TBPN Live - Soham Parekh Exclusive Interview | Chris Miller, Aaron Ginn, Bridget Harris, Pryce A. Yebesi, Jacob Rintamaki, Auren Hoffman, Mehran Jalali, Kushal Byatnal, Avlok Kohli, Nico Christie, Flo Crivello
Episode Date: July 3, 2025(04:05) - Soham Parekh, an Indian software engineer, has been accused by multiple U.S. startup founders of simultaneously working at several companies without disclosure, leading to his termi...nation from firms like Playground AI and Antimetal. In a recent conversation, Parekh admitted to his actions, attributing them to financial difficulties and expressing regret for his decisions. He emphasized his commitment to focusing solely on his new role at Darwin, an AI-driven video platform, and discussed his plans to rebuild trust within the tech community. (35:31) - Top Stories (42:21) - Nat Friedman Confirms His Start at Meta (01:05:12) - Chris Miller, an economic historian and author of "Chip War," discusses the historical and ongoing global competition in semiconductor technology, emphasizing its critical role in military and economic power. He highlights China's extensive investments to reduce reliance on imported chips, particularly from Taiwan, and examines the strategic implications of U.S. export controls and the challenges in enforcing these regulations. Miller also explores the complexities of China's semiconductor industry, noting the mix of market-driven competition and state intervention, and the difficulties in replicating advanced chip manufacturing capabilities due to the intricate and capital-intensive nature of the industry. (01:38:12) - Aaron Ginn is a writer and entrepreneur known for his work on technology and innovation. In his recent article, he argues that robots will democratize luxury by making services once exclusive to the wealthy accessible to the general public, thereby enhancing the quality of life for average Americans. He emphasizes that, like past technological advancements, robots will follow a pattern of starting as luxuries for the rich before becoming widespread, ultimately benefiting society as a whole. (02:00:45) - Bridget Harris, an Associate at Founders Fund with a background in early-stage crypto investments from her time at Pantera Capital, discusses the decentralized nature of the crypto industry and the significance of stablecoins as a key development within it. She highlights the challenges posed by stablecoins to traditional banking systems, emphasizing their potential to disrupt financial institutions by offering safer, one-to-one backed alternatives to conventional bank deposits. Additionally, Harris touches on the complexities of tokenizing equities, noting that while it serves as a regulatory workaround for delivering U.S. equities to international investors, it may be less compelling for domestic markets where traditional systems are already effective. (02:13:40) - Pryce Yebesi, co-founder and CEO of Open Ledger, introduces his company, which provides an embedded accounting API enabling vertical SaaS platforms to integrate comprehensive accounting suites without building a general ledger from scratch. He discusses the challenges businesses face with fragmented financial data and how Open Ledger's APIs and components simplify embedding full accounting functionalities into products, enhancing efficiency and user experience. Yebesi also highlights the role of artificial intelligence in automating bookkeeping tasks, reducing the need for human intervention, and positioning Open Ledger as a transformative solution in the embedded fintech space. (02:21:47) - Jacob Rintamaki, a Stanford student and early supporter of AI art, discusses his collaboration with artist Ophira on creating artwork using large language models like ChatGPT. They have launched a platform, beautiful.aiart.com, to sell AI-generated art, achieving initial sales and planning to expand by adding more artists. Additionally, they mention a forthcoming documentary by Grimes and filmmaker Matt Zien, focusing on AI artists and their interactions with AI models. (02:31:41) - Auren Hoffman, an American entrepreneur and investor, is the CEO of SafeGraph and co-founder of LiveRamp. In the conversation, he critiques venture capitalists for not adhering to the ambitious advice they give to startups, highlighting their reluctance to take their own firms public, merge with others, or maintain single leadership structures. He contrasts this with private equity firms, which he views as more ambitious and proactive in scaling their businesses. (02:40:25) - Mehran Jalali, a tech entrepreneur and AI startup founder, discusses his recent project using lidar technology to uncover ancient Mayan civilizations hidden beneath dense rainforests in Belize and Mexico. By flying planes equipped with powerful lidar scanners, his team has identified previously unseen pyramids, buildings, and extensive road networks, revealing structures unseen for over a millennium. Jalali emphasizes the importance of integrating technology into archaeology, aiming to expand these efforts to scan larger areas and explore other regions like the Amazon and coastal areas to uncover submerged cities. (02:50:47) - Kushal Byatnal, co-founder and CEO of Extend, discusses his company's recent $17 million funding across seed and Series A rounds, which will accelerate their mission to transform unstructured documents into structured, validated data using AI-powered solutions. He highlights Extend's platform, built on large language models, that delivers over 95% accuracy in processing complex documents, including degraded scans and handwritten forms. Byatnal also emphasizes the platform's ability to handle various document types, such as PDFs and Excel files, and its application in industries like healthcare, finance, and supply chain, where accurate data extraction is critical. (03:07:30) - Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList and a serial entrepreneur, discusses the surge in venture capital activity during Q2, highlighting increased M&A and IPOs leading to significant returns for limited partners, which are being reinvested into emerging and micro VCs. He notes a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase in LP dollars flowing into these smaller funds, attributing this to a cycle of liquidity and renewed optimism in the venture ecosystem. Kohli also addresses misconceptions about the decline of emerging managers, emphasizing that real-time data from AngelList contradicts such narratives. (03:25:22) - Nico Christie, co-founder of Fundamental, introduces Shortcut, a superhuman Excel agent designed to enhance productivity by automating complex tasks within Excel. He highlights Shortcut's superior performance compared to existing tools like Gemini and Copilot, emphasizing its ability to generate code at runtime through a novel approach called Cogen. Christie also discusses plans to scale Shortcut's capacity to meet growing demand and shares insights into Fundamental's mission to develop digital humans with advanced cognitive capabilities. (03:32:54) - Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, an AI assistant platform, discusses the challenges of maintaining trust within Silicon Valley's culture, emphasizing the importance of ethical behavior and the potential consequences of compromising on ethics. He reflects on the necessity of building a company culture centered on customer obsession and excellence to ensure long-term success. Crivello also highlights the significance of human-centric collaboration software in the evolving landscape of remote work. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://a...
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You're watching TBPN.
Today is Thursday, June 3rd, 2025.
We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome,
the temple of technology.
The fortress of finance.
The capital of capital.
And we have some breaking news.
Soham Parikh, he was fired multiple times yesterday,
I believe.
He's been fired many times in his career.
The first person to be fired by five startups,
five plus startups in a day.
In a day, in a day.
The positive news, any-
Timeline exploded.
Any companies that he works for
that are predominantly on LinkedIn,
he's safe for at least a week.
Another payroll cycle will come through.
For sure.
And so there's a big debate raging.
Is he a scammer?
Is he a misunderstood builder?
How wrong was what he did?
The headline here, India-based engineer is accused
of juggling multiple jobs and misleading YC startups.
He defends his passion for building and lands a new role
in a video AI startup after online backlash.
Yeah, break it down.
Atlas says they hated Soham because he was profitable.
Probably was extremely profitable.
It is wild to think, you know,
if five plus companies came out yesterday
and, you know, realized they were all employing him,
how many others was he, is he actively working for
that just didn't happen to pop up on X that day?
Yeah, yeah, the only, it seemed like the,
what do they call it in manufacturing
where there's like the single rate limiting
piece of equipment is the one that you need
to like build everything else around.
Basically like there's some choke point
and for him it was probably like standups.
And so could he do 10 standups at the same time?
It's hard to juggle those.
But it seems like he got the numbers up there.
We've been hearing about this.
I bet you his TC was on average significantly higher
than the ARR of the companies that he would work with.
Wait, his personal TC across all the jobs.
Grouped.
Which you put as over two million.
Over two million, is my estimate.
I was thinking over one.
That's five. That's five.
Let's say TC 200K years in equity. Are we thinking like TC 200k cash on equity or counting the equity
as the thing is he interviewed very well. Yeah, I think pretty universally people were
impressed by him. Yep. He could easily go in and get you know 180k. Yep. For you know
cash comp and then you add some equity into that. I mean the big question Matt from anti
metal who had hired him over two years ago,
said that he was joking about how much equity
he'd actually left on the table over the years
because probably unlikely that he was hitting the cliff
with these companies.
That wasn't really the strategy.
Managed out so quickly.
The new CS grads, Ben Heilach, called out.
They are poor, poor CS grads.
Soham getting all of the jobs.
Well, the market is ripping.
Wow, Bitcoin's almost at 110, $110, $110,000.
So we are in white suits to celebrate the jobs news
and the market news.
We'll be doing a deep dive on the news
and doing our normal interviews in just a minute,
but we believe we have Soham Parikh joining the show
in about four minutes.
So we've been coordinating this,
but we will keep you up to date.
Hopefully it happens.
Go ahead and send it to us.
We can go through some other posts.
We have a post here from Anna Mostarek.
She says, the tech industry needs a,
are we dating the same guy group?
These are groups that pop up on Facebook
and things like that where people coordinate and see if you know girls see if they're dating the
same guy yeah clearly we needed something like that or we needed I think
the big question that that we were kind of debating is you know was he you know
a lot of these companies don't typically have something in there and their offer
letter that says you legally
cannot have other W-2 income.
Yeah, that's a big question.
Yet, he probably was signing full-time job offers, who knows.
So we'll have to dig into it with him, but we believe he's here in the studio with us
here, so welcome to the stream.
So Ham, good to meet you, how are you doing?
There he is!
Welcome, the man himself.
Thanks so much for joining.
Why don't you introduce yourself
and just take a few minutes to just give us
what's going on in your world,
what's the last 24 hours been like?
How would you describe yourself?
What do you have to say to people?
And then I'm sure we'll have questions.
Let's go back to the very beginning.
Who are you?
Where do you come from?
I mean, I'm originally from Mumbai.
I kind of grew up here all my life.
Obviously, drove into computer science,
like coding and everything,
kind of without a choice,
kind of process of elimination. Fell in love with it. As you're aware, coding and everything, without a choice, process of elimination.
Fell in love with it.
As you're aware, at this point, I'm
like everyone's favorite founding engineer,
pretty much, or worker 17, or whatever you might call it,
like AIbot or SOHOM as a service.
I don't know.
But yeah, don't have much to my story, essentially.
I've just been always passionate about building things.
Who was your first job?
My first job was actually at a company called Allen.
It was like a voice assisted conversational startup.
This is back in like 2020, 2021.
2020.
And when did you come to the States?
Because I know I was talking to Matt,
and he said you would go to the anti-mental off sites,
and you're very much a part of the team.
So to be honest, I have family in the East Coast.
The first time I ever visited US was in 2018.
And then I was supposed to do grad school there.
Different financial circumstances, couldn't do that.
Had to kind of not go with that plan.
But obviously, I have visited, uh, you know,
America mostly for like offsights and stuff, just to catch up with team members
and things like that. Um,
Okay. So the main claim, uh, that was levied against you on X yesterday,
uh, kind of started with Sue Hill over at playground.
He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously.
Is that true?
It is true. And yeah, I would love to add color to it, but that is true. Yeah. I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment
contracts or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?
I mean, honestly, I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what
the motivations were, would probably have, you know, obviously I would want to like preface
with saying like, I'm not proud of what I've done.
You know, that's not something that I endorse either. But financial circumstances, essentially,
no one really likes to work 140 hours a week.
But I had to do this out of necessity.
I was in extremely dire financial circumstances.
And somehow, I'm not a very people person.
I don't share much in terms of what's going on with my life.
And in my internal thought process, kind of getting more stressed with,
hey, I want to come out of the situation.
What should I do?
So it was not more so about greed, but essentially necessity.
And just thought that if I work multiple places,
I can basically help myself alleviate the situation.
I was in much faster.
No, it's very economically rational.
What about the conjecture that you had
a team of junior developers underneath you
helping you actually accomplish the tasks?
Is there any truth to that?
I wish I had the money and I wish that was true,
but that is not true.
Any of the founders that I worked with can watch with that.
I have multiple locations, like pair program with people.
I've written every single inch of the code.
Anti-Metal is one of the companies I worked at.
They have pretty high bar for design, as you might know.
They did a launch recently.
There were two occasions where just before the launch,
like the contractor who was
going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out.
And we as a team had to figure out and do everything, which was a team of only three
engineers.
So how did it originally happen, though?
You started with one job in 2020, then you realized, hey, I could add another, and then
you realized you could just continuously add them.
Did you create any type of financial models
to kind of model out potential churn as you would get?
I'm curious if you were operating this looking at it
as basically a SaaS business, the SaaS of Soham.
This was not a business to me.
Every company that I've worked with,
I've deeply cared about.
And again, people who spend a lot of time with me can like back
that on multiple locations.
The, and again, I did not have any financial model.
The, like I said, the only motivation for me was, Hey, you know, I'm in a financial
jeopardy, you know, so I didn't do this until 2022.
2022 is actually when I was, into issues. I had deferred
my grad school, admit, and did an online degree, but basically did not have enough, essentially
just to get out of the situation I was in. Don't want to talk too much deeply about it,
but...
No, no, that's fine. Yeah, so that's kind of why.
Talk about your own abilities.
It seemed universal that the teams that you worked on
said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed
incredibly well.
It's easy for new CS grads to be frustrated,
because you were probably running laps around them
in the interview process.
But yeah, it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a
junior team and you were just you know juggling you know it seems estimates
seem to put it at maybe five five companies at once yeah are you just are
you just like hyper productive are you leveraging AI tools and coding
assistance are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment
or are you also like talented in systems engineering and algorithms and solving really, really hard
computational problems? So I prefaced with this. Some of these companies I worked at was before the
copilot boom. There were no AI-assisted programming. At least three startups have
went on the record saying this. People who've programed with we can also watch with this. The real truth is there's this funny line in some of
my interviews like TLDR, I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true. And if you're
spending hours sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually, at least I hope so, get good
at it. There's obviously a lot for me to learn in general.
I wouldn't say I'm like a, I don't know,
what they call like a platform manager,
something like top principal or whatever,
but I would like to believe that I was a decently enough,
a good enough engineer to essentially be able
to work at three places because that's the only thing
I did the entire day.
So an average week for you,
it feels like basically maybe you sleep for six to eight
hours and then you're basically programming
for 12 to 14 hours every single day for seven days a week.
But as some of these new coding,
CodeGen tools came out, Claude Code, Cursor,
Devon, et cetera, did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs?
Were you getting more efficient or do you still handcrafted code, farm
to table, organic, you know, handmade?
Obviously, like, you know, having more like, you know,
AI assisted tooling like definitely have, but it did not amount to like me
working on more jobs because like I would still love to spend
you know a justifiable hour like working on something and it doesn't have like a measure
it's not like hey and I'm going to split time like four hours for this company for us with that
company like I was essentially like working until I got something done for that day and I think
people around me will probably say this that I am notoriously known for not sleeping.
I am a serial non-sleeper at this point is what I would say.
But yeah, and as far as the interviews go, right? So there's also been a lot of things around like, hey, I've probably used some sort of tool, like Clueli, which I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say, if I'm a paying customer, I'm not.
Or some sort of hack to game the system.
The truth is, a lot of these companies
did not have lead code style problems.
And if they did, I would have bombed interviews,
because I don't practice lead code as much.
I know my data structure as well.
I know what to use when, but typically a gun to my head.
Well, you're also great at cold email.
I saw some of these cold emails. You got a great
format. It pulls people in. It shows your personality. It shows that you care about
coding. And I think that helped a lot as well.
Totally.
Yeah. I mean, I do care about coding a lot, but again, most of these companies essentially
had a take-home assessment or a work trial? So it's very difficult to like game a work trial
or game a take home assessment.
Like you have to do it and then deliver it.
And I did everything on my own.
Like I was also doing the work trials on my own.
And yeah, like I guess I'll leave it at that.
If they did have lead court,
I would have bombed the interviews,
but luckily they didn't.
Like startups usually just like care more about like. What you're talking about, talk a have bombed the interviews, but luckily they didn't. Startups usually just care more about working with you.
Talk a little bit about the companies that you chose
to work for you applied to.
Do you think you could have pulled this off
with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and split three times?
Or do they have defenses in place
that would make this difficult?
There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies.
It's easier work, maybe startups are harder.
I'm just kind of curious about,
it seems like you went for a lot of startups.
What was the reasoning behind that?
Yeah, so it feels counterintuitive.
Like if I wasn't in need of money,
like why would I work for startups as opposed to big tech?
Because they clearly pay well,
they have a nine to five schedule. For the most part, like I would say work for startups as opposed to big time because they clearly pay well, they have a nine to five schedule.
For the most part, I would say people don't really care about what you are essentially
doing.
The thing with me is if you're spending multiple hours a week working on something, you would
have to at least be passionate about it because otherwise you'll just burn out.
Like I said, each of these companies
that I've worked for and again,
founders, some of the founders
who spent meaningful time with me can vouch.
Would say that I actually cared about these companies.
So it wasn't like cold email without context.
Like I deeply read into what a company was doing,
what the business model was,
who their customers were.
I had great ideas about like, what to build for them, what not to build for them, what the platform model was, who their customers were. I had great ideas about what to build for them,
what not to build for them, what the platform is like.
I did deliver beyond engineering
for a lot of these companies.
And yeah, it was more kind of like,
hey, if I'm spending 140 hours,
I wanna do something that I actually care about.
I don't wanna do nine to five
and kind of center a div in six hours or something.
That's just not me, because I do like what I do.
And that's kind of my job.
Cold email hack.
Send the cold emails from the heart.
Put some real thought into them.
Talk to me about other alternatives
that you maybe considered or maybe didn't.
Did you ever think about going to a startup
and saying like, hey, I'm doing a great job,
I'm working 40 hours a week, I need to make more money,
I'd like to take on a second job.
Would that be amenable to you?
Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?
Or say, I'm working 18 hours a day, can you pay me?
Can you pay me three times as much?
Can you pay me, yeah.
I'm doing the work of three devs,
because there is a world where you could have allocated
all that time and one startup would have gotten
three times as much value,
but they probably should have paid you three times as much
maybe to make that balance out.
And so did you ever have those types of decisions,
like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars,
the 10X, you can think of yourself
as like a three to five X engineer,, that's you know the hundred X engineers
Maybe be 10x if you just if you really focus yeah
Yeah, yeah
And so and so it's almost a question of like why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job?
What was what was the what was the stumbling block there?
Yeah, I think the part where you know have basically done is come clean with my situation.
To be very frank with you, like I mentioned, I'm not a good person with sharing what my
internal conflicts are.
I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private, whatever is going with me mentally.
And that's true with any person I'm with as well, that's outside of work.
So one, there was an embarrassment to essentially like admitting that, hey, you know,
I have this struggles mentally, you know,
like and talk in open about it.
And then the second thing is, you know,
I really did not like think through this
because like I said, it was an action that was done
more out of like desperation to get out of the situation
I was in rather than like it.
I mean, the flip side here is that you don't necessarily
need to have something going on in your family
to justify a $10 million salary or a $1 million salary.
Like LeBron James doesn't need to say,
oh, like, you know, I have a sob story
and that's why I need $50 million contract.
He's like, I'm delivering this value to you
and you should pay me the value that I'm creating.
And so I'm wondering if you ever considered
just coming to a founder and saying like,
I can do the job of three engineers
But you got to pay me three times as much
Honestly, I again feels counterintuitive like I don't really care much about the money
I was really into it for building so like greed was not like an incentive for me
Again, regardless of my financial circumstances in most of these companies. I always took the lower
You know pay a higher equity offer.
Again, like equity for me was not even like vested until I would make the move to US, which
like I said, you know, I was based out of India. So I had to go through a whole visa process in
order to make that happen. So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was
uncertain, which it was. So all of the decisions seem counterintuitive.
Basically for me it's like, hey, you know,
I have to do something to kind of get out of the situation
I'm in, I also want to do, spend time
like building something meaningful.
You know, as long as I like the startup
and as long as it's not like hand to mouth,
it did not matter too much, like, you know.
So what are you gonna do now?
You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem.
The and I appreciate how candid you've been with us.
And and I want to talk about the shop.
Yeah, I mean, there's a few angles here.
You could do the the dev shop of Soham Parikh.
I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately.
I think you could sign a maxed out contract with Cluely.
They would probably pay you a pretty penny
to join the team over there.
And also, it sounds like you're interested in joining
as a founding engineer of a new AI startup.
So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now,
and how can you turn this into a win?
Yeah, regardless of the situation,
I've been privileged to work with some of these companies,
like Antimetal, Shares and Mad, the founders, like Sync Labs,
Prady, Ruth of Bah.
They're one of the most crack faces
I've been at in general, partly because they had me.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
I can stand with that.
But I think the main thing is I am really excited about what
I'm going to be a part of next.
So working with a company called Darwin,
they are essentially building a new AI-driven data platform,
video platform, essentially, for more kind of UGC-style media.
And we're going to release to the market very shortly.
Um, this is the only thing I'm going to focus on.
Um, I think, you know, they've put a bet on me. I have a lot to prove.
Um, and there's, there's not a lot to say.
Yeah.
How do you rebuild trust?
How do you, how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just, you're
focused on it for a couple of weeks and then the second job a couple weeks and then the second job creeps in
and then the third job creeps in.
Is there something that you see happening
down the line around worker monitoring
or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in
or doing something to understand if someone else
is working multiple places?
Somebody was saying tech needs some sort of service
to see, hey, are we employing the same company?
How do you rebuild trust and guarantee
that you won't be working multiple jobs
against the will of the current employer?
So I think all of this that has taught me is,
this coming in kind of this makes people understand your situation
after all like we all are humans I don't anticipate like working on multiple
gigs again but you know my financial circumstances have not changed so if even
if it did came to them which it won't like right now I'm very clear that this
is my sole focus you know I would probably like approach with like being
very candid with the founders and just
letting them know. And if that's not a possibility, that's fine. Maybe I can figure a way out
where there is a higher pay or whatever, kind of like to your point. But in another spectrum
of the world, I think what I've really realized is that I just want to be a part of building something that I can
focus on the longer term.
And that's always been the goal.
It is always a goal with any of these companies I worked with.
So obviously, I believe in actions more than words.
I guess what we'll build and launch in a month
would probably be a testament to what we've been able to build.
Well, you're certainly gonna have a lot of attention
around that launch.
I hope you, now is probably not the right time
to renegotiate your offer letter for the new company.
You should probably stick with it,
but I think you're gonna bring a lot of marketing value
to Darwin, the new company you're joining.
What's the reaction been like at home? You're getting a lot of marketing value to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like at home?
You're getting a lot of messages from friends.
Has this broken tech acts and broken containment
into kind of your, the world beyond,
just people asking you about this?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, reaction is natural.
Like a ton of people have been asking about this.
What's also funny is like, you know, some of the memes,
like I am very new to Twitter.
I joined Twitter yesterday.
So this was a lesson for me in social media in general.
Like I am not a social media person.
So it just like, I was like, you know,
very overwhelmed with it in general.
Obviously, you know, feeling shitty about it as well.
Like I said, you know, I'm not very proud of what I did.
I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in a much different manner. So there's a lot of reflection
in general, but I think friends and family have been strong. Like I said, I was lucky to work at
some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. A lot of them
reached out to essentially be like, helpfully give advice on what I should be doing next.
Even sometimes staying through know, just to make
sure that I'm like all right. You know, like...
I think it says a lot that a number of the people that you work for that fired you because you were
working multiple jobs still care about you. It shows that when you were working
for them, at least, you know, that it does seem like you really did care.
Are there any startups that you've worked for in the past
that you were working multiple jobs for
that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet
that you plan to?
I mean, in general, I plan to apologize to everyone.
That goes without saying.
Any companies that you still need to resign from?
Ha ha!
None whatsoever.
I mean, it's the only focus I have.
Okay. He's on the record.
You're on the right path.
While I'm waiting for you, I hope this is a story
of redemption. I believe in forgiveness.
I believe in mistakes.
I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending.
Me too. So to be clear,
your ex account is
at real Soham Perique,
right? Yeah.
That's the real one?
That's the real one.
Because there's a lot of fake ones floating out there
trying to take, trying to ride the hype wave.
Yeah, I mean, 100%.
There's been so many fake accounts and a lot of fake
narratives as well.
But yeah, that is my real account.
There's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand.
And I did not have banana at my home at that point in time, but
I was trying to do that just to show you.
Perfect for each.
But it's been interestingly like,
you know, while to like notice how people are like taking this in different ways, but
in a while to notice how people are taking this in different ways, but yeah, that kind of helps
just feel a little bit less shitty about it, but yeah.
Yeah, what are the questions here?
Remote versus in-office, US versus international AI
shooting 10x engineers?
Yeah, I mean, I think we had this post
from Ahmad at Mercury.
I think the reason this struck such a chord is,
again,
it's this remote angle, the international angle,
the ideas around a 10x engineer, the potential of new AI tools.
But this has been really helpful to get to know you.
And I think you were getting, you
provided entertainment for a lot of people the last 24 hours.
So I'm glad to hear that you're going
to apologize to everybody that you're gonna apologize
to everybody that you misled.
And I am excited to follow what you do next.
Yeah, thanks for stopping by.
Thank you so much for having me.
Cheers.
We'll talk to you soon.
We'll talk soon.
Bye.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
I think he's handling it quite well.
Yeah, and I do think this is a situation
where the damage is hopefully minimal to the companies.
It's not like he was working multiple jobs
and then there was like, you know,
the customer database leaked because he wrote bad code
because he was working multiple jobs too stressed out.
There's no one alleging that,
at least that we've seen.
And I think the founders that hired him
and then fired him in general
probably noticed it pretty quickly.
This is not like somebody joining a big tech company
and working there for five years,
not doing any work and just sort of like
being a cog in the machine.
And so yeah, ultimately it's unfortunate.
Silicon Valley runs on trust.
He violated that trust, but I was happy to see
that he was really apologetic.
And that's the thing about the startup ecosystem.
Like Silicon Valley has really, really leaned
into the trust thing to the point where a venture capitalist
can shake your hand and say,
I'm gonna invest a million dollars,
and the expectation is that they actually do that,
and they don't back out.
And if they do back out it's it's a big thing
It's a big deal. And so yeah, even even though you know, I don't know how I don't know how ironclad every
Work contract is even like we were going back and forth on like does it is there a specific no moon lighting clause that
Describes exactly what you can do in your free time
And can you go do door dashash or Uber Eats on the side
or can you take a, you know,
can you earn an ex-creator pay share, like rev share?
Like does that count as moonlighting?
You're posting, you're making 200 bucks or a thousand bucks
from exes, that moonlighting, you know.
Maybe there's not so close.
But people know what full-time means.
And if I send you an offer, I'm offering you a full-time job,
I'm expecting you not to take another full-time job like maybe yeah, maybe you know someone throws you 50 bucks to you know
Walk their dog once you know once on the random on the weekend
But the idea is that you're not taking a very similar job at another company
Yeah, so it seems pretty clear even if there's no major like legal ramifications
So I don't know he seems he seems like he like he's handling it well and going on the correct
apology tour and there could be the good ending here.
Yeah, Lulu said, come clean, be sorry. He did that. Be willing to laugh at yourself,
embrace a good meme.
Yep, he did that too.
He did that. Feed the curiosity. What was it like? What did you learn? Don't sugarcoat.
I thought it was interesting that he would have been hilarious if he came out and said,
oh yeah, I'm running 10 Codex agents, I'm running Devon,
I'm using Cloud Code.
He was just like, no, I just worked really hard.
And I don't do anything other than use code.
Yeah, it is always tough with this stuff,
because somebody who would lie about working multiple jobs
might just come on here and lie to us.
But he seemed sincere.
And so I'm inclined to believe that he is an insomniac
and just was working three jobs 40 hours a week each,
and that's 120 hours, and that's, you know,
Morgan Stanley Investment Bank Associate work.
But it does raise this question of like,
there are people out there who are willing
to work 100 hours, and if they go to Wall Street,
they get comped on that immediately
and startups don't really have a mechanism.
Not necessarily immediately.
No, but the comp and the expectation is matched
and I think Wall Street has absorbed that latent demand for work and capacity of young people
who are down to grind basically.
And they can choose to opt out of it
and get getting a different job,
but they kind of know what they're going into.
Like no one shows up at Goldman Sachs and is like,
oh my God, I had no idea I was gonna have to
do a slide deck on Saturday, right?
But in startups, there's kind of this like,
hey, we have this good work culture,
it's kind of chill, let's do 40 hours a week,
but then also, there's no real way to make three times
as much if you're willing to work three times as hard.
So yeah, it's an interesting story.
Yeah, and to be honest, he posted yesterday,
he said, there's a lot being said about me right now,
most of you don't know the full story,
if there's one thing to know about me,
it's that I love to build, which I do believe.
He said, that's it.
I've been isolated, written off, and shut out
by nearly everyone I've known
and every company I've worked at.
That doesn't feel completely true
because he's in conversation with the CEOs
that had hired him.
But building is the only thing I've truly known
and it's what I'll keep doing.
Earlier today, the timing of this is amazing.
Earlier today, I signed an exclusive
founding deal to be found at one company and one company only they were the only
ones willing to bet on me at this time I actually think there's a lot of
companies that would take a bet on him now and it just has to be you have to
promise me that you're gonna work for this, just for us. Exclusively.
And I think the right thing to do for this next company
is try to bring him out to SF or wherever they're based.
That, for sure.
Because he will probably spend 18 hours a day
in the office.
Yeah, it's so much easier to deal with a known unknown
or like a known risk factor.
It's the devil you know.
Like forever this will follow him.
It's like, hey, monitor this guy.
Make sure he's not working a second job.
If you scroll down on this post, he says says I'm pissed and I've got something to prove
it's like he had a very aggressive posting style and he came on very sweet
and nice and just like seems like he got in a bad spot he made some bad
decisions yeah he's sorry about it yeah and he's now got something to prove yeah
and he's now infamous yeah infamous well
That's a fun story. I'm glad we were able to get him on and cover it
That's that's part of the beauty of the show live, baby
Anyway, oh, he's maxing yeah, and I think that provides some good closure to
This chapter of the timeline
Yeah
We have a million messages coming in from various sources.
I can go through a little bit of the stories if you want.
We got to ring the gong though because the US economy added 147,000 new jobs.
Let's go.
Manufacturers are-
It's like a very, very slight job speed.
It's not actually bad.
We're very excited.
Joe Weisenthal has a post in the stack somewhere where he says.
Breaking.
It's a beat.
147,000 new jobs.
Unemployment rate falls to 4.1%.
Last month revised higher.
Analysts had expected 106K new jobs
and a 4.3% unemployment rate.
So we love to see it.
Stark contrast with the calls from our president
to reduce rates.
If jobs report is good, it's hard to argue
to drop them very much.
So manufacturers are pausing hiring amid
tariff uncertainty while unemployment fell,
partly because fewer people are looking for work,
so that's never a good sign, but it does seem like
the American consumer seems resilient and things are,
we're staying in the kangaroo market.
We're neither, you know, it's not so over,
but we're maybe not so back just yet.
We're kind of right back where we started
at the beginning of the year,
in terms of the stock market rates.
Anyway, the CEO of Ford had a controversial quote
in the Wall Street Journal.
He's AGI-pilled.
He's AGI-pilled.
He's been talking to Dario over at Anthropic.
And so the CEO of Ford said,
AI will replace quote, literally half of all white collar workers,
which is something that was definitely said
on Dwar Kesh Patel first.
I think Sholto might have mentioned that
and then Adario mentioned it in the post as well.
And Anthropic's been kind of noodling on this
and then OpenAI and Metta have kind of stayed back from that
and a lot of the other labs have kind of said like,
I don't know, I think the quote from Sam was like,
Dario's a scientist, he should apply
more scientific rigor here to do this prediction.
This is a very jarred and bold prediction.
Yeah, it was Brad Lightcap over at OpenAI
was pushing back a little bit.
But look, when he was making these comments,
he was also talking about just how advanced Xiaomi
and these other Chinese EV manufacturers are.
So this was coming from a broader conversation.
And it's a good, ultimately, whether or not
he actually believes this is true,
he's signaling to the market that he's on top of this trend.
And if this does turn out to be the case,
it's very possible that Ford will be a beneficiary
in some way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's a tough business.
And I'm sure he's looking to the Chinese manufacturers
and looking at their cog structure and their SG&A spend relative to revenue
and seeing how they can benchmark.
Not that the Chinese EV manufacturers
are necessarily adopting AI any faster than Ford,
but it's certainly the idea of how the shape
of the business will be in the future.
Well, a little bit.
They do facial recognition tech.
That's true.
I think it will, you walk up to your car,
pull the lock for you, et cetera.
I think there's a story about the Ford CEO
dailying a Chinese car just to get a taste of like,
okay, we need to step it up in a bunch of different ways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In other news.
Yeah, there's no reason that Ford can't catch up
on these types of things.
Yeah.
In other news, we have a massive story out of the United Kingdom folks
Britain's Royals gave up their luxury train citing fiscal restraint
In an era of hard choices for economies around the world Britain's's royal family is also playing its part,
waving farewell to perhaps its most extravagant
mode of transport, the Royal Train.
The House of Windsor's personalized service
that chugs the royals to engagements
will be axed in 2027 after a review concluded
that it no longer offered value for money
and that two new helicopters would be a relight. Nothing is sacred anymore.
I know.
Nothing is sacred anymore, John.
They're getting rid of their train.
The locomotive service, which features bedroom compartments,
a dining room, and a study has been a lightning rod
for anti-monarchy campaigners who pointed to its costs
as emblematic of royal excess.
Shows the power of democracy that we have anti-monarchy.
You can't even be a king with a private train anymore.
What's happening to the world?
It's ridiculous.
You know, royal excess, what is royalty if not excessive?
It's the brand, it's terrible.
Last year, King Charles III undertook a 190-mile rail trip
to the capital from England's East Midlands,
which was billed at nearly $62,000.
It's like the price of a Model S.
Wait, the trip was 62.
It was a 190-mile rail trip on a private train car,
and so they have to staff it.
They have to load it up with fuel and food
and all this different stuff.
And the study has that books.
Does that not strike you as, I mean, it's a...
$62,000 for 190 miles.
It's a bargain, right?
Yeah, but 190 miles, it's across maybe a few days.
Probably bringing multiple people too.
He's having meetings on there.
Yeah, depends on how many people were on there.
It's cheaper than taking a zipping around in a PJ that whole well they will a review by
the government concluded that to buying two new helicopters would be a relative
a reliable alternative so a viable what about safety though I have to imagine
trains have a better safety I would think would think so. I would think so. James Chalmers, who manages the royal finances as
keeper of the privy purse, said the decision to halt his personal train would mean the fondest
of farewells. Yes, this is the Wall Street Journal. In moving forwards, we must not be bound by the past he added
rough This kind of public fiscal
Self-flagellation is nothing new to the British monarchy
Which is often at pains to point out its value to UK taxpayers who bankroll the franchise
The late Queen Elizabeth the second gave up the royal yacht in the 1990s in the name of financial prudence
But this latest decision is all the more surprising
Given that the royal family's finances are arguably stronger than they've ever been in modern times
The royal train let's go it up for the royal families. That's the royal family's finances. Thank you
I don't think ramps in in the UK yet, but no
They'll be able to get to the next level
obviously when that happens. The Royal Train will stop rolling for the first
time since Queen Victoria first commissioned coaches to be pulled by a
locomotive in the 1860s. The train's importance in an age of air travel has
repeatedly come into question. Once the train is mothballed, Charles, who has long
advocated protecting the environment,
will instead use two newly leased helicopters
that run on sustainable aviation fuel.
The train will be taken out on one more tour of Britain
before it is retired and can be placed on display.
So, RIP to the Royal Train.
The Royal Train.
Hopefully it makes a comeback at some point. I think American Train. You know, the Royals are backing off, let's to the Royal Train. The Royal Train. Hopefully it makes a comeback at some point.
I think American Train.
You know, the Royals are backing off,
let's get an American Train.
Yeah, this is actually could be bullish for trains
because them shutting it down creates an opportunity
for them to start it back up,
which would be a positive catalyst for the train.
Yes, yes, I agree.
Well, you mentioned ramp.
Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards,
bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more,
all in one place. If you're trying to expense train trips, do it mentioned ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
If you're trying to expense train trips, do it on ramp.
That's the way to do it on ramp travel, baby.
Ramp travel.
What else is going on in the news?
JP Morgan is revamping its bank for the super rich
to cater to global clientele.
David Frame, named global head of private bank,
helping deep-pocketed clients invest more abroad.
Oh, oh, there's also big news.
Not very American.
No, not very American, but Ilya Sutskovor
has issued a statement on Daniel Gross
with Safe Superintelligence.
So Ilya writes, of course, the OpenAI co-founder,
now at SSI, says, I sent the following message
to our team and investors.
As you know, Daniel Gross's time with us
has been winding down, and as of June 29th,
that's three, four days ago,
he is officially no longer a part of SSI.
We are grateful for his early contributions to the company
and wish him well in his next endeavor.
I am now formally CEO.
Reading between the lines, do we think he hit his cliff?
I don't know, when did SSI start?
Probably one year cliff or your best?
You think it went default?
I don't know.
When was SSI founded?
1970, Scuba Schools International.
Wow, super intelligence has not arrived
in Geordi's web browser just yet.
Oh, he may have hit his cliff.
Maybe he's hit his cliff.
It was founded June 19th, 2024.
No way.
But it's very possible this was resolved prior to that.
Absolute dog.
And anyway, so Ilya says,
"'I am now formally CEO of SSI and Daniel Levy is president.
"'The technical team continues to report to me.
You might have heard rumors of companies
looking to acquire us.
We are flattered by their attention
but are focused on seeing our work through.
He's a missionary.
We have the compute, we have the team, we know what to do.
Together we will keep building safe super intelligence, Ilya.
So DG has entered the trade portal and seems...
We have a trade portal and seems...
The trade portal.
I don't even know what that means.
I've never heard that term before,
but I understand that it's vaguely from...
It's portal time.
It's portal time.
It's portal time.
But anyways, the rumor is that he's going to Meta,
but we will have to see.
Yep.
Well, speaking of Meta,
Nat Friedman officially posted
that he has in fact joined Meta.
This was rumored and leaked multiple times.
It seemed pretty confident.
Everyone seemed pretty confident in the reporting,
but he has confirmed it.
He said, I started work at Meta this week.
This is Nat Friedman tweeting.
My job is to make amazing AI products
that billions of people love to use
He's in the application layer, baby. He's probably a player. Love it. I'm excited I'm so excited for well says well says taking the balance sheet of the world's largest
Megacorp and using it to develop the technology to find Noah's Ark the Ark of the Covenant and other biblical
Artifacts is top-tier stuff Congrats King
Ashley Vance says if you're not hiring an intern
to use ground penetrating radar
to find the ancient first copies of Solaris
buried under building 12, I'll be disappointed.
I love it.
He says, it won't happen overnight,
but a few days in, I'm feeling confident
that great things are ahead.
Yeah, I posted something when the news leaked
that it's like, it's 2026.
I put on my meta quest for Lama, open Instagram,
and pull up the latest Vesuvius scroll,
because I certainly hope this means more
Nat Friedman side projects.
Obviously he's gonna be incredibly locked in.
It has a huge task in front of him,
catching up to the big labs.
He's, you know, has an incredible team now,
a lot of funding, but it is a big challenge.
And I'd certainly hope that he has time
for some side projects.
I wonder what this means for AI Grant.
I wonder what this means for the rest
of the Nat Friedman cinematic universe
of kind of cracked interns that have gone on to,
the Nat Friedman diaspora is really illustrious
at this point.
Sort of a new teal fellowship.
Anyway, let's pull this up.
So breaking news, the big, beautiful bill has passed.
No way.
The House, I had a polymarket just about 45 minutes ago.
It had rocketed up to 99%.
It's now sitting at 100%.
So Axios has the reporting the
house passed presidents big beautiful bill Thursday this articles from five
minutes ago clearing the way for Trump to sign it by his July 4th deadline it's a
massive victory for speaker Mike Johnson who was able to flip dozens of members
who had a vision initially threatened to vote no as well as for Trump and Senate
Republicans the bill passed 218 to 214. Representatives Thomas Massey
and Brian Fitzpatrick were the only Republicans to join all the Democrats in voting against the
measure. Moderates and conservatives demanded adjustments after the Senate made significant
changes to the House version, but ultimately none were made. Several key holdouts flipped following
meetings with the president at the White House but a ground of a group of
hardliners needed more persuading. Anyways so we will wait to see the the
impacts of all this I'd be curious to get Zach Kukoff on maybe at the end of
the show to just kind of break it down. We will be continuing to track the big, beautiful bill.
But if you're trying to design something big and beautiful,
head over to figma.com.
Think bigger, build faster.
Figma helps design and development teams
build great products together.
You can get started for free at figma.com.
Palmer Lucky is not here. People are loving the S1.
Yes. Really loving it.
Yes.
Then they're going out.
We gotta get Taneon, who does the S1 deep dives.
For sure, we gotta do that.
And if you're also in the S1 deep dive business
and you have an interesting take, hit us up.
We'd love to have you on a chat about the Figma S1.
Very interesting in that.
Anderol Palmerlaki has an update on the story
about how many weapons from America are flowing to Ukraine.
He is kind of giving his take
in where he stands on this issue.
So, Andrei Yermak says,
today I remembered an early wartime meeting
with Palmer Lucky.
I think I remember this photo,
or a photo like it going out at the early start of the war.
Steady, kind, and clear like Tangiro
in the face of darkness.
Grateful he chose to stand with Ukraine.
His company's growth is proof.
Good people build strong things.
And Palmer chimes in and says,
Anderil had people slash hardware in Ukraine
two weeks into the invasion.
Our autonomous weapons have destroyed
hundreds of millions of worth,
hundreds of millions of dollars worth
of Russia's war machine.
The United States should give them the tools they need to win
It is the fastest path to peace one way or another so I had to look it up
But Tanjiro is an anime
Or a manga 10 manga Demon Slayer. So
Andre clearly knows his audience with that post
Luke Metro has a post here. So OpenAI
came out yesterday and said, these OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not
partner with Robinhood. We're not involved with this and do not endorse it.
Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any
transfer. Please be careful. And Luke Metro says what every CFO is thinking.
Yeah, these tokenized shares on Robinhood
are every startup CFO's newest headache.
They are derivatives from what I know.
So it's not actual equity, it's closer to something
like a prediction market.
No one is more creative financially
than secondary salesmen.
Yeah.
Do you remember the whole Ford contract situation,
this whole thing?
Yeah.
Yeah, you'd write that, I mean, it's a derivative contract,
but people were doing that for a while
and then that got banned.
And I don't know how they're doing this one, but odd to-
Never bet against American financial instrument innovation.
But the interesting thing, what does this say about Robin Hood says that they're not a GI pill
Because if you're truly believe that open AI is building God you wouldn't want to make God angry
so
Not a GI pill. They guess something is that the conclusion that could be one one conclusion
I think we need to frame everything in the context of do you believe every decision is how a GI?
You know you're just reading between the lines yeah yeah even even the even you know the UK is clearly not a GI pill
because if we're approaching superabundance yeah what's wrong with
having a royal figure out how to operate the royal train course cheaper than you
know walking yeah right this is this is very damaging for their brand yeah
Ford CEO though a AGI Pilt.
That's right.
Let's get him on the show.
Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta.
Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.
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Anyway, Zach Pogrob has some fantastic photos
and Getty images, he went through Getty images
and found some insane photos of Steve Jobs
that I hadn't seen.
I thought I'd seen every viral photo.
He's watching, in the bottom right corner,
if we can pull this up, he's watching Larry Ellison
game tape.
I love it, it's amazing. So good. Yeah, wow, he's really Larry Ellison game tape. I love it. That's amazing.
So good.
Yeah, wow.
He's really watching Ellison just being like,
okay, what's he saying?
How am I gonna counter this?
How am I gonna do that?
I assume.
Well, we're just learning from one of the best.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Zoom in on the bottom right one there.
That picture laying on the floor,
like, you know, deep in conversation or argument.
No, no, always on the phone.
I think he's just thinking.
It just seems like he's just exasperated,
like taking a second to think.
It's funny, I just assumed he had an iPhone up,
but the phones weren't that small.
No, he invented the phone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they didn't have that.
This is pretty pre-reached.
He had to go through that to make the iPhone.
Indeed.
Speaking of hardware and jobs, I have Reggie James new book here. It looks absolutely fantastic
I got it last night, so well. Thank you for making it
I purchased it to support the fellow technology brother, but it is absolutely fantastic
Portfolio company in their daylight. That's very cool. Love to see it and bunch of other features
I love these but nothing oh we got nothing in there. Daylight. That's very cool. Love to see it and a bunch of other features.
I love these books.
We got nothing in there.
No way, that's amazing.
Yeah, very cool.
Beautiful.
Beautiful stuff.
So go pick it up.
What is it?
Hardwarebook.com I think was what he said.
Hardwarebook 2024.
Hardwarebook2024.com.
It's sold out.
It's sold out but I don't know,
DM Reggie with something interesting. He'll figure it out. He'll figure it out. So it's sold out, but I don't know DM Reggie with something you'll figure it out and figure it out or if you're trying to build a
Product go to linear comm or linear app
It's linear dot-app linear dot-app linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products meet the system for modern software development
Streamline issues projects and product roadmaps and they got linear worlds best team
Streamline issues projects and product roadmaps, and they got linear world's best team
Best teams use linear they got cursor
perplexity retool ramp open AI scale boom cash app for sell you should be one of them kind of LeBron James of
Product planning speaking of LeBron James breaking news from Emily Sunberg LeBron was in the Hamptons last week and needed somewhere to practice
Instead of going to some weird rich guys home gym who would have probably asked for photos afterwards,
he turned to the most obvious solution, a high school,
and Emily interviewed a teenager
who played pickup basketball with him.
This is amazing.
Great story.
Good for his brand too.
Yeah, great for his brand.
It's just good all around.
Great for his brand.
Yeah, it's an unexpected gift in an unexpected time.
Like you played, you're a teenager,
you probably played basketball at this high school gym
like every day for a couple months during basketball season,
probably off season a little bit,
and then all of a sudden the greatest basketball player
of all time, potentially.
I don't know where you stand on the Goat Debate, Jordy,
but he just shows up, puts on a clank.
There's only one Goat Debate I care about.
The best entrepreneur of all time, of course.
We have another post here from Jira, at Jira Tickets.
Good morning, 10,000 new AI startups
with cute little minimalistic names and logos
just launched and they say they're gonna change everything.
Please enjoy your timeline scroll,
just call me if you need anything.
That's true. We have a post here from.
Is he just saying that there's a ton of AI startups launching
every day on the timeline?
Basically, and they're all going to change everything, John.
OK.
They're going to do their best.
Minimalistic names, logos.
I feel like what's clogging up the timeline more
is people actually taking the viral video seriously
and breaking through.
I don't see that many cute little minimalistic names
and logos that much, but I don't know.
It's interesting, yeah.
I guess it is a paradox that there could be so many things
that all change everything simultaneously.
My recommendation for Soham, we were on the drive in today,
we were working on this.
It's hard to see. Maybe text it to the group or put it in the tab. The dev shop of Soham, we were on the drive in today, we were working on this, it's hard to see.
Maybe text it to the group and put it in the tab.
The dev shop of Soham Perique is the last,
and just flip the browser company logo,
you're at five million of ARR by the end of next week.
I really do think that, I'm hopefully excited for him
if he's going to this new video AI startup
and he's working seriously on that
and he enjoys the founding engineer role there,
rooting for him.
But I do think the dev shop,
he's teed up for something amazing.
I think that that would be a fantastic business for him.
Deeply aligned with the culture, clearly loves building.
He got over his skis, made some bad decisions,
disappointed some people, maybe broke some rules.
But if he just stayed in Mumbai
and found 50 other guys like him,
and he was the guy that was onboarding clients,
he would absolutely crush it.
Totally, totally, yeah, onboarding clients would be huge.
And it seems like he likes juggling,
he likes juggling, bouncing around.
Totally.
And I think most importantly,
with this like, the crazy viral attention that he got,
I think he had a chance to kind of rewire people's brains
on what it means to use a dev shop.
Because using a dev shop feels very antithetical
to like the way startups are built.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday.
It's a sign that you can't hire,
or you can't actually build.
You don't have a team, a line to you.
But he has such an interesting story
that I think a lot of people would say,
yeah, let's get Soham on for the dev shop on
for a quick sprint for three months.
Seems to be good at that.
He has a good team and he could grow it from there.
So I don't know, I'm optimistic about that.
I was surprised that it didn't seem like
when we talked to him that it was even in his mind
that he could do that.
It also seemed like he hadn't considered
just having a bidding war between the three jobs
and saying like, who can actually pay me more?
And the equity thing was weird too.
Surprisingly, there's a bunch of teams right now
where if you just said, I'm gonna work 18 hours a day
on your company, they would probably pay you 350K.
Yeah.
There was something weird about the fact that he's like,
I don't wanna talk about my personal life,
but I have financial needs but also the money
I did wasn't doing it for the money and actually like I cared about the equity because it's like if you're really in like
I have medical bills or something. You'd be like cash now
No, the take away is that like there's like he's the mob the Mumbai mob is like saying like go get equity
No, no, no like go you you work for us kind of thing
Sure, sure sure but but in that case you would just max out the max out the cash, right?
Max out the cash comp and you and you try and go get one one job or multiple jobs
They just pay all cash or as much cash as possible. Yeah, and I mean we need to talk to more of the founders on the other side
That was really wasn't like he had this master plan of,
I'm gonna, like, the takeaway from yesterday
is I was coming away and being like,
okay, if five people came out on X,
are there 20 more on LinkedIn?
And it's like this massive conspiracy
that he was like master plan,
but that wasn't my takeaway.
We'll have to dig into it more and talk to more folks
because it's totally possible
It more DD DD had a post from yesterday who was on the show yesterday
He said so hom is just the tip of the iceberg just like this redditor pulling 800k a year working five jobs
Wow, there's a reddit
What is it a
Group called our slash over employed. Yes
500,000 people where people just maniacally
discuss this there are thousands of so hamper reeks we don't know about
there's a post here from user big fat phony account he says five jobs at 800k
TC using an ROI mentality I've jumped from three jobs to five jobs two weeks
ago I'm now making three, three K a day.
It's doable for me.
Here's why I'm an expert in my field, which is data.
I know how to solve problems in various forms.
Clients, as I call them, know my value.
If there's a problem or they need my expert help,
they like having me on the team.
This expertise has come from 15 years of experience,
but also three years of over-employment teaching me the the team. This expertise has come from 15 years of experience, but also three years
of over-employment teaching me the latest methods. I'm all remote. None of this one day in the office BS
just say no. So he's basically giving the playbook. The funny thing is you could just
have a consulting shop and do this above board and probably be way more successful. You just have to build the muscle to sell your services
and not just get fixated on just applying for jobs.
You can still look, okay, this company is hiring
for this role, great, I should reach out to them.
Hey, I offer XYZ service.
I'll be fractional staff engineer,
whatever it's called.
I command a premium because I'm super experienced
and I have this team.
You can call me anytime.
I'll be available 18 hours of the day
and you could just build a legitimate business.
So I think that that should be the takeaway
from engineers that are getting inspired by SOHOM
in the wrong way is just build a consulting practice.
I agree, I agree.
Well, if he does, he's gonna have to reach out
to a lot of people.
He needs a CRM that he can trust.
He needs Adio, customer relationship magic.
Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales,
and grows your company in the next level.
Let's mix it up with a post from the P God.
If you're pure- This is important
going into the weekend, everyone.
Yeah, this is huge for July 4th
Which is tomorrow if you're pure of heart drinking 17 ice cold beers isn't bad for you
We gotta have Andrew Huberman back
And Brian Johnson too, we'll get both of them. They'll love it. They'll be they'll be like, yeah heart agree
I think we feel this way about splitting a bottle of champagne. Yeah, it certainly doesn't feel bad everything in moderation
including moderation
That's what I like to say
That's right
Anyway, what what else should we go leaf over at public our friends said?
This is an interesting context on the on the tokenization of private companies
So he says tokenization of private companies. So he says, tokenization of private companies is tricky and risky.
Public used to offer alternative assets like music royalties
and we look deeply into offering
tokenized private company shares.
Here's why we haven't done it.
The risks come down to four aspects,
liquidity, supply, information rights,
and investor protections.
First, some background.
Public offered private assets
via regulatory framework called Reg A.
Think of it like a wrapper that turned a private asset like IP art real estate or
a private company into a security ie securitization enabling it to be traded
it's very similar to what a crypto token represents in the Robin Hood
tokenization scenario same thing different database and he goes on to
give a lot more context he says let's say Robinhood now owns $10 million worth of stock at a $300 billion valuation.
They could spin up 10 million tokens priced at $1 each and offer them on their platform.
Customers then own the token, not the actual shares in OpenAI.
Think of it like a ticket representing a sliver of ownership in the SPV, but not OpenAI directly.
And he says the issue one, a $10 million float
on a $300 billion company with major hype
is unlikely to meet demand.
That limited float can quickly lead to a price spike,
AKA the shares will trade at a premium.
The $1 token might jump to 10,
implying a $3 trillion valuation for OpenAI.
What started as a fundamentals-based investment
quickly turns into pure speculation, people buying tokens in the hopes
someone else will pay more I mean the float on these things is crazy I mean the
numbers that's what I was saying with with with five million five thousand
dollar investments five million dollars total so there's one thousand people
that are putting 5k down to set the price of SpaceX
It's like does that make any sense not setting the price the initial price. Well, they're setting yeah offering no no no
But but like there are essentially
1,000 slugs of 5k
Value to kind of set the price. It's like the smallest possible market. So yeah, I mean I
think that there's there's a lot of
market so yeah I mean I think that there's a lot of risk to that. They could just trade like the other thing the other thing because you know these types
of offerings will typically to be tied to SPVs not the underlying shares.
There's usually no information rights.
There can be dilution other changes and so you actually don't know the value of the underlying assets.
Well, really quickly, let's tell you about NumeralHQ.com. Sales tax and autopilot. Spend
less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Chris Miller joining
the author of Chipwar. In just a few minutes, I wanted to run through this post in the,
it's not a post, it's an article in the Wall Street Journal from yesterday. China is quickly gaining in the AI race.
I think this is something we'll be talking about with Chris.
Chinese artificial intelligence companies
are loosening the US global stranglehold on AI,
challenging US superiority and setting the stage
for a global arms race in the technology.
In Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia,
users ranging from multinational banks
to public universities are turning
to large language models from Chinese companies
such as Startup, DeepSeek, and e-commerce giant Alibaba,
that's Quan, of course, as alternatives
to US offerings such as ChatGPT.
HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun testing
DeepSeek's models internally,
according to people familiar with the matter.
Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company,
recently installed DeepSeek in its main data center,
which is interesting because Saudi Aramco,
I believe they have their own model as well.
And so they're testing DeepSeek.
Very AGI-filled.
And I mean, you could rewrite this to say,
hey, like, perplexity has a deep-seek fork.
Microsoft serves deep-seek, so maybe it's okay,
but obviously the larger geopolitical narrative here
is like we don't want to have the rest of the world
standardized on non-Western models.
That could be very harmful to global competitiveness,
and so that's something that we'll be digging into.
Even US major cloud service providers
such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft,
and Google offer DeepSeek to customers
despite the White House banning use of the company's app
on some government devices over data security concerns.
Of course, there's a separation between the layer there.
If you're running the open source model on your own chips,
it shouldn't be able to call back to China.
But if you're installing the DeepSeek app
on a government phone, well then everything that you send,
it has to go to a server to be processed
to then be inferenced.
And so, like, when, like, I assume that everything
I've ever said to ChatGPT exists on an open AI server
somewhere, right, because they have to store it,
because when I open the app, I want to see all my chats.
Yeah, yeah, it's required.
Well, that's a slightly separate thing.
That's about, like, actually disclosure, but yes.
Hegseth, Hegseth and the Deep Sea Gap
just being like thoughts on Iran right now,
what should we do?
We're in a...
OpenAI's chat GPT remains the world's
predominant AI consumer chat bot
with 910 million global downloads.
Let's hit the gong for OpenAI.
There we go.
Compared to with DeepSeek's 125 million,
give me the wha-wha-wha, 125 million for DeepSeek.
Not even close to OpenAI.
DeepSeek, you gotta catch up, buddy.
No, it's very impressive, 125 million, serious number.
Figures from Research Sensor Tower.
The US's AI is widely seen as the industry's gold standard
because of advantages in computing semiconductors,
cutting edge research, and access to financial capital.
But as in many other industries, Chinese companies
have started to snatch customers by offering performance industries but as in other as in many other industries Chinese companies have
started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at
vastly lower prices I imagine prices yeah a study of global competitiveness in
critical technologies released in early June by researchers at Harvard University
found China has advantages in two key building blocks
of AI, data and human capital
that are keeping it, that are helping it keep pace.
The competition, some industry insider said,
has set the world on the path
toward a technological cold war,
potentially even a chip war.
And we have our guest, Chris Miller,
in the studio, author of Chip War.
Welcome to the show, how you doing?
What's happening?
Good thanks, how are you?
Thank you so much for joining.
It's great to have you.
Great to have you.
I would love, I mean we were just reading
an article from the journal about the
China versus the US AI race. There's a whole bunch of modern details, but I'd love to
kick it off with a little bit on your background and how you initially became interested in the
idea of a chip war and kind of how things emerge from there. Yeah, I got interested in the idea of
a chip war because I realized we've been living through multiple iterations of one since the first chips were invented in the late 1950s that
you couldn't really separate the development of military power or countries strategic position
on the world stage without understanding the ability to access and deploy computing power.
And so we're seeing a new version of that right now with AI, but it's actually replicating what we
saw in the Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union or the economic competition in the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s. And so then as now, there's this deep link between access to
compute and strategic position. Yeah. Going back in the history, we were digging into some of the
back in the history, we were digging into some of the efforts that the Chinese government had invested.
Yeah, how many five-year plans have they done?
Yeah, it feels like they've been investing.
They keep stacking these five-year plans,
and it seems to be working.
For decades, just to stay on the lagging edge,
what did you learn about that,
and what can you tell us about that narrative
as maybe the chip war's heating up right now,
but China has been aware of this for decades and has been investing
against it.
Yeah. No, they, they certainly been investing for a long time.
I think really the last decade or so it's kicked up a real notch,
both because China's solved a lot of his other technological problems.
It's become self-sufficient and many other spheres of manufacturing and
making chips is the one of the really few areas and the largest by far
Where China still has to import manufactured products from abroad such that today China's largest import
more even than it spends on oil is importing semiconductors from
Taiwan and that so this is something that they wanted to break free from. More on semis than oil.
That's wild.
That's insane.
When you talk about that, is that driven heavily by stuff that's not sanctioned on the lagging
edge, the 15, 16 nanometer, like the bigger chips?
Or are we talking about smuggling numbers of three nanometer chips
that have been repurposed through shell companies or something like that?
It's a mix, but it's mostly things that are legal to sell to China.
And you can sell both the lagging edge, like things in your dishwasher, but also a smartphone
chip at three nanometers that you can still sell to China.
And there's a large volume of those for PCs and smartphones
and autos that are still being sold.
Yeah, yeah.
So every Huawei phone has a chip
and those are not sanctioned.
We're just talking about the large accelerators,
the big GPUs that are really under lock and key.
That's right.
Interesting.
Then take me through kind of how you processed
the initial rollout of the chip ban during the Biden era
What how did that play out for you were by people were calling you?
I don't know. I want to know your side of that of that era of history here
Yeah, well, I would actually rewind the clock back to 2018 and 19. That's that's when
the clock back to 2018 and 19. That's when ASML, the Dutch company that produces the lithography tools you need to produce cutting edge ships was first thinking about selling a cutting edge tool
to a Chinese customer. And then the Trump administration, the first administration,
leaned very heavily on the Dutch and said, don't let this go through because if you do, China will
have everything it needs to catch up in chipmaking.
And so I think that was actually the key turning point. And then the 2022 restrictions that not
only tightened up the rules around chipmaking equipment, but also banned the GPUs that you can
make with these tools in some ways naturally followed from that first 2019 move. What was
different in 2022 was that there was a real, I think,
understanding and it came before chat GPT that AI was going to be a big deal
and that access to GPUs was going to be a critical input into building bigger
and better AI systems.
Yeah. How, how did the chip shortage fit into all of that during COVID?
I mean, everyone experienced, uh, I mean, everyone experienced the chip shortages
from like auto prices going up, used cars.
There were so many market distortions.
How did you process that point in time?
And then I wanna step forward even further.
Yeah, so I think that chip shortage,
it didn't really impact tech companies.
It impacted, as you say, autos and dishwashers
and microwaves, but it brought together a political coalition across the West that included the auto companies and the tech
companies and medical device companies, all of whom realized chips were very, very important.
We needed reliable supply chains and we needed to stay ahead technologically in this. And that's
why, whether in the US or in Japan or in Europe, you had chips acts being passed to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing,
to try to provide some more resilience for the supply chains.
It would have been unthinkable five years earlier,
but because of this coalition, it was possible.
Yeah. Is it,
is it a misnomer to call China's strategy around
semiconductor and domestic production of semiconductors
and all of their semiconductor strategies communist.
It feels like they in some ways have
an extremely capitalist system with not picking winners
and putting out huge government incentives.
They're shifting the market,
but from what we've heard, a lot of times there's just a huge pool of money and there's vicious competition to go after it.
So how would you actually characterize, like what words are we using? How are we describing
the Chinese political system now, specifically with regard to not just how they elect people,
but specifically their chip policies.
Yeah. You know, I think you got a strange mix of policies being deployed with the Chinese. And
in some ways, that's why it's worked relatively well by a lot of metrics. You have the benefit
of the market weeding out firms that can't compete, but you've also gotten the benefit of the
government devoting long-term patient capital into its priority areas, which pulls in resources, pulls in
entrepreneurs to these segments.
I think the risk for China is that unlike other sectors that they've done well, like
solar or EVs, where they've had a thousand flowers bloom and you figure out which ones
are capable, which ones are not, in the chip industry, you don't have nearly as much of that. And in fact, the key players today,
like the most significant, most advanced maker of processor chips today was also the most
significant advance in China 10 years ago. So there's much more. That would be SMIC,
which produces chips for Huawei. Yeah. And so you don't have this thousand flowers
bloom dynamic in the chip industry just because it's so capital intensive and the
number of people with the know-how is fairly limited that you've got a small
number of flowers blooming and all these flowers now have state ownership. Yeah
can you do this different dynamic? It feels like they're building like a like
a mirror stack. Can you walk us through the equivalent to Nvidia,
TSMC, ASML over in China,
and then maybe give me a little bit of color.
Yeah, and on the SK Hynix side as well,
are they doing stuff there?
And then I'd love to know kind of,
if you can give me like a qualitative grade
of like how serious these competitors are.
Huawei seems super advanced.
It seems like smick
and smee, maybe not, but I'll let you explain it.
Yeah. Yes, I think you're right. They are trying to build out the entire supply chain.
On the memory side, you have YMTC, which is their leading producer of NAND memory, CXMT,
leading producer of the DRAM memory, including eventually the DRAM memory that will go into
the pair with GPUs, the
high bandwidth memory. I think on the memory side, China's done really well. You probably
wouldn't say it's the cutting edge in terms of its ability to produce that volume, but
in terms of the kind of pure technological capability, if they haven't cut up, they've
gotten very close. I think for the processor chip side, it's been more complicated. Huawei is very
capable at chip design. It's done it for smartphones at the cutting edge. Now it's catching up
very rapidly in terms of GPU design. Hard to exactly benchmark these in the Nvidia,
but Huawei is very capable in chip design. The challenge they've had is that SMIC is right now
about five years behind TSMC, five or six years,
in terms of its ability to produce processor chips
at quality and at scale.
And so that has been a real limiting factor.
And the reason SMIC's behind is because there are no
real Chinese equivalents today of companies like ASML
or Applied Materials or Tokyo Electron that
make the tools that make chips. There are companies that would like to compete with them that
can compete with some of this really simpler lower end tools. But when it comes to the
advanced tools, the Chinese firms just aren't there yet. And so SMIC needs to buy.
How far behind? Hard to say. I mean, I think certainly, certainly 10 years behind today, they're not investing a ton,
they're reverse engineering, usual playbook. But if you look at the leading edge fabs that
Smick operates, it's still mostly Western tools inside. And every single year for the past decade or so, China's been one of the largest, if
not the largest importers of chip making equipment in the world.
Last year, China accounted for ballpark half the revenue of all of the world's key chip
making equipment vendors, which is a pretty good data point for where those firms are relative
to their Chinese competitors.
What about the scale of the shell company activity buying
from TSMC and other players?
Have you tracked that closely?
Yeah, well certainly a big shell company was discovered
and then we hope shut down
last year, but the scale was vast, truly enormous, millions, several million ships procured from
TSMC and then appears diverted to Huawei, which is, you know, at a scale that I am frankly
surprised by, everyone knew there'd be smuggling in the scale of dozens or hundreds or even thousands.
But smuggling at the scale of millions
really calls into the question the ability of the US
government to properly enforce these rules.
And the only thing worse than a rule that is overly broad
is a rule that's overly broad and not seriously enforced.
You get the worst of both worlds.
And so I think the US government has a lot of thinking of its
own to do and how do you actually make these rules stick in the real world?
And thus far there's, it's been a real struggle.
Are there any under explored areas in data center build
out that where people aren't really tracking the competitive dynamic between
China and America?
I was listening to Dylan Patel talk about how with
Huawei's Cloud Matrix 384, they were able to do,
I think fiber optic connections between the chips
and basically do NVLink at a much larger scale
and Nvidia had tried to do that
and maybe not been as successful and it felt like,
you know, Huawei's slightly behind or seriously behind
in a number of categories, but that might be one place
that they're actually ahead.
Have you tracked that at all?
Is there anything that people should be digging into there?
I feel like the narrative was like,
everyone was getting up to speed on Nvidia,
and then people learned about TSMC,
and then they learned about ASML,
and then they learned about SK Hynix,
and I feel like we're all about to learn
about a networking provider soon,
but what's been your take on that industry?
Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're right to focus on networking
as a key area of rapid technological advance.
It's hard to benchmark who's how far ahead,
unlike in Foundry where you've got a really clear way
to measure TSMC versus SMIC. There's not such an obvious
kind of benchmark. I think the the underexplored area in the
Chinese ecosystem is actually not at the chip level with the
cloud level, which is we know that China's smuggled in a large
number of chips, we know that there are a meaningful volume of chips
that Smic has produced domestically for Huawei.
But it appears that a lot of these chips
are in data centers that have low utilization.
And anecdotally, all the anecdotes we hear
about utilization of AI data centers in China
suggests a lot of real challenges
in terms of getting utilization,
partly because there's some state owned telecoms
that are just mismanaging their cloud businesses.
But it's, I think, surprising that Chinese firms
like DeepSeek talk about compute limitations
given the number of chips we know that are actually in China.
And so if you're starting with a thesis
that China's good at centralization,
that doesn't appear to be what we're seeing here.
We appear to be seeing an inefficient, um, decentralization,
perhaps driven by some of the pathologies of having state-owned firms run data centers.
Do you have any insight into what's happening, uh,
that benefits China, but happens outside of China? I've heard reports that, uh,
folks are taking, uh,
training data on hard drives and flying it to another country,
or doing a training run, saving the weights to hard drives
and then flying back.
You know, you could imagine, you know, DeepSeek V4
or something being trained by, you know,
a series of shell companies, and it's just an American guy
with a big AWS account, right?
But at a certain point, I would hope that Amazon says,
wait, who are you and why do you want to spend
a hundred million dollars this month on cloud?
Like, we like billing everyone a few thousand dollars,
but this is gonna set off some alarm bells.
What are the risks there?
Is the government doing anything about that?
What is your take on this idea of just, you know,
hopping onto other clouds
and then routing the data backwards?
Yeah, I think this is an emerging area of focus
for the government.
I think you're right that it's an area
where the US government doesn't have
a whole lot of visibility.
And I think cloud computing companies haven't,
they've got, know your customer requirements, et cetera,
but not nearly as much investment as say a financial institution spends on making
sure they're not transferring money to a sanctioned Iranian entity.
For example, I wouldn't be surprised if for the next couple of years we have a lot more
build out of this type of regulation precisely to deal with what you're talking about.
And I think, you know, a large training run is large.
And so I think we shouldn't be surprised to see
heightened, know your customer requirements
as you get larger and larger in terms of the scale of compute
that you're using.
The other nuance is that certainly
US cloud providers are key here,
but there are also cloud providers from other countries
in other countries that are playing a role. We read a lot about Malaysia the last couple
of months as one of the key buyers of GPUs and a variety of Malaysian companies that
are maybe working with Chinese companies operating there. I think that's also an area where we
might see more regulation. There's been proposals and out of the house representatives, for example,
to say we want more GPUs going to us cloud providers and fewer going to nine US
cloud providers precisely. So that type of region,
America first for AI is sort of the way to think about that. And, and, you know,
the different parts of the government that would find that pretty appealing.
Can you, I mean, you mentioned Malaysia.
Can you take me on a little bit of a tour geopolitically of,
of what's going on in some of the other countries that might,
might be on the horizon for AI relevance?
I'm thinking about, you know, we've obviously,
everyone knows the US and China and then Taiwan's role and then Malaysia pops up
and then France has France has Mistral now
and there's deals being done in the Middle East.
I was always surprised that Russia
was not on the conversation at all
because they have a very long lineage
of incredible math prodigies and it feels like you would,
I mean, there are a number of AI scientists in America
who come from Russia and so I'm surprised
that we're not seeing,
oh, Russia's getting in the super computer game
or trying to build out some massive data center.
They have been busy.
And so what are some of the other countries?
Can you take me on a tour of maybe,
maybe let's just start with like,
what's going on in the Middle East?
How are you thinking about that?
Is it just like a jump ball bidding war
between are they going with the West or the East?
And then we can move on to some of the other regions
in the world that might be relevant or not.
Yeah, and the Middle East has a real advantage
in terms of the amount of capital they can deploy,
which matters if you're trying to build
the compute clusters.
And I think both for Saudi and especially for the UAE,
there's a desire to build their next generation of industries
if and when oil becomes less
reliable for them.
And that's driven this investment in terms of building infrastructure.
And we saw after Trump visited a couple of weeks ago now, big deals announced, especially
in the UAE, 500,000 GPUs a year to the UAE is a large number.
I think the question for the UAE is,
there's no doubt they can build data centers,
no doubt they can afford the GPUs,
can they build businesses on top of that?
And I think all these countries want to do more
than just host Azure or AWS data centers.
They wanna own their own businesses
and build on top of that.
And that's a harder thing to do
than simply building data centers.
I think the UAE has big ambitions in particular,
but it's easier to have ambitions
than it is to realize them and it'll be a challenge.
What's your take on TSMC's traction in Arizona
and Nvidia's had some announcements as well.
How bullish are you on the progress they're making?
So I think the good news is that TSMC has publicly said
their manufacturing yields for the shared ships
that they produce that actually work
are just as good in Arizona as they are in Taiwan.
That's a really powerful data point.
I think the bad news is that on a unit cost
they're still a lot more expensive than in Taiwan.
And that cost differential will decline over
time, but it's a real differential and it's not going to go to zero. And so the key question
I think is to what extent TSMC's customers are going to keep pushing TSMC to build more
in the US versus be comfortable with production in Taiwan. I think the trend has been that
they're pushing TSMC to do more in the US.
And certainly TSMC looking at the tariff dynamics has registered that. They've announced plans to build six fabs beyond the one operational one or construction right now. It's unclear exactly
over what time horizon that happens. But so long as you've got these kind of tariff and geopolitical
issues front and center, I think TSMC customers will be encouraging them to pursue this diversification.
Yeah. Who, who would eat that cost because Nvidia has famously very high margins.
All the hyperscalers are thinking about doing in-house chip design. Now,
I'd love to know your take on, on Microsoft strategy, the TPU at Google,
anything else that's going on,
Tranium and Amazon, for example,
because you could see those,
you could see, yes, TSMC in Arizona is more expensive,
but that cost is kind of mitigated
by being able to route around Nvidia's margin,
but I don't know if that's a reasonable thesis.
Yeah, I think my assumption would be
that the cost is shared by across the supply chain.
And actually, if you look at the supply chain,
you've got a number of high margin companies involved.
TSMC has a pretty healthy margin.
Its key customers do as well.
And if you take an iPhone as an example,
ballpark the share of the TSMC content in an iPhone, $50, let's say. If that goes up
by 30% in the context of a thousand dollar iPhone, it's not dramatically going to change
the economics. Same for an Nvidia server. So I think you're right to say there's plenty
of places where you could absorb some of that
cost.
What share of it goes to TSMC versus customers?
I'm sure it's a constant source of negotiation.
Yeah, so there's kind of like an interesting supply chain here in the actual delivery of
AI applications.
And I can't help but wonder if some of the international players outside of America and China
are maybe targeting the wrong thing.
It seems extremely valuable to be able to fab chips
in your country and own your supply chain
and be able to produce a consistent flow.
And then it also seems incredibly valuable
to have the front end to AI,
essentially like a chat GPT national champion
that users go to.
But the model itself and the data center seems
maybe less important there, but it feels like
all of the different countries that we're talking about,
whether it's France or Saudi Arabia,
they seem obsessed with owning a data center,
but then if the local population is going to chat.com
instead of letchat for Mistral,
like has France really won if they just have a model?
And maybe they're thinking about it in terms of like
deploying within the government in the same sense
that like the DOD is deploying Lama right now,
but how do you think these international countries
are thinking about the different
places that they can try and plug into the overall delivery of artificial intelligence?
Yeah, I think that's the right question to ask, and I think you're right to suggest that just
having a data center is not a guarantee of making money off of AI. It seems highly likely to be the case that the application layer and the operating
system for AI, however that develops will be places where a lot of money is made. And
again, not clear that if you build a data center in your country, you're going to guarantee
that you have that at all. I think when governments think about this, there's probably a degree
to which they're not asking the question you're asking and they ought to.
There's also, I think, a degree to which they're thinking
about sovereignty and control over their tech infrastructure.
And they're worried that if they become wholly reliant
either on US or Chinese AI providers,
they're gonna be in a weakened position politically.
Now, is the best use of their resources solving that problem, building data centers? I think that's an open question.
But we've certainly seen a lot of countries turn in that direction as their
first response for trying to build a bit more room for maneuver in the AI space.
It's interesting, as the UAE was opening up to Western businesses back in the day, there
was a structure that was popular where if you were Coca-Cola or Michelin and you wanted
to sell into the UAE, from my understanding, you needed to set up basically a 50-50 JV
with somebody locally. So it was basically owned and operated to some degree,
but almost more of a franchise model.
And I wonder if we'll end up effectively seeing something
like that on the data center side.
I just wonder how much that particular layer matters.
If you look at what China's done in just the delivery
of conventional web services, it's
obviously knockout, drag out fight
to try and build data center capacity and import chips,
but also develop the traditional semiconductor,
the CPU supply chain, and then ban Facebook and Google
and develop homegrown alternatives
for the application layer.
But they haven't tried to rebuild Linux from scratch.
Like, North Korea does have a fork of Linux
called Red Star Linux, apparently.
But in general, Chinese phone companies
have been fine forking Android.
That hasn't been a place where they've said,
oh, we gotta rebuild,
we gotta own that from start to finish.
It's like, we wanna be able to make the phones,
and we wanna be able to deliver the services
so that Google can't bring their own censorship rules,
and Samsung can't cut us off
of actually delivering the phones,
but in terms of the actual operating system layer,
everyone's been kind of fine with standardizing
around Linux and Android.
I don't know, it's interesting.
I wanted to talk about the AI trade deals.
Yeah, yeah, so this is where I want to get into.
I would love to understand the talent market to the in China to the extent that you can yes
It's been what what we've been covering for the last couple weeks these sort of massive
changes between
In talent moving around between the different labs. I'm curious if there's that level of competition for talent or it's
Between like deep yeah because in some ways for talent or it's, you know. Between like Deep Sea and Alibaba?
Because in some ways, you know, these American, you know,
researchers constantly, you know,
shifting around to the highest bidder.
It's not necessarily the best for winning the AI race
or winning the AI war.
It's the right strategic moves for the different labs
and different hyperscalers to compete for this talent to build the best businesses and
products that they can. But it's not necessarily an authoritarian might say,
Hey, let's just consolidate all of the AI talent at one lab in America. That's
not the way America works. But how does it work in China? Yeah, you still do
have a pretty flexible labor market. I think there's an interesting question.
Would you be right to consolidate all AI talent? I think if you're a believer that we're going to
reach a single threshold called AGI, and if you reach it two months earlier, you've got this
enduring strategic prize, then maybe concentration is the right strategy. But if you're a believer
instead that there's going to be a bunch of different products, which will themselves
be pretty transformative, but there's not one threshold you
want to pass, then actually you probably
want a more flexible system that's
going to allocate between different firms.
And maybe it is macroefficient to have
people jumping between firms once every year or two.
If they're bringing the cutting edge,
spreading it to different firms, that
could actually be a good thing on the macro level, as they're bringing the cutting edge, spreading it to different firms, that could actually
be a good thing on the macro level,
as well as for the individual level.
I would be more pessimistic about China's chances
if I found them centralizing more aggressively.
I thought one of the most pessimistic data points
this year about the Chinese AI ecosystem
was the news that deep-seed researchers were having
their passports confiscated.
They had to report international travel,
which to me is a strong disincentive
to doing any research.
China seems to love doing that.
They were doing that to rare earth element experts as well
at rare earth minerals.
It seems like it's just in the playbook.
When an industry becomes important,
the passports start disappearing.
Yeah, I mean, the other elephant in the room
is you can imagine the amount of pressure
that the CCP is putting on Chinese AI researchers that
are here in the US.
Maybe they want their citizens already,
or they have a path to citizenship.
But if they have any family or any exposure at home,
there's still a lever that they can pull.
I want to talk about talent in the context,
not just of AI model development,
but actual chip fabrication.
It feels like right now what we're
seeing in the foundation model labs
is an extreme power law in the value of AI researchers,
hence $100 million offers for top talent
and starting salaries in the 300K range.
Like that is a wide, wide power law, right?
There's always been this narrative around TSMC
that you can't chat GPT how to make a semiconductor.
There's a couple books out there,
but it's a lot of lore, it's a lot of tutelage
and mentorship, how power law distributed is talent in semiconductors
And is there a world where?
chips act 2.0 gives Intel a bunch of money or something and then they start offering
TSMC experts a hundred million dollar offers and that really pulls forward American chip production
So I don't think the mental model is that expertise
is power law distributed.
I think that there's lots of very unique capabilities
you need to make a chip,
and the level of expertise you need
in each of the verticals is very deep,
and you need all of them.
As you only got 90% of them, your chip doesn't work,
and so you need to build this expertise
over a long period of time. And so if you were to say, who are the three people you need
to hire from TSMC to replicate TSMC, I would say that's not the way to think about it. I hire
half the staff or more. When TSMC was bringing the facility in Arizona online, they had hundreds of
people from Taiwan working in Arizona.
And this was not even the most leading edge ship production. This was two generations
behind the cutting edge with all of the explicit help coming from headquarters as well. And
so I think that helps illustrate how much of the transfer needs to happen at different
levels. But if you look at who's Nick hired over the last decade, it's been a ton of engineers
from Western, Taiwanese, Singaporean, semi-hunter firms.
And I think a lot of the advances that they made can be ascribed to the fact that they
were able to import all of that human capital from workers who had previously spent a lot
of time at other companies.
What are you tracking?
We're halfway through the year.
What what kind of events are on the horizon or various
potential new legislation are you kind of following?
I think from the policy side, there's going to be some action on tariffs and
semiconductors, it seems.
Presidents repeatedly said that unclear exactly what direction that's gonna take,
but it could have pretty big implications
for the cost of building AI data centers.
That's certainly one.
And I think on the kind of tech controls front,
we haven't seen the last of the moves
from this administration either.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see more there too.
Have you been tracking the leadership change
at Intel, Liputon is coming in,
it seems like they're gonna be doing a lot of layoffs.
I was trying to go back through Ben Thompson's analysis
of Intel through the years
and try and understand how the narrative,
I've been tracking Intel that long to follow
whether there should be a split.
What has been your take on Intel and has it changed?
And how do you think, what should we expect from Intel
over the next few years?
It seems like they're gonna be tightening things down,
but do you expect any significant changes?
Would you recommend any specific changes?
I'm interested to hear your take on Intel.
And there's a lot of people who think that a split
between the manufacturing design businesses
is the right way forward.
I think that the question, if you think about a split,
is what does that mean concretely?
Because the reality is you still need to have
a fair amount of integration between the design side
and the manufacturing side,
because the manufacturing side is making chips
for the design side that will be in progress
for a number of years, and the manufacturing side needs business for the design side that will be in progress for a number of years.
And the manufacturing side needs business from the design side.
So split or no split is probably too simplistic a way
of thinking through the option set.
There's a bunch of different variables around that.
And I think that's probably exactly what
Litbu is wrestling with right now.
I think that the second challenge that Intel has
is in its products business,
the CPUs for CCs and data centers, I think there's a wide agreement that they've got work to do on
both those fronts in terms of remaining competitive with AMD. And they've lost market share over the
past couple of years, they need to win that back. And so I think those are the two key issues he's
got to deal with.
And they're of course interlinked and it's hard to say
you're only gonna focus on one of them.
Totally.
This is great.
Any other questions, Jordan?
Fascinating.
No, would love to have you back on.
This is fantastic.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
This is next quarter.
Really appreciate this.
Great.
Well, thank you for having me.
Cheers.
Bye.
And I'll be right back.
Up next, we have Aaron Ginn,
the GPU whisperer,
as his moniker in the information proclaims.
He has a new piece out in the wild.
I believe it's in the Wall Street Journal.
We will get the latest from him.
Aaron, how you doing?
Hey man, how's it going?
Did I get that right, new piece in the journal
or somewhere else?
The one on robots?
Uh, well, ArenaMag.
Is that where?
Yeah, yeah, that was, yeah, ArenaMag and then I did...
You're prolific.
Yeah, it's fun.
I'm a kind of a, not only Christian, but academic at heart.
So I like, I like writing.
I like all sorts of things in that zone.
So, but yeah, I have a new one on robots.
Okay. Take me through it. What was the inspiration? What's the thesis?
Give me the details.
I guess I kind of know for hot spicy cakes done in a kind manner.
An agent-to-me manner. But I think most of the analysis done with people in our space is devoid of any kind of reference
framing.
They kind of live, people in Silicon Valley, particularly people in AI, live in, they think
they live in this kind of arrogant Michael Cosmis, CS Lewis would say, chronological
snobbery.
So they don't appreciate how other things that look very similar are just patterns of
repeating as the, you know, one of the most famous Solomon phrasing
because theorizing the Bible that Solomon said that, you know, that there's nothing
new in the sun. We don't fully know the truth, but it's true to Solomon. And in that sense,
like innovation kind of goes the same pattern that you have something that innovation is
always intentionally oriented to CapEx, both in the sense of knowledge workers and also
capital expenditure and and it always starts with the as a rich luxury but then it gets proliferated out and
robots as
People have been kind of pitching both in the sense of the doomsday sense in the utopian sense
I think are wrong because they did if you look at past patterns of
Innovation and how it's been adopted
in society, it generally doesn't get oriented towards the rich.
The rich continue to do what they do.
There's a reason why rich people have their own planes, have their own drivers, have a
yacht, have multiple houses, have chefs and carers, things like that.
That's basically the same trajectory of lifestyle that they've had for a while.
And things that you own, things that you do, things you buy. The names that are associated with the Yale Club
and the Harvard Club continue to be the same names.
People who go to Davos are the same names.
But the real arc of capitalism,
which is why the Exocentralist, the German,
the Frankfurt School was completely wrong,
is that what it does is that it takes those luxuries
and gives it to everybody else.
I think that there's a, I've heard the name of the digital capitalist, but he said that
his kind of moniker of looking at innovation and adoption is oriented towards taking something
that is available to the rich and giving it to somebody else.
So Uber is the example that I would probably drive for everybody else.
And it's a robot to be the same thing.
Certainly like robots will, there'll be a certainly, you know,
a luxury version of a robot that will be deployed
for people and the rich and famous.
But the rich and famous can afford people.
And rich and famous like character.
They like things that are like, go listen to,
like I know people love comparing you and Jordy to All In,
right?
And just go look at what your mouth talks about.
It's like, it's things that are look at what your mouth talks about. It's like,
it's things that are take a long time or delicate.
I love it. Yeah. Yeah. This is made of endangered Panda for right.
That I think myself, right? I am.
No, all in host has ever ward Panda for that.
The king is real. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so like, so for the rest of us, right. Yeah. Upper middle class down,
robots will be for us.
Robots will give us the ability to do things that we didn't have before that
makes us more like rich people. Yeah. And AKA time. Yeah. And,
and so that's what it's arguing is that that robots will not be dystopian.
It will not be utopian. Yeah.
It'll be every other pattern of wave innovation and helping the average
American live a better life.
Yeah, yeah, I noticed this when I started interacting
with the multi-multi-billionaires
that every app on my phone, they had a person for.
So if you do incorporation of your company
through LegalZoom or Stripe Atlas,
they have a lawyer full-time on staff.
You have Uber, they have a driver. You have DoorDash, they have a lawyer full-time on staff. You have Uber, they have a driver.
You have DoorDash, they have a chef.
And it's like-
You gotta have guys.
The new technology, yeah, the guys.
Yeah, how many problems can you solve
by just calling a guy?
Very interesting.
What do you think about, it was Chris Pike, right?
Somebody's gonna create guys.app,
they're democratizing access to guys.
To just a guy.
It's just a database of lawyers and drivers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, even like, you know, you don't call 911
and that's for everyone.
Private security is the opposite side of that.
But what do you think about Chris Pike's take that when,
I mean, I guess this relates,
but I think his take was that if there is a human
that is acting as like a roadblock to something that you want,
that will be replaced by artificial intelligence or robotics. But if the human is part of the
delightfulness of that experience, and his example was like an Omakase chef, that will never be
replaced because you want... What do you think about that? Give me your reaction please.
So like I'll, I'll like, um, I'll, I'll be at your mouth from a race.
Cause like the question was, you said like, we go, uh,
he was talking to J Cal right? He's the ultimate, like the thing guy,
whatever the thing is that's that's Jake out, right? And he goes, you know,
talk about watches and Shumato was like, Oh,
get a handmade mechanical watch. Right. So I'm wearing one right now, actually. So, so like,
and so you look at this right now, right? So it's a lot of a,
go to get bezel.com.
Your best available now to source your own watch on the planet, literally any
watch.
So, so, so it, uh, you know, hand in hand, gilish a hand in car,
can carve you to use software engineer that it'd be gotten watches.
And so the reason why this is worth it
is because of that human interaction.
It's that his ability to do everything by hand,
he has the machine built in late 1900s,
he does everything, he can show it.
It's like that's the point, right?
And so another example of this would be like being a waiter.
You could, here's this example,
there is automated checkout Applebee's,
I don't know if you've been there recently, but there's automated checkout Applebee's.
Like Chick-fil-A, right, one of the most highest grossing per store sale fast food joint in
the world.
One of the best.
Also delicious.
Has tons of people, right?
So it could if it wanted to, but it's not the point of where you go.
And fundamentally there's this disconnect.
I think it's spiritually connected.
I think you could watch some of Peter Chil's recent
interview with Duthat, and you can kind of hear
some of these trends.
It's like if you remove the ability of the anthropomorphic
orientation of what innovation is and why you do it,
you come up with these inconclusions
that are basically absurd.
There's people in Silicon Valley who argue absurd things
about the nature of what the argument of innovation
is going to, because the pre-seposition and priors and the metaphysics that are built into it are basically
that humans are worthless and existential and they kind of have a Star Trek daycare
for you, the world is very dark.
And the same thing exists with social media, the same thing exists for search, the same
thing exists for mobile phones, now it exists in AI.
All of these are continuations of the same thing.
And just like the AI do-mers, if you go look at the names of the people,
it's like the same people who are like the title two
social media is gonna end the universe are the people,
because it's the same line of thinking.
So humans just like what you're doing now,
people watch this show because of you too.
Like it doesn't, even if there was a mimetic machine.
Yeah, it's not the most efficient way to get the news,
but it's fun. But it's fun, right? Like, because it's not the most efficient way to get the news, but it's fun
Right like like because it's part of what the nature of this
It's hard for me to imagine
The idea that that let's say a humanoid robot, you know gets real traction in restaurants
Well naturally, you know and you can go and sit down at a restaurant, the humanoid can serve you and whatever, and it's efficient, it's fast, it's smooth.
That will naturally create even more opportunity
for human waiters, waitresses that love the craft
of service, and I think it is a real craft.
And I think that anybody that's had a truly fantastic
dinner and can attest.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's a,
this is one reason why I think the adoption curve of AI
is gonna be kind of like two different buckets of things.
There's gonna be the infrastructure side,
which we're gonna excel at.
And then there's gonna be the adoption side,
which we're not gonna excel at.
And some of it is political, which is everything from we lost the AI moratorium and the bill,
but thankfully the bill got passed, so we're not paying higher taxes. So thank you, Daddy
Trump. Daddy T wins again. So yeah, exactly. Make what I know is right. But on the other
side is like, if we're going to do, let's say, one of the best things AI does
is that it allows this, the ability of computers
to look like humans, behave like humans.
It's fantastic at that.
It's the ability to model us, right,
to make a mimetic version of us.
And from an education perspective,
that could be incredibly powerful,
because my upbringing, even though I went to public school
before, it was insane, so like I'll say from that,
but my dad, who's Chinese, raised me much more of a tell me you did traditional tiger dad sort of fashion
So I still remember this one conversation I had with my dad because in like fourth grade and I got like a hundred in a class
And he said why did I do extra credit?
right it was like his immediate response and
Any no, they hear they're they the more Caucasian people in the audience
will clutch their pearls and, oh my God, it's so traumatic.
Right, but the point of it, right,
is like, you always can do more, right?
He's teaching me resiliency,
teaching me how to challenge myself,
teaching me how to push beyond what I think I can do
into like open by expense,
because his goal was to not have the upbringing he did,
which is super poor.
And so imagine the AI that could do that, right?
That could be your own, yeah, it did,
your own ability to challenge your thoughts.
People are thinking of the clue-y thing,
which I think is a very surface level
understandable AI can do.
But imagine if AI was actually a challenge agent,
that let's say you got the right answer.
And AI was like, you're wrong,
so prove it to me like you're right.
There's a whole other layer of this.
This is what in terms of the El Salvador project that we're working on is that that's kind
of like the orientation of why other countries don't have that.
They don't have the teacher, the labor unions, let alone they don't have the internal capability
of delivering these types of things today.
But a computer can come in now because what they have now, they have nothing.
They're willing to take a swing being like, well, if it works 50% of the time, that's
a huge win for our country, but America will be lawsuits and this and this and this.
But Kelly is just like, oh, this sounds like a great idea.
We should just try this.
If it doesn't work, well, I'll do something else.
That's why I think we'll excel at infrastructure, which is why it's so important we push in
video products everywhere. but the adoption is going
to be in Africa, second world, third world countries. It's not going to be in America
because we already have people doing it today and people will still be the preferred like
rich people still have tutors, right? And they're still going to have tutors, even though
they can actually good at tutoring.
Interesting. Give me the update on sovereign AI generally.
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think yesterday, about more and more Western
companies adopting DeepSeek and Quan.
It's like I actually read that.
Yeah, I need to check.
Now it's Josh, Jim, Lisa, and Lynn.
But yeah, I mean, any major updates there,
did anything get stuffed in the bill related to chips or semiconductors or
anything like that? That's relevant.
Uh, not that I, not that I know of. I mean,
I mean people have to take a step back and realize this is a tax bill,
not spending bill. I'm, I'm an Austrian economics guy as y'all know,
so I don't like that. I don't believe that you can keep spending bill. I'm an Austrian economics guy as you all know, so I don't like that. I don't believe that you can keep spending forever. This is a tax bill. It's literally why it's
going through reconciliation. To be willing to like lower your threshold. Like I agree
with Elon. He's one of my heroes. He's very wrong on the purpose of this bill. But he's
right. We're spending too much money, but it's also we have to get away from omnibuses.
So the AMRortization stuff got removed
I'm pro that stax is pro that the OSTP office is pro that I this is not be something should reside than sticks
It it's something that we have to win and we can't have these like varying laws everywhere on the chip side essentially
You know there are like I have a hat that the the president seller gave me. So, for countries like, you know,
Buckeli, who's trying to basically provide this sort of infrastructure and capital to the world,
the market is there for us. And we have these, basically, voices that I think are living
in an era of where the moat resided in areas that they previously defined sort of infrastructure
ways.
And we're at this moment now where we could accelerate victory to where, hey, how about
China, we outsourced all manufacturing last 30 years to them that make all the stuff in
Tmoo, they got the stuff in Chi and all this crap.
Like why can't we do that to them for semi-cannibbers now?
Like why can't we take their money?
Right?
And you see all these people like, oh, but wait a minute.
What if AI destroys the world?
It's all this kind of like Suits saying, again,
Title II people, go back to that debate.
Remember, free speech debate online and telco versus where
does the right to speak reside and the right to serve content.
Those people are the same people in the AI moratorium.
It's literally the same line of thinking.
And so the AI moratorium was supposed to be
specifically on like training and application.
But in El Salvador, like they passed an AI law,
but basically a free training law,
which is how the law should be structured.
When you train something, it's up to the user to apply it.
If the user applies that to
Make a robot to kill somebody just like you get a hammer and kill somebody right or get a robot to scratch
You know Jordy's Mercedes, right? It's that person's fault, right?
It's not gonna be like if John trained that, you know open source model they use it against you know, Jordy
It's like it's not John's fault. So I can go somewhere passed that law, but in America, they want to co-mingle these responsibilities, most out of baseless fear.
But still, the policy of the administration
is still towards, we need to export,
we need to become the AI exporter of the world,
because we have this ability to be
the definite infrastructure of the next era,
and not reside in this kind of loose,
or not even loose,
it's actually really hard to understand
what the critics are saying.
Even with something less dramatic than like,
using an open source LLM model to commit a crime
or something, just the intellectual property thing,
like it's very easy that we've had the ability to go
and pirate a movie and upload it to YouTube
for a very long time, that's like not a crazy new technology,
but it is in the sense of like copying data is new
and distributing it all over the world,
and yet, you don't even, YouTube doesn't even need
to stop it ever from happening.
They just need to stop there from being an economic model.
Like you can't build a business on top of YouTube
just uploading Star Wars.
Like that's not gonna work for you.
And as long as you kill that economic model
with enough pressure and say,
hey, we're not gonna serve ads against this.
We're not gonna pay you out.
We're gonna ban your account eventually.
There's a bunch of ways to prevent this stuff
at the level of like, yeah, like someone might,
some kid might upload Star Wars and five people see it and before it gets taken
down, not the other world. Who cares? Exactly. And so, yeah, yeah.
Going after the, uh, like the individual actors that that's a very,
very good point. I like that.
The most, the most freeing phrase you could ever,
and maybe you could raise your kids this way too,
cause it was the most spring for us ever received from a, from a guy who's famous,
but I won't say his name because he's a huge radio star.
And he taught me this.
He goes, whenever you feel stuck, just say the phrase, so what?
So what?
Right?
And like, why should I buy into your presuppositions?
Why should I believe in these things?
Like, prove it to me.
Like, so what?
And it's so freeing to reside in that zone of like but you just said so what like somebody
Does that like why is that a big deal like and and then it kind of puts people on their heels like?
Like I said this once in debate about like since they're talking about chips like well like, you know
By dance could get access to this. So like first of all Oracle's number like top five customers are like Chinese
So like, you know, they're already doing it right then I said like so what? Mm-hmm. Oh my number, like top five customers are like Chinese. So like, you know, they're already doing it.
Right, then I said like, so what?
Oh my God, like, it's like, oh yeah,
videos will be more musical.
Like I was like, it's a, and they're like,
well, we could do this, could you do this, could you do this?
I'm like, I'm like, yeah,
I could say the same thing about anything.
I could say the same thing about like, well, you know,
if you buy this watch, you could use this
to put on a bomb, right?
And then like, it's like, that's's like that's like their level of thinking.
There's so many steps.
I was going to ask Chris earlier, you know,
how he thinks about a war versus a race.
And then you would have to ask him the question.
Well, then should you have named your book the chip race?
And then that would have sold like one percent of the copies.
So the war or is it a race? Interesting. Yeah, it's so tough. I mean, so many of the
loudest voices in our industry are beautifully conflicted because they run
multi-billion dollar businesses that are dependent, you know, the future
fundraising, current fundraising is dependent on certain narratives.
And so it's hard to figure out what's real.
Yeah.
As it relates to like the China stuff?
Not just that, even just like the progress of models,
how much we should be spending,
when the GI will arrive,
when super intelligence will arrive.
AI war versus AI race, right?
Because if you brand it as a war,
then all of a sudden it brings in a new level of funding.
Like, you know, there's all sorts of
downstream implications of, well, you know,
it's really important that we get the AI doom question right and so we need to over invest. Or it's really good that we get the AI doom question right
and so we need to over invest.
Or it's really good that we win,
it's really important that we win the geopolitical battle.
And so it's okay to over invest in this case.
You know, it's all about just like
justifying different levels of underwriting.
And when you add one of these infinite numbers,
you can say 1% chance of infinity is still,
you know, I'll pay any price.
Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I guess my, my firm is just way more optimistic. Like I understand
like, why can't we just invest because it's cool. Like, like, like I like, I like, we
like stuff that Elon does. I don't know Tesla because I like my, my cars to go boom. Right.
So, but it's still cool. Like, why can't we just be cool? Why can't it just be, Hey, this
is awesome.
This is like moving the trajectory of the human race
to something even more amazing.
It seems like getting there.
It's like no, war, death, oh.
Yeah, but it seems like we're getting there.
I mean, I don't know if you saw Nat Friedman's post,
but you know, he was saying he started at Meta,
and he's gonna just build some cool stuff.
And I'm like, yes, like that sounds awesome.
Because I mean, there are a lot of AI products,
but a lot of them are-
And he's gonna discover the great lost wonders of history.
I hope so.
I hope so. You better.
Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by, Aaron.
This is always a pleasure.
Always a pleasure.
What are you doing for the fourth?
Yeah, what are you doing for the fourth?
No, I don't like to work.
I do something with my church.
And I usually, my house is a third space
so for the community so it's very,
on the other side of this is, I built it,
I built it a custom house and so it's a big,
basically I don't drink but it's a big beer hall
essentially from front to back.
Wow.
So we usually host something, it's like,
I don't know, maybe three or four thousand square feet
and it's just a big open room with a kitchen,
dining room, living room outdoors
So we usually like host stuff and people like use use my house to do that
So I think this goes back to you the you know
The human element is like fundamentally innovation is supposed to be at the primorpec is to be make humans better
That's what people pay for it. Yeah, and there's certainly negative downsides of this
And we have to mitigate those downsides,
but you always should start from the phrase, so what,
or go read Thomas Sowell about can you even regulate
downsides without creating a secondary effect
of mitigating upsides.
And I think that from many people are projecting
lots of things in AI that they could just get from just being in community
and just having friends.
And like y'all have your sauna workout.
Yeah, yeah.
You're like you have-
You're familiar with this.
Yeah, exactly.
So much of the projecting of internal problems
people have into technology,
when if they had a friend,
they resolved their loneliness academic,, they had a good family, they surrounded by a religious community, particularly Christianity, a lot of these
things kind of go away.
Where you can just look at a technology, you can look at innovation from where it is.
Which is like, this can just be awesome.
It doesn't need to kill us.
It doesn't need to start a war.
It doesn't need to be us. It doesn't need to start a war. It doesn't need to be a HSI. All those are certainly things we can talk about, but
to overextend you dig into that person that's arguing that there's typically as like a pathology
built into them that is projecting externally when it's just like, Hey dude, like do you
like want to hug? Like, you know, just like, you just want like what you want to hang out
like with your pool or like go to CrossFit or something
like that. And then it kind of like you know fades away because there are many things in the world
you should not care about. And I don't like I get asked to about things. I'm like I don't really
care about that. Like it's not something I want to talk about. And because you care about less
things is key to joy. Because less things means you're actually more responsible for more things,
which means you can be happy because you can see your work go into something that has output
But there's when you become unhappy is when you see all this crap happening around you
And you get worried about it and you do something about it and you really can't and really it's like you're there's just things
You just shouldn't care about and then you're like sensing. I hate to cut you off, but I'm sensing it talk
I hate to cut you off, but I'm sensing a TED Talk. We'll have to.
We'll do a TBPN Talk very soon.
But have a fantastic weekend.
Great seeing you, as always.
See you soon.
See you guys.
See you, man.
Well, speaking of fantastic AI products, go to fin.ai,
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Well, our next guest is Bridget from Founders Fund.
Welcome to the stream, Bridget.
How are you doing?
Busy time in, oh, wait.
OK, so can you say where you are?
The last time I was on, it was a different format.
You guys were in the old format.
We were.
Yeah, new studio.
We are now in Hollywood, future
capital media. Yeah. And entertainment.
Future home of media. But speaking of future homes, where
are you right now?
So I'm at EatCC.
Where's that? So you're literally doing the meme. You're a
venture capitalist and you're in France right now.
At a conference.
At a conference.
I would hope people would have a conference.
One hour conference, seven days on the beach.
Is that what we're going on?
Oh my gosh.
It's productive.
It's productive, okay.
Well, I lost my honor here.
Yeah, I don't know why they have it in France,
but last year it was in Brussels.
I know why, it looks beautiful.
Yeah, it was beautiful.
And all the bunch of capitalists will be there anyway.
All the events with the ocean backdrop.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
Yeah, give us the,
what actually happens at an event like that?
Is it people kind of voting on direction of the technology,
or is it just like pitch, meeting founders, building on top of stuff?
Yeah, I would say it's like, it's sort of a mixture of everything.
I would say like, these conferences probably originally started
because the crypto industry is like, just so decentralized,
like for lack of a better word.
And everyone lives in different places. because the crypto industry is just so decentralized, for lack of a better word,
and everyone lives in different places. So I think originally it was for
like-minded individuals to meet up,
and Peter actually used to go to some of the really early ones
called FC Financial Cryptography,
and then they slowly evolved into ETHCC,
there's Token 2049,
and it's just a good way to see everyone in person.
Obviously in person is so much better
than Zoom, but people in crypto are just so distributed.
Like they're not really concentrated in one city,
maybe New York now, but it's still kind of like, you know,
since the US isn't like insanely regulatory friendly yet,
like people are everywhere.
So I feel like there's very serious projects
in San Francisco, New York, Puerto Rico,
Singapore, and Dubai, which is like all over the world.
Yeah, totally, totally.
Yeah, but Joey and I try to do one-on-one meetings
most of the day, because if you just get caught up
in events, it's easy to just do a bunch of events
and not actually get anything done.
Yeah, we've gotten to Steamworld a few times.
We're not crypto native enough to know the full calendar,
and we'll try and book some crypto people, and they'll be like, are you crazy? We accidentally held our cryptoworld a few times. We're not crypto native enough to know the full calendar, and we'll try and book some crypto people
and they'll be like, are you crazy?
We accidentally held our crypto day
during the Bitcoin conference.
During the Bitcoin day, and we just didn't know.
And we were like, well, Brian Armstrong's coming on,
so if he's not going to this thing, we'll know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But we actually had some folks from the conference
hop on, which is cool, and it wound up working up well.
That's great.
It was like 2 a.m. our time or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And getting Mert on the street, we had Mert yesterday, and it wound up working up well. Anyway. Yeah, it was like 2 a.m. or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And getting Mert on the street,
we had Mert yesterday and he's always great,
but he's always traveling across the world.
I wanted to get the update on the stablecoin world.
What's interesting is the game over, circles out,
it feels like the legislation's passing,
but what are you seeing?
Are there still investment opportunities?
Are there still opportunities to build?
Or is it the time of the enterprise SaaS integrator
in web two?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a good question.
Yeah, I think stable coins are definitely
the main character right now.
Like we, there's a new announcement every single day
with something stable coin related.
Like it's very hypey.
It's very in the meta, but I think like for good reason.
I was joking with Joey the other day.
It's like stable coins are basically the part of crypto that has found the most
product market fit. And it's just like a tokenized us dollar,
which is like kind of ironic because the original crypto it's like,
we're going to rebuild the financial system.
Everything's going to be Bitcoin denominated. Like we're going to do,
you know, basically recreate,
and now we just have the tokenized US dollar moving around.
Well, everyone was complaining about volatility
of the meme coins, and the crypto community said,
fine, we'll give you something with zero volatility.
Are you happy now?
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Well, it feels like some of that hype,
I wanna get into the tokenized private assets
and tokenized stocks as well,
but before that, Ss came out and posted
that there was a certain concession in the stablecoin bill
around stablecoin issuers not being able to pass yield back
to holders.
Could you dive into that a little bit?
Because that felt monumental, but-
Yeah, I think that was something
that the banking lobbyists probably snuck into the bill.
And the bill was like a Herculean effort even
to just like pass the Senate.
Like it got blocked once.
Just to like get it like to the Senate
was like basically like an insane task.
And I think basically the gist of that is like,
if too much money flows out of banks
and into like stable coin issuers like Circle,
or there's going to be like a million in the US probably,
that's money flowing out of like
the traditional financial system.
And then basically like net new money
cannot be created via loans
because stable coins have to be one-to-one backed
with like T-bills or cash and cash equivalents.
So stable coins would kill
the entire
Western financial system.
Like, I mean, basically, and they make,
I mean, it makes so much sense because it's like,
I would rather hold my money in stable coins.
It's like one-to-one backed, it's very safe.
And when you put your money in a bank,
it's like, people think it's safe and whatever,
but it's actually like not that safe.
Like they're like lending it out
and that's how new money gets created
and that's how the economy functions.
And implement their monitoring.
Yeah.
Sorry, what did you say?
Yeah, yeah, we all experience this firsthand.
I mean, most people in tech with the SVB crisis
and first Republic and the idea of FDIC insurance
and everyone kind of learns about fractional reserve banking
at the worst possible time when there's a crisis.
But you actually wrote an article all about how a stablecoin bank might be different. Can you take us through some of what you might expect? And why do we I feel like there's this whole crypto podcast called like bankless and they're all like don't have a bank at all. And that was a meme in crypto for a while.
Now the banks are gonna issue stable coins. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what is the role of the bank going forward?
What even is a bank?
Like why do we need that at all?
And then walk me through the stable coin bank idea.
Definitely, definitely, yeah.
Okay, let's see.
Yeah, I think me and my friend, Avi,
wrote the piece originally like early this year.
We basically were looking into this act
that didn't end up passing.
It was called the Credit Card Competition Act.
It had like a 3% chance of passing the Senate or something, but we were reading it.
And basically what it did in practice, if it were to be like passed into law, would
be to like allow or force banks to accept a network other than like Visa or MasterCard.
So it basically create this like golden opening for a stable coin network to come in and people
to be able to pay with stable coins and all of these things.
Because right now, like, banks are pretty locked into Visa and MasterCard.
Like they have a trillion dollars in market cap.
Like they're the de facto.
And they've also been doing fairly well on the stable coin side.
Like they're kind of innovating actually pretty well.
So it's kind of like a regulatory thing where you would have to
have the CCCA, the act I was talking about, pass in practice for a stablecoin network
to come through. And so that was the first angle we looked at it. And then basically
we were thinking about, okay, what about from a consumer banking perspective? And it basically
would function the exact same way as a narrow bank would, where it's just a stablecoin bank.
Your deposits are held one-to-one backed.
They're backed by T-bills.
And it's super safe.
But again, it's like, if all of that money
were to flow out of the traditional financial system
and banks and into this, this is why the narrow bank could never
get a master account.
They can never get a charter.
And they never actually got a meaningful amount of deposits because it's like a threat to the Fed and like to the US
economy essentially, if it got, you know, in aggregate, like a ton of deposits. And
that was kind of like the way it would trend, I think, if it got a master account. So yeah,
but a stablecoin, I mean, I think it's something that like needs to exist.
Like it just makes so much sense. And the banking system is incredibly antiquated. Like
it's actually not safe as we've seen. And so, but yeah, I don't know. A lot of the banks are trying
to explore stuff around stablecoins. Now JP Morgan is trying to pilot like a tokenized deposit program. Vyserv is trying to launch a stable coin.
And yeah, and like honestly,
the incumbents are doing incredibly well,
like Stripe acquired Bridge,
Stripe acquired Privy,
Stripe via Bridge launched their own stable coin, USDB.
So it's kind of one of those things where like,
you wanna see all these like net new winners be created,
but also like Stripe and a lot of the traditional players are kind of crushing it.
So it's interesting to see.
What about stocks on chain,
private company shares on chain?
What are you tracking there?
There was a bunch of memes this week.
We talked about it with Mert a little bit,
but I'm curious what you're expecting.
It just seems like there's funny enough,
a massive amount of demand for US regular publicly listed US
stocks just tokenized on chain.
Yep, yep, totally.
Yeah, so I actually went to the Robinhood event
where they announced the private company shares and then
tokenizing equities.
And yeah, I think basically like if you're tokenizing
equities, it makes a ton of sense as a regulatory arbitrage
like to deliver these equities to people outside the US
that have historically had a hard time getting them.
But like for people in the US, it actually just makes sense
just to like use the traditional equities market
and just buy them from your bank account.
And then I think on the private side, yeah, Robin Hood talked about what do they do like
SpaceX and OpenAI, I think.
But again, it's really it's, it's difficult to issue private company shares like we saw
like the OpenAI response, I'm sure.
It's just one of those things where, yeah, it's hard to custody them, where are they
living?
What happens when you redeem them?
And it kind of becomes foggy.
So that's why I think unless it's a regulatory arbitrage, at least for tokenized equities,
it makes more sense for outside the US than inside the US.
But everyone's doing it now.
Like Kraken issued X stocks.
Let's see, obviously Robinhood Coinbase is trying to get into it.
So I mean, I think it makes sense, but within the US,
it's probably like a less interesting market
because our system works pretty well as is, I would say.
And then I also think like the most interesting thing
about like issuing these things on chain is native issuance,
such that basically like, instead of like wrapping,
you know, Apple stock and then issuing it on say Arbitrum, like you just like natively like,
like let's say just like a comp, like I don't know, like Mertz company just like goes public
and you natively issue those shares. And such that you don't have to like wrap and unwrap,
add an extra step where you're taking like counterparty risk, you're taking custody risk,
there's more fees involved,
and you don't actually own the underlying,
like you're trusting someone else to own the underlying.
So I think it's just-
Yeah, the point of crypto was trustless systems,
so that should be the goal.
Exactly, exactly.
Like if you wanna like natively,
like Tether is doing like tokenized gold, right?
Where it's like, that's the only asset
that represents their gold is that tokenized gold.
It's not like they issued it, you know, on like the CME
and then they wrapped it in like tokenized.
So I think like, if you have that extra step of tokenizing,
it only makes sense as like a regulatory arbitrage.
Otherwise you should natively issue it.
And I think native issuance is gonna become
more and more of a thing.
And that's going to drag
the rest of the financial system kind of on chain.
That's Vlad's vision too with Robinhood.
It's like, if a lot of these companies,
if you can find a structure that works for open AI,
SpaceX, all of these private companies,
and you just have them natively issuing shares of their own
that represent some kind of stake in the company
in a clean cut way, then you don't even really
need to go public, right?
Because that's kind of your trajectory of letting out
some of the trouble.
Yeah, it is interesting, the strategy
of trying to force the conversation
and then potentially force the partnership by just creating
these things, right?
Republic was coming out.
We had Ken on, and he was basically saying, yeah,
plenty of people aren't going to like this,
but we think it's sort of the natural evolution.
And then we'll see what actually pans out.
Well, I'm sure you have a big day of yachting and wine
tasting tomorrow.
I mean meetings, meetings.
Business meetings.
So we appreciate you staying up late to hop on the stream.
Thanks so much for stopping by.
It was great to catch up.
We'll talk to you soon, Bridget.
Have a good one.
Enjoy the fourth in France.
Yes.
If you're looking to get a good night's sleep,
head over to 8sleep.com slash TBPN and get a new Pod 5.
They have a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial,
and free returns and free shipping.
And we are ready for our next.
I am back in the game with an 89.
Congratulations, Jordy.
You hit a soundboard for you.
And let's bring in our next guest, Price from Open Ledger,
embedding accounting in your platform.
Fast Price, how you doing?
Good to meet you.
Did you hire Soham?
Did you interview him?
No, not needed.
Well, check spam.
It tends to be a bull signal if you've reached out.
But yeah, please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
Nice. Hi, I'm Price, co-founded CEO of OpenLedger. We're building
an embedded accounting API that helps
full accounting suites into their products instead of having to build a general ledger from scratch.
70 million people are running businesses of all types
and no matter what type of business they're running,
they all have to do their accounting.
And so they're turning to a lot of modern platforms
like Shopify, MindBody, and ServiceDyton
to run their platforms,
but most of them still don't have accounting features
and the ones they do are usually duct taped together.
And so what we've built is a set of APIs and components
that makes it much easier for these platforms to
embed a full accounting suite inside their product for the
end users to use. Interesting. So why do you is this b2b2b
software? Yeah, I love it. We're adding an extra layer. Yeah,
why did you pick an easy problem like accounting?
Well, I don't see it as an easy problem.
Well, I don't see it as an easy problem. No, no, I'm totally kidding.
It seems extremely hard.
I get it, though.
I get it.
I think at first glance, it seems like a very simple company
in a lot of ways.
I don't think it's.
To be clear, I don't think it's.
He was joking.
It's a simple idea, extremely complement,
to actually create. Totally. Because you have to create so much flexibility for each different
Client, but yeah, what was we had we had a
CEO on from from Ambrook that does accounting just for just for farms
Yeah, and she said it took them like I think two and a half years to like build the core accounting
Sure, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So what have the trade have the trade-offs been as you've built the product?
Yeah, so we went all the way down to the ledger level
and built our own ledger database.
That's what we build all the functionality
on top of for reconciliation.
And then the actual embedded accounting API itself
is all built on top of that general ledger level.
And so that took a bunch of time,
but we really wanted to save folks who,
that exact situation you mentioned,
folks who are building these custom accounting products
that provide so much value to any users,
finding a way to really take those core things
that don't change between accounting systems
and turn them into infrastructure that anyone can use
to build their own products.
What's the go-to-market like?
How do you actually bring on these businesses?
Is it power law distributed?
Do you need to just get a few really huge companies
on the platform or are you trying to go super broad
like Stripe where kind of everyone's using the product?
Yeah, so I think that's how we really got our start
and that's how our first clients are larger power law
as customers but what we're looking forward to is this deeper thesis
that we've been building around is this idea
that accounting data is basically the best substrate
you can get to put at the base
of a vertical agent for business, right?
And so as folks are building more types of vertical agents
that are working with financial APIs or payments
and things of that nature, having accounting data reconciled into a book or working with financial APIs or payments
and things of that nature, having accounting data reconciled into a book
or a chart of accounts and building on top of that
is one of the best places to sit
because that information is essentially like memory
for a company.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the reason that every board meeting starts
with like, let's look at the finances of the business
because that is the map of the territory
and then you can dig into specific things,
so that makes a ton of sense.
In terms of agents, it seems like you don't actually need
to do all the work of maybe discovering the correct patterns
because your clients are working on top of you
in that regard.
Are you using artificial intelligence at your company?
Is there been different trends that you're tracking
that are improving the product on your end yet?
Yeah, so what we're really excited about right now
is really weaving it inside and through
the way we're building our general ledger architecture
so that it can automate a lot of those bookkeeping tasks
that really are a big part of accounting
and turn that into infrastructure
that can quietly sit inside of a product
rather than having so much human in the loop input.
And I think that's really what makes this,
part of what makes this a really exciting opportunity
and different from a lot of other embedded payment
or FinTech features is that we're essentially helping
to automate more of a service as well alongside a suite.
That's something that a lot of platforms previously
were helping their end users and customers
like hire bookkeepers or accountants
to sit alongside them.
We help kind of add that almost as an extra feature
that they can sell alongside their suite.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Jordy, anything else?
No, very cool. Thank you so much for stopping by.
I'm excited about all the different features
and functionality that you can build on top of OpenLedger.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen such a big trend in vertical SaaS
and all the different B2B players.
It makes sense that there would be an enabling technology
here.
So thank you so much for stopping by.
This is great.
Yeah, great to hear from you, Price.
We'll talk to you soon.
I'm excited for you guys.
This rocks. Thank you. Have a great day. This is great. Great to hear from you Price. We'll talk to you soon. I'm excited for you guys.
This rocks.
Thank you.
Have a great day.
Cheers.
Let me tell you about public investing
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Being a shareholder, underrated.
Underrated being a shareholder.
Being a shareholder is underrated.
Well, we have our next guest coming into the studio.
Not quite yet.
They need a little bit to build the four up.
So we can do a little bit of timeline here.
Oh, well, we can tell you about AdQuick.
You could take a four up and put it on a billboard, baby.
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You saw us deploy ads in the real world.
We did an out of home campaign in New York and the response to that has been remarkable.
It's been really fun.
It's been a way to running by it, taking pictures.
Yeah, and it's been a way to reconnect.
We've gotten so many text messages from people who are less online, family members, all sorts.
It really cut the out of home.
It's just built different.
Old friends, college friends.
It's just built different.
I mean, you've got to do a lot of different marketing
strategies.
There's a lot of different things.
Out of home should be a piece of that.
It is incredibly underrated.
I expect people to just start doing the one-on-one.
No launch video, just big one-on-one billboard that's the way to do it very efficient
way to do it it's very efficient well do we have time to dive into the business
of Formula One or Jordy you want to check on our next guest because I saw f1
last night yeah tell us give us your review it was incredible it was one of
the best movies ever seen
I'm really sorry because I we wanted the whole crew to come and but I you know was catching a friend
You know a college buddy and a former guest on the show as well
And it just kind of came together but saw it in IMAX
highly recommended the entire film seemed to be shot in IMAX which I have no idea how they did because
Half the shots are from the perspective of a Formula One car, and so they must have mounted some massive
camera rig on that thing.
But it was beautiful.
Hans Zimmer delivered an absolutely incredible score.
I've been listening to the theme to F1 religiously as I drive at just five over the speed limit.
Right?
You sure you want to put that on the record? I heard that you drive always perfectly at the speed limit, right? You sure you want to put that on the record?
I heard that you drive always perfectly
at the speed limit.
One under.
You cap your car, you actually hacked it.
Yeah, I kind of take the Nvidia approach to driving.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, fantastic movie, highly recommend it.
Lots of great sponsorships, lots of great ads
within the movie.
Shark Ninja's in there.
We got a bunch of great stuff.
Highly recommend seeing in theaters.
Go check it out, F1 with Brad Pitt.
We'll be on Appetite soon.
We have our next guest.
Welcome to the stream.
How are you doing?
Could you guys introduce yourselves?
We weren't fully expecting to.
We're excited to have you all here.
Thank you so much.
Of course.
So, I mean, maybe just to start out. My name is Jacob
I'm very excited to be here at the temple of technology the fortress of finance capital of capital
Very early very early supporters. We appreciate never forget you we will remember
So just quick background
I'm currently a student at Stanford,
along with Jack Whitaker, one of your old interns.
Nice.
And then right now, I've been working
for a lot of guilt for the past, wow, it's
like I think four or five months now.
And what I'm going to be talking about today with Ophira is
Wait, wait, first, fit check?
What is this jacket?
Yeah, what's this jacket?
Oh, yeah, no, this, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, If you're going to a pitch meeting, if you're fundraising,
this instantly gets you in the building.
It's a letterman jacket of our industry.
Exactly. Yes, that's great.
And it doesn't have Java on the back,
but it does have Java on here.
So I think it's pretty good. Oh, that's great.
Yeah. Incredible.
It's amazing.
Okay, so give us the, yeah, yeah, give us the story.
And then Ophira, quick intro as well would be great.
Hi, yeah, my name's Ophira and we're gonna be talking about
large language model art.
I actually, I invented making artwork
with language models like chat GPT.
And Jacob has a really exciting project around that.
Wait, break it down.
You're the creator of AI art.
Break that down.
Yeah, one of them.
Yeah, no, she's ridiculously,
I'm gonna gas Ophira up for a moment.
Please.
She invented a large portion of modern AI ASCII art
and is probably the world's best jailbreaker.
OpenAI holds these competitions pretty regularly,
like every couple months or so. They invite people from all around the world to jailbreak
their models. Usually people can't get past like one or two of the tests out of like a
20 test thing. O'Farrill just regularly wins them, breaks everything. Like it's something
where I was talking with Ben Mann, who's one of the Anthropico founders. And even when we were discussing this, he's like, yeah, no,
like there's still a lot of red teaming and CBRN, which is chemical, biological, radiological,
nuclear threats that like these artists in their communities, they just break through
everything. Like, and all the like, I don't care what of MIT, PhD, like hire everybody, like doesn't work.
Like they're just, they're killers.
And that's kind of cool.
I feel safer.
You know what?
I was using the same techniques to make artwork.
So back when Microsoft Bing came out in like summer of 2023, I got like, you know how you
guys read poetry books sometimes and the poems are like arranged in these beautiful shapes.
The words have like, like this gorgeous shape of tree.
That's what I do with language models.
Though I actually first discovered that they could do that
in the first place.
And I've made a whole beautiful art form out of that.
So this is not diffusion based image generation.
No, no, this is using a language model, doing it.
Yes. And so just the letters on the keyboard.
It's actually a very interesting capability
because it's showing spatial intelligence,
despite all it's doing is predicting the next token, just like,
like you would normally get a chat reply.
Yes.
But it's doing it in these gorgeous shapes that very often actually reflect the content of the words.
Yeah. I've seen someone put out a benchmark for having LLMs basically interpret secret messages in, are you familiar with
this, where you draw, you basically write out a sentence in a square box and the LLM
gets really confused, even though the human can one shot, it's kind of like an archaic
guy for this type of thing. But it's very fascinating that you're able to get good results
because I thought that that's a place where LLMs were particularly weak, but it seems
like you've been able to break through.
I think they also, like, one thing to note is that they don't naturally, they're naturally not very good at this.
Like, I think if either of you, like both of you, I feel like are fairly AI fluent,
but if you tried to go out and do this, I don't think that you would get terribly interesting results at first.
There's a lot, like, to get some of the artworks that are featured on beautiful ai art.com going right now showing showing my stuff
but um, yes, uh to go to go buy this, um,
I usually like I mean ophira can speak on this like you want like
Sometimes it's like 30 40 even like hundreds of prompts that warm it up
Sometimes it's like 30 40 even like hundreds of prompts that warm it up and go into these very weird
Places of distribution since if you think of modern language models, they're pre trained on the entire internet
So the odds of like if it is on the internet you can probably
Make it so for people saying like how do you make this art? How does this happen?
Like if you just have creative enough prompts that go on
for pages at a time, like you can just find anything
on the internet.
You can make all sorts of ridiculous stuff.
And that's how, honestly, I think you can get around
these jail, kind of like these safety measures and so on
is that if your training distribution is the internet,
like anything on the internet, you you can just you can go and find
So give me the give me the announcement. It sounds like you mentioned
Selling art on the internet. Have you processed your first sale? How much we know things cost?
How many sales have you done? Can you give us a number? I'm itching to ring the gong for you
I'm actually gonna check right now. How about the Stripe dashboard?
Let's see it.
Stripe dashboard.
It looks like we already have six orders.
Congratulations.
Hey.
Boom.
Boom.
There we go.
That's amazing.
That's great news.
Well, we'd love to have you back on
when you hit a thousand sales
or take it to the moon or put it in the loop.
Yeah, what's the vision for beautifulair.com? Are you gonna add a bunch more artists over time? We'd love to have you back on when you hit 1,000 sales or take it to the moon or put it in the Louvre.
What's the vision for beautifulaiart.com?
Are you going to add a bunch more artists over time?
What does it look like?
I think that my original thought was that first,
all of these great artists, we just
have to put something out there.
We just have to keep shipping.
So goal of today was launch, have all the payments set up,
have all of the drop shippers so that way we don't have to worry about inventory,
about shipping costs, et cetera. And yeah, no,
a bunch of people from the NFT community have reached out.
The crypto community has been pretty good to us.
I think that adding more artists is definitely on the list.
Farah can talk about this.
Yeah, I wish like I just came on the show,
I found out about an hour ago maybe,
so you guys are gonna admire my telephone today.
So this is actually a poem by a historical artist
named Aldous Huxley called The Crystal Cabinet.
Okay, cool.
And you can see it's in the shape of a wing.
Very cool.
And it's very beautiful and it was interesting.
I actually prompted Claude Opus Three by Anthropic to do that and it's very beautiful and it was interesting. I actually prompted Claude Opus 3 by Anthropic to do that
and it's very interesting.
So it's a whole conversation as Jacob describes
and you actually say like, can you make this more
like the shape of a wing for example?
And again, even though this is like,
I can picture that in my head cause I'm a human,
but somehow the model is able to gradually refine
the shape more and more like that.
That's very, very cool.
Yeah, very cool.
Well, we look forward to following along.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
Do you have a closing?
Anything you want to say?
A closing remark, I think, is something
for people to keep an eye out for.
O'Farrill can speak on this as well.
But Grimes is making a movie about the AA artists.
That's how part of the impetus for launching this is that there's filmmakers from Cannes
that are right now filming Ophira, Janice, some of the other artists I'm going to feature.
Our friend filmmaker Matt Zien, who we actually met through Grimes, who is a huge fan of this
artwork and a big supporter of it,
is hoping to film an independent documentary
about kind of first contact with the AI models.
Cause so many of us have had like weird experiences, right?
Like you chat with them,
and it's not like talking to a computer.
It's like there's a little something going on there.
So this is going to be kind of a,
I would call myself like kind of further on the edge of that.
Sure, sure.
It'll be about how we interact with models.
So stay tuned for that.
Well, where's TBPM merch in it?
We'll be first TBPM at Cannes.
Fantastic, fantastic.
We'd love to see that.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
We'd love to have you back chat more.
Congratulations on the launch, guys.
There's so much to chat about, but have a great day.
Great to see you guys.
We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Yeah. Really quickly, let me tell you back chat more. There's so much to chat about, but have a great day. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you soon.
Cheers.
Yeah.
Really quickly, let me tell you about Wander.
Find your happy place.
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We dropped that video into a timeline in turmoil.
It was a timeline in turmoil.
And it stood out.
It was a bit of a timeline cleanse. We did well. We did well. It was a timeline in turmoil. And it stood out. It was a bit of a timeline cleanse.
We did well, we did well.
It was a lot of fun.
It's having a long life on Instagram right now.
It did well on X and I've been enjoying
getting it into the hands of the Instagram audience.
Before our next guest, I just wanna say
happy birthday to John Exley.
Oh yes, happy birthday John.
The most positive person I've ever met. He's been very helpful in the chat.
And he's our unofficial moderator. There's 77,000 people on the stream and so I think we'd be melting down without him.
So he's been a huge asset. Happy birthday John. Thank you and happy birthday to John. Cheers.
Anyway we have our next guest Orin Hoffman in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Welcome back to welcome back
Great to talk to you again. I'm excited to be here second time guest. Yes. How you doing? I had a question for you
Do venture capitalists take their own advice?
Apparently not. Yeah, break it down myself. Yeah hypocrites. Yeah
Why I want to hear your your the examples that you have for situations where VCs give advice
But then don't take it themselves and then I want to go into kind of the meta level of like why is this happening?
What is driving that dynamic? But first kick us off with some concrete examples of VCs giving advice, but they're not taking it themselves
Yeah, I think first of all just my levels
Venture capital is really not that ambitious
First of all, just my levels, venture capital is just really not that ambitious. They're not nearly as ambitious as someone who runs a private equity firm.
The level of ambition is probably like 10x higher on private equity than it is in venture
capital.
And so in private equity, you might be really building an amazing company that you're trying
to take public, that you're really trying to take over the world. Venture capital, it's like you're just kind of like,
you're just OK with this, essentially,
just a little business.
Yeah, is that because of duration?
Well, yeah, and on the company side,
there are certain investors that take a more hands-on approach
or maybe they're on the board.
But it's somewhat, it's sort of culturally,
you're sort of leaving it up to the founder
and fate to some degree after you write the job.
It's essentially, it's a lifestyle business.
And so the venture capitalists always
derive lifestyle businesses, but they run them one themselves.
That's a good point.
They often say to founders, hey, you should have one CEO,
but most venture capital firms have like four CEOs. Yeah.
And it's like hard to make decisions.
They'll say take dilution, but they don't take dilution.
They'll say things like, you know, merge with other companies.
They never do merge.
They almost always say, hey, it's a good thing to go public, but you never see them trying
to take their own company public.
Like Bill Gurley or, you know, Brad Gerstner are not taking their companies public, but
they always give advice to take, you they have big companies, they run fairly large
companies, they could have taken them public, but they don't, they'll say board governance,
but they don't have their own board governance.
So there's whole host of things where the venture capital will say one thing, and then
of course they sell like, well, you should have a differentiated product, but most venture capital firms,
they're just selling money, it's commodity.
And so it's very hard to differentiate
and you just have all this competition.
If competition is for losers,
well, like venture capital firm
is like the most competitive place
where you have some of the most smartest people
competing against you.
This is the original irony of PT.
Yeah, but in some way the partners are the product.
And there's only one Oren Hoffman.
So you're differentiated by the product
that you're providing is in some way yourself plus the money.
And so that's that.
But what about some of the rumors
that firms like General Catalyst or Andreessen Horvitz might
actually go public?
And if you look at the way Mark Andreessen has been building his business, it does feel
like he, if someone's going to turn a venture capital firm into a blackstone, like, you
know, financial institution, it certainly seems like he's trying to do that.
I would agree.
I would agree.
And so I would say, first of all, if you think of interest in Horace, they have, they have,
at least they have two CEOs and not six, right?
And they clearly only have two and they're clearly the CEO and they're
clearly running the firm. So I would say they are way more ambitious than almost
every other venture capital firm, general catalysts,
like they own like a hospital now. So, right. So I mean, they're,
they're definitely leveling up the level of ambition, but still, if you just
look at venture capital versus private equity, if you just think of the top venture capital
firms versus the top private equity firms, you just do a comparison for each one-on-one.
It's just a 10x different scale in private equity.
Maybe venture capital will eventually get there, and Interest and horrors could definitely be one of those firms that they get
there. But today it's like, we're the also ran of the, uh,
and the ambition level is just so much lower. Okay. Ambition level.
Do you think it's because it's kind of a prerequisite if you're going to be a VC
that you're already rich?
Well, the other thing, the other thing is the other thing is, I feel like
a lot of people go into private equity, and they like they're
grinders, and they grind their way up. And so they build that
muscle. Whereas a lot of VCs, they don't kick it off with
grinding in VC. They're like grinding as a founder, which is
arguably the hardest thing you can do eating glass staring into
the abyss, they get some liquidity event.
They do a rest invest for two years.
Then they go into VC.
And by then, they've kind of come down
off of the mountain of grinding misery.
And then they're like, OK, I'm somewhat retired now.
Well, there's also the different types of ambition.
I want to have a 10x fund.
But you could be off of a small base.
It could be a $20 million fund. And then there's I want to have a 10x fund, but you could be off of a small base. It could be a $20 million fund.
And then there's I want to have a trillion of AUM,
which no VC has done.
BlackRock has 10 trillion of AUM, right?
So there's levels.
And I do think there's a bifurcation of certain VCs
just want to put up good numbers and have a little lifestyle
business and deliver great returns for LPs.
Others that have wildly different and bigger,
in some ways, ambitions, and that they
want to have hundreds of billions of AUM.
And I think that they will get there.
But I think what you're saying is there's maybe not
enough investors that are too many people are just not
actually wildly ambitious at all.
They're like, I just want a 3X. They're running a lifestyle business, which is totally fine. And obviously they're
building their, they're, they're hopefully doing the venture companies are doing good
in the world. It's not like they're not doing good. They're out there doing a good thing.
And, but we just, we're just tend to not follow our own advice.
Okay. Now let me, let, let, uh, I, if I come to you and go to the Silicon Valley market and I say, I'm gonna do it
differently. I'm taking high dilution, I'm going to take this
company public, I'm starting the venture capital firm that will
scale. Is that even a viable strategy? Or is there some sort
of like market dynamic that prevents that from even being
possible?
It might be very hard given the constraints
that other people want to put on the market
and stuff like that.
And different people have tried.
So obviously we saw SoftBank try
and maybe kind of pull back.
We saw some other folks who did have a different level
of ambition.
The crossover investors.
And some of the powers that be internally
have kind of fought against it.
It's tough.
And the venture capital market itself is very small.
So it's a private equity market is just a much, much bigger market, especially when
you talk about things like private lending.
Apollo just has a much bigger sandbox that they can play in than at least the Andreessen
Horace today.
It doesn't mean that will change because the venture capital market is getting bigger.
And of course, Andreessen Horace is going to move it
to other things.
They'll move into wealth management.
They're going to move into a lot of other adjacent things
over time.
So that's really the way.
It's like you get this niche in venture capital,
but that niche really can't be that big.
And then you'll have to layer on other things to grow,
just like any other company.
If you're Facebook, just for Harvard University,
there's only how big you can grow.
Even for all the universities,
there's only how you've got to move into other markets
if you really want to become a great company.
So many VCs are big poker players.
One of the major tier one firms should open a casino
and just start running cash games.
And have rules, no crying.
Yeah, no crying in the casino.
Open a literal casino.
And say, if you start crying, booted.
You're booted, yes.
This is great.
But please, we'll have you back on the next time
we have something to do to noodle on.
Thanks, guys.
What are you doing for the fourth?
Yeah, what are you doing for the fourth?
You in France?
I'm in Wisconsin for the fourth.
Oh, there we go. Stay in America
Let's hear it for capital alligator
That is that's American dynamism in practice yes
Staying in America for the fourth we salute you absolutely
Great to see you. Yeah
Cheers up next we have Mehran Jalali.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
I think we got through all of our ads.
It's just rough.
I like doing ads and now we're out of them.
Will, we have one more Graphite.
I don't have it in the deck.
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And we got our guest in the building welcome to the stream Mehran am I pronouncing that correctly?
Yeah, Mehran or Mehran. Yeah, fantastic. Give us the update. What are you up to? Where are you in the world right now?
Yeah, I'm in San Francisco.
I'm back in San Francisco.
I was in Belize for the past two weeks doing the scan there.
That is complete.
The preliminary results were super, super cool.
What were you scanning for?
Yeah, yeah, give us the whole backstory.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tell us the full story.
Because I remember the initial post,
it was maybe six months ago, that we saw.
So this has been in the works for a while.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, basically, the Mayans, they cleared out forests
to build some of their cities and settlements.
And so when they moved or they died or in any way,
they vacated their cities,
trees ended up growing back over them.
So if you look at it from the satellite,
it's just completely green, it's just completely trees.
But beneath the trees are these like magnificent pyramids
or roads and buildings and whatnot.
And so, and they're invisible from space and they're invisible on the ground but beneath the trees are these like magnificent pyramids or roads and buildings and whatnot.
And so and they're invisible from space and they're invisible on the ground because it's
just so hard to traverse these rainforests. And so what I'm doing is we're flying planes with very
big, very strong light, LIDAR scanners under them. And we're scanning these trees. And while most of
the canopy is just completely full of trees, because you know, it's a rainforest, some of
the lasers have made their way through and then you classify the points you remove the trees you look at the ground
And then you know if we discover something like a pyramid or roads or structures and stuff
We know that we found something that no one's seen for the past, you know thousand two thousand years or whatever
So yeah, LIDAR scanning forests to find civilizations
Did you find anything? Yeah, what'd you find?
So I'm doing two scans this year 400 square kilometers in belize 600 square kilometers of mexico
The belize one's done, but only like a third of it has been processed so far
Super cool. There are some there are pyramids. There are like hundreds maybe even thousands of buildings
hundreds of kilometers of roads
You know things that no one has ever seen, you know since a thousand two thousand years ago
Yeah, tell me about the uh the tell me about the the economic model of your entire operation
you're flying planes you've got yes yes it's a nonprofit so I mean so what got
me interested in this was I saw this will be a full-profit spin-out at some
point units we're gonna we're gonna tokenize the Mayan ruins.
Yeah.
The capped Lidar unit, no.
Yeah, 100 extra.
What got me interested in this was,
I saw this cool paper over Thanksgiving or so,
funnily enough, that was about how some conservation efforts
scanned some trees in some forest in Mexico,
and then these archeologists removed the trees
and they found stuff underneath.
And so I decided to see like, oh, like if you can spot, you know, random archaeological sites
without even explicitly looking for them, I wonder, you know, have they been doing more of it?
And the answer is like, you know, archaeologists have done some of this stuff in the past,
but ultimately there's just not a whole lot of money in archaeology.
I mean, you know, it's not a very like well-funded thing.
Like it's like maybe all the money going into archeology
on an annual basis is the same as like a series A
or series B or something.
And so, and it's like massive economies of scale
because you're flying planes,
the more you can fly them,
the more you can divide your total costs by.
There are these like extremely expensive,
like million dollar LIDAR scanners.
And yeah, I mean, the main costs are basically the plane
and the LIDAR scanner and the crew to go
and actually do the scanning.
Yeah.
So where do you go from here?
What's the next step?
Yeah, so still the data has yet to be processed.
The processing is basically figuring out what points
belong to the ground, which ones belong to the trees,
removing the tree ones, taking the ground ones.
And then while like, you know while the naive visualizations are striking,
like you're seeing this huge pyramid or whatever,
ultimately the archeologists draw
the most interesting inferences.
Is this actually super novel to us?
Sure, no one's seen this before,
but did anyone expect this to be there or not?
So process the point cloud,
give the data to the archeologists.
They made their inferences, but my goal ultimately is to scan all of this area.
I mean, ultimately, I think, you know, we need to put more money into archaeology.
I think there's really cool stuff to do with tech and archaeology.
We need more tech, technology and archaeology.
And my goal is essentially to use these results, you know, get like published
some all that stuff, raise a lot more money and do like a significant larger scan next year,
like 10,000 square kilometers at the very least next year.
And within a couple of years, you know,
finish all of Central America, then move to the Amazon,
then other interesting archeological projects,
like, you know, scanning coastlines, stuff like that.
So I just-
Anything to scan in America, considering it's
the fourth tomorrow?
Anything to scan in America considering it's a fourth tomorrow? In the US, the thing that's interesting to me about Central America is that they actually
had massive pyramids and stuff.
The US and the Amazon, there is stuff there, but ultimately, and the Amazon at the very
least, they didn't have stones, so everything that you find are like dirt mounds, which are cool.
Like the fact that they're there,
like in places that seem so hostile to life,
kind of in general, you know,
like just raining nine months a year or whatever school.
But yeah, they're like dirt mounds and stuff in the US
and the Amazon as well.
But at the moment, my interest in mostly in Central America,
I think there was like, you know,
50,000 square kilometers or so there to scan.
And I plan on scanning all of them first
and then other things.
How are the local governments in these areas areas are they excited about what you're
doing are they are they are they emailing you for updates hey what would you find well when I was
in Belize and I was talking to the you know the people in the city they were super excited you
know they they're proud of their history they find their sites cool they find that like other
people are interested in them they're very cool and I think that people are super excited. The governments are
also very excited because you know this boosts their tourism, this boosts their national heritage,
it shows that you know there were once great civilizations here and like you know that's
something to be proud of. And they're also wary because the problem is that there's a big looting
problem in these countries, especially countries like don't have so much money dedicated to archaeology to protect all of the sites.
And so they're a little worried about the data privacy and stuff related to this stuff
because when you're earning like $10,000 a year, when that's your GDP per capita and
you like find like a Jade mask worth like 200K in the black market, there's a strong
incentive and so they're trying to prevent that.
And so, yeah, I mean,
we've been working with the governments to assure them about the data privacy,
but generally like they're super excited about this.
Yeah. I can imagine.
Can you talk about El Dorado?
Um, you know, huge of true.
Yeah. Uh, I mean, what is the lore?
What is the are there any are there any folks
out there that still believe it's out there?
Is there any like what is the what is the historical
narrative and then what is the modern narrative?
Well, I think the meta point is kind of that
things like El Dorado, things like Atlantis, like Noah's Ark and stuff are like kind of how a lot of people get interested in archaeology
initially.
They're like, we're going to find Noah's Ark in Turkey.
And then you look and you're like, oh, well, you know, huge if true, but I don't know how
much these these hold up to some scrutiny.
And then you're like, okay, like what are other like more practical things that we can
do?
So, yeah, I mean, huge if true, but like, you, like what are other like more practical things that we can do? Yeah, so um, yeah
I mean huge of true, but like, you know, most likely not true
But it's it's good that these persists because it gets some people interested in archaeology
Yeah, what about other things that we should be scanning for? I mean if not gold rare earth elements are top of mind
Maybe there's a secret chip fab somewhere we could grab
Yeah Maybe there's a secret chip fab somewhere we can grab
Expecting you to find my in data centers. Yes. What do you think? I was a Jensen back There was a Jensen of that era that would be truly huge of true
Well, I think we should scan the Amazon
I mean there's like been really interesting stuff there like the early people that like, you know
The early Europeans that went there they reported, you know, like 10 foot tall naked women that are like shooting arrows, which is how it got the name Amazon.
You know, it would be cool to maybe fact check this, but like even if this is not a real like there's probably some stuff that this was based on.
It would be cool to look for Atlantis, you know, huge of true. I think we should scan all the coastlines of the Mediterranean,
the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, because there are probably so many cities that are now underwater.
I'm Iranian, I would love to do archaeology in Iran as well. There are so many civilizations
that are mentioned in Sumerian history, but we have no traces of except for like you know that we know there was a powerful king there. So there's a ton of archaeological mysteries, but like kind of the
bits versus atoms thing is also true in archaeology. Where like the atoms part of archaeology doing
field work, doing digging and stuff, that hasn't really changed in hundreds of years, but there are
like interesting opportunities in bits now of like you know Nat Friedman's Vesuvius scrolls,
or, you know, doing LIDAR scanning,
using satellite imagery, stuff like that.
And like, those are kind of the lower hanging fruits.
The more we can do remote sensing,
the more we can do scalable things,
that's the lower hanging fruit.
And then yes, like making really educated guesses
about like where some like Atlantis might be
and like doing work there.
But I'll defer to what I've learned.
Do you find it funny or fascinating
that being an explorer is like super contrarian?
Like we have this idea that that the world is fully discovered and you know, we've we've mapped every coastline
So there's nothing else to do. I like high school career fairs like no one's saying oh you can still discover things
Like I didn't know this was an option. Um, I
Don't know if it's contrary.
But yeah, not many people are doing it.
I would love if there were more people doing it,
there was more interest, there was more money in this.
But yeah, I mean.
Well, you're starting the exploration industrial complex.
You're the first of the modern era.
I think when the results come out,
they're gonna be super cool.
And yeah, it's gonna get a lot of people
a lot more interested in this sort of thing
Fantastic very cool. We'll come back on whenever you have updates. We should do the next one from the air ideally
Starlink powered yeah
The place like like 500 meter taking the sharpest turns it can it's not gonna be a pretty sight
Well, it'll be fun. Anyways, thank you for coming on
Thank you for having on. Very excited.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
Have a good one.
Cheers.
Bye.
Up next, we have Kushal from Extend App coming into the studio.
We got some gong-worthy news, baby.
Oh, yeah?
Oh, yeah?
It's gong time.
It's gong time.
It's gong time.
What's up, guys?
How are you? Good to see you. How much have you raised? Good It's gong time. What's up guys? How are you?
Good to see you.
How much have you raised?
Good to see you too.
What's up guys?
Give us the news on the fundraising front first and then we'll figure out what you do
for a living.
I just answer customer support for a living.
That's what I do.
Oh, you got to get on Finn.
Finn by Intercom.
Yeah, yeah, Finn.ai.
Then you can just go to France.
Yeah.
There we go. what's going on
what's the news what's up guys great to meet you well we recently announced
17 million dollars in funding across our seed and series a rounds congratulations
thank you thank you
okay now the less important news, what does the company do?
Well, we also filmed a pretty kick ass launch video to go along with it too.
I saw that.
It was kind of fun.
Yeah, it was great.
So is this like some type of new like fax machine company
you're doing document processing?
What are you building?
Yeah, yeah.
So my name is Kushal, I'm the CEO co-founder of Extend.
And at Extend, we're building a modern document processing cloud.
So, you know, we work with companies that just get a ton of PDFs and unstructured documents, right?
And we help them ingest and process that.
So we really work with, you know, cutting edge AI teams, data teams, technical teams,
whether they're trying to build AI agents on top of that data, new products with that data,
automate manual back office work with that.
We really give them all of the infrastructure
and tooling they need to go after that.
Is the actual physical document ingest problem solved?
Is Iron Mountain just dominant there?
Is there no need for actual new scanning?
Have we scanned every document in the world by now?
Not even close.
It's actually funny.
One of the first customers I talked to
back when I was getting the company started off the ground,
it was a large healthcare provider in Milwaukee,
believe it or not, in the middle of the country.
And I talked to them,
I'm trying to pitch them, you know,
LLMs for document processing.
And they're like, this sounds great.
Come back to us in two years,
once we have digitized this mountain of lockbox,
warehouse of PDFs and boxes that are stored in our backyard.
So not quite there yet,
but I think we'll get there pretty soon.
Talk to me about the tech stack.
Is OCR traditional OCR pipeline?
So there's like dead at this point.
I've heard about some people that will send a PDF
to Google for OCR,
get a big messy bucket of text,
but at least it's in text format,
and then run that through an LLM
to just kind of clean it up.
What's the state of the art?
Yeah, you know, what's really surprising is
so much of the world still runs on these PDFs
and Excel documents,
and they just end up being the system of record
for such mission critical data.
If you think healthcare, finance, supply chain, it's just all powered by PDFs.
I think people's mind would be blown if they knew how much of the global economy just runs
off of PDF files.
And the problem's been around for a long time, right?
I think OCR at this point is decades old.
Funnily enough, we have a bunch of hoodies for the team and we have the OCR patent printed on the hoodies
It's just a little testament to it, but it's like 40 50 years old at this point, right?
But it's really accelerating now
You know
I think more documents are gonna get processed in the next six months than all of history combined since the PDF file format was invented
And I experienced this myself, you know, I actually built this back at Brex in 2018.
I was an early engineer there.
And we did exactly what you were saying, OCR a document,
and then just run it through a ton of painful regex
to try to pull out these targeted data fields.
And it was so painful.
And fast forward now to today with LLMs,
and the capabilities are just so much higher.
And the demand for document processing is through the roof right now.
I was going to say, talk about kind of the demand.
I know you got a bunch of pretty incredible customers already.
Yeah, I mean we have the privilege of working with some awesome folks from large enterprises
like Square, you know, that are trying to do a ton of use cases around financial statement
ingestion or Flatiron Health who have
billions of pages of patient medical data
All the way to cutting-edge startups like, you know Brex and Mercury and Checker and many others that are all using us in production
And we have incredibly high retention ton of folks that kind of refer us to others and come inbound
And we're growing the team to keep up with it
But the demand has been pretty intense and I think what we've kind of seen is that as these models have gotten better,
it's sort of increased the possibility of what you can go and do. But for very mission critical
use cases, where even 99% accuracy, for example, is not good enough if you're trying to do mortgage
processing or patient healthcare intake, because the downstream impact of bad data is so catastrophic.
And so we really focus on these pipelines and industries
where you just cannot get it wrong.
Accuracy, reliability, you cannot get it wrong.
And that constraint puts a ton of complexity on the problem
and that's kind of where we go deep.
And that's why we have a number of customers
that kind of try to do the model approach
and then come back to us in three months, six months,
and they sign up for Extend and pay for Extend despite the models having gotten
exponentially better over the past couple of months. So yeah, I mean, what the models
are getting better, but what models are you actually using and for what use cases? Because
I imagine that the price difference and the time cost of using a heavy duty reasoning model versus
a really quick optimized like, you know, 4.0 level model
has got to be pretty different.
And then is tool use at all in the mix with some of these
because I can imagine as clunky as RegEx is,
every once in a while you might want to have a layer
of RegEx validation on top of things, right?
Just to make sure.
I think you're getting at a really key point, which is there's very few use cases,
which is like, here's a document, extract this data.
Cause for any mission critical pipeline, you have the entire end to end system.
You have to build of classify the document because that changes the schema and
then split the document up and then actually parse it to make sure you can
handle these tables that span 10 pages. Right.
And each one of those kind of adds complexity
to the axes of cost and performance and latency.
And you kind of need to have all three of those, right?
Not a single model is gonna be great at all of them.
And really why customers end up buying us
is because they don't wanna be locked in to one model.
And we give them all the tooling to figure out,
hey, this initial triage step,
we wanna use a really cheap, fast,
low latency triaging classifier.
But then for this really complex table, we do want to use a really powerful reasoning model.
And we kind of help them integrate and build all of that end to end.
Talk about where the data is winding up. Are you seeing more clients demand that you map the documents that you're ingesting
all the way to a relational database like Postgres or something are people just saying hey
Just give me a blob of JSON. I'll stuff it in a MongoDB
Do people want a CSV file that's on AWS or s3 or something like how do people want the data?
finalized from you
Yeah, I mean the flexibility is kind of the name of the game and that's where we provide options for all of that
Some people that are trying to build AI agents on top of it,
they'll want the JSON payload, but then also put it
into a vector DB, right?
Some other folks are going to want to actually index that
in Elasticsearch if you're trying to do text
experiences on top of it.
Other people that are just automated mortgage processing,
for example, that'll just go structured data points
into a DB that then they can take
action on. So we kind of give them the data, the raw data,
and then get out of their way so they can figure out, you know,
where to do and what to do with it downstream.
Yeah. How, how real are, I mean, there's, there's,
there was this narrative for awhile, like, Oh, enjoy the VC subsidized era.
It's like the early Uber days. All the LLMs are cheap,
but they're going to be really expensive.
It's like the early Uber days. All the LLMs are cheap,
but they're gonna be really expensive.
How real is it that LLM inference can be a material cost
for a company like you that's kind of reselling inference,
not to degrade what you're doing,
but that's a piece of your business.
You have a cost that's inference,
and then you're earning revenue from the value
that you add on top of that,
versus a startup that's buying from you.
How big are these line items?
Are we talking something that's material to SG&A
for a company, or is intelligence basically too cheap
to meter at this point?
Yeah, it's a great question.
And it really depends on the use case, right?
And our contract sizes range from,
we work with small startups paying us a few hundred bucks a month, all the way up to large enterprises that pay us
six plus figures a year, right? And it kind of varies all across the board. But, you know,
we haven't played the unit margin game where we're trying to, you know, give away a dollar
for 90 cents or anything like that. We have been positive, you know, economics on all across the
board. Because really what we benchmark ourselves against
is what is the cost of bad accuracy
in your downstream product or your user experience?
What's the cost of six months of edge time?
And at the end of the day,
those end up outweighing a lot more
than potential percentage differences
on the LLM cost themselves,
especially as they've continued to come down.
There were some things we couldn't do
from a product perspective 18 months ago
that now we really can just because it's so much easier to make multiple LLM calls and
do things more agentically in an end-to-end system.
Very cool.
Jordy, anything else?
No, very excited for you.
This is amazing.
Clearly ripping.
I can sense.
I can feel it in the voice.
It's going well.
There's nothing better than seeing, yeah,
a lot of people raise the series A. Not everybody
has this level of pull from the market.
So I'm sure you'll be back on for a B in no time.
That's fantastic.
Can't wait.
We'll talk to you soon.
Thanks so much.
Cheers.
I feel like that could be very valuable for you.
You could maybe use Extend to take take ingest all the registrations from the
G63s from G wagons and all the service records and then you could have
For all of them that you not have to hear I was gonna say I was gonna say I mean we produce a lot of
documents yeah, and
Figuring out how to process these bad boys
It's almost like they come from the computer and the internet and they could just remain there
and yet we print them out because it's fun.
Anyway, what else is in the news?
What else is important to cover today?
We have one more interview today.
Yeah, we've got AvLog coming on in just a little bit.
Daniel, growing Daniel was
Breaking news he says watching the soham interview and I can already tell people are going to see this interview of a legendary liar
Talking about his legendary lies and be like wow I kind of believe him you can label the tin poison and people will still eat
It label the tin poison. Yes, you can label the tin poison people still eat it. Label the tin poison? Yes, you can label the tin poison,
people will still eat it.
He says, you had said at some point it's tough
because someone who would lie about having multiple jobs
might come on here and lie to us.
Is he quoting me here?
Quoting you, he seemed sincere.
He did seem sincere, it's very possible
that he's a legendary, he's a 10X engineer
and also a 10X liar or 100X liar.
Well, the proof's in the pudding, you know? Yeah, you know, it's very obvious He's a 10X engineer and also a 10X liar or 100X liar.
Well, the proof's in the pudding, you know? Yeah, you know, it's very obvious
that I wouldn't recommend a portfolio company
hire this guy.
I think it's possible he goes and works somewhere
and just does a great job.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.
You might hire him if he's in your house,
literally in your house.
Yeah, but the pushback there is-
So you gotta have him in the office,
but then you gotta live with him.
And he's gotta be a hacker house.
No, but he very, maybe he just is,
you know, he sets up his desk
and he's just still moonlighting, you know.
I think he might be, he might just be built for moonlighting.
He also was-
The dev shop, dev shop.
He also was-
If he does the dev shop thing, he's fine.
He would routinely miss deadlines
and then use various excuses
when the India Pakistan stuff was happening.
He was telling people they shot a drone 10 minutes away,
guilt tripping people.
So, it's rough.
Terrible behavior.
It's a buy or beware situation for anyone who's employing him. It's rough. Terrible behavior. It's a buy or beware situation
for anyone who's employing him.
That's right.
You know what you're getting yourself into,
you gotta be careful and make sure that that aligns.
And ultimately, the value of what you're paying,
what's the value he's delivering?
And you just know, okay.
Could be some volatility in that.
But he's more of a known quantity now.
And we learned a couple things,
at least got him on the record.
So, you know, if he goes out in moonlights again,
everyone will be able to point to that interview.
Be like, he said he wasn't gonna do it.
And he did it.
So somebody was saying a fake Soham,
fake Soham account was saying,
Elon can work at nine startups.
Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies,
but when you do it, it's a scam.
And then Austin says, so tired of this argument.
Working at multiple companies was not the problem.
Many people have side gigs or contract at many places.
They just don't lie about doing so.
So that's the key thing.
Jamie Dimon is not sneaking on to other boards.
Elon's very public about his different companies.
And it's all about just avoid lying.
Just don't lie.
That's what he said.
So Ham probably could have had a cracked dev shop,
but he chose to lie.
So hopefully he course corrects.
Oh well, we will see.
We will let the timeline decide.
I'm sure the timeline will not let up on the memes
and the jokes
And anything else that's going on?
Oh
Well, should we uh should go through some f1 stuff? So
F1 has made an annual sponsorship revenue of more than
636 million dollars, which I believe is a significant multiple
to the amount of money that they were asking for,
for actual TV rights.
I think they wanted 200 million ESPN balls.
For the right to distribute that and show that as content.
But the ads inside the F1 are actually-
Are generating well beyond that.
Yeah, so between 2019 and 2024,
Liberty Media says F1 series annual sponsorship revenue
more than doubled to 636 million.
At a team level, total sponsorship revenue
increased by 60% to 1.3 billion over the same period.
So Liberty Media is selling F1 sponsorships,
but then the teams are also selling sponsorships.
There's levels.
The sport is bigger than it has ever been
in its 75 year history, and everyone wants a slice,
but how can sponsors stand out and justify the cost
when demand is so high?
Yeah, they haven't announced their new media rights
or TV rights deal, but given how much they're doing on the sponsorship side,
I wouldn't be surprised if they just go for max eyeballs
and kind of take it at somewhat of not necessarily a loss,
but just understand it won't be the profit center
that it maybe once was.
Because if you actually look at F1 viewership,
that was TV rights in the United States.
They wanted $200 million. No, ESPN wasn't interested in doing that yeah I guess this is global
previously previously in 2020-23 on where they were paying between 75 and 90 a
year and they just don't command the live US viewership to really justify that anymore, I guess,
or even beyond that, despite the sports popularity.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Apparently, brands are picking teams based on
the unique personality of those teams now.
So, to give this example,
the team's distinct personalities
can be a big draw for sponsors.
Heineken began sponsoring Red Bull in 2017,
just a year after the Dutch Brewer
started its longstanding series level partnership with F1.
The deal with the team is effective
because both are non-premium brands
in a sport dominated by luxury car manufacturers,
as Hesse, who has previously worked for both,
looking up and down the grid at the time,
they wouldn't have sat anywhere else.
And so there's the official like drinks car of F1
and if you're selling alcohol or energy drinks,
you head over to F1 Red Bull Plus, what was it?
There's the steak, Steak has a collaboration.
It's like insert and it's the Sauber steak F1 team.
The kick Sauber.
Which is kick is the streaming platform for the steak.
The kick steak Sauber.
But without further ado, let's bring in Avlock.
He's got a Q2 update for us.
Great to see you.
What's going on?
Likewise.
Welcome back.
How you doing?
Welcome back.
Thank you.
It's been great.
Q2 was awesome.
Break it down for us.
What was awesome about it?
I mean, overall, there's just a lot of optimism.
Maybe I'll just take from the top
and what we're seeing ecosystem wide
and then what we're seeing in our data.
I mean, look, ecosystem wide,
we're just seeing-wide and then what we're seeing in our data. I mean, look, ecosystem-wide,
we're just seeing exits across the board.
M&A is up by a huge margin.
IPOs are up by a huge margin.
And so what we're actually seeing is
a lot of exit dollars coming through,
making its way back to LPs.
And that ends up flowing its way back into venture
because all of venture is parallel,
as you have some of the best companies go public,
get acquired, all those all flow right back in,
and they go right back in
and get recycled back into venture.
And I think we just sort of hit the perfect storm in Q2,
where a lot of optimism is there,
obviously a lot of exits, you know,
a lot of it's been reported. You have Circle, you have Scale AI
and a bunch of other companies.
And these exits are massive, huge.
And so the LP dollars,
the returns that LP is getting are also massive.
And what we're just seeing is those dollars
come right back in and they just get reinvested
back into emerging managers
and some of the scaled up, uh, skilled adventure firms.
And so the, the thing that was actually shocking to me personally, um, you know,
you can kind of feel it.
So I invest of course, um, and you can kind of feel it in the deal velocity and
the, and the rate at which, uh, companies are growing, like the revenue growth is
real, but what we saw in our data was the LP dollars to micro VC,
emerging VC, think of these as like managers
with a hundred million dollar fund size,
two million dollar fund sizes,
was up 50% quarter per quarter, almost 50%.
So that's in one quarter, it was like a giant increase
that for many quarters, it was sort of the valley of death.
A lot of people. Yeah, there was a very dark, dark period sort of the valley of death. A lot of people.
There was a very dark period where you saw some of these.
We tracked those dark periods actually in our data too.
It was like we have the boom times and the bust times.
And for a while there were a lot of the bust times.
But we're just seeing a lot of optimism coming in.
And it's actually really, really great to see.
And I think some of the data that was
circulating around X over the past few weeks was around the emerging, the depth of the emerging
manager class. And I just think that data is actually wrong. It's coming from PitchBook.
And PitchBook's data is very laggy. They don't actually have information on this class of venture.
Yeah, they don't have a real time view of it.
Injulus does, and so we basically see it all.
And it's great, a lot of optimism.
Well yeah, and the emerging managers
that we're steadily deploying over the last couple years
during that dark period are the ones that are now,
I'm sure, showing tremendous markups during this time,
which will hopefully catalyze more investment as well.
Yeah, how much of the liquidity is psychological
for LPs versus actual dollars going back into LP pockets
and then they just need to redeploy them?
Cause there's something about like,
if you've been in some fund for years and years and years
and the marks and they don't really feel real
and then all of a sudden you actually get a check. You're even if that's only 10% of
the money that you put in or 10% of what you commit in the next fund, it kind of feels
like, okay, this is the this is working at least, I'm ready to go back in versus just,
okay, I actually need to deploy new cash because I have cash on my balance sheet now It depends on the type of LP. So if you are a
More of a traditional larger asset allocator. You have strict requirements on
Amount of money that goes into public says private. So that is a little bit stricter
but you have a large swath of capital that comes from
But you have a large swath of capital that comes from non-institutional. So you've got family offices, individuals, a lot of wealthy individuals.
I just saw a report the other day, the number of millionaires in the US has gone up considerably.
For them, it's all psychological.
A lot of it's psychological.
Even if you get 10% of your capital and 20%, 30%, it feels real.
Because venture is, it's a weird asset class
when you think about it.
You basically invest in it and you're,
we don't know if you're gonna get liquidity
for 10, 15 years, depending on where you invest.
But when you start seeing that cycle of liquidity
coming back, all of a sudden you gain confidence,
not just in the asset class,
but also the manager that you're backing.
And so we do see a lot of that.
So that's what the reflexivity is
that we're seeing on the platform where,
you have NASDAQ that was up 18% year over year,
and even venture dollars deployed as an overall ecosystem
is up like 30% year over year.
But within the micro VC emerging VC area, a group
40, 50% quarter over quarter, right? So there's this reflexivity of excitement, because you're
starting to see the dollars come right back and people are looking at going, this is real.
These companies are real. It wasn't just in their minds like propped up
valuations, which was a lot of the narrative,
I would say, for the past two years, post-Serve.
And the thing that also-
It's interesting to think about people
that maybe invested in the first six months of AngelList
being a platform.
And then maybe they just made a couple investments at the time
and then checked out for a decade.
And then suddenly they get an email. And's like, yeah, it's a liquidity event.
It's like, whoa, maybe, maybe, maybe I should pay more attention here.
We actually have that.
You know, there's this thing that happens with banks sometimes and even crypto platforms
where people have money and they're like trying to get in touch with them to take their, take
their money.
It's pretty significant in some cases.
And so yeah, we have cases of that as well, which is, Hey, you have a return.
You probably want this. This is actually pretty significant. Yeah. So we see,
we see that.
What do you think about potential new sources of liquidity coming into the LP
pools, coming into venture?
I saw some news about some crossover funds potentially
lowering the requirement to invest in the fund
maybe down to, from like a million dollars
down into like the single digit thousands
or maybe 25,000.
Code two, code two had a 50K offering.
Maybe it's a separate fund.
And so I don't know if that changes the requirements
around what's it called, professional investor rules?
No, accredited investor rules?
Yeah, accredited investor rules, yeah.
But we're seeing private company stocks go on chain
and potentially be traded on consumer retail stock apps.
We're seeing lower hurdles to get into venture funds.
It feels like there could be a wave of
sort of like retail-esque liquidity coming into venture.
Do you think that narrative is real?
How early are we in that?
Do you think that could be a significant shift
in the dynamic of early stage investing?
Yeah, short answer is it's real.
And Angelus is also working on something around there
and we'll have something more to announce.
The way to think about it is venture has never
actually been connected to the public markets directly.
It's always been venture dollars get invested
in the companies, those companies maybe 10 years,
15 years later, maybe never, right?
But go public.
And that's when people in the public markets
end up investing in those companies.
But what's never happened is venture or dollars
going into venture funds coming from the public markets.
And what you're seeing is you're starting to see
a lot of these different experiments
and people crying this out.
Code two as an example,
and there are a couple of other funds as well. And the accredited investor rule that you're referring to is you can only
take on 99 non-qualified purchasers in a fund, qualified purchaser effectively you have
$5 million in assets and above. So if you have less than that, then you can only take
on 99 of them into a fund. So that's what actually keeps those fund sizes pretty restricted.
But you can register your fund
and you are effectively under different regulatory regime
and you can take on a lot of investors at once, right?
But that takes time, it's expensive
and also depends what SEC regime you're under, right?
And what the goals are of the administration and power at that moment in time. And right now the goal of the Trump administration And so what's happening is everything is optimized towards new startup formation, more capital
coming in.
And so you're seeing a loosening of restrictions or a reinterpretation, if you will, of some
of the SEC rules to allow for a new startup formation.
And so you're seeing a loosening of restrictions
or a reinterpretation, if you will,
of some of the SEC rules to allow for this to happen.
It's actually not even new laws.
It's just, most people don't realize this.
The SEC-
Let's look at them differently.
They just look at them differently.
It's interpretation, right?
It's, they look at the law and they can interpret it
and write their own rules based off of it.
So a lot of that is changing in real time. And so that's leading to funds like the CO2 fund and a
few others. So it's real, it's happening. I think venture is undergoing a pretty significant shift.
It is not the same as it was five years ago, 10 years ago. You have a very large number of these
micro funds, emerging funds, and then you have the mega mega funds, right? And these micro funds, emerging funds,
and then you have the mega mega funds, right?
And these mega funds are not the venture funds
of yesterday, right?
These are full blown, sophisticated
financial asset allocators that some of them
are now getting into roll ups, right?
And that's a whole separate strategy
that comes from the private equity world.
And so we're in the midst of a massive change
within venture.
How do you think about new products and experimentation?
We've seen AngelList doesn't have the same luxury
that Robinhood can do, which is run some crazy experiment
in Europe and make companies, you know,
OpenAI was posting yesterday that they were frustrated
with what was going on there and that they didn't endorse it. Obviously you guys
have to maintain and build trust within the venture community and part of that
is kind of balancing the desires and and of a bunch of different kind of players.
So how do you think about kind of innovating because at the same time it
is core to AngelList.
Like the initial platform was an innovation, right?
And then the RUV and the rolling funds and things like that.
Yeah, it's actually really simple for us.
There is a through line that has never changed for AngelList
since the very beginning,
which is the founder is at the top of the pedestal.
So everything we do, we always ask, is this what the founder would want? Right? And if it's not
good for the founder, it's not for the startup, we just don't do it. And so this even applies to
innovations like the Rolling Fund. We ultimately asked, hey, is this going to drive more capital
into early stage founders? And if the answer is yes, great, we're going to do it. We're going to pursue it. If the answer is
ever no, or we're not quite sure, we just won't do it because founder trust is everything. And
ultimately, we're here to make sure that we increase the amount of innovation in society.
And that always comes from ambitious founders. And so that's actually been a very easy thing for us to
do. It's also why we never really went into secondary markets. I mean you think
Angelus with our entire portfolio and everything would be the first to get in
there. We never did because there's always this question of well are they
like are we adding more work on their plate?
Having been a founder myself multiple times
and also having been in that seat,
the answer is it's just a distraction.
You're busy running a company, building a company,
recruiting, dealing with a thousand fires
at any moment in time.
And so it was easy for us to not fully pursue that path.
But any new innovation we have, we always ask that question, is it good for for us to not fully pursue that path, but any new innovation we have,
we always ask that question,
is it good for the founder or not?
If not, we won't do it.
And that's just a through line all the way up to the,
as a board, we view it that way as well.
That's super key.
And when you look at many of the new experiments
that are happening, they don't pass that test.
Still, it'll be interesting to see to watch and and witness it I've been
interested to see if if some of these experiments can can end up kind of
forcing innovation or change but again that's still not that's still not the
role of someone you know Angelus shouldn't piss off every Fortune 500 CFO
or every late stage company, right?
Like it's just not a good business practice
given their vices.
I think there are some cases where you actually wanna push
the Overton window, right?
I think that's where you're referring.
It's just like, can you push the Overton window
and make something normal?
And so with that in mind, I'm actually very,
I love all these experiments that are actually happening.
In fact, right now is such an amazing time
and venture and startups and starting company having,
even Robin Hood's experiment is amazing
because we have a chance to push the Overton window.
But where it is today,
that particular one is very fixed.
I don't see a way around that.
Yeah.
Yeah, how are you thinking about the Angel List
kind of core business and scaling the team?
We were talking yesterday, there's a lot of signs
of wild top signals right now between these AI hiring
packages and different valuations and the list goes,
Soham working six jobs, right?
They're all across the board.
Meanwhile, Satya is scaling back on some new data centers.
He's doing kind of routine layoffs.
It feels like he's not letting at least Microsoft
get too exuberant in this moment, even though
there's a lot of I'm curious what your approach it has been and will be for the next half
of the year.
Yeah.
So as context, Angeles has been profitable for a little while now.
And so a lot of the way we've all yeah.
Yeah.
So we need to get you off the profitability yeah I love it I love it
we need a gong like that in the office yeah definitely um and so you know we've actually
always approached it um approached headcount and people in the in the company as do we really need
this next person and how is it how are they actually going to move the company forward. So none of that's actually changed in how we're approaching
any of the new bets that we have. The bar has actually increased now which is hey for this
next new person we're bringing in are they truly curious to work with AI tools and the model. So they
really understand how their job is completely changed. And if
not, we probably shouldn't bring them in because as you both know,
knowledge work is complete change forever, right? Whether
you're in sales, marketing, definitely coding, right? And so
you want people who are naturally curious and are
naturally leaning into these new tools.
And the reality is the amount of headcount needed
to continue to scale will go down over time.
And so that's how we've thought about it,
is you just bring in people who are naturally
tuned to this way of working.
Because we're in the early innings right now.
It's like so early in terms of how companies
are gonna be formed, how teams are gonna be formed,
do you even have your traditional functions anymore?
Sales, marketing, engineering, product design,
I don't know because people are starting to blend skills
very, very fast and so we're in such early stages
that you almost wanna rewire your culture right now.
I think every company should rethink whatever culture they had and rethink
however they formed their teams.
You may need to blow it up because what's going to happen is I'm telling you
that I've been watching some of the newer founders are just graduating from
school. They operate differently. They're like, you know,
recently for the first time I came to tech in 2009.
For years, I didn't feel like I'm kind of
a part of an older guard, if you will. In the last 12 months, there was a distinct change
in San Francisco. I'm like, these new founders just operate there.
Oh, I'm a veteran now.
Yeah, a veteran. I never felt that. I never felt that before, except for the last 12 months,
where they are very capable, very creative.
They were just born in a different era.
They don't have any of the hangups
of how things used to be done about a decade ago.
And I think it's very important for any company
that's been around for even five years or seven years
or 10 years to just rethink the entire company
from the ground up at this point
Otherwise they're gonna get completely demolished
Totally. Well always great talking. Oh, it's fantastic. We should make this let's schedule it
Yeah, let's get the next one the calendar ASAP. Have a great rest
Enjoy July 4th. Yeah, thank you. You too. Thank you sir. Bye
Up next we have we have two more guests
We're going long before the 4th of July. We got to get an extra couple minutes in who we got Jordy
We have added a new guest this was very last second. Hey, we're great. We're here. Welcome to the stream
You're live. This is Nico Nico. What's up guys? How are you? Break it down introduce shortcut
Nico managed to go viral yesterday on a timeline that was in turmoil. That's insane
You you did it against a serious competition. I haven't I haven't I haven't been able to watch the video yet
So you're gonna have to bring break down the whole thing for us
But you introduced shortcut the first superhuman
Excel agent and when I read this line, I was like, well
Well the the when I read this line, I was like, oh, yeah
You should just build agents on top of Excel where people already are you don't need to reinvent Excel
Yep, and build agents you love it. But so anyways, but in your words, what do you do? Yeah, what's up guys?
I'm Nico from fundamental. I'm one of the co-founders here and we just released shortcut yesterday and X and But in your words, what do you do? even in the limited stuff that we were allowed to use for Gemini,
because we just know I couldn't do it.
And yeah, we're scaling up capacity now.
I'm actually about to drop a million dollar check on scaling up the infra.
Just to see. I mean, a comically large check. Yeah, drop it off with one of the hyper scalers.
Yeah, go give it to AWS.
Andy Jassy.
Here we go.
But awesome.
So is this the second talk about maybe step back fundamental?
Yeah, sure.
So fundamental is a research lab.
We're in Menlo Park now.
But we actually shut down our lab at MIT,
where my co-founder was a professor,
about 18 months ago.
The mission of the company is to build digital humans, back when that was a crazy, deranged
thing to say. But from a computational neuroscience perspective, it basically means giving AI
more than just intelligence, but fundamental understanding of life, an ability to perceive
and experience emotion, grounded interactions in the world, long-term autonomy.
So naturally, you start with Excel, the foundation of modern life. grounded interactions in the world, long-term autonomy.
The foundation of modern life.
I cut my teeth on Excel.
I got my knuckles bruised for using the mouse.
And the reason it hasn't been done yet is because the people who are capable of doing it are just so out of distribution for regular people that Excel hasn't been touched until now.
Okay, talk to me about actually building this thing.
I remember like CapIQ and Bloomberg had like VBA plugins for Excel.
There's some pretty crazy stuff you can do under the hood of Excel.
It is very modular. I don't know if that's changed with Excel going more cloud native,
but Microsoft talks a big game about copilot. Are you worried about getting Steamrolled? Is there a way that you guys work together? How does that dynamic play out? going more cloud native.
by just using the ADA features, like the accessibility features, to just scrape the text out.
But how are you working through that?
So for context, the reason we're doing what we're doing now is because we actually set the state of the art in iOS World,
which is the computer use benchmark. as if we had full access to the machine interface.
So what that means is, can you write your own code essentially to do what you want to do?
And to do that you actually have to own the machine interface.
So we couldn't build exactly on top of Excel.
What we actually wanted to do was recreate it entirely with feature parity. a little bit of a secret.
that much, but I've noticed that the way Gemini is like surfaced in Gmail, it's very clear that it's not doing code gen.
It's actually just taking text, dropping it in an LLM, it's a chat interface and that's
it.
And so I can imagine that we're entering the V2 of sidebar companions and this feels very
logical.
Yeah, even Gemini, if you actually look into the Sheets integration they have now, they are starting to do a little bit of Python integration. very logical.
about how you do that. And it's actually about owning the interface
the same way Cursor had to fork VS code to own it.
Yeah.
Talk about the demand.
I replied to a comment of yours 15 minutes ago
and then a bunch of people are now replying to me saying,
can I get an invite code?
So it seems like.
All right, all right.
Announcement, well, we got, first of all,
I went viral on LinkedIn.
I didn't even know that was possible.
Let's give it up for LinkedIn.
They're always good.
Always good.
We got about 7,000 comments now
and I've only given out about 50 codes.
This thing is extremely token hungry.
But I did just make code TBPN.
No way, let's go.
10 uses, it's probably eaten up by now.
Go hunt it down.
But yeah, we are trying to get this out as fast as we can.
That's why I'm writing these big checks for Infra so that we
can scale up capacity to surf.
The only bottleneck is GPUs.
That's amazing.
Incredible.
Well, thank you for pinging us.
Yes, this is awesome.
This is super exciting.
Come back on.
I'm sure there'll be news soon.
What's the next few months looks like?
Is scaling shortcut?
Yeah.
Are you going to be?
Can I refine this a little bit?
I want to ask, cursor very ground up adoption
from what I can tell, it's a developer
who's at a big company and they just buy it
or install it, expense it, that type of thing
versus going top down to, I imagine Goldman Sachs
has a lot of people working in Excel.
You could go to McKinsey, you could go to Goldman
and say, hey CTO, install this and let's do an enterprise contract. How are you you could go to McKinsey, you could go to Goldman and say, hey, CTO,
install this and let's do an enterprise contract.
How are you thinking about go to market?
Yeah, I mean, the stupid answer is I'm doing
a little bit of both and saying what's working.
But it's pretty obvious that the same people
who adopt AI in enterprise for Excel
don't have the same risk tolerance
or like the appetite to try stuff at the frontier
that does software engineers, like for Cursor.
And also my intention is that this bubbles up
organically and that people bring it in as opposed to me
go to me telling some VP adopt this.
You can produce headcount by 20% because that reality also
can exist if I wanted to write like.
Cool. Very awesome.
All right. We'll come back on soon.
Thank you for the code.
Hopefully we get a shot at it before.
I'll make you a special one.
Yeah, we appreciate it.
Amazing.
Congrats on the launch.
Crushed it.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Cheers.
We'll talk to you soon.
And up next, we have Flo Crivello coming back on the stream.
Sohan's former boss.
Former boss.
So we opened the show with Sohram himself.
And now we're going to a former employer to get his side of
the story and the question that I want to answer is that that point that
growing Daniel pointed out which is the question is can he change a logical
liar that's just gonna continue to lie and scam yes Ken is redemption possible
yes is redemption possible so let's go to flow and get his take. How are you doing?
Good to have you back on the show.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. No, redemption isn't possible.
When people show you who they are, believe them. No,
there's plenty of very honest people. Like,
what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and being,
been confronted about it for three years, like two or three years.
And like, look, it's a special kind of person too
who can do this thing to people who trust them, right?
You have a relationship with an employer, you know?
And my understanding is that he basically has been
averaging like getting fired once a month
for the last three years.
Like it's a special kind of person who can do that.
So he could have learned his lesson like two years,
three years ago. Yes, yes, yes. Like the first a special kind of person who can do that. So he could have learned his lesson like two years, three years ago.
Yes, yes.
Like the first time he was called out and.
Totally.
Totally.
I wasn't tuning in.
I didn't hear what he said.
Yeah, to me, the argument of
sounds like he has some situation that's bad, but it's not a justification to go
steal money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups
for years and years and years and years
and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.
So really quickly, how long did he work with you?
Two weeks.
Two weeks.
And what was the result of that?
I mean, I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work.
Did you get any good results?
I am literally out of a meeting like an hour ago
where the engineer described his impact as negative.
Negative, okay.
Well, because we had to, we had to onboard him.
Yeah, you had to onboard him, yeah.
Yeah, it's wasted our time and money.
Has he apologized to you?
Not yet.
Okay, he said he would apologize to everyone else.
He would go on an apology tour.
We'll see if that actually pans out.
My big question is, is somebody like this,
you could have them working in your office
as a full-time employee and they would probably still,
there's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing
with people on LinkedIn that didn't see the whole Soham gate.
We never compromise on ethics.
Like that's just a thing I don't fuck with.
He's gonna apologize.
Is he gonna give the money back?
Yeah.
That's a good question.
I don't know.
Because stock is cheap.
Yeah.
That's the higher bar.
If he wants to make a statement,
that's what he would do.
100%.
Yeah, makes sense.
How do you prevent this in the future?
How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future?
Obviously, the Valley's built on trust.
This is a violation of trust.
There's been discussions about maybe we need a Reddit for,
are we dating the same man?
Are we employing the same software engineer?
Maybe we need an AI tool to check the GitHub commits
and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time.
Every week, they're not available.
I was wondering if this could be done at the HRIS level.
Yep, that's a good question.
This employee has accepted two offers in the-
Why are they in two instances of-
Of rippling.
Of rippling, that doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, how are we solving this?
I don't want to over-rotate on it.
I think a lot of what makes Silicon Valley tick
is its culture of trust.
You know, there's this whole game theory
around like hawks and doves, you know, and it turns out there
is no stable equilibrium, you're like in a constant state of
shifting. Because if everyone's a dove, then the returns of
being a hawk are very high. And vice versa, if everyone's a
hawk, then you can have these like clicks of doves that start
emitting. So I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards
this attractor state of like the hawk. And like a lot of industries end up in this state of like low trust. So I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley to wield this attractor state of like the hawk. And like a lot
of industries end up in this state of like low trust. And I
really don't want to do that. Like, look, you're gonna get
screwed over every so often. We had a good laugh. You know, the
memes are amazing. Like,
I hope I hope your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new
signups and maybe he paid back a little bit. Some customer.
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree.
Like, yes, the handshake deal protocol is built on trust.
Do some VCs violate it?
Yes, every once in a while, a term sheet falls through.
It's not the best thing that ever happens,
but the alternative is so much overhead on everyone
that it's probably worth taking the risk of,
yeah, occasionally the handshake deal is going to fall through.
You're going to get screwed over every so often,
and it's not worth overpivoting on it and looking for your shoulder your entire life.
So it sounds like he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single startup.
He says he's not going to work at multiple companies.
It seems like the jig, even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie,
like people, like his SEO is terrible now.
Like it will forever be like very easy
when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring.
He's like, oh, that's a different Soham Parikh.
There's a lot of people named.
Sure, he can change his name,
and it's gonna be really complicated for him
to get away with this longer.
My question is like, if, we were kind of saying like,
the Sohom Perique dev shop makes much more sense here,
does that make sense to you?
Like if he was saying, hey, I've been working
at all these different startups,
I'm starting a developer shop and yes, you can hire me,
but I'm a contractor.
I don't think clothes hire in dev shops, why are dev shops bad for startups? Why would this not work for him?
I actually think for him, the real move is to start a course on how to crack
coding interviews because he's really good and credible.
He's actually credible, right? So he can actually make lemonade here.
Like he should do that and he can make a lot of money.
It's very high leverage.
And do you think he was cheating?
Yeah, it was that and the cold email strategy.
It was like, he had a very dialed in cold email approach
where he would be, you know, he'd be like,
say something nice and really clearly,
he researched the company. I know the product.
I love building.
The funny thing is in his message, he said,
he said, I'm pissed.
And I was like about what what?
You pissed you got busted and you kind of gave himself yeah, he was saying like oh, yeah like I'm gonna put you know
There's gonna be a great reversal here and he came on it was like the mainstream narrative is basically correct about me
But maybe I'm sorry the the redemption of being like, I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working at one company.
It's like, you don't get, you don't get, you don't get, yeah, yeah, we don't give a, that's
like a second, the fourth place trophy.
You worked at one company.
Yeah, that's funny.
Yeah.
I mean, uh, look, he's, he's not sorry.
He just got cut.
Like that's it.
It's really simple.
Um, and, and why do dev shops not work for startups?
I mean, I'm a nerd when it comes to the theory of the film
because of my experience at Uber and so forth.
It's called managerial dilemmas
that explains why dev shops don't work.
It's fascinating, yeah.
But can you unpack it a little bit more?
Because Uber is interesting because
wasn't the very first version of Uber
done by a dev shop and wasn't that part of the early, early Uber lore that like
the code base was written in Spanish.
And so everyone at Uber had like the Spanish to English dictionary there,
which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google translate existed at the time,
but they still had the dictionary for some reason. It's like,
it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is.
Yeah. I think people add a little bit to it
This is a person. Yeah
But you know like next time I hear about it, there's gonna be a guy with like a sombrero
Yeah, Travis was in Tijuana pulling random devs off the street
Yeah, really really amp it up the apocryphalness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow
It's a tall tale at this point
The reason why that subs don't work is because there's a complicated game theoretic argument
which goes basically the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't
know.
And so there is an information asymmetry which always makes it possible for someone to cheat
because they can basically bullshit and you see it with engineering all the time.
It's like, oh, this is so complicated.
You said it'd be a day, but actually it's going to be a month, and you have no clue.
You have no way to verify.
And this is inevitable.
Like the reason you hire them is because there is this
information asymmetry gap, because otherwise you might as
well just do it yourself.
And so basically, in a way, it is always possible to cheat,
which is why we are not fucking around and hiring people who
do cheat, because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating.
If he doesn't cheat, by doing this he'll cheat by doing something else.
So there is always a way to cheat.
So you could say that to some extent, not cheating is irrational.
You can't cheat. You can't get away with it.
He's made millions. He's made so much money, right?
Like you can't cheat. You can get away with it.
And so in a way, you've got to solve for the equation where it's like, I can't cheat.
I can make a lot of money, I can get away with it.
Nothing is ever gonna happen to me,
but I'm not gonna do it because of X.
And you have to solve for X, that's your job as a founder.
You're like, why would you act irrationally?
And the way you do that, thankfully,
is we have that bit that you can flip in our brains
as humans, we have these tribal pro-social tendencies
that are like, I don't wanna cheat
because I like these people
or because I'm budding to the mission,
which is why they always say every startup
is like a religion, like the mission,
the culture really matter and the camaraderie
really matter as a startup.
And that's what you lose when you have dev shops.
Well, yeah, to be even more specific,
the dev shop gives you a scope.
They say it's gonna take me XYZ time to do roughly this, or maybe dev shop gives you a scope. They say, it's going to take me x, y, z time to do roughly
this, or maybe they're on a retainer.
And then if they come back to you the next day,
and they say, well, actually, it's
going to take more time, and it's going to be more money.
Well, an employee is going to say,
well, it's going to take more time, maybe,
but I'm not going to necessarily charge you astronomically more.
I'm just a salaried team member.
And because they have that equity compensation as well,
they're bought and hopefully bought into the mission.