TBPN Live - Saratoga Water, Amjad Masad, Guillermo Rauch, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Kian Sadeghi, Vercel and Replit

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:17) - Ashton Hall and Saratoga Water (09:40) - DOW jumps 500 pts (21:21) - Vercel Deep Dive (37:13) - Replit Deep Dive (44:20) - Guillermo Rauch (01:20:50) - Lulu Cheng Meservey (01:51:40) - Cloudflare Deep Dive (02:24:40) - Amjad Masad (02:54:37) - Kian Sadeghi

You're watching TVPN live it is Monday March 24th 2024. We are live from the Temple of Technology The fortress of finance the capital of capital this show starts now. We got a great show for you today folks Thanks for saving me there John. How's your money? I wasn't quite sure I was too focused on my routine this morning. I forgot to focus on the job at hand. Yep, which is to do the show But I woke up in the.50, you woke up at 4.50. That's right. There's a guy online who woke up at 3.40. He's doing 3.40.

I mean, there's real alpha if you're a morning routine guy and you're just getting up. If that's your identity, just be the boss. Also, if you're gonna film it, you gotta get up even earlier to talk to your cinematographer. Hey, can you get gonna film it, you gotta get up even earlier to talk to your cinematographer, hey, can you get into the building, set up the cameras for every single shot.

But a fantastically viral video. It's actually very strategic to start your day at midnight when the clock strikes 12,01, just get into it. I've been saying that. I've been waking up earlier and earlier to the point where some days I'll wake up at noon the day before, just to be super ready for the next day. But we are of course talking about Ashton Hall,

the viral influencer, fitness influencer who has a bizarre morning routine where he dunks his face in ice water and rubs banana on his face. But respect for the hustle. But- What we really care about is that he's moving markets. He's moving markets and he's also moving views.

He has pulled basically a billion views, become a celebrity overnight. He already had millions of followers on Instagram. It's now at 8.8. I'm sure if I open it up now, it's even higher. He posted, what's interesting is that this broke containment. So this video, he's posted. What's interesting is that this broke containment. So this video, he's been posting on Instagram for years.

This broke containment. It has like a million links on it. And you've probably seen some of his other videos where he's running with the G-Wagon. And it's- Always great, but this video was art, and so it broke out in a completely different way. It was actually not even posted by him on X.

It was posted by tips for men fashion essentials luxury And it has almost a billion views 100,000 quote tweets something like that and it's fascinating the way it's structured just to be the most viral thing possible I mean, yeah, he's obviously very muscular and jacked and then you have this weird repeating very muscular and jacked, and then you have this weird, repeating like imagery of the Saratoga blue bottle of water that he loves, he dunks his face in ice. Which we figured this out, it wasn't sponsored by Saratoga. It was not.

So he was just appreciating. He's just a fan of it. Just appreciating business. Just wanted to put them on. Yeah, there's a bunch of other funny things where, as you dig into the video, there's just a fan of it. Just appreciating business. Just wanted to put them on. Yeah. I guess you do the same thing here. There's a bunch of other funny things where as you dig into the video, there's just more and more Easter eggs.

Like at 6 a.m. or something, he dives into the pool. But as he's walking up to the pool, you can see that there's a no diving sign. Did you see that one? I didn't see that. I saw that he was in the air for four minutes. Oh yeah, that one's really funny too. So like the editing is genius.

And clearly it's crazy because like the cinematographer and the editor on this is genuinely a generational talent in terms of social media. You don't think it's him? No, it's not him. He has a team. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah, he has a team of like three people. I figured he was just setting up the camera. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can actually see the other videographer in there because he has a team of like three people and in one of his Instagrams I went on different than a chef Yes

I went on a little deep dive and he and he said like if you want to be a successful online coach He referenced Alex Hermos II and he said you need to you need to build a team And of course his his the product that he sells is help you build that team to become the fitness coach or the online influencer, right? This is kind of like a meta level of like, he's the boss's boss. He's the coach's coach. Yeah, he's a course seller who helps you sell courses effectively.

But he talks about you need to start by getting a social media team around you, a great person that can film you constantly so that you're posting every single day. Then you need a appointment booker who just schedules appointments with clients, like your leads. Then you need the closer who gets on with super high energy

and is like, yes, this is gonna transform you. Get ready to put your credit card down. But that's not you, the closer's not you. That's not you, no, he's not involved. And then they get them to download an app, and then the app says, here's where your workout routines are, here's where your diet is, and then they get them to download an app and the app says, here's where your workout routines are. Here's where your diets diet is. And then yes, Ashton will get on the zoom call with you like once, but like he's scaling his

business out. And so he can't possibly be on zoom with, you know, 50,000 fitness clients, but they can watch his content and they can be in his program that he's overseeing as essentially the CEO of this training corporation, which is probably doing fantastically well. He says he hasn't made 10 million dollars yet but he is well into the seven figures. So he's not building in public, he's sort of like partially talking about it. I mean you never really know what these guys if they're lying but I totally believe that he's making millions of dollars. I think it would be impressive if he wasn't making millions with that much attention. He has deals, he has brand deals of dollars. I think there's no question. It would be impressive if he wasn't making millions

with that much attention. And he has deals. He has brand deals as well. I think he has a shoe deal already. And I wouldn't be surprised if Saratoga Water partners up with him as well, because he's done fantastically for that brand. The face of Saratoga.

The news today is that the morning, LMAO, the morning routine guy, really added $1 billion to the stock of the water he drinks. It's up 10% before hours. Saratoga's actually privately owned by another company, but people are still buying it. We bought some of it. I'm just looking now.

It's actually basically flat. I guess it popped out of the gates. The short sellers think that it's not gonna be Lindy. Yeah. So they're gonna stick around. It is a very interesting question of how do you seize the moment on mega virality? He is not like the Hawk To A Girl

where he was unknown and then he went mega viral. He already has a machine to convert all this. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see him do a whole host of interviews and podcast tour off of this. He already has millions of followers and a complete funnel with a team where he can capture and monetize. I think that was part of the problem with Hayley Welch, the Hawk to a girl was that she became famous and then had to go do podcasts and

then go and set up a podcast on her own and then set up a business around it and start making money from it. She wasn't equipped to capture all that attention and all that value immediately. And so that's why probably when she heard Hey, this crypto thing is interesting. She launched the coin and then that went very poorly. So Lulu who will be on the show later today says she's sad to see the Saratoga X account sleep through this most posts most recent Posts are from 2022 in their hashtag soup. You're missing the moment get back in the game you have three more hours before this vanishes vanishes into the sands of internet history. And yeah, they don't even have their most recent

bottle design on there, it's rough. Pretty amazing you can get almost a billion views at this point for free for your product. Yep, so my question for Lulu, which we'll get into with her is, does Saratoga actually need to do anything in this case? Like if, case in point, like the viral video of Ashton, the one that kicked all of this off,

wasn't even posted by him. It wasn't even an example of him going direct. He posted on Instagram, tips for men posted it on X, and that's the one that went viral. Doesn't matter, the value still accrues to him. Does Saratoga need to hard post from that? We need to go study the tips for men account because I don't know what the-

Because they posted other stuff and they get like 10 likes. And then this one was like this game thing. Yeah, it's one of those accounts. Yeah, it's just like, it's kind of just like slop cool images sometimes, some interesting stuff, but you know, it's very high volatility because it's just an anonymous,

like feed the algorithm account. So my question for Lulu is like, what do we wanna see exactly? Let's try and concretize that more because if Saratoga just came out and we're like, oh yeah, like this is cool, like, you know, maybe that gets some virality, but it's not gonna be a billion views.

They've already got the billion views in their product. They've probably captured most of the value. Like, what do we really wanna see from them? This is a company that's been in business since 1872, let's remember. It's not like the founder's gonna come on and be like, oh yeah, let me tell you my whole story. This is a whole other story, but at one point,

one of my favorite bottle water brands is Mountain Valley. Popular, it's the green bottle. I looked, they like at one point like filed for an IPO or something like that, then they didn't go public. So I looked at some of their numbers and however bad you thought the business of selling bottled water is, it's worse.

They at one point with one of their skews did 10 million of revenue, 10 million, and they had $100,000 in margin on it. Oh, that's rough. I was like, just don't do it. 1% margin, yes, rough. Just stop yourself, just stop that business activity. There's gotta be better ways to make 100K, but anyway. Speaking of tips for men, I got a tip for men.

We have eight sleep. Nice to feel your best day is turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. If you're trying to wake up at 4 a.m., 3 a.m., 2 a.m., 1 a.m., you're gonna need an eight sleep. It'll help you wake up earlier and get on your grind. I actually did wake up on my eight sleep at 3 a.m. this morning. I assumed it was time to wake up. I checked the clock. I'm did wake up on my eighth sleep at 3 AM this morning.

I assumed it was time to wake up. I checked the clock. I'm like, I've got to go back to bed at least for an hour and a half. I'm glad you were up early because you got to experience the stock market open, which was fantastic. Let's hear it for the stock market, folks.

Let's hear it. It's fantastic. A massive rally. Stocks are up the Dow gains around 500 points on tariff optimism. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Import investors are welcoming the latest pivot on tariffs with the US set to limit the range of import levies it introduces next week. US stock benchmarks started the weeks solidly higher

the S&P inched up last week, snapping a four week losing streak partly driven by uncertainty caused by President Trump's trade policy. Yeah, and many people are saying that this is related to tariffs, but on the other side of this, it is very possible that the market is reacting to Ashton's routine going viral. That's true.

And if you can imagine if everybody just started consuming products at 3.45 a.m. versus waiting until 9 a.m. It would be a big boost to consumer adoption. Yeah, just a.m. versus waiting until 9 a.m. It would be a big boost to consumer adoption. Yeah, just a big boost. And consumer confidence, for sure. Consumer confidence overall spending. It is hilarious watching his routine and being like,

this guy has been up for five hours and he still hasn't started work. It's like so much time before doing anything. I got very Tim Ferriss-coded in college, and I would do the whole wake up, meditate, breath work, journal, and then I was like, what actually makes me feel better about my life is to just get the things that are important done

and be productive, and yes, be active, but the whole hour and a half morning routine just to start your day, I'm much more of the mindset now. I just like to get up and start. Yeah, he's probably taking it a little bit too far, but I do think there is some truth in there. He actually laid out his reasoning for waking up so early and he said, you should be up from four to eight.

You will be unbothered. There'll be no one else bothering you. So you can really get deep work done, which is probably true, whether or not it's just this crazy morning routine. But even if you're just answering emails, it's probably productive. And he was saying that you will be self-selecting,

you'll be selecting yourself out of the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. crowd, which is usually filled with drinking and partying and all these things that kind of just set you back, both p.m. to 2 a.m. crowd, which is usually filled with drinking and partying and all these things that kind of just set you back, both physically and mentally. So I think there's some truth in what he's saying, and if you follow his protocol, I mean, yeah, it's gonna be a little silly

rubbing banana all over your face, but you'll probably be, you know, closer to higher performance than doing the opposite of what he's doing, right? I think my point of view on it is that, it seems like willpower is one of those things that the more willpower you use, the more that you get. But it's almost, it's maybe not a perfect rule

because if you spent all your willpower in the morning, hammering through this multi-step routine, and then you get to the email and you're like, actually doing my email is a lot less fun than like jumping in the cold pool. So maybe you should just start and do the stuff that takes a lot of willpower and then do the jump in the pool in the afternoon.

Right? Yeah. I mean, he probably could get 90% of his workout done in like an hour instead of five. But I mean, he's a fitness guy. Like he needs to be doing fitness. Yeah, and I also respect his game of what is the most viral thing that I could do from 345 to then. It's fantastic.

It really is art. And I think it just shows you how extreme the power law can be on social media. I think that we should spend this week and make the TB version of it. I like that we should spend this week and make the TB version of it and roll it out by Friday. Well back to tariffs, the important thing. Trump said he would impose tariffs to match those aimed at the US by trading partners. The planned reciprocal action looks set to be more targeted than originally thought,

the Wall Street Journal reported. The administration has narrowed its focus to about 15% of nations currently running persistent trade imbalances with the US. Treasury Secretary Scott Bassant calls this the Dirty 15. The sectoral tariffs are now unlikely to be announced on April 2nd. Though the measures under consideration still amount to a shock to world trade,

they fall short of the worst case economic scenarios investors have been girding for. And so another classic economic story where the initial headline news is very bad and then pull back and then you get to something that's a little bit more reasonable. So hopefully it shakes out, hopefully all of the companies that we're rooting for

get through it and are able to make their products in safe places and deliver them to consumers affordably. That's right. Well, if you're looking to trade the tariff news or get in on the action head over to or hedge.com can do it all investing for those who take it seriously multi asset investing industry leading yields trusted by millions go to public.com and sign up. Do it.

Anyway, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy. We got some news from Deleon, a friend of the show. He says, out with the old, in with the new. Keon over at Nucleus is building the new 23andMe, and the old 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. Keon says, Blockbusterbuster has collapsed it's time for Netflix to rise the number one greatest detail that is currently being missed from the story is the chart below. When 23andMe launched in 2006 it cost about

ten million dollars to read all of someone's DNA a whole genome test so 23 and me and the technology 23 used missed millions of genetic markers that could dramatically shape someone's health and future family. 23andMe and the technology 23 used, missed millions of genetic markers that could dramatically shape someone's health and future family. 23andMe used something called shotgun sequencing. They basically blast all the DNA away and use a bunch of averages to guess what your genome's like. They don't actually read out a single strand of DNA.

And so now- Which, taking the shotgun approach to your health sounds a little bit bad when you say it out loud, John. Yep. So we're glad to take the sniper approach. Yes, yes. And so now this whole genome test cost a few hundred dollars. We can now finally bring to everyone a true DNA health

test, family planning, disease risk, and he starts showing for his company, which we love. So good luck to you, Kian. Let's read from the co-founder, Anne Wojcicki. She says, the 23andMe special committee released news today indicating their plan to take the company through chapter 11. Well, I'm disappointed that we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected. I am supportive of the company and intend to be a bidder. I have resigned as the CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue

the company as an independent bidder. She wants it back. I love it. Nineteen years ago when I co-founded 23andMe, the direct to consumer industry did not exist and most people had no idea they would ever want to see their genome. So much has changed. There's now a thriving direct to consumer industry. Over 15 million people have been 23andMe customers. These customers are continuing to learn about their family relationships and how to optimize their health thanks to the incredible team of individuals at 23andMe. And this is a pretty interesting bidding process.

So lots of people came out in support of Wojcicki. And didn't Kion submit an unsolicited sort of bid? He was talking about bidding months ago. We'll see what actually happens. I don't think he's quite at the scale where he could just buy this off of his own balance sheet, but he is a growing company, and there's always the chance of a bigger round.

Got a bunch of big investors behind him. It's possible. Bology came out in support, Celine from Loyal came out in support, talking about how inspiring the leadership at 23andMe has been, and it really was a formative company in the 2010s, basically. What's interesting is that Wilmanitis has been beating this drum for a long time about, hey, 23andMe has a lot of genetic data.

Let's not let this fall into the hands of an adversary country. So I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about who buys this and where the data goes. And if you did 23andMe maybe like 15 years ago as like a Christmas present, you might want to export that data and then delete your account and make sure that they remove it from their servers just so that your data is not up for sale at some point. I don't know. It's not health advice, but it seems like a reasonable thing to do. And I do believe that if you ask them to

Delete your genome and really that is the I would imagine that the Core asset value of the business is the genetic data of the 15 million people that have used it or even No, I don't think so. I Mean, I think your asset is really just like getting people to come and think a hundred bucks for something He fund is saying, you know, look we can buy this. No, I don't think PE funds are thinking, I think the core asset is really just like getting people to come and pay a hundred bucks for something. PE fund is saying, you know, look, we can buy this. No, I don't think PE funds are thinking that. I think maybe some venture investors might be thinking that in terms of let's train a custom,

I think Keyon is thinking that, but I don't think private equity is thinking that. I think private equity is thinking, okay, it has this much revenue, people kind of, like there's a thousand customers that come in every week and buy this thing that's a hundred bucks and here's the profit margins, can we strip out any of the costs, can we actually make this work?

I don't think people are thinking about this trove of genetic data because it's very hard to monetize at this point, it's not like, okay, Reddit is for sale and you can just take the Reddit data and immediately train an LLM and boom, you're good. There's gonna be so much scrutiny on this acquisition and who buys it, what they intend to do with it. There's millions of Americans and I guess people globally

that are going to be, want to have a say in what kind of happens. And so the Wall Street Journal reports that 23andMe said that there will be no changes to how it stores, manages, and protects customer data. Any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data, and then they immediately move on

to the next segment in this Wall Street Journal article. How do I delete my 23andMe account data? But saying. And then it's very clear, it's like, log into your account, go to the settings section, click delete data, permanently delete data. So you can go do that if you want. Anyway, what will happen to the genetic data

in a bankruptcy sale? In certain bankruptcy cases, a judge can appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman, ombudsman, who makes a recommendation on whether a bankrupt company should be allowed to sell consumers' private information. This happened when lab testing startup UBiome filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

The court appointed one who ultimately recommended approval of the sale of personal data. So watch out, you might get your data sold. Anyway, did you have something else to say? Yeah, I was just gonna highlight that. It seems like a very real possibility. I think that Anne would have come out and said, there is no scenario in which a company buys 23andMe

to then sell your data to other companies. She would have been very explicit about that. So the fact that she's not being explicit about that and then they're highlighting this you buy them Case where they did sell the data. Yeah, I would I would just I think the safe thing to do is assume Your genetic data will be sold to the highest bidder Yeah And so if you're if you're particularly jacked and have great genetics and great muscle insertions

You should go and put your data on 23andMe so it leaks out and then we can create more super soldiers. That's right. That's my recommendation. Huge alpha there. It's kind of like training an LLM. You want to put a lot of content online. Exactly.

Put your genetic data in 23andMe. Yep. Do whatever. You want to influence the next. Go to net if you have to. Exactly. Well, if you don't want to go bankrupt, what should you do, Geordie?

Run on ramp. Ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Don't go bankrupt, people. Manage your expenses, manage your finances, get on ramp, it's that easy. Anyway.

Time is money. Should we move on to the drama that's tearing up the timeline? Tearing up the timeline. The timeline was really in turmoil this weekend. We got a post from Nico over at Default. He says, this is like Kendrick versus Drake for people who know React.

And it's because Amjad, who's coming on the show, is beefing with Guillermo from Versel, who's also coming on the show. And we will try and take you through a little bit of this back and forth. And I just lost power to my... John needs a new battery. Yeah, so this, you've got new batteries here, right?

You're good? Yeah, so this was tearing up the timeline over the weekend. We also tried to get the third party show. We did. CloudFlare CEO, Matthew Prince, you're invited on the show. Please come on. If not today, maybe later this week. But Omjod took some shots at Versel. So basically, we should start by setting the table with exactly what's happening here. We all started because there was a vulnerability found in Versel. And so Versel is a web hosting service for Next.js apps, which is a open source React framework that they maintain. And so research suggests that Versel faced criticism for unclear communications about the vulnerability.

The drama centers around a critical vulnerability, CVE-2025-29927, in Next.js, disclosed around March 22nd. That's two days ago, came out on a Saturday. And this allowed attackers to bypass middleware authorization checks. This affected versions of Next.js using middleware with Next Start and output standalone. But applications hosted on Vercell, Netlify, and CloudFlare were stated as not affected. And so Vercell's CEO, Guillermo Rowe, acknowledged communication missteps, especially with key industry partners,

and committed to improving processes. CloudFlare, led by Matthew Prince, released a tool to migrate projects from Vercell to Cloudflare. Savage. Possibly to capitalize on the incident. So he's saying- I think a little bit more than possible.

Beaten them when they're down, saying, hey, there's a vulnerability, get out while you can. Replit, under Amjad Massad, highlighted their proactive scanning and patching of affected applications while expressing a preference for more open frameworks over Next.js. And then of course applications while expressing a preference for more open frameworks over Next.js, and then of course there was a back and forth there because Replit uses Next.js for their website,

and so it's like how could you possibly come for us when you're using our open source framework? And so public exchanges on X saw Guillermo accusing Matthew at CloudFlare of using quote, childlike tactics and memes, suggesting competitive tension. The CEO of CloudFlare often refers to Guillermo as the triangle boy or something like that, because I guess the logo for Versel is a triangle.

It's actually, the aesthetics of Versel are fantastic. I think we were talking about this earlier, the design's fantastic. An ex post by Ancelam IO noted attacks from CloudFlare and Replit on Vercell as being in bad taste, indicating a broader controversy. Additionally, there was a mention of a significant customer switching from another company to Vercell,

potentially heightening the rivalry. And so we can go into a little bit about the history here, and I thought it might be good to give a little bit of an overview of Vercell and then Replet and then Cloudflare. Let's do it. All to tee up our guest, which we'll be joining in 20 minutes.

So let's kick it off with Vercell, founded in 2015. Yeah, one other thing to highlight, there was a post that you had flagged here from this guy, how do you know how to say this guy's name? Jurgely Oroz. Gurgely Orozars? I'm sorry, man. I tried to say this guy's name? Jurgely Oroz. Gurgley Orozars? I'm sorry, man. I tried to say it right.

John made no effort. It looks like Gurgley. But, uh. Is that Gurgley? Gurgley Oroz. Up to recently, if a vendor had an outage or a security issue, their competitors would purposely not take advantage of this, would not bad mouth the vendor,

or tell customers to switch, at least publicly. Feels like this is changing. Riplet and Cloudfair are both doing this following the next JS CVE. Yeah, so anyways. I was talking to a friend and he said, open source and security fights always seem to lead to no winners and everyone looking worse.

Yeah, one thing that I feel like is potentially broadly happening in tech is when there was so much internet to build and there was so many sort of like green field opportunities, it was very easy to have this sort of positive sum mindset of there's plenty of market, we're just going after these sort of legacy incumbents, we're creating new markets. And then when you get into this sort of hyper competitive dynamic,

where there's a bunch of different substitutes, yeah, then you get like rippling deal, totally issues, right? Where it's like, yeah, we are going to spy and like, try to steal customers, you know, that that our competitors getting so I feel like this is just the evolution of software broadly, where in other industries, if a competitor has an issue, their competitors will try to highlight it and use it to their advantage. That's just business, right? Yep, and it is a little bit,

it's not necessarily winner take all, but it is kind of zero sum in the sense that like, you're either on Cloudflare or Versel, and in many ways there's been this kind of upgrading process where maybe, I mean, the story I think we'll get into is you prototype and build like kind of almost like a vibe code and app on Replet. Then you might take it a little bit more seriously

and deploy something on Versel, which is gonna be very fast. And we'll talk about some of the clients, but MrBeast famously did a, a merge drop on Vercell drove hundreds of millions of, of hits very quickly. Vercell was able to manage it, but Vercell is on top of AWS and can be very expensive at scale. And so CloudFlare might be the cheaper option when you go a little bit more

professional. And so they, they play in similar markets, but they're all at different tiers. And, and, and so they like to chirp at each other, especially with the coming wave of AI and vibe coding and even less infrastructure, more abstraction. It's, they clearly are all coming for each other's markets. And so over at WAP, Sharkey says, the Versel team has been a great partner to WAP engineering.

They are always available to debug and solve our complex critical issues. Recently we've hopped on several calls with their lead engineers. They all care deeply about what they're building, excited for the future of NEXT. And Paul Graham came out in support of Versel. Guillermo said one of our main values at Versel, iterate to greatness. We're constantly learning, adapting, and improving. We have an insatiable appetite for feedback. The job is never finished. Keep your asks and complaints coming. We're listening. And PG says a sign of a sign of a company still run by the founder.

What hired CEO would solicit complaints? And so I think, I think we're still doing a pretty good job of managing this, but, uh, it's getting, it's getting a little nasty on the timeline, uh, because people are going back and forth. Anyway, let's give a little background on Versel. Founded in 2015, Guillermo Rao, oh, he created Socket.io, I remember this. Socket.io was a, what was it,

WebSockets framework for doing communication in the browser in real time. So you open a socket for my computer directly to yours. So instead of going through a server and kind of round tripping, I can communicate with you directly. Great for chat apps, great for video and anything where two people are communicating directly.

Lots of cool web apps came out of that around this time, 2012, 2015 era. He founds ZEIT, which was the precursor to Vercell, with co-founders. The mission was to simplify global cloud deployments and streamline developer workflows. So at the time, you go to AWS and you have your application, when you open up AWS, you see a slate of like

75 different products that AWS has. They have databases, servers, cloud storage, S3, like long-term storage, cold storage, hot storage, like all these different things, and you have to decide what you need to build your app. And so it's an infrastructure as a service, infrastructure first product. Now they do have Vercell competitors.

They have Heroku, which is kind of a Vercell competitor in the sense that you can deploy. Yeah, and to be clear, it feels like, I mean, Vercell ate Heroku, which is kind of a Vercell competitor in the sense that you can deploy. Yeah, and to be clear, it feels like, I mean, Vercell ate Heroku's lunch. Yes, it definitely became a new Heroku. There was an era where you feel like every Y Combinator company was on Heroku. I built on Heroku, it was great.

And then it was, okay, everybody's building on Vercell now. And basically, it's a more expensive option, but it allows you to come product first. I just wrote the code, and I want you to to handle the scaling and I'm willing to pay hand over fist for it. It'd probably be a lot cheaper to go direct and it's even cheaper to go below AWS at a certain point. You wind up like, you know, these big LLM foundation model companies are building their

own data centers right now. They're out renting those from AWS because you save money as you go down the abstraction layer, but you lose flexibility. And so early product launches in 2016, they launched now a one-command development service for static sites and Node.js apps. In 2016 October, they released Next.js 1.0, which was an open-source React framework

for server-side rendering and static sites. Now, React, there was a whole battle in JavaScript frameworks around this time. I don't know if you remember this, but like jQuery was like the popular JavaScript framework. People were debating, should we use jQuery or vanilla.js? And then the JS frameworks got like more and more bloated.

Google came out with this great one called Angular, which was basically the model view controller. Like you could basically say, on my front end, I have an idea of data. Like I have, on our website, you have all of our sponsors listed there, and there's like a row for ramp and a row for bezel, and you pull those in, and then,

as you're dynamically changing them, the front end's updating. Angular was really cool, it allowed you to, you had to learn it, but it was pretty performant. And then Facebook came out with React and just like ate their lunch. And Angular went through the second version. They came out with a new version and it was much more complicated to use in my opinion. And so React really took off. Next.js is a framework for React. So they're layering on top here. And they wound up building an ecosystem around

immutable deployments, preview environments, and serverless architecture. So the idea that you don't need to think about what's happening on the backend, and if a million people show up or a thousand people show up, Vercell will just send you a bill that scales, but you don't actually have to go in and say, okay, I need 100 servers today instead of one.

That's the whole pitch. And so in 2020, they rebrand to Vercell and they wanted to reflect a broader focus on developing, preview and shipping. They retain the triangular logo while adopting a name that suggests versatility, acceleration, excellence. I gotta say, Vercell's website is the fastest site in the West.

It is hilariously quick. It puts every other site to shame. It's really great They're obviously just like flexing the power of their product But go go to versell.com and just click around Yeah almost addicting when I when I figured out that everything is like CDNs and you can basically build the entire app and then deploy it onto a CDN so that when someone hits your hits your website for The first time they're not pulling it

from your server on AWS in Virginia. They're pulling it from the local server that's just like a couple blocks away from them and it's much faster. I was really hooked on it. But at the time, if you wanted to deploy your whole site to CloudFront, which is AWS's product, or CloudFlare, which we'll talk about later,

it was a lot of work. Like you had to bake everything down into HTML and make sure it was served just like a single file. And there were no server calls. And it was very difficult, but it was a magical experience when you click on the link, and it just loads immediately. It's amazing. Let's go through some funding milestones.

Versel does a series A. So they were kind of grinding for like five years doing this open source stuff. This is a 10-year-old company. 10-year year old company. But in 2020 things start working. They rebrand. There is $21 million from Excel and Nat Friedman. What do you know?

He's in there early, of course, get a classic goat. Series B, they get 40 million from Google ventures. Series C that was that. A was a COVID round too. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe announced.

Maybe, maybe. No, I'm saying if it was announced in April, it was getting done. March, maybe? Yeah. Well, in Series C, June, 2021, a hundred million dollars at $1.1 billion valuation. Series D, just six months later,

they get 150 million from GGV Capital. The valuation goes up to 2.5 billion and then a series e Just last May 250 million from Excel from Excel Company valued at 3.25 billion and they hit over a hundred million dollars in ARR and they have over a million monthly Next.js users and so we can go through some of their technology They've you know, they've built their whole their whole game plan is build next JS into the best React front-end framework that everyone kind of needs to use now. This is a cut down that that is a controversial statement There's a lot of next JS haters out there that say hey, you should just be writing react

Why are you what? Why are you messing around with next JS? It's gonna lock you in a box And then there's a lot of people that might say hey You could use Next.js, but why don't you just host it on AWS? Just figure it out, figure out the actual implementation. And so they also launched the vZero tool for generating UI components.

They wound up partnering with AWS to bring in some AI features, which we'll need to talk to Guillermo about. And in January, 2025, they acquired Tremor, a React component library for data dashboards. And so they've built their team, they've made some acquisitions, they've done some partnerships,

and now they have a pretty diverse list of customers, Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, Nike, Washington Post, Under Armour, Fanatics, HashiCorp, Century Auto, Open AI, Perplexity, Chick-fil-A, Uber Nike Washington Post Underarmor fanatics hashy Corp century although open AI perplexity Chick-fil-a reduced build there we go from 25 minutes to 5 seconds. Wow. Love it. You love to see it Wow and and Stripe developed a viral Black Friday promotional site in just 19 days You'll love to see it and mr. Beast Beast, as we mentioned, also. Absolutely, Doug.

Yeah, I think most of the sites that I've been involved with building over the last few years were Versel-based. No, of course, because you want to just get your product out quickly, worry about the scaling later, and at the low end, optimizing your infrastructure is just not a key cost.

Like the server bill is gonna be so much lower than what you spend on designers or implementation. So you should just be able to not really worry about optimizing your infrastructure or your servers. And so that's kind of where Vercell is. I'm very interested to hear where Guillermo is planning to take the company, because now they're talking about, well, we're going to host anthropic APIs.

We're going to host LLMs at the edge and deploy and scale those for you. So you should, in theory, be able to have a front-end website that has an interaction with an LLM and it's not needing to go call back to some anthropic server because one of the most time consuming things if you're wrapping one of these APIs, if you're an API, if you're a wrapper is, okay, I take the user's request, the user said, write me a funny joke, I take it to my server

and then I take from my server over to OpenAI server and then I get a response from OpenAI back to my server, back to the client and that's that's just extra round trips and Vercell is all about speed and you can't have that it's unacceptable that's right well it should we move on to a company that's been going even longer I guess or I mean I guess the story has been going on for longer this is replet they were officially founded in 2016 basically the same year as Versal. Very different product approach, but Amjad Masad has been in the development technology world for years. In 2019, he wanted to build a browser-based coding

environment, a Google Docs for coding. He envisions a REPL, which is a read evaluate print loop running entirely in the browser. Normally you have to open up the terminal, get install Python, but what if you just do all this in the web, it would enable you to share these and then obviously like add a bunch of features over time. So he released an open source version in 2011 called JS REPL to allow interactive coding

in multiple languages. Brought some people on the team, brought some design stuff, and then he worked for companies like Code Academy and Facebook, he built development tools there. Then JS REPL used to power in browser tutorials at Udacity and Code Academy, proving the concept's value. So if you go to Code Academy and you were learning Python

or learning JavaScript, you would be able to write the JavaScript and then also evaluate it and run it in the browser, which was very fun. And it definitely helped people learn this stuff. And so the platform grew to over a hundred thousand users, primarily students and self-taught coders. He founds Replit in 2016 with some co-founders,

initially Bootstrap with personal savings and early community traction. They received seed investment from Bloomberg Beta and initially targets both the education market coding classes and hobbyist developers. And so Replit has always been about democratizing programming, much less about, hey, let's abstract away the complexities of AWS infrastructure.

It is abstracting away complexities, but it's taking a much more product focused approach. And that's led to a lot of fans, basically. A lot of solo developers, indie developers have really come out in support of Replit throughout the years. PG's been a big supporter. And so in 2017-

Yeah, and it's interesting, both these companies felt like they exploded onto the scene in that 2020 era. Totally. They actually had been toiling away for almost more than a decade before that. So it was like these sort of like 10 year overnight successes. I mean, he didn't get into YC until winter 2018.

But then once he was in YC, he quickly closed a four and a half million dollar seed round from Andreessen. They surpassed a million registered users and developers started launching hundreds of thousands of projects. And so the focus is really on these interactive multiplayer coding, kind of like Figma for software development, writing even backend code, any scripting, multiplayer functionality

was really new. There's GitHub integration and support for many programming languages. They raised $20 million. The big moment really came in 2021 when they got the.com. Absolutely. That just really put it. That's the turning point. March 2021.

Pounding the table saying, we're here for Replet.com. Moving away from the.it. Go to snag.com and reach out to our friend Rob if you want a great domain. I love it. So they upgrade from the ace editor to Monaco in 2017, later transitions to CodeMir.

The move to CodeMir sparks community backlash, which is later resolved with rapid bug fixes. There's series B funding in 2021, another COVID round. I remember when these were happening, he raised 80 million at 800 million valuation. The user base exceeds 10 million. Infrastructure is scaled to handle massive growth. And there was always this question of like,

is Replet for learning and testing, or will someone actually build a real business on top of a Replet app, or something that they develop in Replet? Is it more for practicing and prototyping? Is it a tool or is it an infrastructure? And I think as we talk to them, I'm glad later today.

What is the long-term customer base going to look like? Is it the indie hacker who wants to create their first one to 10 apps, or is it somebody who's, if you look at their website now, it's really oriented around this similar thesis to like lovable, which we talked about with Harry last week, turning your ideas into apps, so they are, what do you want to create a website

for your dream business, a habit tracker, an education app for your kids, et cetera. So kind of long-term, this feels like the user base could, and he might not like me describing it like this, but it could look like something like what Squarespace did for websites. Hey, anybody can make a website and other platforms like this, but it could look like something like what Squarespace did for websites. Hey, anybody can make a website and other platforms like that, but more so with anybody

can make a website that actually has like crud app sort of functionality. Totally full functionality, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's what all these companies are fighting over is that everyone recognizes that that's a huge opportunity and whoever gets to it first and becomes the portal for making new websites is gonna be extremely valuable.

But at the same time, Vercell is very much also competing with Cloudflare and competing over the enterprise and moving up market and moving into these other use cases. Yeah, and so Omjod and Replit have launched a few things over the past few years. They had a bounties marketplace for freelance coding tasks. You could just put up a bounty and say,

hey, I need this built. And they had this massive community of like kind of indie hackers, kids who are learning. It was like, hey, let's give people their first time making money with, you know, by writing code. Yeah, I thought it was a really cool thing. In September of 2022, they debuted Ghostwriter,

which was a competitor to GitHub Co-Pilot, something to help you, AI-powered coding assistant, essentially, fancy autocomplete, but extremely valuable in the context of Replet. And then they partnered with Google Cloud in March of 2023 and quickly secured a 97.4 Series B extension, reaching a $1.16 billion valuation. So up there with Versel in the unicorn club, they continued rapid growth to over 20 to 30 million users. And then they fully removed the education product, the free starter plan limits new users

to three public projects, and they're kind of going up market, trying to be more serious in the business world. They relocated their headquarters from San Francisco's Soma to Foster City, and now they are over 150 employees with a sharper focus on professional and enterprise development.

It says they remain committed to innovating in cloud IDEs and AI-powered coding tools guided by the founders original vision. And so that's the story of a replet. We have four minutes. So we try and do some cloud flare. We got the biggest one yet, but we can kind of rip through this cloud flare down in 2009. Oh wait, we got Guillermo on. Okay. Let's just bring him in right now. Let's do it after. Welcome to the show. How you doing? My man. Great. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

Me too. I think everyone's looking forward to this. There's drama on the timeline. We need to have a TVPN segment. We really appreciate you coming on. Can you just give us like a breakdown of what's happening in the world of Versel right now? Well, yeah. Maybe to introduce Versel too for those that are new to our company. Vercell creates frameworks and infrastructure to deploy great web applications. We're super invested in open source. We created a framework called Next.js that empowers a lot of the internet and we're very proud about it.

But we also have investments in a bunch of other open source projects. I have a long history of being involved in the JavaScript ecosystem, TypeScript ecosystem. So if you're building a new application, Vercell and Next.js are a pretty good choice for people. Fantastic. And what's going on most recently? Yeah, I mean, if you go in X, there's a lot going on. Maybe the thing that started a lot of this was

we got a ping from a security researcher about a potential security vulnerability on Next.js. We get lots of this operating at the scale that we're in. We have millions of monthly active developers on Next.js, tens of millions of applications deployed at the Vercel platform. And so we get a lot of pings, but this one in particular was interesting because it was a potential off bypass, which, you know, in the security industry, it's as bad of a bug as you could imagine, like bypassing, login, sign up things like that. We took a look at it, we, we process it through

the queue, we remediated it. And then when we disclose it to the world, you know, we, we, we could have done a lot better in how we disclosed it. So we filed a CVE in partnership with GitHub, which is the standard mechanism for how you notify every Next.js user on the planet, whether they use Versel or not about this vulnerability. But the awesome thing about Next.js is that once you use Next.js,

you're actually not just getting the open source project Next.js, you're getting a huge getting the open source project Next.js, you're getting a huge ecosystem of products with it that you can use that integrate really nicely into Next.js. There are a lot of auth partners, a company like Clerc, StackAuth, BetterAuth, Lucia in the open source ecosystem.

This is awesome products. I think we should have notified those people before that CVE went out so that they could have had the opportunity to look at what the impact would have been to their projects and things like that. On the other hand, we did test internally, like, okay, Netlify, which is another deployment option for Next.js affected. And again, we could have done a much better job at partnering with companies like Netlify and Cloudflare for most next-gen as well. But it kind of became like a Twitter thing, you know, that like, it got big and then Cloudflare got involved. I think you guys were just talking about it before I joined.

And yeah, there's some banger tweets being exchanged here and there. Yeah, you're- It's so entertaining. I'm curious to get your read on it. You've been in the game for, you founded Socket back in the day. Do you feel like the environment now,

there's still a lot of internet to build, and there's still a lot of opportunity, but at the same time we have these sort of scaled businesses like CloudFlare and Versel and things like that. Do you feel like the environment today is like more hostile or emotionally charged than ever before? Cause there's, you know, people are, there's now like sort of like the market's established

in many ways. It's not maybe quite as quickly as it used to. There's new opportunities, but it's like, it's started, you know, is this sort of more zero sum environment making things a little bit more charged today? I think not. I do think that on X people get really spicy. I was very shocked that the CEO of Cloudflare came.

I mean, he's the CEO of a public company and he came guns blazing, even putting out like some like cringe-worthy memes against Purcell, which is a company that is very developer-loved. We invest not just in Next.js, but we power, for example, the AISDK, which is the most popular way today in the JavaScript ecosystem to add AI to your product. It has a million downloads a week. It's provider agnostic,

it's deployment platform agnostic. To come after in such an aggressive way, I was a little taken aback. Our style has always been, if you look at my ex feed, the thing that I love to do is highlight great products. If you create anything great, especially if you use NextGaze, I just love to say like, look at this really cool thing. I never talk about competitors, I never, especially in a diminishing way. But in this case, I had to reply. Because he's saying,

oh, if you want security, come to Cloudflare. And the record shows that if you want security protection come to Cloudflare, there's a very mixed bag there. There's a mixed bag and I had to recover from the adels of Cloudflare. I did bring up Cloudbleed, which legitimately was one of the worst things that has happened to the internet. I don't know if the audience knows, but you could Google and literally find off tokens of different companies like Uber indexed by Google. So that was an order. And by the way, our bug was bad.

I'm not here to say like, oh, like whatever, make excuses for middleware and whatever. Our bug was really bad, but theirs was catastrophic. And you could end the attack. The impact of the bug was Googling is like accessible to everyone. The impact of our bug is actually very nuanced and I'm super thankful to the researcher because it takes a lot of thinking and reverse engineering to arrive to these conclusions. But yeah, to your point, I think that it was uncalled for. We've tried to, I think, and we could get into the speculation of why he would do such a thing. We tried really hard to use Cloudflare.

We were a customer. We tried it out for a new compute product, which coincidentally it was Edge middleware, and it didn't work out for a number of reasons. So maybe there was some soured relationships there as well that we had a piece out of the, as a customer we had to build our own, but I can only speculate.

Let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the, as a customer, we had to build our own. But I can only speculate. Let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the future and what the biggest opportunities that you feel like Vercell has in this sort of new, probably the most exciting time of my life. John's a few decades older than me, so I don't know. It's good business to be in the internet and AI. It really is.

I imagine things are going pretty well. Yeah, let's kind of ignore the drama for a second and I'd love to talk about the future. Everyone loves drama, but my message to all of the vendors and partners and people in the ecosystem would be, the pie is about to get as large as we've ever seen in the history of technology.

Vercell doubled the number of signups year over year, mostly due to the introduction of vZero, which is our coding agent. I don't think we've ever seen a technological platform shift of this dimension, where every piece of software will be rebuilt and re-imagined with AI. And the pie is about to get so big that being paranoid about

the size of your slice and taking cheap shots of your security competitor, to me, does signal short-sightedness on this AI opportunity. In fact, the AI SDK is powering competitors to vZero. is powering competitors to vZero. So today, one of our partners announced, knew that email is like the vZero for crafting email campaigns, all built on open source technology that we've sort of taken from vZero and given back to the world.

And so, and I also had a, you should check it out, I had a banger ideas thread on X the other day. Every single day I'm thinking, here's a bunch of ideas of amazing products that you could create with AI that customers are so willing to buy. I just actually interviewed, we're at a company offsite slash orgbo and I interviewed one of the greatest public company CEOs of our times. I can't disclose who and I asked him, what are your priorities for AI? He's like, oh, we're completely reimagining the company across these three dimensions with AI. I want to buy AI

for this, AI for this, AI for this. So to your point about the positivity is there is room for everybody. There's all this amazing open source technology that you can use to create new products and new ideas. I also believe part of my optimism is that in the beginning, two years ago, there was maybe a belief that there was going to be one gigantic chat bot to rule them all. Like a sci-fi movie, you go to one computer or you talk to the room, hey computer, everything is computer. Or what I believed at the time, and we actually, this is why we started creating a lot of open source technology, there's going to be expert AIs, focused products that cater to specific requirements. And that's actually what's ended up happening, right?

So on Vercell, we host companies like OpenEvidence, which is a chat GPT for medicine, getgc.ai, which is like the chat GPT for lawyers. Amazing products for finance like Hebbia. And so what's actually ended up happening is that there is a redistribution of wealth, so to speak, that's happening with AI. There is also, I call it sometimes the unbundling of Google. It's no mystery that a lot of companies or a lot of consumers, sorry,

are not going to Google for certain queries and they're going to specialist products to answer. Like when I think knowledge, I might go to perplexity or I might go to grok and do a deep search. Right. So that unbundling of the one of the largest companies and information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes. So I really do think I share your optimism and positivity beyond the drama that that happened. One thing I always think about with Vercell is just like the focus on speed. I feel like that's almost like the core

brand tenant is just like, I mean, Jordy pulled up Vercell. Yeah, is there a brand and I want to know what's the importance of like speed in AI deployments. Oh, it's dramatic. I know you're hosting AI, but are you hosting AI at the edge or kind of delivering it in like a, like a CDN? Like how, how does that work? And how does that, what impact does faster AI usage happen in like the consumer experience? There's a couple of things.

If you're running a business that you should know right off the bat. Number one, a lot of traffic will shift towards answer engines. I reported recently that we see 5% of our Vercell signups that also happen to be some of the highest intent signups coming from Chad GPT, which is up from being like 1% or less than 1% six months ago. And it's growing. I didn't share the growth metric, but I'll share it now for you guys. I said like you 30%

Month over month Wow So walk me through that it's people going to chat GPT asking how should I deploy this what should I build it's recommended recommending Vercel Sama had a really good take and also if you want to see a fast website, I am very proud that we host openai.com. Sam recently shared, you might not want to learn so much coding or only coding.

You might just want to learn how to use AI, which one of the artifacts of that, and I love the Claude artifact name, I think was one of the most important inventions has happened in AI in recent years, is that coding and writing code is an output of what you ask the AI. So what's happening is people are asking,

what is the best way to build a website? What is the best way to deploy? I actually posted, so we have a little tool, a little playground, you can check it out, it's sdk.priscilla.ai and you click playground. You can ask a bunch of models what they think about you. And that'll give you a glimpse into how the AIs are thinking.

But not only how they're thinking, how they're directing the world's behavior and choices. I was very proud to share a screenshot that I asked like four frontier models in parallel, what's the best way to deploy? And they all said, Vercell. And I actually constrained it to like, you can only, you know, the classic thing,

you can only do one thing or, I've hurt myself, like, okay, Vercell, Vercell, Vercell, Vercell. And so to me, that was, I actually didn't know at the time, I was just like, like messing around in the weekend with the tool. I think that's the canary in the coal mine

of how you should be thinking about AI sending traffic to different places. The consequence to our business is, number one, SEO still matters. So one of our customers, for example, sponsors this fantastic show, Ramp, they're in the business of being found. And so it's going to be through Google searches, during the business of being found. And so it's gonna be through Google searches or it's gonna be through these agents. And so the agents are super forming a web search. So you still wanna be in good terms, so to speak, with the people that are like retrieving

and crawling the internet, right? So that's one thing and Vercell really helps companies with SEO. The other one- That's an interesting thing to think about. Yes, sir. Like it's interesting to think about. Yeah, sorry. Like it's interesting to think about Google over time. If nobody's searching on Google,

they just, every link is paid for. Yeah. They sort of still have this sort of like, you know, pay to play model. Has the train left the station on SEO or is there still an opportunity for new companies to kind of bootstrap their way into AI recommendations? And I also want to hear your second point. Sorry for shutting you off.

No, no, it's totally fair. So I think what's so relevant is that quality content, facts, proof, this agents will be actually like also Elon's truth seeking AI goal because it really matters that you train a model that is subjective and is post-trained on truth seeking, right? During pre-training, you throw a bunch of data at it. During post-training, you sort of like orient its behavior. And this model, this is why I'm a big fan of open AI, in the sense of open source, and also in giving developers choice. The AI SDK lets you very quickly swap models.

I think it's going to be very important as a community as I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or business people. I'm talking about as citizens of the internet, we have to be very vigilant of the behavior of models, the decentralization of AI, something that we're so deeply believes in is, and we have a template you can clone. You can basically roll your own chat GPT within two clicks. And we recently partnered with XAI to power the default model. So you can go to chat.vercell.ai and you can basically clone and deploy your own chat GPT in your own domain name. And so what would be great for society is if we all invest in massively decentralizing intelligence so that we're not at the behest of like the one truth center

or truth company of the world. Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's one kind of question that comes to mind. So you guys are powering openai.com and openai.com somewhat recently is like very much reoriented around being a sort of like, you know, search bar answer engine. And OpenAI right now is being priced like it's

the next Google, right? At $300 billion plus, like that is the next Google. You talked about sort of the- Yeah, by the way, one comment on that has been super top of mind. I actually think that's a brilliant design. So I talked about how every piece of software will be rethought and rebuilt as an AI product.

What people will expect is that when they go to your product, there is an interface like that. And I should think that's really good design because they blended marketing content, which is what typically we think of as a website. I sometimes dismissively call them e-brochures to remind the team that we're not in this world to take a magazine and plaster it on the internet. The whole point of Next.js and Vercell that we bet on 10 years ago was a more dynamic web, a web that powered products. And so what's brilliant about

that design is that you're immersed immediately into the product experience and it's AI native. And I think that's just a sign of things to come. You're going to go to so many other products. I mentioned the email one, but there's an open evidence of so many of those where the interface will be, okay, what do you need? What do you want? When you go to v0.dev, the question that we ask is, what do you want to ship? Because we want you to convert an idea into an application. Talk about the line between developers and non-developers, right? It seems like it's sort of blurring today. Vercelles' entire brand has been around building,

building products for developers that is the core of the mission. But is there a point in the future where, and you have your coding agent now, right? There's this full sort of like stack. Is there a world in the future where, and you have your coding agent now, right? There's this full sort of like stack. Is there a world in the future where, you know, you land on versell.com and somebody that's not a developer can just type in a prompt, right?

Because it seems like, you know, part of the drama, if you extrapolate it out, it's like, there's, you know, real. Whoever becomes the aggregator for building new websites and apps will be incredibly valuable. Yeah, that was going to be my third point actually. So the other huge opportunity for us is what we call agentic deployment infrastructure. So there's going to be all of these agents that create for every user on the planet.

And also to your question, I think that the tam of what a developer is, is going to so much. I mean, we're already seeing it in the numbers. I'm already seeing it in the customer interviews. I was chatting with a lady yesterday on the X platform, the everything app. She was reporting feedback about the zero. And at one point in the conversation, it was like, by the way, I just want to be very clear. I have no idea how to code. I use B zero and I get stuck and I need some other like another expert's opinion. Like go to another doctor. I asked Rock and she brings it back and forth between the two products and she's creating,

the reason she was giving me feedback is what she was saying, like the app has gotten so big, what do you recommend? And so people are like just having the best time of their lives, being able to create when they couldn't code before. But going back to the agentic infrastructure, think of it this way, V0 is automatically calling out to Vercell to create deployments, to assign domain names, in the future to even buy domains. V0 might even just say, hey, I thought of a better domain name for your product.

What do you think? And so we're very excited to see the growth of this infra. And by the way, there's a defensibility to it that's really interesting, especially for people that are working in infra that are listening to this call. I'm very convinced that Vibe coding will eat a lot of the world of creating front end applications. Meaning this AIs are so good at writing React and Tailwind and Next.js.

It's actually shocking to me. And I've been a front-end engineer. I started front-end engineering when I was 11 years old in Argentina. And so I had my ego tied up to this thing of writing front-end code. I contributed to a library called mood tools when I was 15 years old, six, I was like, like, the kid that could do frontends. And now I'm ready to like, give up on part of my identity of like, hey, v zero is creating an opportunity for a lot more people to be like me and experience that joy of creating frontends. Now what I'm not so sure about, and you've seen all this conversations on X about security and

vibe, you can vibe code, but it's hard to vibe debug. Yeah, I don't, I believe that you don't want AI in your infrastructure just yet. We operate in 20 regions worldwide. We reach dozens of cities through our pops in our CDN network. We have to maintain uptime for the world's most valuable properties from, you know, AI companies to cryptocurrency companies, some presidential meme coins, whatever you think of, so much is going on on Vercell. Every second of uptime, everything that can happen to this platform is absolutely mission critical, it's life critical. So many healthcare companies banking on Vercell. And so I don't want AI to necessarily be messing with the foundational sort of infrared and software

that needs to ensure that these things run perfectly, that the train runs on time. On the other hand, and this is why Carpathia think point divide coding, when you're exploring, when you're creating, when you're designing, when you're crafting the interface, that's where AI is completely dominating. And now it's gaining full stack powers where you can integrate with that infrastructure.

So we recently partnered with companies like SuperBase and Neon and UpStash that they also hired those crack team for engineers that, you know, they might be using some AI, but you know, hopefully for our partnership, they're very careful. And, but in, in that creator, that new creator is getting the best of both worlds that you, you vibe code and you're working

on rock solid foundations. Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about value accrual in AI? I know that there's been this debate over the model layer or the application layer. You could even abstract that. And now people are just saying, I either wanna be the aggregator,

the chat GPT app that's installed on 100 million phones, or I wanna be in energy and get me shares in a nuclear company because I think everything else in the middle is going to be commoditized. You don't have hardware yet or your own infrastructure. Does what you're seeing in AI change any of those decisions over time? How are you thinking about just the different opportunities? It seems like you're obviously going up market to be more of an aggregator where you could come to develop apps. But are you thinking about going down the stack further, training your own models, developing your own chips?

What does the far future look like for Versel? I really believe that the best metaphor for AI is what happened with the cloud and mobile, but it's going to be much bigger. And so if you look back at the cloud and we in this room have all studied it, there wasn't a particular player category that had a lot of upside. It was all over. It was the foundational infrastructure and hardware, obviously. And we're very proud to partner with AWS to provide sort of that quote unquote hardware layer to Vercell as a global network. There was a lot of upside for developers that quickly changed their behavior.

So this is very important, by the way. When I noticed AWS, I was very quick to this. Luckily for me, I was very quick to dismiss the other DIY options that were available to me, because I got so excited by the automation potential. And there's merits to all solutions. But being an early adopter in riding the right wave, it can be transformational to your career. Later on, it happened with React. React was open source by Meta. I believe that's one of their greatest

inventions. And I was also quick to adopt and I noticed its potential as the engine for what later became Next.js. And so I think my advice to people would be, just adopt AI and see where you can add value. I think the application layer is extremely exciting because the interfaces to AI, as I mentioned, will decentralize and unbundle. There's gonna be a lot of upset for agentic infrastructure

So companies that know how to work well with not just humans but agents and that's a very that's a remarkable Shift right a lot of products have been so far created for Developers not for the agent you think of it as a representative of the developer You have to create products that are good for a representative of the developer. You have to create products that are good for the representative of the developer. How do you... Yeah, I was gonna say, as a leader, how do you work with your team?

A lot of people, the sort of like high level leadership advice is like the CEO helps the team focus. But then in the case of Versel, there's so many different areas of the business now, and it seems like you're very focused on serving your customers, the developers, and the sort of companies building on Versel, but at the same time, you have all these different bets.

How do you kind of prioritize internally? And it seems like you're okay with just doing things in the way that Facebook releases react releases react you know they've benefited from it but they haven't nearly captured all the value from it and so it seems like of course hey with sort of you're very open to sort of releasing things and not it's less oriented around we need to you know capture a hundred percent of the value that we create or yeah I think short-term obsession over value capture is that it's not the right recipe to

build a generational company and I'm obsessed with growing the size of the pie. My number one allegiance is the web. So when I was in Argentina I was able to and this I you know when you're a kid and you try out lots of different programming languages, the thing that blew my mind is the URL. In fact, if you look at the success of Versel so far, it really is about the success of a URL. I thought, holy crap, Kubernetes is so hard. CDNs are so hard. What if people could just deploy with one click or one press of a button and get back a URL of what they're working on that they can share with the world. Look at other companies that have been massively successful like, or products like Google Docs or Figma. They've essentially done that. Like a thing that didn't

have a URL before now has a URL. We're doing that for every application on the planet. So it's primarily an infrastructure business. And then on the other hand, we know that in order to cast the widest possible net and attract the widest, the biggest number of people, open source is the only way. It's non-negotiable. And in addition to Next.js, I can mention we created Next.js, sorry, Next.js and AISDK and Turbo. And we acquired a bunch of companies like ShadZien.

And so the more we can, you know, cast this message out of the world of the web needs to win, and also needs to win because we have the best products. I, you know, you can think of our competition as all these other products in the developer ecosystem. Another reframing that is perhaps more interesting is think about Apple. Apple is holding an entire world hostage to a lot of arbitrary rules. They make all the calls. You know, the web that I experienced when I was a kid was a web that is completely permissionless, which is also why I'm crypto-pilled and we could get into that and whatever. But permissionless is actually the most important. It's like freedom of speech is up here.

And then right up there is also permissionless, which is also increasingly a form of speech is that you can get something into a URL without asking Tim Apple for permission. And so that is the true enemy, so to speak. And I think my message to all Desiree Commons would be like, let's band together and make sure that you can publish without going through an app store review process. You can launch crypto companies without asking Apple what they think about crypto, whatever you want, you should be able to, and in AI, right? Like AI models need to decentralize and get into the hands of developers as quickly as possible so that we build defensibility against the sort of like monolithic AI systems.

I think I'm trying to think about like how 9,000 or whatever that is like, or sky that I just, I don't wanna go to one interface. Vercell needs to be decentralized and democratized URLs and interfaces to the world. And by the way, my other point was gonna be, I'll give credit to Apple. They have a culture of quality, and they've managed to

permeate that culture of quality to that to their ecosystem. And I want that for the web as well. I want to make sure I actually don't even have a particular force in the race. We don't we not only support Next.js, we support another 35 frameworks. Whatever framework allows me to go to a website like a blind tasting, it'd be like, Oh, this one says freaking great. You should be able to work backwards to Oh, they use some technology supported by herself. That's my that's my fitness function. Curious Did anybody ever come to your office with $5 billion in

cash and tell you to ask you to train a foundation model? And how did that conversation go? Because I'm sure like, you know, in all the craze in the last couple of years, there could have been an opportunity to just like, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of people that would have been happy to say, Hey, you're really well positioned to build. Yeah. When's the humanoid robot coming? Yeah, not that people seem to be very obsessed with the V zero data. So I'll tell you, I also haven't shared this before, but so many companies have come and asked for... Because by the way, the interesting thing about vZero is, and going back

to the design mindset and quality mindset, is we're trying to produce things we're proud of. And nested. We're proud of, our customers are proud of, end users of the internet say, okay, now there's a better web. I think we should also band against AI slop. Like we shouldn't create a web that has this overly brushed texture images coming out of like, like low quality models and whatever. And so a huge inspiration for me was actually mid journey. Mid journey, speaking of which is that Next.js user that self hosts Next.js extremely proud of that. And there's something about like the taste that gets embedded into these models. So it's not just the data that you want. It's also infusing your preferences and

taste. And it's almost like casting an opinion into the world. Like this is what I believe products should look like. And by the way, you also want, and this is why the conversational interface is so fantastic. You can still leave the customer to their own creativity. So you can say you go to VZero and you say, build me a product for travel, like wonder actually also over sell customer. And then you're like, Well, I don't like it. Make it more yellow. You know, and like the model will follow. Yeah. So it's striking that balance between creativity and best practices for a better

web. I have a question. So I'm like completely convinced on the strategy of bringing in new developers, allowing even non non-technical folks to build and deploy websites. But some of your companies, some of your clients are absolutely massive. And one of the critiques is like, well, you're abstracting this AWS infrastructure. It can get kind of expensive. What, what are the conversations like on your side to keep a Nike or an Uber

on Vercell long-term and what, how do you see those relationships going and how important is it to not only enable someone to show up non-technical prompt, build an app, but then scale it into that one person, one billion dollar company. And they're saying, yeah, you know what? I'm sticking with Vercell forever. Yeah. Yeah. Your question also contains the answer because you said, you know, Vercellus has been getting a lot bigger. Yeah. And because we've been getting bigger, which, you know, comes with these challenges like extra and whatever,

but the ultimate privilege is the amount of incredible infrastructure optimization that we can do. When you're starting a company, a little company, like you're not thinking about optimizing. If you're thinking about optimizing, you're probably not doing that. You know, we have this motto that we introduced at Next.JS Conf that is a famous, there's a famous essay in the software engineering industry of like, you first make it work, you then make it right, and then you make it fast, and I would add a fourth, and then you make it cost efficient. And actually from a computer science point of view, fast and

cost efficient actually almost come together. We've done so many optimizations of the infrastructure. I think this year we've already announced eight price decreases or like last quarter and this year. And we continue to announce price decreases because we're passing on the cost savings that we realize in our infrastructure. On all sides, the CDN is getting more efficient. The compute, we just announced fluid compute. It's a staggering what we've done in terms of compute efficiency.

Some customers saw an improvement in efficiency of 85%. Wow. So what I would say to the 90s of the world, the previous story of Versel, which is still fundamentally awesome, is you won't have to worry so much about DevOps and platform engineering and on-call and those human costs,

which are ginormous. And now you'll be fighting for like infrastructure, high quality infrastructure engineers with all of the AI companies as well. So like the human cost is very real of doing something like Bercel. But then the scale costs of like Bercel actually gets more efficient the more I use it is awesome. And we're committed to continuing to sort of share those infrastructure savings with our customers. And by the way, the inspiration here is AWS. I think when I started using AWS, it was quite expensive. And then they just announced so many price decreases

because, and by the way, that's kind of the dance. We manage Next.js for people. You can also self-host and manage it yourself. And we're actually also partnering with companies that are even competitors of ourself to help them manage Next.js better when they wanna create an offering like that. And we know that there's work to do there.

But the nice dance is that if you let up and let us manage your workload, we will be able to optimize it to a level that is sort of unbelievable. Well, it's noon, we'll let you go. I'm sure you have a bunch more to do today. Great having you on. Please call back in when you have more news.

I love it. It's a really fun conversation. I love your show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming. I'll see you next. This is fantastic. See you on X. See you on X. Yeah, that was fun.

Always a good excuse to use drama to get the real story. I feel like we struck the balance. It's great when somebody is able to speak with more than 144 characters. Yeah, all of a sudden the nuance just comes in. It's amazing. Emerges. Yeah, fantastic.

But very, very cool. Very cool company. And it's a crazy position to be in where you're hosting potentially the next Google, right? It's crazy. If you go to OpenAI right now, this is relatively recent. I don't know exactly when they searched it.

It just says, what can I help you with? Yeah, yeah. And then. Yeah, there's no landing page anymore for learn about OpenAI jobs. It's like you're here to do. Yeah, they still have a little bit on the side but you know they're very very oriented around anyway we got Lulu coming on to break down the the drama and the comms we're gonna talk to her about a bunch of

stuff but we got to ping her because she's not in the waiting room yet. So let's ask. Let's see. Okay. Good. We do have her on. Okay. Maybe I should send. She's extremely busy. She jumped on, she only had 30 seconds, we weren't ready, she bailed. No, I'm kidding. No. I believe it. Yeah. Anyway, let me try and send her this thing.

And in the meantime, we should do some posts. And she is back. Is she back? Let's see. Well, I mean, in the meantime, maybe she was getting some bananas. We can tell you. Uh well, I mean, maybe she was getting tell you about Bezel. That's a great time. I got a I got a beautiful Vacheron Constantin on purchased from Bezel. Highly recommend you go pick something up over there.

They have over 23,500 luxury watches, folks. Uh fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. This watch right here, it's shipped from the seller to Bezel. And any time I see drama on the timeline, I can't help but think if the two people arguing just went watch shopping together. I was thinking about that watch to watch. If they went, or no, if they just went and they browsed around Bezel together for an hour

talking about what they like and what they don't like, they would find common ground. Exactly. And then they would squash the beef. This is, Bezel is a technology that will bring harmony to the timeline, I believe. Now a lot of people said, Oh, we got Lulu in the chat. Let's do it. Hey, how you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the temple

of technology. We're live. You're live. The fortress of finance, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Great to see you. I'm so much to talk about. I'm kind of surprised it took this long to get you on the show. Former brother of the year, 2024. And for some reason we had to do 75 guests before we could get you to sit down. What happened?

I had to make sure the show was good. Oh yeah, okay. Big dog in us. She big dogged us. His reasons. Fair. But we're glad you could take time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down with us, chat.

There's so much to talk about. I wanna talk about the comms around Saratoga water. I want to talk about Morning routines. Did you wake up at 340 this this morning and dive directly into a pool? Or are you taking a little bit slower today? No every morning. I dive for five minutes. Yep Every morning I dive for five minutes. Yep. In the air. Medium, mid-air suspension is four. I like to go for five, sometimes seven. Fantastic.

Average five for me. Great. I take my face every once every 10 minutes, I think. Just gotta go a little bit above and beyond, stay ahead of the pack, rub the banana peel. I don't just do the face, I do the neck and behind the ears. So fully ready for the show. Always taking it to the next level.

What do you, you had critiqued that Saratoga Water, that their last post was a bunch of, it was hashtag soup, you described it. Yep. How, if you were, if they were a client, do you have anything particularly that you would have advised them on of what they could have done better?

Yeah, I don't have any fancy water companies in my portfolio. So I don't think I'd want that. You might get a call later today. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm not fully diversified yet. I thought I was. OK, I think they just have to wake up here.

There's somebody whose job is to run social for them. I'm sure there's a person whose area of responsibility is this. And they were just completely out of the game. Like some people said they were on Instagram, but on is pretty generous there. Like they were present on Instagram with a check mark. The posts weren't actually that good. I think there are some brands that are like,

boycotting X because of Elon, whatever, but you're just kind of hurting yourself. Like it's like you're owning your own balance sheet to try to own Elon. You're owning your own cashflow because you're mad at Elon. Just like go on X, make money, do what you need to do. Forget about your personal feelings. I don't know if that's actually the reason, but if it is, it's bad reason. It does feel like it's a bit of a 15 minutes of fame moment for them.

And so I wonder like, what is the good ending here? Like they quote tweet the video, they lean in, they're making jokes, they capture a bunch of attention. Maybe they grow their account from a thousand followers to even like a hundred K because it's such a viral moment and a billion people saw the morning routine. But then what do they do with that after that? I think they have to, okay, I think the gold standard for this before the famous rug was the hoctua girl.

Like she took the 15 minutes and just extended it beyond what the laws of physics seem to suggest was possible. And I think what the water company could have done here to extend would be like lean into the routine, like partner on some routines, lean into the unhinged. Like I know that they're this sophisticated, fancy type of person,

but still sometimes you just gotta roll with it. Strike up some partnerships, have like follow on content, like lean into the funny, just do. The bar is like literally anything. And then it's like getting creative and then it's like something really enduring. If they wanna do something really enduring, maybe it's like a program,

maybe it's like some pop-up stuff to just stay top of mind. But the actual bar of just like showing a pulse was not that hard to hit. Yeah, I feel like the challenge is, I have no idea what Saratoga's brand stands for, but now in my mind, it stands for getting up at 345, putting the banana on your face, having four minutes of air time. And so it's almost like they, I'm the most water obsessed person that I know by a long shot and I didn't know what they stood for before. It's almost like the right thing to do is,

the right deal to do is you hire, you just say, hey, we're gonna kind of scrap our brand from the last 200 years. I think they're a very old company. We're now the Ashen brand. We're signing him to a maxed out. It's just 150. It's just 150 years. Yeah, it's 150 year old brand.

1872. Well, listen, it's time for a refurbishment. Do a brand partnership with Chiquita Banana. That'd be great. There we go. Do the Banana collab. You could be doing, like, some people commented when he opens up the journal, he's on page one of his journal

Oh, yeah Notion partnership There's a lot you could do yeah Let let's talk about You created a meme going going direct. I feel like it's one of the the most powerful Yeah I feel like it's one of the most powerful, like basically memes. Was it our trend of the year?

Potentially trend of the year. I mean that and founder mode are the two. When you think about things that have sort of influenced founder thought in the last five years, it happens to be in my view going direct and founder mode. And they go hand in hand. I'm sure you're already thinking about sort of what the next play is.

Is the next play going indirect? Going indirect. And sort of like it going- Getting puff pieces and fire. You know, getting puff pieces and stuff like that. No, but what do you think is, now that this sort of way of comms has become the standard, is this just the enduring approach for the next

however many years until we get better institutions? Or? You gotta always outrun yourselves. I'm really glad you brought this up. We did not coordinate by this, by the way, you guys gave me virtually nothing to prepare with and no talk points. I kept being fully unprepared, thank you.

So we didn't coordinate, but I actually had been thinking about this because Rostra launched around a year ago, almost exactly a year ago. And in that intervening year, founder mode has kind of become part of the canon. Like it's here, it's not evenly distributed. Maybe Deloitte is not going direct,

but like founders going direct is now part of the default playbook for comms like any YC company that's coming out into the world today they're thinking the founder is going to go direct but the thing is you have to outrun yourself like once something becomes the thing that everybody does that becomes the new norm and you always want to be standing up above the norm like I remember for a while last year I was doing manifestos I having all of like, my founders and my companies do manifestos and then for a three month span, it was just like every other week of manifesto.

It actually began, I kind of got like, manifestoed out and same with like the secret plans. So you gotta keep- Same with the five reels, same thing. Kind of burned through them. That one happened really fast. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry everyone.

Yeah, well, so how do you think so? One more montage reels guys. Yeah, so we everyone. Yeah. Well, so how do you think so? One more montage wheels, guys. Yeah, so we just had Guillermo on. Vercell creates Next.js. They release it to the world. And then they say, yeah, we'll manage it for you if you want. Or you can just use it by yourself. You basically open source the concept of going direct.

But then you have sort of playbooks that you run with your founders. Is there anything else that the thing about something like going direct is you can tell somebody exactly, any sort of like highly specialized skillset. Double-fisting Celsius? What is that in front of your hands? I go Yoruba Mate.

John goes Celsius. That's pretty reflective of our brands. Sorry. It triggered me because the week before last, I had two, I didn't know how caffeinated. Oh, they have a lot of caffeinated in there. I needed like a defibrillator. Oh yeah.

Well, Red Bulls. 400, yeah, it is six Red Bulls, I think, technically. Who's counting though? Yeah, gotta be careful. All right, Jordan, where do you get it? No, but the idea is like, is there other things that maybe fall outside of that, that you feel like you can sort of open source,

things that you can just tell the world, they're very hard to execute, so they should still go to your firm to actually pull them off. But what else are you thinking about, kind of like open sourcing? Yeah, or they can just do it. I like the concept of open sourcing.

In fact, you should be able to do it by yourself, whether I get hit by a bus, or your team gets hit by a bus, it should never just like rest on any one person. I think the next era, so going direct was probably the big thing for the last year. I think the next era is in shorthand,

attention is all you need. Like in a world where AI can just do anything all the time, you can see people like shipping and launching stuff. It used to be monthly, then weekly, and now daily, there's just like huge drops all the time. You can see people like shipping and launching stuff. It used to be monthly, then weekly, and now daily. There's just like huge drops all the time. And it's a tree falling quietly in the forest unless you can get people to actually care about it. So the two things are number one, how to get the attention

and just like focus it for a small period of time. And then number two, how to harvest it and turn it into something. Like the big mistake that founders make is they'll do something to catch a little bit of attention and then it goes away, like we're talking about Saratoga water, it goes away and you didn't do anything with it.

So you're doing like attention catch and release like California with illegal migrants or like sports fishing. Like don't do the catch and release, hold on to the attention and turn it into money. Like your job is turning attention into money. I mean, that's the beauty of the Ashton Hall thing. He went super viral, but he already had been on Instagram for five years,

had millions of followers over there. He goes super viral. He already has a whole business set up on coaching and fitness stuff. Like there is a funnel. And if you found him from this X-post, you're gonna be paying him if you like him very quickly. Whereas with Hawk2aGirl, we were talking about this, she had to spin up a podcast and then

I'm sure at a certain point she was like, well, this crypto thing seems like a good way to make money. Whereas Ashton already has a business and can just go capitalize on it. We got a delivery here. Oh, thank you, brother. Here we go. We got the Saratoga. You guys should do the Dunk Lives, the new Ice Bucket channel.

Yeah, we also need holes to dunk our face in. Yeah, we definitely do. So here's a question for you that I think is actually an interesting one. So the three of us are dear friends with David Senra. And David has sort of studied all these entrepreneurs that were able to build these massive careers or massive sort of family empires completely in silence, right? He made a post, he made a post two weeks ago that was somebody to the effect

of like, I talked to this family, they had written biographies about the family and he asked if he could do a, an episode on them. And they were like, absolutely not. We're not giving away our sort of secrets is, do you think that, you know, do you think that that the playbook of just building in silence and you're sort of in the shadows and nobody, and not really sharing what you're working on, do you think businesses like that will, there seems like there's tons of examples

throughout history, but that was pre-internet, right? If you take the strategy of we're gonna build in silence, be very secretive, does that playbook work when you have 10 competitors that are gonna be extremely loud, constantly sort of like accumulating attention? And I just wonder if that's sort of a pre-internet strategy. So the thing here is, one day soon, maybe you'll have the one person billion dollar company,

but for now, the company that wins is the company that can recruit and attract the best talent. And the pool of super elite differentiated talent is pretty concentrated and they're all being head hunted by like the same firms. And so the way to get ahead is to get that talent before your competitors can and they'll join you if they know you and trust you and believe in you. And so if you're someone who's already a household name, like if Palmer Lucky went silent for a while, it'd be fine because people know what he's about. Ilya Setskova has been silent for quite a while

and people know, you don't have to try to figure out like what am I gonna get if I try to go work for them? And they have like demand knocking down on their doors. But if you don't have that, then you do need to build it. And I think where your question is coming from too, is like we see a lot of founders get dunked on for like yapping too much and posting too much. And it's like, when are you building your company?

You're tweeting like every hour. And I think the one thing to know is it's not about how much you yap, it's about the ship yap ratio. You have to respect the ship yap ratio. And if the ratio is right, you can get away with anything. That's great. Elon's a perfect example of this.

Nobody's like, hey, bro, you're posting 20 times an hour. Relax. The rockets are going up. OK, the rockets are being caught. The rockets are being caught. It's sitting in the chopsticks. He can post what he wants. On ongoing direct, I've always thought

that there's a little bit more nuance there. Obviously, it's really key to tell someone that, hey, it's OK to start posting and going direct and doing founder-led communications. But that doesn't mean that you should close off the indirect channels. And I see it almost as like, uh, like tiers or levels. So level one is like, you start telling the world what you're building, build some credibility.

Maybe there's some posts on X from the founder's account. Then you start doing new media like podcasts like this calling in telling, you know, you're using other people's platforms, but you're accelerating. And then eventually the traditional media comes in and writes like the big profile. And that still has a lot of benefit. Can you talk to us about how founders should think about writing up that curve and where the value is across all three of those? Yeah.

So roughly you want to think of it as, uh, as like concentric circles going outwards and you cannot mess up the order. So the innermost circle is your co-founders and executives and the people who work for you. And they have to believe and you have to fully saturate them with the propaganda and the sense of mission before you go out to the next circle. Next circle maybe is investors board,

and then you get to customers, and then you get to maybe regulators, maybe other people. But the problem with trying to skip one of these in the sequence is, let's say that you didn't brief, let's say that you're launching like a new mission and you didn't brief your employees on this refreshed mission, but you go to the press and now your employees are reading it in the press

and there's a disconnect, two things can happen. One, they're like, WTF, this isn't what I signed up for. Now you have a world of pain because any pain coming from inside the house is like a thousand times worse than external. And two, your employees have freedom of speech and they have Twitter accounts and they can go on X and post like, well, wait a second, I'm not, are you sure this isn't this doesn't seem right. And then all of a

sudden, everything, everything downstream of employees has lost credibility because people figure if it's true, employees would know about it. And so, sequencing it correctly and not getting too greedy too fast is really important. Like always go from the smaller circles to the outer circles. Where we're-

That makes sense. In terms of getting, every company wants to get attention. The challenge is that there are some sort of cheap things that you can do that get massive amount of attention that are sort of like, you know, basically like slop. Like I won't name it, but there was a launch video in the last 30 days that was just in my group chats

was like super cringe, but then it got like millions of views and I was looking at it and I'm like, all right, like this seems like cheap attention, but then maybe it just like millions of views and I was looking at it and I'm like, all right, like this seems like cheap attention, but then maybe it just got so many views that it works. Talk about, maybe talk about like taste when it comes to getting attention and is there more longevity if you're sort of building that sort of slower base of sort of like tasteful releases

and messaging and comms versus like the cheap, high attention moments. Yeah, tasteful, tasteful vids. So there's two things. One is, you know, the crazy hot chart? Yeah. The crazy hot chart. Of course.

Yeah, who doesn't? There's like a company crazy hot chart where if you're really hot as a company There's a lot that you can get away with But if you're new and people don't know a lot about you then every single thing you do is say is like Disproportionately affecting how they think of you And so if you have a 10-year history of just like wins and bangers and you have one thing that is kind of weird or Flop or a little bit cringy, you can kind of get away with it,

it gets absorbed a little bit better. But if your company is launching for the first time, and the one thing people see is 100% of the data points that they have about you, you can't really afford that. So I'm not saying don't take risks, I'm saying that the importance of taste goes up like even, even more when you're new and there's not a lot of data points

about you and then the second thing about just taste versus quantity is a lot of things that get a ton of likes and engagement are just total garbage and their responses are all like bots like if you go to a tech crunch X post and look at the replies it's just straight up bot Like if you go to a TechCrunch X post and look at the replies, it's just straight up bot replies. If you go to these like framework bros or I don't know, the like mental model bros, here's what happened this week, thread bros. You had a lot of engagement, but I would not trade that for the world. And so the thing to look for is like, who is in the replies and who is not in the replies. Cause replies are usually really positive too,

but it's positive from people that like, it's a counter signal if they like. Yeah, exactly. It's all about signal, right? Signal. Yeah. Do you think the best sort of like, going direct founder mode to put it in one bucket,

CEOs are sort of like born that way and maybe you need to help uncover that ability of like sort of communicating their story to the world or is it something that anybody can figure out with sort of proper training and understanding sort of social mechanics and the platforms that we distribute content on and all that kind of thing. Okay, there are different archetypes of super cracked impressive founder that you wanna just throw your life to the side and go follow them and do whatever it takes

to get on that rocket ship kind of feeling. There's different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling. But the key is you can be in an archetype but you can't be different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling. But the key is, you can be in an archetype, but you can't be between archetypes. You can't be in the cringy, uncanny valley of here's the real you and here's the online you and you're sort of like make it halfway there. You can be the like super brash, controversial, loud type. You can be the me-me funny type.

You can be the strong silent type of founders and just like one thing once a year. But if you're type 3 and you're trying to force yourself into type 1, it's going to be painful for everybody like most of all you. People can tell. I think it's less about there's one type and you have to be it, and can you learn it or do you have to be born it? It's less about there's one type and you have to be it and can you learn it or do you have to be born it? It's more like there's different types

and you can fit into one of those types, but you can't try to jump from one type to another and kind of like fall into the abyss halfway in between. Yeah, I think about the difference between like a David Holes and a Justin Mares. Like Justin is doing threads, but they're very detailed on health and breaking stuff down.

David Holes just shows up once a week and tweets something like about the future and how AI will change everyone's world. Yeah, like alien civilizations. Yeah, alien civilizations, but they're both great posters, but if they tried to swap, it would be really, really weird. Yeah. You sometimes see people online larping as plumber.

Totally. Yeah, they're trying to be someone else. Yep, exactly. I have a chip on my shoulder. And I always say this for the going direct thing is like, how do you communicate? Because there are some people who their authentic communication is best in a blog post or a long post. Other people can be really pithy and just post bangers.

Other people are really great on video and should just do a podcast circuit. Other people are great on national TV. And so figuring out where the founder sits and then accelerating that instead of being like, well, X is the popular one. So I got to figure that out. It can be very hard. This is what we were talking about. And you were saying I should describe it as default out. Remember? Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that. You and I were talking. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Standard out. Standard out. Remember? Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that. Were we, you and I were talking. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Standard out, standard out. You were talking.

Oh yeah. So in programming, in programming, you have standard out. As like a, as like a, um, a metaphor for the, the default, uh, the default type of medium that somebody should use. Yep. And if they need to go outside of that, they can, but everybody has like a strongest, like a default medium. And you can, you don't have to like only stick to that. Like you can go outside of it. Some of these like Andre Karpathy posts are actually a blog post and just dumps it into

the Xbox and hits post and it's fine. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that's about the flexibility to X platform, but there are definitely great CEOs out there who's like their default out should just actually being going and sitting down with, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin and doing an interview and they will they will crush that and if they and then and then that clip should live on X and someone else should, but they should not try and turn it into a banger hilarious post because like that's just not authentic to who they are. I have a I have a prompt for you.

One of our one of our 2025 goals is to get a glowing puff piece in a mainstream journalism outfit. What's the strategy for getting TBPN on the cover of the New York Times or the New Yorker? What should we do? The journal would be the ideal. The journal would be fitting. So how can we reverse engineer this? Take us through the steps. I think Financial Times could be good for you guys. I see you looking really nice with that salmon pink backdrop.

Oh, yeah, that'd be fantastic. OK, yeah, financial times. How do we get the profile done? OK, so the first question is, what is the business goal here? Like, how do you convert attention to money, right? And you guys converted, OK, let's just work through it live. You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot you guys converted, okay, let's just work through it live. You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot of listeners

so that you have leverage with advertisers and then the advertisers pay you and then it grows and continues being the most profitable podcast in the world. That's the business, baby. Number one question is who are those marginal listeners? Are they people in tech that you haven't reached yet and you're gonna get more bang for buck

by converting like people in tech who've been living in a cave and don't listen or are you gonna go out and reach a new community that you haven't gotten into yet or you're gonna go to some like in between like adjacent community where it's people who in let's say it's people in DC who now understand that half of Silicon Valley is in Washington DC and they need to understand tech better. So it's like policy people who would want to understand tech. So here's my first question to you is like,

who is that next group of listeners that you're going after? Probably slightly older public markets investors. We were pretty big in the private markets for tech, but moving our, we like to think of it as like YC Demo Day was our NFL combine. Earning season is our Super Bowl. And so we want to deliver on a Super Bowl level event for TBPN covering public company earnings, MAG7. So you want to go to sell side analysts. You want to go to the big banks. You want to go

to probably the exchanges have some events, like New York Stock Exchange has events. You probably want things that are Citadel adjacent, like Deshawe adjacent to get into that community. And also there's a lot of overlap between young tech people and young hedge fund and quant trader people. Obviously like the young Jane Street people just go back and forth. And so if that's the audience, then I would work backwards, like reverse engineer this whole thing and think, okay, where are they getting their information? And what do they already care about that we can tap into? Like it's hellishly difficult to make people care about some new thing that they've just

never heard of. Yeah. Whereas, and Derek Thompson had this insight too, the best viral thing is something that's a little bit new, but a little bit familiar. Okay, let's say that we're talking to those people. You're probably going to aim for, I mean, they'll read Wall Street Journal, they'll read Financial Times. Let's just say journal because the paywall is less strict.

Now you want to think about how do you fall into one of the coverage areas? Like are you in tech? Are you in culture? Are you in culture? Are you in finance or something? So there, for example, New York Times has a guy who is like between tech and culture. And so maybe someone like that, or let's say it's the journal and their tech,

honestly, their tech desk, their tech team is in in shambles right now because they had this super bizarre layoff a few weeks ago. There's just a crazy management decision to lay off a bunch of AI and tech people at the cusp of ATI. It was crazy. Really odd. Yeah.

Maybe you want to aim for culture, finance, and then now you're putting together two pieces. One piece is like, what do those young hedge fund analysts or whatever care about and what are they thinking about? They're probably trying to understand what's coming out of the tech world and which companies are worth watching versus which are not. And they can see publicly available information, which is very scant, but they're trying to read behind the scenes of like which founders are respected and how good are they really and can they recruit that kind of thing. And then what does the paper cover?

And the paper probably covers big trends and what's happening in the world of AI. Like as we approach AGI, what are changes happening in the world? So, and then the third circle is like the unique perspective that you guys bring. So I would start by not doing a pitch at all, just vibing, networking, going out for drinks, chilling,

and starting to talk about what's in the middle of that Venn diagram, which is like, you have the unique experience, it's interesting to the people you're trying to reach, and it's interesting to what the journal has been covering. Do that like for three months or so, and then figure out one hook that's in the news, and then offer to do a deep dive into the hook, and then have somebody who's not you, like have somebody

else that they respect who's in your network and their network, tell them, or like a me, or like a founder, or like an Eric Lyman, you know, go to them and just tell them like, this is the thing blowing up in tech and they should really take a deeper look. And at that point, you're familiar to them. Familiarity breeds affection, positive feelings, but it also breeds credibility. So people who are told a fact 10 times tend to believe that the fact is true just because they've heard a lot.

So at this point, you're familiar, you have the story dialed in, you have your unique area of expertise, and then you have some third party validator telling them to look deeper into it, and that's how it begins. Well, thanks for coming on the most profitable podcast in the world.

Last one, I know you've got a minute left. We try not to swear on this show because swearing is vulgar. And we're very short, bearish, using cuss words online right now. How are you advising your clients in a world where big names are thrown around mean words? I think it's the same thing as before, which is like whichever bucket you're in,

stay in the bucket. And if there's a founder who just talks like a sailor and that's how they are, you can try to ask them to clean it up. I've never seen that work. I've just never had an experience where someone tells the founder, like, clean up the potty mouth and talk different and they actually do. And so it's just, that's your archetype. You stay there. But I will say the big takeaway, if people are trying to figure out like, what is the next era of comms? and just if there's one thing I as a founder need to know about about building a cult and movement around my company it's we're we're entering the

era of personality hires with respect and affection you guys ultimate personality hires I'm one too safe space it's okay cheers but in a world where AI is better than us at pretty much everything, every human is gonna be a personality hire. So just figure out what your lane is and lean into that. And if you have that fire in you and you get into fights once in a while,

it's not the worst thing. And if you don't, don't try to LARP as Palmer Lucky and find the fights just so that you can have something to beef over. Just find your lane, be in the lane. Don't try to jump into a lane that is disingenuous and unnatural for you because people sniff it out. Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that a lot.

Authenticity, as silly as it sounds. Great, well, I have to say thank you for coming on. When your clients have historically that I'm aware of have come on the show, I'm sure there's been some that I'm not aware of that have come on the show I always come away and just tell John he was too too he was too media trained too good so you're doing great work and thank you for for for being a the former brother of the year and a friend of the show see what happens this year yeah the good work just be year and a friend of the show. We'll see what happens this year. Keep up the good work.

You might be two times. Just to be clear, it could be two times. You need to do the ceremony. You need to do the ceremony where I go and put the crown and then we all cry. Yes. Well, I mean, we're gonna have a black tie event this year for the award show and I'm sure you'll be invited.

That's it, perfect. All right, thanks guys. Amazing. Thanks for stopping by. Take care. Bye. That was great. Lots of great insights from Lulu as always

What's your review of the Saratoga water? Is this gonna is this gonna put Rora out of business is this gonna put every water company out of business? They're getting so much. Let's do a taste test Tastes good. I mean it tastes fine. It's okay This just screams to be the restaurant that a mid restaurant, or the water that a mid restaurant would stock. Okay.

Trying to be like, oh yeah, we have bottled still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we have Saratoga. Okay. Saratoga. Yeah. I think it's fun that it's going viral. Good luck to the team. No, I'm happy for them because I enjoy

and appreciate value creations. I'm glad they're doing. Totally. Glad they're? I'm sure their numbers today. value creation. So I'm glad they're doing, I'm sure they're numbers today. Fantastic, they must be so happy. Yeah, every single. Well, you know what they should do if they wanna keep up the sales coming out of this viral sensation.

They should buy some ads on. Buy every billboard in the United States. They really should. Just take advantage of this moment. Spend your next 10 years. They should go on adquick.com. They have out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise,

and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. It's great. Do you want to dive into CloudFlare? Should we just move on to some timeline? What are you feeling right now? How much did we actually get into of Cloudflare? I feel like it's worth.

We didn't start Cloudflare, but they are the third player in this debate. We're gonna have Amjad Massad from Replet on in 30 minutes. And I thought it'd be good to kind of show the three companies that have been duking it out on the timeline. Yeah. We broke down for sale.

Let's briefly cover it and then we'll go into the timeline. Fantastic. So it's an older company, it's a public company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince. That's the CEO who has been chirping at Guillermo on X. The goal was to build a globally distributed network to improve website security and performance.

And so when you run into CloudFlare, it is a CDN. And so when you're scaling, you're getting a ton of traffic. The idea is instead of those hits, triggering database queries and all the stuff that's going on wherever your server is on AWS, they hit CloudFlare first. It can mitigate DDoS attempts because it's just delivering the front end webpage first.

And CloudFlare is a product that helps your website similarly to Bercel be very quick and fast. And they started with a $2.1 million Series A round in 2009 to develop a prototype and kickstart operations. They launched a TechCrunch Disrupt. What a throwback, 2010. They had core services, CDN, DDoS protection, which I mentioned, performance operation, and it was all a freemium model.

So you get onto cloud flare free for a little bit. And then quickly, as you start scaling, they start charging you more. But as the, the tenor on X has been cloud flare is still pretty affordable. Even when you scale up, Amazon AWS has a lot of cloud flare, competitive products, cloud front, I think is literally a direct competitor to their CDN product, but CloudFlare's been price competitive, roughly,

and so you get a lot of stuff, and then we'll go into kind of what they're doing to add features and functionalities to their product catalog. So in 2011, there is a Series B by NEA. They wound up hitting billions of page views, millions of domains served. They're scaling pretty quickly after only two years.

They get to that $20 million Series B. Then the next year, $50 million Series C. I mean, they were basically five years-ish ahead of Versel. But it's interesting how Versel's Series A was 20. So it's like everything just kind of like. Yeah, everything got pulled forward. Yeah, pulled forward. Around, that's a standard And now, a $50 million series A is common. A $20 million series B, if a company does that and doesn't say, hey, we intentionally

raised less money than we could have, you're like, okay, they're probably struggling. And so Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures comes in for the series C that's $50 million in 2012 and they added more points of presence Which means more local servers that can deliver Content even faster because the whole name of the game is if you're in Chicago you want a server in Chicago That's delivering that website So it's extra fast because the speed of light and physics come into the equation when you're going Even just going across the US and back is you know at light speed is several milliseconds and that matters I think it's almost like 30 milliseconds

I don't know for sure but it's it's it's significant enough that a content delivery network makes a lot of sense roughly Is that roughly how fast I was running this morning? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I smoked the whole team Yeah, we had a little ray a little foot race this morning with the team and Jordy came out on top he's fast fast brother. In 2012 they reached a one billion dollar valuation or close to it based on rapid growth and network expansion. In 2013 they added DDoS mitigation and they successfully defended against high profile attacks. The spam house incident, that's going to be a good start when you dig into spam house.

But I'm sure there were a lot of DDoSing going on. I mean, basically anytime someone was obsessed, I mean, DDoSing was so crazy at the time. The backstory here is hilarious. So in March 2013, Spam House, which is a nonprofit organization that maintains block lists of malicious IP addresses experienced a massive DDoS attack, which experts called the largest in history that knocked their website offline and broadly disrupted the internet. So, hey, you know the guy that's trying to stop us from doing what we do? Let's stop him. Oh yeah. I mean, DDoS stuff is serious.

I mean a lot of nation states use it to knock off different services that they think are not aligned. Axe has been the subject of DDoS attacks. Elon's talked about that. Somebody thought it was a nation state potentially. But it's happened all the time. And it can happen on a very small scale too if you're just running a small company

and there's some kid who's a script kiddie and gets upset happen on a very small scale too if you're just running a small company and there's Some kid who's a script kitty and gets upset with you or just want to troll you. Oh, yeah, that's right Yeah, and it's basically I'd mess with him and I'd go like dad Why is your website down and then you'd go spend like yeah ten minutes being like, yeah I don't know, but it's really as easy as just going like, in the Python code, while one, like infinite loop, request this website.

And it just requests it millions of times and it can just be done so quickly that if you don't have something set up, you can be in a lot of trouble. And so they doubled their domains to 1.5 million, servicing roughly 5% of global web traffic, getting really, really big. Then they go on acquisition.

They did the meme. The best thing is when companies do the meme. It turns out these generational companies, they do the meme. They do the meme. And that's the lesson, always do the meme. Whatever percentage of your TAM that you put in your pre-seed deck

that you want to achieve, just do it. Just do it, yeah. You'll be a big company. It'll actually work. They face and resolve scaling challenges. Then in 2014, they go on this acquisition spree. They acquired Stop the Hacker, what a great name, in February of 2014 to boost threat detection.

They acquired CryptoSeal in June of 2014 to enhance encryption and certificate management. CryptoSeal, I believe founded by Ryan Lackey, good friend of mine, great, just kind of genius programmer, honestly. major initiatives, they launched Project Galileo to protect vulnerable public interest websites, introduced universal SSL free HTTPS for all customers and keyless SSL for high security clients,

and then they expanded their global network to over 30 data centers. That set them up for their series D, $110 million from Capital G, that's Google, Microsoft, and Baidu. They got three of the hyperscalers, essentially, in the company. They expanded to China, and then they adopted

a bunch of other technologies, web application firewall, introduced the I'm under attack mode to counter layer seven DDoS attacks, and at this point in 2015 they hit 62 points of presence worldwide so they're continuing to grow and whenever you're deploying fast applications on the edge we saw this with the Vercel Vercel going to something like 30 points of presence cloud flares up at 60 in 2015 and that's the name of the that's the name of the game when you're trying

to deliver the internet very quickly. In 2016, they acquired Eager Platform Company to build out CloudFlare apps platform and we'll talk about that because that's kind of the product that will compete with the replet and Vercell stuff is actually being able to run your entire app on CloudFlare instead of just deliver content. So the traditional CDN is images take a long time to load. Let's put those on servers that are close to the people requesting them. Netflix is a great example. You want to put, you know, squid game, the video for squid game.

You want that to not come from far away. You want that to be up close unless you're cashing it. But in general, you want it to be close so that when someone clicks that explored high, you know, people talk about high frequency trading. We'd explore this big for us. Podcast. Yeah. Trying to get. I mean, with the rate we're growing, we'll probably have to build our own cloud flare, honestly, and just buy our own hardware.

We'll probably have to set up our own nuclear plants to run the facilities, create our own chip fabs, and ultimately design our own chips. Yeah, exactly. Just completely vertically integrated down to the mining and extraction of nuclear fissile material. That's right But that's the that's the modern media game you play. Yeah, 75 person company now I'm sure we'll be at thousands in a couple years. That's right Cloud Flare in 2016 they hit a hundred global cities. They had some outages and operational errors

It's it's a it's a rough-and-tumble game that they're in 2016 They expand this is what Guillermo was mentioning, the Cloudbleed incident, a security bug led to data leaks, quickly identified, patched and mitigated. I don't think there was a huge impact on the business. I don't think information, and we didn't get a chance to talk to Guillermo about this, but I think both with the Versel security issue

and with Cloudbleed, I'm not sure that there was a lot of customer credit card data that was stolen, but the potential for harm was really significant and that obviously hurts reputations and needs to be addressed with open communication, which is what all these CEOs are trying to do now. There was also a little bit of a political content debate because the Daily Stormer, which is a very controversial right-wing website,

was using CloudFlare and obviously was the subject of intense DDoSing constantly. CloudFlare had taken a stance of, hey, we're just an infrastructure provider. We abide by the First Amendment, free speech. If the government wants to shut you down, they can do that. But we are not the arbiter of what should and should not be on the internet.

We're just an infrastructure provider. But in 2017, they did drop the Daily Stormer after public pressure and internal reviews. And they had to kind of rewrite and figure out where is their content policy, what's acceptable, and what's not. Of course, their private company, they can decide what is appropriate

to use their server for, and they have the right to refuse service, but it was controversial. And they had this happen later, they had 8chan with a customer. That was the same thing, yep. So they dropped them at some point. And so that's always been kind of a hot button

for all these infrastructure platforms. When Alex Jones got deplatformed, it was all the way down to like, the Shopify plugin that he uses for reviews wants to not let him use that review widget anymore. And it's all a nested bottle, like bag of worms basically, it's very frustrating. And I mean, we saw this with Trump

where he got to platform from like Pinterest and stuff. So sometimes these things can become like big hot button issues. But back to the interesting tech stuff, they launched Cloudflare Workers enabling serverless code execution at the network edge. So what that means is that if you do have something that needs to be computed on the server side, you're not just delivering your content on the CDN anymore, your HTML and your images, you're also allowing the user to interact with your

app and create actual server-side functionality through these Cloudflare workers, part of the whole serverless trend. They acquired New Mob to optimize mobile performance, implemented creative entropy generation, lava lamps, pendulums, Geiger counters to enhance security. That's crazy. Have you seen the lava lamps thing? You've heard of this? I haven't.

So basically, there's this big question on it when you're working in security. Big piece of that is how do you generate random numbers? And so one of the ways they do it is they create a wall of lava lamps that all move in a completely random and not predictable way. And so they take a video of that and then they compress that image and that generates a random number that can't be predicted. Because even if you're just like,

we're gonna use some random number generator from the computer, there's sometimes vulnerabilities in there where you can actually truly predict. They're all pseudo random number generators. So there's this race to create the craziest random number. Yeah, look up Cloudflare lava lamps. They have a picture of the actual wall.

It's so cool. It also just like a great vibe. So I love that. 2018, they launched the 1.1.1.1 DNS service. This is a free privacy-first DNS resolver. They expanded to domain registration, wholesale cost domain registration with no markups, formed an alliance

with major cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees, which can actually get really crazy expensive. Zero trust enhancements, cloudflare access, and Argo Tunnel setting the stage for comprehensive security suite. So they're taking security seriously. Oh yeah. Putting the screws to Google,

and they set themselves up for an IPO. So in 2019, they go public. Right before, they did pre-IPO funding. Series E, it's $150 million at around $3.2 to $3.5 billion. They dropped more controversial clients, as you mentioned, 8chan. And they had a few operational hiccups around this time, some outages, some software deployment issues, but nothing that stopped them from going public. Yeah, this is what Guillermo was talking about.

The number one thing is mitigating outages. Yep. And so they filed their S1 in August, went public on September 13th, 2019 at $15 a share. They raised over $525 million. Let's go. Historical size gone for them. There we go. They launched Cloudflare Warp, a VPN VPN mobility service and then they went on another acquisitions

Spree they acquired s2 systems for browser isolation technology and link to bolster developer tools leading to cloud flare Pages getting more into the application layer And then they appointed the co-founder And then they appointed the co-founder, Michelle Zatlin as president, marking a milestone in tech leadership. Revenue reached $431 million in 2020, with significant growth in enterprise customers, because again, even though they are competing with AWS,

they famously have built their own servers, own their own hardware, and can be much more competitive on pricing. So they enhanced workers with support for new languages, launch cloud flare pages and R2 storage, which is S3 compatible object storage, but it doesn't have egress fees. So if you're storing a bunch of images or texts or Jason files on S3, you can just move right over to R2, which is, I think,

isn't that the one letter, one letter more and one number less? It's a very funny name. And so they're all about, you know, getting people to migrate more and more stuff off of AWS onto Cloudflare. And then they acquired Zaraa's to improve third-party integrations. Revenue grew to 656 million in 2021. they surpassed one billion in annual revenue in 2022

Introduced D1 a serverless SQL database and a quiet went on some more acquisition sprees Navigated complex issues during the during the yet Russia Ukraine conflict balancing service continuity with policy adjustments They blocked kiwims, which is another Controversial website there were harassment issues there And so they're they're constantly scaling and then dealing with the fallout of you know Having a whole bunch of companies on their on their platform launched workers AI in 2023 partner with NVD NVIDIA to deploy GPUs at the edge. So if you want to do AI workloads in an actual city,

very low latency, Cloudflare now offers that. More acquisitions, Zero Trust Networking Company, Secure Infrastructure Access Company, Cloud Native Security Company, just tons and tons of acquisitions as they go. And now they are aiming for net profitability and targeting $5 billion in annual revenue in the coming years.

They're expanding enterprise sales and enhancing zero trust and edge computing offerings. And they're deepening their AI integration, broadening the developer platform. Yeah, and one thing I love about CloudFlare is they sponsor the US Ski Team. Oh, that's great. So if you like skiing,

you might also like their set of products. And this is a CloudFlare at the moment, it's a $42 billion public company. And they've actually, they've suffered, you know, much of the same sell-off that other firms have, but it's just wild to think about whatever that pre-IPO round was, the Series E, they did a 3.2 billion. So they're up 10x, those IPO buyers,

something like that, that's great. And certainly a good outcome for Union Square and all the early investors that got in at those $10 million, $20 million rounds, but it took a while to get here. 15 years in the making. Yeah, it's interesting. One thing that's fascinating,

so Cloudflare is a sort of scaled platform, has plenty of pages comparing itself to other providers. And you would think if Matthew Prince, the CEO, is coming after Gear Mode, that they would have be positioning. I would expect a cloud flare versus versell landing page There's no mention of there's nothing on the cloud flares. Who are they copying themselves to? Versal does mention cloud flare But but but I'm sure it's not interesting. Well, maybe that changes after today's spicy episode. Yeah, I mean, I just think like, you know, who knows what's going on behind the scenes,

right? Guillermo didn't mince words when he said, like, we tried to use Cloudflare for a pretty important project internally. It didn't work. And so now I can imagine there very well could be some ego involved. But anyways. Yeah, it does feel like a little bit of like big dogging going on, just like, hey little bro,

like you don't even have servers, you know, Vercell, like, you know, we have our own infrastructure, we compete with AWS, you're not even in the conversation. Like that's kind of the energy Matthew Prince brings, but you know, hopefully everyone can benefit from a rising tide and a growing pizza pie. And the pie slices will get bigger for everyone because that's what we wanna see.

We wanna see bull markets everywhere. Where you can enjoy a nice piece of pizza pie. At a wander? That's right, John. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander. Go to Wander.com.

Use our code. Yeah, use our code. Enter, they're giving away a trip to TBPN audience. Yeah, go check it out. So go check it out. Wander.com slash TBPN. Inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning,

and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. That's right. Anyway, we got eight minutes. Should we hit the timeline? Let's hit the timeline. Let's go to shield. Yeah, great post from shield here. He's following up. He says venture capital in the 90s was wild. Good funds had triple digit IRRs and he's pulling up. So KP here, here vintage their first vintage this is why they're in the whole tree yeah this is why they're in the whole

thing so their first fund it's eight million dollar fund they only got a 31 X multiple only a 51% yeah why is the IRR so low given the multiple is that just because it was such a long fund it took them a long time to get liquidity on those like because they had a 32 X fund fund seven but it's a hundred and twenty two percent IRR for yeah for Kleiner Perkins fund seven I wonder what's going on there's no other there's no in in sight we'll have to get ever at Randall from Kleiner Perkins on the show but anyways their best performing fund was in 1996, unsurprisingly. Right before the dot com boom.

The right time. They IPO'd everything in that portfolio, probably. Yeah, so they have a 17x multiple, but their IRR was 286%. That's crazy. I mean, they turned 300 million. 300 million, so. It was a much bigger fund.

Yeah, so they turned it into almost $6 billion. Yeah. Wow. And then there's a bunch of other funds here. We got Mayfield, which I feel bad. I should know better. My venture is legit. Very old school though. I mean, you can see in the 80s already on fun for you. Imagine KP comes out their little $8 million venture fund 31 exit. Like, oh, I think we might be onto something here. What's also interesting is all through the 80s, they just were like, we do $150 million funds. Like that's what we do. They were very disciplined. Yeah, but the fascinating thing is they have their first fund

in 1972, $8 million. They don't raise their second fund until eight years later. Oh yeah. The $55 million fund. Probably just so slow and took so long for those companies to get to liquidity. And it's funny, the learning is like, they do this huge, we don't have any data

past their 96 fund because I think it just switched to being KP at a certain point. But it's funny that like they didn't learn their lesson on like upsizing the fund because they just put up this ridiculous performance on the biggest fund that they have outlined here. Yeah, I mean, I wonder what's in that 72 vintage. It might've been like Intel maybe.

I don't even know. Apple, something like that. Get a couple of those. A lot of bangers in there. Sequoia also doing quite well, putting up big numbers. It'd be fun to do. I have a feeling that this summer, the news cycle will slow down a little bit.

And it would be fun to do deep dives on the top 20 individual funds ever. And the individual partners. I want to talk, I mean, if they're still in the game or they're still just maybe probably retired, probably skiing where they don't have chair lifts, that's very honest.

But we'll get them on the show. We'll have them break it down. We'll have them toast to the good old days where you could put up a 31x multiple In a couple I want to I want to find somebody that was doing venture capital in the 70s send them a bottle of Dom And a bottle of Saratoga. Yep, say hang out with us for three hours straight. Yep, and let's just let's do it Talk about the good old days Anyway, should we go to some nominative determinism? Yep. I love this one

It's Andre Carpathi. And if you break down his last name, it's Carpath. And of course, this is the man who worked at Tesla on self-driving cars, an AI pioneer, and DJ Cows says, I think about this every day. And I think about it too, a lot. Not every day. We do think about this a lot.

But I love this. Yeah. Bill Ackman is really into nominative determinism. That's why he's Ackman, activist I love this. Yeah. The Bill Ackman is really a denominator determinism. That's why he's Ackman, activist man. Sure. Yep. Makes sense. Yeah, it's a great one.

It's a good one. Should we go over to Super Dario talking to Arvind Srinivasis? Yeah, I just thought this was funny, because it's been this ongoing sort of thing that we talk about on the show. So Arvind Srinivas from Perplexity says, we're building, explaining why they're building a browser. He says, it's the only way to create AI agents with enough control over multiple apps, especially on iOS. The goal,

agents that can book travel, buy things and act as a personalized assistant. So we're just waiting some for one person to build an agent to book a private jet. You know, this is a very silly bridge to what's basically an ad read, but ramp travel is fantastic. I like, it is a magical product. And I'm not, I know I'm saying that I'm super conflicted,

but honestly, like you go there, it aggregates all the flights, it saves all your information perfectly. You click it and it's just automatically expensed, automatically put into, you just show up to the airport and oh wow, my TSA pre-check is in there. Cheapest rate too. Yeah, it's a flawless product.

And then you can also book the hotel right there. It is such a good product. And of course, as a manager of a company you can decide What's in policy? What's out of policy? How much you want to spend and stuff? But you know for us. It's a more of like you put a minimum on how much you spend on the hotel So that yeah, we're not staying anywhere staying on brand But for some companies that want to save cost same time and money they could put the cap on that as well But it really is it really is a magical product and I and I wouldn't be surprised if the first time I have an agent

Book for me. It's in yes Because they've built all of the like the harnessing to actually plug in in a really really seamless way I mean like ads or upsells. It's it's so much than booking. No ads in there, so we'll put one in here. We got a post from Austin, a friend of the show has been giving me a bunch of just, you know, he built the morning brew into a monster has been very helpful on TBPN. He's retired for a minute.

I put this in here cause I wanna call him out. Stop it. This is like one of the worst things I've ever seen. I really, really hate the idea of someone with as much talent as Austin retiring. It's like get back in the game, create some shareholder value, build a massive business. You should be working 100 hours a week. American needs you. And I saw this and I was just disgusted.

Okay. But it was revolting, honestly. But it's, it's really, really depressing. week American Needs You and I saw this and I was just disgusted. It was revolting honestly but it's it's really really depressing. But okay but clearly he's a marketer he's a media man and he's retiring so that he can unretire come out of the gates. I still I just have a lot of sensitivity around our word specifically. Yeah. I don't think we should be talking about retirements. I think we should be working to the bone forever. Well, he's staying busy. He is.

He's staying busy. I love it. He's got a bunch of things that he's doing. And we're going to have him on the show soon. I love it. I'm trying to pull him out of retirement. We're going to pull him out of retirement. We'll convince him.

We'll give him a talk. We'll give him a talk. Come get on the show. Yeah. We'll give you a dedicated spot. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is funny, because he. Yeah, I mean it is funny because he's like I'm in I'm in retirement. Here's my focus. I'm training for a half Ironman. I'm investing. I've written five a note angel checks

I'm tinkering. I'm playing with dozens of AI tools. I'm growing I helped 3x oceans talent monthly growth rate to 2 in 2.5 months Obviously, he's still in the game. He's merely in his Michael Jordan playing baseball era, I believe. That's right. He's getting back. I was looking for the right sports analogy. I was like, I just don't know. I don't know these things, but did Brady retired at one point briefly? Did he? I don't know. Is that not even correct?

It's more like, doesn't Bo Nicol retire in between every UFC fight, right? And then he comes back. Is that how that works? It's technically a retirement. Amazing. You always find something new to not understand. Well, come out of retirement, come on the show and announce your life's work and get to work, Austin. You're on notice. Let's skip the humanoids thing because that's a bigger deep dive. Let's do just a funny, funny post because we only got a couple minutes. Actually, how are we doing on Omjod? Is he in? No?

Okay, we will do this Ashley Vance post. Dan Primack shares, remember when Elon and Zuck said they were gonna fight in a cage and lots of people believed them? I believed them. And Ashley says, I heard somewhere that Italy wanted to charge them

$300 million to use the Colosseum. Not sure if it's true, but I think it is, and I think it killed the brawl. What a miss. It would've been so good. In general. It would've been amazing. Cash grab, not usually a good idea,

and missed opportunity to make Italy the center of celebrity grudge matches, pay-per-views, things like that. Huge miss. Also, they had a rough weekend. Who do you think would have won? Because there was always the thing about like Elon is just much physically, is physically bigger, but Zuck had been training more, and so it felt like if the fight had happened like that week that they were beefing, Zuck would have won. But if you gave Elon a year to train, Elon could learn enough of the basics to put his size to work and win.

What do you think? I think in a pure play boxing rule set. It was going to be Mixed Martial Arts. Oh, it was. Yeah. This is something I know about. The only thing I know about UFC is from the Zuck. It's actually so funny because I do

think that Zuck could nerd out enough on technique and get the right. And Elon would go into it being like, yeah, I'm just going to rely on my size advantage and just try to not work out at all. Yeah. Sure. And then Zuck would just be nerding out.

He'd get some super technical submission. I mean, the weight alone, I mean, there has to be a 40 pound gap or something. It's pretty significant, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of the Italians, they had a rough go in F1 this weekend coming in at... What happened?

Was Ferrari? Both didn't finish. Oh no. LeClaire and Hamilton, they've had a rough start to the year people are saying is a mechanical issues Is the car always something with for always I don't for our people people are saying like Lewis has gotten like a full season of like the typical Ferrari stuff just in in you know, barely started here two races It's unfortunate. It's rough, but Predictable. Well, should we go to Zach? Two races. It's unfortunate. It's rough. But predictable.

Well, should we go to Zach Glabman? I don't know how to pronounce that. Might be Zach G. Labman. Says crazy ad placement, TriRamp. And it's a United worker at an airport. And in the middle of his, in the middle of his bright yellow vest, it just says Ramp. And this just makes a lot of sense because you have

business, CFOs are flying. Business people traveling, ramp has travel products. I actually saw this and I was like, wait, is this actually? Did they actually do this? No, no, of course not. It's a joke, but the guy works on a ramp, I guess. We got a chart here from Orin Hoffman. He says, insane growth, what an amazing company.

And he's showing the flock safety ARR chart from Sakura we got to have the soccer guys on some time oh yeah because they have some of the best insight we got a fact check ad cock came out and said that figure is the number one most in-demand stock in the private markets which I think is categorically incorrect based on my insight into the market. But I would like to have Sakhar on to talk about what are these sort of, they do this research, heavy research on private companies, kind of pulling out random different data sources and putting it together nicely. And yeah, I would imagine they would have something

to say about that, but. Yeah, I mean, YC Company, Flock Safety, we've talked about them before, 200K in revenue in ARR in 2017, growing to 285 million in 2024. Wow, that is a lot. And I wonder what they do next. I can talk briefly about, uh, persona, who's the founder of rippling.

Sounds like he had a was really in a pickle over the weekend. Uh, this was yesterday at 6 AM. A lot of people sent this to us. Uh, like when there's just something extremely dramatic, people send it to us. I like when there's just something extremely dramatic, people send it to us. I'm like, you like that. Yeah, I get some of these texts and I'm like, is this a tech story? Yeah, we'll cover it,

but it's not necessarily top of our list. But it sounds like he had some very- But you gotta pay attention when there's a billionaire on the run. That's always an interesting story. Billionaire on the run, yeah. Something like that. I don't know if he's a billionaire,

but he's close to it. Close to it. We just spend like 10 minutes analyzing like dilution. Dilution. Well, well, Greenoaks came in at this valuation. They wanted 10% dilution. But then they have the SVB thing and they had to take, you know, kind of an emergency round of shorts. Um and were they 50-50 when they started the company? We don't

know. We don't. We don't really know. But anyways, he's going through divorce had a bunch of issues over the weekend, but they've been resolved, I think. So I was happy to cover that. Now he sent an update post. Yeah. So I mean, the high level here is that persona posted a massively viral thread, 17 million views, 68k likes. He said that he's going through a divorce and he's on the run from the Chine police hiding outside of Tamil Nadu. He had a rough go with his wife who he was married to for 10 years. They have a nine-year-old son, marriage broke down and his wife was having an affair

He was accused of a bunch of crimes the police came for him But it sounds like he's been more or less exonerated from all the accusations and is now And is now safe and sound and fortunately the kid is unharmed and I think that's the silver lining of what really matters here. Yeah. We got a post from Will Brown. He says, bro. This is why we do the show. Last night was a deep seek moment. It's funny because like that makes sense and the whole deep seek thing, the whole reason that that phrase makes sense because people were saying deep seek is a Sputnik moment. Yeah.

It's like now last night was Sputnik moment yeah I love it the internet utterly and we snapped if we kind of miss coverage a little bit on deep deep see there is a new version of deep seek out but I don't think it was as revolutionary it was much more incremental and it didn't have the narrative of oh it was built for ten dollars in a shed with you know screws and it doesn't hit the same doesn't hit the same news around it yeah they there are there's also the new Baidu model that they're they're training right or no it's Jack

it's Jack Ma with with an well speaking of someone as handsome as Jack Ma we got I'm John Masad in the building welcome to the show What's going on, how are you good? I just dunked my head in a ball of ice I hope you got your banana on there, too The bananas key I hope you use Saratoga, man. I hope you got your banana on there, too. Yeah, my banana is the key. The banana's key. You can't start your morning without a banana on your face. Just some banana all over. And you still lifted like crazy. Last time I saw you, you were dead lifting, like 500 pounds

or something like that. I lost a lot of weight. It's just like you get to a point where it's unhealthy. It's, it's not exercise. It's, it's, it's fucking killing you. It gets, it gets a little risky. The risk of injury gets up there, but you gotta be able to, you know, break a sweat every once in a while. I, you see, uh, Daniel growing Daniel's tweet is like, if you want to look like shit and feel like shit, start powerlifting.

Yeah. Cause you just, oh, well, if I want to get the number to go up, I better bulk more. And then I'm just eating so much. Yeah, exactly. I still maintain some of the muscle. But just trying to work out for longevity and health. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining.

Can you give us just a brief overview of where Replet is, what you're working on, how's it going? Yeah, so Replet, kind of like the genesis of it has always been how do you make it so that, you know, programming is more accessible to more people. It's had a profound effect on my life, like, you know, coming from Jordan, growing up there, you know, lower middle class family, being able to come to the US, come to New York, initially, and then move to the Bay

Area and be able to build a billion dollar company. That's outrageous. And it shouldn't be possible. But the reality is that, you know, we have this massive this massive wealth engine machine that's called the internet. And for a long time, it hasn't really been possible for a lot of people to take part in that. There's the, I think Peter Thiel said, the paradox of the internet. It was supposed to decentralize wealth, yet somehow concentrated into Silicon Valley. But I think what we're seeing now is finally the tools of creation are becoming more accessible. And that's really been my mission.

And so initially, RepLog was about, let's get people learning how to code. And I think that was a good pursuit. But people don't want to code. The reality is, I spent the last, whatever working at Code Academy and Replet. I mean, it's good. I think we taught a lot of people how to code and at Replet, we built a ton of infrastructure

around how do you set up a virtual machine, the runtime, install packages, automating all of that and all the way to deployment. But really the big unlock was the agent, putting an agent on topating all of that and all the way to deployment. But really the big unlock was the agent, you know, putting an agent on top of all of that. We were the first agent in the market to be able to configure services, databases, deployment, and go all the way to, uh, to deploying, uh, deploying an app.

And it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months. Can you talk a little bit about the benefit of knowing how to code and how that collides with Vibe coding? I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I Vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andre Carpathi is like, I Vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, there's probably a little bit of a difference

between when Andre Carpathi is Vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is Vibe? Like is there still value to learning to code in 2025? I think there is, but I mean it depends John about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right? Like if you know in the up case like you know what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. I assume this optimization path we're on, where agents are gonna get better and better and better, the answer would be different. The answer would be no, it would be a waste of time

to learn how to code. But you could have different predictions, and I think different people will make different assumptions I I'm at this point like sort of Agents built, you know, I the the progress we're seeing with agent. We just we just are rolling out V2 Agent I've never seen a sort of like an a b-test as we're rolling out. I've never seen metrics my entire life I worked at Facebook other places

We're moving metrics like crazy just by improving the agent, like 100%, 500% in certain metrics on success that users are having. And so I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guardrails. Like, you know, there's the guy that lost six months of work on Reddit, there's the guy on Twitter that leaked his API keys. Like, on Replet, we do get commit for you. You don't have to worry about that. We hide the API keys in like a secure vault.

And so I think a lot of it goes to like, hey, these beginners should not be using a lot of these tools and instead they should come to places like Replit. That being said, I'm very bullish. I sort of changed my answer. Even like a year ago, I would say kind of learn a bit of coding. I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems, right? Learn how to communicate clearly, you know, with, you know, as you would with humans, but also with machines. Can you tell me some stories about like success stories from replet maybe like the S the what's possible as a solo dev today? I mean, we're seeing Peter levels IO do crazy stuff, but what are you seeing from the, from the most, uh,

successful replet users? Let me start with that with the business cases, cause I think those are, are kind of really profound cause we've always had like micro entrepreneurs like make money and you know, it's certainly accelerated massively, but a hundred plus year old, your old company, uh, Sears Sears, I don't know about you, I didn't know they continued to exist, but they have this spin off called Sears Home Services. About a year ago, they hired a team to like a more trendy sort of tech team to get them off of Cobalt which is whatever

hundred year old program language and they were able to do it very quickly and then after they done that you know basically most most companies as they're modernizing they go adopt a bunch of SAS tools and no code tools and local tools and to become like a modern company they actually skipped all of that and went to went to AI. And their operations team, which manages the kind of field workers that go out and every day kind of do house repairs and all of that, they started building AI tools. So one AI tool that they have is like the worker would go and talk to the AI and it would optimize their route.

And that made it so that they're making a lot more money. And now that team, everyone in that team started building AI tools. And so you have this ops theme that's highly levered, that are able to move business metrics. And they leapfrogged an entire era of computing and landed on AI agents. And now these are the generalists that are building the business. And I think this is a view into the future where firms would not be made of like, you know, SDR and like, can't EAE, whatever. It's going to be like, I'm a sales generalist, right?

I can do all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things. like can't EAE, whatever, it's gonna be like, I'm a sales generalist, right? I can do all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things. That makes sense. How do you think about balancing the sort of needs and demands of the different types of people and customers of your platform, right? You have somebody that comes on,

they're sort of early in their sort of like entrepreneurial journey, they build something, but then suddenly there's this moment where they become a business, and once you become a business, and you're sort of like servicing, so like you have the challenge of having so many people on your platform, and some of them can end up

wanting different things. What does it look like in terms of you want to be able to continue to service these users over time while still making sure that Replit is the best place for somebody to start their journey? We've taken a difficult approach and perhaps not the smartest. The reason I've been working on it for my entire life is because what I try to do is build an end to end experience where we infuse a lot of taste and decisions and choices on behalf of customers.

Actually, you had that in the past where like the Apple ecosystem kind of makes a lot of decisions for developers and even Windows as much as we look down on it, but Vigil Basic was a great product. It made a ton of decisions for you and like a lot more people were making things at the time. And so then you had the open source movement and the open source with was this radical disruptive, you know, bottoms up thing where there's a hundred competing libraries and a hundred computing ways of doing things. And that created a lot of mess and create a lot of power. But now getting started and doing things and that created a lot of mess and create a lot of power. But now getting started and doing things programming became a lot more difficult.

Like imagine setting up a modern web, you know, app, let alone trying to set up like a Python environment. Like if you mess up your Python environment, the best thing you could do is throw your laptop in the garbage and get a new one. I've been there. It's miserable. It's terrible. So, you know, so you had this, you know, bottom Zoppo innovation and kind of like the early

hacker lingo, you had the cathedral versus the bazaar. So the Windows ecosystem is the cathedral, the open source ecosystem is the bazaar. And so in my mind, well, build, let's build cathedrals made of bazaars. Like I think open source is awesome, but let's actually build tasteful experiences on top of that. So my work at Facebook, I was part of the early React team. You know, I was working on the tooling there and especially, especially like React Native, we made it so that in five minutes, you can spin up a Hello World app as if you're trying to do it using Apple and iOS.

That would take you hours, perhaps. So now fast forward to Replet. And we built basically all the way from nuts and bolts to the UX of what it means to make software. And so that's been a lot harder. But I think you end up with this general purpose horizontal tool that can satisfy a lot of needs. The challenge, of course, is like positioning and marketing this thing.

You guys know as entrepreneurs, like people like to do to pick one product on the market, but look back on the history of computing. Typically the, the, the best products that end up being a core part of our lives are the general purpose horizontal product. Uh, there's kind of a narrative that's floating out right out there right now that companies that are aligned with the AI growth trend are seeing

extremely fast rates of adoption. You're seeing companies get to a hundred million ARR faster than ever before. The risk that people are kind of worried about is that maybe churn rates are going up as customers test a new AI tool and then kind of bounce around. They're using cursor one week and then Claude code the next week

and then they're bouncing to this one. What are you seeing and what do you think's happening and do you think there's any merit to that fear in the market or on X right now that maybe the AI revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous SaaS installation cycles? It is certainly suspicious. I mean, anyone who tells you differently is sort of, and I was a little worried about

our growth, like, is it, is it going to go away? What's going on? Like, this is like a little too fast. And I think, you know, we really started focusing on the other metrics that really matter, which is the revenue quality retention, things that more advanced companies are thinking about, like net dollar retention, we actually have above 100% net dollar retention, even for our consumer plan, which is probably unheard of. But I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric, like how fast you can grow the ARR. I think you want to make sure you're biding an awesome service and also make sure

that people just want to stay on your platform. I think especially on the VS code wars, the switching costs being so low is gonna be a challenge for them. You can go from copilot to windsurf to cursor in like five minutes, same project. Quite like it's one click, you can open from copilot to windsurf to cursor in like five minutes, same project. Quite like it's one click, you can open the project. And so they're gonna have to find a way to differentiate

the great thing about Replet, we provide this really great convenience. And so if ain't broke, don't fix it, you deploy something on Replet and people really tend to stay. fix it, you deploy something on Replet and people really tend to stay. That makes sense. Internally, I'm sure the entire team is using Replet all day long. Is there still a place for traditional prototypes or is everyone across the team sort of like doing rapid prototyping of features, which is obviously something that your end

customers use? Or is there still like, hey, let's just, you know, make this in Figma and kind of align around it first? There's certainly a place for for Figma. I think there are, first of all, there are things that are tough to prototype and there are things that you want to do very, very quickly, even faster than sort of any kind of software prototype. And it depends on how people think. I think designers still would want a canvas to think. I think these products might end up growing in that direction where maybe you

go to Replet and you initially have some kind of canvas and that kind of results in a piece of an application. But right now I still think there's a place for Figma. But the way I think about what Replet is doing to our organization, I hope more and more companies, is like everyone is highly levered. Like we just built, you know, agents are new and part of the exciting things is that no one knows how to build agents. There's no tracing tool, you know, like an APM, like a Neuralic or DataDog for agents. So we built our own internally and a couple people on our team spent like a week using Replit and byte coding. This really great infrastructure tool that has saved many, many hours of engineering. We have even more exciting story. We have someone in HR

we have even more exciting story. We have someone in HR that couldn't find an org chart tool that really fit what she wanted to do or was too expensive. She spent three days. She spun up this org chart tool with connection to ADP and versioning history. And it's amazing. She never coded, right?

So I think the way to think about it is how to increase the productivity in your company amazing. She never quoted, right? So I think the way to think about it as like, um, how to increase the productivity in your company and less about like, Oh, what should we displace? You know, I think, I think these, these tools will have their place. Yeah. How do you, um, how do you think about sort of buying software as someone that enables the creation of software when, you know,

you've obviously been building Replet for a very long time. Ten years from now, you guys are in market for a new CRM. You're talking to the big players. Is building it yourself just become a part of that sort of like RFP process where the team is like, okay, well, we can build this. Like this is, you know, what we think it's to, it's going to cost to, you know, basically build it, maintain it. It used to be the biggest bear signal.

If a startup was building their own CRM, it was like, oh no, you're way over your skis. This is going to get terribly wrong. And you're going to be maintaining this thing for years. And you actually don't have a special, you're not a special snowflake in this case. Just use Salesforce or something. But yeah, doesn't that change? It has a name for it, like NIH, not invented here syndrome.

Yep, totally. So yeah, I agree. So I think I thought quite a bit of this, like future of SaaS. I think that the question is like, if you can conjure up a SaaS product, can you like, is there even a future there? And we do see this every time I wake up on Twitter, I see someone using Replet and replacing a piece of software

that costs them 15,000, 100,000. I just retweeted one this morning. And so there's a lot of, I think, vertical niche specific SaaS tools that are generateable very easily, even with today's technology, let alone like a year from now, I think you'll be able to kind of generate them, especially on a platform like Replen, which gives you all the cloud services involved. I think there are ecosystem SaaS products that are fairly hard. I think there are ecosystem SaaS products that are fairly hard. So I think think about Rippling, how embedded into your company as like the, what do they call the system of record. In Salesforce, think about the ecosystem and the developers that they have.

I think if you're starting a SaaS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus. You want to build a Chinese style company. I think what Rippling is doing and I think this idea of like being generative and having larger pieces of software, I think it's going to become more important in the future. So I think I'd be really worried about vertical specific SAS But I think I would bet on those horizontal SAS companies. Yeah, we got to ask about the Vercel drama We talked to Guillermo earlier this show

What's going on there? What's your take? Can you break it down for us? well, you know I Someone asked me Do you do you plan on supporting next.js and Replit Agents? I said no, because we want to bet on something like VEAT that is open, like community built, and the way Next.js has been trending is that it's optimized for Vercel. They disagree, but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community. There's a project called OpenNext

that makes it so that Next.js is deployable on more platform. Matt, the CEO of Netlify commented agreeing with me. The larger community feels like Next.js is perhaps more tied to Vercell than they would like to admit. And I think they overreacted to my comments and they strisend my comments. I think it would have been less of a story if they didn't overreact to it. And look, Vercell is an amazing product, an amazing brand.

They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just next. Yes. And for me, water on their bridge. Like, you know, I, uh, you know, I think, you know, emotions get, get high on Twitter and you start calling and, you know, I wish them really the best. Yeah. How is, how is next different than the React relationship with Facebook? I mean, with all these big main core frameworks, you're kind of, if you're in Angular, you're aligned with Google. If you're with React, you're aligned with Facebook.

But has Facebook or Meta done a better job of kind of releasing that into the community? They're not trying to monetize it as aggressively. Well, not at all trying to monetize it as aggressively. Well, not at all. Not, not monetize. Look, I worked, I exclusively worked on open source at Meta and the, the advantage and disadvantage of working in open source at Meta is that there's no direct tie into, to, to the bottom line. Right. So, we were not trying to monetize react. to the bottom line, right? So we were not trying to monetize React. So far, they haven't monetized Llama in terms of selling an API. And so generally, as long as they are

their user internally, they're going to maintain it and support it and get some value out of the community and mindshare support. Now, the disadvantage of that, we actually weren't ever able to like make a complete product because like if you go to Google and you know use Flutter, I think that thing is actually much more polished of an experience because they have a direct incentive to advance the Android ecosystem, for example. And so Facebook, we built really cool pieces of infrastructure, but the UX around them are bad. So you have companies like Expo building on React Native to make it a better experience, companies like Versal building on React to make it a better experience.

And these are amazing companies. And I think that's how it should be. I think where it gets tricky is when you end up also maintaining the core core software and really tying them together. What do you think about kind of the Ben Thompson aggregation theory around there might be a new company to emerge from the AI boom that is the hub for these vibe coded apps and websites and games. Obviously it for a long time, it's felt like web development

services, if you could call it that were very much, it was bifurcated, like there was Shopify, which is a power law winner, but then there was also Squarespace and Weebly and like dozens of other companies that did quite well. But if there's a new aggregator emerging and Nikita Beer's written about this, like maybe there will be one company to really break out and be the hub for vibe coded N64 level games, that would be very valuable. It would also be more of a winner take all environment.

How do you think that that plays out in your category? Look, I don't really, that's not the model for, for, for our business. Like the way I think about it in the early computing era, you had the mainframe, it was the domain of the expert. And then you had the PC and it became possible for anyone to use computers. And that ended up eating our economy essentially, because that's how disruptive technology work.

And so in the modern era, the modern software engineering is also the domain of the expert and now it's become so that anyone can make software. Initially it looks like a toy, by coding games and things like that. But I think it will fundamentally change and transform the economy. And my model for what we're building, it's let's build an Excel. It should be fun. We do a lot of things that make it fun. We actually build a 3D gaming stack. But the model is like, can a billion people use it to, it's part of their everyday work, to build businesses,

to really be a core piece of the infrastructure in the economy and the idea that, it's gonna be a Roblox. I don't see that as interesting. I mean, Roblox is a great company. You know, maybe Roblox is the aggregator for VibeCode at games. But I think it's really not the big prize. It's like, you want to build a trillion dollar company,

you got to think a little bigger than that. I love it. Yeah, do you have any words for your doubters? Something you said is like, the next big thing looks like a toy. It's been this idea within Silicon Valley Yeah, do you have any words for your doubters? Something you said is like the next big thing looks like a toy. It's been this idea within Silicon Valley that you could have applied it to crypto. This was Chris Dixon's, I think, original thesis. It still feels like Riplett is this billion dollar company now, but I still think your

doubters and your haters would say, oh, it's just a toy, like it's kids making apps or whatever. But do you like that people still kind of underestimate this potential? Is that part of what creates the opportunity for the next 10 years, is people not realizing the tsunami that's kind of about to hit the industry? Yeah, it used to bother me,

but now I think it's actually an advantage. And I think, you know, when we're at the height of like AI trendiness and it obviously was early, you know, we're the first outside of co-pilot to train a code model. We're like this company in the city and we're growing fast and hired a bunch of executives that I think are part of the sort of the hype

kind of Silicon Valley, they jumped from one company to another and last year, I did the founder mode, I cut the team in half, now like 65 people. I moved us out of the city. We're now in Foster City. Literally there's no other sort of, there's actually nothing out there. It's sort of a desert.

And so we have this nice sort of kind of office that we're turning into a campus. We have food, we have all that. And the team here is sort of a tight knit team. There's a selection effect on who joins Replet. and the team here is sort of a tight knit team. There's a selection effect on who joins Replet. If you are smart enough to figure out that Replet has this amazing potential in the future, then we would want you on the team.

If you really think it's a toy, it's not worth your time, then great. And so I think these things that just sort themselves out. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. I love having you. We'll have to have you back soon. Yeah, it's I'm incredibly excited to watch what you guys do for, for the next year, the next two, the next five, the next 10. Uh, and uh, yeah, I would love to have you on again in the future sometime soon.

Thank you for doing the show. It's, it's been, it's been really cool. Thanks so much for joining. Cheers. Awesome. Do we, uh, for doing the show. It's been really cool. Thanks so much for joining. Cheers. Awesome. Do we have another guest? We have a surprise guest for you all, folks. Is he ready? I just sent him the link.

He's jumping in in just a minute. And he should be all queued up. We'll go through some more posts while we wait. Oh, Bryce Roberts bought two cars. We gotta talk to him. We gotta have him on the show, figure out what he bought. Bryce Roberts over at NDVC says, bought two cars today. One dealership wanted me to come down to the lot,

get on a bunch of calls, and refuse to send me basic info over text. The other was willing to send me anything I needed and requested over text and email other was willing to send to the car, but we'll have to talk to him about what car he chose. I'm hoping it's a Dodge Demon and a Lamborghini LM002. I think that would be a perfect fit two-car garage for Bryce, but we'll have to talk to him about it. But it really is an interesting take. We talked to the car dealership guy, and I've wanted a car dealership that, I mean, sometimes

I just want to buy a car. I just want to click a button and I don't really care. Jordy likes to go to the dealership and take a look at everything. I completely disagree. I wanna just push a button and have it arrive, which is maybe stupid, but I don't know. I certainly enjoy it.

And let's see if I'm ready when you are. So we are going back into the 23andMe news and we'll give some more context on this, but I like that we're able to be responsive. It's actually crazy that Keon single-handedly bankrupted the 23andMe. Yeah. He was barely in market for...

Well, I mean, it's not a surprise because he did the TBPN interview. And I'm sure the market saw it and said, hey, if he's gonna be in the temple of technology every week, let's just get out of the stock. Let's just call it. So let's bring him on down. Kian, how you doing?

There he is. What is up? Welcome to the show. Are you guys celebrating? I mean, it's kind of depressing. It's kind of macabre to celebrate on when your rivals go bankrupt. But what happened? Listen, let's put this tweet up, John.

We got a tweet up here. I put up late last night. I think it was around 2 AM Eastern or so, maybe 1, 2 AM Eastern. I saw the announcement. The first thing I have to say to 23andMe is thank you. Because the reality is, you're on the shoulders of giants here, right? We're on the shoulders of giants. Old companies do. You go from Blockbuster to Netflix. You go from Blackberry to the iPhone. You go from MySpace to Facebook. And now you're going from 23andMe to nuclear genomics,

right? The industry is wide open. The nucleus is years ahead, and we're going to seize the moment. But before I talk about that, thank you to 23andMe. You did a great job building the foundation. And now it's time for something new. That's reality. So yeah, talk me through the key. It seemed like your post was really focused on the technology and the price to sequence and the difference between shotgun sequencing and full sequencing. Talk to me about that. How different is the technology? And also, why can't 23andMe just use the same tech as you? Yeah, great question. So pull up another tweet here, John, that actually I just put another

tweet right out here that I should pull up on the screen, give some further context on what's going on and what 23andMe users should actually do. It's currently riding high on Twitter. But no, the difference between micro-reins and whole genome sequencing is massive. It's like a horse versus a car, right? You're talking about 23andMe's technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers. Effectively, it's not actually useful for any really disease risk assessment. So it's fundamentally different here. And the same question is the class innovator's dilemma's problem, right?

Why can't this be coming to this thing? Well because imagine 23Me is a castle. They have to pull out the foundation of their castle. Everything has to change. Technology, product, regulatory infrastructure, every single part of 23Me has to change to actually foundation of their castle. Everything has to change. Technology, products, regulatory infrastructure. Every single part of 20th Me had to change to actually embrace full genome sequencing. This is capitalism at work.

We love capitalism out here. 20th Me is dying because they couldn't adapt. Nucleus is sending because we are embracing the newest genetic technology. But actually, I think it even goes beyond technology. Yeah, go ahead, Johnny, you have something to say? No, I just want to push on that more because if I'm, I like you if I'm, like, I like, you know, I'm

not going to compete with you, but if I was a potential buyer, I would buy 23andMe, rip out shotgun sequencing, drop in, you know, call up, I don't know, Illumina or something and figure out how to do whole genome and- You would independently derive nucleus. That's the beauty. Yeah, exactly. You have to resequence everyone. You have to change all the models.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe the de novo approach is correct. And I mean, that's why I'm bullish on you. But you know, at the same time, it just, I'm still not really understanding like, why is it such rocket science for them to just offer, Oh, hey, we're on V two. Now we were like, you still spit in the tube, you still pay 100 bucks, you mail it to us. We just put it in a different machine. It doesn't seem that complicated to me, no offense. Well, it's a massive informatics change.

It's a massive regulatory change. It's extremely non-trivial. It's kind of like being like, horses both get out of places, why can't they just make an engine? It's fundamentally different, you know? But really the thing that Twentynny got wrong, it wasn't just technology,

it was also actually the philosophy of the business. They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs, but because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it, which ended up making that such that the customer wasn't the customer, the customer is the farmer company. And I want to say here's something really important, which is a lot of people ask me right now, what should I do with my 23andMe data? What should I do with my 23andMe data? Well, first and foremost, you should move do with my 23andMe data? What should I do with my 23andMe data?

Well, first and foremost, you should move it to a HIPAA-compliant environment. One of the most shocking things about 23andMe is it's actually not HIPAA-compliant. It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded. So, Nucleus, for example, we are HIPAA-compliant. We are a physician-ordered clinical-grade test. We make sure no genetic or protective health information is shared with any third party. It's very similar to going to your doctor's office. Another thing to know, and I hope you have the thread up here, which is we outline some

of these things, is 23andMe, the reality is that it's actually been illegal since 2008 for any insurance company, any health insurance company, as well as any employer to use your genetic information. That's been illegal for two decades. It's very, very important to say that. So there are some safeguards in place, even though not 23 is not HIPAA compliant. But if you're a 23andMe user and you're listening to this, you need to do two things. One is to download your genetic data, secure your genetic data,

and then two, which is micro-ray data, small snapshot of your DNA. But two, you should probably put that in a HIPAA compliant environment. You can actually DM me. I can help you doing that. Some customers are currently uploading their DNA. Two, nucleus currently, because they know that we're going to take very good care of their DNA, because it is, I mean, I can help you doing that. Some customers are currently uploading their DNA to Nucleus currently because they know that we're gonna take very good care of their DNA because it is of course, ultimately all about the patient. Talk about,

there's not total clarity right now. 23andMe is not HIPAA compliant. I'm trying to understand in, you know, 23andMe in a bankruptcy environment is the value of them as an asset. It's pretty damaged. It's pretty damaged brand. There's not a lot of brand value necessarily.

What are some of the risks of the types of buyers for that business? And it seems very possible from our initial research that somebody could buy it, and with the explicit intent of not even rebooting the business, but just monetizing the underlying user data. Is the value the data or just the revenue stream? Because I'm sure that they have marketing campaigns running.

I'm sure they're bringing in customers and charging them $100 a test or something. There's some normal business going on there. It might not be profitable, but maybe you could cut costs and get to profitability. Or is this nightmare scenario of someone buys it just for the data? Is that at all credible? Yeah, so it's a good question. I think one thing is Nucleus actively is looking into right now, considering whether it makes sense to earlier, I'm sure you remember, we know We explore the possibility of acquiring 23 me and we're looking into right now whether that would make sense to go and see what we

Can do how we can help in this situation. I think the thing to remember is that again, this is microarray data It's a small sliver of someone's DNA a lot of the most critical genetic markers that you wouldn't want someone to know about Simply do not exist in the data and that cannot be overstated because it is microarray data. It is a small slip of your DNA. It misses the most fundamental health list that someone could have. So in some respects, it's a little bit overblown when people are worried by sometimes this is funny narrative. People are like, I did 20 to me. I learned that my pee smells like asparagus. If that gets out, I mean, that's bad. It should never go out. But like, you know. Not that big of a deal. Yeah. Yeah.

You wonder. Like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It can't be both doomsday, they're getting my DNA, and also the product isn't that good, and it's not that reliable. It can't be both.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. I would encourage you to think about this. Your ops found out your smell. There's two really extreme narratives about 23 minutes. Totally. Totally.

So look at it. It's like, oh, I learned nothing. It's like, why do you think you learned nothing? Because it's the smallest of your DNA. That's like one narrative. Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world. My data is shared. It's like, well, I learned nothing. It's like, why do you think you learned nothing? Because it's the smallest of your DNA. That's like one narrative. Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world. My data is shared. It's like, well, actually, the reality is that it's the smallest of your DNA.

Obviously, no data should ever get breached. No one's saying that. Of course not. But of course, it's micro data. And so what I recommend is download the data knowing that one, there's better regulations that protect you and protect old people who do genetic testing, and that there are actual regulations that exist in clinical geneticist companies like Nucleus that can safeguard your data, right? It's like on your doctor's office.

So that's the thing I think that should be top of mind for consumers right now. You mentioned that they were potentially selling data to pharmaceutical companies. Again, that's kind of this weird narrative where if the data is not that valuable, then who are they selling it to? Is that true? But this is also, this is, again, this is a great point. This is one of the reasons why 20th Me failed because originally the founder, Anne, she said, okay, listen, we're going to use this data. People are actually, she has a quote on the record, people are going to donate data to 20th Me. In other words,

one of the reasons why 20th Me failed is they never wanted to build a true consumer health application. It was never actually about, hey, can we provide you with life-saving or medical insight? It was about, hey, because it provide you with life-saving or medical insight? It was about, hey, because it was really a genealogy business for a long time, hey, we're going to get ancestry on, we're going to get as many people as possible, we're going to take this data and then go to GSK. They worked with GSK, for example. The problem with that is, this is the thing they underestimate, is because it is a small

slip of your DNA, it's fundamentally not useful for drug discovery, which cut off with them. Because then if your business models based off collecting a lot of data to then make drugs, but it's microarray data, it doesn't work. The customer doesn't want what you're buying, which is why eventually they collapse. So in some sense, it's a technological problem, which is again, it's the smallest of your DNA, but also I think it's a philosophical problem. The customer wasn't the customer. The former company was the customer.

And so that's why people say, I didn't learn anything about it from 23Me. 23 didn't really, their goal was not actually to really help you in your health. And that's another big shift from 23Me to Nucleus, right? We're HIPAA compliant, our technology is far more advanced, we actually want to give you medical grade insight that helps you live longer, helps you have healthy family as well. And then also we want to continue to build out that platform beyond just genetics, blood, wearables, urinalysis, full body MRIs and beyond into a true consumer health application. Imagine 23 weeks shift, right? How far ahead that would be? That'd be 20 years ahead of everyone, right?

Consumer health has just recently hit the zeitgeist, right? Twenty would have had a head start, but that wasn't the customer. And so it's just not just technological difference, it's actually a very strong philosophical difference as well. How, how are they such a, you know, they have this sort of one time purchase problem that that could contribute to challenges from a business standpoint becomes much harder if you're sort of get this upfront payment. And then, you know, I'm assuming the average 23andMe customer just gets the testing

done, maybe references back at some point. But why don't you think they were able to avoid bankruptcy given the scale that they were at? This is a company that does hundreds of millions of top line revenue. You would think they would be able to figure out some economic, like they've been in trouble for a long time, you would have thought that they would have gone founder, you know,

and would have gone founder mode and like, figured out a way to- Well, it sounds like she tried and is now bidding on the business to go founder mode maybe. I always say that there's no such thing as a genetics company. There's only such thing as a healthcare company. And the reason why people always say, 20 days one time, 23Me is one time, right?

There was actually no difficulty for 23Me to add in other diagnostic tests and build a more consumer health application that was vertically integrated. But again, their customer was the pharma company. They actually, they didn't care that it was one time. They got your DNA. And that is the fundamental difference. 23Me could have solved that problem. I mean, you look at some companies today, some blood testing companies are building on top of Quest Diagnostics, we could have snapped their fingers and launched

that product in one minute. Of course, that wasn't the cost, that wasn't the business model, that wasn't the strategy. This is a good example where strategy means technology, which eventually results in failure. You have the innovation lemmas problem, the genetics has really changed. The 20th and mediums has been around since 2006, 2006, the cost of being a genome was 10 million a sample today. Nuclear sets are a couple hundred dollars. It's one of the greatest technological shifts ever. Right?

And so all these pieces together you have, you know, 23 collapse, which is sad, but I also think it's the sign it's time for something new. It's time for a true health consumer health application. Can you talk a little bit about ancestry.com they required for by Blackstone for 4.7 billion. It seems like that business is doing pretty well. Again, not a genetics company, particularly they have their little niche in ancestry. People really love that. They become experts there, but how does that business play with you and 23 me?

You know, it's interesting because one time a very, very wise investor of ours said, he said retention isn't about the product, it's about the use case. Okay? It's a very sharp comment. And I think Ancestry is a great example of that because genealogy is a very super high touch point of business. People love genealogy. They love looking at who their ancestors are.

People like literally spend their entire hobby actually around this, right? And answers to capitalize on that. They realized that genetics was a mean to do better genealogy. Twenty-three and me never realized are they a genealogy business, are they a health business, are they a drug discovery business? They never got that right. For nucleus, we use genetics to help people live longer and have healthy families. The value prop is very clear.

It's not about DNA. DNA is a means to accomplish some end goal for the user, which is namely better health and having a healthier family, right? That is a fundamental difference. And to your point, answers to this multi-billion dollar business. Natara, people say genetics business don't work. Natara is a clinical genetic business. It's about a $20 billion.

So genetics is in its absolute infancy stage here and I really do think in the next decade you're going to see the rise of a consumer health behemoth and that consumer health behemoth is gonna have a whole genome entirely someone's DNA at its foundation and it's gonna impact not just someone's health but again also their family and nucleus is building that future. So is it is it possible then that 23andMe had become this sort of toxic brand and even the pharmaceutical companies said, you know, we like the data they have, but we don't want to kind of like even mess around here because there's huge potential

for blowback, right? I imagine, you know, there's there's some risks there. Is that part of why they potentially come up? Well, the pharma companies worked at 23andMe, but because the data is such a small sliver, they realized that there was something to be found. The most important thing for drug discovery in a genetic context is finding rare genetic markers, because those are actually elucidate mechanisms.

To identify novel, rare genetic markers, you need a whole genome file, right? Because a microarray, again, is such a small bit of your DNA. If your DNA is a thousand page book, it's funny that you said one page. One page, you can't actually get anything out of that. So it didn't work from a drug perspective business. It didn't work from a consumer health business, hence its collapse.

There's a great actually chart here. I don't know if you guys, it's old tweet, Peter, maybe you guys pull it up later. It's on Bedrock. Does screen sharing work? Can I share my screen? I think you can actually. Oh, here we go. We're going to try. Yes. This is a technology first year. Whatever you screen share is live. So it's live. Ignore the tabs. There's a lot of tabs up there. It's actually, it's actually perfectly. Yeah.

So here we have a, you know, this great thing. I shout out to bedrock, right? They have this narrative violations, right? Clean tech is dead. You have Tesla, day and night, so he's fast. You have Tinder consumers, dead. You have Canva. And then of course the most recent artificial intelligence has been overhyped under the, for 10 years, you have open AI. I will tell you what is next in 2024 popular narrative right now is consumer genetics is dead. And then right now, nucleus is open AI. That is what's going on. Let's go.

Pump the bags. Let's ring the size gong for Keon on nucleus. Do you have any idea how quickly you have any sort of read on how quickly this is going to get resolved? Well, you know, nucleus might be the one resolving it, if you know what I'm saying. Listen, I'm quite sure.

So am I. Rubbing his hands. So, I'm calling out some of our big boy investors. They currently text me saying, Keon, what can we do here? And you know, we tried for a quarter of a billion dollars. You know, what's $50 million? You have to ask us. Getting cheaper every day.

Getting cheaper every day. There you go. All right. That's great. Well, good luck to you, Keon. I hope you can pull it off. I know you'll be successful regardless of what happens. Thanks for jumping on.

You're doing me. Love it. Great to be back. I hope this gong is going to get hit for very specific reasons soon. Absolutely. Good luck to you. Thanks, guys.

Take care. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Breaking news. I love some breaking news, and I love having founders hop on to help us break it down. Because we are going full golden retriever mode I don't understand anything about that but that's why we get the experts on that's the way the show works. Trust the experts folks, trust the seed stage founder

pumping his bags. Don't even trust yourself. Just trust the experts. Exactly. Do you want to finish out the timeline right now? What do you think's interesting in here? Yeah, we can do a little bit. I thought this one from Liz Wessel. This has to be the frothiest VC market for seed and pre-seed I've seen in my tech lifetime, 2012 to present. It's becoming truly absurd.

Ramp investor. Seed stage. Wow. She did the seed round. Crazy. Yep. Goat it. I haven't seen anything crazier personally

than 2022. I was gonna say crypto stuff was really crazy. Like the last company that I committed to was like a $60 million post seed round, but the founder had sold his last company for hundreds of millions, and I don't care. But again, I'm not an institutional fund that's trying to, you know, cares about ownership targets or anything like that.

This is a good context from Jason Lemkin. He says, I would be fine with it if public multiples were higher. And so, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, we had Logan Bartlett on the show to kind of break down what's happening in the public markets because there should be some sort of tracking between these two and and it's when there's a really crazy disconnect that you think hey maybe the public markets are a leading indicator on what will happen to venture

valuations but at the same time there's a lot of companies that are getting to hire ARRs faster than ever and it'll be interesting. The weirdest outcome I think would be that, you know, seed and pre-seed deals, they get overpaid for and they don't produce the same number of power law outcomes. Like maybe there's not a single trillion dollar company that comes out of this vintage, but all of those companies wind up producing like a hundred million of EBITDA and they're like good businesses and then like the funds kind

of perform anyway. That would be a very strange outcome. It would look nothing like venture has ever, but to see a, it would be very interesting to see a venture fund vintage 2025 produce a reasonable IRR without a power law winner in the portfolio. I have no idea if it's possible, but it'd be interesting. To steel man that, there's potentially, we've accumulated in the last 25ish years, the know-how to repeatedly build valuable

software tech just technology businesses one really and In that scenario paying these expensive prices because you have this incredible team Yep, and maybe you only get a 3x on that one investment, but you get a bunch of other 3x's and collectively You get a 2x fund that X's and collectively you get a two X fund and that becomes venture. That'd be very interesting. There's nothing, if that happens,

and I can argue against it easily as well, but if that happens, it's not necessarily bad because ask any dude in private equity that has just been doing these 2x funds for however many decades. They've done very well. So we want higher success rates for founders and teams, too, even if it's lower terminal exit values.

It's also interesting that OpenAI is maybe positioned itself as potentially the power law winner of AI. People are clearly underwriting that deal at a future valuation of a trillion dollars. They think it's going to be a big consumer tech company. No one's really concretized what the source of monopoly power will be in that company. There's not really a network effect yet, at least. The scale, it's just an aggregation theory thing. It becomes a verb.

Yeah, it's like Google. Competition is always a click away, but you accumulate so much customer support that you just. Data, and by nature of the usage, the product gets so much better. I would think so too. And then. So maybe we're bullish, who knows.

But I mean, it's certainly not cornered resource because the LLMs are commoditized now. It's not really scale because everyone can serve these. All the hyperscalers can serve these. It's really just that attention. Anyway, we should have Augustus on to talk about this next one soon. Yeah.

From Li's Jin. I actually wanna have him on to talk about his. Oh yeah. Yeah. From Lee's Jin. I actually want to have him on to talk about his. Oh yeah, the debate with Ron DeSantis. Or yeah, his. He was debating Ron. Well, Ron DeSantis. Has been trying to ban cloud seating. Has been trying to ban cloud seating

and RFK recently came out saying, I support what Ron DeSantis is doing. Like part of the Maha movement is anti-cloud seating and Augustus came out very strongly saying like no RFK like don't do that like like this there's more nuance to this argument and so we should unpack that we should unpack his testimony which was very interesting and we should also have him talk about this which is that China is erasing deserts from its map the first time I ever met Augustus at Josh Steinman's house having some cigars was

he could just comes up to me and he's like, Oh yeah, did you know that like the Gobi desert is going away? And I was like, what are you talking about, dude? It's the Gobi. And he's like, yeah, China's erasing their deserts. And I was like, how? He was like, yeah, they're basically just planting tons and tons of trees. And that's exactly what this video shows. He says, by far 65 million MU of desert has been greened. That's around the same area of Denmark. And you can watch this video and it's crazy because it's just like literally just sand dunes and then the most verdant lush greenery you've ever seen.

And it just looks like, wow, like I would never wanna live in the desert, but I would absolutely live on this beautiful lush farmland, like imagine plopping like a nice farmhouse on that, and that's just like the American dream. And we could do that with our deserts in America. And so we should, yeah. And so we talked to Agastus about this earlier saying,

you know, after you do cloud seeding, like is there a tree planting startup that needs to be built, or will that be your company? And he was kind of saying, maybe it'll be a different company. But I want this to happen. And I want to figure out what the economics of this business are. Is it just a handout from the Chinese government?

If so, do we need to do that in America? Is there a way that you can do this just with the free market? That would be amazing. Yeah, and this ties into the terraforming stuff with the, what's the, the Salton Sea. Yep. If we can get water back into that bad boy, then everything around it. But we have some breaking news. I wanted to pull it up.

It's not actually breaking, but oh, it is breaking. It's the nucleus genomics team. Oh yeah. They were all posted up watching Kian come on the show. So Ben, Ben pull it up if you can. Look at the team here. Locked in. That's amazing.

All meetings were canceled, but shout out to the team. Thank you for keeping our genetic data safe. That's great. It's great having Kian on the show. He's definitely built for television. We talked about this earlier with Lulu. Like what is his format? What's the format? He's a good poster, but he's great in an interview. And talked about this earlier with Lulu. What is his format? What's the format?

He's a good poster, but he's great in an interview. And just come on and rock and roll. And rub the hands as he thinks about acquiring a former multibillion dollar company. Yeah. It's great. Absolutely fantastic. Well, that's a great place to end the show.

Yeah, thank you for watching. Go leave us a five-star review. Put an ad for your business or your fund into the review. And if you're breaking news, if you're raising the big money, if you think we should ring the size gong for you, give us a call. We'll have you on the show. And we have a number of founders this week coming on

to break their fundraisers. Yeah, we can't wait. I can't wait. It is a beautiful day. We're going to have to set the minimum threshold and then just raise it. It's like, oh, $50 million, that's a Tuesday for us. Call us when you raise an 80.

Exactly. But right now, it's a golden opportunity for anyone who's It is. Making waves and venture. It's a beautiful week to get to work in and around technology. For sure. So many interesting stories. And if we keep up this pace,

we will be doing a Dom episode probably next week I can't wait we're at 26k I can't wait 6k out let's go thank you for everyone who's been supporting thank you everyone really appreciate it have a great rest your Monday have a great day bye