer to do something for you, you will eventually, through some means, need code. A couple questions. What models are you guys getting the most leverage out of today? Is it a mix? Are you, are you focused? on, you said earlier, I think you're focused on a variety, being trying to be model agnostic, but be curious where, who you're paying out on the back end. Yeah, so right now we achieved the number one score across the board on Terminal Bench with Claude Opus. But again, we are,

you know, really focused on having the model agnostic stance because org by org they might have different preferences. Also, what the best model is depends, you know, know, what day it is, you know, tomorrow there could be another new best. And it's important that we have that ability to quickly swap them in. So that's one thing that I think is important. It's also even task by task. There are certain models that are better. And we want to make sure that the user has that familiarity with the model so that they can go in and, you know, swap it out if there's a task that they're doing that GPT5 might be better for or GROC might be better for. You forgot to mention you raised some new money today. Give us the news. That's right. We got a gong here.

That is right. We have raised $50 million from Sona, N-A, J.P. Morgan, and V-P. Morgan. Jamie Diamond's getting in? He couldn't help himself. He couldn't help himself. He couldn't help himself. I love it. Congratulations. That's our deposits, everybody, the world's deposits at work. Talk to me about that last question. We'll let you get back to your busy day. Talk to me about the branding. It feels like we just got the idea. of an agent recently, now you're kind of pitching droids, it's clearly your term for... Droids you're looking for. Yeah, yeah. People always talk about, you know, and being, we're not the droids. How much of that is like a differentiated brand that you want to be specific to your company

versus like a new coinage that you want to describe a different way of working that you'd actually like to see other companies adopt? And if you were seeing the entire industry standardized around that particular piece of language, you would be happy? Or would you be like, hey, they stole our brand? Yeah. I mean, I think generally like agent as a term is here to stay. But the point is, as a kind of general purpose term, it's often synonymous with like poor quality or like a while loop wrapped around LLM calls. And I think what we want to do is to make good on our promise to customers, which is giving them that best agentic experience. And we do that

through droids. At the end of the day, when you have a cold and your, you know, your nose is running, you don't want a tissue. You want a Kleenex. Similarly with software development, you want the droids to come in there, right? Okay. I love it. I love it. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for hopping by. We'll talk to you. Thanks. Thanks. We'll talk to you. Let me tell you about Bezell. Getbezzle.com. Your Bezle concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously. Any watch. And we have our next guest in Also, I guess we've got to wait to talk about this. Two new launches, one from Meta.

Yes. The Alexander announced Vibes, which is a meta-AI app for short-form AI-generated videos. Okay, yeah. YouTube launched something with AI-generated shorts leveraging V-O-3 recently. What else? And then there's a new chat chippy T product called Pulse. But let's get into it with our next guest over at Invisible. Welcome to the TV channel, John, Francis.

How are you doing? What's happening? Welcome to the show. Doing great. Excited to be here. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Kick us off with an introduction on you, the company. Any news you got to share?

What's new in your world? Yeah. Well, as you saw in Bloomberg, we've raised $100 million this year, which is a big turnover events. There we go. Woo! That's $2 billion. Yeah, crazy thing that when you saw a meta acquiring scale,

they had raised $1.8 billion, and we had only deployed $6 million. scaled profitably to 134 million of revenue of last year. That is wild. I remember I heard about you guys. I forget what context I heard about you guys for the first time. But even this was probably two years ago, even back then I was like, you guys were somewhat under the radar I felt like, but I heard some of your revenue numbers back then. I was like, how have I not heard about this company? But yeah, we wanted to. Invisible for not much longer. Yeah, no longer. No longer. Now we're visible. By the new domain, you're visible. Visible technology.

Yes. Give us an, I mean, I'd be helpful to hear like where you guys have an edge in the market broadly. And then I want to kind of, yeah, understand. Yeah, problem set, core, like what you're actually replacing, where customers are getting the most value. Anything like that would be super helpful. So 10 years ago when we founded the company, there was a question, which is if there's an app for everything, why isn't everything perfect yet. And Salesforce was the first SaaS company in 1999. For the last 25 years, every enterprise software company has been a SaaS company. And this has actually put customers

in a pretty absurd situation where if the customer wants a cake, Silicon Valley will not sell them a cake. They will sell them tools to make a cake. And the customer then has to hire a systems integrator like Accenture to stitch together all these SaaS applications into an end-to-end solution that actually works for the business. And so that is what we were disrupting. And Palantir was not public yet, so they weren't a well-understood comp. We were kind of like an ugly duckling because we were talking about AI services. And so it's just a fundamentally disruptive business model.

So you were competing initially with someone like an Accenture to integrate existing software systems. Is that right? Yeah, we build custom AI applications for enterprises and governments. And so you can think of this very different than SaaS, like a triangle. We have the horizontal platform, which is very powerful. But you have field engineers and field CTOs in a forward-deployed motion that builds custom AI applications that actually solve the problem for the enterprise of the government. And our insight was that even though every solution would be custom, the horizontal platform

would allow you to sort of build infinitely customizable software over time. That makes sense. We've been seeing Mark Benioff and Dr. Karp going at it over. various contracts, Salesforce, which you already mentioned, Palantir, which you also mentioned. Are you in that knockout, dragout, fight? Have you found a differentiator around industry or size of problem or are you just going in the arena? So Salesforce was founded in 1999. Palantir was founded in 2003.

So way before the Gen A.I era. So we were in a sense like the Gen A.I. Native way of doing this. we hired Matt Fitzpatrick, who previously ran McKinsey's Quantum Black Labs, and he's now our CEO, and after years of being capital efficient, this round sort of enables us to go into a pre-IPO motion. And, yeah, if you're a public markets investor, you don't really have that many options for buying AI today. So, and this is generally true for the enterprises, the customers themselves, if you want to

build custom AI solutions, Palantir is like a data integration and decision-making support company. So they really focus on that. But if you have a problem in anywhere else in your business, how do you build a custom solution with world-class field engineers? It's a very different type of engineer, very different type of go-to-market person, very different type of business that is familiar building custom solutions on the enterprise. You know, enterprises do not want their data to leave their systems. So they need all the solutions to be on-prem and containerized, and we have the ability to build in that way. Do you find, do you think that there's a shift in the AI era to large enterprises doing

more of these sort of like semi-custom solutions? Is that going to be a continuing trend? Because it feels like the last era was very much like rip out the old custom on-prem solutions and go to some sort of like one-size-fits-all cloud solution. Exactly. Yes. And this is a reversal. We're going all the way the other way. And I think it's because enterprises ultimately need proprietary and custom solutions. So in the SaaS era, like I said, they were stitching together things. And they had to do that with some combination of like their internal engineering function and systems integrators. And systems integrators are not tech companies. They're going to overcharge, under deliver. You're going to pay them by the hour. So their incentive is to bill you as many hours as possible without getting fired. And that's not really aligned with a company. efficiency. And so in this era, I think enterprises are realizing it's going to be very, very difficult for them to build world class engineering teams and to build a platform like the one we have where we can take the best models, the latest models, which we train. We have an AI

training business and deploy them in the enterprise to actually solve the business use cases that they have. Yeah. So how much should we read into you guys transitioning away from training? Is that a business that is? We're not transitioning away. We are fully committed to training. So actually, the move of meta acquiring scale basically cleared the field. And so it's an inherently oligopolistic market structure where there are a few players that have invested as much as we've invested over as many years as we've invested.

And so we have like 20,000 experts. And that number is scaling very quickly. We can hire like 1,000 experts a week. So when you're asking a model, a question about the, properties of silver or the history of Sweden or whatever you're asking a model, we have PhDs, masters, experts in every subject that are training these models and there's e-vals and lots of inputs into making these models great. Got it.

So leveraging the experience on the training side in order to help the- To deploy it in the enterprise. Got it, got it, got it. And then the business model for the deployment side is, is just going to repeat it back to you. So I understand is there's some period that looks more like services, but it becomes a piece of durable software

that they can use for a long model. Just like Palantir, exactly. Yes, yes, got it. AI services is exactly that way. Yeah, that puts us in an investing mode. We literally invest in our customers. So we put field engineers, field TTOs in with our clients, and there's an investment period to build the solution.

But once the solution's place. That is very durable revenue. And so you're, you're like a nightmare for someone like an Accenture, some of these big consulting companies that don't really have the true expertise around training these models and you get to, and have a lot of organizational bloat. Is that, is that right? Yes. So Matt, who, Matt, who's our new CEO, we bonded over ancient Greek and Roman history. And he calls it the battle of Thermopylae, because even if you have, even Accenture has like a million people worldwide, has some huge headcount. If there's three, if the pass is only yay wide and there's 300 people at the pass and we're always winning at

the pass, then we're going to win every battle. In other words, if, you know, I believe our technology is superior, dramatically superior already to traditional systems integrators. So if you're a buyer and you're hearing Accenture's pitch and Invisible's pitch, which one are you going to pick? The Battle of Thermopyla, Spartans win. It's fantastic. Spartans are coming for it. What a market. This is just a fantastic market. Awesome. Well, congratulations. Great to be on the progress. Great to be on the show, big fan. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

You said prepare, prepare to prepare to go public. What's the, what timeline are we thinking about? Is that, is that multiple years out? Is it, is it? We think in terms of, you know, how many hundreds of millions in revenue do you need to have before the story is just obvious to public markets investor. so we really want to build a business for all markets so the intrinsic value of the business the ability to survive you know in any condition is key and then we'll take it public awesome all right we'll come back on anytime yeah we'd love to ring the door to you great to have you thank thanks thank you all right up next jacob from our uh sorry david from juice box coming into the studio juice box re-stream waiting room in juice box has some fundraising news the

Gong's already warmed up. How are you doing? Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. David. Big day today. Introduce yourself.

Tell us. It's kind of a good day to drop a cinematic launch video. This is a good day for it. But take us through it. Introduce yourself, the company, the news. Yeah, I'm David, co-founder of Juicebox. Juicebox is an AI recruiting platform. We help our customers win the talent war.

And we do that by helping them find and engage the best talent. And yeah, today we're announcing our third. $30 million Series A and previously unannounced $6 million seat. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. There we go. Big day.

Okay. AI winning recruiting wars. What does that mean? How long until you're out of business because no one has a job anymore? I thought AI was going to get rid of it with all the jobs. No silly question. Are you working more with early stage, gross stage? stage, growth stage, you know, public companies, all the above. Like, where, where are you kind of

focused right now? As I saw, I admit, I only saw half the launch video, so you had me up until whatever, 50%. Nice. Did you see the part with the Zuck impression? I did see the Zuck impression. You made it through the important part. Yeah, we work with all kinds of companies ranging from, you know, founders doing the first hire all the way to. kind of growth stage companies, a few Fortune 500 customers as well. Some of those companies are perplexity, Ramp, Cora, and a bunch more. I think the common thread where we're able to add the most value is if the right person for the role is actually really hard to find, and that can be because they have a specific

skill set, a specific set of experiences, something that makes them unique and uniquely positioned to really excel in that role. I think of hiring as kind of like some sort of chain of events with different, point solutions there's actually finding talent job platforms linked in indeed then there's you know the you know you might want to send someone a test or have them fill out a form or process resumes you need an applicant tracking system I've seen other point solutions for send a video and then ask some questions and then process the video and let the let the user the hiring manager kind of

review videos there's a whole bunch of different things do you see yourself as kind of a cross journey platform? Are you focused on a particular landing zone? Like, where's the product position today? Yeah, it's a great question. I think of the recruiting space is really having two different ways in which you could add value. One is finding net new candidates, people that you wouldn't have discovered or wouldn't have gotten into your pipeline in the first place. And then everything that's carrying through the pipeline and optimizing that pipeline. And the latter is usually about like saving time and optimizing conversion rates. And the former is about making sure the right talent is speaking to you in the first place.

We're focused on that part. And so our goal is to help companies discover talent that they wouldn't otherwise. And we do that by combining a bunch of different data sources and then using large language models to run the search and surface those profiles for you. And so if you think about what a recruiter does today on, say, LinkedIn recruiter or like a typical search solution, they set a bunch of filters and then start reviewing profiles one by one. It's super manual, requires a lot of thoughts still to, like, think of what could make that profile a fit.

And that's exactly the process that we're able to do with LLMs. So is this a direct replacement for LinkedIn recruiter? Are you trying to get people to just be able to... Or do you want to, like, pop a tier LinkedIn with a screen recorder or API or something like widget, plug it in something like that? I don't know. It depends. I mean, there's been some companies that's done successfully. Some of them got acquired by LinkedIn, but I don't know.

No puppeteering of LinkedIn. Most of our customers are existing LinkedIn customers. Our goal is to help you find net new talent and do so in a more efficient way. So it's really about kind of enhancing the workflow of the recruiter and enabling them to do that search that would just be too manual or too time consuming to do otherwise. Like looking through 50,000 software engineering profiles is just not something that's like feasible. but for an LLM it's very feasible and can do it in a couple minutes. So there are different pools of talent for,

I mean, we do media, video production here. We might want to hire somebody who doesn't really have a LinkedIn presence, but they might have an Instagram account or they might have a personal website where they've done some, they put up their show reels or what they've worked on. Do you have crawlers that could go out and find those profiles on the internet?

How could I think about the surface area of you going out and finding me candidates? and sourcing. That's right. So we look at a bunch of different data sources for different types of roles. So I'll give two examples, one on the engineering side, you know, GitHub profiles, a ton of value on those, especially where, you know, traditional LinkedIn profiles or resumes might be a bit more sparse, especially for engineers who don't put a ton of info on there.

GitHubs can be really rich and a really interesting data source. Meanwhile, on the sales side, often what we see is, you know, customers want to find sellers who have experience selling into a specific type of buyer persona. And so there it's actually a bit more about the company data. You know, what type of companies does their current companies sell into? What type of a platform are they selling? Is it a SaaS product? Is it a usage-based product and more?

And so all of that information we enrich and we try to aggregate up front. So we can make those decisions for you and help surface the right profiles there. There's another, they put an example. They have a tag on their site called Likely to Switch, which would be like you have a round of late. layoffs, funding or vesting timelines. People don't really think about that. You can see, like, okay, this person's been here for four years.

They're probably getting a refresher, but they're vested out. That's pretty cool. What do you think, do you have a strong thesis yourself around employment over the next 10 years? I'm assuming, you know, Sequoia leading this round. I think that says... Sequoia confirmed, not AGI-I-pilled. Confirmed? No, but it says that we're still going to have talent wars in a decade, right?

That's what that tells me. But how do you think about it? Yeah, I think if you're AGI-pilled, it actually means hiring the right talent is even more important. And the reason for that is that if you think of, like, the output of a given person is usually constrained by, like, their time, their previous knowledge and context. whatever tooling they're using. And so if the tooling that they're using is getting exponentially better, they use LLMs to automate a bunch of the things

they'd otherwise do. They're much more productive than they would usually do. And that's all a multiple of the person, or like the initial person in their kind of raw capacity, having the right person that role becomes even more important. Because if AI basically 10x is whatever you do, you want to have the highest baseline that you can add that 10x to. And so it gets even more important

to have the right talent on your team. And if you think of that in the context of a software, If a 10x software engineer becomes 100x, you want to have as many 10x software engineers as you can. And so my view is that the race for talent will become more and more competitive as AI gets better and better because of having the right people on your team has that outsized impact. And I think we're already seeing some of that in like, you know, the war for talent and the AI labs. But I think more and more of that will trickle down into the rest of the economy as well. sharp what do you think about outcome-based pricing famously used in the recruiting industry most human

recruiters even if they work for a firm they might get one month salary as a bonus if they place someone successfully versus LinkedIn which is subscription software completely not outcome based what model do you think will dominate in the future what are you doing yeah it's a really good question. We, so we have like a proceed pricing, normal SaaS model, but then we also have an agent product, which is priced per role that the agent works on. And so it's not quite outcome-based, but it's more like usage-based. How many roles are you deploying the agent for? Over time, we want to get closer and closer the outcome-based pricing as is possible. You know, if you think of recruiting agencies, it's pretty common to do like 20-25% fee of first-year salary, which

on like a dollar value is much, much more than one could probably charge for a SaaS subscription. And so there's definitely a lot of things that are attractive there. At the same time, I think the markets maybe not quite there yet are not quite ready to pay for software on like a, say, percentage of higher model, though, you know, I hope we'll be able to push in that direction over time as well. Fantastic. Well, congratulations. Super cool. Really insane progress. Yeah.

And congrats on the new round. We will talk to you for having me on. Have a very rest of your day. Thanks for coming on. Samo launched a new feature today called Pulse. It's in ChatGPT, initially available to pro subscribers. That's the $200 a month tier, right? Pulse works for you overnight and keeps thinking about your interests,

your connected data, your recent chats, and more. Every morning you get a custom-generated set of stuff you might be interested in. It performs super well if you tell Chat-GPT more about what's important to you. regular chat, you could mention, I like to go visit Bora Bora someday, or my kid is six months old and I'm interested in developmental milestones, and in the future, you might get useful updates. Think of treating ChatGPT like a super-confident personal assistant. Sometimes you ask for things you need in the moment, but if you share general preferences, it will do a good job for you proactively. This also points to what I believe is the future of Chat-GPT, a shift from

being all-reactive to being significantly proactive. I completely agree with this concept. and extremely personalized. This is an early look, and right now, only available to pro subscribers. We will work hard to improve the quality over time and find a way to bring it to plus subscribers too. That sounds compute intensive. That sounds like they're going to be running essentially

an 03 pro-level query, a chat GPT5 pro-level query every night asking, based on what's going on in the news, based on what this person searched for, based on all the chats recently, let's summarize and put together some sort of dossier for them and service that. So that's basically one big, you know, fire up the GPUs every single night. You've got to get the customers to pay for it, at least in the short term.

But what do you think, Tyler? You think you'll use this? It's pretty interesting. I'm wondering, is this the thing that Sam Mullen was talking about, the compute-intensive thing they're rolling out? He said this week we will be launching a couple compute-intensive things. Some of those will probably be announced at Dev Day. This is one that he's just announcing this week.

I mean, this feels like it's effectively doing something like, you know, just kind of hanging out in the background. Hanging out in the background, you know, somewhat actively, somewhat passively, just gauging, you know, what your interests are. I can see this as like almost like having a Google alert set up. Amjad from Replit says, reminds me of Google now, but how do I get started? I don't see it in the app. So it's obviously rolling, rolling out slowly. Yeah, you can definitely see like an agent being. built into this.

Yep. That seems very natural. Totally. And I feel like chat GPT was already starting to sort of surface this concept of like, hey, do you want me to do this every week for you? Do you want me to do this every month for you? But I haven't actually set up any of those cron jobs and had it stick around and been become part of my workflow.

But I like the idea of it. And I think that this, the big thing is just like for retention, if every time you open the chat GPT app in the morning instead of just a empty box, you're greeted with, like, here's some interesting stuff. Or you're getting a push notification. Or a push notification, that's going to be huge for retention. Or it's like, hey, this product wants. Do you want to buy this?

You want to buy this? Let's pull up this video from Alexander Wang. Let's pull it up. Just share vibes, a new feed in the meta-AI app. Let's see if they beat the slop allegations. I think it's powered by Mid-Journeys. It looks pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, Mid-Journey, fantastic model.

It looks pretty good. I wonder how this is actually going to... So separate app is what he's saying? It's a new feed in the meta-AI app. Okay, in the meta-a-I app. So you would expect this to be baked directly in Instagram, but that's probably too much compute out of the gate to just drop it in as a filter or something

or button in Instagram. Because if you have a billion people pushing that button, you're just going to get swamped. I think this beats the slop allegations. There's some cool stuff you could do with this. I mean, video generation looks good. Looks V-O-3 level to me. I don't know.

Obviously, these were curated and selected, but... We'll have to get an app. Tyler, before we do the show tomorrow, please use the app for, like, I don't know, like 12 or 14 hours, something like that. Straight, no break. Just get wireheaded. Just lock in. Just lock in.

Max, Max, uh, Conrad in the chat says, I'm tired of hearing about fundraisers without business metrics, top line, bottom line value created for customers. Okay, Max. Good point.

We want to push people harder to say if you want to come on, you've got to give us some numbers. And if you don't got numbers to share other than the headline. We should have a very small column. Credit to juice, I think they've been actually crushing it.

Raising money. Yeah, I mean, that is a market where money flows very freely because you're, as a business, you're ready to sign a check for $200,000 to hire someone is the software engineer? You're like, yeah, I'll pay $10,000 to get the job done, $20,000.

So the money flows quite freely, and that's why there's so many executive recruiters, software engineering recruiters, that make a ton of money just working basically for themselves, just as talent agents, moving things around. Well, Meek Mill and Elizabeth Holmes were going back and forth on X. Elizabeth says, thanks, Meek,

currently serving a 137-month sentence in federal prison. and would love to work with you on reform. Here's some legislation I have drafted. Your story inspired me. And Meek Mill says, let me check your story out. And Will Brown says, Elizabeth Holmes, this year is our year. Elizabeth Holmes, we can never forget this, Tiger. Meek Mill, I used to pray for times like this, to rhyme like this.

I know. Focus on it, too. It's a great one. Yeah, I think they're thinking about different aspects of reform. Yeah. Well, we don't wrap. Maybe Meek Mill would want Y-C arrest, where she has. to lock in and just repeatedly build

the device forever. I like that. We don't wrap, but we do sing Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Tyler missed it. I got me a second to kind of like hit the right note there. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Book of Wanderth, inspiring views, Hotel Great Amenys, Dreamy vets, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concier service. Well, we got breaking news. Trump signs order to approve the TikTok deal and avoid the U.S. The chat was on it way before we were. And let's see, TikTok is poised to be spun off into a separate U.S. entity to comply with the 2024 law requiring the China-based parent company bite dance to divest or face a U.S. ban.

Trump said, I had a very good talk with President Xi, a lot of respect for him. Hopefully he has a lot of respect for me too. And we talked about TikTok and other things. But we talked about TikTok, and he gave us the go-ahead. under the deal, a group of U.S. investors, including Oracle and Silver Lake, are set to take a majority stake in the new TikTok entity. Let's give it up for Silver Lake. Good to see them throwing some size around as well as Oracle.

Bite Dance will maintain less than 20% in equity to comply with the DeVest or Ban Law. Vice President Vance said the company will be valued around $14 billion. Feels weirdly low. Low. Just the U.S. business? I don't know. I felt like, I mean, we talked to Sean Franklin. It sounds like they were losing a lot of money on TikTok shop and some of the, I mean,

the growth had probably plateaued with wheels and shorts. Well, they were just losing money in general. Yeah, but you got to imagine that that monetizes pretty well. It's such a big network, so much time on site. But yeah, it's trading like a Snapchat or Pinterest, basically, like a non-meta property, a non-Google YouTube property. Oh, well. It's crazy.

We'll have to keep checking in on it. So TikTok valued less than perplexity. Okay. Honestly, now I can see why Arvin was trying to get a bid in. True. Yeah. He's like, I'm already at around 20, but yeah. I'm already in a merger of equals, basically.

Brett Adcock should have taken a crack, too. He could have, he could have absorbed 30% of his market cap. He could have easily absorbed. Anderil could have. True. There's a lot of companies that could have absorbed. I'd like to see Palantir pick them up, run the data. Yeah, 14, 14 billion is crazy.

Crazy low. That's going to be, I'm surprised the CCP said yes to this. Yeah, what's the catch? This feels like it's worth like 140 billion to the CCP. It feels like there's other chips on the table that are being traded around, whether it's like rare earth or, you know, some sort of, you know, deal on tariffs or they, they, This is such a multi-pronged deal between different countries and stakeholders. The UN thing just happened.

And so there's a whole bunch of different pieces. And the art of the deal is not a single, iterated, you know, price, a single asset in the moment type thing. Could Truth Social have picked it up? Truth Social is right around there, too. No, they've fallen. They're in the single, they're still a unicorn, right? Our president is still a unicorn tech founder, I believe. 4.7 billion.

There you go. He's a unicorn founder, folks. When's earnings on November 7th? So, we got it. We got to lock it for that one. I don't think DJT gives a speech. You should. That would be crazy.

What's you got, Tyler? Do we know, I think there are rumors that, like, the TikTok algorithm would still, like, be governed by the Chinese, but they would run on, like, American hardware or something. We're going to do the inference. Yeah. We're going to do the inference. They'll do the training. We'll do the inference. It's like the algorithm with Chinese characteristics.

Yes. But I am somewhat bullish on the idea of, like, doing some post-training on top of their algorithm or doing some secondary, like, post-inference, you see the ranking of the feed. You're doing analytics on that and seeing, like, okay, like, there's still some, like, propaganda stuff here. Was that confirmed that that is what's going to happen, though? I don't know. I don't know if that was confirmed. But there are, it's not a total black pill if the training still happens there because you can do so much post.

training, I think, and monitoring. And even just having the data, you can start running analytics and understanding what type of content is showing and what context, like, are there actual, like, are certain trends or keywords, or is there certain censorship of certain ideas or promotion of certain ideas? At least if you have access to the data of what's being served, what TikTok users are watching, you can then understand,

and then you can apply pressure or post-training or anything else. Anyway, in other news, the Lucy nicotine vending machine has arrived at Palantir. This was a journey. I worked with Eliano on this, and John says, Palantir has a climate-controlled Lucy vending machine for their employees in their office, and you're bearish. It was a lot of fun.

So we'll be sending out a few more of those, hopefully getting one in the TB and Ultram soon. The last thing was the Financial Times has an article about America's biggest corporations keep talking about AI, but struggle to explain the upsides. We'll dig into this another day, but they analyzed hundreds of filings that suggest S&P 500 constituents are clearer about the technology's risks than its benefits. And another one of these data points of Fortune 500 companies being reticent to adopt AI, I'm not sure if it's just blanket bearish for Fortune 500 companies. If you're a big enterprise and you're not able to figure out a way to deliver positive ROI when a magical new technology comes along, It might not be a good sign for you.

Jordy, what else do you want to talk about today? Yeah, I was just confused. I was trying to dig in and see, I didn't see A16Z in the announcement anywhere. Oh, yeah, they were supposed to be, right? Maybe they pulled out or something. I don't know. I like the idea of the Ben and Mark show

just being hard-coded into the first-post algorithm. They got Rick Rubin on there. Show me some Rick Rubin TikToks. Some Tornburg. A little Chris Dixon in there. Some KB. This would be a good TikTok algorithm. They'd be down.

They still could be in it, but we'll see. see. Well, we can ask, it's out. I hope the thumb is on the scale, regardless of their ownership position. Putting thumbs on scales. A big fan of thumbs on scales. Anyways, without further ado, we, I think got to get on with Taipei. I think we do. I think we do. We will see you folks tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for tuning in. Leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Please do. If you're listening there, and we love you. We will talk to you soon. See tomorrow. Goodbye.