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...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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,
Starting point is 00:00:17 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
Starting point is 00:00:28 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?
Starting point is 00:00:44 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,
Starting point is 00:01:04 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
Starting point is 00:01:28 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
Starting point is 00:01:48 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
Starting point is 00:02:08 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.
Starting point is 00:02:34 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
Starting point is 00:02:55 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.
Starting point is 00:03:11 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
Starting point is 00:03:34 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.
Starting point is 00:04:03 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?
Starting point is 00:04:25 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.
Starting point is 00:04:39 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,
Starting point is 00:04:53 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.
Starting point is 00:05:15 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.
Starting point is 00:05:35 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.
Starting point is 00:06:03 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.
Starting point is 00:06:50 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.
Starting point is 00:07:15 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?
Starting point is 00:07:39 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.
Starting point is 00:08:02 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.
Starting point is 00:08:24 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
Starting point is 00:08:47 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...
Starting point is 00:09:23 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.
Starting point is 00:09:44 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
Starting point is 00:10:22 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,
Starting point is 00:10:58 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,
Starting point is 00:11:19 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
Starting point is 00:11:51 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.
Starting point is 00:12:34 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.
Starting point is 00:12:55 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.
Starting point is 00:13:19 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?
Starting point is 00:13:39 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.
Starting point is 00:13:58 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.
Starting point is 00:14:24 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,
Starting point is 00:14:42 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.
Starting point is 00:15:00 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
Starting point is 00:15:20 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?
Starting point is 00:15:41 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.
Starting point is 00:15:55 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?
Starting point is 00:16:20 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.
Starting point is 00:16:52 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.
Starting point is 00:17:09 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
Starting point is 00:17:26 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
Starting point is 00:18:01 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.
Starting point is 00:18:21 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.
Starting point is 00:18:46 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,
Starting point is 00:19:11 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
Starting point is 00:19:29 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.
Starting point is 00:19:55 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
Starting point is 00:20:18 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,
Starting point is 00:20:44 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
Starting point is 00:21:18 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
Starting point is 00:21:48 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.
Starting point is 00:22:09 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.
Starting point is 00:22:30 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
Starting point is 00:22:53 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
Starting point is 00:23:27 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.
Starting point is 00:23:44 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,
Starting point is 00:24:00 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%.
Starting point is 00:24:14 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,
Starting point is 00:24:40 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.
Starting point is 00:24:59 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
Starting point is 00:25:24 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.
Starting point is 00:25:37 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,
Starting point is 00:25:53 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
Starting point is 00:26:12 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.
Starting point is 00:26:30 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
Starting point is 00:26:52 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.
Starting point is 00:27:17 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
Starting point is 00:27:45 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.
Starting point is 00:28:11 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,
Starting point is 00:28:32 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.
Starting point is 00:28:55 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
Starting point is 00:29:19 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,
Starting point is 00:29:39 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.
Starting point is 00:29:52 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
Starting point is 00:30:11 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.
Starting point is 00:30:33 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
Starting point is 00:30:52 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
Starting point is 00:31:22 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.
Starting point is 00:31:50 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.
Starting point is 00:32:08 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,
Starting point is 00:32:31 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.
Starting point is 00:32:50 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
Starting point is 00:33:12 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
Starting point is 00:33:33 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.
Starting point is 00:33:55 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.
Starting point is 00:34:17 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.
Starting point is 00:34:40 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.
Starting point is 00:34:58 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,
Starting point is 00:35:25 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.
Starting point is 00:35:46 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.
Starting point is 00:36:11 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.
Starting point is 00:36:39 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.
Starting point is 00:36:56 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
Starting point is 00:37:22 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
Starting point is 00:38:08 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
Starting point is 00:38:44 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.
Starting point is 00:39:05 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.
Starting point is 00:39:20 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?
Starting point is 00:39:36 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
Starting point is 00:39:58 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.
Starting point is 00:40:19 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.
Starting point is 00:40:36 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.
Starting point is 00:40:52 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
Starting point is 00:41:09 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.
Starting point is 00:41:27 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.
Starting point is 00:41:40 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.
Starting point is 00:41:58 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
Starting point is 00:42:28 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.
Starting point is 00:42:42 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,
Starting point is 00:43:03 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
Starting point is 00:43:24 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%.
Starting point is 00:43:42 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
Starting point is 00:44:19 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.
Starting point is 00:44:51 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.
Starting point is 00:45:06 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
Starting point is 00:45:27 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.
Starting point is 00:45:44 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,
Starting point is 00:46:00 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
Starting point is 00:46:26 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
Starting point is 00:46:57 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,
Starting point is 00:47:12 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
Starting point is 00:47:36 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.
Starting point is 00:48:08 Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your trust, out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, Zach Pogrob has some fantastic photos
Starting point is 00:48:29 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.
Starting point is 00:48:45 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.
Starting point is 00:48:55 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.
Starting point is 00:49:12 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.
Starting point is 00:49:23 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.
Starting point is 00:49:50 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.
Starting point is 00:50:00 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
Starting point is 00:50:35 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.
Starting point is 00:50:59 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,
Starting point is 00:51:14 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.
Starting point is 00:51:32 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?
Starting point is 00:51:51 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
Starting point is 00:52:07 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.
Starting point is 00:52:28 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.
Starting point is 00:52:52 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,
Starting point is 00:53:14 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,
Starting point is 00:53:31 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.
Starting point is 00:53:54 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
Starting point is 00:54:14 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
Starting point is 00:54:35 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
Starting point is 00:55:03 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,
Starting point is 00:55:33 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
Starting point is 00:55:54 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.
Starting point is 00:56:27 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
Starting point is 00:56:45 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,
Starting point is 00:57:25 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
Starting point is 00:57:42 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.
Starting point is 00:57:57 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
Starting point is 00:58:27 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
Starting point is 00:58:50 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.
Starting point is 00:59:04 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.
Starting point is 00:59:44 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
Starting point is 01:00:04 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
Starting point is 01:00:35 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
Starting point is 01:01:16 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,
Starting point is 01:01:43 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,
Starting point is 01:02:05 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,
Starting point is 01:02:21 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
Starting point is 01:02:45 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
Starting point is 01:03:05 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.
Starting point is 01:03:22 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
Starting point is 01:03:40 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.
Starting point is 01:04:04 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
Starting point is 01:04:40 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.
Starting point is 01:05:05 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.
Starting point is 01:05:16 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.
Starting point is 01:06:00 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.
Starting point is 01:06:34 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,
Starting point is 01:06:57 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.
Starting point is 01:07:29 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
Starting point is 01:08:06 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.
Starting point is 01:08:20 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
Starting point is 01:09:03 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.
Starting point is 01:09:38 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.
Starting point is 01:10:01 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.
Starting point is 01:10:37 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,
Starting point is 01:11:02 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
Starting point is 01:11:49 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
Starting point is 01:12:28 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?
Starting point is 01:12:54 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,
Starting point is 01:13:18 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,
Starting point is 01:13:59 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
Starting point is 01:14:26 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
Starting point is 01:15:19 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
Starting point is 01:15:54 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.
Starting point is 01:16:24 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,
Starting point is 01:16:51 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?
Starting point is 01:17:10 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,
Starting point is 01:17:25 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
Starting point is 01:17:56 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
Starting point is 01:18:22 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,
Starting point is 01:18:42 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
Starting point is 01:19:11 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?
Starting point is 01:19:33 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
Starting point is 01:19:53 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.
Starting point is 01:20:13 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
Starting point is 01:20:39 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,
Starting point is 01:21:15 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
Starting point is 01:21:42 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
Starting point is 01:22:04 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?
Starting point is 01:22:18 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
Starting point is 01:22:35 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.
Starting point is 01:23:02 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.
Starting point is 01:23:21 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?
Starting point is 01:23:45 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
Starting point is 01:24:05 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.
Starting point is 01:24:54 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,
Starting point is 01:25:19 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,
Starting point is 01:25:41 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
Starting point is 01:26:17 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,
Starting point is 01:26:41 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
Starting point is 01:27:06 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?
Starting point is 01:27:32 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.
Starting point is 01:28:14 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
Starting point is 01:28:53 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
Starting point is 01:29:23 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
Starting point is 01:29:46 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
Starting point is 01:30:02 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.
Starting point is 01:30:22 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,
Starting point is 01:30:51 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
Starting point is 01:31:21 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
Starting point is 01:31:52 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.
Starting point is 01:32:09 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
Starting point is 01:32:29 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
Starting point is 01:32:47 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,
Starting point is 01:33:09 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?
Starting point is 01:33:30 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
Starting point is 01:34:04 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,
Starting point is 01:34:22 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
Starting point is 01:35:02 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
Starting point is 01:35:31 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,
Starting point is 01:35:57 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
Starting point is 01:36:17 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?
Starting point is 01:36:38 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
Starting point is 01:36:55 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.
Starting point is 01:37:12 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
Starting point is 01:37:44 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.
Starting point is 01:37:55 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.
Starting point is 01:38:02 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?
Starting point is 01:38:20 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.
Starting point is 01:38:33 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.
Starting point is 01:38:58 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
Starting point is 01:39:32 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
Starting point is 01:40:05 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.
Starting point is 01:40:32 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.
Starting point is 01:40:55 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,
Starting point is 01:41:17 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.
Starting point is 01:41:41 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.
Starting point is 01:42:06 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.
Starting point is 01:42:27 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,
Starting point is 01:42:39 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,
Starting point is 01:42:58 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,
Starting point is 01:43:32 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.
Starting point is 01:43:55 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?
Starting point is 01:44:17 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.
Starting point is 01:44:36 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
Starting point is 01:44:52 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.
Starting point is 01:45:13 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,
Starting point is 01:45:35 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.
Starting point is 01:46:08 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
Starting point is 01:46:34 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
Starting point is 01:47:00 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,
Starting point is 01:47:20 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.
Starting point is 01:47:47 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.
Starting point is 01:48:02 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.
Starting point is 01:48:21 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.
Starting point is 01:48:46 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
Starting point is 01:49:11 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.
Starting point is 01:49:40 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
Starting point is 01:50:08 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,
Starting point is 01:50:53 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?
Starting point is 01:51:23 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.
Starting point is 01:51:44 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
Starting point is 01:52:05 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
Starting point is 01:52:38 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,
Starting point is 01:52:57 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.
Starting point is 01:53:22 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.
Starting point is 01:53:38 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,
Starting point is 01:54:00 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?
Starting point is 01:54:19 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?
Starting point is 01:54:47 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
Starting point is 01:55:02 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.
Starting point is 01:55:25 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,
Starting point is 01:55:59 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,
Starting point is 01:56:20 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,
Starting point is 01:56:41 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
Starting point is 01:57:07 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.
Starting point is 01:57:22 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.
Starting point is 01:57:34 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,
Starting point is 01:57:53 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
Starting point is 01:58:12 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.
Starting point is 01:58:38 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.
Starting point is 01:58:57 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.
Starting point is 01:59:22 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
Starting point is 01:59:54 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.
Starting point is 02:00:27 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, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs,
Starting point is 02:00:40 number one ranking on G2. If you like winning, don't get in a Bake Off with Finn.ai. Don't get in a Bake Off. Slash TBPN. Well, our next guest is Bridget from Founders Fund. Welcome to the stream, Bridget. How are you doing? Busy time in, oh, wait.
Starting point is 02:00:56 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
Starting point is 02:01:10 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.
Starting point is 02:01:26 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.
Starting point is 02:01:37 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?
Starting point is 02:01:54 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
Starting point is 02:02:14 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,
Starting point is 02:02:34 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
Starting point is 02:02:54 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.
Starting point is 02:03:10 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.
Starting point is 02:03:24 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?
Starting point is 02:03:42 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
Starting point is 02:03:58 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.
Starting point is 02:04:22 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.
Starting point is 02:04:36 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?
Starting point is 02:05:01 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.
Starting point is 02:05:20 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
Starting point is 02:05:38 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.
Starting point is 02:05:54 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.
Starting point is 02:06:09 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.
Starting point is 02:06:41 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,
Starting point is 02:06:56 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
Starting point is 02:07:25 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
Starting point is 02:07:51 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
Starting point is 02:08:16 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
Starting point is 02:08:51 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,
Starting point is 02:09:19 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,
Starting point is 02:09:39 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.
Starting point is 02:10:03 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
Starting point is 02:10:28 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,
Starting point is 02:10:55 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
Starting point is 02:11:19 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,
Starting point is 02:11:50 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
Starting point is 02:12:05 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.
Starting point is 02:12:24 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
Starting point is 02:12:42 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?
Starting point is 02:12:59 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.
Starting point is 02:13:19 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.
Starting point is 02:13:29 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.
Starting point is 02:13:45 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.
Starting point is 02:14:01 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.
Starting point is 02:14:29 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
Starting point is 02:14:49 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.
Starting point is 02:15:10 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
Starting point is 02:15:31 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
Starting point is 02:15:59 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
Starting point is 02:16:16 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?
Starting point is 02:16:35 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
Starting point is 02:16:59 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.
Starting point is 02:17:18 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
Starting point is 02:17:41 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
Starting point is 02:18:05 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
Starting point is 02:18:24 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.
Starting point is 02:18:43 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.
Starting point is 02:19:00 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.
Starting point is 02:19:07 Have a great day. Cheers. Let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions folks. Head over to public if you want to buy stocks
Starting point is 02:19:17 the old fashioned way where you actually own the stock. It's pretty cool. There's a lot of websites out there. 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.
Starting point is 02:19:30 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. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. You saw us deploy ads in the real world.
Starting point is 02:19:53 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.
Starting point is 02:20:12 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
Starting point is 02:20:28 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
Starting point is 02:21:03 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
Starting point is 02:21:28 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
Starting point is 02:21:45 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.
Starting point is 02:21:57 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
Starting point is 02:22:14 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.
Starting point is 02:22:36 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.
Starting point is 02:23:09 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
Starting point is 02:23:27 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.
Starting point is 02:23:49 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
Starting point is 02:24:16 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.
Starting point is 02:24:48 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.
Starting point is 02:25:11 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.
Starting point is 02:25:32 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.
Starting point is 02:26:07 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
Starting point is 02:26:53 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
Starting point is 02:27:14 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.
Starting point is 02:27:47 Stripe dashboard. It looks like we already have six orders. Congratulations. Hey. Boom. Boom. There we go. That's amazing.
Starting point is 02:27:57 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?
Starting point is 02:28:11 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.
Starting point is 02:28:34 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.
Starting point is 02:28:56 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
Starting point is 02:29:14 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.
Starting point is 02:29:28 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
Starting point is 02:29:51 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.
Starting point is 02:30:19 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.
Starting point is 02:30:36 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.
Starting point is 02:30:45 Cheers. Yeah. Really quickly, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service.
Starting point is 02:30:57 It's a vacation home, but better. 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.
Starting point is 02:31:10 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.
Starting point is 02:31:40 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
Starting point is 02:32:21 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.
Starting point is 02:32:51 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.
Starting point is 02:33:10 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.
Starting point is 02:33:34 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
Starting point is 02:34:00 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
Starting point is 02:34:21 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
Starting point is 02:34:41 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,
Starting point is 02:35:06 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.
Starting point is 02:35:38 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
Starting point is 02:36:07 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
Starting point is 02:36:30 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.
Starting point is 02:36:51 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.
Starting point is 02:37:12 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.
Starting point is 02:37:40 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
Starting point is 02:38:08 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
Starting point is 02:38:23 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.
Starting point is 02:38:45 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.
Starting point is 02:38:59 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.
Starting point is 02:39:17 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.
Starting point is 02:39:35 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
Starting point is 02:39:47 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.
Starting point is 02:40:11 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. But graphite.dev code review with the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Shopify, Cursor, Ramp, Asana, Purcell, Grafite helps teams on github ship higher quality software faster Cursor ramp get started on a free sell a graphite dot perp And we got our guest in the building welcome to the stream Mehran am I pronouncing that correctly?
Starting point is 02:40:36 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.
Starting point is 02:40:55 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.
Starting point is 02:41:09 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.
Starting point is 02:41:25 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
Starting point is 02:41:59 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
Starting point is 02:42:36 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
Starting point is 02:42:58 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.
Starting point is 02:43:24 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,
Starting point is 02:43:40 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.
Starting point is 02:43:56 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?
Starting point is 02:44:15 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.
Starting point is 02:44:37 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-
Starting point is 02:45:00 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,
Starting point is 02:45:29 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
Starting point is 02:45:43 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
Starting point is 02:46:15 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,
Starting point is 02:46:50 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
Starting point is 02:47:16 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
Starting point is 02:47:43 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
Starting point is 02:48:18 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
Starting point is 02:49:11 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,
Starting point is 02:49:33 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
Starting point is 02:49:54 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.
Starting point is 02:50:16 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
Starting point is 02:50:41 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.
Starting point is 02:50:55 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?
Starting point is 02:51:05 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.
Starting point is 02:51:18 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
Starting point is 02:51:34 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?
Starting point is 02:51:58 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,
Starting point is 02:52:25 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.
Starting point is 02:52:46 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.
Starting point is 02:52:59 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?
Starting point is 02:53:17 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?
Starting point is 02:53:34 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.
Starting point is 02:53:55 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.
Starting point is 02:54:27 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.
Starting point is 02:54:46 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
Starting point is 02:55:20 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.
Starting point is 02:55:52 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
Starting point is 02:56:15 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.
Starting point is 02:56:43 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.
Starting point is 02:57:09 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.
Starting point is 02:57:26 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
Starting point is 02:58:05 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
Starting point is 02:58:24 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.
Starting point is 02:58:42 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
Starting point is 02:59:00 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?
Starting point is 02:59:21 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?
Starting point is 02:59:51 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
Starting point is 03:00:06 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.
Starting point is 03:00:21 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.
Starting point is 03:00:38 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
Starting point is 03:00:58 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
Starting point is 03:01:28 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?
Starting point is 03:01:54 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.
Starting point is 03:02:14 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.
Starting point is 03:02:28 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-
Starting point is 03:02:42 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.
Starting point is 03:03:04 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.
Starting point is 03:03:19 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.
Starting point is 03:03:34 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.
Starting point is 03:03:53 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,
Starting point is 03:04:13 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
Starting point is 03:04:29 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-
Starting point is 03:05:02 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.
Starting point is 03:05:28 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
Starting point is 03:05:50 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,
Starting point is 03:06:27 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,
Starting point is 03:06:49 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.
Starting point is 03:07:09 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.
Starting point is 03:07:36 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.
Starting point is 03:07:49 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
Starting point is 03:08:01 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,
Starting point is 03:08:18 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,
Starting point is 03:08:38 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
Starting point is 03:08:59 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,
Starting point is 03:09:25 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.
Starting point is 03:09:48 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.
Starting point is 03:10:16 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,
Starting point is 03:10:45 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
Starting point is 03:11:09 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.
Starting point is 03:11:55 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.
Starting point is 03:12:16 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,
Starting point is 03:12:36 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.
Starting point is 03:13:11 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.
Starting point is 03:13:31 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.
Starting point is 03:13:53 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.
Starting point is 03:14:17 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.
Starting point is 03:14:47 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
Starting point is 03:15:08 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
Starting point is 03:15:28 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
Starting point is 03:15:50 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?
Starting point is 03:16:22 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.
Starting point is 03:16:52 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
Starting point is 03:17:08 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
Starting point is 03:17:36 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
Starting point is 03:17:58 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?
Starting point is 03:18:28 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
Starting point is 03:19:03 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?
Starting point is 03:19:46 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,
Starting point is 03:20:06 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.
Starting point is 03:20:23 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
Starting point is 03:20:58 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,
Starting point is 03:21:14 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?
Starting point is 03:21:35 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
Starting point is 03:22:03 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
Starting point is 03:22:32 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
Starting point is 03:23:15 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.
Starting point is 03:23:40 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.
Starting point is 03:24:03 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
Starting point is 03:24:33 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
Starting point is 03:24:58 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
Starting point is 03:25:26 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
Starting point is 03:26:09 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.
Starting point is 03:27:05 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.
Starting point is 03:27:21 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.
Starting point is 03:27:45 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,
Starting point is 03:28:21 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.
Starting point is 03:29:20 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
Starting point is 03:30:22 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.
Starting point is 03:30:37 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.
Starting point is 03:30:51 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.
Starting point is 03:31:07 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.
Starting point is 03:31:17 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
Starting point is 03:31:32 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
Starting point is 03:31:51 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
Starting point is 03:32:09 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.
Starting point is 03:32:26 Yeah, we appreciate it. Amazing. Congrats on the launch. Crushed it. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon.
Starting point is 03:32:31 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
Starting point is 03:33:02 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
Starting point is 03:33:27 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.
Starting point is 03:33:45 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
Starting point is 03:34:02 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.
Starting point is 03:34:19 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?
Starting point is 03:34:37 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
Starting point is 03:34:56 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.
Starting point is 03:35:11 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?
Starting point is 03:35:21 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.
Starting point is 03:35:41 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?
Starting point is 03:35:55 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
Starting point is 03:36:17 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
Starting point is 03:36:39 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,
Starting point is 03:37:05 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
Starting point is 03:37:34 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,
Starting point is 03:37:54 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.
Starting point is 03:38:20 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,
Starting point is 03:38:37 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.
Starting point is 03:39:06 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.
Starting point is 03:39:21 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?
Starting point is 03:39:42 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.
Starting point is 03:40:03 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
Starting point is 03:40:33 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
Starting point is 03:40:51 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.
Starting point is 03:41:15 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.
Starting point is 03:41:33 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
Starting point is 03:41:52 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.
Starting point is 03:42:08 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,
Starting point is 03:42:26 they're bought and hopefully bought into the mission.

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