TBPN Live - Shaun Maguire, Nic Carter, Jeremy Giffon, Trump Stands His Ground, 20K/Month GPT

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

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You're watching TVB and we're live from the Temple of Technology the fortress of finance the capital of capital the dojo of the dollar the shrine of shareholder value and Today is March 5th. It's Wednesday. It's 2025 and we got a great show for you The show starts now. We got a bunch of Collins. We got Jeremy's you fall Your fall Jeremy we got Nick Carter calling in talking about core weave talking about crypto. I'm sure I'm sure we'll ask him a bunch of stuff. And we got Sean McGuire talking about the Elon empire, the empire that Elon Musk has built across every possible tentacles. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that should be the puppet master,

the puppet master, the man pulling the man behind the curtain. Yeah. Yeah, the Wizard of Oz. Exactly. Yeah, we've given our studio nicknames. We need to give our guests nicknames. We've done this pretty well with David Senra, the godfather of podcasting. The most powerful man in Miami. The most powerful man in Miami, yes.

Anyway, speaking of very powerful men, we are breaking down, of course, politics. Trump gave a speech. I didn't watch it, but I did control F and see, did he mention tech? Did he mention chips? And yes, he mentioned tech twice. And he said, Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago, but the technology just wasn't there. He's referring to he's asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art Golden Dome missile defense shield to protect our homeland. I mean, Golden Dome, let's go. I mean, obviously referencing the Iron Dome, yes, it has to do it. One great hilarious, hilarious coinage. I think I'm on board for

Golden Dome. This does seem big for you know, obviously politics, we try and stay away from it. But the like the president is saying we're going to spend money on something that technologists build like tech. So if you're in the Golden Dome business, this is a huge opportunity. Exactly. Exactly. That's why we wanted to call it out.

Yeah, I really also I mean, just generally, you have to be pro dome. Yes, generally. And I mean just generally do you have to be pro dome? Yes, general and I recommend everyone build a had a golden dome already. Yeah So so whenever we're gonna star wars you remember Star Wars? Not that not the show Right. This is the Reagan. So Ronald Reagan what he's referencing here He says Ronald Reagan wanted to do it a long time ago referring to a golden dome But the technology just wasn't there. The idea was Ronald Reagan had this, uh, star wars program.

It got called star wars after the fact, I think is a pejorative. They were like, Oh, he's going to put satellites in space and they're going to shoot down missiles like this guy's stupid. And then like they, they was like a hit piece and they're like, Oh, he just watched star wars and he wants to do it in real life. And now it's like, no, actually we do need that. That's that, that's a good thing. Uh, the same thing happened with Trump in real life. And now it's like, no, actually we do need that. That's a good thing. The same thing happened with Trump

in the first administration where the, what was it, the star, what's the Space Force? Space Force. Yeah. So he comes out with Space Force and it's like mocked. And there's actually a show called Space Force that's like the office. It's like a sitcom.

And it originally was making fun of Space Force. It's so ridiculous to have a Space Force. But then the people who were writing the show were like, wait, like this is actually kind of cool. And it kind of turned into like a positive thing. I like that my team has a Space Force. Exactly, exactly. And so yeah, who knows, but Golden Dome, very silly name,

but probably some technology that we want and will probably affect a lot of defense tech companies that we know and love and have mentioned on the show. We should do a deeper segment on what is the difference between a generalized ICBM sort of missile defense system and whatever the Golden Dome is gonna be other than branding because it's fantastic branding. Branding matters. Yep. Naming matters. I'm sure that Trump would like for his legacy. Yep to have at least a footnote about the Golden Dome yep, but you know again going back to this idea of

we've had sort of missile defense systems for decades and Yeah, so there are generally levels to this stuff like ICBMs. We talked about there's the hypersonic thing like ICBMs They go in a parabolic arc It's pretty easy to intercept them and shoot them down with just another missile the Patriot missile and the and the Roadrunner that Andrew All is building You know the whole idea is a cruise missile comes in you need to hit it with a with a drone or Another like a Patriot missile very expensive very you know, not a particularly a treatable system And with with the with the dawn of hypersonics, like you need to upgrade your dome.

So I think the question is like- New dome alert. Yeah, dome is a binary term that sounds very good, but realistically it's like this massive gradient of like our capabilities versus things that wanna penetrate a dome. But, and Trump goes on to say, and other place they have it,

Israel has it, other places have it, and the United States should have it too, right? Kim, right? They should- Yeah, now that we are waging trade wars with our neighbors, we should be ready for anything. This transcript is so funny.

I saw a bunch of transcripts. The top search result is Trump's grand script and fact-checked, and you can barely read what he's saying because every single line is fact-checked. And Ichecked and I mean we do the same thing for the New York Times as well but it's one sentence true so but but I mean just listen to this transcript they should have it too so I want to thank you but it's a very very important this is a very dangerous world we should have it we want to be protected and we're gonna protect our citizens like never before. It's like it really comes across in the actual

voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The voice comes across even in the transcript, just a couple sentences. So the other tech thing that was mentioned, of course, was SoftBank, Oracle, OpenAI. Trump is tying this to his America's first policies. He claims that we have had 1.7 Trillion of new investment in America in just the past few weeks But money hasn't been spent yet, but it's been the vibes of 1.7 trillion have happened That's actually an area where I would want to fact-check not because I don't fully believe it But I would just like to see it listed out check, not because I don't fully believe it, but I would just like to see it listed out. So he goes on and he actually lists this down a little bit. He says the combination of the

election and the economic policies that people love. SoftBank, one of the most brilliant anywhere in the world, announced a $200 billion investment. OpenAI and Oracle. I love how everybody's collectively just agreed that they're sizing down the 500. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's the funny thing. So he says SoftBank is putting in 200 billion. And then he says OpenAI and Oracle, Larry Ellison, announced a $500 billion investment, which they wouldn't have done if Comma had won.

And it's like, well, I'm pretty sure that OpenAI, Oracle 500 billion includes the 200 billion for SoftBank. So you're kind of double counting that. And then he says Apple announced 500 billion investment. Tim Cook called me and said, I can't spend it fast enough. It's gotta be much higher than that. And of course, that was- That was not contradict.

And of course, that was money that Apple was already spending to some degree. But generally, this is good. We want companies to invest in America. This is great. And so it's funny, because it's hyperbolic, but it's also directionally correct So like I'm kind of down I believe they're building the best their plants here instead of China and

Just yesterday Taiwan semiconductor the biggest in the world's most powerful in the world has a tremendous amount 97% of the market announced a hundred and sixty five billion investment to build the most powerful chips on earth right here in the USA And we're not giving them any money. Tripp loves the deal. Well, he's a deal and then he goes into the chips as your chips act is a horrible, horrible thing. We give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn't mean a thing.

They take our money and they don't spend it. All that all that meant to them. We're giving them no money. All that was important to them was that they didn't want to pay the tariffs. So they came and they're building their building and many other companies are coming. We don't have to give them money. We just want to protect our businesses and our people and they will come because they won't have to pay tariffs if they build it in America.

So it's very amazing. You get rid of the chipsacked and whatever's left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt or any other reason you want to. Just like this iconicconic paragraph. Yeah. And so that's pretty much the entire coverage of tech and chips.

Chips Act, you know, obviously passed during the Biden administration, but was saber rattled for years. And, you know, people always make the argument that America is more divided than ever. But with regard to China, Trump and Biden had a lot of similar policies.

Yeah. And you see 100 year marathon Michael Pillsbury, that book really lays down, hey, China wants to be number one. They're not going to stop. It's not that they're going to necessarily just go to be number one. They're not gonna stop. It's not that they're gonna necessarily just go to war, but they are putting a plan in place very slowly to build and build and build and become the number one. Everyone wants to be number one, why not?

And so Michael Pillsbury kind of lays this down. Then there's also this other book we have over here, America Against America, that was written by a Chinese researcher in the government, came over here and was like, I think America is gonna destroy itself, basically culturally, and we can kind of just sit back and let it happen. Very, very weird, kind of blackpiling book, it's very odd.

But at the same time, there's a bunch of interesting things in it. But- But every time we're about to destroy ourselves, we find a trillion dollars in minerals. It's true, it's true, Yeah. And so and and so, you know, Trump comes in, starts talking trade war stars talking, you know, competition that actually carries forward into the Biden admin. And Biden says like, yeah, like I hated I'm very opposite of Trump aesthetically. And I'm opposite

Trump on many things like immigration. But but on China and on tac and on a lot of these things, the two administrations are pretty similar. And so the chips act goes out and now Trump is thinking about renegotiating which which is supported by Ben Thompson at Sir Teckery, because right now, the CHIPS Act is structured as incentives to build plants, not supply side, not demand side, basically. Ben should give free subscriptions to anybody in the White House. Yeah, seriously.

If you want it, you can have it. Yeah, because his analysis is gonna be, yeah, hopefully informing folks. But, you know, I don't really when I tune on when I turn on C span, I'm not really watching for the politics. I'm not really watching for John, I'm watching for the watches. That's right. And so that's why we want to talk to you about bezel. You can shop over 22,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel's

team of experts if you love trump if you hate trump uh his watch available on bezel he has a vacheron constantin historiques uh square uh dress watch it's gold it's uh it's a fantastic piece but you know uh obama known to wear a rolex pick one up on bezel if you're a Obama guy, yeah, so whatever your political persuasion There is a watch for you that will signal who you who you stand with on bezel and this is what you there are 83 separate auctions live right now, so if you're in the You know, it's almost, it's fun. I, I do think one of the, one of the most fun things about like watch hunting is finding these ones that have stories. Like I'm pretty sure Obama has a Rolex

that was given to him by a Navy seal who was on his security detail and saw him wearing one watch and was like a Casio or something. Yeah. Like you got it. You got it. You got to take this Mr. President. Like you got to step it up, something like that. And I was just like, boys, like these guys are just- Giving a watch you love to somebody is one of the highest- Incredible. And then of course you can track it and you can see like,

oh yeah, and then Obama wore it for like the next 25 years or something like that, or like 10 years. And you're like, that's awesome. And so I think when there's a rich history about a watch like that like some story like the Rolex Presidential Day-Date like the the gold the gold Rolex worn by several presidents sure you're not getting one That's worn by a president unless you're going and finding one for like a million dollars Yeah, but even just having a story that you can tell around watches. Oh, yeah, this is the same model that was worn by

Reagan to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if Trump had some type of little scheme at some point where he would just take your Day-date wear it wear it for like 30 seconds. Take it off You know and well he like a hundred and he'd be creating, you know, it could be the Trump edition Rolex Yeah, he just puts it on worn by Trump, you know, they stamp it on the back on they go. It's ridiculous Anyway, let's move on to some tech news Let's go to open AI Sam Altman told investors that he might launch agents costing between 2,000 to 20,000 a month to do tasks like coding and PhD level research

Nick here says lol lemow even This was something didn't we predict this? Yeah. I think I said I wanted a 20K agent. Yeah, we had talked about this months ago. One of the things that I think we were more fixated on was if you just gave me the best model and let me have unlimited usage of it,

that would be worth around $2,000 a month, in my opinion. Sure. What they're saying, and the pushback here has been for $20,000 a month, you could probably get four separate PhD level research assistants and get them all the O1 Pro subscription for the cost of, you know, so this agent can't just be a PhD level

researcher. It has to be vastly more effective. Yeah. Otherwise, because 20 K, you know, it says two to 20 K, right? So we don't know exactly. What's fascinating is like, there are now PhD level researchers that are in the training loop in the RLHF because at a certain point like, like you can't just hire me and you to generate training data for advanced mathematics on the humor side, on the humor side. Yeah. When you call us Sam, when you need humor, you value and you need us to generate thousands of jokes. Yeah, well you can do it, but it's going to cost you a thousand times more per token.

But it is interesting to wonder, you know, like, do you wind up putting those folks in the loop at some point? And do you just say, hey, yeah, at 20k a month, like 20k a month for a software product, you usually get like an SDR, you like like some sort of implementation person and so it wouldn't it would be funny if Like you're at 20k a month and like you also get like a human who you can just like Act like a human you can text and call and be like hey Yeah, like I need the a I need the AI agent to do this and then and then they're using the AI But actually you're you know interacting with yeah, I want to know I want to know how real this is. There's just been this opening eye has been at the leading

edge, and they continue to impress, even though many people said four or five was a letdown. I think many people just expected it, so it shouldn't have been a letdown. It should have just been, like I said, expected. All that said, if Sam is out on the fundraising trail and he needs to be able to show how they're gonna add $10 billion of ARR that's not on their core

consumer subscriptions, this is one way to do it. When you're talking about two to $20,000 a month per sort of instance of the software, it's very easy to get these sort of big numbers very quickly and so I don't think people with where 4.5 landed, I don't think people are, and the way that Satya is talking, people are starting to adjust the sort of narrative around,

oh, AGI is sort of three, four months away. You should invest now at this crazy valuation because we're gonna control super intelligence. There needs to be a new narrative from a fundraising standpoint, in my opinion, to continue commanding these really, really, really aggressive forward revenue multiples. And it's test time inference.

Yeah. When I hear 20k, I hear, I'm signing up for that if I have a workload that needs to be done every single day. I'm not exactly sure what a great example would be, but I mean, it's like, you know, run through every, I'm an insurance company and look through every single policy every single day for anything that's out of the ordinary and you're dumping in millions of pages of text again and again and again and and every time you query you want it to actually sit there and think for you

know hours something like that and so the 20k I would imagine that the cogs on that are thousands of dollars. Just every day you're gonna say write me a stand-up joke in the style of Shane Gillis and feel free to take 12 hours. But you better come back with something good, otherwise I'm unsubscribing. Yeah, I was thinking about the jokes that people like. It's always like the public figures who say like, be me, be Andre Carpathi.

And then it's like, oh well, it knows everything about Andre Carpathi so it can tell a good joke. I wonder when like normies will be like laughing at it because like it needs to know stuff about them to actually deliver a good joke. Cause a lot of it's just like that. Be me, love DraftKings, love Netflix, love parlay's.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, you had the question of like, how real is this? Let's actually read the information to see how much info they have. Basically, OpenAI is now at a 4 billion ARR, which is incredible. Gerstner came out and said they're projecting

to be at somewhere near 11 by the end of the year. So the growth is still ridiculous. Yep, yep, yep. The term agents typically refers to AI as they can take actions on behalf of customers without needing a lot of direction Well open AI investor soft bank has committed to spend three billion on agents from open AI this year alone So so you saw Sam lesson had that billboard on the 101. Yeah, that's it AI is not your boat Yeah, he came out and he said I think it was basically on this digital billboard,

which hopefully they got through AdQuick, otherwise they probably wasted money and did poor targeting and all that stuff. But he was saying that $3 billion of their sort of projected revenue is from SoftBank, which SoftBank is using those projections to lever up, raise tens of billions of dollars of debt to then invest in open AI So it feels

It feels hard to believe that that soft bank Will actually spend three billion dollars on open AI agents this year just because I imagine that Yeah, even if even if the technology is there imagine rolling that out across your entire I mean fully a billion dollars that's got to be on that's like in the same ballpark as the technology is there. Imagine rolling that out across your entire portfolio. $3 billion, that's got to be on, that's like in the same ballpark as Snapchat's cloud bill with Google. Or Netflix's infrastructure on AWS.

They're probably higher than that. But like in the billions, to spend billions with a single software, like tech company contract as a customer, like, you know, software, like, you know, tech company contract as a customer. Like you have to be getting so much value. Yeah, so that, just to put it in perspective, I just ran a few very basic calculations.

That would be them spending 250 million per month this year, which sounds crazy, but it's like $8 million a day on agents. And I think that of course, opening, I would let them spend that much, but soft bank is also running a business right. And they need to be, there needs to be some real value exchange. Right. And I think if you just turn on a bunch of these agents and you're spending $8 million a day on them, very unclear if they're... Yeah, very...

I mean, what's like the craziest deal, man, you could possibly think for this? Like, what if you just say, okay, SoftBank has a ton of employees doing a lot of different things for this year, we're gonna spend this massive investment, but we're going to effectively have every single employee at SoftBank is going to have

an AI agent shadow them. So every task, every email, every Slack message that goes to a human SoftBank employee is also going to go to a like a mirror world metaverse representation of that employee that's run by an open AI AI agent. And so you have information on hey, SoftBank, you know, had customer service people. Let's see what the response from the human was. Let's see what the response was from the AI agent that was shadowing them every single day. And then do the same thing for the analysts do the same thing for the CFO do the same thing for the you know, Masay thing for the CFO, do the same thing for the, you know, Masayoshi. Yeah. Do, do it for everyone. And then you

can, and then you can see, okay, this is actually a replaceable job or this is a job that, that we got twice as much done. And so there's actually twice as much value. So we should expand keep the workforce, but it was a good deal. I don't know. It seems really hard to manage that much AI agency. It's a lot of intelligence to just go say, hey, go do what, $250 million of work a month? I have trouble, I have the O1 Pro. I have trouble dispatching enough valuable queries on a regular basis to really get the most out of it.

And I talk to people and sometimes people will be like, oh, you only use chat GPT like five times a day, I'm using it 20 times a day. And it's like, I don't know if that's like, I don't know that you necessarily wanna like be maximizing your AI usage and that's like the right metric. There might be something where it's like work smarter, not harder.

But if I had a $250 million, it's like a Brewster's millions. Have you seen Brewster's millions? Kid inherits, you know, a billion dollars from his like, you know, rich grandfather or something and says, you know, in order to deal with this sudden wealth, you have to spend $10 million this weekend or something. And if you can spend it, it's all this analogy of like, you catch the kid smoking a cigarette,

you make them smoke an entire pack and it's disgusting, they never smoke again, right? And so Brewster's Million is the same idea with money. And if you Brewster's Million me on AI agents and you gave me a $250 million budget and said, go and deploy this and try and get $250 million worth of value out of this, I don't know. I don't know if I can do it.

Yeah, it's this weird house of cards, right? And when you see, it's completely unbelievable that SoftBank would effectively spend $3 billion a year on agents today, when I would guess that their actual spend on agents in the past 12 months was under $100 million. Right? Yeah, I mean, so that level of growth is not super believable. Yeah, it is almost believable that Masa would say, I will actually spend this money with you

because SoftBank is gonna be such a big investor in OpenAI that we're willing to make this commitment. And it's sort of like this crazy conflicted transaction that has a bunch of, Sam is out there using this revenue commitment to raise more money from other people. OpenAI is using that, you know, open it or sorry, SoftBank is using OpenAI's revenue projections to raise debt against.

And the whole thing is just beautifully conflicted. And conflict, no interest, no conflict, no interest. Let's give a little bit more context, but we'll be able to actually. So the beautiful thing is we will be able to see pretty much exact, not exactly necessarily, but we'll be able to see if this spending spree from masa on opening, I was real because soft banks, public company. So we'll be able to check back on this. So opening is going to have several tiers, $ Two thousand dollars a month gets you high income knowledge workers.

Mid tier agents for software development can go up to 10 K a month and high end agents acting as PhD level research agents could cost up to 20 K per month. In the long run, open AI expects 20 to 25 percent of the company's revenue to come from agent products. The person said our past reporting has given hints about each of these type of agents and so so here's the thing that's somewhat You know just one way to push back here. Yeah Devon AI which is built on top of open AI. Yep Costs $500 a month. Yeah There's been reports that it's super effective in organizations. Yep, it was 500 a month

And then there's also consumption based pricing right as I say with Claude code, right? but all that being said is Open AI's products going to be 20 hundred twenty or ten times better than Devin, which is built on top of OpenAI. Otherwise, why would consumers use the OpenAI version that costs $10,000?

Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting. Yeah, there's so many, there's such a dance here between what are they gonna release in the API? How closely are they gonna keep things held as secrets? There's actually another story we're going to get to about Ilya Suskova and how he's like being really, really secretive. And it's interesting because yeah, I mean, if you're vending your best model, your model

that costs $20,000 a month out on API, someone can wrap that. Maybe you don't want them to do that. Somebody can maybe distill that or reverse engineer it. And so, uh, there's, there will continue to be the question of like house, how much can you lock these down or how long does the frontier last? Uh, it's a, it's an ongoing debate and it's fun to follow up, uh, follow along. Um, but of, there are, you know, endless battles over open AI. And of course, there is the news that Elon Musk and open AI are

in lawsuit. And there's a breakdown here from Rob, should we go through this? Yeah, we can go through this briefly. I'll cover it. So people are sleeping. This is this morning at 3am. He says people are sleeping on huge news in the Musk versus open AI case today, the judge finds that if Musk's donation gives him legal standing, she thinks it's very likely she'd want to block their entire $100 billion nonprofit to for profit conversion. And there's a highlighted piece of a

legal document here that says, next and similarly, if a trust was created, the balance of equities would certainly tip towards plaintiffs in the context of a breach as Altman and Brockman made foundational commitments for swearing any intent to use open AI as a vehicle to enrich themselves. The court finds no inequity in an injunction that seeks to preserve the status quo of open AI is corporate form as long as the process proceeds in an expedited that seeks to preserve the status quo of OpenAI's corporate form as long as the process proceeds in an expedited manner.

Rob says, Musk is trying to stop the OpenAI business effectively converting from a non-profit to a for-profit. To do that, he needs to prove that he is being wronged in a way that allows him to bring a case to the court, which is the legal standing, and the conversion to a for-profit, which gets cut off here. I'm gonna try to see if I can find it briefly.

Yeah, this is a very high bar to reach. Interesting. I mean, I'm still on team. Hopefully they can sort this out. It does make sense that it seems like such like just an aberration of the legal system that we're in this situation where it's like Hey, there's this weird situation where we kind of have to switch from a nonprofit to a for-profit

Can we just have a one-time grace period where anyone who donated to the nonprofit just gets a stake in the for-profit? because that would be that does feel like the most fair but it feels like Legally, it can't happen or else there will be some crazy tax implication or it will get like blocked. Yeah. I actually messaged Rob about coming on the show. He responded back and he says,

you should have a lawyer on the show, not me. This is a super complicated issue, but overall my takeaway from the news today was that the judge is not shutting down Elon's efforts. It seems like still very 50-50, or maybe even 60-40 Altman OpenAI versus the team Musk. So we'll see what ends up happening. But overall, this is pretty wild to just be kind of playing out

in front of everyone while OpenAI stays charging ahead, while XAI stays charging ahead. And yeah, it certainly is evolving. Yeah, I wonder really even what the time. We're going to get ASI before we get a legal conclusion on this case, aren't we? Like this, this is going to drag out for years. I mean, the the Musk pay package is still dragging out, right?

Like we don't, we still don't have a conclusion on that because he's moving, he's moving Tesla from Delaware to Texas, I believe, and like reinstating it and then the judge blocked it. And so the, the, the judge blocked it and so the The legal world just moves so slow. Yeah, it's rough. Anyway, well, there's one more line in here that is relevant It says for this inquiry the court looks at open AI certificates of incorporation in both Delaware and California Which lay out the charitable purposes behind the corporation the documents state that OpenAI quote was organized exclusively for charitable and educational purposes and not organized for the private gain of any

person. And so this is basically what Elon's legal team is leaning on in terms of, you know, making making their point heard. So see how it goes. Well, whether you're Elon Musk or Sam Altman, you're not going to be building a GI or ASI unless you're getting a good night's sleep. So both of you please go to eight sleep.com. Tell them the technology technology brothers sent you and turn your bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Sam, Elon, this is more important. Surely you guys

can agree on this. You guys can disagree on who owns what and what the companies are and what nonprofit for profit all that legal mumbo jumbo jumbo jumbo we can put that aside and we can agree that we all just want to get 100 100 percent sleep scores and that's actually what's really I did not get that last night I did not either. You roasted me. I'm back. I'm back. I've been having a rough time. I got nearly two hours of deep sleep. Two hours. I got 79% on quality and 644 on time slept. You're sick as a dog. I am. But your energy is way back. It is. I'm pumping it up. I'm like, I sleep at the wheel

yesterday. I think all the drugs I'm taking, mostly just Robitussin, it's acting like I'm high. That's great, that's fun. I'm definitely letting it loose. I think the answer is like, if I'm low energy, just like let it fly. Yeah, let it fly. Because it makes for a better show for sure.

Absolutely. All right, ateSleep.com slash CBPN, go check it out. Back to the show. Back to the show. Let's talk about Ilya Setskever. Absolute goat raising billions of dollars. I mean, we've talked about it before. Apparently it's impossible if you're an open a co founder to build anything but a foundation model company. Yep. We would love to see someone start. I don't know supplements company. Yes. I want

to see, you know, him build a you know, I don't know, supplements company. Yeah. I want to see him build a, I don't know. Or just say, post economic, I'm going to go into bodybuilding. Yeah. And go golden retriever max. Start a podcast, do something. I don't know. It's just like, it's like all they can do

is just foundation model, foundation model, foundation model every single day. Every single person. Maybe the machine god is real. Yeah. And what's weird is they don't want to do it together. Never. They all want their own companies. They all want their own foundation models. But you know, apparently it's profitable. The company's already worth 30 billion raising multiple

billions. Is that the fastest? It's gotta be. It's gotta be. So anyway, not to say the value has already been created, but at least let created, but has a company ever gone from zero to 30 in less than a year? I don't know. So Ilya Setskever, he was an open AI researcher. He's the one who found like the transformer paper and like, you know, Google built it, but he really recognized that it was very important.

He, you know, built the early GPT architecture, was very foundational in the development of LLMs and AI And he left open AI last year now He has a new startup called safe super intelligence and it's become one of the most valuable companies in tech Thanks to his reputation And SSI says it doesn't plan to release any products until it develops super intelligence and I was thinking about this So they raised like a billion dollars or two billion at at a 30 billion or they're in talks to raise funding at 30 billion. What would be hilarious if Deepsea comes out, they're

raising like two billion. Is the journal just front running this and saying his startup is already worth 30 billion because it sounds more interesting? Yes. Yes, definitely. Okay. It would be so funny if it was like, okay, hey, we need to train this foundation model guys, like we need like three billion. We'll just give you like 10%. So we'll do like 30 billion valuation,

but it makes sense because like it's gonna cost us three billion to build a frontier model. And then DPC comes out and they're like, we actually only need like 300K to do this. So we're still gonna do the three billion, but it's just gonna be secondary. And don't worry about that. And we're gonna keep the valuation where it billion, but it's just going to be secondary. And don't worry about that. And we're

going to keep the valuation where it is because it's like the same tech. That would be genius. He's just in it for the cheeky secondary. Maybe I mean, there is a there are groups of groups of people who are basically like, you know, the my a si GI world is just like, I need to just corner some resource. Because like, like, yeah, there will be abundance, but there will only be so much beachfront property. Yeah. And so like, I need to just corner some resource because like, yeah, there will be abundance, but there will only be so much beachfront property.

And so like, I must get my beachfront property. But of course, like this isn't what Ilya is doing. He's like, obviously a true believer in AI and tech and also fantastically wealthy from open AI. I forget what they get, they get the credits or units. I would- They don't have stock. How much would you pay to get the full hour-long pitch for SSI?

because Arguably just Getting you know, I'm sure he's pitching relatively few people for this, right? He's not trying to go talk all over the town Yeah, a lot of people are conflicted already. He probably is talking to sovereign. Isn't this a Nat Friedman was the first group I thought? And it's Groce. Daniel Groce is the CEO. Yeah, so but getting the pitch from Ilya would be almost priceless.

Totally. I would lever up TBPN to just get the full pitch and then be able to act according to who who knows, he seems like somebody who would give a very authentic pitch versus just promising. He's sick of this sort of like high flying deal making approach of his former co-founder. Totally. Yeah, I mean, he seems, he has that quote

in that, I was like a guardian piece or something, or SF Chronicle video where he's like, if the AGI doesn't go well The entire earth will be covered in solar panels. Have you heard about this half earth? concept half earth haff I think his name is Peter half he's a Scientist he named it after himself. Yeah, it's a coinage. It's a law great. No, this is like a real thing so so he's like a he's a. Great. No, this is like a real thing. So he's like a futurist, a scientist,

and he has this theory. There's like this four quadrant model for like how the Earth can develop and accumulate more and more energy over time. Like eventually like we're growing our energy consumption at like 2% a year. And if you just play that out exponentially, eventually we will be consuming all of the energy

that hits the earth from the sun. And then eventually you go into Dyson Sphere, that's like Kardashev too. But there's a question about like, do you go black or green? Green is like, we focus on like bio and you have like more trees that are like, absorbing energy essentially.

Black is like solar panels. And then the question of do you stay on Earth or do you go into space? There's this interesting four-quadrant model. But half Earth is basically like, yeah, just black out the sky, put solar panels everywhere, and then we'll all live in pods. And most of the humans will die and we'll basically just be AIs. And that'll be like our progeny. And like maybe that's good for some people. Some people like it. Some people are into that.

Not me, I've never been part of that whole world. Never been big into that world, John. Never been big into that whole matrix world. But he's like worried about this, like genuinely. Like we're kind of joking, like dancing around it, but Ilja definitely is like, if we mess this up, we're just gonna be continually optimizing, like more computers, more computers, more computers,

and then you're gonna have solar panels everywhere and robots taking over. Okay, here's a question. And I don't mean this in an offensive way at all. I have many family members that struggle with hair loss. I knew you were going to go there. Is it possible that Ilya doesn't just shave his head because he wants to reach AGI before his hairline reaches

the back of his head? It is a funny choice. But I think it's just because he's focused on other stuff. But yeah, I mean, put a little mask. But if you're looking at the mirror every day and you've got billions of dollars to deploy and you're arch nemesis Sam Altman is racing to achieve AGI and you look in the mirror and you say,

look, I maybe have like 18 months. It's a wild choice. I maybe have 18 months before to, you know, of a hairline. You know, I gotta grind harder. This is disrespectful. I won't abide by this. I think he looks great. No, he looks he's an absolute chat He just he just cares so much about the AI. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the right approach Yeah, and he wears a suit an absolute dog true an absolute dog. Yeah No t-shirts over here. No, I love it. I'm excited to see this round get confirmed. And I do think this will be a first of speed running

zero to $30 billion in less than a year. So check this out. He's running this place. It's a super tight ship. He's very, very worried about security. And so most AI startups work hard to get attention, hoping it will attract employees and investors in a highly competitive space. SSI operates as secretly as it can out of its offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv. Its bare bones website contains little more

than a 223 word mission statement. Candidates who secure an in-person interview are instructed to leave their phone in a Faraday cage, a container that blocks cellular and Wi-Fi signals before entering SSI's office, one of the knowledgeable people said. Most of its staffers aren't well-known in Silicon Valley because the company is looking for promising technologists whom Sutskiver can mentor rather than experienced people likely to jump between employers and take what they have learned with them. I love that approach. Still Silicon Valley's top investors including Sequoia and Andreessen have poured money into the company. The latest financing, which marks a six-fold increase from

its 5 billion valuation, is being led by Green Oak's capital. SSI's and Tox to raise funding at 30 billion but doesn't include the new cash it's collecting which were previously reported by Bloomberg. We're Sequoia and Andreessen in the same round. I Guess close. Well, you don't see that much This also feels like super conflicted with aren't they both in X AI too and they're doing the exact same thing like hey There's no conflicts in the foundation model world. Everybody's in everything. I think it's yeah, it's commoditizing It's drilling you're drilling oil and like yeah, I want a piece of that Well, I want to piece of that well, I want a piece of that well,

like, let me get it all, I guess. I don't know, it just seems like, like there would be some discussion of like, hey, like, can you not invest in a direct competitor? But, you know, maybe it's dramatically different. Like when you think about the, like just the product pacing, like Grok 3 is very much like productizing so fast.

Like Grok 1 was immediately out and then and then embedded in Twitter and you can see we talked about like, maybe it gets embedded into Tesla's and it becomes the way you you talk to your car. And it seems like Elon really, really wants to like, be product focused, like there's the voice mode and like, all the different features. Yeah, we've talked about this. What he sees in OpenAI is not benchmarks. It is consumer adoption. OpenAI will probably reach a billion users at some point this year or somewhere close to that. I think even potentially they could be in the territory of a billion monthly actives, which is so, so difficult to reach. And Elon, even if Elon got every person on X

to download the Grok app, he wouldn't even come close to that, right? There needs to be sort of organic adoption. Don't sell him short. I do think Elon could potentially unseat Jimmy John's for number two. That's true. Unseating OpenAI for number one is a tall order,

but never bet against Elon and just never bet. Never bet for it's hard to bet against Jimmy John's new hot honey sub but if anyone could take them down, it is so funny that the number two app in the app store yesterday, they hit number one. They went number one. They went number one. Jimmy John's for some reason is the number one app in the app store amid all this like billion dollar lawsuits and fights over. Well this is why Ilya's staying out. He's like, I'm not going to release an app until it can just immediately be better than

Jimmy John's. I'm not even going to try and go consumer. Sorry, I'm wrong. They hit number one in food and drink. Okay. Okay. Gbt is still on top. Chachi was still undefeated and which is why it's just why investors are willing to pay over 300 billion dollars. Well now now you know normally people would be like oh if you have Jimmy Jones on the show it's no longer a tech show but now there's a tech angle so let's get him on. Yeah let's get the founder on Jimmy

Jones. Let's do it. Jimmy himself. Anyway, we got we got five minutes until our first guest is joining. Let's let's let's close this out. You know, everyone's everyone's interested in following all the different co founders around the world as they build ever increasingly large foundation models. The interesting thing is like, we heard about, what was it? Test time compute, reinforcement learning, deep research,

all these different tools that were, they clearly came out of Ilya projects early on at OpenAI. I forget what they were originally called, Q-Star. Remember Q-Star? And it was like it was this was leaked what it that Ilya was working. What did Ilya see, right? And so clearly he's he has some ability to put together kind of new algorithmic paradigms Yeah, and even though he was People people get so obsessed with like, is deep learning hitting a wall?

Are you scaling-pilled or not? Whereas Ilya was like, he was both scaling-pilled and went super long the transformer and deep learning architectures, but at the same time was working on reinforcement learning approaches on top of the big massive scaled LLMs to bring those two together. And I think they were kind of, I guess they were kind of obvious. I was watching a video earlier from Two Minute Papers

from five years ago from OpenAI, and it's talking about this game that they did where they had two AIs on each team. So it's two V two game hide and seek. Yeah. And and and they and they play and over like, you know, a million rounds they simulate. And like, they just can't even find each other. And then they get into like 10 million rounds. And then they start learning these strategies of like, well, if I go in this in this box,

and then I put like a cardboard box here and I lock it in place, then I'll start winning. And then and then the other AI figures out that if they take this like ramp, they can surf up over it. And eventually they start like figuring out how to like break the physics engine of the game and do all this cool stuff. And and that reinforcement learning obviously played into when opening I played defense of the agents Dota two Do you remember this at all they did like a 5v5 basically like Starcraft I mean they also did Starcraft literally yeah they did they started playing video games on was the thing that would actually go viral yeah and also live streaming it

yeah yeah yeah yeah and so those types of well the Pokemon thing is interesting because it's not like they didn't train on Pokemon. It's just clawed. Also running a 24 seven experiment is also very powerful in that you're putting it all out there. It's verifiable. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I don't know. Ilya, I hope he comes up with something cool.

It does seem like he's very aligned with safety and very worried about. This is my, Ilya is my bet on what Keith was getting at when we had him on the other day where he said What comes after the LLM? Yeah seems like every other former open AI early team member co-founder is working on language models Yep, it's very possible Ilya is working on whatever comes after that sure sure so

Very excited to see that play out and And yeah, as the, as the AI brain develops, you have the, the memory core, the reasoning core, like Ilya is good at it. And he set the expectations so incredibly high saying, I'm not going to release a product until I, you know, presumably have something that's significantly better than whatever else is on the market. Right. Yeah.

I wonder how he would even release that. Like what, what would the product instantiate is like we need we need it's just another app there needs to be the information needs to send the tech paparazzi yeah you know outside of the Tel Aviv office snapping the picture of Ilya walking out you know all secretive that's the content I want the information great well you know what he has to do when he launches this company? Billboards. Billboards.

Because he's going to have no one's going to know about this. It's one thing if you're in YC and you launch immediately and you grow organically and you're going direct and you're posting, but. And you go viral for your sweatshirt. He's going to have this fantastic product, but no one's going to know about it. So Ilya is going to have to buy some billboards.

And where is he going to buy them? And he's got to do it on AdQuick. So Ilya, I know you're listening billboards and where he's gonna do it on ad quick. So Ilya I know you're listening go to ad quick comm Start working with the team now Also, I mean honestly Ilya you could do some recruiting ads on there throw some billboards up waterloo, Tel Aviv Silicon Valley, there you go the billboards up SSI We're hiring but go through ad quick because they make ad out of home advertising easy and measurable

Ilya I'm talking to you directly they you can say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising Ilya Only ad quick combines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe so Ilya go to ad quick, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you and good luck with your new venture. And so we're gonna have Jeremy come on the show right now. And you know, our main advice for Jeremy was to start buying one-on-one billboards. Start buying one-on-one billboards,

saying you got a special situation, raise too much money, call Mr. Grafon. What's up, guys, how you doing? Good. How are you? Have you bought a billboard yet? I'm working on it. I'm working on it. I think I think all the management fees need to go directly into billboards That's that's what I've learned from the most profitable podcast. That's great Break it down for us. What would go on the billboard? What's your business? How do you pitch it to people these days?

My business is picking up the roadkill of the venture industry. The startups, the founders that have triumphantly built heroic and wonderful businesses and have gained millions and tens of millions of revenue and built incredible teams and have a Wonderful product and customers that love them But for the fact that they had too much capital Forced upon them and it is buried them under an untenable prep stack and made the whole business not work and and Left them with no choice but to kind of get stuck in no man's land. And my mission is to help those founders

get back in control of their businesses and run them as fully profitable cash flowing great businesses as God intended. Love it, incredible line. I would love to get a sense, you know, we spend a lot of time covering the news and the news tends to fixate on these sort of colossal failures and these sort of moments of glory.

The humane AI pin, for example. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You're seeing the behind the scenes, which is companies that raised a lot of money, you know, maybe three to five years ago that are now in a tough spot. You know, the venture world has sort of turned sour on them. What is the state of that market right now?

How busy are you? I know you spent a lot of the last year raising your first independent fund. Now you're investing. What what's kind of happening on the ground? Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot of businesses, there's a lot of great businesses out there and a lot of stock founders,

and there's more and more of them, and increasingly a lot more VCs who realize that there is a severe lack of DPI, especially in the middle of the portfolio right now. And so, you're starting to see a lot of great companies that realize they need probably a different owner, an owner that's more in line with actually their goal and their vision.

And then a lot of funds that are realizing, gross IRR is all well and good. But eventually, you know, you can only eat the DVI. And that's kind of that's what the capital allocators are starting to demand. Have you seen founders that get in that position? You know, they have the opportunity, you know, they're talking to you or they get into position. Are they ever trying to sort of pivot their business

into a better AI narrative and then go back to market? And is that working or are they trying that and giving you a call back and saying, yeah, you were right, like, let's try to figure something out. Well, yeah, so, no, what they're doing is, what they're realizing is that they can pivot to AI and they don't need any more capital.

Oh, interesting. They can, you know, especially if the business was built, you know, four or five years ago, they can replace a lot of their costs with AI. I think like every organization should be thinking hard about whether or not they ought to cap headcount and just, you know, keep headcount at or below where it is and increase kind of headcount, so to speak, through AI. And I think we're about to see kind of the Renaissance, the bootstrapper.

And so I think a lot of founders are starting to think like, maybe I can grow my business 10X without more capital because of these tools. And so, yeah, certainly you can slap an AI label on and go raise another round. You certainly have the founder who's in the just two more million bucks, bro. Just give me two more million. I got this. But I think that's a mistake. I think we're about to see an era of incredibly capital efficient businesses that, by the way, are not giving up growth at all. You can still grow 100%

a year. And if anything you can do with a lot of this capital, you can own more of the business. You can like, you know, be a lot more of the drivers driver's seat and, and you know, really kind of control your destiny versus kind of lever yourself up as much as I know that, you know, you guys are always in favor of the max leverage options. Exactly. Can you walk me through anatomy of a deal and how kind of the the pref stack waterfalls out on one of these? What are the different kind of tension points for some precede investor who feels like they're sitting on a 10x or 100x and then someone who got in late and clearly kind of knows they overpaid and just wants to get something back.

How do you get all the parties around the table and then think about incentivizing the team going forward? Look, I mean, I think one thing founders don't understand or maybe underappreciate is that your cap table ultimately really affects your business in a wide variety of ways that can be kind of very subtle. And so at some point, maybe you go from having a venture fund as an ideal owner to being a neutral owner. I think a lot of funds are in that stage now where,

it's not detrimental to be owned by a venture fund, but maybe it's not super additive. And then eventually you get to a point where it can start to become, you know, it can detract because just the incentives really diverge. And so, you know, what I'm really looking to do is like, what I implore everyone to think about, especially if they're not in a business

that's like on a clear trajectory to raise, you know, need to burn hundreds of millions in capex for some kind of like nine or 10 figure outcome, is think a lot about like, who are my owners? What are their incentives? And like, you know, when you get to the board meeting, is it actually, is there friction or are they actually behind me? And I think that's a lot of it. And a lot of it just comes down to like, what is the cost of capital of your owners to get a little bit boring? Like the cost of capital of the people that own you makes a really big difference for like what they expect and what they demand of your business. And so, you know, it varies. Like

if you're an individual, if you're, you know, a pre-seed or seed, you're happy to stay in the business. There's no reason for you to sell. You can roll over. If you're like a growth bun that maybe did, you know, a somewhat regrettable, you know, it's a little bit wake up from the night after the party, look around, there's beer bottles everywhere. We'd prefer to just pretend that it didn't happen. Maybe you want to get your capital back. Like, you know, I think like oftentimes the best outcome is just returning capital, which used to kind of be a norm in venture. And because this like bifurcation between huge outcomes and then very little liquidity in the rest of portfolio is not happening as much anymore.

Every venture capitalist today says they're in the people business, right? If you ask them like to have any type of specific thesis, they just say, you know, we're in the people business. That's Sanders. Yeah, yeah. So that's generally the right take that's that centers point of view Are you more in the people business or the value business? Because from my lens, you know, you're looking for value and in some cases You're more than happy to let the founder move on to their next chapter and bring in a professional CEO. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean I I think I'm also entirely in the people business But it's you know is the I think I'm also entirely in the people business, but it's, you know, is the, I think everyone should be, you know, doing their highest and best use, like following their calling. Sometimes for a founder that's, that's, you know, getting more control, more, more sovereignty over their business and really kind of being in it for the long haul, having way more optionality in terms of like financing. Sometimes a founder, you know,

a thing that happens far too much that no one talks about is all these founders who are stuck, you know? If you have 20 million of revenue, 100 employees, and you've raised 100 million bucks, you can't just quit if you're the founder, even if it's clear that like what you were trying to do is build the next, you know, deca corn or whatever. And so there's a lot of founders out there who are, who know, and what's funny is the board knows and

the founder knows, but they're like not willing to have that conversation. And so, um, you know, there's a lot of founders who are stuck and for those who are stuck and would like to leave, but don't want to abandon the building, the business, I think, um, uh, you know, there's more options than you think. And there's someone out there to get back to the people thing. There's someone out there who is the perfect person to come in and run a business like that. Because, you know, a lot of times the person who takes a business from 20 of revenue to 100 of revenue can be a very you're looking for a very

different type of person than someone who's going to start it from zero and grow it into a huge business. And so it's really just about about like, is this person doing the thing that they're really fired up about? And if they're not, then like, do you really wanna be in that seat? Are there any common character traits or kind of either even background career paths

for that type of operator who's maybe not the founder, but the type of person that can, with pretty high confidence, take a business from 20 million to 100 million in your experience? Yeah. I mean, I think like, you know, my friend Andrew Wilkinson has written a lot about this. I think he really kind of has it right.

You know, there's a lot of C-suite and senior executives at a business that's two or three times bigger than maybe the business you're looking at. And those are people who are like highly capable, at least some entrepreneurial spirit, but maybe they're not, you know, whether by constitution or circumstance, not interested in taking the full risk of a founder, but still want to be in the driver's seat, want to, you know, want to run a business. And there's actually a lot of talent there that can be unlocked who are people who, you

know, can't do the go through YC thing, but still would love to have real upside, would love to lead a team and run a business. And yeah, I think there's actually a lot of really untapped talent there. And it's kind of an underrated option. It's kind of like how it used to be like buying a business and running it. If you're like an MBA or something, was like an underrated path to, you know, quote, entrepreneurship. I think coming in and running a like decently sized startup or business

is kind of one of those now that not a lot of people consider. It's kind of like very like you're either a founder or you're just an exec or maybe like a four to five hundred CEO or something. But there's a lot of middle ground. And I think, yeah, I think there's a ton of untapped talent. Question going off of that. Search funds got very popular. Simultaneously, it seems like venture,

the world of venture capital discovered private equity and roll-ups, and we've seen a number of companies come out the gates and decide they're going to basically raise venture dollars to pursue a PE.E. style strategy. That concerns me, given that private equity is pretty good at what they do, right? They've sort of gotten better and better and better

over the decades around finding fairly priced businesses and making them more efficient and growing them and selling them. What do you think happens to these sort of software or AI enabled roll ups and are you salivating over the potential of buying them down the road once they. Look, I think raising venture to acquire businesses is a great gig right now.

Yeah, so and here's here's why. There was like the Grim Reaper. Like if you're if he's excited about something. No. And here's why. Right. You can if you typically in private equity, if you want to if you want to go buy businesses, you raise a fund, you get two and 20, which is a great business model.

You've talked about this before, Jeremy, sort of the perfect business model. But in that right now in Venture, you can go raise $20 million at 100, dilute yourself at 20%, and so you actually have much better economics if you're going, you know, buying up these businesses. And eventually, I think that's going to stop, right? Yeah. And by the way, there's a hurdle in private equity and there's no hurdle in venture capital, which makes the whole thing even sweeter.

Yeah. But you know, I'm not, I don't think I'm a groom reaper. I think I think I'm a, I think I'm a liberator. I think all these founders are crap. I think if you, if you, if you envision that you're going to be doing a lot of business in the category in 10 years, it's probably a bear signal, right? Yeah. I think, I think it's more think it's more seeing exuberance.

Once the MBAs pile in, it might be over. I love it. But look, if you build a business to 30 million bucks of revenue, that's a heroic feat. It's extremely hard to do. And then you somehow end up with 8% of it under a $200 million dollar press stack. That kind of sucks. And I don't think that's the outcome that anyone is trying to have happen,

but it happens as a kind of a spandrel of the venture industry. Yeah. The Grim Reaper is the bankruptcy attorney. You are the winged angel. Yeah. And there are, if you really want to sell your startup for parts, there are people out there who can do that with brutal efficiency and, and they're great guys. But like, I, you know, I'm a fund, I want to sell these businesses for more money in the future, which presumably means they get more, they get more valuable. You know, I'm not, I'm not a, I don't want to just like, you know, make toys or

us go bankrupt. That's, uh, that's someone else's job. But I mean, is, is over the long term, is your business correlated with, uh, like frothiness and volatility? Like in a post froth post highly, you know, high exuberant high exuberance, like that is a good signal for you, right? Yeah. There will be more opportunities. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm interested in, in dislocations and dislocations certainly happen more in bubbles or exuberance. Yeah. Um, but I also think it's happening

more frequently too. Like it seems like it's a good model. It doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like your fund is like a one time, like, oh, they just like unique case right now. It's like, no, VC is built to do these types of things. There needs to be a system to help process the ones that don't go perfectly and that's where you can come in. Yeah, well, look, I mean, venture is 10x in terms of dollars deployed in the last 10 years.

It's a completely different thing now. You know, just as the biggest firms are turning into PE shops, the biggest venture firms are functionally PE shops, there needs to be, there's basically one product in Silicon Valley and it's like primary growth capital. And once these markets become bigger and more liquid, more efficient, there needs to be different kind of, different, just as there is in Wall Street or like on the East Coast, there needs to be different kind of different, just as there is in

Wall Street or like on the East Coast, there needs to be different products offered to founders like equity at different costs of capital and things like that. Again, like a really basic fact, I think people understand is like, if you have if your model is to have a lot of zeros in your portfolio, your cost of capital, ie the like minimum return that you need, is just really high, which like creates all these knock on effects. I really return that you need, is just really high, which creates all these knock-on effects. I really think founders would just take a crash course on venture. It would really help them a lot.

Like a lot of really exceptional founders get into bad situations that they probably like 30 minutes with like Chad's GPT could really help them avoid. And like understanding- Hey, maybe you should make a wrapper. I honestly think you should make a wrapper and just like create the the sort of product for these founders and say, yeah, any time that somebody raises around, send them your send them your little rapper and say, hey, put your term sheet in here and understand what you're about to embark on.

And it's good lead lead generation for you. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the board members could use the wrapper as well. Got him. OK, another question for you. Historically, you've been heavily focused on software. You acquired 30-some odd businesses while at tiny. We've seen new categories attract venture dollars,

like basically traditional manufacturing businesses that have some sort of tech enablement. Is there a world in the future where that is, you know, an area of interest for you or are you all in on software, you know, indefinitely? Everything is of interest to me, Jordy. I just love, there's always, there's always like interesting problems to be solved that can create like Pareto efficient outcomes in everything. Right now there's like a lot of them in software and venture, but yeah, as long as like humans are not even in the driver's seat, but like involved, there's going to be know, dislocations and problems to be solved.

It's like amazing how many times everyone could be better off if they just like, you know, it's not something that they could, it's not something they need a third party to do. But oftentimes like a third party really helps. So yeah, it'll be on all kinds of things. I mean, right now you're seeing the ventrification of middle America and like as all these venture Co start to buy up you know vets and and med spas and all these things like venture capital I'm in like I'm in the rural Midwest right now and like you're gonna these people are gonna start to feel venture in a very tangible physical way and I think that's really gonna change you, you know, it's just going to change the industry dramatically.

Do you have any, you had a great heuristic for, you know, early detection of potentially great founders being, I think you put it as a Stripe account plus high school diploma or something, high school report card. Can you break that down and tell me any more about that? Yeah, if you made money online in high school, I honestly can't think of an exception to have someone who's done that and has not ended up being like quite a successful founder in one way or another.

This is like the internet. You can just go on there with a laptop and make money. It's like, you don't gotta do all this. You don't gotta like go to Harvard and do YC and all that. Like you can just go on there with a laptop and make money. It's like, you don't gotta do all this. You don't gotta like go to Harvard and do YC and all that. Like you can just go on there and like drop ship stuff. Make something that makes money. That's the new tagline. Yeah.

What's your read on general catalysts exploring an IPO? It's been something that everybody's sort of waiting for. The first sort of scaled venture fund to go public? Do you see all the big firms going that direction over time, or is it going to be a pretty binary in that, you know, Andreessen stays private forever, blah, blah, blah, or, you know, what does that look like? So I think like one very simple cut at this is just firms that are started by founders versus firms that are started by investors. Mark and Ben, they're founders. GC, it's also founders.

David Fialko, obviously an entrepreneur. I think kind of expected to see that when a founder starts a business, even if it's an investing business, they're doing it to, it wasn't any kind of sort of business to grow a big business. And you know, I thought Mark Andreessen put it nicely and on Patrick's podcast when he talks about, you know, you can be a small partnership that generates some good returns and then kind of is a relegated to, um, to some Wikipedia page or you can build Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or, or, uh, Andreessen Horowitz. You know, I think it's also in the name, like, uh, you know, I think, I think they, they like put, put a lot of clues there.

So, you know, I think founders, great founders are just going to build big, important businesses and, um, you know, your business can only really get so big if you're actually in the business of like true alpha outperformance, you can't, you know, build the JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or something. Do you think that there's a potentially alpha in getting into one of those big VC firms, but not in an investing role and instead going into an operating role, uh, like what you see as like what you see as not a deal team but operating partner at Bain Capital or Texas Pacific Group or any of the large PE firms,

assuming that these large organizations are going to wind up actually operating more like PE firms, not just at financial scale but in terms of their behavior. And so you're going to come in and reliably be CEO of portfolio companies that are coming in through like the P.E. arm essentially. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I think it's like joining, you know, joining Goldman in this in the seventies or eighties or something. You know, it kind of depends. It's actually kind of funny. This is like kind of a niche thing, but it's very interesting to me how COOs at funds are either like incredibly important heroic individuals that the firm would explode without, or they're like completely

back office kind of like low status, no one likes them. And they're also either they're either like extremely well paid or really badly paid. And so like, it's funny, it's very like high variance roles. And I think it depends a lot on the culture of the firm. And so, yeah, I mean, I would argue that like a lot of these firms, most of people there already are not, you know, strictly investors in the sense that they're not making, you know, judgment based capital allocation decisions with research and all different portfolio support and all this stuff, which is like, you know, not what you would have thought venture was in 2005.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you just mentioned like the idea of like having a venture owner is not the right thing. And that's where you come in a lot of times. But in the future, some of these firms might actually kind of set up shops to become better owners of turned around assets, right? They already are. I mean, Sequoia Heritage, you know, Sequoia Heritage is, is, is, is, is, is of turned around assets, essentially, right? They already are. I mean, Sequoia Heritage, you know, Sequoia Heritage is significantly,

or maybe not significantly, but it's like roughly the size of Sequoia. I know Andreessen's doing a kind of a Sequoia Heritage thing, GC is, like, they're all just starting to be giant. At some sense, at some scale, you just become an asset manager and really what you're looking for are, different fee paying products basically. And you really can think about it. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's still, there's still like a decision to be made between like,

oh, it's like an index fund and they're just gonna like blindly take a slice of everything versus they're gonna like that's kind of been like the the meme around Andreessen a little bit is that they're just like in a lot of deals but then you have general catalysts where it's like we're buying a hospital network and that's much more like private equity and so I understand that like all of this is going towards like venture becoming asset managers but they're still built there still will be forks in the road. Like Goldman Sachs does have a proprietary prop desk, right? But they don't have as much high frequency stuff as Jane Street, right?

There are different strategies. And so it'll be interesting to see where each fund kind of goes, I think. One more question for you. Mostly a prompt because we were talking about this in a group chat I think a week ago, there was a chart showing some of these new AI startups and their sort of revenue milestones. You laid out very clearly, somebody was basically,

somebody in the chat, I think it was Bill, said something to the effect of, are we short all of these? And, you know, I've kind of like struggled with the question because people get a tremendous amount of value out of these products. They love them. It's real revenue. It's real customers sort of trading dollars.

You fired back and basically said, iron law of the universe, easy come, easy go. Maybe just kind of extrapolate that in the context of the current AI market. Yeah, look, I mean, I'm sure some of them will be great businesses, but it does seem very true to me that just anything that can be done very quickly can sort of be undone.

And I think you're seeing that. I mean, I think all the kind all the IDEs, the best one changes from day to day. The switching cost is pretty low. These are very smart teams. I'm sure they will come up with moats and stickiness and all that kind of stuff. But I think, you know, I think it's kind of like if you think about the internet, it's like, yeah, everyone's going to rush to use the internet enabled version of X, Y, Z thing. But does that mean there's the idea that Google is the last search engine, not the first, right? And so I think for a lot of the companies where it's just like, I wish I had an AI version of this. The consumer intent is like, I want to buy an AI version of this, not like I want, you know, you know, pick your pick your kind of specific AI business. And so,

you know, I think some of them will make it out. But I think a lot of them will not because it's just that's just what the rush is. It's like anyone who can add AI into this is adding so much value that I'll just like buy it. I mean, I know, like, I pay for, you know, whatever, six different models, like, that's probably not gonna be true in three years, right? Like, there's probably one that I'll end up paying for too. There's certainly no reason to pay for six right now. And so, yeah, and like, if you know, if someone launches a slightly like an incrementally better model tomorrow, they're gonna get my 20 bucks a month until like, you know, until they don't. And so, yeah, I don't know.

I can't think of an example where a whole class of businesses have cropped up, grown immensely quickly, and then kind of just been the new equilibrium. That's certainly not what happened in the dot com. There's some exceptions, but in general. That makes sense. We have a couple minutes left. How are you thinking about building your firm?

Are you hiring for any roles right now? What does the future look like for Gafon and company? Yeah, you know, it's very interesting. I've been beautifully studying all the great solo GPs of the venture world and analyzing their setups and everything. I think it's very compelling. I think asset management is actually a great AI use case. So yeah, I think the answer is yes, I'm hiring little tech bros exclusive here.

I'm hiring. There we go. Breaking news. Scoop. Put the chiron up. Yeah, I'm going to make one hire. Breaking news. Scoop. Put the Chiron up. Yeah, I'm going to make one hire. I'm looking for an investment principle, someone who's super smart, wants to be the first

hire, keep the team really small, a lot of economics to carve up. And basically, I have more deal flow than I can handle right now and what I need is is help basically And so yeah, you know if it just wants to be someone who joins me and then me and me and them and 30 AI agents You know allocating capital if that sounds appealing Yeah, well we have our next guest on the line right now. Thanks Jeremy. Thank you for coming on We'll talk to you soon. We love you. Love you guys. Talk soon. This is fantastic.

Nick, welcome to the show. Hey guys, I didn't mean to kick off the last guy. No, you're all good. What's up? Booted. Booted. I was three minutes early. You're all good. How you doing? Doing great, man. How did investment committee go?

Breakdown, introduce yourself. What do you do? And then what does investment committee go? Breakdown. Introduce yourself. What do you do? And then what does investment committee mean on a Monday? Like, who's at the meeting? What are you talking about? Yeah, when a little asterisk first, Nick just started Lent. And he's not.

He's giving up nicotine. So he said he's a little bit grumpy today. But we're going to turn it around, because we're going to eventually talk about CoreWeave, which is maybe a 2,000 bagger or something in that I was trying to run the numbers on it but how did investment committee go it was good yeah and we're actually having I am having a poly crisis with all the companies that I'm on the board of so that part's not good so never become a venture capitalist you know I don't advise it to any young folks listening. Don't do it. Okay, go become an artist or some artists.

I'm an artist. What kind of art should the fans do these days? What's that? What kind of art is not going to be immediately commoditized by AI. I don't like sculpture. No, I think you just have to learn to work with the AI. You know, you know, look at Grimes. Okay. Our model is the Grimes AI but people still like her. Yeah, that's true. That's good. How often you take a board seat when you make an investment is that you sound like future investments you may just write the check and say, you know Let's say that Camp potential investees hearing that I'm on five boards

I've got capacity, you know, I got I got some space still So if I'm leading and it's my deal then and we try and lead most of our around so I will I do we do end up on a lot of boards first You want to be on a public company board at any point like you know how Andreessen has visibility into Facebook and that's just like alpha for the entire portfolio, right? Yeah, and I think they pay you as well. So that that part's nice. So I don't get paid to be on Well, maybe maybe core.ave will bring you up. We'll bring you back.

I'm silently hoping that they're going to ask me to be on the board. Explain the business to us. And if they like how you explain the business, then you're on the board. Boom. We'll send them this clip. Yeah, we'll tell them the technology brothers

collectively requested that Nick be added to the board prior to the IPO and get a little. Yeah, maybe maybe. Let's just break a small shareholder. Right. Right. For now. Could start building that position. When did you invest in core weave? What were they doing at the time? And what are they doing now? It's obviously been in the news, but I would love to hear it from you. What a fun story, man. It was my first angel investment ever. What? Yeah, it was a good start becoming an angel investor. So I have like over 50 now, but that was my first and I was not accredited at the time. I mean, you know, dirty dog, you know, dirty dog. No one checks.

Okay, that's the trick. No one checks. Yes. He doesn't check I Don't think I even had the money to make the investment at the time. I think I borrowed it from my dad. Well amazing And I had met these guys because we were mutual haters of aetherium so we we hated aetherium proof of stake specifically and I think I found them on Reddit and Brian Venturo, he was posting on Reddit about how proof of stake was stupid and bad because they were ETH miners, right? They were mining ETH. They're against the transition of proof of stake.

And I was as well because I just love proof of work and hate proof of stake. So we were kind of strange bedfellows. And then they were just mining ETH. That's what they were doing. They had a different take on it than other ETH miners. They used more high-end NVIDIAs, which became very important later versus other ETH miners used AMDs,

more commodity AMDs. And then we became friends. I became friends with Brandon and Brian and mostly centered on our mutual shared disdain for Ethereum, Ethereum culture. They had like a very like weird relationship with Ethereum. It was all their revenue, but also they just like had a very antagonistic relationship. And then they pitched me the idea of repurposing their GPU hardware, just like idling by mining ETH and other proof of work crypto assets. And then also, you know, on a more bursty basis doing like rendering stuff. Like then, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like blender. So that the AI wasn't even in the conversation. Yep. Yep. Wasn't? Yeah, yeah. See? Yeah, like blender. So that the AI wasn't even in the conversation. Yep. Yep. Wasn't even in the discussion. This is 2018 though. Yeah.

No one was this except for Goren new. Yeah. Was this related to the the render network like the octane renderer R and D R? Was that a thing or is this just like general purpose rendering for? Do you know what they pitched me was like, they were gonna like go to the blender conferences and be like the industrial HPC farm for blender. Yeah.

And, and movie studios and whatever. And that sort of happened actually, but then, so I did the first round in which they raised capital. I think it was the, was the only only VC to be on the cap table. I did it personally. I actually brought it to the fund. And we didn't do it because it was seen as outside of scope, which was a catastrophic mistake, obviously.

Worst mistake of my career by far. I just ran the math. I did the numbers on it. Yeah, it would have been big. It was our first fund. Fun one would have been a 50 X fund on that alone. Wow. If we'd done the check.

So that was, that was a mess. And then, uh, you know, back then, like, like, why was it not in scope? Cause we had done some crypto mining stuff and then we got really turned off by it. And you know, we invest in like more like asset light crypto businesses. So mining we thought was totally out of scope and the whole pitch was we're going to stop doing crypto and we're going to pivot into this other stuff. So then in 2019, they almost went out of business because was actually really big for them because they were all these apps they're built on like AI dungeon if you guys remember that I remember that yeah that was my

first it they were like yeah this thing's going crazy like the usage is hockey-sticking and I played it I'm like oh my god like wow this is actually like amazing technology like that's when I realized I'll I'm or like you know the transform model was was gonna you know change the world. And so then that just hockey sticked. And they obviously did an incredible job of being creative about financing and you know, Magnetar was obviously a great, you know, capital partner to them in many different ways over the years. And technically they've delivered, um, it's not, it's not an undifferentiated product. It really is. Um, you know, different ways over the years.

It's not an undifferentiated product. They built with the idea of HPC big performant, synchronous HPC clusters in mind when absolutely no one was doing that. None of the hyperscalers were doing that. Now, of course, everybody's realized AI specific data centers make sense. But Coru was really the first to do it. And so they've been able to lock in a long duration contract. So they've done very well. Very cool. Changing subjects a little bit.

I want to go back to it feels like a year ago. It wasn't that long ago. What was the vibe at the crypto ball which you were at once everybody started realizing that the the incoming president had launched a token no one knew at the ball that the Trump coin had launched or maybe others knew but I certainly didn't know I think it launched around 9 p.m. and I didn't get out of there till like 1130. And really, so there wasn't too late. There wasn't.

People were at the ball just hanging out, having fun, and people weren't realizing what had happened yet. Nobody that I knew at the ball knew. I certainly didn't know. No one was talking about it. So I felt that we were rug pulled actually by Dr. Yeah, because because most most conferences, there's quite a lot of people just looking down at their phone the whole time because it's just not that.

And obviously, this wasn't a conference. It was a party. But the timing was hilarious. And then and then the lesson from this last Sunday was if there's ever anything White House related, you know, any type of crypto event, expect some big news. I thought you had some of the best takes on the strategic crypto reserve. Now that a few days have passed, have any of your thoughts changed? You know, you're generally not super excited about it. You had written a post before that you were sort of broadly against it.

What's your thinking on today, March 5th? And where does this all go? Yeah, I mean, we're going to find out on Friday what they're really proposing or thinking. I think there's so many unanswered questions. Like, how are they going to pay for it? Is Congress going to have to authorize? Are they just going to hold the seized Bitcoin? Are they going to sell the seized Bitcoin to buy Cardano? Is that really going to happen?

I mean, can you imagine a portfolio rebalancing? Yeah, it's strategically important for the United States to, you know, diversify. Yeah. I mean, really, like if, if they can't find some ersatz way to finance this thing without asking Congress because they can't ask Congress Let's be real Congress is not gonna pass this. Yeah, so, okay. Are they just gonna use the bitcoins? They hold 200,000 bitcoins Okay, we want to do a basket of Bitcoin Cardano eats Solana ripple. So you're selling Bitcoin to buy ripple and card. That's crazy. Come on So we're gonna find out what David Sacks has up his sleeve. I mean, I like the guy I think he's smart. I don't know how this policy came to be

I don't support it Continue not support it whether or not it's just Bitcoin or Bitcoin in a basket of other crypto assets It doesn't make sense at all. There's no strategic purpose to It doesn't make sense at all. There's no strategic purpose to owning crypto at the government level other strategic assets that we hold are Commodities that are like hard to acquire in a pinch if we have liabilities to nominate those commodities, right? We it makes sense to have a petroleum reserve makes sense of a tungsten reserve or a uranium reserve even medical equipment agricultural commodities, whatever

Where is the industrial need to own Bitcoin or ripple or Cardano? There is none So I just don't understand the whole thing seems totally incoherent to me What? I Think we share the same point of view on sacks Do you think that he is having real influence on the sort of messaging coming out of the White House related to crypto or is he finding out live like the rest of us? I think if it was just up to Sachs, we wouldn't be talking about the reserve. There wouldn't be a Trump meme coin. Yeah. World Liberty five wouldn't be as big as it is. What other crazy stuff did Trump do with crypto? I don't know

I mean, I've just been hoping that Trump would just fire Gensler put in Atkins and then never say the word crypto ever again We'd be so much better and said he's like hugging us to death And I don't know where it's coming from. I don't know. Is it Baron? Is it Eric? Is it Don who's doing it? Who's the puppeteer whoever Whoever it is, they need to stop. Hopefully, Sachs can put an end to all this nonsense. I just feel like Trump to care. It does feel like a distraction from the other side of Sachs is responsibilities, which is the AI stuff. We heard a good take on the strategic crypto reserve yesterday that I want to get your feedback on. Trump is known for coming out of the gate hot with a very aggressive proposal. Canada is going to be the 51st state. And then when all things are said or done, it's like a 5% tariff or something like that.

And so the idea here was, hey, maybe the Cardano thing is this opening salvo of craziness that winds up just being pure Bitcoin reserve. Do you think that's strategically 4D chess possible? I know you're still against it, even if it lands there, but is it possible that that's what's happening here? Yeah, certainly. I mean, the thing is, I kind of like disagree with the premise of the question, though, like everybody says this is an amazing negotiation tactic. But like I make deals for living, right? This is what I do. If a founder came to me, they're like, Yeah, you know, we're raising a pre seed. It's $100 million pre money. And then they expect to get negotiate down to like 50 million or something. I'm like, this person is clearly insane. Like trustworthy and I don't want to be like a track record of doing just that. And it's like very public.

I mean, yeah, look, Trump, he wrote, he wrote the art of deal is great deal maker, whatever. I still don't like the strategy. I think it sucks. What about just like being a fair and honest broker? You know, like what about that? Yeah. Yeah, that's totally fine. Yeah Uh, does trump launch another crypto project while in office? Well, are you uh, Are you or you think he's he's had enough? So he's launched what four five in close to six if you count october milani. Oh, yeah four since october

Six if you count over Milani. Oh, yeah four since October So there's world Liberty five there's Trump coin. There's one a coin There's the reserve which kind of is a project is there's probably something else that I'm forgetting sure NFTs is Trump enough teas two editions actually not just one edition To be clear because I know a lot of the whole is the first edition of the Trump NFT They're very upset at the second edition. Okay Because I know a lot of the whole is the first edition of the Trump NFT. They're very upset at the second edition. Okay Delusion and the Trump NFT No inflated supply no inflation, but when you issue a whole new batch, of course, you're gonna dilute

That was a problem with Milani too. I mean look if we extrapolate this it'll be 45,000 Trump's crypto projects by the end of this. They're growing exponentially. The supply of Trump crypto projects is growing exponentially. More broadly, where does crypto go from here? It feels like a very interesting moment because it's never had more attention. It's never had more users. It's never had more attention, it's never had more users, it's never had more adoption, right? Even with stable coins, things like that,

yet the vibes are bad, right? Like there's a, and the price action is not what you would expect out of the government saying, we're gonna start buying these assets. Where does it go from here? How are you thinking about it as an investor? I think markets are calling Trump's bluff. I actually don't think we're going to see a reserve. We might see a stockpile. I don't think we're going to see a reserve where we're using government

taxpayer funds, regardless of how they're accounted for, whatever accounting tricks they use. We're not going to see taxpayer funds used to buy crypto assets. That's crazy. Okay, that's not going to happen. Markets call it as bluff. Also, you know, risk markets are going crazy. Everyone's worried about the tariffs and inflation and, you know, recessionary signals, whatever that probably explains a lot of the sell-off to vibes are really bad in crypto because the big L1 launches of this year have not done well Meme coins are dead is a category

Even though we have sort of like emerging regulatory clarity around it like the retail bids just not there I think retail got hosed one too many times so they're just not willing to do that they don't want to buy the You know 30 billion dollar FTV hot new L one that Andreessen put $400 million into right? Nobody wants to do that. Okay, there's no ultimate bias. It's just PCs buying from other VCs now with a lot of these launches. So in terms of liquid tokens, yeah, like everyone's down bad, the cycle didn't happen. Bitcoin did well. Nothing else happened. There was no alt season, right? So the framework, people have this mental framework that's wrong, that cycle didn't happen. Bitcoin did well. Nothing else happened. There was no alt season, right? So the framework people have this mental framework That's wrong that cycles have to happen in a certain way and they happen every four years and it plays out like this It didn't happen like that In terms of like actual usage of blockchains like it couldn't be better stable coins are taking over all of fintech all of global finance all banking remittances B2B you know international trade settlement like my corner of the world the little stable coin corner where it couldn't be happier but most people in crypto don't

care about that the coins matter and the coins might be dead for a generation here so. Yeah how are you thinking about net new stable coin investments? Where are the opportunities? Obviously, anywhere that money, you know, Fiat moves today is an opportunity for stables. But there's now been a bunch of teams sort of tackling, you know, these various areas for a while.

Are you making a lot of net new kind of pure stable coin bets? Are you kind of letting your bets ride? Yeah, I have wires going out for two new stable coin related deals this week. So we're at 19 now in our portfolio, I believe. If you if you look at the stable coin stack, I don't know how exciting this is, but you know, there's the issuers, then there's like the infrastructure like the intermediaries like the B2B stablecoin startups. Then you have like consumer, which are like fintechs built on stables. The issuer game is like immensely competitive and the domain of banks and consortia now. So like, and also basically no one's ever created a new stable coin issuer from scratch done. Well except for probably Athena I mean tether and circle dominate so that one's very hard the B a B stable coin payments like the PSP stable coin based

PSP thing Immensely commoditized. There's a hundred new bridges right? Everybody wants to be the next bridge Very very competitive very hard to be thin margin. I'm looking at weird stuff like the banking layer itself. Like, how do you incorporate stable coins into the core banking infrastructure? We're still looking at regional fintechs that have a stable coin angle. Like that's very interesting to me. But so you're looking for modes like that would be more of like maybe regulatory driven mode or local network effects, something like that.

But yeah, I think just like tossing checks into the next bridge that that's probably be losing strategy is is trade by even trying to move to stable coins in a meaningful way? Like in AI, you know, we see, yeah, chat GPT is dominant, but there's Gemini and, and Copilot from Microsoft and every hyperscaler has their products baked in. Is Western Union thinking about working on this or is it just, you know, just completely the trains just passing them by because it's more complex from the regulatory perspective I would say the major fintechs Non-bank fintechs are very interested. They're looking at making acquisitions Sure, the remitters are either being disrupted by stable coin remitters or building their own

So for sure that's happening there the big credit cards Like Visa and MasterCard are pretty active like the big global payments networks Are I would say all looking at it? the last bastion those banks the domestic banks foreign banks are actually doing a lot of stable coin stuff depending like look at so it's Jen or standard chartered doing a lot of stable coin stuff, depending like look at the source, Jen or, um, standard chartered, uh, tons and tons of stable coin stuff. The domestic banks have PTSD from what happened over the last two years with choke point. They are very afraid. Um,

I think many of them would like to be in the business of either issuing a stable coin or being a service provider for stable coin being the first mile. Um, that's going to take a lot provider for stable coin, being the first mile, um, that's going to take a lot longer. They're, they're still afraid that the fed is going to destroy them if they so much as think about stable coins. Is it shifting from like regulatory arbitrage to more just like, I don't know, like, yeah, yeah, whatever the inverse of fear, like boldness, courage, arbitrage. Like if you're, if you're courageous, there's an opportunity right now.

I think so. I think so. I think so. That's good. That feels good. There's still a reg orb, actually. I mean, that's why people say reg orb to mean crime. Like I don't see it that way. A lot of like fintech thought leaders on Twitter

will say that, like, oh, you're just doing a reg orb. You're just a. Yeah. Stable coin. There will be questions asked of how stable coins work from a KYC and surveillance perspective. That's actually not settled. That's a big gray swan hang of the industry. People don't really talk about much grace. Well, I've heard that term before. I like that. It's like a black swan, but some of us know about it. It's a known it's a known unknown Not a unknown unknown. Yeah, great. Yeah, cool like that What other gray swans are out there?

Yeah, grace want to your top five gray swans and crypto or just in general in general. I Only know about crypto. So I'm gonna limit my okay. That's quite tether is the top gray swan and crypto Some kind of explain that we have some crypto investors and entrepreneurs in the audience But I would say it's not the average. Why is tether so sketchy? I know the answer, but I'll let you kind of explain Yes, I mean, you know they made they did some like let's say light accounting fraud in the past you know They were hacked for 850 million dollars and then they Are bitfinex was was a bitfinex or tether. Anyway, they commingled their balance sheets

Yeah, there was like a weird ersatz promissory note alone type thing I mean look they're just an offshore dollar that serves people that want dollars on the blockchain in a kind of lightly surveilled way outside of the contours of the U S banking system. So of course they're going to be used by a lot of insolubrious people. That's all that was always going to happen. And, uh, you know, so the Wall Street Journal is always going to be digging up examples of kind of nasty criminal use. And there's only so much activity

they can flag and freeze. So that's really it. Obviously, the reserves have been questionable in the past. I think they're fine now. But they have gone crazy. And they're fine because even if they got hacked for $850 million, they just make so much money that presumably they would be able to cover the hole in the balance sheet. Is that the idea? Well that they could do today

Yeah, I mean the reason the hack was they were forced into it because no US bank would really serve them So they had to use these sketchy banks and one of them scammed them basically so like the sketchiness it like the Fact that they've been sketchy is also kind of a function of the fact that the DOJ is like chasing them around Yeah, yeah, because they're like forced to use some of the worst intermediaries on the planet if that makes sense Yeah, now they've been able to legitimate themselves now. They've canter Fitzgerald. They hold all the treasuries like that's probably fine But in the past that's that's like the thing that people don't understand about tether the reason that they looked sketchy Sketchy and they like wouldn't disclose what banks are using whatever they were on transparent

Was kind of because they were playing this cat-and-mouse game with the US government That makes sense any other great swans. Oh well, if coinbase is custody set up it Any other great swans? Oh, well, if Coinbase's custody set up, it gets hacked or anything happens. They custody hundreds of billions. They were really the main custodian for all the ETFs. That would be like absolutely catastrophic for the industry. I don't expect it to happen, but that's that'd be bad.

Yeah, is there? I'm curious if you're looking at businesses. There seems like some of the biggest opportunities in crypto outside of stable coins are just solving the security problem, right? And the lack of, you know, once funds are on chain, they can move around instantly, right? You know, we saw that with what's the firm that got hack for 1.4 billion? Two weeks ago, Bybit.

We saw that with Bybit, right? There's not a lot of recourse there. Is there opportunities around security and the sort of broader sort of like fat finger issue? We talked about this yesterday in the context of Citibank, accidentally sending, they're constantly sending money around sort of not actually sending dollars, but like these dollars are sort of appearing in client accounts. Are you looking at opportunities where software and can kind of like solve for that or is

that just going to be kind of ever present sort of risk in the industry? Yeah. So first of all, yes, cyber is actually one of our biggest investment themes on a go-forward basis So we we think that we've really under invested in like security in the crypto space Second of all what I think we should do is take crypto away from being a real-time gross settlement network Or like a bearer asset a digital bear asset and then make it more like the way that traditional finance works I know like people like Matt Levine are going to like make fun of me for saying that like, oh, you're just rebuilding traditional finance from scratch.

My answer to that is yes, that's exactly what we're doing. Okay. But instead of working with like fax machines or whatever, and like weird file transfer protocols that predate the internet, we're going to do it on a better substrate. And we're going to introduce this amazing thing called deferred settlement where you don't settle the payment instantly and in so doing you obtain scalability and you can't obtain recourse and So if we're able to create like pull payments as opposed to push You know all crypto payments are push that solves a lot of this problem if we create a messaging layer alongside the settlement layer

You know like that's what Swift is to wires writes the messaging layer alongside the settlement layer, that's what Swift is to wires, right? It's the messaging layer to the settlement layer. All of these structures that make traditional payments work and be safe and have recourse, they just don't exist in crypto. It's so weird. If you were to examine the crypto market from first principles, you'd be like, this is garbage nonsense. I don't know how anybody uses it.

I don't know how anybody trusts it. So yeah, it's just a matter of making it more like traditional payments and finance. So that's the next chapter here. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it takes away from, you know, we built an alternative to traditional financial rails and we did it in, you know, I say the collective we we did it in 15 years. And it's moving hundreds of billions of dollars around the world. And it's showing a lot of potential.

And I think it's totally, I think your point of view and I share this view is it's okay for just sort of making a better version of the sort of the legacy systems that are more internet native. So I love that point of view. Do you have anything else, John? This is great to have you. We'd love to have you as our resident cryptographer. I don't actually know any cryptography. Well, it sounds cool. And that's what this show is about. Cryptographer sounds like we're going to have them on the show to like crack people's passwords.

Which would be a fun segment. Yeah. Just don't ask me to explain it. See gay proof. I can't do that. I'm sorry. It's impossible. No one can actually. Did any of the, did that dark forest game go anywhere? People were pretty hyped on that for a while. Uh, was that like a paradigm thing? I don't know. I, I, it was like a couple of years ago. Uh, it was ZK proof powered, uh, like multiplayer online game and the, and the map, like the fog of war is cryptographically sealed. So

I can both run source installations. We know we're not hacking. It was kind of a cool idea in general, crypto rule of thumb. If you asked me, did that crypto game go somewhere? The answer is no. And that's true 100% of the time. It's never not been true. Yeah. So there's the answer. Yeah. What's interesting is that, uh, I mean, did, uh, what was the thing you were talking about with GPT to AI dungeon? Yeah. I haven't seen like, we have GPT-4.5 now and I'm still not seeing like dungeon games, AI generated games taking off. I see a lot of demos of people building games

with Claude code for example, or cursor, but I don't see a lot of people saying like, this game is completely AI generated and it's a mobile game and we're printing millions of dollars and it's working, it's like a business. It seems like somebody business. Um, it seems, it seems like somebody should have run with that or maybe they have. And I just, I'm not aware of it. I don't know if you've seen anything like that.

I think AI dungeon was popular because people could, people could just like jailbreak the game and then just use it as a conventional alum pre chat GPT. But now you can just use. So it was so magical. Interesting. Yeah. Um, but yeah, maybe this is the new benchmark like yeah can you make a good game with AI soup to nuts like that's what levels did right if you guys played his I haven't played have you played it yeah yeah I've like I I swim like a weird amount of time playing play a lot that's great there's a PMF or Die blimp ad in there.

Oh, you guys sponsoring it? PMF or Die has a blimp in the game. I think they did some corrupt bargain or something. And they did like a trade. No, I think Patty, one of the players, was so excited that he just said, I'm paying for this out of pocket. Oh, wow.

That's great. Very cool. Well, I think this answers your question. You can make a game with AI. Yeah. It's just, it's a horrible like flash game from the 2000s. But it's-

Hey, you're playing it. It's got your attention. Yeah. You're addicted. I know, they got me. It's a Skinner box. You can make a Skinner box. That's great.

Use a whale on the Peter game. On the levels IO, flying, flight simulator. That's great. It's terrible. It's a terrible game, but it's fun. You guys should get on there. I will go play it. We'll see you in the air.

Next time we're on, we'll all be playing at the same time. See you in the metaverse. Yeah, see you in the metaverse. Thank you for coming on, Nick. It's great to have you. Take care, guys. Bye bye. Talk soon.

It's a lot of fun. Apparently, levels is up to 58k MRR in about 14 days for this game. He's really ripping with this thing. According to Heskull in the chat. That's pretty good. It's funny because he has enough of an audience now that he can almost release anything

and hit metrics like that. That's great. It's sort of potentially warping the actual PMF. Who knows? Do we got a couple of posts we can run through well I mean we're inviting a Sequoia investor on and you know Sequoia is an investor in ramp So let's do a ramp ad there We go time is money save both easy use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place go to ramp.com to get started and

What oh there was news about core weave. They're buying weights and biases for 1.7 billion. Did you see this deal? I saw that weights and biases before I've I used to watch these videos called two minute papers. And they had this very interesting like professor who would have all these like funny turns of phrases. And he would, he would always say, hold on to your papers Whenever he saw some like AI breakthrough and he had a bunch of other like funny funny like little phrases that everyone would like he had a great community of like just

Giving you updates on like what the latest AI papers are and and weights and biases was like his main sponsor And that's where I know about them So weights and biases they have paid tools to start for $50 per month for professionals, have attracted data scientists from various industries, including pharmaceuticals and medical imaging firms. It's more than 900,000 users hail from companies, including OpenAI, Siemens, and Salesforce.

And so CoreWee is expected to IPO at a public market valuation north of 20 billion. But it's concentrated customer base has prompted investors to debate how long the company's growth will continue. Weights and Biases competes with major cloud providers and other AI focused firms such as Databricks, Hugging Face, which sells similar tools to developers. Weights and Biases are common terms in the AI field.

The revenue, the information couldn't figure out the revenue, but they raised at a billion dollar valuation in 2021. And then 1.25 billion slight up round in 2023. Company started in 2018 and previously raised 250 million in funding from investors, including Co2 management, insight partners, and Felicis. I can never pronounce that. Felicis, is that what it is? Yeah.

I don't know. I think you got it at the end. Well, let's see about Sean. Let's see, it's 1231. I'm here, I'm here, what's up boys? Amazing, welcome to the show. I'm scared to pop on with you guys. You guys are wittier than me, and that's unfair territory.

Well, oh, I love the t-shirt. Counter-Strike? I could do it. I figured you guys would like this one. I... What versions of Counter-Strike did you play throughout the years? So I was unbelievably hardcore, and... Yes.

I mean, I played early, but primarily one point out of one point six, one point. Oh, I started one point three. I was one point six multiple Cal invite teams. Cal baby. Did you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like God's exiled angels. G X a. I don't remember. And then E E K the elite nights for a while. I was on a bunch of these teams. I remember, I remember D E K I was, I mean, I'm probably older than you. Yeah. I was on a team called HTTP high tech performance. One called neg. Did you ever go to the CPL? Of course I went. I could never go. I could never convince my parents to go. Cause I was too young. Yeah. And they're like, what are you doing? Lugging a CRT monitor out to Texas.

No way. Exactly. In the Volvo station wagon. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I, and I was too young. Yeah. They were like, what are you doing? Lugging a CRT monitor out to Texas. No way. Exactly. In the Volvo station wagon. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I, and I would go to a lot of tournaments and so Cal is the best. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember going to a best buy a tournament at a best buy and we played against this team called, uh, what was it? It was these guys made one of the, uh, the protocols before a 3G. There were two different wireless protocols. I forget what they were called. I mean, I think, I can't remember the timing.

Maybe 1G was primarily TMA, like the original time division multiplexing. That's right. TMA was primarily like CDMA. CDMA, yeah. So we go up against these guys. And their clan tag like CDMA. CDMA. Yeah. So we, so we go up against these guys and their, and their clan tag is CDMA. And we're like, why, what,

what does that stand for? Like, it is like, you know, cool guys, you know, like everyone, everyone's name usually is like something, a reference to like the game. And their name was like, was like this reference to this wireless protocol. And we were like, why did you name it that? And they're like, well, we're the guys that invented that. And like, we're the founders of the company or something that did something. They absolutely destroyed us.

They were really, really good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They were like Qualcomm engineers, basically. And so they destroy us. And then they felt so bad because we were like 13 years old that they gave us the prizes, which is great. So there was when I first started playing the best team in the world was called TSO and they were based in Seattle. And they were like, I never met them because I was a little kid at the time, but they were described as like telecom engineers too, but they were more on, I think more on the infrastructure

side. Like they, like they would actually build the early fiber connections and stuff. And so, I mean, that was how you got an advantage back then. Like if you could figure out a better internet connection, you would have an advantage every time you played. And so I got an F in algebra two in high school, but I, but I got a networking education through counter-strike. Yeah. Fantastic. Uh, well, I don't know. Are we live guys? We, we are live. We've been alive. Uh, anyway, Sean McGuire's here. Partner. It's yeah, we're live. I'm so glad we didn't have like a Zuck moment. Zuck was on Rogan and he was like, pretend he was LARPing. Like he does like

bow hunting and like Joe Rogan started kind of pressing him on it. Like John's asking you like, Oh, you got the counter-strike t-shirt and like you actuallyan started kind of pressing him on it like John's asking you like oh you got the counter-strike T-shirt and like you actually could like back it up But like of course like of course like actually didn't have much substance behind it I'm sure he had it, but no man you're live super excited to chat. There's been yes Elon companies, that's what we want to dive into yeah first of all we are a show built on X Take a little victory lap on X you invested in a take private.

$800 million, guys, and no victory laps until it's exited in liquid. But there has been some saving of democracy that's been happening. No, and the bigger the bigger thing is, you know, I think around six months ago, there had been, you know, legacy media like the Washington Post, basically reporting, coming out and saying, Sequoia Capital and listing out all the investors have lost $20 billion on this investment. Now, that obviously wasn't, you know, true. It wasn't, it had been, I think, marked down internally

and some of the other asset managers had, but it was more so to kind of reprice it for employees. And, you know, it's very clear that in many ways, there's two things happening right now. One, people that used to be active on Twitter that are less active now, they message us and they say like, I'm shadow man. I'm Bruce Guy Social.

Yeah, yeah. But I think the app has never been better. Yeah. And it's very clear that it's here to stay. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of credit there. You never lost conviction. I mean, no, on that, I never lost conviction. A lot of people did.

And I think that people. People are very susceptible to believe in what they're told. And I think if you believed what you were told by the media, then you could understand, oh, it's dead. But if you use your own eyes, it's like the whole thing is operating, no major outages, Elon the helm, product innovation happening and like lowering costs. I honestly found that to be one of the more interesting, like cultural mass hysteria moments that I've lived through. And that was just so easily disprovable

in a short period of time, but you know, teach your own. I'm glad you only had to wait a couple of years. It would have been more excruciating if it had taken much longer to get repriced. There's so many different things we wanna run through today. I'd love to get kind of repriced. There's so many different things we want to run through today. I'd love to get your, you know.

Can we run through your guys' style? Like how are you guys so well dressed? Well, we had to come out the gates. We were calling ourselves, you know, tech bro is sort of derogatory. We were the technology brothers. We needed to kind of reclaim it, elevate it. And part of that was dressing nice.

But you've had your sort of hands across the whole sort of Elon empire. Obviously, you have a relationship with Elon. I kind of want to go company by company and just kind of get your take on them. Right now, I think Tesla is very interesting. It's not a pure play humanoid bet, but it does feel like humanoids

are the next platform for Tesla, especially when you look at sort of generalized EV sales for Tesla have not been performing great. Talk about kind of the humanoid market. I'm sure you've gotten pitched by a lot of these companies. I'm guessing you're still a Tesla shareholder, but talk to us about that category because it seems to have everybody's attention for good reason. So let me first of all, I work at a registered investment advisor.

None of this financial advice is my own entertainment. Also not the opinion of Sequoia Capital. This is all the dumb individual. Sean McGuire. It's a poster. Nonsense. And also we're not investors in Tesla, just given the timing and that it was public where, you know, major investors in SpaceX, investors in Boring Company, investors in X, investors in XDI. And I love all those companies and very optimistic about all of them.

On humanoids, look, I strongly believe it's going to be a real thing and a giant thing. I think the only question is like the timeframe for when this happens. I don't think it's an if, I think it's a it's an if I think it's a when I really struggled to make a forecast there in part because there's such a complex supply chain and there's like there's just so so many different sub components from you know my partner Constantine has spent a lot of time thinking about rare metals and getting different rare earths for making magnets, all the way to scaling manufacturing, to just every individual sensor, every actuator. I really just don't know the scaling of it, but I was at the Tesla Optimus event.

I can't remember when, maybe it was a few months ago or whatever, and it was more impressive in person than I think people realized online. Like I was just standing there in the street, is at some studio in LA, and you're just standing there, and all of a sudden like 20 robots started walking out from behind a curtain, like right next to me. And I think it's one thing when you just like see a robot video. It's another thing when you see like a tethered robot demo to see 20 untethered robots walking in like a progression. And I genuinely couldn't tell at first if it was

human in a costume or a robot. And I had to like figure out how do I verify because it's about the same size and they were maybe 20 feet away when they first started coming out. And so I was like scanning down the whole thing. And then you look at the waste and the waste was very narrow. It's like, holy crap, you know, that really is a robot just walking. And they were out there for about two hours

interacting with the crowd. And like, even if there was like some human control for safety reasons and all of that, the vast majority of actuation and all that was autonomous, you know, meaning like the, whenever you have multiple actuators, you get feedback loops of, you know, all these things. And like you can't, no human can, can like put out, handle all the like feedback loops intuitively. And so you need controllers that smooth out all the noise and like can map whether it's like a computer brain that's telling you the goal or a human telling you the goal mapping. It's almost like with computers how you take raw electronic signal in transistors

and then there's like, you have very, very low level programming. You know, and then you have, you know, you have like, you have assembly, you have, you know, firmware, you have operating system, you have, you know, higher level systems, you have all these things up to Q. It's like everything other than maybe the final operating system level was everything else was basically autonomous. And it was insanely impressive. And so it really gave me the sense of the stuff that's coming soon. I just don't know exactly when. And look, I think that for Elon, he is playing all the different angles of AI from, you know, foundation model with XAI to two robots, which I think will be like the ultimate embodiment of like the combination of if you have a GI plus a robot, that's what lets you do kind

of on the unlimited amounts of physical work in the real world. The foundation model lets you do kind of unlimited just knowledge work. And then, Neuralink lets you merge with the AI if we actually get like AGI that's way smarter than us, maybe existential for humans. But if you, if we have Neuralink, we can merge, just put the AGI in your own head and now you're, you know, an enhanced human. You know,

we're back to playing Counter-Strike. Me and you are going to be piloting Tesla Optimus robots against each other. Shoot each other. Like no human can beat the chess systems, but it's still fun to play chess. You still have Magnus. Yes. You got, you know, Heroku or whatever his name is. You know, we're still going to be tearing each other up at the LAN. And I think we'll be doing more of that with AGI. Do you think it's a good time for me to put a deposit down on a Tesla roadster?

I think I think Elon might deliver it. I think we've been waiting, but all the pieces are falling into place. I think it's going to be an epic car when it drops. What do you think? I actually have to be careful around any public company. No comments on any. I just want to deal with the car. Yeah, let's move on. So let's talk some of your recent investments. So talk to us about Reflect Orbital. That round got announced last year. Very exciting company. I would love to hear it in your words, and then a little bit more about your investment thesis,

and I'll stop there. No, I love it. So for anyone that doesn't know, reflect orbital is an absolutely insane idea where they want to eventually have a constellation of satellites that reflect sunlight back down to the Earth with two phases of the business. The first phase is lighting applications.

And that's everything from like, imagine the LA fires, firefighters operating at night, couldn't see anything. It's genuinely really difficult to fight a fire at night and be able to just like put sunlight and let these guys operate almost in daylight, say in a disaster when there's a hurricane, like the hurricane in North Carolina or anywhere, there's lighting or let's say you're doing a giant construction project, somewhere away from the city, the lighting costs on these projects are insane.

And so basically let you extend the hours, especially like in Northern latitudes, let you actually like do construction more year round. But the longer term market is energy. And you know, I'll come back to like the thesis and why I was willing to make this investment in a second. But basically, the real, the crazy big business someday is extending the useful time of solar power plants by a few hours a day. So it depends on the latitude and time of year, but a solar farm will operate with decent efficiency, call it 10 hours a day

on average, something like that. And by having this reflector ring that basically lives kind of the satellite is a ring that basically the constellations are ring that basically only lives at the interface of sunrise and sunset all the time, like just the light dark boundary. And you can basically extend the very high efficiency time of a solar farm by, you know, call it two hours before sunrise and two hours after sunset with this constellation. So anyways, insane idea. constellation. So anyways, insane idea. I have been involved in the space community for, I mean, officially for over 15 years, unofficially for most of my life. I've been obsessed with space since I was a little kid, like literally obsessed. I can show you guys

a sick ass video from, I think like sixth grade where I did this thing called satellite amateur radio experiment, SAR-X, which was this NASA program, sick retro nineties video where we learned ham radio and talked to astronauts aboard one of the shuttle missions, you know, using ham radio, I got to ask a question in sixth grade. It was pretty, pretty fun, but I've been obsessed with space my whole life. I've been skeptical on basically every space business model I've ever seen. Um, the reflect guys, there's a few things. One, I just profoundly believe that the

launch costs, launch costs plus a bit like mass to orbit over the next five years or so is going to increase. The costs are going to drop dramatically and mass orbits going to increase dramatically. Basically guaranteed SpaceX is driving this. If you look at the mass to orbit curves from the last five years, like it's incredible how much more mass to orbit we're doing every year because of SpaceX. The cost hasn't dropped as much, but I am very confident it will with Starship. And so we're getting to the point where like you don't want to start making space investments once all of that has already happened.

Like then you're late and it's competitive. You want to be a little bit ahead of the curve. So I think we're at a point right now where for like the right businesses, it makes sense to be building them right now. So you can actually like be alive and be scaling a little bit as we hit. Like you know, you can ride with the cost and mass curve. For what it's worth, I passed on Varta early on. Obviously you guys are very close to Deleon. I love Deleon. I think I should have done the investment.

And I'll tie it to reflect in a second. But with Varta, in my opinion, in the seed pitch, I think they had the wrong micro idea, but the right macro idea. And it was my mistake for wanting both the right micro and the right macro. And to unpack that, like with Dellian, the first product that they wanted to do was ZB land. It's like this ultra pure, you know, fiber optic cables that are really good for

very long range communications. To me, I just don't think that's a very important product. And I actually think that with Starlink, we're going to need very little like ZB land in the future, almost all long range data movement in the future is going to be done via Starlink. In my opinion, I think Starlink has like a 10 X plus cost advantage per gigabyte for long haul data transmission compared to say putting a fiber optic cable line under the ocean. And that's where you actually get a benefit from something like ZB land. And so anyways, Dylan, I love to argue with each other. Super smart guy.

That's the one where I had been so involved in space for so long that I already had a piece on ZB land and already thought it was like irrelevant with Starlink and kind of passed because of that. But the macro I think was a hundred percent right. I'm just like, we're at the right time in space and just building in a cracked team of space engineers that know how to get things in and out of space. I think that will be very valuable. I think it's hard to imagine what Varta's revenue driving product will be in five to

ten years, but I think they will have a successful product. I just can't tell you what it will be. So anyways, back to reflect, I've met with so many space teams in the past and these guys, they're just insanely good. And they have a real, even though it's such a crazy idea, I think the best businesses in history oftentimes sounded like insane ideas early on. You know, Sequoia was seed investor in Airbnb. The, like, hearing the stories of how people thought about Airbnb in the beginning, like, it's crazy. People were like, I would never share my house with a stranger.

They're gonna trash it. They're gonna use all my toilet paper, whatever people's issues were. But lo and behold, it worked. And Sequoia made a huge amount of money from this and they couldn't even raise the seed round. If you look at SpaceX, when Elon started it, everyone thought he was insane. Like you're an internet entrepreneur who's going to build a rocket company. Isn't there NASA for

that? I think so many of the best businesses in history really sounded insane. But for Reflect, if you really go through the details, and I think very few people have actually gone through the details, they have unbelievable macro tailwind. So one is just dropping launch costs. Second is I don't think you could have done this business 10 years ago, even if the launch was there, because we haven't yet built enough solar power plants on the ground. Something that's nice to reflect is we don't have to build any of the ground. Something that's nice for Reflect is they don't, we don't have to build any of the ground infrastructure, zero. There's already, you know, called 10,000 solar power plants.

And so we get to leverage that. Anyways, you go. Is the idea that Reflect would take basically a rev share on the incremental sort of energy generated that they are directing at these farms? And is that why? Yeah, exactly right. So basically, like for one of these solar farms,

there is almost no additional operating expense to operate for these extra, call it, four hours throughout the day. It's literally just like silicon photovoltaics sitting on the ground that is otherwise just not generating power. And so it's like, either they get no revenue from this, or if they work with us, then they get revenue.

And it actually has very profound ramifications to the kind of financial engineering of running a solar farm. A lot of these utility style infrastructure projects, you basically juice it where you use debt to build the solar farm. And your revenue is, if you recall it, the first 15 years is just paying off all the debt you have.

And then years 15 to 30 is a lot of profit, but it takes a long time to get to the point where you're, you know, you've paid off a lot of the loan and it's generating lots of profit. If you can increase the useful time by 40% whatever of a solar farm, that's all profit upfront. It's insanely valuable. And so it's like an incredibly easy sale. So one of these things like if you build it, they will come and they will come in droves.

But the point is, this company would have made zero cents before there were 10,000 solar farms on the ground because building each of that, we couldn't build those ourselves. It'd be too expensive. But now that they're there, we have just this very clear value prop. And I think these guys actually know how to build the satellites needed. And it was just an easy idea to shit on. And it may not work, you know, like the. But I believe in taking risk.

And I think these guys are excited for I want to sit outside at night, set up our podcast set. You come over and the sun just appears. We do the, you know, the first podcast under space sunlight. I love it. Question for you, I think it's easy to see why SpaceX is a multi-hundred billion dollar company in many ways that feels cheap at times

being the sort of toll road to space. At the same time, how do you advise, feels cheap at times being the sort of toll road to space. At the same time, is there any type of fear among founders that are building space fairing startups that, what if SpaceX does this? So you're benefiting from the sort of decreased launch cost. But at the same time, there's this risk that somebody that, you know,

can has even more access to space can sort of enter that market. How do you think about that risk? Well, I think that, I think that Elon has probably the biggest target on his back from a regulatory perspective of anyone. And there's no one I'm aware of who takes antitrust and all that more seriously than him. And I think that those guys are going to, they're just building the best launch platform in the

world and they probably will launch some other business like obviously they launched Starlink, but I think it is also a fixation on on Mars that's sort of helpful right it's like it's actually great that the And you know attention is going there and and there's plenty of opportunity and sort of low Earth orbit for the rest of us. Yeah, so I think that's a great point. Look, I think SpaceX is deeply incentivized to have a giant ecosystem of lots of great independent companies in space, and I think especially in LEO. And yeah, you're right. I mean, I think the focus is going to be Mars in addition to Starlink, which is already operating and scaling and on Mars, I'll just say, I was, I mean, I've always thought just from an intellectual perspective, it's the coolest thing ever to build a city on Mars. But like,

when I wrote my initial SpaceX investment memo, you know, it's like, yeah, I don't really understand Mars from a business perspective, but I think this is going to be such a great company. Irrespective of it, it's fine. It's a side quest from a business perspective. I am now at the point where I really believe that Mars is going to be one of the biggest profit generating endeavors in history. And not necessarily, not like from the direct, like building a city on Mars, but from all the indirect things. And I'm sure you guys remember all the myths about, or, you know, all the stories about

NASA and the sixties and seventies, all the spin-off technology, microwaves, materials, and all these different things. And I think the spin-off technologies from having a clear goal of building a self-sustaining city on Mars, which will have about a million people or whatever in 30 years, the spin-off technology is going to lead to, it's probably going to have to make sure that nuclear power plants in a box get built that are very safe and reliable and you can transport in space, gonna have to perfect vertical farming, you know, gonna have to perfect surgical robots gonna have to, you know, or just have optimists

do it. But you know, there's so many things gonna have to make fabs that you can like assemble in space that can remake whatever, you know, leading edge silicon you need, gonna have to do mining. I think all the second order effect spin out businesses that are gonna come from this are gonna be outrageously valuable. And there's something about when you have a clear goal

and all the constraints of like being in Mars, one, it lets you recruit the best people in the world because it's such a cool project and the best people will do more than the second, like a level below. And the second is just having all these constraints forces you to come up with solutions you would never come up with otherwise.

And those are oftentimes better solutions. So anyways, I think we're gonna, I think the company is just gonna rip. We have one more minute. I want some advice for new entrepreneurs. New grad wants to work with you, wants to work with Sequoia, wants to start a company at some point. What are you telling them?

You had a little bit of an uncommon path PhD, DARPA, all these things. What do you, what do you recommend for new grads going into entrepreneurship in the age of AI, in the age of Mars colonization? I mean, look, I, it's not what people want to hear, but I think that if you don't have a very, very clear idea, don't, don't start a company just for the sake of starting a company, go join and go join SpaceX or Joe, go join XAI or Tesla or, or, you know, some, um, go join Varda, go join some amazing company for a year or two. I strongly, I strongly think that's better than just like trying to start a company for

the sake of starting a company. Um, and then when you do, like when you do have an idea for company, don't listen to what other people tell you. Even, even me, even like VCs, you got it. You got to kind of think for yourself and a lot of the best ideas seem crazy. Any other questions? Send great place to add. You are a new resident space brother. Thank you.

Great. Having you. I'm this is fantastic. Nothing makes me happen. I'm being your guys brother. Music for my ears. Please welcome. Welcome to the brotherhood. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks. We're going to play Counter Strike someday. We should. We should. Let's have a late party. Yeah. Yeah. Have a good

one. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having you. Fantastic. I got a call right now. Yeah, we got to wrap up. This was a fantastic show. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Tune in tomorrow. We're doing more Collins, we're going to do more timeline more deep dives. We're just doing more of everything. That's the theme of this year. More and better and more and better and more and better and more and better. Moss. It's the live moss lifestyle. Liv moss lifestyle. Yes. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Talk to you soon.