TBPN Live - Shaun Maguire, Harry Stebbings, Blake Anderson, Sean Frank, Adam Ryan, Connor MacDonald, Perplexity $18B Valuation, Tornado Cash

Episode Date: March 22, 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(01:18) - Perplexity Raising at $18B Valuation (17:00) - Big Screen VR (25:00) - Tornado Cash (32:25) - Harry Stebbings (48:50) - Adam Ryan (01:04:00) - Blake Anderson (01:32:05) - Shaun Maguire (02:03:24) - Connor MacDonald (02:20:58) - Sean Frank (02:38:28) - The Timeline

You're watching TBPN Live. It is Friday, March 21st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. This show starts now. Jordy, what's going on on the desk? There's a bottle of Dom Perignon there. It's not a Dom episode. What's going on? Our friends over at Slow preempted our Dom episode. So they said, hey, the growth this week has been tremendous. We wanted to have the next Dom episode be on us. So thank you to Sam, Yoni, Megan, Will, Gigi, the team over at Slow, and Jack, of course. So yeah, they're just basically preempting our Dom episode. So yeah, we'll have to-

I got very excited when I saw this yeah when I was opening it like the way the box was I thought somebody sent me a plant and there we go so thank you guys very tempting very tempting it is a Friday very tempting to crack into it but we'd like to do Dom episodes on Monday yes sort of power lunch start the week strong. But thank you to the Slow Adventures team. Fantastic. And let's get into the show.

We got some great guests today. Yeah, we got some great guests for you. I think we have four different guests coming on in about half an hour. But we're going to rip through some news. There's a ton of stuff to talk about. First up, Perplexity is in early talks for a new funding round at 500.

They're raising between 500 million and a billion dollars at an $18 billion valuation. I mean, you gotta kick it off with a size gong for perplexity, absolute dogs. Absolutely dogs, big numbers. They'll be doubling their valuation from December. That's right. And it's March, so that's three months, double.

ARR is also nearly a hundred million dollars Not too bad Let's break it down. Let's read this little Bloomberg article I will say the actions I feel like the posters didn't like this, but we can wait for some of the reaction mixed I found some very positive posts in here. We'll get to I found some more critical posts. We'll break it all down We'll give our take. So, Perplexity AI, a startup building artificial intelligence search engine

to compete with Google is in early talks to double its valuation to 18 billion in a new funding round. The company has discussed raising as much as 500 million to 1 billion in the round. Founded in 2022, it's a pretty young company, just three years old, Perplexity has emerged as one of the most prominent startups

using generative AI to rethink core internet services. Last year, Perplexity tripled its valuation from one billion to three billion and then tripled it again several months later, a sign of the immense investor interest in all things AI. This new $18 billion valuation would include the amount raised in the round, so that's a post-money valuation,

but still, 17 billion pre-money isn't that bad. What's pre or post among billions? Yeah, at this point, doesn't really matter. The ARR is nearly 100 million. Perplexity said it had more than 15 million active users. They're facing growing competition from Google and OpenAI in its core search business.

OpenAI rolled out a search product to all of its users of its chat bot, ChatGPT. And of course, Google has those AI-generated auto-fill answers. I forget what their product name is for that. But basically, when you go to Google, you get an AI, generative AI. And they count all of those as Gemini users.

Yes. Which is cool, too. It's great. It's cool, yeah. If you're optimizing for usage, it's great if you are literally Google, and any time somebody Google searches, you can sort of put it on the.

I mean, this is what's happening with Llama, too. I mean, like, Llama is forked into WhatsApp and stuffed into Instagram. Put it in there. Yeah, it's the number one LLM. It's the one people are talking to. Let's talk about the backers. Perplexity is already backed by SoftBank,

Vision Fund 2, Nvidia, Amazon. I didn't know SoftBank got in there. SoftBank getting in early in this case. Oh, don't they have some big, I think SoftBank is a big customer too. Oh really? They're doing this thing. No way. They're sort of investing

and becoming heavy users, dogfooding the product. Well, we should have the founder on because he's a very interesting figure, very interesting poster. And obviously, I mean, I've used the product. I'm not like a daily active right now, but I think it's cool and I think we'll get into this later, but Sam Altman was just on the Stratechary interview

talking to Ben Thompson and on there, Ben really tried to nail him down on where the value is going to accrue in AI. Is it gonna go to the application layer or the model layer? And this has been the big debate with all the new foundation model companies. And Sam, and it's funny how Ben like phrases it to try and kind of like nail him down. and Sam, and it's funny how Ben phrases it

to try and kind of nail him down. I'll actually pull up the exact post. It was from Tane. According to Perplexity, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 invested between 10 and 20 million in Perplexity as part of a larger $250 million funding round. This was back last year, and so SoftBank has gotten almost a 5X, I think on this, more than a 5X potentially on this. So hit the size gong for that. So Ben Thompson was interviewing Sam Altman trying to get to the bottom of does the value

accrue to the model layer or the application layer? And he can't just say that. So of course, he has to come up with a good question. And he asks Sam this, he says, what's going to be more valuable in five years, a 1 billion daily active user destination site that doesn't have to do customer acquisition, wink, wink, wink chat GPT app installed on everyone's phone already in the home row on my phone or the state of the art model. And Sam Altman says the 1 billion user site, I think. And so Sam is now, he was at the forefront of the state of the art model race. Now he is somewhat acknowledging that the value

might accrue to the application layer. And he is actually, this is a very bold case. I think he's more than acknowledging that. He is pushing that narrative now because- I think he views it and we've talked about this before. The reason that Elon can train a model fairly, he makes it look easy to train a model that's competitive with OpenAI.

Much harder to get an app that is pacing towards having a billion users. And so that says it all. Yeah, so it's like, if you have distribution through X, own X or you own whatsapp or Instagram or you own google.com You're gonna do very well harder to bootstrap a new destination site with billions of users. Yeah, I saw on the perplexity Numbers 15 million active users. That's a ton Yeah, but they got to grow that they got to get into the billions because that's where the consumer tech apps really play Yeah

But it's interesting. Yeah, they call it the B zone the bees But yeah, I mean it's interesting cuz like for a long time the the the hater the Sam haters were very much like oh like he's like all the value is gonna accrue to the Application layer not the model layer and he's, like all the value's gonna accrue to the application layer, not the model layer, and he's stuck on the model layer. And now he's kind of like pivoting his argument and the narrative's kind of shifting, and now it'll just be interesting to see how that plays out

because it seems like- Just oscillating back and forth. Yeah, yeah, it's always unclear. It's like, is the CEO spinning a narrative? Because Ilya's saying is- Or is it the truth? Yeah, you guys can have fun at the app layer. I'll see you, I'll see you at ASI. See you at ASI, yeah.

Anyway, I wanted to go through some reactions to Perplexity in general. Our buddy Emmet Shine said, this was a couple months ago, but he said he set up Perplexity as my default search tool within Arc. I use Claude for creative work and ChatGPT for general larger processing work. I like Perplexity's multimedia results for search. So far so good.

And in the little video he shares, what's he searching for? Rora PFAS filtering. I thought that was a really cool Easter egg. He's doing a little shout out for our friends over at Rora. Well, Emmett did the branding for Rora. Yeah. So he's a shareholder. So it's sort of like, Emma did the branding for Aurora. Yeah. So, he's a shareholder.

Oh, there you go. So, it's sort of like one hand watches the other. One hand watches the other, yeah. Which we love. Little cycle. Ash Aurora has a funny post here saying, at this point, perplexity not raising every six months is a bear market signal.

But yeah, if you're on a tar. They've set the bar high. And if you're trying to go after Google, if you're trying to go after a trillion dollar company, yeah, you're gonna need a lot of capital, you're gonna need a lot of aggressive growth targets. So it's not an unreasonable strategy if you're underwriting it against, we're gonna be the next Google.

But it is a high valuation. Yeah, and on the next, Arvin, the CEO says on the next post, perplexity will make Apple intelligence work. So I like it. Like, like not bluffing in many ways perplexity, the team at perplexity would do a much better job leveraging the power of Apple and their position in the market than Apple's current AI team.

Totally. So I can, there is a world where, there's a world where Apple has to pay a huge premium to just buy a great AI product team. Which is not in their DNA at all. I don't think they've ever done a multi-billion dollar acquisition. It's super, super rare.

They really do some small ones. But you're thinking, Apple's evolving as a company. They are not, they're not seemingly in a position now where they're able to do deep, innovative, visionary work. They're shuffling, they're shuffling people around. And if Apple was ever gonna move from a, hey, we do all of our R&D in-house, we don't sort of acquire teams, et cetera.

This would be a big shift. Yeah, it would be a big shift, R&D in-house, we don't sort of acquire teams, et cetera. This would be a big shift. Yeah, it would be a big shift, but it might be something that over time, I don't think if Apple paid $20 billion to acquire Perplexity today that the market would love it, but you could see a world in the future where something like that could make sense. Yeah, I mean, the shareholders would be like,

Apple, what are you doing? You wasted like six weeks of cashflow on this company. What are you doing? No, but honestly, I think it's more like, I forget the actual number, but when we ran the numbers on, I ran the numbers on like Tim Cook's comp versus like how much money they make.

And like Tim Cook like barely makes like a day's worth. A day's of cashflow a poor guy, poor guy, poor guy. But you know, the, the dynamic here, that's interesting him saying, we're going to make Apple intelligence worth. Apple makes $20 billion a year from Google through their search integration. So for Apple to want to integrate, I'm sure that there's something related to that contract that would, that would prevent.

Well, they also have a, Apple has a deal with ChatGPT. And in theory, you can ask Siri to go to ChatGPT and you can actually, on your phone, if you're on the latest OS, you can add your ChatGPT pro credentials and it basically uses the consumer API key to send the query to ChatGPT.

Should be a great experience. I can never really get it to work though. It still gets confused about where to route the query, which is really rough. I think they're just so spoiled from the experience of Google where it was just, there's just this one little bar in Safari and they route it to Google and that's the end. And this is a much more nuanced consumer experience. But clearly a strong deal between Apple and perplexity would be transformative for perplexity. And so good luck to him as he tries to hunt that down. Should we go to near?

This is a great post. Great post. It's just like tangentially related to perplexity, but I like it. Every man has a stack. For some it's creatine and magnesium. For other it's Arch Linux and Vim. Some just answer perplexity and Claude. Others have Vercell and Cloudflare,

or NGINX and Redis. Some guys will even say Bitcoin and Ether. The essence of being a man, you must have a stack. I love that. I mean, my daily show stack is very much Lucy and Yoruba Mate. Yoruba Mate. I'm on the Celsius and the nicotine pouches and the creatine and some chat GPT here and there.

A lot of X, X I would say is in my stack. Yeah. And a stack of weights in the weight room beforehand. This is a very funny post, but I agree. And then there was this interesting Perplexity ad they're doing. It's like Apple level cinematography when I saw this. So this is from a few days ago, March 17th.

Perplexity just dropped its first celebrity ad starring Squid Game's Li Zhengjie. I botched that pronunciation, I'm sure. Anyway, he's the guy from Squid Game, we love him. The AI search startup takes a jab at Google. They call it Pugle with a cheeky line, don't use glue, which was a reference to a very niche Gemini hallucination, suggesting that you should eat glue on pizza.

Yeah, something related to mozzarella. Yeah, and then Katie Nutipolis over at- What I like about Arvind is he's not willing to poke the bear. No. So in the case of Google, he's not. So yeah, sorry, he's not afraid to poke the bear. He will clear, you know, frequently get in Sam Altman's, you know, comments. It gets a little spicy. Sometimes it goes a little bit too far, but I like a challenger CEO.

It's like a, you know like you're fighting with a bull. And just from a comms perspective, we should talk to Lulu about this, but I think there's something about when someone is so much bigger than you, your downside is so limited, because if they reply to you at all, you're blowing up,

because it's like, oh, you were acknowledged by the gods. He probably runs the numbers on what percentage of Chad GPT's users can I sign up for my product if I get Sam to reply to me? Yeah, I'm sure it was a boost at the time. Poke the bear. Poke the bear.

Yeah. Yeah, this article was, I mean, this ad was. Can we pull up a little bit of this ad, Ben? Because it was a little controversial. So Tokenbender here quote tweets this and says, perplexity seems to be on a path to be a case study. I will not elaborate. But look at look at this ad.

This is beautiful. It's really, really well done. And I mean, the lighting, everything, the sets like this feels like it would be at home with Apple. But I think people are a little bearish on this because it's like, oh, they're spending too much before they have like true breakthrough consumer adoption feels like a Super Bowl ad. People are always really skeptical about like, oh, you're advertising too much before they have like true breakthrough consumer adoption, feels like a Super Bowl ad. People are always really skeptical about like, oh, you're advertising too much,

but it's like, this is a consumer war. You gotta get people on. And I think it's fun, I think it's a well-produced ad. So he goes to Pugel and does not get a good result. They clearly made the font smaller. I've never watched this show. Oh, you've never watched Squiggle? Yeah, I watched it. It was pretty good.

It's very funny because they created a fake Google and they clearly sized the text down, so it just looks like a complete wall of text. Whereas when he uses perplexity here, it's just like a single answer. It's just very clear, much larger text. Yeah, they're trying to get an answer. I like their positioning as an answer engine.

It's a good phrase. And they also have nice merch. There's been some cool coffee cups I've been seeing on the timeline that are pretty cool. Clearly like a... No, the token vendor line was in reference to perplexity launching a venture fund. And the response at the time was,

hey, I don't even think they were in the top 25 apps in their category at that point. And so the pushback would be like, why do you have a venture fund? And you should just focus on the product. But yeah, they're getting attention. They're getting users. They're 16 in the charts right now.

If I have to go long short on this, I would go short perplexity venture fund, long perplexity cinematic ads. Because you're trying to get consumers to use it. It's much, you have to do this crazy dance of logic. We saw all the big. We'll invest in this company and then our product will become better.

All the ads, all the ads. Because ads work. Yeah, all the ads from the Super Bowl, from the big AI players, the Googles, were very mid. Like very, I don't remember any of them at this point I remember sure it's in I remember the open AI one the open AI one was more like a design film cinematic and cool yeah but for a lot of these it's just like you've got to just remind normies that you exist yeah hey yeah you

should try this out you know if it's if it drives yeahs. This marketing is better for the average American. Yeah. Perplexities new ad, then the open AI sort of sun God, black sun. Yeah, the black sun was weird. Worshiping the black sun. We're all turning into bits. Anyway, you do an $18 billion,

you raise a billion at an $18 billion post, let's say 800 and 900 million of that secondary, what's the first thing you're doing? You're heading over to Bezel, right? Yeah, Bezel. Go to getbezel.com, shop over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. That's right. Pick something up.

And we love you, Bezel. And in terms of other amazing wearables, we got breaking news from Big Screen VR. They launched the Beyond 2. I am so excited for this. This is just a fascinating story of a company that's just been grinding in VR for so long. So hard.

Yeah, tell me. I'd hate to take anything away from big screen, but I almost forgot briefly about that Soul Reader company. Do you remember that? Oh yeah, that's Trace Company. Yeah. I have one. E Ink Screen, very different product. But that's that's what I want. Are they selling, are they delivering? Yeah yeah yeah you can get a soul reader. You should. That's great. Soul reader's great right before bed.

Yeah. Because you just throw it on it can pull in articles. It can pull in ebooks and stuff. I read the driver that story about cannonball on the Soul Reader, it's great, great. Alex Roy. Yeah, my main thing is I'm falling asleep. Yeah. Right now I do a lot of audio. Yeah, you don't want light. So it's just, it's very warm color temperature.

There's no blue light. So you'll just fall asleep in like five pages. It's honestly hard to finish a book. I'm sorry to the big screen team, we got sidetracked here. Well, it's a very different use case. No, no, I know. It's a very different use case. So, no, I know. It's a very different use case.

So with Bigscreen, it's for this really immersive Ready Player One style VR. And it's so, so light. They launched the Bigscreen one last year, or maybe the year before. They launched the Bigscreen Beyond 2 just a few days ago. We're trying to have the CEO on soon to talk about it. And actually, one of my friends, Kyle Russell,

works over at Big Screen now too. So it's 107 grams, which is phenomenally light. And John Carmack, when he was at Metta working on their headsets, said that the key to creating consumer adoption in VR was, I think he said like $100, 100 grams. So if you make it super light and super cheap, people will just start throwing it on and there's a bunch of interesting

posts that will go through here, but They're they're claiming breakthrough optics a hundred and sixteen degree field of view edge to edge clarity a massive sweet spot reduced lens glare Increased brightness and eye tracking improved for shareability We added adjustable IPD so you can adjust where the lens is go over your eyes so you can give it to a friend. The first version was, they would actually like 3D print your face onto the mold and we should pull up the video if we can, Ben, to kind of show people. That's cool, they're shipping in less than a month.

Oh yeah, and the demand was crazy. I think they sold twice as many as the previous version. How does it integrate into any headset in the world? And our community loved it with Beyond becoming people's daily driver VR headset for VRChat, Racing Sims, and other VR games. But our community has been asking for more, asking us to push further on optics and a wish list of new features. After years of cutting edgeedge research and development, we're unveiling our most advanced product yet, BigScreen Beyond 2. Let's go.

Let's go. I'm so hyped. I'm never taking these off. Yes. That looks very cool. Yeah. Somebody actually did a teard down of this headset too. They like cut out even more stuff

and got it down to like 60 grams, which is like nothing. Feels like just having like a pen on your face basically. But I mean, the weight thing, this was the number one complaint about the Apple Vision Pro. They've just gone completely the other direction to give you a super, super light headset. Now they've made a bunch of sacrifices to get there.

Like I'm pretty sure this thing has to Be powered by a computer. It has to be plugged in there's a bunch of different things that you have to do It's for a prosumer or kind of a developer almost But I want to figure out how to get this rig Built out really really easily with maybe some small Mac mini powering it or some Nvidia box That I can just use super simply and just have this wonderful experience so But Palmer lucky has actually been a big proponent of what big screens doing He wrote we're on the path or he was he was interviewed and was talking about it

We're on a path where we can make virtual reality devices that provide matrix level immersion the big screen VR cost $990 and it weighs 1 5th of the Oculus Quest Pro. Apple headset display is the next generation for the same company. And so he was interviewed by Peter Diamandis and talked about how excited he was about that direction. And Carmack was saying the same thing, we mentioned this.

Big screen beyond feels like a prop from a futuristic movie But it works far and away. I really wanted to I really want to do sim racing in here totally We have to in the new in the new studio Like the most ridiculous yeah, I went there's a place in Pasadena that has like full sim It doesn't do VR cuz yeah people get sick and it's kind of gross to show them Yeah, but they have full full VR full like people get sick and it's kind of gross to show them. But they have full VR, full three screens. And it was fun. I was at Laguna Seca racing some Porsche Cup car.

It was fun putting up lap times. I think I was on the simulator for like an hour. It just blew right by. It was great. Avi Schiffman chimed in. This is an interesting old quote from Steve Jobs. Steve said, there's no such thing as headphones for video. Steve Jobs would have turned 70 today and I can't help but wonder what he'd think about

the early steps for Apple vision. Avi says, Apple should have made something closer to big screen beyonds, tiny little goggles, just a more immersive content viewing experience that fits into the Apple ecosystem is enough. It didn't need apps and neither did the watch. And that's a really, really good point. You just put it on and it's just whatever's on your phone is just boom right there. There are, there are a couple of companies that are not even doing VR. It's just basically a big TV screen and you, and it has the form factor of like sunglasses. And so if you're on a plane, you want to watch a movie on a huge screen, you just throw those on. There's a couple companies,

but they're all a little rough around the edges soon. But just to put the weight in perspective, Kyle Russell, my buddy shares this. He says, even the tiny iPhone SE weighs more than the big screen beyond at 144 grams. And back in the day, do you remember those VR headsets that were like you literally slot your phone, it was Google Cardboard. And so you'd slot your phone into a holder and then strap that to your face. Yeah. And there was another one,

the Samsung VR something you needed a Samsung phone, you put that in there and then you just bought the lenses. And there was this idea that like, your phone would be driving the VR experience never quite got there. But you can go the lenses. And there was this idea that like your phone would be driving the VR experience. Never quite got there, but you can go even lighter if you're just purely focused on VR like big screen is. And then Kyle also shares a little meme from the big screen team discord. Silence optics engineer, a physicist is talking

because clearly internally they're always bumping up against the limits of physics. It's very difficult. That's the number one constraint for these guys I can't believe how cool this thing looks it's again this this is why we need new science fiction for the products from like 40 years from now because this feels like a device out of you know snow crash yeah we're gonna check the box and then and then we're gonna need to move on to the next bit next big thing but

I'm excited for for VR to finally get here and I can't wait to get my hands on a big screen beyond two. We'll have to do an unboxing on the show. Well, if big screen wants their next million customers, what should they do? They gotta buy billboards. Immediately. Immediately. Immediately.

We gotta figure out how many billboards are on the 101. Small device, massive billboard. A power play is to just get every billboard. Get every billboard right around Cupertino. Really let Apple know, hey, we're putting the screws to you. We're home. This, ours way is nothing. Yours way is more than the truck.

You can't make even, you can't make your 29th generation iPhone way. Does your neck hurt? A brutal mugging. A big screen beyond. I wanna see it on an ad quick billboard, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, you see the tornado cash news? Tornado cash? Yeah, you were telling me about it. This has been a story that's been developing for a while and it's it feels like tracking it's kind of hard because it's moving in slow motion There's been little and basically just to set the level set on tornado cash tornado cash

It was a I believe like an aetherium contract. It was just code, but it would allow you to deposit Deposit crypto it would get basically like tumbled around with all the other mixed in with all the other tokens. And then jam it in the smart contract, basically the blender on. Yeah, turn the blender on. And then just let it run for. And then you can come back later and kind of sneak it out.

No one knows who's taken what. And it's like basically like money laundering on the blockchain. But it was a big question because although it was used by criminals a lot, is math a crime? And a lot of the libertarians and a lot of the crypto folks were like privacy is important. That's why we got into this whole game. What are you doing? The I believe the the founder was arrested and has a court case coming up. But the most recent news that

just dropped today is that tornado cash has been removed from the OFAC sanctions list along with many other addresses. Shout out to Brian Armstrong and CoinCenter for suing the government in court and winning for your human right to privacy. Beware many front ends to tornado are fake and scams and will empty your wallet. So yeah, you know, maybe don't try and use this. But from a libertarian political perspective, everyone's celebrating in that way.

Yeah, this seems like a win for human rights, and law enforcement will still be coming after the criminals that try to use tornado cash. Totally. In many other ways. As they do with Ross Ulbricht using Bitcoin yeah the the problem is that like tornado cash was a lot harder to track then there still are ways to little insight so former teammate of mine and friend Dylan

Abruscado is the founder of this online survivor style game called Crypt of the Game yep he ran I think it was the first or second season two before they were required by Uniswap. The winner of the season won all this money from playing the game and then donated it to the legal defense for Tornado Cash. And so, yeah, this was just a very big issue. Yeah. I mean, Brian Chow here at Psych Sword says, the Tornado Cash founders are political prisoners, the case against them should be immediately dismissed. This was a couple months ago.

And there's a little breakdown from one of the founders, Roman Storm, great name, Tornado Storm, wow. He says, my name is Roman Storm and I am one of the founders of Tornado Cash, a non-custodial privacy protocol. I am being prosecuted for writing open source code that enables private crypto transactions

in a completely non-custodial manner, meaning his company never takes ownership over your crypto. It's the opposite of a bank. It's not designed to be like Coinbase. It's merely a smart contract. This prosecution represents a terrifying criminalization of privacy. The charges against me threaten to criminalize software development itself.

If successful, the implications could extend far beyond the crypto industry impacting every software developer. I face up to 45 years in prison on charges including operating unlicensed money transmitting business, conspiracy to commit money laundering and sanctions evasion. This case has already had a chilling effect on developers working on software tools. Recently a developer filed a lawsuit against the DOJ seeking relief because my case has made them fearful of releasing new software." And so this has been very, very controversial. Vitalik actually chimed in.

No man left behind. Roman Storm and Alex Pertsev next. Tornado Cash itself won an important case today. And the whole crypto community is behind this. There is a flip side to this that we should talk about, which is that the allegations are that maybe this operation was profiting off of the money laundering in like a maybe more criminal way.

And I think that's what they're alleging, but I don't really want to depend on it. Yeah, this has always been the challenge with crypto where you have these sort of open source on chain protocols that in many ways can operate autonomously. Yet they have to, they end up building sort of front end services that have to, that end up building sort of front end services that have to,

that end up using like AWS. And there needs to be some company that sort of like puts a ramp card down, and probably not ramp in this case, but you know has to put a card down or pay for these services. And so then you have to look at what is the company that is you know a US or some type of corporate entity that can pay USD for services? And then what is the protocol? And this is why in crypto, they historically would have the sort of foundation that that sort of manages the protocol. And then there's usually a C Corp that sort of engages with the foundation. It's like very, very complicated structures, which is why all the big crypto funds would have these pretty massive internal legal teams to help their portfolio companies think through this.

Yeah. I think in general, I'm pro-privacy, but anti-money laundering, but it's obviously very not. But Vec commented on it apparently and says you can't go after the developers of code. What you actually need to do is go after the individual bad

actors who are breaking the laws that already exist. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like you don't go after, you don't try and like lock up Satoshi for creating Bitcoin, even if you could find him. You go after Russell Brecht for creating the platform. And so Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, said, no man left behind. Tornado Cash itself won an important case today,

and the founders are next. So yeah, interesting that just because Tornado Cash was able to sort of beat their case, doesn't mean the founders are fully out of the woods yet. I think the case is going to trial in April, so we'll have to track that. Crazy. But if you want to avoid money laundering at your company,

if you want to avoid waste at your company, you should go to ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. You can see on this image here, you got a little picture of Saquon.

Oh yeah. It says keep your team focused on the game, not expenses. We're gonna get Saquon on the show. Yeah. It's only a matter of time. Excited to have him on. He can teach us about football. And investing apparently,

cause he's a fantastic investor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's in ramp and anderol now. Yeah, he just got into anderol. He was over at the anderol offices. Huge alpha just being a pro athlete and getting into the non, the typically non-sexy categories.

It's normal for an athlete to be like, you know, we've got an NBA player and like, Rora. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know protein powder, but that's very competitive. Yeah, the real alpha is saying, no, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna become an American dynamism investor. Fantastic. Well, speaking of guests, before we have Saquon on,

we got a whole bunch of guests hopping on right now. We got Harry Stebbings coming on. The king of Europe. The king of Europe. The king of Europe got Harry Stebbings coming. The king of Europe. The king of Europe. The king of Europe Harry Stebbings. Harry sent a nice note on the timeline yesterday. He's been super supportive. It's interesting I was DMing him with with him a little bit and I'm sure he's gonna be in the waiting room any second but on how he's in the waiting room. Yeah he was saying he listens to the show and I think we finally made a show

There he is enough for his marathon walks because the guys putting up 40,000 steps a day How many steps have you wrapped up today? 50,000 now so every thousand two and a half hours and I listened to you on the walk. It's fantastic We got it. So so just let us know when we need to go from three to four hours. Yeah, just we want to pace with your walking your steps. Honestly, I walk with my mother on the weekends. If we could do weekend additions also, it would save me having to talk for six hours. I love it's been it's awesome to see your relationship with your mom.

Sometimes makes me feel like a bad son because I don't walk for that many hours with my mother. But I was just saying, you had a nice message yesterday on the timeline. Thank you for the support. It's interesting. You know, the shows that we really respect, all of them are highly ephemeral, right?

Like they're shows that aren't really oriented around the news. They're oriented around individuals, people, companies, et cetera. them are highly ephemeral, right? Like they're shows that aren't really oriented around the news, they're oriented around individuals, people, companies, et cetera. And ours is the exact opposite, right? Like it would be kind of crazy to go back and listen to- The back catalog is kind of crazy. Sometimes we'll talk about a story

that maybe is more evergreen, but you've built up this sort of crazy catalog of some of the most amazing investors in venture ever. I wanted to have you on for a few reasons, but really to give you an opportunity to talk about Project Europe. We joked on the show that until you guys came out with this new program, the Project Europe

that most VCs thought about was planning their sort of trips to St. Tropez over the summer, but you guys are taking it back. Do you know what, we're taking it back. We also have Portofino. Yeah. No, it's us. Fundamentally, the world has decided

that Europe has lost innovation, we've lost entrepreneurs, and I meet great founders every day, and do you know what they're told? You gotta move to the Valley. And I'm like, you don't have to move to the valley. You can build a massive company here. And I think bluntly, we need to change the vibes. Vibes is everything. Elon, you like him or you don't. The guy knows how to master vibes. And for us now, we've told our young entrepreneurs that you should

leave, that you should build a company elsewhere. There a guy Gary Stevenson who is blowing up in the UK who tells young people that bluntly it's the system's fault it's not your fault and it you know but there's nothing you can do about it there is I was it guys ten years ago I had no money I was a kid in a bedroom. Today, we manage over $750 million, the show and the media companies, multi, multi millions, because of the internet. I'm not doing that as a me, it's the internet and the empowering nature of,

I DM'd Mark Benny off 53 times before he came on the show. I, I, I, I, I, we, we remind, by the way, we remind sometimes we'll message a friend about coming on the show and they like, don't get back right away. And I'm like, I got a channel Harry. Yeah, for sure. I just got to hit them up again. And it's important to share those.

A lot of people would just, you know, have the temptation to make it look easy and say, oh yeah, I just message Mark Benioff and he just like popped on. It was easy. But it's important to remind people that persistence is what creates greatness. Totally, I mean, Logan Bartlett's the same way. I think he DM'd, he said he emailed SBF like 15 times to try and get him on the show

and I was like, I don't know how you could do that. It feels so awkward to me, but you've clearly broken it down and it's paid off massively. It's fantastic. But you know what? You've gotta get innovative. I use suino.ai to write songs about people and then I send them to them. So I'm like, you know, write me a song asking John in a like male folk guitarist tone about the future of M&A and then I'll send it to them. I promise

you you're the only one who's going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so important in like fundraising sales and you know, even growing a podcast. It's all the same thing Oh my god, totally the same thing but on project Europe Yeah, it was like the doom loop just pervasive and I have so many friends in the US who are just like Europe, dude Like why are you still there? It's just it's just not true. but the timing But but the timing seems incredible you've been you know bang the the the European drum for a while now But it does seem like even in the last month almost there's been the sort of shift and that's sort of potentially coming from this You know the US is getting into trade wars with our neighbors are some of our closest allies

This is sort of like nationalism happening around Western Europe kind of waking up, You know, people are, there's more, you know, the people are talking about what is gonna be the ender roll of Europe. You know, I'm sure you're looking at some of these companies, but the timing seemed great. Do we need? I think we're going through this intense period

of deglobalization and what happens in intense periods of deglobalization is intense patriotism. And I think we're at the start of that now, where absolutely we're starting to see Europe once again get a little bit more patriotic. It's funny you said there about the Andruil of Europe. It's Helsing. And my favorite thing is when you see defense funds, and you're like, no, no.

I don't quite know if defense is quite the category. It's more like Andruil and Helsing. Sure. Very cool. I'm rural and Helsing. Yeah. Very cool. Do you, I'm curious, you run your fund, you run the media business. Do you LP into other European funds? Are you trying to kind of create a sort of like,

I'm at one of the benefits. Karetsu. A Karetsu, no, but one of the things here in America is great if I've got a buddy who's raising a pre-seed round. I talk to them, I'm like, okay, I know 30 people that could lead this pre-seed round. Like, don't worry if any one person says no. Like, you're gonna get a yes. Just talk to a bunch of people.

But I imagine when there's probably not 30 London pre-seed funds that you kind of, at the moment, but maybe there should be, or maybe there are? I mean, I don't actually LP really into other funds just because With the network from the show if I LP'd into one I'd have to LP into all of them So I find it easier to say just like I'm sorry I can't do LP checks otherwise you end up being Mark Andreessen well I don't know a fun that Mark Andreessen is not in I've

So many funds where Mark is an investor. And so, listen, he has more money than me and can afford to do that. I couldn't do 100 funds. Can you tell us a little bit about the patriotism in Europe? Are there layers to this where a Spanish company will only want to raise from Spanish investors and say, hey, get this British guy out of here? Or is Europe kind of solidified in the same way that the United States is kind of a block, even though obviously there's a difference between Florida and New York and California.

I would say that Europe is solidified completely. There's definitely not this kind of isolationist element of like, Oh, Spanish versus Italian versus whatever. And Jesus, even the English and the French are getting on these days. that goes to show just how much of a united front it is and I think especially in the wake of you know the divide that's growing between the US and Europe that becomes ever stronger that unified country element of Europe and so I don't see that at all and Europe really stands as a block and I think you see that in how people have responded to Project Europe.

And we've had thousands of applications. I started with 25 founders and I was like, hey, I'll go get 25 founders that are amazing. And they will write a check into this vehicle to back the next generation. We literally went to 150 in three days. We've had another three to 400 requests to be in. There's a legal cap of 250, so we can't actually do it.

But it was amazing. Talk about when you were an early investor in Lovable, they've seen ridiculous growth. It's one of those charts that's not really a line. It's more like a wall. Talk about that round, how that came together. Are you getting these companies like weeks earlier than American investors that would want a shot at it? Is it months? Talk about your edge in Europe on the ground.

Yeah, 100%. Lovable is a great example of a global company that's being built from Europe and Sweden in particular. Their numbers are insane. They're growing, you know, 2.3 to 2.5 million error per week. Their retention is better than chat GPT is at over 85%. I mean, it is a monster. And their retention is really important. It is not sugar high AI revenues. And so Phenomely impressive listen Anton is quite obviously brilliant. I think we over Exaggerate how difficult our role is as venture investors our role is to invest in the 1% and generally the 1% I find is quite obvious and so when I met him it was pretty apparent that he was bluntly

Creating an entirely new category. I've learned one thing in investing that when you're able to make your customer a superhero, it generally works very well. Nike is a good example. Everyone's an athlete. That message is empowering. Shopify, everyone's an entrepreneur.

And Lovable allows anyone to build a website. My mother who has a bakery uses lovable to make her bakery website. That is incredible. Yeah, what happens? I love your commentary on just the website market in general, the sort of, you know, you've got the framers, the web flows, you know, all these different platforms. It's felt over the last few years. Yeah, it's felt over the last few years. Wibs and Spare, SquareSpace, Shopify.

It's felt over the last few years. If you just waited for web flow to become four years old, then you could create the framers, and then you could do the lovables. Unending gold mine, honestly. Yeah, and it seems like the- You've got a couple of different segments here that I don't think people are really talking about enough,

which is you've got the number ones, which is P-owned, owned larger older players. Now, they are in a lot of trouble. They've lost innovation, they've lost product centricity. They're in a real world of pain. I'm really looking at a lot of the P board assets, your Ana plans, your Coopers of the world thinking, wow, you were bought at the height of the market. You don't have the founder as the CEO. You've lost product centricity. This is gonna be a really tough slog

to get back to that acquisition price. And they know that. And then the second that no one's talking about either is this really worrying segment. This is almost what I'm most worried for. 50 million to 200 million AIR or SaaS businesses that are growing in the teens and they're not profitable yet,

or they're barely profitable. They are not acquisition targets for P. Those are not good enough numbers. They're not good enough to IPO. What happens in that case? And there's a lot of these companies. That is a really dangerous chasm to fall down that I don't think many people are talking about.

What about just the broader market? We're seeing a pretty significant sell-off in the US. Is Europe seeing something similar? I haven't been tracking it very closely. When you say sell-off, what do you mean? Yeah, I think he's talking public equities, but I mean, in your position, do you as a venture investor, probably don't care, but I even talk about maybe just like pricing in the early stage market, which is probably what you're more clued into. I mean, there's so many things here.

I think one thing that no one's doing, I'm so shocked about it, is like bluntly how LPs are responding to a lot of the endowment policy changes enacted by a Trump administration. I mean, like this is a very, very difficult position for a lot of endowment funds to be in. They're forced to rethink a lot of their private allocations

and that will significantly impact managers' abilities to raise funds this year. And so- Can you step back and explain exactly what the change is? Well, so you're seeing essentially the Trump administration reduce a lot of the budgets that they're able to have to their privates. And so you're seeing that reflected in how they're engaging with new managers. When I speak to a lot of endowments today,

they're simply not adding new managers and they're even trimming their existing. And so I think that's bluntly gonna really impact the amount of new managers that we see this year. In terms of pricing, honestly, it's higher than it's ever been for the clearly great assets. And there's a lot of people who come and say, oh, it's so unfair, it's so unfair. I understand that for a lot of the market, you're not coming out of Stripe or Facebook or you name it but if you are you have

more money than ever before and the prices are honestly higher than ever before. The prices are absolutely nuts today and so you either have to be if you want to win in Venture State you have to be one of two things. I believe I'm a better picker than anyone else and can find diamonds in the rough. Or I believe that I am such attractive capital that I can win a beauty contest and still pay a very high price but beat everyone else. Yeah. Do it all at the same time.

No, I think that was it. It's funny that any investor who's complaining about high prices is just like, just price every investment perfectly and never miss. Put up a great fund. But by the way, entry price really matters. When you look at Wiz and Insight, something very timely, their entry price was very high.

And so people are really shitting on it as an investment saying, oh, we'd only returned a third or a quarter Of that fund. It's not it's just that the entry price was so high and we'll talk about that. I'm curious Do you do you know any dynamics? I was wondering imagine you're the the partner who leads, you know 200 million dollar investment turns it into two and a half billion and Then you're kind of waiting around for your other partners saying like I cut my I kind of did the heavy lifting here But I need you guys there because they're not in carry yet. Is there a scenario where that partner doesn't really see

much of a Personal benefit from having you know returning two billion dollars I mean, let's just say I think they'll be getting a pretty big bonus at the end. Yeah, I'm not too worried about them But I mean it is just testament to the fun size matters. The scale's massive. It's never been bigger. All right, Harry, there's a lot more to talk about. We'd love to have you on again.

Go enjoy dinner. Thanks for coming on late. We appreciate you coming on late. We really appreciate it. It's fantastic to have you. Guys, honestly, you are a fantastic company on the walk. Always let me know what I can do. And love guys thanks so much talk to you enjoy your evening yeah I was coordinating timing with him yeah being in London well it seemed like

he got to a great podcasting studio he's locked in he's locked in you love it over time over time we're gonna get the Dellians like a permanent sort of like hub in the office just say come flip on the lights. You'll be live The remote studio, I mean that's what the big TV channels do it's like Oh if you're doing a spot on you know NBC go to the local NBC affiliate in your town and we'll have a green screen and a great microphone and a And a teleprompter for you and you'll look great if you can stop by.

Anyway, we got Adam coming on the show in a couple minutes. Give me some background on Adam. How do you meet him and what does he do? The godfather of media, Adam Ryan. That is a bold intro. So Adam Ryan's a very good friend. I was actually on the board of his company through the Series A. And he prior to that was at the Hustle.

He ran sales there. Eventually was, I think, the president and the COO under Sam Parr. He also was at Under Armour when they acquired My Fitness Pal. So he's just been kind of right in the, he also was at he was at a Spiceworks as well so he's always been at kind of the intersection intersection of like software and business media and content and so he can

talk a little bit about work week and then I wanted to get him on to talk about the TechCrunch acquisition that happened today which there's a lot of turmoil. Has the number actually leaked, or is that private information? It's private information. But we got it ready. But should we be ringing the sides phone or not? There he is.

There he is. That's what we'll ask Adam. Adam, we heard TechCrunch was bought. We have this beautiful gong right here. Should we ring it or not? I think this is like a poor noise champagne bottle situation. It's time to ring it or not? This is like a poor noise, champagne bottle situation. It's time to ring it.

Okay. Okay. We'll hit it. We'll hit it. But great. Great to see you, Adam. I just want to say you always thought that I would be good at podcasting

and always believed in me. So, you know, thank you for that. You were the first person to say, you should be podcasting. But it's great. I gave a quick intro earlier, but it'd be great to have it in your words. And then I want to kind of get into the news.

Jordy, I think I sent you a contract once to become a podcast. So we can talk about that. But yeah, big fan of the show show guys. It's been amazing. And I've never seen Geordie just in his natural element of getting to shoot the shit all day. It's a perfect job. Yeah. Fantastic.

Yeah. So work week is imagine if LinkedIn was only for people that were verifiably in your profession. So think about if you're an econ or on a hospital system or HR, you have a platform, social media platform that's built just for you. Conversations there authentic around your lingo, you know, similar to what this podcast is all about. Actually, I think this is why we all like it as founders as you guys talk like us, you think like us, you know, similar to what this podcast is all about. Actually, I think this is why we all like it as founders is you guys talk like us, you think like us, you bring that out. And we've built that in a social media platform. So that's

largely what we do. I think one of the areas that we've focused on is like, if I wanted to go launch an HR social media platform, I would never have a shot to do it. HR people would not listen to me. And so our go-to-market is to partner with operators, practitioners in these industries and have them create newsletters and podcasts that then help us build an audience to drive to these memberships in the future. So that's most of what we're up to nowadays. And previously, as Jordi said, the hustle, my fitness pal and spice works kind

of at various different points of media. Amazing. Let's jump right into into TC. You know, we've talked about this on the on the. They were owned by, what was it, AOL, Apollo, the private equity fund bought AOL. It seems like at some point there would be an incentive to sort of dismantle AOL, the underlying assets, and I imagine that Apollo doesn't want to just hold that position forever.

Maybe just talk about kind of the history of maybe why you think TechCrunch has really just struggled. I think it was owned by it was it was owned by Verizon. I'll give you some background. So founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington, partners of Archimedes Ventures. Eventually they went under the Yahoo umbrella after its former parent AOL and Yahoo were acquired by Verizon. So it became a Verizon company and then Verizon sold to Apollo. So it's been private equity back since 2021. And now it has been sold to Regent, a media investment firm.

Yeah, it's the property. It's like the hot potato that no one wants, right? It's just been sold and sold and sold. But I mean, I think the, the, the through line is, uh, looking, if you look at their search interest on Google trends, they peaked, uh, any, any guess what year they peaked of search interest? 2012. 2011.

Good guess. Jordan. Uh, 2011 was the peak of their search history. Today. Their search history is essentially the equivalent of what they had in June of 2006. And it's just been a depreciating, distressed asset for 12 years. And that's why it keeps getting tossed around.

And I actually think it's, they're an interesting one to study though, because like, why were they so good and They were so good because they figured out one move that was just awesome Which was building relationships of VCs in Silicon Valley Breaking the news having mom be proud creating the cycle keep going the mom proud engine Yeah, I mean when you start a company, it's so fake for so long. Even if you go to your parents and you say,

hey, I got $2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, they're like, who? That's not Bank of America. And at some point, that's not Chase. At some point, you get the TechCrunch article and you can send it to your family and be like,

hey, I'm in business. I'm a real person. Yeah, at some point, I had one funny TechCrunch story. So we announced our seed round from Andreessen and we simultaneously launched our pre-seed. It was this awesome moment. We had been in the timeline a lot and TechCrunch agreed to cover the story.

They didn't tell us when they would release it. They didn't even tell us they were for sure gonna cover it until like a couple days before. And then when they did release it, they refused to use our product imagery or any assets that we created and they used a stock image of a birthday cake and we were just like hey like we're really excited about the article and like we want to share it broadly But like this is not you know

Not on brand for us and like feels kind of random and they like fired back and they were like you're not you don't you're Not a writer here like don't and it was like very hostile and it left this like terrible taste in my mouth and I was like, okay, I'm never talking to TechCrunch again. And I think a lot of founders have had that sort of frustration where it's like, hey, we still love the TechCrunch brand because like for me, I grew up reading it. I remember just as a kid going to the homepage

and being so excited. And I think it has like a ton of potential as being a place to inspire entrepreneurship. But the fall off is potentially that, and this is like the entire work week thesis, is that business people, whether you're an investor, founder, et cetera, want to learn from other business people.

And so at some point along the road, after Michael Errington, I think, was out of the picture, and he was a private equity owner, they maybe stopped hiring founders or people that just deeply loved venture. And it coincided with this explosion of content creators broadly within venture capital that Pacci would start breaking fundraising news. And you knew if you worked with Pacci, he was going to, you know, publish it on the day

that he said he was, he was going to make you look good. He actually deep dive it in a much deeper level than you would ever see on tech crunch. Right. Yeah. And I think the other piece of that, like two things they, I think they really screwed up like one, when you build the, your actual best product, which was their like fundraising breaking news around the relationships with investors, you can't write anything that's actually like, deeply critical, even in the

future. And what they did was they got stuck in middleman land of like, you can have like the Axios, Sarah Fishers of the world, Packies, they're like, hey, I'm here to like, tell a good story, a real story, but like to support you or like hard hitting journalism. Like I'm going to like go say the thing that no one wants to say aloud. They like John Kari Rue, like he broke Theranos, like right. He's a serious investigative journalist in the business world. If they tried to do both and you just can't win in the middle. Like I think today, like either your editorial and your audience, like it can't be rounded anymore. It has to be pointed. And like you have to be

like, this is what we stand for. This is what we do. This is who we support. If you're like anywhere in the middle, you're just going to get forgotten. And I think they they lost that like 10 plus years ago. I mean, looking at their account, they have 10 million followers on X, and they're like, 19 likes on their announcement that they have been sold, which is like big news in their own world. And it's just so rough.

Yeah, it's interesting. We had heard months ago that it was for sale and was trying to find a buyer. And I do think the actual purchase price came in a lot lower than what they had hoped. But what I can imagine happens now is whoever this guy, I don't know the guy who bought it, but I imagine he basically fires everyone because I can't imagine that guy.

He's not going to. So Regence is a private equity firm that owns a bunch of logos that 15 years ago were cool. And his playbook is, and TechCrunch put this in their own press release, you know, they're, I think their GDS line was like, this is a software update, not a system restart. But he said he's not firing anyone. But he owns a bunch of different logos and publications that are typically distressed assets. And I kind of see it as like they're, they're hoping he, his playbook is like,

I own 50 of these. If I can make a few of them a little bit better, flip them in five years. And so I don't think they're actually going to probably fire a ton of people. Unfortunately, I think it's actually going to continue the path of not being relevant or good, uh, because they're going to not lose money. And I think they need a whole restart to do that. Let me give a little overview of who they own at Regent Computer World, Network World, CIO Magazine, CSO Magazine, Mac World, PC World, IT World, Rate My Professors, Cheddar News,

Military Times, Defense News, Marine Times, Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times. So a lot of these hyper verticalized small trade publications they've put together. And then they own some stuff in fashion as well, and then industrial and consumer products as well. And it says that they were in super cuts for a while. And then they actually- Yeah. I saw that too. That was a fun.. I was like actually I'd like to hear that story

but yeah, I mean the I Think you know when was the last time you heard a founder and I'll say like I can't wait for tech crunch to like Break my story and I think that's like the core of what's going on Yeah founders would still want them to break the story, but it's hard to get them to respond even if you have something that's somewhat newsworthy What else is going on in media today that you you find interesting? I know you wrote earlier this week about the skims which was like a hustle era super hot, you know newsletter That that sold how did that go? Is there any takeaways from it? Yeah, they, you know, they were started 2014. Oprah said she loved it. Reese Witherspoon, Chelsea Handler kind of like went on this raise like 25 million from 21st Century Fox bunch of good companies also hit their search interest peak in 2016.

So I think with them, they had a great business. They were probably seven years too late. I think that's a founder not founders not selling at the right time and like being bad builders and their time had passed. But I don't think they crossed the pref stack. So, you know, 12 plus years down the drain for them and pretty sad considering one time they were they were a household name among among like millennial women for a few short years. But yeah, that happened this week.

And I think that's what we're seeing is like, it's the onslaught of like, if you're not loved, you're out. Um, and none of these people that are getting sold today, like have people that are truly like logging every day and loving what they're seeing. Uh, yeah. I mean, last question that we'll let you go, uh, what do you think the founders of the skim should have done differently? It was, is there a path where this could have been a great cashflow engine if they'd not I mean, last question that will let you go. What do you think the founders of the skim should have done differently?

Is there a path where this could have been a great cashflow engine if they'd not raised and kind of run it more as just making them influencers? Could they have been the next, you know, Call Her Daddy or something if they played that differently? What do you think? I do think they were more of a faceless institution than they probably got credit for,

which is kind of against my belief of what you have to be today. I think you have to have individuals at the forefront. But also, my interesting analysis there from 2014, their press releases like our advantages that were low tech in 2018, when they announced their series B, they said at the heart of what you do is technology. And I think there's like, it's okay today to just admit who you are and what you do. And they tried to be something they're not, which is a technology company. I think they wasted tons of capital trying to do shit that they have no idea how to do. And they should have just kept with building content for women their age and building, creating

for themselves and they would have been just fine. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you follow anything? Last question on my side for now, and would love to just have you back on when there's media headlines. So Caller Daddy had all these big issues with Barstool because they just weren't really getting a good deal. Alex Cooper eventually leaves, starts her own network, does very well, but then creates this sort of new superstar

in Alex Earl. And then Alex Earl announced this quarter that she's leaving. Do you think it's possible to build networks anymore long term? Or with these sort of scaled networks, Do you eventually just lose, you know your best talent? How does that work? Uh, I think it depends. I mean the Alex Earl one's interesting. I was confused because she was already a superstar I mean she was like

She was already making like a few million a year Pre Alex Cooper, I think What the net what the best networks, I think is find emerging talent early, early, like in pre seed stage, essentially, as like content creator and to keep them. And I think there's been plenty of good examples. I mean, everyone talks about a bar still leaving, but like Big Cat, PFT and all those guys are still there

and drive most of their revenue actually and always have. And so what happened, how they do that, they get paid a lot of money and they feel like they're treated fair. And I think that's like at the core, not everyone wants to do everything. And I think when you're building out those networks, the only way to keep talent is I think to talk to the talent and be like, what what kind of life do you want? What what kind of pay do you want? And you've got to build for that. And I think if you look at TV, they actually this is what people should take

away is like, Stephen A. Smith just got a fucking whopper of a deal. They kept him but he they like knew what he needed. He wanted to be the high he wanted to get the highest contract. TV has done this really well for a long time friends cast giving them their new contracts to keep them together. Those are all innovative contracts that keep talent. I think to do to sustain, you have to kind of take that same approach. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you Adam. See you later. Talk soon. Bye. Very interesting. Nice. Who we got next coming in? Adam's always, he's never pulled punches in his writing.

He's got a great newsletter where he just kind of says it how it is in media. Because he's been in the trenches, right? He built a million subscriber list while at the hustle, and it's certainly not easy. We got Blake Anderson coming in from the cage, live from New York City where he's been In an apartment for 33 days straight. How you doing Blake and you guys hear me we can yes

Welcome to the show they can hear me, but I cannot hear them Okay, try it again check you all say something check check check public comm investing for those who seriously multi-asset investing, industry builds, funded by millions. Can you play music and do hear it in your apartment? We got stocks, bonds, treasuries, options. Can you hear that? Yeah, test speaker.

What about eight sleep? I know you guys are sleeping on eight sleeps out there. Nights that feel your best days. How do I sound? Turn any bed into an ultimate sleeping experience. Go to eightsleep.com slash TBPN. Can you hear that, Blake? Yes, I can. you now. How do I sound? Not my ear. Your ultimate sleeping experience. Go to ateSleep.com slash TBPN. Can you hear that, Blake? Yes, I can.

Okay, cool. What about getbezle.com? Can you hear that? I can hear that. Blake's a watch guy. Ramp.com? How about, I was gonna ask about Ramp. Can you tell me about them?

Yeah, Ramp, time is money, so say both. Getbezle.com. You can hear that? Okay, good. Are we good? I think we're money so say both. Go to rake.com. You can hear that? Okay good. What about that? Are we good? I think we're in a good spot. Blake.

Blake. Okay. Blake it's great to have you on the show. It's a big day today. Thank you for taking the time. You haven't been, I think everybody here is very familiar with you just from PMF or Die and everything.

You haven't left the cage for 33 days. Today you're launching the app and maybe you start to get a sense that freedom might be on the horizon. Freedom might be on the horizon. But yeah, talk to us, how are you feeling? You know, I'm feeling very stressed out. I feel like I have this pit in my stomach

that is not going away for anything. And I think that the only way that I can release that is achieving PMF. And if I do not achieve PMF, I think I'll be in a very dire spot, you know? Good luck. Yeah, we're gonna have the audience who gets to vote on the sort of

fantasy football style punishment. Like you might have to do pink hair or something like that. No, but we're believers. Why don't you break down 10X in your words, maybe just start with kind of the manifesto. It feels like the app is extremely timely with everybody sort of realizing that one of the biggest opportunities with AI today

is giving everybody a tutor. But yeah, tell us about 10X in your words. Yeah, I think that the power of AI education can not be understated. Everything that I've built has been on the backbone of AI. And yet at the same time, I have so many friends that constantly ask me how they can use AI to learn more efficiently, to learn how to code,

to learn how to market, to learn how to do anything, any digital skill. And I don't think that there exists a platform that's kind of synonymous with AI-based learning. And this was the general background thesis on building 10x. And next came the medium, right? What is the form factor? And so the original form factor with how we were launching

and the version that's going on the app store this evening is a Duolingo style learning path where you can select your skill and progress through the foundational knowledge needed to learn how to code with AI, market with AI, build a business with AI. And so that is one key function of the application. Additionally, we have the ability

to custom generate lessons. So you can generate a 15 minute podcast on anything that you want to learn about. I find myself going down these like interesting podcasts, rabbit holes on Spotify. And what I found is that once you get past the very base layer of any sort of domain, it could be machine learning, it could be complex systems,

it could be American history. It's very difficult to find the sort of domain, it could be machine learning, it could be complex systems, it could be American history. It's very difficult to find these sort of custom tailored information to progressing to that next step and TEDx provides that for people. Additionally, you can track your skill progression over time as well as chat with a chat GPT, grok-like basic chat bot within the application. Very cool.

I saw a post earlier today from this guy, Chris Pike, who's over at Pace. He says, when elite universities uploaded all of their courses online for public consumption, we collectively realized that the limiting factor for global intelligence is not access to information, it's motivation. What's your read on how motivated is

the sort of next generation of builders who the initial 10X app is like, how do you make somebody, how do you turn somebody into a developer, right? Right now maybe knows nothing. Do you feel like there's like, just a ridiculous amount of sort of motivation that doesn't necessarily have like a pathway yet?

Do you see that 10X is like, hey, here's how you go from zero to builder? Yeah. So one of the most popular questions that I get on social media is how can I learn to use AI? How can I learn to code nowadays? And there doesn't seem to be any resources that are really constantly up to date with the newest and best techniques. In addition, if we look at what Duolingo has done for language learning, the big thing that they've done is they've gamified it, they've made it fun. And I think that that's in line

with your point regarding motivation. And so right now with 10X, it is significantly more enjoyable to learn through 10X than through a basic standard chat bot. Though obviously we have the chat bot embedded within, but going forward one of my primary north star metrics is how much dopamine do you feel rushing into your brain when you hear those little sounds and get that xp and see yourself level up do you have do you have haptics yet or you

got you got the phones vibrating or is that rolling out soon yeah we've got we've got haptics um but you know i don't you know hapt haptics are just just a small step and a very big mountain in competing with Instagram and TikTok because, you know, my view for the 10x mobile application is that it might not be the platform that you sit down on use for three hours straight, but it certainly can fill the latent space in your day instead of Instagram and actually put it towards something productive.

Yeah, talk about this. Talk about the concept of like character building and sort of leveling up your character because a big part of 10x is like okay I'm a character I'm Geordie I can go on 10x and like level up my character to learn how to code that's awesome. Was there a specific video game or anything that inspired you as a kid that you were super into like that you got maybe way too into? Was it I think World of Warcraft was probably way before your time. Was there any specific?

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say Skyrim was a big one. So not to be confused with World of Warcraft. The big difference in terms of the type of person that played this game. No, that said, no, I think that games where you can see your skill and level progression over time are just inherently so much more addicting. Skyrim, Madden, FIFA, even Minecraft in a bunch of these different mods that I would use when I played as a kid. And that was essentially the thesis behind UMACS

and what made it go so viral is the ability to scan your face and get this sort of like six factor rating system about like your skin quality and your jawline and like your overall attractiveness and potential. And so in its current form, it's just XP based. But moving forward, I think that really interesting thing that we can implement is the ability to take these sort of preliminary challenges and quizzes to assess your current skill position

and then make this into more than just a system to come and learn statically and linearly, but something that can dynamically update based on where you're at, where you're progressing, and then become somewhat of a status symbol. Right now, we all know the term 10X engineer. I want a level 99 in 10X to be a hallmark of somebody who has agency in this post AI world. Love it.

Talk about your go-to-market. I know this is historically how you've grown your apps is sort of leveraging these sort of short form video platforms. You're taking all that learning and channeling it into 10x's GTM. Are you doing anything different this time or is it the same playbook that you've sort of happily shared with the world because it's easy to talk about, it's hard to actually do?

Yeah. So, you know, I think that 10x is inherently less viral than the previous products that I've built. Now that said has so much more long-term upside. And so if I were launching a Riz GPT right now, it'd be like done. Wraps. I'd be, I'd have completed it. I'd be at a million ARR, but I'm trying to build a big business here. And I really believe in the long-term mission.

Now that said, I think that I'm taking a lot of the learnings that I've had from my previous applications and figuring out how to make something that isn't inherently as viral or maybe like scandalous into something that people really resonate with and still can go viral on organic platforms. And so, I think that one of the big marketing messages that we have is you won't be replaced by AI, you'll be replaced by somebody using AI, learn to use AI.

Now that's inherently a little bit scary and like digs into insecurity. And I think that that'll be conducive to engagement on these social platforms. We're split testing a ton of different niches. We're working with self-improvement creators, with AI and tech creators, we're working with OnlyFans creators.

And so we've got the whole roster. This is what you were saying before, that somebody logs onto OnlyFans for whatever reason. And then it's like, hey, why don't you learn how to code? When are you, I know you're launching today. I got the pre-order page pulled up. When do you think you're going live Because I know you probably still have some stuff to do there

No, we're going live immediately after this call. Amazing. Okay, everybody listening Blake really wants to see the sunlight He wants to serve he wants to go hiking go download the app. I just changed my bio real quick to My my ex bio which used to be MJ of AI apps and then everything it's now I haven't left my apartment for 33 days please download so I can surf and hike. I love it. I'm putting it in the chat right now. You're the man Blake. Good luck today. We will we'll talk to you later and excited to see I see Sam Sheffer in the background

there he's collecting all this footage I can't wait to see the documentary on it It's gonna be amazing and Godspeed today. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Bye What a hilarious project so chaotic 33 days without going outside. I mean they do have the roof deck I know you haven't seen the Shawshank Redemption, but when he gets out of prison and he's just They do have a little sunlight. It's you haven't seen the Shawshank Redemption, but when he gets out of prison and he's just being like. They do have a little sunlight. It's beautiful.

Yeah, I guess he can go outside. There's somebody in the chat says, if he fails, he has to, this is rusty pitchfork. If he fails, he has to buy a Dodge Charger EV and use it as his daily driver. There you go. Oh, no. That's great.

Brutal. So much fun. Well, should we go to one more story? Because we have Sean Maguire joining in 15 minutes, but I think we got enough time to break down the billionaire who just bought the Celtics. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page. No one knows about this guy. Sean Puri said, the Celtics just sold for $6 billion to a guy with no Wikipedia page. Money talks, wealth whispers. Send tweet. I love Sean.

It does crazy numbers. It does crazy numbers. I love when you can drop something that's just very niche, like only for your fellow posters. It's also great because Sean's been on the show, obviously we're notorious yappers, and basically the opposite of whispering. But we love wealth, so we'll break it down. William Chisholm was a complete unknown to sports fans

and most private equity investors until earlier this week. He just bought the Boston Celtics for 6.1 billion. By the time they're ready to spend their billions, most sports owners are already celebrities in their own right. Wall Street Titans, CEOs of prominent companies, heirs of America's richest families. But when the most prestigious team in the NBA was sold for $6 billion, a record price for a pro sports franchise, the most shocking part of the deal wasn't how much the buyer paid, it was the

person who bought it. This is from the Wall Street Journal. William Chesolm, the little known managing partner of a little known private equity firm, will become the new owner of the Boston Celtics after agreeing to purchase the team from WIC Gruesbeck. The party's announced on Thursday. The deal stunned NBA insiders and private equity investors and even Chisholm himself. You think of me at eight years old, 10 years old, watching the Celtics and never dreaming

that this could possibly happen. It's just a pinch me moment. Amazing. Chisomb has a far different public profile than other NBA owners, especially those who have splurged on teams in recent years. He's nowhere to be found on Bloomberg or Forbes billionaires list.

Little L for Forbes there. They missed a big one. Before the sale was announced. He paid to stay off the list. Yeah. He's getting on there now. He didn't have a Wikipedia page. So this line from Bill Simmons.

We know so little about this guy. I don't even know how to pronounce his name. Yeah, it's Chisholm, apparently. Not Chisholm. Chisholm. Chisholm, whose firm, Symphony Technology Group, invests in technology companies that handle cloud security software or run job search platforms,

has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal exactly once, when STG bought the construction data unit of McGraw Hill. We look forward to helping the business achieve the next level of success he said. Amazing line. No private equity bro has ever said something like that before. Except every time if they don't actually want to make a comment. Yeah you could have just said no comment but he's on record with the Wall Street Journal just once. Now the man whose firm invested in companies called Onclusive, Reich, and Keltra has a slightly more recognizable brand to his name, the Celtics. Chisholm, who grew up in north of Boston in Georgetown, Massachusetts, spent his professional life far from the spotlight.

He attended Dartmouth as an undergrad, received his MBA from UPenn, Wharton. He worked at a private equity firm, Bain Capital. I wonder when he worked at Bain, probably in the 90s or something. And then set off to start his own private equity firm, STG. You were at Bain, very briefly. It was Bain, but in 2010, I think.

Do you have a Bain alumni chat that you're part of? Definitely not. I would not be in that. No way. But you could have made a generational run for the top spot. You've got the height for it. Yep.

They would have just said, hey, we're going to push this guy through. The height thing is real there. I was working out at the corporate gym at Bain Capital once when I I was interning there and one of the big shot MDs comes in is on the exercise bike. It's just like you like me race right now. And it was the most like mogging ever. And he's like, I could put up, it was like the fan bike. He's like, go as hard as you can. I can do 21 units of electricity or whatever. He had some weird metric that he was benchmarking against and he just wanted like

The young guys to see like all like push me harder Stg which Chisholm co-founded in 2002 invests in companies your average hoops fan I've never heard of but it positioned Chisholm to strike when the opportunity of a lifetime came calling The capital to put something like this together is frankly the easy part Chisholm said After striking the largest deal in pro sports history It's getting the right folks around the table the investors alongside Chisholm include current Celtics minority owner Rob Hale related companies present Bruce a Beale and investment firm sixth Street the Celtic shines a light on the changing financial landscape I bet this was sports

This was done over a group chatter around a golf probably Before the Celtics deal the last three NBA teams that changed hands were sold for between three and four billion So the price is soaring the league recently allowed is soaring. The league recently allowed private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds to buy team stakes. So they're allowing more capital in, the price goes up. It's just supply and demand. It's fascinating because the narrative around the NBA is that they've lost ground to the NFL. Then there's also this larger narrative that just professional sports are falling off and becoming less relevant,

and yet prices have never been higher. Yeah. Yeah, these are trophy assets. Yeah. They've, you know, over the last 20 years, they've been fantastic investments, but they don't need to make money to be valuable. Yep.

Based in Menlo Park, STG manages just under 12 billion in assets, according to Pitchbook. I wonder how much of that is his because he's putting a lot of money into this deal. Chisholm's backing from Sixth Street drew some shade throwing from current Celtics minority owner Steve Pegluca. I definitely mispronouncing that. And I bet all the sports fans know exactly how to pronounce his name who would also be leading a group bidding to buy the team from Gruesbeck. We had no debt or private equity money that would potentially hamstring our ability to compete in the future he said in a statement on Thursday. The former

co-chairman of Bain Capital is no stranger to private equity. Oh so both of the guys that were building on the deal were Bain alums. It probably was a Bain chat. You're right. He said he and his group would remain at the ready if the announced transaction does not end up being finalized. We'll see if this Chisholm guy actually has the money. He's throwing down the gauntlet. If you have one false step, I'm hopping in with my deal. Chisholm attended Celtics games as a kid sitting in obstructed view seats in the rickety old Boston garden. So when he learned that the team of his dreams was available,

he didn't take long to make up his mind about pursuing it. It was certainly a discussion with my wife and family for about a second. Hey honey, hey honey, I know you're working on dinner, but can I spend six billion on the Celtics? Oh, okay, cool, cool, got it. Yeah, okay, six billion on the Celtics? Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah.

Okay. At least we talked about it. Yeah. Great. Chisholm said that every husband has gone through that at some point. Yes. Yes. Similar.

The GT3RS or the Adam R. Pagel Royal Oak. Yeah. These are conversations that you have to have as a family. A little family meeting. Hey, I'm buying a $6 billion sports team. Let's go. He said, a central goal with the Celtics is to maintain its current success.

Under the previous leadership, the team won the 2008 championship and added another last summer. This season is well positioned to become the first repeat NBA champion since 2018. To that end, Chisholm agreed to an unconventional arrangement. Grusbeck is to remain the team's governor, leading its team operations through the 2027 to

2028 season, Chisholm referred to that decision as an intelligence test. Why would you want to mess with that, Chisholm said that is working at every level. When Chisholm does take the reins of every part of the Celtics organization, though he is confident that what put him in the position to buy the team will let him hold on to its winning ways in our little Way at STG we've done that too. They've done it in so many good lines in here They've done it in higher job platforms apparently and now he's doing it in sports very fun story

Anyway, one day you'll be able to trade shares in these in these teams Hopefully you'll be able to do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously in these teams. Hopefully you'll be able to do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. What's the? Go to public.com. But we gotta move on to, we talked a little bit about Wiz.

I don't know if you wanna do some timeline. We got seven minutes. But Sean McGuire's hopping on. We can talk to him about Wiz as well. I just was curious, what are the publicly traded sports teams? I don't know. There is the Atlanta Braves, MLB.

Really, you can just go by shares. That's Major League Baseball. Okay, yeah. Good clarifying. Just our audience follows business like sports, so you gotta clarify these things. Manchester United, it's got some shares on the New Yorks. I'm looking it up because I wonder how these things,

so Man U's trading at 2.3 billion on the NASDAQ, so you can go buy that on public. Madison Square Garden. Oh yeah, I guess the MSG group, but that's the garden, that's the actual holding company for all the different media assets. Founded by James Dolan, who also, or I guess his dad founded it, but then he runs it,

and James Dolan created the Sphere in Las Vegas. Oh, interesting. So the Green Bay Packers have done sort of these public offerings, but they're not doing it anymore. But I have a special announcement. It is Jeremy Gaffan's birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Jeremy.

And I figure we could sing him happy birthday. Ready? Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Jeremy. I hope you find a special situation today. We love you Jeremy. Fantastic.

You deserve all the success in the world. You're still a young whippersnapper. Yes. And you have such a bright future. Yes, may all your deals go through in 10x 10x. That's right. Like this whiz deal, which did more than 10x. It turned into a $4 billion windfall for index ventures. They're set to earn a 250 fold return on seed money in a

startup Google has agreed to buy. And the partner on the deal is Sader Shah. And sh. And Shal got the call he had been waiting for on his 37th birthday in January of 2020. A promising Israeli cybersecurity founder that he had been asking for years to launch a company was in need of funding. It's time, said the voice on the other end of the line. Shal kicked in 3.5 million on behalf of Index Ventures.

Flash forward five years and that original seed money earned a 250-fold return this week, turning into an $875 million stake when Alphabet agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion. And Index didn't stop at its first check, folks. It went turbo long. It put more money in Wiz during every subsequent funding

round. Let's hear it for the folks at Index. They built up a 13% stake. In total, Index has turned its $240 million investment into $4.3 billion. You'll love to see it, folks. So Bryce over at Indie, Bryce Roberts, friend of the show, taller than you, I believe.

I don't think so. Really? I don't think so. Sit up next to him. But nice try, nice try. And yeah, he broke down. The challenge here is how many they need. They just need so many.

This is the biggest software M&A transaction in history. That's crazy to think about. And we've been on a dry spell since the WhatsApp acquisition for a decade. That was like 25 billion or 30? I think it was like 16, but yeah. Oh wow, okay. Which is crazy, so Figma would have been the next,

I'm sure the next biggest. Yep, Figma would have been the next. And the crazy thing is, InSight needs like 10 of these to have a... A 5X fund. And the crazy thing is, is index or insight needs like 10 of these to have a. Five X fund. Yeah. Because it's a, it's an $8 billion fund

that they're investing out of. Although was that the case for this particular seed fund? Because their seed fund, it might be a different vehicle. Yeah. But either way, a huge win. They made a lot of money, but we talked about this with Harry. It's possible that like, they still got to do more work.

Can't retire to the slopes just yet, Index. Keep it grinding. Find five to six more whizzes. Come on, do your job. Yeah, and I'm excited to ask Sean about... Yeah, because Sequoia was also big in whizz. Yeah. Yep.

Success stories such as these were once dime a dozen during the go-go years of Silicon Valley when massive startup exits dominated the headlines and made being a venture capitalist one of the hottest jobs in finance. These days, the IPO market is dreary. Prized startups such as Stripe and SpaceX have chosen to stay private for over a decade, putting their investors in a perpetual holding pattern as they await a chance to cash out. It doesn't really matter from a fund performance perspective. For most LPs, they're happy to hold on to Stripe and SpaceX shares at a high, at a high

mark. They don't really mind that, but still it's an important factor in terms of getting cash out of these things. That's right. Regulators, meanwhile, have become more cautious about blessing acquisitions. Google's whiz deal still needs regulatory approval from the Trump administration. We talked to Joe Weisenthal about the new head of the FTC, the new Lena con, and it seems like they will probably be more friendly to this deal. It's blocked ventures.

Yeah, it's over. Very, very, it's all over. It's so over if that gets blocked, but, but this is a weird one because it's not, uh, it'd be very hard to make a, an argument about a monopoly in the cyber security cloud market. Obviously we've talked about how Google is third in cloud. They're not even first. When you look at Adobe and Figma, Adobe is the number one creative suite of apps. And so it's not like Wiz is going to be competing with Google's core business. Yeah, exactly. It's not really

consolidating the search market. I'm sure Amazon and Azure both have cybersecurity products that compete directly with Wiz and so it would be harder to make the argument at least I think it would be we'll see what happens. The review process itself could take years to conclude so don't buy those vacation homes just yet. If the Wiz deal proceeds investors hope it will pave the way for similar startup exits in the future. Getting the call when Shah received Asaf Rapoport's call, the entrepreneur and his three co-founders hadn't yet settled on a name or a specific plan for the startup beyond wanting to go big in the fast-growing world of cybersecurity.

The how and what, Shah said, was still waiting to be discovered. In his head, Shah called the startup Asafco, a testament to his conviction in Rapoport, the founder. It was completely unexpected. It was it was completely expected and unexpected at the same time because I had been waiting, Shaw said of the 2020 call. Shaw's hunch about Rappaport, a dog lover and veteran, which we talked about they have dogs at the office and I believe their dog is the chief dog officer or something like that, and a veteran of the Israeli army's elite cybersecurity unit dated back to 2014 when Shah backed Rappaport's first startup

called Adalom. It was later sold to Microsoft for a disappointing $320 million. But I love the Wall Street Journal. But Shah felt he had spotted an entrepreneur of rare talent after the call. Yeah, I mean, when someone's sold $3 sold 320, they're in the position where they've gotten tons of experience. They've known how to run the full playbook, probably hired a great team, can build a team very quickly, and they probably want to go bigger.

Maybe two orders of magnitude bigger, which is exactly what they did. And they exited for 320 million, the first one, 32 billion, the next one, it's exactly 100 times as big. Awesome, you love to see ambition like that. We love to see it. Should we talk briefly about the One X and Nvidia? Sure, yeah. They're doing a research collaboration. Did you see the, you pulled a picture.

All I saw was the picture of the robot holding a jacket, but I thought it was cool. I mean, insane aesthetics. Insane aesthetics. Like very cool. It almost feels like out of sort of Yeezy, Yeezy inspired to some degree. Yeah, we're getting somewhere with this

where it doesn't look uncanny valley creepily human. It looks more friendly. It doesn't look terrifying. It's not as scary as some of the purely Terminator ones. It would still be weird to have this thing walking around your house at night while you're sleeping. But I could get used to it. This is the friendliest looking humanoid

I've seen so far, I think. Yep. But I like it. So anyways, so developing AI for humanoid robots involves tackling many open research challenges in safety, dexterity, visual understanding, and much more. It helps to compare notes with other labs tackling similar challenges in order to accelerate progress

towards a future of NEOs Doing all the tasks needed to keep your home in order autonomously to that end. I like 1x is focus on the home Yeah, it's obviously gonna matter a lot to just like pick it focusing on the home is just critical I like 1x is focus on the home. I like wanders focus on the home I could imagine having a wanderander with a one accident. We got Sean McGuire himself. Welcome to the show. What's up team?

I didn't wear a Counter-Strike t-shirt this day. I let you down, sorry. Yeah, you're still looking good. It's great. I'm as good as you guys. And not a, whoever that lady that, had anyone that comments on your hair is just jealous. Yeah.

You guys are very good looking men. Everyone on the call has good hair. But I mean, it's been a rough week. Sequoia is only making like a few billion dollars these days off of these acquisitions. What are you going to do to turn it around after the Wiz acquisition kind of fell so short of expectations? Yeah, it's been a tough one, you know, five years after investment,

to pretty mega outcome. What are you gonna do? Congratulations. Breakdown, I'd love to hear the quick highlights of meeting the team and how that investment came together. And then what you think from your view, how they were able, because we talked about this yesterday,

the Wiz team, the reason they were able to get such a tremendous price or one of them, I'm sure multiple, is because they just were growing so quickly and getting so much traction that they didn't need to sell. So they had infinite optionality, but how do you think they pulled this off? but how do you think they pulled this off? So on the team, I mean, Gilly Renan and my partner, Doug Leoni, get all the credit. They are both absolute legends.

So the backstory there is just quite used to have square Israel. Gilly was one of the three partners there. Gilly is an insanely talented guy and he started his own fund called Cyberstarts, which we seeded and early on, meaning like Sequoia invested in his fund, which we don't do very often. And Gilly called up Doug, said, I have the next one.

And it was a soft and the team Doug holds like four of us into a rapid fire meeting. I was in that first meeting and I mean, to be very honest, the learning I personally got from watching Doug operate here and like getting to see like a phone call from Gilead of I've got the next one with these crack, like crack team to multi-billion dollar gain five years later. Like it's really hard to explain how much learning goes into that. But I think there is a lot of really interesting stuff from the beginning here. And so this is my recollection. Different people have different recollections, but basically dug out the call, set up the meeting, four of us joined from Sequoia. The team had, it was obvious how insanely good the team was. They had sold their last company

to Microsoft and they're basically running cloud security there. And they had a very strong point of view on what the problem was. The problem was cloud security, no one had solved cloud security. They had like an extreme articulation around the problem, but they didn't really know how they were gonna solve that problem at the time. And so they had a really clear insight into the wedge into the market, which was mapping that basically people don't even know what assets they have in their cloud environments.

And so the first thing they're going to do is they'd figured out how to map people's assets kind of outside in so you can tell a customer in a first meeting, this is everything you own, and therefore, these are vulnerabilities. But the original idea of how to solve the problem after that wedge in was basically a networking solution, like a zero trust networking solution.

And so it's, I wouldn't say it was a pivot because they had identified the problem they wanted to solve, but the actual solution changed dramatically in the first few months. And so, you know, people talk about like market versus team. This was a market and team, but I think it's interesting how like the idea changed so much in the first few months. And I think it-

But taking in a little bit more, you guys made the first investment, was it 2020? Yeah, it was called January, February, 2020. Okay, in 2020 was the average venture capitalist believing that no one had solved cloud security or is that something that you had to really be in it, running it at Microsoft to realize that it wasn't a solved problem because you know I think the market was reacting to the news saying wait is Google not did they not

have a coherent like security at Google like this that's why they did this deal what was going on before but yeah was it was it yes it's a really good question and it's yeah funny I, I personally have like an extreme background in this space. I had started a company called Expans originally KDM a long time ago, started in 2012. And to be very kind of like we were a precursor company to Wiz, like basically directly. And we started off in an on prem era. and so doing the mapping of on-prem networks from the outside in and our primary value proper, our sales wedges, we would show up and we already knew people's networks and their vulnerabilities when we would show up. And so I personally had a

prepared mind, but I think there was this extreme skepticism of the cloud has been around for 15 years. Why? Why is cloud, why now? Why is cloud security not solved? But I think to anyone that was a practitioner, it was clear it was not solved at all. And I think the lesson is that, the way I think about it, the cloud penetration was still very low in call it 2015. If you look at total percent of compute in Fortune 500 companies, I don't know what it was in 2015, but it was probably like 5% or 7% or something.

That'd be my guess. By the time you got to 2020, it was a much bigger fraction. And so it's like, I think we had just flipped where customers and buyers in their heads, if only like 5% of your network is cloud, you care more about securing the on prem than the cloud. And if you're a second class citizen, like you just doesn't really get done. By 2020. Cloud was like the first class citizen. It was by far the most important thing to secure. And no one had, everyone before had had us,

including my own company, like we started with an on-prem solution and we started to bolt on a cloud solution. And our cloud solution wasn't very good because that's not what we started. And so to come in and only do cloud, that lets you have a way better product experience for the cloud.

And they just entered the market when it was, you know, call it maybe not in terms of total compute, but 40, 50% of the mind share in an org had become cloud. And then they were able to grow with that as it went from there. And so it's just that something can happen like the cloud can get created, but it may not be the right time for to build like the cloud security business for another 15 years. You have to wait for maturity of the market and all that. And I think they just time the maturity perfectly. And then the last thing is you, you need to solve this from the outside in, like you can't, Microsoft can't solve this themselves. You have to have a solution that is kind of looking at all clouds and looking at the entire industry because people are multi-cloud,

they work with multiple vendors. I think that this has to be, you have to have, Wizz very much came with the right approach for that time. That makes sense. Can you talk about Kela? Got announced a few days ago, I think five days ago, very high profile round. I heard about it, I think last year at this point. So it's probably, they're probably already getting, you know, preempted on the next one. But talk about the team there.

How quickly did you know that you wanted to back them? I mean, basically we're killing it in Israel, or made us the wrong language. We're investing very well in Israel. Anyways, so, Kele, my partner, David Kahn, led the investment, and I'm his wingman there. Kele's another amazing team. We have known one of the two primary co-founders, Alon Jor, for quite a long time. He was an absolute legend. One of the things we've been doing in Israel is,

and actually, let me make a bigger point about Israel. One of the things that I think is point about Israel. One of the things that I think is very unique about Israel right now compared to most other places, it's much easier to concentrate talent in Israel than it is as like a Stanford spin out. Let me unpack that. Like if you go back in time, basically every every great company I can think of in the past has done a phenomenal job concentrating talent. If you think about Palantir, they got all the best people out of Stanford in a few year range. If you think about Google, they got all the best people 10 years prior and after the dot

com crash, they went and acquired a bunch of the best teams. They brought in Jeff Dean and they scooped up a bunch of the best talent after the dot com crash, they went and aqua hired a bunch of the best teams, they brought in Jeff Dean and like, they scooped up a bunch of the best talent after the dot com crash. If you think about, you know, PayPal, obviously the PayPal mafia, like they had concentrated insane amounts of talent, SpaceX in the early days, like anyone in the world that wanted to work on rockets, like there was only one place to go and they went to, you know, SpaceX and the best companies concentrate insane amounts of talent early on. For a bunch of reasons, I think it's become much harder to concentrate talent spinning out of like Stanford or Harvard or wherever than it used to be. I mean, one, like to be very blunt. One is these universities have become like, they basically lost meritocracy and they lost, you know, like there's great inflation. You don't even know where you stand relative to other kids.

Harvard last year implemented their first ever remedial math because there are people coming in that don't know algebra because they dropped the admission standards. It's the truth. It's crazy. Like they dropped the admission standards so much. And so like the people coming in are no longer as good. And then there's great inflation. So you don't even know who the absolute most crack people are. If you go back to like, call it the 80s and onwards for a while. Harvard had this insane math class called Math 55. Math 55 was legendary in the math community. It's like, you know, probably 50% of the people that even finished the class went on to be math professors.

It was something that you would basically learn like a whole undergraduate math curriculum in one year. So you could just do graduate classes and research after. Is that class like YC where if you enter into it, you're kind of doing it for 12 hours a day type of thing? Is it that intense or is it? It's the only thing you do when you're at Harvard, like if you're in that year. So Bill Gates actually did Math 55.

And so did a bunch of the other kind of Microsoft founders. The, like the fact that they did Math 55 and survived as say, computer oriented people rather than pure math people, and that they went and started a business that, that calling card let them recruit anyone from Harvard, like anyone they wanted would go work for them just because like people knew how smart they were because of math 55. It's like these things are actually very important as like signals to other smart people that this person is on a level above me.

And so therefore, like I should lower my ego, like I was not able to finish math 55, you know, some hypothetical person like tries math 55 gets absolutely smoked weeded out Therefore, I should lower my ego. I was not able to finish Math 55. Some hypothetical person tries Math 55, gets absolutely smoked, weeded out in the first week, and then Bill Gates crushes it, and so they want to go work for him. We don't have that as much anymore at Stanford and Harvard, etc. There also just weren't as many companies getting formed back then. And so, the ones that actually did get formed, I graduated college in 2007, Facebook was the hottest company in the world kind of when I was an undergrad.

And at the time, I think Zuck is probably two years older than me, there were basically no startups coming out of Harvard at the time. And so everyone that was good that would consider a startup or was technically brilliant, like they would just go recruit them. Now there's like 50. And so the talent gets spread across all of them. In Israel, there is still this insane concentration of talent.

And it comes from, this is my weave, this is my Trump weave coming on. There's this insane concentration of talent that comes from the fact that because everyone goes into the army, there's extremely rigorous selection of people for the army and call it from an intellectual standpoint, there's like 60 slots for the most prestigious best things. And there's like extremely rigorous vetting to get those slots. And so the people that go do that are already kind of selected on a totally different level

than those other people. And then out of those 60 people, one or two will emerge as like the apex, you know, alpha men or women that just do insane work and are geniuses and everyone else wants to follow. And so when they come out of the army, they are really able to concentrate talent in a way that is basically impossible. If all you've done is gone to a school that has like, if you've gone to school, it has pass fail grades and your admissions process is basically non meritocratic and like an essay. And so anyways, like with Kela, I mean, if you go back to Wiz, like the Wiz founding team were absolute legends, like psycho level legends in Israel,

and therefore able to concentrate insane talent. In the first couple of months of the company, basically day one, they hired 20 people that were ultra elite. It's just like when you're that good and everyone knows it, you can bring in these incredible people from day one. Kela is of this mold as well. You know, like a lot of people know what, VCs are now learning what Talpiot is. Talpiot is kind of

one of the most elite courses in Israel. It's people, people that have extreme aptitude in mathematics, physics, and leadership ability. And so three of the four Wiz co-founders were Talpiot, Alon Dior, one of the Cala founders, was also Talpiot. And so like there's the Talpiot mafia and he's especially highly regarded there. And so anyways, they've done an incredible job concentrating talent and, you know, Alon teamed up with this woman, Hamu Tal Meridour, who complimented him perfectly. She'd been at Palantir for a long

time. And she's like really under obviously, when you're working, when you a defense that company, you need two things, you need to build great technology, but you also need to be able to sell it. And you need to understand that government sales government procurement, and alone is a genius at building great technology. And Homitall is a genius at, you know, selling it and navigating government relationships and for this reason,

I think both Palantir and Anderol did this unbelievably well. They kind of established this playbook. Well, uh, related to that, what does it, what is your take on the latest continuing resolution? It seems like there's not this massive increase to the defense budget that some, you know, defense tech startups were hoping for. Maybe there's money that's going to shift around. But what is your advice to maybe young defense tech founders that are hunting

for that first program of record, looking for some some government money in the new era? It's so crazy that we're having this conversation. Like, you would have told me 10 years ago that someone's gonna say in like a live podcast, what do you say the young founder is hunting for a program of record? Like, that language, you know, this was like, you are an alien 10 years ago.

Yeah. Look, I would say to the young founder You know, this was like you are an alien 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I would say to the young founder that's hunting for program of record, only one or two of you a year are going to do that. And it's going to be like of new companies and it's really hard. And it takes both having great tech and great, you know, government BD. And so don't under invest it in either of those. Yeah, it's interesting. It used to be extremely difficult to raise venture capital. Now it's

seemingly very easy to raise venture capital. The hard part is in this category. And I want to hear your take on dual use. There's a theory that we were kicking around yesterday talking about, well, maybe you're better off if you're a dual use company. We talked to a satellite company, Albedo. Obviously, they do imaging of the Earth at 10 centimeter scale. That has military applications, but that also

has commercial applications. So if the DOD money doesn't come quickly enough, maybe they go sell it to hedge funds and oil and gas companies. Do you think there'll be a shift in VC or defense tech VC towards I want a little bit more of a dual use story earlier just to hedge against defense budgets? So it's kind of crazy that you're asking me these things because the company I started

was a cybersecurity company that was basically a worst precursor to Wiz. Sure. Where it was dual use and about two thirds of our revenue was from the US government and one third was enterprise. It's like these maximum two sets of overlap of the threads you're asking. I think, I mean, like with our company, everyone told us you cannot be Gov only, it has to be dual use. That's what every investor told us, every expert. And so therefore we did it because we wouldn't have been able to raise money otherwise. But I think dual use is kind of a mirage.

It can be great, but I think you have to, I think we're entering an era where investors are okay with just government sale companies, single use. And I think you just have to do what's best for your company and what's best in any given moment. If it's natural for your company to be dual use because the product is basically the same in both, you know, enterprise and gov, then do that. But if it's going to, like, really cost you on one side to do the other,

then I would just not do it early on. And, like, with Palantir, I don't know, I was never in the building at Palantir. I don't know the story that well. But my kind of my understanding was that early on they had way more pull with the government than with Enterprise. But like they tried to do both. I think with Palantir there were different points in time where they had way more pull with the government than with enterprise and times where they had more pull with enterprise

than with government. But I think there was pressure on them to always be doing both. And I would just say, lean into wherever you're getting a lot of pull right now, but don't close the door on the other. Yeah, it depends on the product. I mean, obviously, Microsoft Teams is ITAR compliant, right? Like, is it a dual use technology? Yes, I guess, but then if you have C4 on it.

Windows 95 is whichever ones are still certified to run. You know, at least when I was in the DOD, like the most current operating system was from the 90s. Yeah. Crazy. There was allegations in a lawsuit of corporate espionage earlier this week I don't need you to or want you to comment on that incident but do you think that corporate espionage is is it sort of potentially a broader issue in Silicon Valley something that needs to be taken more seriously, or is this just sort of like a

You know one-off sort of crisis well, man. Well, I think that Elon was right when he said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. That's just been true on every level. It's like second law of thermodynamics. Look, I don't have a super strong point of view on this, but I'll just say I think that

nation-state espionage in Silicon Valley has been much, much bigger scale than people have understood for at least the last decade and probably beyond that. And you know, Deleon, yesterday, whenever, I think he's right, like if you're, like if you're a hardware company, just go try to compete on the merits of the hardware and obviously do what you can to protect your IP, IP and data assets and everything. But like at the end of the day, and hardware, you're going to win on the merits of the product. On the software side, I think you have to be a little

bit more concerned. but it's just in hacking, there's this expression, you want to be a target of opportunity. Sorry, you want to be a target of choice, not a target of opportunity. Meaning like, if some nation state says we are going to hack this company, like they can hack anyone, but you don't want to be like the slow pack animal that's just like the target of opportunity. You're the slowest gazelle. It's just taken down by the North Koreans

that are just stealing your crypto or something like that. Exactly. You want X, the everything app? Well, yeah, I'd love to give you another victory lap on X because I think last time we came on, it was rumored that there was this new announcement. But before that, could you talk about what's your sort of takeaway from the incident with the NASA astronauts? We're very happy to have them

back here on Earth with the Dolphins. But is there any learnings that you think that the space industry should be taking away from that broadly and NASA in general. So I might've mentioned this guy before, but one of my closest friends from Caltech, his name is Casey Hanmer. He's a brilliant guy. He's a prolific blogger. Love him. I mean, very smart guy.

He has been saying for, so he worked at JPL and he's been saying for many years that this is not what he's been saying. So I'm sorry, Casey, I'm making this more provocative than what you actually said, but he's basically said that NASA has been underestimating SpaceX and that it's in NASA's interest to kind of understand and anticipate like just how fast the progress of space sixes. And what he actually said is that they're underestimating Starship and that Starship is going to really change what's possible in the future. And that NASA has been still designing missions with the constraints of 10, 20 years ago, which is when launch costs are in the limit infinity, and there's very few

slots per year, then the economic rational thing is to spend close to infinite money making sure that your satellite works the first time, because the launch costs dominates in the return math. Infinity divided by infinity or whatever. But you know, if you have any large constant number divided by infinity is zero. So anyways, like they've had this state of mind that launch is precious. It's infinitely expensive. There's very little of it. I think NASA needs to get in the state of mind that launch is becoming abundant.

In the future, it's going to be in the limit going to zero. Like, literally, if you go 20 years from now, I think that, I mean, Elon has said that the forecast for Starship or something like $20 a kilogram or something like that. And you used to be a hundred thousand. Yeah. Used to be a hundred thousand dollars a kilogram. And so I just, we have to get in this mentality that like SpaceX is not, SpaceX is not just Elon. SpaceX is an incredibly well-run company that has like a very diverse set of leadership and you know, very robust team and that they are bringing insane capabilities

to bear that will deeply, deeply benefit NASA. And we need to intersect the future, not the present or the past. I love it. Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, we talked about the X funding last time, but I want to know about X is clearly on the war path to becoming an everything app. We're basically running the entire show on X. Now we have group DMS for how we organize the show and stuff. It's been a really robust platform for us. But I see that they're rolling out payments and all sorts of different features. There's always been this narrative that an everything app

can only happen in the East. It's America's most important. Happened in China 10 years ago. Exactly. So can you lay us out, like what are the hurdles? What are the milestones? What are the opportunities for X to become a really, like really fully realize the vision?

It's not my place to fully lay this out. realize the vision. It's not my place to fully lay this out. I'll let, you know, I'll let Elon do that. He's pretty good at setting vision on things, but I think people are going to be like X has been underestimated the last few years and not by you guys. Like you guys are part of the small cohort of people that realize the eighties was a great decade and, you know, and that America is the greatest country in the world and that X was the place to be the last few years. But by a lot of the world has been underestimated. And I'm, I'm very optimistic about where it's going the next few years. And I'll, and I'll just say like, instead of saying the roadmap, I'll say the company has had to since to take private, there's been like a few years of like fixing the foundation of the company.

And we're starting to enter the era where like the foundation is strong, and they get to now like actually build on top of this new strong foundation. And so I think we're going to see the era where the foundation is strong and they get to now actually build on top of this new strong foundation. And so I think we're gonna see, it's like the progress has been below the ground the last two and a half years. It's about to go above the ground where we all see it. Yeah, a lot of the products that got built or rolled out

were just things that had kind of been on the shelf and maybe were not really launched for whatever internal political reason. Elon kind of got all those out the door and I feel like the app's been working really well. The algorithm has been more satisfying than ever. I feel like I'm seeing really interesting content. So I've been satisfied. One more question.

Do you think M&A is really, you know, is the whiz acquisition, it still has to be approved from what I know, but is M&A really back on the menu? Do you feel like when you're talking to some of these later stage founders that are exploring, thinking about the future and saying, does an IPO make sense? Does some type of strategic acquisition make sense? How are you thinking about this personally? I'm sure your general advice is just be a great company and grow really fast and you'll have a lot of optionality, but do you have a sort of feeling about where things are going?

Not about WIZ at all. My general kind of M&A view is I think there's two things that people are looking for. They're looking for guidance that things will actually be approved. And it's not just in America. There's also, for most companies, European regulatory approvals. And that has been the bottleneck for quite a few M&A deals in the last few years. So I think it's like greater clarity on the global US and Europe, but everywhere kind of regulatory approvals. And the second, I think there's still like when I talked to bankers or anyone the last six weeks, there's a lot of macro uncertainty. People are very nervous about tariffs and very nervous about doge. People don't want to go do a big M&A transaction when the markets can change 20, 30 percent

either way quickly because because it just, you don't know exactly what you're underwriting. This happened with Square and Afterpay or whatever. They bought Afterpay for like 20, $30 billion, some crazy number, and then Square was worth something like that, like a year later, you know, it's just like. Yeah, I said, look, those are the two things.

I think if we get clarity, like favorable clarity on those two things, then I think M&A will rip, but it requires both. Well, the new head of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson is out doing podcasts. We'll have to have him on the show. Maybe he can join,

and we can put the screws to him and say, let's do some deals Andrew Not coming on after that Anyways, thanks for having me boys. Yeah, thanks for stop I say you guys are crushing it keep going absolutely crushing it. Thank you for being a part of it good man. Bye Very cool, it's great. It's always difficult to get him in trouble with a sickoia regulatory. Yeah, that's the challenge of being an RA. Yeah, yeah.

We're getting better at it. I think we should have a button. The cone of silence. We should have a button that we hit before. This is not financial advice. This is not financial advice. And then we have to beep each other because I lean into it so often because I think I'm just asking, like, hey, do you think the Tesla is a cool car?

And he's like, that's a public company. I can't talk about it, but still lots of great insights and always a fun conversation with Sean. And speaking of Sean's, we're having another Sean on the show, Sean from Ridge. Is he in the temple? Oh no, we got Connor. Connor's first.

Surprise, surprise, we got Connor. So for those that Hey, we got another rich guy. Surprise, we got Connor. So for those that don't know, I'm sure everybody already knows. So Connor and Sean are business partners and leaders over at the Ridge. Dear friends of mine, Connor, I wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. One, because I knew you were going to dress for the occasion.

Thank you for dressing up. Dude, of course. Looking sharp. Showing some respect to TVPN. Yeah, yeah, respect. And a little fun fact piece of lore for the fans, in our first launch video, when you see us having dinner and drinking wine,

Connor was at that dinner with us. And he is pictured. He's the shoulder that you see us over. Fantastic cameo. Little cameo. Early, early Technology Brothers supporter for sure. Thank you. We appreciate it.

And now you're on the show. Welcome. It's great to have you on. I wanted to get a kind of a market update on how performance marketers are thinking about the various platforms and planning for the rest of the year. We've lived in a world, you're also a young adult, but our entire lives have just been every single year, ads get more expensive, so you kind of need to plan

around that to some degree, but you're very plugged into the sort of e-commerce space broadly, there's challenges in e-com on the sort of tariffs side, but there's sort of this dual pressure. It's hard to get products. It's expensive to get products. It's expensive to sell them. Maybe I'd love just sort of a high level market update

around how you're thinking about the different ad platforms, and maybe we can get into where you're finding an edge. Obviously, don't give away the stuff you were doing nine months ago. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. No, don't give away the stuff you were doing like nine months ago. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. No, perfect, so to take a quick step back, yeah, Ridge is a direct to consumer brand.

As Jordy mentioned, the last 10 years, it's gotten harder and harder every year. I think DTC acquisition has been like a war of attrition. Things get more expensive, you're reaching that new marginal buyer who's harder to acquire, more expensive. It's been a difficult environment to scale in You're reaching that new marginal buyer who's harder to acquire, more expensive. It's been a difficult environment to scale in as a DTC brand, regardless of consumer

sentiment. I think what we're facing right now, clearly what all the data is telling us is that not only are things getting more expensive, ad platforms are performing worse, there's restrictions on privacy, but I think people are spending less money. When it comes to the business of selling minimal as well, it's like I do, that's become increasingly difficult. So I've got two quick data points, one anecdotal, but there's a great service called DTCindex.com, and they have something called the Direct Consumer

Confidence Index. So it's like a stand-in for CPI, which has like, you know, they only take that snapshots of data sparingly throughout time. DTCCI is measuring the sentiment of consumers every single day. And on the 18th or just a couple of days ago, consumer sentiment about the economy dropped to the lowest level since October 14th of last year to paint the picture of how are people feeling about spending dollars today?

The second point that I have is from our contact at Metta who described the current climate for DTC brands, at least the growth oriented ones as a quote unquote bloodbath. So that's my quick performance update is that that is what we're working with. So I can talk maybe what we're doing to work through that a little bit if that was here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What's amazing. What is working right now? Um, so actually, with a little more Dumer news, and then I'll get into what's working. Um, consumers tougher. That makes everybody's lives harder. On top of that, I think there's been changes within meta that makes everybody's lives more difficult. Um, and people like to

put the importance of meta, but it's like, you know, there's that stat. It was like 40% of every VC dollar went into meta advertising. it's like, you know, there's that stat, it was like 40% of every VC dollar went into meta advertising. It's like 30% of all digital dollars spent, something like that. So when meta is worse, it's harder for everyone. And right now we're at this point in time where it feels as if the meta platform in and of itself

is not doing what it used to do. They began kind of waiting outcomes differently. It's become more middle and bottom of funnel to say, you know, it's serving to warmer and warmer audiences and us as marketers or, you know, growth people, like we want to be driving incremental results. Meta is harder to get that done with, at least in the way that it has always been.

So that gets to what has been working. We've basically had to completely change our strategy. Real quick, Connor. Why is Meta worse? Is it stuff that they sort of need to do or is it stuff that they did and it was sort of the unintentional effect is that the ad product gets worse for advertisers?

Like why is it happening? And are your contacts at Meta saying, hey, we know this is not great and we're actively trying to get back to where we were? Or is it just get used to it, this is the new normal? Totally. Yeah. No, some of the things are out of Meta's control. Meta's obviously gotten less efficient post iOS 14, which was when Tim Cook and Apple really put a lot of restrictions around what data did Meta have access to. At that point, you went from, as an example, being able to optimize for a 28-day outcome. So if you're optimizing for a purchase that could happen over

28 days and Meta could attribute that purchase to itself. Now that's just a seven-day period, right? So now it's like a much smaller period. You have fewer or less ability to exclude the customers that you want. And Meta's began waiting these click-based outcomes. So all of those things together means Meta's only able to attribute orders to the platform on a shorter timeframe. There's less exclusions.

And it's serving to people who have already seen your ads. If you're trying to introduce new people to your brand and actually generate awareness, generate intent and drive incremental orders, that's just a harder environment to do it within. And those are like, that's half things that are out of their control. And then part of the things that I mentioned

are within Metis control and I think they are trying to address. So the answer to your question, Jordy, would be a combination of the two. Yep, that makes sense. Anyways. I have a question on Jordy, would be a combination of the two. Yeah, that makes sense. Anyways, I have a question on AI ads, not AI generated ads, but actual ads in LLM responses. Perplexity is starting to monetize by allowing advertisers to inject advertisements into you ask perplexity, what wallet should I buy?

Boom, Ridge Wallet ad. People are proposing that OpenAI will do this as well in the ChatGPT app. Are you thinking about that? Will that be something that you're testing this year, if you're not already? Well, I will say I just got off a phone call with the VP of Growth at Ramp, George Bonacci. He wanted me to remind everyone

that if you're looking to save time and money, go to ramp.com. Save both. There we go. Save both, thank you. George Bonacci, he wanted me to remind everyone that if you're looking to save time and money, go to ramp.com slash TPN. There we go. Say both, thank you. Yeah, but no, we were talking about, we weren't actually talking about paid ads in perplexity. What we were talking about was SEO optimization

within chat responses, which is not something we've done a lot of so far. It's one of the things as a more established brand I think we immediately benefit from. Of course. There's. We are we are you right. And so Reddit gets baked into all the LLMs and you already pop up. Yeah, totally. So we I don't think we have to focus on whatever you want to call that like LLM SEO optimization versus someone else is less established. But I think over time as people hatch on to that as a opportunity, then we'll have to pay more attention there.

But I'd be more interested in it from a quote unquote organic perspective versus the paid ads on perplexity. Okay, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, do you feel like the sort of e-commerce industrial complex needs another great ad channel right now? Like, it seems like throughout the history of selling products online, like things have gotten a bit rough

and then we got Instagram or then we got Reels or then we got TikTok or whatever. And it just seems like in order to like keep the, keep growing, there always needs to be that sort of next platform. And could that be LLMs? Right now I don't see a lot of, from my lens it's not commercially oriented searches

happening on ChatGPT. People still discover products on places like Instagram, and then they ask ChatGPT, how do I make a good quesadilla maybe, but it's not like, there's not a lot of commercial intent there. But do you think, do you see a world in which LLMs can be that next, like, you know, 10x ad platform, or do you just think it's a different? Probably, I wouldn't say a 10x ad platform. I

think the important distinction is like, there are certain brands and industries that benefit from like these high intent channels, right? You are looking for a mattress or you are looking for insurance. They're the ones where as people discover those products through LLMs, like that's probably a massive opportunity for them. How many people on a daily basis are going to be searching for men's wallet in Chat. I don't think is going to move the needle on our business. What has moved the needle are these like Discovery channels, which was like when Snapchat was introduced or a TikTok or whatever else is how can we get out in front of millions of people and say, Hey, we've got a better wallet than you currently own.

You know, they're supposed to launch ads in Meta's threads. So we'll hold out hope. Maybe that's the 10x ad platform. There we go. You never know. There's always a bull market somewhere. I love it. We had Kenan Davison on from Icon.

His company helps DTC companies like yourself build and scale out AI ads. Not fully ad generated, a lot of repurposing content. Can you tell us a little bit about how AI is incorporated into the creative workflow? Who's actually doing this work on your team? It seems like it's probably still like a Centaur model where there's a human working with an AI editor

of some sort, but can you break down the creative workflow and how AI is impacting that right now? Yeah, awesome. And I'll start with, from a performance perspective, I think one of the most important things we've been able to do is scale up our content creation. So these are like one and the same. We have two performance creative strategists

on our team who went from manually concepting to writing briefs to sending out to creators to receiving that content, to editing it, to creating ads. We're trying to truncate that all down via AI. So you can imagine the further upstream parts of the creative process, the concepting, the briefing, is we're probably doing five, 10 times faster and probably with more novelty than we were otherwise,

just because it's easier to ideate with something like, we use Claude mostly, we found it to be very helpful in that sense. So that's really benefited the ideating process and has sped up that workflow quite a bit. I'm a big fan of Icon and Canon. And they're a really cool example of, once we've generated all of this content,

how do you go zero to one on some new concept? We have thousands of hours of content just laying around in Google Drive. So how do we repurpose that and elong of like elongate the value of that? And iCon's been cool in that because it is basically an AI video editor. We can say, hey, we want a concept to appeal to 40-year-old men in flyover states, and it will put together a concept and kind of piece together and stitch together the content to do that.

Got it. Do you have another one? No. and stitch together the content to do that. Got it. Do you have another one? No, I was gonna make a joke about asking Siri to buy me a wallet with high grade materials, lifetime warranty and a 99 day risk free trial. But I don't think Apple Intelligence can do it yet. But maybe Apple can, I don't know. I had one more.

How are you thinking about sort of activations and stunts and things like that? Ridge is at a scale. Once you're doing hundreds of millions of revenue, you can start to think about, oh, should we sponsor a NASCAR team? Should we do this? You have a big partnership with them.

A race horse. Yeah, race horse. Jordan's thinking about getting a Bentley Continental GT Speed and I thought you could wrap it with a Ridge Wallet logo and maybe help him with the the payment on that Yeah, that'd be great you can you can have you know just be $3,000 a month No, but how about these sort of bigger stunt marketing and is it just brand marketing or do you historically just see? Like how do you think about attribution?

Well, we're kind of gearing up for right now from a stunt marketing perspective. Each year we do a sweepstakes. So last year we did a 24 karat gold plated cyber truck that we gave away or That's right. Tennessee Velociraptor. Yeah. So that's what we did last year.

And I think each year we're just gonna try to raise the stakes. That's kind of the name of the game. So what we're doing now is we're gearing up for that. Can't share too many details, but we'll have more cars, bigger activations. That'll be live in August, so everybody can look forward to it. I feel like the last one it went really far because I think I

saw MKBHD do something with it. But then later, like Doug DeMiro was auctioning it off. And I saw like, I was like, we're now like four steps away from the ridge guys, but I'm still seeing ridge on all of this stuff. Like, how did this happen? Was that kind of intentional that you talked to multiple influencers and you say, okay, you're gonna have it for a day You're gonna have it for a week. You're gonna Is that was that the plan? Yeah, no, totally. So it was it was that was a part of the plan Some of it was serendipitous. So we realized the year before hey if we can get the car in a YouTube creators video things

Just perform like three times as well, which is like no real surprise. So the game last year was just like, yeah, how do we coordinate getting one or both of these trucks in as many videos as possible? The serendipitous part was I had this the Cybertruck here in Salt Lake and JerryRigEverything who has a very big tech channel, tweeted he said, Hey, does anybody in Salt Lake have a Cybertruck that I can use for a project? And we were like, Hey, we do. And that's how we got into his 24 karat gold plating video. So that kind of started it. And then we got it in a Marquez video, we had it all over the place. And we made in

2024 videos, Colin and Samir did a did an ad read in the truck, which was really cool. And then to top off the campaign, the winner selected the cash actually, so they didn't take either car. But we were able to auction off the 24 karat gold plated cyber truck on Doug DeMiro's cars and bids. So it was a very YouTube heavy campaign, which was very fun. Is it tricky running these sweepstakes? Because I think legally you have to be you have to say no entry required,

anyone can just write in and then people can kind of like batch mail in a thousand entries. I remember hearing stories about someone at Caltech in the very early days of the original photocopier figured out that McDonald's monopoly didn't require any purchase, no purchase necessary. So they dropped off like thousands and thousands of pages of like I would like to enter the contest and they got like every single code back and then they change their rules or something like that. But what do you think about in terms of like manipulation of these sweepstakes? Is that a risk at all? Or is it pretty standard these days? We use it. We use a third party legal team who like

runs sweepstakes professionally. So I think we're relatively buttoned up. You have the, you have to be able to mail in. You've got some free entries on the site We we we are able to see some people trying to game it. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah So we were able to take care of that. Um, but otherwise it's very above board. We're not doing any like sort of McDonald's monopoly sort of schemes over here. Yeah. Yeah, you can get in trouble if you're if you're running an unregistered lottery You want to stay away from that? Yeah game last question I have because you're talking about a bunch of these different creators you're working an unregistered lottery, you wanna stay away from that. Run a clean game. Last question I have, because you're talking about a bunch of these different creators you're working with,

you guys have your MKBHD kind of like core partnership. I grew up at a time like following the surf industry where every surf apparel company had like, their core ambassadors and they had other people on the team and then they had the people that were trying to like, you know, you know, just more like development side. Is there a world in the future where Ridge has effectively, you

sponsor a ton of creators. So you're just like spending money across all these different channels. But is there a world where Ridge has like a proper team of ambassadors that are just sort of rep like in a more serious way, like representing Ridge within industries, helping with product development? Or is it the kind of thing that makes sense to do with like, one 10 poll kind of creator and then everyone else is just more commercial relationship?

Yeah, I think it's a combination of both. I mean, we went from kind of the spray and pray approach, we've sponsored thousands of creators and billions of views. And now our goal is to just do deeper integrations with with creators over longer periods of time marquez being like Marquez being the flagship example of that, but I would love to assemble like an Avengers team around him of cool creators and celebrities It's very cool. Reach out if you're that creator Where can people find your podcasts? Oh

Marketing operators you find it anywhere you listen to podcasts Only weekly so that we're not putting out that much content but But well monetized you guys would appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah, you do have ads, which is great Are you guys gonna be sponsoring the all-in summit I know you are you been running that back this year That's the the one place to add. So it's a great place to be. But yeah, TBD still. TBD, yeah, we got a sweet deal on it last year. If that comes about again, maybe. Cool, well, good luck.

Good luck. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on, Connor. We'll talk to you soon, bye. So what's the- An absolute dog. An absolute dog. What's the word on Sean? Is he joining or should we move on to some timeline? I mean we can start some timeline and then when he's in the waiting room. I like timeline. He's coming in right now hot

We got Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet back-to-back Ridge Wallet. There he is Welcome to the show. Look at that microphone. That thing is serious. Do you podcast? Look at that microphone. That thing is serious. Do you podcast? Dude, I am so happy to be in the capital of capital, the focus of finance. This is, this is my, my Zen garden. I do podcasts. I just want to say I was listening before I jumped on that last guest you had does not work at rich wallet. I've never seen him before. Just been LARPing. He's got the LinkedIn set up. He's got all the wallets, everyone. He actually works for a rival wallet company, and he's been selling secrets on the side. Yeah, there's an alt.

I mean, Ridges. Are you worried about spying at Ridge? No, Ridge has had so many knockoffs over the years, and from all different parts of the world, there's an alternate reality where like 10 years ago, like Sean and Connor have a blood feud, and then Connor goes and works at one wallet company, and Sean does the other like, you know, have a blood feud and then like Connor goes and works at one wallet company and Sean does the other. And then like, they're

just always like the same because they're like, you guys are like yin and yang in terms of like, I think like being good at, you know, anyways, great to have you on the show, Sean. How's your week going? I'm good, man. Yeah, Connor is my rippling. So I'm dealing with scenario and I'm gonna steal all the secrets. Okay. That's great. The rippling to my deal.

Fantastic, we wanna talk about you. Yeah, I wanted to just have you guys both on to just get a high level read on what's happening in e-commerce. It certainly hasn't been an easy start to the year with the tariffs. I mean, technology companies are in a pretty good spot if you're just selling SaaS,

worried less about the impacts of all these different sort of policy decisions. Talk to us about how the start of the year has gone. We had you on the, you were one of our very first guests, but I feel like a lot has transpired between then and now. Totally man. And I changed my mic.

So hopefully this sounds better for you guys. Thank you. Nice dude. I'm reading chat on the right hand side. So I'm here to support dude. The biggest thing about tariffs is just the uncertainty and the rollout. So like we're friends with a lot of nine figure brands and everyone would like to bring stuff to America, but that is a two to four year manufacturing timeline.

Ridge has been working on our US factory and our capacity for two and a half years and I can currently make 20,000 units a month. Okay. I sell 50,000 units a month, right? And in peak, I sell way, way, way more than that. So it is just, I've not been able to keep up with demand and maybe in four years I could get there. But with all of the whiplashing on tariffs, it's very hard to know what to invest in. And what that leads to is just me hoarding capital right now. Like I'm not going to do distributions. I'm not going to hire anybody.

And it's really this freeze because I don't know where the puck's going. Right. We had we had tariffs come in, tariffs come out, tariffs come in, tariffs come out. Section 321 was stopped. Now it's back on. It's just very hard to make a decision when you don't know what's going to happen in two weeks. What are you seeing situations with brands that have less of a fortress balance sheet

where there's actually, I imagine there's certain brands that are running the calculus of, are we even going to make it to Q4 with how this is going? What's the chatter in the industry? Yeah, so there's been five years of bullshit when it comes to DTC. There was COVID, which was really good for some people, horrible for some people.

Famously, away sales dropped 90% because people stopped traveling. And then you have tariffs. It's just the latest flavor in this. There was iOS 14 issues and everything else. What we see is a weight. The interest rates of credit cards going up, it's going to hurt consumers. Totally, dude. Yeah. You're talking about credit cards. Brex very famously was an e-commerce credit card provider and they shut down all the credit cards when COVID happened. So that's why I'm so glad you guys work with Ramp, the better of the credit card providers.

So what we're seeing right now is a wave of shutdowns in smaller sub $10 million brands. That's always been a trend, but it's really ramped up the past three months since Trump got elected because they just can't absorb tariff costs. Things were on the water to be brought into America, and then costs went up 25%, 40% for these people. When you add that in with everything that's happened, you know, iOS changes, advertising changes, consumer being softer, there's just a wave of bankruptcies and shutdowns happening. So if you haven't secured financing, if you don't have a solid balance sheet, it's

just a really, really hard time to be trying to sell stuff on the internet. Talk about solo brands. They're currently being priced at $12 million on $450 million of revenue. They're not profitable. I have to imagine this is a tariff thing, but we were trying to figure out what was going on with the company. Did you track this at all? It's like the numbers just don't make sense to me.

Sean is like, Sean's got his finger on the buy button. It's like, I could just buy like the every, every share. Cause they also have chubbies. It's like a pretty popular men's fashion brand too. And they're doing like a hundred million in sales over there too. So I know solo so intimately. I know Spencer, the original founder. I know Berkshire capital, the private equity group, the bottom, I know Summit, the private equity group that bought them from the private equity group

to take them public. They had a roll up strategy. They overpaid for some assets and they've depreciated all of them except for two. So they have Solo, which makes the stoves and they have Chubby's and they used to not break out revenue. Last quarter was the last quarter. They actually broke their revenue out. And what you have is Chubby does roughly a hundred million dollars in sales and is EBITDA positive. And then you have Solo, which is a shrinking business, shrinking 25% year over year, losing, you know, $50 million or whatever. And the reason

why they're the market kept so low is they have so much debt on that business. I think it's over over $250 million in debt for a shrinking business that loses money. So, you know, they will sell chubbies that like when you break out the finances like that, that's they're looking for someone to buy that asset to pay down some of this debt. And then they're, they're just to take private. It is just some, somebody will swoop in. Does it happen before or after bankruptcy? That's the whole challenge, right? Yeah. You're not just going to pick that up for 12 million bucks, you're going to pick up $250 million of debt with it potentially. And

that's a big, that's a big decision. You got to be ready to do something with that, right? refinance that or pay that down somehow, right? Yeah, I mean, like the obvious suitor is Yeti. But there's a bunch of outdoor roll ups. I mean, there's it's one side. That's Maybe somebody it makes sense to own that asset, but it's just it's a it's really really hard to be solo stuff right now That's rough. Well, good luck to them is Do you believe there's potentially another ad platform on their horizons that will save the industry?

Swoop in and provide cheap ads that allow everybody to scale. Everyone indeed is just one more ad platform. It's a day, just one more. Yeah, I mean, you guys have talked about this a bunch, right? Ridge benefited massively from the rise of just meta platforms and being able to buy cheap ads and scale very profitably.

But what's your conviction level? Are LLM ad networks going to be a thing or are you short there? Well, they will find a way to monetize. Google is the most profitable best business on earth, $80 billion in fucking revenue or whatever. It's all straight profit. And it's all just people searching and then get in the middle of that. So if you're Chashu BT or Perplexity, you could probably build an amazing sales business on top of that. But dude, this year, Metta is working. Last year, Metta did not work. And we're giving so much of our money to the big blue beast. And we're spending more today

than we spent in December. Right. It's just because I think they're taking AI seriously, and they're really trying to bring AI across their ad, like their ad networks, they do have threads, that's new ad space, right. You know, Twitter is looking to highly monetize its ad space. I think their daily users are going up. Famously, there's Reddit, which has never been able to monetize well. The revenue per user is dog shit. So all we're hoping for is that AI helps people bring the power of the Facebook ads engine to more places.

We think Apple of into that in Q4, but just more ad space to be more higher powered. And unfortunately, if we're in a recessionary environment, the first thing that gets cut is marketing budgets and then Ridgewald swoops in to buy the cheap CPMs. So podcasts crushing it right now. It makes so much sense why Ramp, Bezel, Wander, Public.com, AdQuick, Aidsleep

are sponsoring this podcast because podcast ads for us crushing right now. Yeah. I love it. What's your take on, I need to re-download threads. I deleted it because I'm just so loyal to the everything app. But are you using it at all yourself?

Do you think it will be, if anybody could make the sort of text heavy format, the sort of conversational format, uh, be, have good ad units, it would be meta platforms. Um, are you guys spending it? Like, can you spend on threads yet? Are you getting invited to spend on it soon? So I don't use threads. I'm trying to spend less time on the internet, dude, trying to touch them that delicious sunshine. It's been hitting my face lately. Uh, but dude, never bet against

Zuck. You give him pixels, he will monetize them. So if he's got users, he's going to monetize it. The rumor is that threads ads are coming in Q4 of this year. And with that, they're also going to better monetize messaging and whatsapp in general so you know whatsapp still has 100 million users in america like if you're not logged in every day using it a lot of people are And they do have you know, just dms and everything that hasn't been monetized. So snapchat lost messaging ads last q4 Whatever snapchat does meta will just scoop up and do it too. So we got more ad We'll just scoop up and do it too. So we got more ad and it's coming guys. Are you long? Are you long or short Apple ever doing an ad

platform? You'd think that they sort of like handicapped the American online ad industry. It would have been nice if they had offered up like, you know, a stick and a carrot at the same time. Is there any, you know, if Apple's entering this era of just like, you know, op toll road operations, you know, if Apple's entering this era of just like, you know, op toll road operations, you know, squeezing margin everywhere, getting these sort of incremental fees. Do you see a world where app store ads? Yeah, the app store is not much for direct to consumer companies.

Yeah, correct. So my wife was interviewing for a role at Apple years ago. And she she when you interview at Apple, they make you do these like presentations and her presentation was the advertising opportunity at Apple and the executives there were very much like, we're never gonna do that. Like that is so against who we are.

But then, what we've seen in the past two years is that now they're actually totally, it'll be an ad exchange. So I don't think they'll actually monetize any of their ad space. They have the app store, they have Apple TV, they have iMessages, a social network, I think. We all spend way more time on iMessages than anything else. They won't monetize it, but they will sell your data. And that was the whole iOS 14 breakdown, is that Apple wanted to, they wanted revenue from Facebook

in exchange for that data and Facebook said no, so they shut it down. So they will get probably $40 billion in the next two years from just ad data exchange, I think that's tracking. That makes sense. I'm curious. They have your phone number, they should, they should do AI telemarketers.

Like they have your phone number, so you pick up your iPhone, it's just ringing and it's just an ad on the phone. Hi, this is Sean Frank here. I was just calling to see if you wanted to. You were interested in the Ridgewall. And it's just AI Sean. Last question. Are the various platforms treating you nicely enough?

Are they taking you out to dinner as frequently as they should? Do you feel like you have, do you feel like you're a huge customer for them and client? Didn't Ramp send you a huge tombstone for how much ad you've spent? Has Metta sent you anything? No, dude, I mean, I think I'm at

over a quarter of a billion dollars in Metta spend, so I'm waiting to get to a billion billion and then maybe they'll give me, maybe just a cameo for Mark Zuckerberg being like, Hey man, I appreciate all the work you're doing. But now I did ramp ramps a great partner. I got a little tombstone from them. You know, Snapchat is the in terms of like understanding and client relations, I think they're best in class. Did Evan Spiegel super involved in the ad platform.

I've had lunch and breakfast with him probably three or four different times, and he's just like, how can we get these ads to work? That's all he cares about. So, yeah dude, love all of the network. Also Shopify is the best partner out there. That's amazing. One breaking news story that I want to get your take on.

DoorDash and Klarna signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments. There's a lot of chatter on the timeline about this. I know Ridge Wallet has Afterpay installed, Shopify integration. What's your take on paying for your Chipotle burrito over several years? Well, so the previous guest you had on, a good friend of mine, Connor, we lived together. And

when these things rolled out, he was so bullish. He's like, dude, I can smooth out my burn. He's like, everything should be finance, interest-free, everything. Take advantage of the ZERP environment. Surprisingly, we see a large percentage of our purchases go through a firm. It's probably 15% of all purchases are running through a firm. So they do do serious revenue. There is needs from consumers. And I think people, it's probably more bearish

for the credit card industry than anything else. Like alternative merchant provided financing, eating high interest rate credit cards. Who pays for it in that transaction? A firm takes a higher payment processing rate than Visa does. So that's how they're actually funding this whole exercise. Do I think people should be putting Chipotle burritos on layaway? I do not think that's a good purchase. So that makes me very, very scared. And the memes have been great. For me, it's such a contradiction

because leverage is awesome and then burritos are awesome. So you would think putting them together would be this sort of 10X experience, but it feels very dark. It's a little bit risky. What about conversion rate effects for Ridge? When you rolled that, do you remember when you rolled that out? Was there actually a lift in in conversion or revenue that you could see or is it just

something you kind of feel builds like a better customer experience over time when you roll out something like after pay? So the reason why we did it is because you know, at one point, not that long ago, 2020, 2021, e commerce was the hottest industry, everyone was rushing long ago, 2020, 2021, e-commerce was the hottest industry. Everyone was rushing into it. The glory days. Um, all of those providers would pay you money to actually add it to the website. So I think it was either Klarna or a firm gave us $50,000 to have it as an

option on that end. And also, I mean, Ridge's product portfolio has grown a lot. Like you could easily wind up checking out with, you know, a whole Christmas gifts of luggage and wallets for a lot of people wind up in the several thousands. And at that point, you know, yeah, doing some, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if, you know, everyone listening is probably billionaires, you know, multi billionaires, but if you need to get gifts for your staff, bridge.com slash Sean use code Sean for 10% off. There you go guys.

Sean, I love you. Good luck in the trenches and hopefully there's not news in the next week that is so dramatic that it requires us to call our e-commerce correspondent. But if there is, expect to call. You know what? I would like to go on your guys's payroll as the e-commerce correspondent. I'll get a whole outfit and I'll just I'll be out there in the warehouse is telling you what's going down So I appreciate you guys. Goodbye. I don't know about payroll I mean, we're trying to be the most profitable podcast here, but we'd love to have you on yeah We'll do it if you quit we'll do it if you if you quit your show If we can buy if we can acquire

If we can acquire your show we can work out a deal You don't have to do all you you gotta do is turn on Zoom. Yeah. There you go. I was gonna pay you guys. Oh, now we're doing it. Okay, now we're doing deals. Yeah, this is the Klarna firm show.

Yeah, you can pay over time. Great to see you, Sean. Great to see you. Our new studio, if it goes where we think it's gonna go, will be much closer to Sean. Oh, fantastic, you can just pop by. That'd be great. Drop in.

Well, should we finish up with some timeline, wrap it up, and get out of here? Because we actually got to see some new studios in 20 minutes, and I think they're about 40 minutes away, so we are fully screwed. Fantastic. Anyway, there's some new polymarket, very exciting. Will Jesus Christ return this year?

What do you think, Jordy? It's a 3% chance. Are you long, are you short on the return of Jesus Christ? I don't feel ready to make a bet, although I would like to talk to the 3% that are going long and just try to see if we could get some insights. Yeah, I bet the comments section's very valuable there. We said we don't talk about politics,

but we never said we wouldn't talk about religion. Fantastic. Anyway, let's move on to LinkedIn has discovered loot boxes. Kevin Kwok shares that jobs are being recommended that are just some from stealth startups. So you apply to the company and there's two jobs that look identical. As chief operating officer at a stealth startup and chief operating officer at another startup. And so you click, you apply, you might wind up at the next dekakorn, you might wind up

at something that's bankrupt in six months. But it's a lot of fun. Speaking of unknown stealth startups, I have a portfolio company, Stealth Robotics Company. Is that the name of the company, Stealth Robotics? Because that's a good name. That'd be a good name. I mean, why not?

It's not. So they're coming out of stealth. They're going to be coming out of stealth later this year, but they are absolutely ripping and in a very interesting category, and that's really all all I can say but they're hiring for a ton of different engineering roles and if you are in the market to join a robotics company where you want to learn more DM me on X I will connect you to the team well we got some quick hits because there is more news that I want to make

sure we cover because we'll be going deeper on these stories next week. First off, we didn't get a chance to talk to Sean about this, but Sequoia Sequoia Capital has stepped in and backed Elon Musk in his Delaware battle. A comment from Sequoia Rare, they say Delaware law should not subject founders to heightened scrutiny for being an asset and benefiting to all and benefit to all stockholders. And so if you haven't left already, leave Delaware is the comment from the account,

leave Delaware. And so I wanna go deeper here. I wanna know exactly what it takes to leave Delaware, how many companies are actually moving, where they're moving to the Texas Stock Exchange, all these different things that are going on. I wanna know what's going on. Something crazy, like half of Delaware's tax receipts

are from C-corps. I think it's more than half. I think the state makes all of their money from C-corps. I want to see. And didn't this, I'm pretty sure that the governor was going on television and kind of mocking. So anyways, they've got gotta really turn this around. Unless they wanna be relegated to obscurity.

I always wanted the vacation in Delaware, the home of the C Corp. Oh, okay. Just because I just love business and I respect the, you know. If they're gonna have a hall of fame of business, that's where it should be. The biblical home of, yeah, yeah, the hall of fame.

The ancestral home of the corporation. The business hall of, yeah, yeah, the hall of fame. The ancestral home of the corporation. The business hall of fame. In Delaware, we should build it. Let's go to Sheil Monot. He says, exit mania is upon us. $2.6 billion exit for next insurance. Exit mania. Exit mania coming soon.

Like, WrestleMania or, Yeah, we gotta have Sheil on to talk about exit mania. So next insurance, the rumor is that it was 8x revenue, 14 and a half x 2024 gross profit. They got scooped up by Munich Re for 2.6 billion. Congrats to them. Little size gone moment for the folks over at Next Insurance. You'll love to see it.

Lots of M&A stuff going on. Let's also move to more news about Apple. We've been talking about the Apple Intelligence delay on repeat for the last few weeks. Well, now they're getting sued. They're facing a false advertising lawsuit over Apple Intelligence delay. Yeah. You never know how much to read. This is a pretty wild ad. You never know how much to read into this kind of lawsuit because you can just sue anyone or anything for anything at any time. So this could just be a money grab.

I mean, it could literally be like some class action settlement where everyone gets 75 cents, but it's bad press and you know Apple hates bad press. So they're shuffling executives around. We covered that yesterday. And I'm sure the folks at Apple are thinking about how to handle this crisis. They probably need to call Lulu, who will be on the show on Monday.

Anyway, Gary Tan, he says this is the golden age of building. He shares some news from CNBC why combinator startups are the fastest growing, most profitable in fund history because of AI. You think did CNBC get the scoop from us? Probably from when Gary was on the show. But yeah, for like we'd like our scoop. Attribution required on everything we say. Although, who knows if we will give you

attribution when we cover you. We'll try, we'll try, we'll do our best to react. We'll at least do a sponsor acknowledgement. Yes, definitely, definitely. Yeah, who's advertising on this CNBC landing page? We'll shut them out. Anyway, what else? We got some great math by Christian Kyle.

This goes viral every time he posts it. It's insane. He just knows how to play the hits so well. My three month old son is now twice as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh seven and a half trillion pounds by age 10. Great.

And it's awesome that this is definitely, this is the first time his son has been on TBPN, but I'm sure he's gonna be an absolute Chad hard tech founder someday. And we'll be interviewing him by the time he's, you know, at least a teenager. So he posted this once on Axe, it got a hundred thousand likes easily.

He just posted it again, got another 100,000 likes. It's made its way over to Reddit, become the front page of Reddit over there. People love math jokes like this and exponentials. Very fun. What else should we cover from the timeline? Saquon Barkley is in Anderil now, that's exciting. He says thank you to Paul Malaki-

Hit the gong for that. And the entire Anderil team for having me out. Couldn't be prouder to be Malaki. Hit the gong for that. And the entire Andrel team for having me out couldn't be prouder to be an investor. I mean, a lot of people wore Eagles gear at Andrel headquarters that day. That's a lot of fun. Saquon, pull up the Founders Fund portfolio page and then just DM every single CEO.

Because if you look at Founders Fund fund performance, Arfa Rock leaked it. And he was quote, quoting Harry Stebbings, who earlier this month says, I've never seen such institutional demand for fund than the current demand for Founders Fund growth fund. And the reason for that is they are putting up incredible numbers.

And I will say this because John- Can't comment. Can't comment, but I can comment. And I will say this because John can't comment, but I can comment. And this is the kind of performance that you're pleased when it's leaked. Inspiring to the whole community. Yeah, so Saquon, go hit up the FF portfolio.

Get in however you can. We got a post from Jason Levin. We'll close it off here. Let's do it. Jason says, when TechCrunch gets acquired by a PE firm to be chopped up for parts. This is a very creepy deep fake. It's pretty good. There's a little bit of me in there. It's from The Shining. Here's Johnny. It's me as Jack Nicholson in The Shining breaking through the wall with an axe

because he's gone insane. I think that's the story of The Shining. Well, yeah, we love private equity and we love like compared on the street. We love private equity. We love when companies get bought by private equity, especially when they're potentially, you know, competing for attention. And I mean, if you're the private equity firm that bought it, we have a genius idea to turn it around. We've said it before, turn it into a lifestyle magazine about skiing. That's how you get the capital allocators back on board.

And that's a great way to leave it. We should have the new... We should go skiing right now. We should go skiing with the acquirer and break down the plan. The plan to turn TechCrunch out. Thank you for tuning in today. I should go skiing with the acquire and break down the plan the plan Um to turn tech run. Thank you for tuning in today. It is a pleasure to do the show. Uh, we're pretty bummed It's the weekend. It's not normally 21 hours and we'll be back 21 hours And that's what I think just 21 hours and now it's like almost 72 hours. It's yeah

68 hours 6070 hours will just be brooding. It's's gonna be rough, but we'll get through it folks. The timeline's always there. We'll still be posting. We'll be posting clips. Follow us on X, review us on Apple and Spotify, and enjoy your weekend. Thank you. Thank you.