TBPN Live - SpaceX/Cursor Deal, Images 2.0 Reactions, Fake Bear Attack | Anil Chakravarthy, Naveen Gavini, Avlok Kohli & Ankur Nagpal, Joel Edwards, Renen Hallak, Darian Shirazi

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

(00:46) - SpaceX & Cursor (18:10) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (23:03) - ChatGPT Images 2.0 Reactions (31:32) - Anil Chakravarthy, President of Adobe's Digital Experience Business, discusses the company's collaboration with Nvidia to integrate 3D digital twins into marketing and customer experiences, exemplified by HP's use of this technology to streamline product design and marketing. He emphasizes the importance of customer experience orchestration, leveraging AI to deliver personalized experiences by combining the right content and customer data across preferred channels. Additionally, Chakravarthy highlights Adobe's $25 billion buyback as a signal of confidence in the company's profitability and growth, underscoring the focus on AI adoption to provide real value to users and enterprise customers. (47:25) - Naveen Gavini, former Chief Product Officer at Pinterest, is the co-founder and CEO of BuildForever, a company dedicated to creating personal and human-centric products. In the conversation, he introduces their latest product, Extra, an AI-powered email application designed to transform personal email management by organizing inboxes around users' lives, reducing clutter, and enhancing clarity. Gavini emphasizes that Extra aims to make email more manageable and enjoyable, addressing the common issue of overwhelming personal inboxes. (56:58) - Avlok Kohli & Ankur Nagpal. Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList, discusses the launch of USVC, a fund designed to democratize access to venture capital by allowing individuals to invest with as little as $500. He emphasizes the fund's unique structure, which ensures that the price investors pay and redeem at closely reflects the value of the underlying companies, avoiding market-driven fluctuations. Kohli also highlights the fund's commitment to direct ownership, avoiding layered SPVs to maintain transparency and alignment with investors. (01:09:44) - Joel Edwards, a geologist and co-founder of Zanskar Geothermal, discusses the company's mission to discover and develop hidden geothermal resources in the western United States using AI and advanced sensing technologies. He explains that these "blind" systems lack surface indicators like geysers or hot springs but can be tapped to generate electricity by drilling into underground pockets of hot water. Edwards highlights the bipartisan support for geothermal energy due to its baseload capacity, zero emissions, and domestic sourcing, and notes that Zanskar recently raised $115 million to expand its AI-powered geothermal discovery platform and develop new power plants. (01:20:34) - Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data, discusses the company's decade-long journey since its 2016 inception, focusing on developing new infrastructure to support AI's evolving demands. He highlights the early recognition of AI's need for rapid data access and the company's collaborations with leading AI organizations, including hedge funds and life science institutes, to build scalable, efficient systems. Hallak also emphasizes VAST Data's role in simplifying AI adoption by providing a unified software infrastructure that abstracts hardware complexities, enabling enterprises to deploy AI agents securely and efficiently. (01:31:00) - Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures, began his career as one of Facebook's first software engineers, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg, before founding Radius, a B2B Customer Data Platform. In the conversation, he reflects on his early experiences at Facebook, the challenges of founding and scaling Radius, and his transition into venture capital, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with smart individuals and the evolving landscape of AI investments. (01:51:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:53:46) - Fake Bear Attack (01:58:58) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. And today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPN, Altruy on the Temple of Technology, the Porteous of Finance, the Capital of Capital. A bunch of major stories today.

SpaceX and Cursor partnering up. More news out of images 2.0. A bunch of news out of OpenAI. And Mythos, a group of unauthorized users have been using Claude Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Blue.

Bloomberg, we'll go through. There's a whole bunch of timeline. We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe, Build Forever, AngelList, Zankar, vast data gradient. We're going through all the news of the day. Well, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor, who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this a gong already? This is gongworthy. This is gongworthy because it's an option to buy the company, but a $10 billion, break up fee. incredibly incredibly yeah I think I think it's a win no matter what it's a win yeah it's a win it's a win it's a win no matter what uh well let's go through the facts first so um SpaceX partners just just immediate takes we assume you already know all the industry host fact do you know all the information do we need to give you any information we'll see but uh let's let's run there so SpaceX partners with cursor to quote create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. The deal gets cursor, whose agentic coding model, Composer 2 basically operates at frontier level performance, access to compute from SpaceX's Million H100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer,

and that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer. There were some other terms that Elon was throwing on. Fantastic terminology from the XAI team over there. What was the other one? It was like AI. Compute gigafactory. Compute gigafactory. They're all hilarious and very good. I like all of these. Computer.

Were they saying computer? I don't know. The XAI timeline, I was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, when did this actually start? Like, I, because it just kind of came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on like the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where it's like now the thing that started is like, like, Elon sort of being like, I want to buy Twitter, is now like a NeoLab with a massive

supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget, they own graphite now or potentially well, and a social media app. The space code review company? Exactly. So I'm really, I'm, I'm genuinely so. Excited for Merrill. For the graphite team. Yeah.

I'm thrilled for the. for the cursor team. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled for Scott Wu. Yeah. Yeah, Scott, Scott Wu is licking his chops. He's like, what are you going to leave out in the record?

He really is going to have fun with it. I mean, I also think we need to take one moment. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, uh, just send some thoughts and prayers to SBF. Oh, yeah. Imagine, I don't know how this works. Yeah. In whatever prison he's in.

but I imagine, you know, hopefully every few days he can go and, like, talk to the outside world. Yeah. And you can imagine him going, you know, making the call. Yeah. And he says, you know, for the last few weeks, it's like, you know, sir. What would the mark be? How is enthropic doing? How's my baby doing?

And it's like, sir, it's traded up north of 800 in secondary markets. And it's quite possibly going to north of a trillion. And then he's like, thank you. Hanks up. Comes back the next day. I haven't checked him with cursor a little bit. How are they doing? Sir, you may not want to hear this, but...

There's a $50 billion acquisition on the table. They've agreed to sell for $60 billion. And if they don't sell, they're going to get $10 billion of non-dilute of capital. Absolutely wild. Anyways. What a wild, wild turn of events. Anyway, let's go through the timeline because it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon in ink over the past just four years when this all started. April 14th, 2022, it's April 22nd now.

So we're talking four years to go from just proposing buying Twitter. He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, hey, maybe I don't want. want it. It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that $44 billion because this was when the interest rate hike happened and the end of ZERP and basically all software companies sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and basically anything that was even meta sold off like 40, 50% post, although that was like an anomaly and they built back up. But the question about like, okay,

well, reality labs is a, what, a 10 billion, tens of billions dollar bet on revenues that might come in like 10 years. Like, it was so far away. And the revenue ramp on VR and Metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues, even if they were still bullish on the idea of meta winning the VR race, winning the Metaverse at some point. It just wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So you got to discount that back at 6% instead of 3% or whatever your risk-free rate is. in your DCF. And so everything sold off. And Elon had locked in that pre-end of ZERP price.

And there was a big question about could he get out of it? Were they going to twist his arm? They, there was a little bit twisting. The arm was a little bit twisted. But Morgan Stanley came on board and a bunch of other ones. It was almost broken. But the people who were,

whose arms were twisted, Morgan Stanley and all the VC backers who came in, they wound up with SpaceX stock. And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with XAI stock. and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy. It was never bet against Elon.

Like that was the thing. It was like, surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for $44 billion. It's a crazy idea based on the market and where things are. But everything's sort of penciled out. So he closed the Twitter acquisition on October 27th, 2022. And he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sync day, of course.

He comes in with a sink. What was the joke about the kitchen sink? Let that sink in. Oh, let that sink in. Okay, it wasn't, it wasn't like, I'm doing the whole, the whole, isn't the whole kitchen sink another phrase as well? Yeah, like throw the whole kitchen sink at it. Okay, yeah. Well, he did that too, because he threw everything together.

Yes, good job. Yay, yeah. So, XAI came later. He publicly announced XAI on July 12th, 2023. And that's only nine months after chat GPT, maybe eight months after chat GPT. Google quick followed with Gemini. and it was like, it was a very fast following, I think, to get to XAI off the ground. And that was like, just for context, I was right around the time you first publicly talked about

the potential for a tech live stream, right? Oh, yes, yes, I do. I think that was, I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah, I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition, and I was sort of trying to justify it as a, you know, it was more about his desire for, free speech than anything else. Like, you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock-on effects for Elon's strategy.

Anyway, so he was, you know, coming out on July 12, 2023, saying, I'm back in the AI horse race. I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind still. Remember, that's why he founded OpenAI. He wanted to push back against DeepMind. I'm going to go up against Anthropic, going to go up against Open AI. And so the first major problem, product milestone came just a couple months later, November 3rd, that's when they introduced GROC, November 3rd, 2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on December 7th, 2023, when GROC started rolling out inside of X for premium plus subscribers, which was a new tier. It's actually crazy how many-

-en-ver. Yeah. I mean, that year on Twitter was insane. Like, just product feature, phaotic feature and they were shipping stuff that had been clearly developed beforehand. Like, I think the community notes idea had been workshoped and even like engineered in the pre-Elon era. But he just got there and was like, ship that tomorrow. And like there were a lot of things like that that happened. And there were other things that got pulled back and review. And like there were other pieces of the puzzle that were like not doing so well.

And he was just a cut, cut, cut, cut. And so he sort of like put it back in startup mode and it felt a lot more agile. And it still does. And so that was the moment Grock. finally became a part of the X product experience. In early 2024, XAI started shipping updates quickly. March 17th, 20204 at open source GROC 1. March 26, 2024, GROC access expanded to X premium subscribers.

Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on April 12th, 2024, they announced 1.5V, which added multimodal capabilities. Then GROC 2, GROC 2 Mini. By the end of 2024, GROC was available to all X users. And so 2025, XAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On February 19th, 2025, XAI announced GROC3 beta, then March 28th, 2025. So over a year ago, for some reason, this feels more recent than that, XAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. So March 28, 2025, effectively merging the AI company with a social platform.

After that, X kept releasing faster model updates. They did GROC 4 fast, GROC 4.1, then came the SpaceX deal. That was February 2nd, 2026. So the clean sequences that Musk first proposed the Twitter acquisition, then founded XAI, then brought GROC into X, then merged XAI with X, and then SpaceX bought XAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team. Yeah, and this just makes, it makes so much sense, right? Cursor needs compute.

They need the resources. They need the capital to train a frontier coding model. They've also never done a pre-trane, I believe, whereas the X-AI team has, right? Correct. And the big, big thing is that the GROC brand has, you know, been through so much. Sure. There was some, an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplace. Oh, yeah.

And it had been adopted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So more people had said, like, you cannot use this product in the workplace, then we're actually using it in the workplace. Curse is a great brand, right? It's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of coding, right? Yeah. Say in the announcement.

Best to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing. We've got everyone on Earth building, building a box that you can tell to do things. Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist? No, no, I don't. I think the competition, I think the competition is great. You want the government to have.

Bringing out the best in, it's bringing out the best in the run. But I think cursor is like, knockout, dragout fight. Cursor's always had a great brand. I saw someone else. We, SBF replied to SpaceX's tweet. So, that's me. Pull up the first post here and then scroll down. The SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely.

It should be like the first one in the timeline. SpaceX and Cursor, SpaceX AI is what they're calling it now. Is it not up there? And Cursor, I can find it. and send it in. Let me find this post and send it into the production chat. Toxedo Sam says, do you think they'll make Elon take his shoes off at the cursor office? Okay, so Richard Wu has some contact.

Yeah, there we go. Look, SBF is somehow on Twitter. How can you be on Twitter from jail? All these people in jail on X, I don't understand. No, it says it in his bio. Yeah. He says it in his bio. He says, we can.

use BOP approved phone calls emails to tell others what to post on our social. Okay. I think it would be a free speech violation to say, like, if you are in jail, you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity, but it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre-internet because it seems like having like a ghost writer on your account is a really good way to like start, you know, kind of like influencing public perception, right? I think this is Elizabeth Holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like she, you know,

her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining and over time that just wears on people and eventually people are like, you know, maybe maybe she isn't so bad after all, right? So. Okay. Well, Richard Wu broke down the structure of the deal. He says the structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what's happening is one, XAI is having trouble, training. a state-of-the-art coding model, hence co-founder departures, they might have a bunch of idle GPUs.

Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a $5 billion training run to compete with Codex and Claude. X-A-I 3, X-AI says to Cursor, use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state-of-the-art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you. For Cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for $60 billion or get $10,000. billion that pays for all the GPUs you rented. Win, win. And I was reflecting on Michael Truel's, I mean, fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young, but his aesthetic is very much in like the stripe world, I imagine, because I feel like the one

really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with, was it Patrick Collison? Is that the one I'm thinking of? And it's like them at the coffee shop and it's so welcoming and warming. It's like that is welcome in every corporate entity in America, right? Like, and to your point about like, you know, oh, like, if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics, blah, blah, blah, do we really want Grock running around with Mecca and Annie and all this crazy stuff? But if it's just like Michael Truel from Cursor, he's so reassuring. Like, I, if I'm like, Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, yeah, of course, like we love Cursor.

That's great. Yeah. Aesthetics do matter. Vives do matter. and I think makes it a lot of sense. Matt Slotnick says he loves math. Okay, what is the math here? He's talking about Julian.

So Julian says at a 30x revenue multiple at first glance, it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for cursor. However, the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX, given it is expected to go public at more than 100x revenue. A 70-term multiple expansion on 2 billion of revenue adds up. Wow. Yeah. This is a notorious thing in corporate M&A. And occasionally it's gone poorly. But there is like an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple

and maintain your current multiple, that is accretive to the stock. And so there's a whole philosophy around that. But the smart investors should price each earning stream differently. And having like a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than super competitive oligopolistic coding market, if that's what this winds up being. It's a tricky, tricky situation. Will Brown. Wow. Hercer just hit a $10 billion run rate.

They did. It's guaranteed, right? There's no way that they won't make $10 billion this year. That's not even a run rate. That's just like it's locked in. It's more than contracted. I don't know. Yeah. And it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit and that it's, you know, by itself.

Yeah, yeah. They can, you know, they'll be in a position to actually, you know, reinvest that. That's like a nice little neolab kind of. Series A, basically. But Ken says no. You got to multiply that $10 billion by 12. Because in that month, when they get the $10 billion check from SpaceX, it will be $120 billion. They will be the largest AI company in the world that month.

And then they just have to figure out, they don't collect until end of year if they're still independent. Otherwise, it's more than $25 billion. Okay. Well, Fleming business has some other thoughts. What is this supposed to? from Patrick? Wait, which one? Which one? This is

Patrick is quoting Scott Wu. Oh yeah, yeah, last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it because despite this does not look... See, without images too, without images too, we just, this kind of asset. I actually think this might have been done the old-fashioned way. It's no, banana. This is Nana-Manana. There we go.

It's good at cutting out of faces. Thank you, Watermark. Yes. He says, here we go again. Last the Mohicans. Yeah, Scott Wu is the last. one standing in this particular category and yeah he's licking his chops thinking about who might want to hop over to Cognition Cursor Cognition Winsurf Devin Cursor zombie corp as the as the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of Scott Wu's territory what else should we go through with the cursor the cursor Cursor's long-term viability was contingent I'm very happy for everyone involved

Yeah. I'm very happy. Some news from Space News, Inc. This is very interesting. China backs Orbital Data Center startup with 8.4 billion in credit lines. They're pilled. They're pilled. Elon is interested.

8.4 billion in credit lines. That is a lot of money. A Beijing-based space startup has secured early-stage funding. Early-stage funding to the tune of 8.4 billion? What are we doing here? And extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space-based computing infrastructure. Beijing Orbital Twilight.

Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously. This is a new meta. Yeah. What is cursors real name? Any Sphere? This is a pretty good name.

I like any sphere and I like cursor, but it doesn't hold a candle. It's a Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. Also known as Orbital Chengwang announced the completion of a pre-A-I funding, pre-A-1? or is that pre pre a1 funding round April 20th the round saw participation from venture and industrial investors including high song capital cit ic construction investment capital cathay capital they got everybody it's a murderer's row over there at the same time orbital state said that it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling 8.4 billion from 12 major financial institutions

including the bank of china are they going to build a rockets with this? I mean, I don't, I don't understand why this would be so capital-intensive if they're not going to fad the chips and they're not going to launch the rockets. Well, they're going to put a lot of GPUs in space. I guess they're just going to buy a lot of Huawei chips or something. Are they going to go to Huawei and get some special stuff? Yeah, I mean, this is pretty interesting because I feel like, you know, generally the main bull case for space data centers is that the like regulatory environment in the U.S. is going to be so hard to build data centers. Yeah, yeah.

Supercomputers, but yeah. On normal land. Oh, yeah. Yeah, supercomputers. So you've got to send super computers to space Because there's less right now we can do data centers in space We just we we if it's on the ground it's a supercomputer Okay, yeah that makes sense Because because we don't want any more data centers on earth it's earth day by the way Congratulations earth you've done fantastically Yeah, but the whole thing like in China is like they you know you can just like build things there right

There's like very little regulatory overhead Yeah, so it's like what like I feel like the the space data centers Yeah, it's a lot more sense for the US yeah if you're worried about it if it If the bull case is regulatory, which it seems to be that's generally consensus, I think. Yeah. I was laughing about how, you know, how there's all this fear about, like, data centers using water in America. But over in China, they have the Three Gorges Dam, which generates electricity from water. And it technically uses a lot of water.

The water's not destroyed or anything. It just passes through the dam, generates electricity. They're using an entire ocean of water. Exactly. The Hoover Dam. That's a nightmare. If you just, like, there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unplanned. potable so you can't drink it anymore.

But there's another one where you think like water has individual rights and should not be used at all. Like it should not be used. It should not flow through a water wheel. It should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all. It should be left to its own devices still and just chill. Maybe. Anyway, Orbital has incubated, is incubated by the Beijing Astro Future Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission.

the Science Park Administration. The Institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations. The rationale for the constellation in November briefing. So large-scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide, but further growth faces major obstacles, including heavy land use, weird, soaring energy consumption, weird, limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China,

but maybe they are skating where the puck is going, and maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction. So they're planning a dawn, dusk orbit about 700, 800 kilometers above the Earth, aiming to achieve a large-scale space data center to support space-based computing by 2035. Wow, thinking in decades over there. So they're going slow. They're getting there. In initial phase, spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait, why are they talking about last year?

We'll focus on core technology changes in the first computing. They're manipulating time, John. The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 26, but it does not appear to have launched. They have, they have like decent launch capacity with the Long March rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but you got more money. You can just yolo more rockets up there, I guess. Problem solved, although I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the Three Gorges Dam. Anyway, moving on.

More images out of chat GPT, images 2, image gen 2. Pull these up. Images V2. These are crazy. Has anyone done that ruin test of the guy driving the car into the whole thing where he was like, it's AGI if it can understand this meme? I wonder how, I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been saturated on the internet. And so it no longer is a challenge.

I'm going to have it making image. This is a crazy image. I am a tiny man. What is this? My space. My son was born. This is truly never. They handed me to him.

Never forget where you came from. Blink 182. It really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing the Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens. Cows are flying. Horses are flying. The next one by Ethan Mollock has like every image benchmark in one.

You were asking about this. You said, and explain the history of this. So originally, like, when, like, Dolly first came out, the, like, image that everyone was like, oh, this is crazy. It was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon. Yeah. So then it's like, okay, that's, like, very easy. And then it became... Well, it's very hard to Photoshop that.

It's very hard to go get an actual picture. Because, wait, if someone's just, like, make a picture of a dog and it's photo real, everyone's just like, oh, who cares? We have a picture of a dog. We don't have any pictures of astronauts riding horses on the moon. But there's people riding horses, right? Yes. And so like, there's a sense where it's like maybe it's not, like, doesn't need to fully understand like everything that's going on because there's a lot of like references that can pull from.

Totally. So then it became can a horse ride an astronaut. Yes. It's like the reverse. Yes. And early image models would always just do the flip. They would just put the astronaut on the horse. Yep.

Because that's more logical. Yeah. So there's a number of these things where like if you ask a person to draw it out, it's like, okay, you just think logically like this is how it would look. But there's just like no reference images on. So another one was like a full wine glass. Yeah. So you think of a full wine glass is like, it's still only like technically, you know, halfway three, fours. I never understood why that one didn't work.

I saw the whole video. There's very few images online of a full wine glass being like, oh, full to the brim because people typically fill them halfway. And so in the training day, okay, got it. Yeah. And then there was the, you know, near the clock. What is this image? This is not the one. This is not the one.

This is not the one. This is not the one for the timeline. That one's way more aggressive than the, this is the, this is the image. Then the, this is the one. This one looks aesthetic and it still looks weird. The only thing is, is it would a horse's belly really look like that? It is sort of like a human horse. It kind of looks like a human.

But it does have the wine glass completely filled. And then explain the clock. The last one you pull up was Grock, I think. Okay. Explain the clock. What's going on with the clock? Yeah, that one says another like understanding thing where like can it, if you give it a time, can it do the clock?

Yeah. Like the correct time. There's also one where you do a bunch of clocks on different time zones. Yeah. And it couldn't do the clock. It couldn't do the clock. It has two hour hands. Yeah, this one.

You know what that means. We're moving the goalpost. Do it. Move in the goalposts. Do it. It's time. It's time. It's time.

It's time. It's 99% of it. And it's not. It's not complete yet. It's not complete yet. You guys have more work. No, no, Sam was talking about this with Ashley Vance. He was saying that, like, you know, he thought job was finished with, like,

chat, GPT images because it was really good. And then they worked a lot harder and they realized that there was more to do. And this is like the Carpathie thing about, like, yeah, you get the self-driving cars to 99% and then takes another year to add another nine and then it takes another year to add another nine and then another nine and it just takes forever to improve these things because we demand perfection. We do not accept two hands on a clock. Keep grinding, folks.

Keep grinding. Anyway, there are a lot of other fun posts. Semin houses, I thought this was just a real image of Dorcasch taking a selfie, and then it was re-contextualized via a meme. It is, in fact, an AI image. This doesn't even look like the new model, though. Hi, I'm Dorcas.

I grew up all over the U.S. and now SF-based and always down to nerd out of that AI science and history. A little about me. I host the Dorcasch podcast. study at UT Austin. Just published a book on the history of AI scaling. Let's grab coffee or do a fun activity this summer. Because, of course, this is a meme template that is very popular and has gone viral with a lot of

new people that have been hired and moved to San Francisco. So the other thing I've noticed with images, too, is that I think it has fully, the new model actually has taste. I agree. And it has fully democratized, like, high-grimilar. quality lifestyle and product imagery. And I'm shedding a tear just a little bit. Yeah.

Because you used to be able to tell like the kind of somebody who's working on a CPG company, you could kind of clock their ability. Yep. As a founder, based on the quality of their images, right? Because maybe they're not super creative themselves. Maybe they haven't raised a bunch of money, but if they're scrappy, they can meet the right photographer, they can put stuff together. Yeah, yeah.

And now it's like everyone just has a great product photography. Yep. And I saw it this morning with, there's that Andresenbach company that does like electric scooters. Oh yeah. They were just like ripping out a bunch of images that look like they spent tens of thousands of dollars doing them. But they're clearly like images too, which is cool. It's just like funny that we've entered a world where. Yeah, I've seen some people.

I think that the end result will be like you will see more. opinionated and creative and more people like there will be a collapsing around like everyone will copy Apple or linear but then on the flip side you will see people that are that are doing things that are really

unexpected and those things will be copied but if the brand can run through and actually establish itself is like oh it has this unique aesthetic it won't matter that somebody can recreate it because plenty of people did that with the Red Antler stuff it was like there were brand

that really owned that and carved that out as like their aesthetic, and then there were a bunch of copycats and no one really liked this. I was reflecting on the fact that, like, for a long time, Mid Journey felt like it had a very unique aesthetic, like, art station and like painterly and sci-fi really well, and then Chachapiti Images V1 and some of the other image models just felt like stock photography.

And now I feel like I'm starting to see more stuff out of images with Chachapiti that feels more opinionated and has a stronger aesthetic. And it can be able to be able to see more. do more of like the sci-fi stuff. Although sometimes it leans in a little bit too much to the photo realism. I think you gotta get kind of crazy with the prompts to actually get something that's abstract because I was taking some mid-jorney prompts and I was putting them into chat chappitie images.

And I was noticing that like it was just putting out stuff that was like, it was like, what the prompt was like make a video game of like a car racing and it just looked exactly like a video game because it just looks like a screenshot instead of like the idea of a video game. Okay, last one we're gonna pull up and then we have our first guess. Post from Ben Hylack, the legend. It says, Nightmare Blunt rotation. Oh, yeah, it can do, it can do 360 images. They can do 360 images, which is really cool.

You got Sam, Watson. So it generates a full equine rectangular image, which is something you could view in VR, and then you can load that into a panoramic, you know, stereoscopic image generator. I wonder when 3D images will come. And also, I mean, the big question is like, people are going to want to animate these.

What's the downstream tool chain for actually turning this into video? Are we going back into video at some point? We will see. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with it. And it should help with like front end and a lot of other stuff. It seems like it's done very well on design and layouts and all this stuff. Well, we have a perfect person to talk about AI. imagery, AI, generative AI, creative tooling, and more because we are joined by Anil from

Adobe, where he is the president. So let's bring in Anil. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on. Great to be back on TVPN and congrats on your acquisition. Great news for you guys. Thank you.

It's great to see you. Great to see you again. I would love to just get a general update on what has changed with Adobe. What have you been working on since the last time we spoke? Look, I'm coming to you from Adobe Summit. We are here in Las Vegas, you know, big show, 14,000 people. You were just talking about Jensen. Jensen was here on Monday.

And really talking about how NVIDIA and Adobe are working together. And you were just talking about 3D, I caught the tail end of your comments there. And that's actually one of the big things we announced is how do you have digital twins so that you can take the digital twin and carry it all the way from product design into marketing and customer experience. So, you know, with HP, for example, they have 15,000 new skews every year with all the products they have,

and they're working with us and with Nvidia and to bring it together into marketing. So we are super excited about, you know, what we call customer experience orchestration, which is how do you use AI, how do you use all the software you have to deliver personalized experiences? How do you bring the right content, the right data about the customer, and then put that into the channel that they care about and really get the most out of the customer life cycle build loyalty. That's the big topic of the conference here.

Yeah, walk me through that HP example because if they have a skew, I imagine that there's a CAD file at some point and then they might want to instantiate that in text or imagery or video or a 3D rendering and they might want to go over to one of your 3D products or bridge to another. How important is Adobe at the center of like asset management

and actually creating some sort of abstraction on top of what the actual core item is versus just translating from one sort of output to the next in the way that someone might take a PNG from Photoshop and drop it into Premiere Pro? No, that's exactly right. So they start with the 3D image that they have or the 3D, as you said, a CAD file.

From that, what we do is we create the digital twin. And then we apply the brand intelligence on their behalf. So in HP's case, for example, if it's a new PC that they're releasing, they have all kinds of things on what they want when they say it's a laptop and the laptop is open. What's the kind of image they want on the laptop? What's the kind of lighting they want on the laptop?

And then they release it all over the world. So there's pictures of people, They always want to show a business professional in the laptop. That's the, along with the laptop, they want them showing them using the laptop to do something. So they have all kinds of brand guidelines, of course. But then there's a lot of tribal knowledge on what makes an ad successful. And it's not only for them, then they have to get all of that traveling through the entire marketing campaign.

Because one of the big problems has been, you know, in the current world, they use the 3D CAD files for everything in manufacturing and so on. But the marketing, the content starts with a photo shoot. They're not actually using the 3D CAD file that they have the source of truth. And that's what we're enabling them to do. Use the source of truth so that the images are completely high fidelity. They are brand preserving. But then you can generate everything around that.

You can generate the background. You can generate the foreground. You can generate the users. And then, of course, you can do what we call transcreation, which is the translation into different languages. All of that can be generated based on their brand guidelines and what works for their brand. So is your relationship with Nvidia that you want to marshal enough compute that you can be delivering inference to a customer? Because I remember using Content Aware Phil back in the day.

It ran locally on my device. As the models get more compute intensive, they eventually won't run on device. They'll run in the cloud. I know you have API partnerships, but is there a vision to deliver inference to the customer all in one go? Exactly.

It depends on the campaign. Let's say HP is running a back-to-school campaign. Then they want a set of imagery. They want a set of things that they can transfer over to their channel partners along with accurate product data. Or if they're running, for example, a holiday campaign,

a different set of imagery, and so on, so forth. So depending on the campaign, depending on the geography, depending on the customer segment, making sure that they have the right campaign, that is obviously the content, but it's also the product data, making sure that that's super accurate

because it's got to match what exactly the customer is buying. And then anything that's relevant for the particular channel partner, it could be through their own direct channels, but it could equally be through CDW or through other channels, and they want to make sure that the entire thing carries over. So that's what we're doing for them is not getting workflow right, getting the Adobe brand intelligence, which is one of the big things that we announced this week at Summit, getting all of that together so that they can have a single,

seamless marketing workflow and get the benefit of both AI and the 3D technology together. Jordi? You guys announce a big buyback this week, and that's been exciting. But what do you think you need to do from a result standpoint to show that you guys are an AI beneficiary versus a victim, right? Because the narrative is obviously against you. The market has spoken. But at the same time, AI is a powerful creative tool.

You guys have massive distribution into millions of individuals and businesses. And so I think people are waiting to actually see the story in the numbers. And there's like only so much you can say to kind of like give people confidence. But how are you thinking about it? Yeah, exactly. As you said, we announced a $25 billion buyback. That is a signal of our confidence. This is going to continue to be a very profitable business for years to come, and we wanted to make sure that everybody in the market knew that. And, you know, look, I think to your point, first step for us is AI adoption and making sure that AI is delivering real value, whether it's to individuals and real value to users or to enterprise customers like we were just talking about.

And for us, what that means is, how do you really embed it into the tooling so seamlessly, whether you are a marketer, whether you are a creative, or whether you're a business professional using acrobat, that AI works for you flawlessly. And it does what you want. I love the example from the last show that you had, which is sometimes you do want the horse riding the astronaut. That was an interesting concept. But, you know, that may be, but we have a lot of customers like Home Depot that just want sawdust and nails. and that's what makes their campaigns authentic.

So depending on what the customer wants, depending what the user wants, making sure that AI is helping them get value, not AI is getting in the way. That's our focus right now, is just making sure that customers, whether they're enterprises, individuals, small businesses, students,

understand that AI is critical to the next generation of creative platforms and marketing platforms and tools. But it's, in the context of what they're using, it brings the UI, the agents and the reasoning, the models and the data all together to work for them. So I think we've made a lot of strides on that front here at Summit over the last couple of years.

I think as the results show, one thing for us is, I think from where we are in the market, for the market even to see us continuing to the performance that we've had, we're a double-digit grower, we have very healthy margins, even continuing to see that for the next couple of years, I think we'll change a lot of minds. And then I think we also see the opportunity

through customer experience orchestration to reach a real inflection point. So that's what we're looking to do. Yeah, I was going to ask, what's your M&A outlook? It seems like there's a ton of really talented teams building creative tools that could fit in to Adobe.

Hopefully, you know, you're spending a lot on the buyback, but hopefully there's still some dry powder for some talented teams. We do. We have plenty of dry powder. We haven't over-extended ourselves. In fact, we are really pleased. We just announced that we have received

all the regulatory approvals for Semrush. And we are in the waiting period to close it. So in the next few weeks, we'll be closing Semrush. We're super excited about that because Semrush, along with our portfolio, solves a real problem for marketers. Marketers, I mean, we heard a lot from customers at Summit. every brand is like, how do I show up in the right way through OpenAI,

through Chad, GPT, obviously, but through Claude and Gemini and Perplexity and Grah. I don't even know how consumers, they know consumers are going there in droves. What they don't know is, what are they even prompting for that I should know about? So if I'm a brand in the cosmetics world, how are they actually prompting? I don't even know what they're prompting for that I should be aware of. Then how should I make sure what do I need to do to make sure that I am included in the response and then what do I need to do to make sure that I'm included in the response

in an accurate manner? And then how do I get that traffic coming to me? Or how do I close the sale right there if it's something that I can close right there? This is a new world for marketers. They have, marketers have no idea how this whole thing works I mean, they don't know, for example, what happens when you put in a prompt into chat GPD? What is the queries that get kicked off?

Where does it get kicked off too? How is that information assembled? How does it impact their brand? They don't know the first thing about it is what they're telling us. And they're saying Adobe, help us. I'm interested to see how this category plays out because there's obviously a bunch of companies doing, they call it answer engine optimization, AEO or GEO, whatever they're calling. it. But the big question was always, this feels like a very natural thing for someone like a

Sem Rush to enter in a big way. They already have the distribution. So it'll be an interesting battle between Sem Rush and some of the upstarts like profound in some other players. I think the battle will be over pretty soon according to me. There we go. I think James, I think James are profound. We should have you guys both on and go go out of it. That's great. I want to talk about video. So, I mean, we saw Open AI pulled back from SORA. There are some really amazing models that are happening. Some of them are in China.

There's a whole bunch of IP stuff. But what I'm interested in is that Photoshop continues to be an important tool, even in a Gen AI world, because there's so many fine details. Having Gen. A.I is just one possible tool is valuable. The models are getting better. We're three years into this boom, but video's moving slower. It's more inference demand.

And I'm wondering about how your team. taking lessons learned and strategies that you applied to, the evolution of Photoshop, how that integrates with different model providers, different tools, different in-house solutions, and how you're planning to bring that to After Effects and Premiere because this feels like a place where you need

even more opinionated editing, like we're nowhere near text box editing, like, you know, like 40 hours of video into a movie. Like that's just not, like we're so far, from that. Exactly. So look, this is where I believe Adobe brand intelligence will be a huge differentiator because

that's what then gives us the right information to pass on to the creatives, to say this is how this is the kind of how you use the Adobe creative agent. And this is how you want to let the AI be take over and this is where you want to be opinionated. I mean, what we have done is provided that flexibility. We announced over 30 integrations now, you know, whether it's runway or fly, you know, whether it's or Flux and obviously Google with both VO and Nanobanana, etc. So we've been very open and we're very open to integrating any other models that come up as well. The key, though, is the creative themselves, if you're working for a brand.

I mean, if you're working for, I mentioned Home Depot earlier, or if you mentioned working for Coca-Cola and so on, they don't have enough information by themselves unless they really get a really super detailed creative brief on what exactly to, where they need to take control, where they can let the AI run. We believe we can automate that and provide the right information at the right time to the creative.

They can bring the brand idea, they can bring the hero asset, they can bring the creative idea, and then you can apply the intelligence and exactly to your point, you can be a lot more opinionated in what you produce. Yeah, yeah.

It is very fascinating. We got like fully generated video before we got a tool that puppeteers Premiere Pro in a way that can sync up music and edit to beat and make cuts just on normal non-AI

generated footage, but that's just the nature of computer use and whatnot. So I'm sure it's an exciting time. Lots to build, lots to work on. Congratulations on all the progress. Yeah, great to get the update. Yeah, thanks so much for taking the time. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. We'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one. Thank you. Goodbye. I'm next. One quick, quick thought. I think, like, right now, like, already the great image models, the nanobananas, the images too. It is like you're just talking to somebody who is a digital guy or girl who is very good at Photoshop. Like, that is the experience today. And it was not that way 12 months ago.

It is that way now. I no longer need Photoshop. I don't need to go to Fiverr to say like, hey, I need somebody that's good at Photoshop. I don't need to text like Ben and be like, hey, can you help me Photoshop this? And you can just actually just prompt your way. You do not need any UI anymore at this point. That's true. That's true.

For the average, for the average kind of. For, yeah, I mean, we are crossing into the fence. And I'm just saying that's going to get there with video where you just have a timeline. Yeah. And you can click on a scene or a segment. But speed is really, really important here. Like, like, if you, if there's one word that's wrong on image and you need to regenerate it, you're going to wait 45 seconds.

And it will be faster to have done that in just a, you know, traditional workflow. Now, it's getting faster. It's so fast now. It's very fast. It's so fast. But if you're, I was just, I was, I was, you're writing a two-hour podcast and you say, oh, I want you to cut to Jordy in minute 45. And it has to go regenerate the entire thing.

like that is slow, you're going to need to puppeteer the tools. You're going to need tool use in here, I think. I don't know. Just because the inference, I was just shocked because I was playing around with like generating product photography and you're able to say like put the text here, you know, turn it around, put it at a different angle, more shadow, less shadow, all this stuff. And it's wild what you can do without any UI. But without further ado.

We have Neveen from Build Forever. is the former Pinterest CPO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having on. I like the bomber, George.

Nice piece. Thank you. Thank you. It's a one of one. New York Stock Exchange. Oh, NYSD. What day was the New York Stock Exchange founded? You tell me, 1792.

11 Wall Street. Wow, that is a very old. Great address. Great year to get into business. Great year to get into business. Best day to get into business. business. But it's great to have you on the show. Yeah. First time in the show, please introduce yourself in the company a little bit. Yeah, totally. So my name is Naveen Gavini. I'm the co-founder and

CEO of Build Forever. And honestly, we're just a group of engineers and designers and people that love building products that people love to use. And we've worked, as you said, I was early at Pinterest and we worked on a number of consumer products that people use around the world today. But our focus has been on a product that we launched yesterday called Extra. And it's really a reimagination of email is your life's inbox. And so for many of us, we spend all day kind of working, sending email. And when we have time to get to our personal email, it often feels over on overwhelming and just like, I don't know, I personally gave up on my personal email. I had over 250,000 unread emails. And so we were just kind of looking for a solution of just making email more

manageable, more fun, and delightful. And so with extra, it keeps track of what's important for you. So You never have to miss something. It helps you clean up your email, organized around your life. And it does things proactively for you in the background and helps you get stuff done. And so this endless studio list feels not so overwhelming. And it just feels delightful and joyful to open up your email every day. Is it a 4U page for email? Yeah, essentially.

That's how you can think of it. That's a good analogy. Yeah. So everything that's important in your life. We turn every email that you have into a short vertical looping video. It's not quite that, but Joe Wisenthel was talking about this. You know what you're saying. It's basically like, yeah, just actually picking and choose, you know, it's always been so silly that inboxes, it were primarily based around who messaged you last, not based around what was actually important or actionable or anything like that. Yeah.

And I feel like we're, we need to move like the idea, the whole idea of inbox zero is just such a pre-AI idea. idea where you are just getting flooded with more and more and more and more and more spam. And I think products that can help here are great. Also, it feels like you can kind of just, yeah, I'm curious. So you're built on top of Gmail. I don't know if you're supporting other email providers. Google is like aware that AI can be powerful in email. They're working on a lot of features, but I feel like this is one of those things that is going to require like really, really rapid iteration. And so I feel like you probably have this beautiful window of like maybe three to four years where they're kind of just slow to figure out some of this stuff.

And you can probably build a cool business in the meantime. But where do you want to, where does this go? How does this, how are you thinking about this as a venture scale opportunity? Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, like maybe starting. where you kind of left off. I think one of the challenges, an email is historically, for the past 20 years, like all of the innovation in email, if you think about it, has gone into the enterprise. And it's gone into really sending emails faster, right?

So that's like kind of all the email clients that you've seen have been like, let's help you get to inbox your own and send faster. And when in reality, like our different take on emails, that when you think about your personal email, not your work email, the amount of emails you send is actually very little relative to the amount you receive. And so the entire experience actually needs to be rethought of from information consumption, not as a communication tool. And I think that's the big pivot with email to think about on the personal side is that

it's more around information consumption delivering to you the right information at the right time. And then from there, there's an entire business to be built on how do you actually get things done for people in their lives? How do you help them along that next point in time and the journey without them having did you work? And so you're seeing, you know, a whole ecosystem of amazing companies being built on the agenic side around fulfilling different actions. But all of them need kind of a distribution entry point of like, how do we start that journey? And what is the personal data that we actually help achieve some of those actions upon? And so I think email is a really great place for that.

And if we can build an experience that starts to make that seamless for a user where they don't have to go and, I don't know, set up an API key or connect to a service, and they could just seamlessly launched that from an experience that feels native to them like email, it could be a really compelling experience. And I think, you know, we previously built a very big business with ads at Pinterest and other companies. And so this idea of being able to show people products and services at the right time could lead to a really incredible consumer product that's also accessible to the masses. Ads. I was not expecting that. Well, that was a Pinterest. No, I know. But you're saying, Aren't you saying like in theory if you build a really beautiful...

Yeah, you pay and get at the top of the inbox. I'm going to say everyone's sending you a thousand emails and if I advertise and pay I can get more surface area maybe? Also, I think people, I mean, my, our stance and many people's stance, I'm sure your stance is like if you get a really nicely targeted ad, it is like additive to a product experience. And so I think in the world in the future where, you know, somebody's using extra for their email, like, and you decide. to turn on ads, you could probably serve, you know, really high quality ads users.

Yeah, some of our beta users really love actually finding deals and products from brands that they actually love that often get buried and missed in their inbox today. And when we show CMOs and marketers the product, they absolutely love the idea of their products being displayed natively, not buried in a promotions tab. You know, their CTRs are through the floor with kind of the existing treatment in many people's mailboxes. So if you're actually interested in the brand and you've bought something from them before, the idea of being able to see other complementary products or things from that brand in the future could be very compelling. And I think we're thinking about multiple tiers. I think there's obviously

a lot of folks that, you know, may just want to not have ads and pay. And so I think there's lots of different ways to go about it. We're still early in the journey. But right now we're focusing on getting as many people to have a joyful inbox experience as possible before we start to monetize. What's the beachhead agentic experience? Is it just unsubscribe? People love coming in to clean up their inbox. It's crazy. I recommend everyone that's listening in. Like, if you're tired of your inbox being overwam five minutes with our onboarding flow, we'll give you a inbox designed around your life and, you know, and you'll feel a lot lighter and cleaner after using extra. But I think a lot of people are specifically for the person that's sitting on like 200,000 emails? If they have like 10, like, I probably have like 10 emails in my personal and like they range a lot from like need to write a thoughtful response. to need to do some flow in some web app or need to send a payment or need to do. And I'm like, I don't know that I would hand over the keys to an agent for most of those, but I would definitely love for you page on my like promotions and updates tabs in Gmail,

which are like basically newsletters and sponsored stuff. And then I would love because Gmail's done like an okay job with the unsubscribe button, but I misses it a lot. but then there's some services that are just like, we're breaking the law and like, you have to call us to unsubscribe for our emails. And I'm like, I'm not going to like chase this down.

So I'm just going to keep getting like random, our privacy policy updated for some like telecom service usually. Yeah. So I think with extra, you would get an amazing free page with the information they want. And I think honestly, a lot of people just feel the sense of control and clarity of being able to see it in a different view of like,

here's what's important, here's what I need to do today. And, you know, it's distilled down to just a few items versus this long list of things that you have to do in your inbox. That's cool. Is the app live on the app store?

It is. Yeah. We went live yesterday. Amazing. Your life's inbox. Here we go. Happening now. I'm getting it.

Thank you. There we go. Very excited to try this. It's great to meet you. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for coming on. breaking it down for us. Congratulations. We're watching. I'm excited to give it a try.

We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have Avlock from Angel List. And I believe we might have someone else joining as well. An anchor is joining as well. Fantastic. They've both been on the show before you know them. You love them and they have a big announcement.

Today, Angel List is launching USVC, a public venture fund alongside Naval Ravacant. How are you doing? Yo, yo. Hello. Feeling great. to the show. Big day. Big day. Break it down for us. What is USVC? All right. Perfect. I'm going to let Unker break down. What is USC? We're working on getting a four up. Just give us one second.

Okay. We can just hang out. Great, great, great hair. Did you just get a haircut? Here we go. We got everybody. There we go. Yep, got a haircut just for TBPN. There we go. There we go. I thought so. Great to see you guys. Welcome to the show. massive day, Anker, it's been too long since last week. Since the whole week. Since I've been here, every Wednesday afternoon blocked out. But now, today's launch is really fun. I mean, we couldn't reveal that much last week,

but really the last month has been gearing up towards this. And I think, I think Naval mentioned it when he first started Angelus. This was such a big part of his vision of what this company could become. And it's really fun to like finally get this out there. at this out there. Let's get right into it. How are you describing the project? Yeah, let's talk specifically about the product.

This, you know, everyone, everyone is aware of the companies that are a key part of it. But, but yeah, talk about kind of the decision making that went into the product, how it's, how it's different than other products in the market, all that stuff. Cool. Yeah, so the idea with USVC is we wanted to open up access to. the asset class of venture. Right now, I believe it's very siloed. You need to know a lot of people.

It's very, very hard for most of America to have access to, you know, the place where most of the wealth is created. So that's the goal with USVC. Can we build sort of a high-quality way to index into venture as an asset class? What's unique about this structure is there are a lot of private market ETFs.

People may have seen the Destiny ETF, the Robinote ETF, all of that. The difference with this, This is set up differently where it's a closed and tender offer fund, which sounds like a lot of heavy words. But what it really means is when you're investing in this, you're actually holding something very close to the underlying business. So the price of what you pay and what you redeem at is roughly equal to the price of the underlying companies. It's not driven by FOMO or like markets being super excited or down. And I think that is structurally very different.

I don't know if I'll look at them at anything. And part of the challenge with some of these other products is they can have, they can have great assets that make up the fund. But if you want to pet, but it's hard to justify if they're trading at five, six, seven times nav. It doesn't matter how good the underlying assets are. No good investor can kind of confidently say, I'm going to invest in this fund, unless you truly think that the assets are kind of mispriced fundamentally by five or six X. Yeah, that's exactly right.

I think the way to think about USVC is it's meant to be a vehicle that you can think about over the long term. So rather than trying to think about am I getting it at the right nav, am I getting it higher or lower than its value, you can just trust that when you invest in USC, you're getting it at the right nav and you can hold it for the very, very long term. That's why we made the decision, or that's why USVC made the decisions that it made. So how do investors actually on board? It's very easy.

So right now it's, yeah, it's very easy. We'll get you all to invest soon. But it's fully self-serve, usvc.com. It's been, yeah, then that's sort of been the innovation here. Like, historically, these types of funds require people to be accredited investors. But now access is truly open to anyone with as little as $500. How are you thinking about number? number of bets. It's open-ended, so it sounds like uncapped. But is this the kind of thing where you want to,

I feel like you want to concentrate on like 20, 30 core positions similar to a venture fund. I imagine this isn't like you want to spray and pray at seed, but maybe you would. If it's the right founder, how are you thinking about it? Yeah, so I can talk about portfolio construction. You'll see a lot of the names we've gone out with today are the names. everyone has heard of, you know, X-A-I, Open A.I, Anthropic. However, long-term, I think a lot of the long-term alpha is not even necessarily in these names. So we absolutely will also start investing in a lot of seed stage companies. The idea is these are bets.

It's not just about the next one year, but bets that will pay off in the next three, five, seven, ten years. So about a third of the portfolio, the goal would be to have to have. its queue early stage as well, just because we want to be finding these companies before they're actually discovered. Yeah, so similar to a, it's kind of a platform VC where they're going to concentrate a lot of their capital into later stage, established winners that are more stable, and then you can still get exposure to the early stage of super promising companies. That's very cool. Can you talk about the concept of direct ownership, how many layers of abstraction? I think that

there's a there's there's there's just like thud generally among retail investors that I've talked to that they will see a name that they're excited about and then they will find a product that sort of proxies that name but it's seven layers deep it's very confusing and and and they don't really know how to process it and mostly they're not even necessarily worried about fees or or anything like that They're more worried about like, I thought I owned SpaceX and then it just turned out I didn't. And we've talked to Matt Grimm at Anderall about this. There's been all sorts of stuff. Yeah, people promoting Anderol SPVs that don't have access.

They just like, yeah. And I think that that messaging is important. So can you talk this through like how you think about ownership, what rights you actually do need, what rights you don't, how you think about delivering exposure to the end user or the end investor? I'm going to let Avalogue take this because Angelus as a platform has drawn the line on what they will expect as an SPV. So, look, why don't you take this one? Sure. Yeah, one of the unique things about USBC is that it runs on Angelus. So we're able to have it take advantage of all of the infrastructure of Angelus.

And one of the things I tweeted out a few months ago was Angelus as an example had banned all layered SPVs by default. for the reasons that you mentioned. In fact, when we did it, we lost revenue because of it. But that's because we didn't know who the underlying owners were, and we had no way to actually even trace it. And so we banned it. So in general, when it comes to the infrastructure that we're running at Angelus, we are always thinking, first and foremost,

about ownership of the underlying assets because we're running infrastructure for funds, SDVs at scale. So from that vantage point, you can think of it as USVC in the way it thinks about it acquiring assets as the exact same ethos, which is you want to only look at assets where you actually know where the underlying assets are coming from, rather than these layered SPVs that have fees that are not disclosed and carry that's not disclosed. That's something that we effectively banned from Angelist a while ago. Makes sense. What is the pitch for founders? Why should they take USVC money? I can give I can give reasons, but how are you positioning it? So I think that this is the most fun part. And you're going to see see this soon where, okay, you know, you'd argue that Anthropic doesn't really need more promoters right now. But we're going to be taking some bets on companies and startups that have very loyal, very passionate communities. But they may be a $50 million business, $100 million business.

something in that range. And to them, it allows them a very scalable way to actually let their community share in the upside. And that's going to be one of the magical things here where it's not obviously an IP or anything, but now we can have a vehicle for people to get their communities involved in their upside. And for most founders, it's generally pretty cool to be able to say, hey, by the way, if you are a customer and you want to participate in this, you can invest in USBC. There's a $500 minimum.

Is there a maximum? there's there's no maximum so load up load up the truck what what happens if uh Elon Sam Dario these guys are like you know what I want to just team up with the other guys let's let's throw 50 billion collectively into each other's companies through USBC through USVC yeah let's just let's just all create a kretsu this is the Japanese way correct yeah yeah you did you did strike something interesting that the nature of this fund is different, right? Like, effectively, it's an evergreen fund, which means we can accept kind of unlimited amount of capital, but from the deployment perspective, every time that happens,

effectively, we have, you know, we have to kind of come up with the strategy for that. Yeah. So it's a very different structure. Yeah. How should investors think about the time horizon? If you're, if you're going, I've talked to people that have LP'd into VC funds and they're like, I don't even know if I'll see it before retirement. I mean, there's people who got into like early rounds of SpaceX and they're like 20 years into like, it looks great on paper, but I still don't have liquidity. And that's a, that's a benefit, but it's also a drawback. And I think going in with eyes open is important.

But how should the investor, do they think about this as 10 years journey or something that they're throwing in retirement bucket mentally or should they think about it? Obviously, it's not something that they're going to be trading in and out of on a day-to-day basis, but what's the right mindset to go into this with? So I'll caveat that this is not a liquid instrument, right? Like we've been told to repeat, this is not a liquid instrument. However, the goal with this type of structure is at our discretion, things are looking good and this is our goal. We will have up to 5% of the fund available for redemption every single quarter.

Sure. So the idea is that people theoretically, once we get into a good rhythm, can kind of pick and choose for how long they want to be a part of this journey. Sure. Again, it's not the most liquid instrument, but from a timing perspective, there's, it is, you know, people can kind of come in and come out. However, you know, only three quarterly redemptions. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Very cool. Do you anything else? No, this is great. I'm very, very excited. This is the most angelous product ever, I think, even though you guys are more than a, more than a decade in now, right? Yeah. And yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes. I feel like, I imagine you guys are going to be spending a little more time on the East Coast with this. I guess you're already over there, Anker. We're already in New York and that works on the West Coast. So we have good coverage. The website is usvc.com. There's a beautiful video of Naval. And I have no doubt we'll have many many of your new Port Co founders on the show. We can't wait. So keep us in the loop.

It's great to see you guys. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. this launch video is very funny because there are clips of Naval and then their clips of founders. And the first clip sort of makes it look like Naval is talking to Steve Jobs if you just have the sound off. But what a fantastic portfolio. Go check it out at USVC. There are seven companies in the portfolio currently. X-AI Crusoe, who's been on the show, Anthropics Sierra Technologies, Brett Taylor, Ligora, OpenAI, and Versel, you have seven different companies here representing.

Go check it out at usbc.com. Well, before we go into the next guest segment, I'm trying to, this hasn't been posted by any, any super reputable sources yet. But there's a number of sources saying that Toma Bravo, actually according to Reuters, is nearing agreement to turn software for a medallia over to creditors, which would be a $5 billion loss. That is rough. Absolutely. Brutal. We'll dig in here more next.

Anyway, we have Joel Edwards from Zankar in the waiting room. Let's bring Joel in to the TVPN Ultrum. Joel, how are you doing? What's going on? Good. Hey, guys. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on.

Great to meet. Thanks for hopping on. And thanks for cleaning the camera. I appreciate that. Always want to look sharp on TBN. First time on the show, please introduce yourself in the company. Hey guys, Joel Edwards. I'm a geologist by training.

I'm from Zanskar geothermal. We're a group that we wildcat for new geothermal resources out west to make power. Okay. What's the best? Incredible. What's the best geothermal? What's the best geothermal? If I got one more AI agent, I was, no, I'm kidding.

Name every geothermal resource. Like, what are we actually? We just concretize it for me. Like, what are we talking about here? What is you striking gold look like? Yeah. Striking gold. In your head, have you guys ever been to Yellowstone, National Park, First National Park?

Yeah, I think so. Steen the old faithful geyser, any of those thermal features. Okay. These are the types of systems we're looking for, except for the systems we're looking for are hidden or blind. Okay. So there's nothing at the surface. There's no geyser. There's no hot springs.

Okay. Nothing. But there are massive geothermal resources at depth that you can tap with a well-field. You can pull that heat out of the ground, and you can put it in a turbine and make electricity. Interesting. Yeah, take me through the geology 101. Where's the heat coming from? Why is this underground?

How do we get it out? Is it just, there are just like pockets of hot air, hot water? Really dumb it down for me. There are pockets of hot water underground, not hot air. Yeah. And they're fairly discreet, fairly local, but when you find them, they're incredibly energy dense. So think in your mind like volcanoes, right? That's a, that's a manifestation of a geothermal system. Okay. Think hot springs and so forth. There are parts of the world of the crust where there's just a lot of heat.

Yeah. And that gets manifest in these different thermal features. And you can drill into these things and you can pull steam or hot brines out of the ground. and then you put it into a power plant just like, you know, all thermal power plants, nuclear coal, combined cycle gas. Yeah. They all put heat into turbines. Turbans spins the generator and you make electricity and so forth. Is that classic meme?

We discover a new way to generate power and we are going to use it to boil water and generate steam and spin a turbine so we get more electricity. And this is like, exactly. We do every time we discover something new. What is the business actually going to look like?

Is this whale hunting? where you're really trying to find a single site in the next 24 months, and then you'll spend years. Do you want to commercialize it, or do you want to sell it off to another company at that point? Like, how full stack do you wind up going here? Yeah, we already own an operated power plant, geothermal power plant in New Mexico. So we sell electricity to an investor-owned utility, and then they service Albuquerque and Santa Fe and so forth.

Interesting. So the business is to find geothermal resources, build a power plant. plant and then sell the electricity to a customer. Yeah. So this is part of that. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry.

Is there, is there, this feels like eco-friendly? Is there pushback to geothermal energy production generally? Like, people are worried about earthquakes or something. I don't know. Like, it feels like this is, this is a step forward. Yeah. People are going to find a way to hate anything. So what are they going to hate about this?

Like, are you in, like, are you renewable? Are you clean energy? Like, what, what, what? category are you in, do you think? Yeah, right now we are beloved by both sides of the political aisle. So you show up in D.C. Enjoy it while at last, buddy. Yeah, exactly. Somebody will find a way. We're one of the few, like, bipartisan things where you show up in D.C. and everybody loves you, shakes your hand. It's a really exciting moment. There's attributes about geothermal that people love. It's baseload. There's no emission profile. It's domestic, so all these resources are in the U.S.

You know, it uses U.S. supply chains. It uses drillers. Everybody loves drillers. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people love drillers. Yeah. And so forth. So it has a lot of those attributes that speak to both the left and the right. And then probably, you know, another attribute is the underdog attribute. Everybody loves a good underdog.

Geothermal is an underdog. We're a niche, small industry. We have a lot of the same setup that oil and gas had like 100 plus years ago where it looks like there's a lot of resource out there. Looks like a ton of potential. It's still niche. Is it going to scale? Yeah, is this one of those things like rare earths are not actually that rare? It's just hard to find.

We don't like doing the refining nearby. How rare is like the thermal energy is there? Are we talking like tens of gigawatts potentially if we were to put in like AI data center parlance? Yeah. I think tens of gigawatts is near term super duper realistic based on. based on the tools and the tech that we have today. So exciting.

Yeah. Obviously, there's people talking hundreds of gigawatts, terawatts. We'll see what happens, right? As things, as industry scale, nonlinear,

unpredictable things happen, right? Costs and technology and all these things change. So it's hard to predict what's going to happen 10 years from now, but basically there's two things that drive scale for resources.

It's the number of resources out there in existence. And then it's your ability to extract the resource. and that's really technology dependent. So geothermal, where Zanskars really focuses on finding more geothermal hotspots. We have a thesis that there's a lot more out there. We've already found a bunch of sites. We've announced a few of them.

There's more to come. And then there's other groups that have focused on, how do you get more out of these systems? And those are in the unconventional bucket. It's like the oil and gas play in the Permian in West Texas. Yep. They came in with unconventional well fields. They drill horizontal wells.

They stimulate. They get more hydrocarbons out of the rock. that process is happening in geothermal right now as well. Okay. So you have the exploration piece, finding more and then getting more out of it. Yeah. Double-clicking on the exploration piece. It sounds like AI can be used to do more computational discovery, actually interpret data.

But what's the gold standard for actually obtaining the data? Like what sensor are you using to detect the potential of a geothermal? You know, discovery. System. What's the secret sensor? The trick in geothermal is that there's not a single type of geologic data that tells you if a system is in existence other than just drilling a well into the thing and measuring. So there's nothing you can do just like radar or like pull something through the ground and find it that way? Unfortunately, no.

I wish it was that easy. Okay. In oil and gas exploration, they use seismic reflection imaging. And that was kind of their silver bullet tool set to find a lot of these reservoirs. In geothermal, we use a mix of data sets to try to find these hidden systems. And that's where AI tools really flex because they can handle the hyperdementiality problem really well, better than humans. So we basically build a sandbox in which the models learn how to find systems. And the building the sandbox piece is the really hard piece.

You have to put the right data in there. You have to put the right learning, objective rates, and so forth. that's that's the piece that we live in we build the sandboxes for the models interesting uh last question for me i feel like you guys are betting towards uh the the you know the meme template like the world like the world if it ran on geothermal energy and it's like yeah it's like delic you know there's flying cars everything's green uh hypothetically uh a friend of the show mark bennyoff he's out in hawai he's big on ai could we put a cap on a volcano and capture all the energy out of a volcano and use that to power Salesforce AI.

Sure, why not? A cap? What is what does the cap look like? I don't know. I'm just imagining, I'm imagining a physical something to trap the heat that comes off of the volcano. Maybe you want to drill into the volcano and extract the lava that way, but has anyone actually at least theorized about capturing energy from volcanoes? They seem very powerful. They're pretty powerful. We have a lot of active operational geothermal well fields on volcanoes today. Really? So the main island of Hawaii has a geothermal wellfield. They've drilled into the side of that volcano and they make electricity out of it.

That's crazy. I guess if that's the cap. Yeah. Yeah. The cap is the wrong. There are these little mini caps. Yeah. But they are extracting energy from the volcano.

That's a remarkable. That's right. Wow. Yeah. So there's a lot of geothermal operations, power plants in Indonesia, Japan, Philippines where a lot of these big volcanic systems live. In the U.S., we have some volcanic systems generating power in California. And then most of the rest of the systems are generating from cracks or fracture zones in the crust.

Sure. That's very exciting. Did you raise money? We raised some money, yeah. We've got some cash. I want to ring the gong free. It's exciting. The gong is coming.

I knew the gong was coming. Yes. We raised $115 million a few months ago. and so good. Congratulations. Thank you. Wait, $40 million what? Credit facility?

It's a credit facility, yeah. Massive. Yeah. It's all good. I'm really glad you're doing this. Yeah, this is amazing. I'm really glad you're doing this. Appreciate it.

You know, people talk about AI, bottlenecks and AI, right? You know, talent, chips, you know, energy. And there's sort of like this cycle and technology live streaming right now. And right now there's sort of like a talent. bottleneck and an equipment bottleneck, but, you know, if we keep doubling from here, there will be an energy bottleneck in technology live streaming. So I'm glad you're, I'm glad you're doing this work. Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Have you ever been on a drill rig? No, I have.

You guys have not lived yet. I mean, this is the American experience is to be on a drill rig. I know, I know. Tell us, tell us when you're in Southern California. We would love to go live from the rig. Yeah. So anyways, thanks for off and on. We'll talk to you later. Thanks, guys.

Appreciate it. Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have the founder and CEO Vast Data. Just hit a $30 billion dollar valuation.

Congratulations. The $1 billion series F. Absolutely. It's massive news. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Good. How are you?

Thanks for having me. We're good. Would you mind just giving us a little bit of the journey a little bit of the background. I'd love to know all the things that went into building the company to this point since it's such a massive milestone. Of course.

It's been 10 years in the making. We started in 2016. We wanted to redo infrastructure. We thought AI required a new infrastructure stack way back then. If you remember 2016, it was the very, very early days of AI. but it was already clear that you needed fast access to a lot of data to train these massive systems. And now we needed to infer and to fine tune and for reinforced learning. And so we've been on this journey with AI throughout its various evolutions.

We started from storage building a massive... Was there any points on that journey where you were like, maybe we were too early, did we pick kind of the wrong... or was it kind of like steady, you felt like there was steady progress being made and you had line of sight to getting to where you are now the entire time? We definitely did not have line of sight. When we started, if you looked at my presentation that I built for myself, the last slide had a picture of a brain on it and it asked, can we build a thinking machine?

I'm not sure we still have today line of sight to doing that, but it's been our North Star. And over the years, we always partnered with the organizations that were on the bleeding edge of AI. Before Generative AI, it was hedge funds and Life Science Institutes that were doing massive analytics using GPUs. And then, of course, once Generative AI hit, it became the labs and the AI clouds that became our biggest customers. Do you have insight into how hedge funds are scaling compute resources? I just saw, didn't Jane Street invest a billion dollars in Corweave? And it seems like I saw another company that they funded that was doing Custom Silicon. And it feels like they have an incredibly advanced compute stacks that are a little bit more opaque because they're maybe just have a different recruiting flow or different public messaging flow.

That is exactly right. In fact, Jane Street is a customer of ours both directly and through Corweave. And so we know them well. We play in that space now for seven or eight years. I found that before the big AI labs, the hedge funds were the ones that had the biggest GPU clusters. Yeah, they're ahead of their time and they're very secretive, so we don't know much about what's going on there. What about the social networks and the social platforms? I feel like ad delivery is also potentially underrated as a source of large-scale machine learning.

large-scale compute clusters. We've seen meta trained the Lama model on the reels-sized cluster that they built is sort of a bonus. But how big is that of a business for you? And how do you think it comps to the hedge fund world? I think the hedge fund world is a lot more secretive, but I would dare to say that it's bigger in terms of size. There are very few of these metas out there.

And there are a lot more hedge funds. Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, talk about what the next phase for your company is on the back of this financing round. So we're trying to fill in that software infrastructure layer. Jensen gave a really good analogy of a five-layer cake, power, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. We're that middle layer.

We want to abstract this new hardware away from these. new models and applications. We want to make it easy, make it secure for everybody to generate AI agents and use AI in production. And especially as we move from the labs into enterprises, I think it needs to be simplified. And it's always been that software infrastructure layer, what I call the operating system, that took a new technology from new hardware and a killer app to making it widespread where everybody can use it. And I think we're at that moment with AI and we're trying to do our part in accelerating the adoption of AI. How have you been processing the CPU shortage, this idea that like as agents get more and more robust, they need

more CPU, they need to be fed. You've got to feed the GPUs. Is that something that you're working on particularly, or do you have a view on the the overall just CPU shortage, which sort of blindsided, I think, a lot of people in tech who'd been following the GPU ramps. But then they're saying, oh, well, what's going on with the CPU crunch? I think these AI factories are bigger pieces of technology than we've ever built before. It includes CPUs. It includes DPUs. In some cases, it includes TPUs.

So all these processes. DPUs? Can you break that down? The data processes. Oh, data. Okay. Yeah. Yes. And so all of these chips are in high demand. We're seeing a NAND shortage that's extremely severe right now.

We're seeing a memory shortage. And so I don't think there's anything that is of abundant supply right now. The fabs need to be built out. Nobody was expecting this type of curve in the growth of AI. And I think it's going to continue for that. definitely a few years to come, if not many years to come. Yeah. And so the hardware vendors need to build out a lot faster than they have been.

Yeah. Can you walk me through at a deeper level, your relationship with CoreWeave and how that fits together? I think a lot of people think of CoreWeave is servicing, you know, the companies that are training and inferencing models specifically. What are you getting out of that partnership? So CoreWeave has been an amazing partner for us. They're the biggest of these new AI clouds, like N-scale and Crusoe and Lambda.

You see them around the world also as sovereign clouds. And basically, they're building this new stack. And they're making it easy for end users to consume this new stack in a cloud environment. Or just the software builders. And so we try to provide them with as much software as we can, such that they can turn that around into cloud services, whether it's a storage service or a database service or a streaming service,

as we add more and more layers of this stack, those are the things that are required from those end users. Okay, so we were just talking to the president of Adobe. It sounds like Adobe is doing inference and they're training some models and they're doing a lot of different things. They might go to CoreWeave and then VAST data might be powering the software underneath and they might not even necessarily have a direct relationship with you because they're getting just access to the best possible product from Corrieve directly, effectively.

Is that right? It is right. Adobe specifically does have a direct relationship with us. Most of these larger enterprises tend to have both cloud environment that they're leveraging and on-prem and hyper-scale. And what we've built, what we call the data space, basically allows, them to do all three of those and have one abstraction layer that enables a seamless experience. Interesting. Given your exposure to the world of hedge funds, are there a bunch more situational awareness-esque

funds that have absolutely printed over the last year or so, but just done it a lot more quietly and the West Coast kind of hasn't picked up on it? That's a really good question. I actually met those guys from situational awareness a couple weeks ago. They have a really interesting view into the future, and I think they're capitalizing on that view for every phase as it unrolls. I am not the right person to ask because those funds tend to not have as much infrastructure. The ones that we work with tend to be more quant-driven.

Situational awareness, I think, is just a few very smart people. They don't need that much compute power. Yeah, yeah. It's more macro research. Doing it the old-fashioned way with guts. Yeah, yeah, I love it. Conviction. Yeah, yeah, I mean, conversations and research and having a contrarian view.

Well, congratulations in the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, great to meet you. Fantastic. Appreciate you breaking it down. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Have a good one.

Yeah, can you imagine situational awareness with a couple gigawatts of compute? Under the hood. Anything's possible at that level. I was... What was that copy trading profile? You know the one I'm talking about where you can create the Nancy Pelosi stock? Autopilot. Autopilot has a tracker for situational awareness. Every time they post about it, they use this like AI image of them.

It doesn't look anything like... No, no, no, no. But there's so few images of Leopold on the internet that that AI image has just become like what mainstream media will pull. for him because they just assume that that's actually him and it's not, but it's just very funny that it's a man who has only appeared on Dwark Cash. Yes. There's no other, there's only video of him.

SBF just posted his full holdings. If lawyers hadn't fire sold, he's up 165X on Anthropic, 72 X, 27X on Salana, 8x on Robin Hood, Genesis did he'll. Anyway, he's taking a victory lap. We have our next guest, Darien, from Gradient Ventures in the waiting room. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going? Hey, how's going? Good to see you, Jordy. It's been a while. It's been a long time.

Good to see you too. Where are you calling in from? I'm in our office in Jackson Square. We just moved in here about eight months ago, and we're right next to Thrive and obvious in IVP. It's like, you know, a VC community now. We could live here even. There's apartments upstairs, you know. That's amazing. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love to get some of your backstory, some of your journey to venture, just a little bit of like how you wound up in this

particular seat in Jackson Square. I mean, I grew up in Silicon Valley. My father came here in the 70s. He worked in tech as well. What was he doing in the 70s? Like what was tech like in the 70s? Semiconductors. Semiconductor. There we go. The true Silicon Valley. Yeah. Yeah, true Silicon Valley. Where we actually made stuff. Yeah, we actually made some. He was industrializing. Now we're re-industrializing. but so he was working in semis okay yeah and then he sort of fast-tracked and like coached me through everything on you know what startups were venture financing all those kinds of things he had he was actually fortunate because in business school his his closest friends were venoed kosla and bob kegel probably everybody knows vnode but bob was one of the founders of benchmark and so he had been

steeped in you know all these different kinds of communities that were very very venture-focused and startup focused and the industry has evolved a lot then i was fortunate because i I actually got an introduction to Sean Parker when I was 17 through my cousin, Haddi Partovie, who I think you've had his brother on the show. And he introduced me and I visited the Facebook office and met Mark. And Mark was like, oh, you should come work here. I think they were struggling to hire people at the time because I wasn't exactly the best engineer. But, you know, it was a fun time.

No, we built a lot of stuff. We launched newsfeed photos, et cetera. And then I left to go to college. Is the story, is the apocryphal? potentially apocryphal story of like everything was a single file and you would yell hey i'm i'm changing the code is that do you think that story is real at all oh i mean like when we wanted to push to the web tier we would just r sync the latest folder on busting's laptop wow like that was the push process and um and then we introduced subversion actually there was a guy that i worked with erin sig who was

brilliant who we we um we put together like subversion checked in files in and out we created templating i worked on that project too. But when we got there, there was like tons of SQL interspersed with HTML. It was hilarious. But, you know,

that is what startups are about is it's super messy. And that's what I learned there. Although I also learned that, you know, only one in a billion are as anomalous as Facebook. You know,

not every startup can go that way. But also hilariously. Did that warp your, you're kind of like, where, I don't even, I don't know the full story. Did you come out and you were like,

everything I turned, everything I touches turns to gold. And then it's like, okay, normal VC world. Like there's going to be failures. I don't know. I feel like I'll talk with founders sometime and it's their first company.

It's going so well. Yeah. They don't even know that like how anomalous it is. And sometimes I'll just be like you have something really, really special here. And stay locked in because the odds of this happening, you know, another time in this way are very low. Oh, totally. I mean, I ended up starting an enterprise software company, which was much more difficult. I remember meeting Aaron Levy when he was starting box.

He was in a bunk bed with Dylan in a house in Berkeley. And they asked me if I'd invest and I thought they were crazy and I didn't. And that was a huge mistake. But then there are positive stories. I met most of the founders of Palantir and invested personally early in Palantir. And that ended up being an incredible company. Or when Luke Nosek was talking about SpaceX like almost a decade ago and I was like, you're crazy.

We're going to launch rockets to the moon. Like we're not going to do that. And ultimately, you really just have to surround yourself with really smart people. Fortunately, I've always been surrounded by people much smarter than myself. And so I think that's why I'm in this chair. Ended up being a founder, invested in a lot of great companies, like first investor in Case Text, which got bought by Lexus Nexus, one of the first investors in Ligora, which is now on a tear.

And then at Gradyant, we've ceded Lambda Labs. My partner did that deal. I joined here about eight years ago with the goal of investing in AI, mainly because I didn't get crypto. And I was like, I don't understand why crypto's interesting. And so I joined the nerds at the AI fund. Yeah, during the 2021 era, like, you guys, you know, you were the Google's early stage AI fund, but you were still like, as a fund overall, some of the partners were like branching

out and would do different stuff, obviously. But, but you guys now get the benefit of like, we were doing all these companies, like, you know, almost a decade ago or a decade ago. and how they're, like, important. What was the enterprise software company that you built? And, like, coming out of consumer social, why enterprise? Yeah, I mean, I was always obsessed with data. Okay.

Like, I actually thought that the edge that Facebook had was how clean the data was on everyone's profiles. Like, people would just give us their birthday, like, what classes they were in, like, all this information. And it was very well organized. and this is before LLMs where you couldn't organize and massage that data very easily. Now you can. Things can be amorphous and it's easy to process, but before you couldn't. And so, you know, I was very interested in, you know, small business data. I thought that we could compete with Dun & Bradstreet.

It was a company called Radius that we scaled to pretty significant ARR. And we sold it. It was a huge, it was a long journey. It was full of crisis, full of learning. And actually that kind of helped me with a, with becoming a VC, mainly because I really empathize with how founders are going through a terrible time. I mean, running a company is not fun. Regardless of whether it's going well or not, the best companies in the world,

it may look like everything's going well, but the mess is just masked by growth. It's like that's the difference between a good company and not a good company. And in general, founders I really have a lot of respect for because I decided not to sign up to found another company after my own. I decided to go to the dark side and be a VC, which sometimes I say is a cop out, But being a founder is really the most difficult job. And if you can sign up for it multiple times, I mean, that's incredible. That's a sign of like just incredible resilience. Or a masochist.

Yeah, that too. What are you? I'm so curious. I'm so curious what you're excited about investing today. And I know it's probably like comes down to like just backing great teams because that that typically works well. But we're in such an interesting time right now where, uh, It feels like all software, all enterprise software is like converging on the same kinds of simple use cases, this chat style interface to get agents to do things.

Like everything is, everything is converging. And, you know, you guys were, you know, you did Neo-Clod, you did Lambda, you did a Neo-Cloud eight years ago. That was like the best time to be investing in a Neo-Cloud. And then now that it just feels like, you know, that you have the SaaS Pock. in the public market and then a lot of early stage companies that are getting investment are still SaaS. So I'm curious, like, do you still believe in SaaS? Like, what kinds of opportunities are you most excited in? I believe in shorting SaaS, if I can. That's probably what I believe in right now. I generally think that software is, like, oh, that's a good, that's a good laugh back.

You're bullish on puts. Yeah, I'm bullish on Salesforce puts is what I'm saying. But, you know, I think that the reality is that we are doing a lot of soul-stitching, like a lot of seed funds. You know, there are a lot of things that are still very interesting and investable. Like, we just invested in a robotics company that I'm super excited about that has a hardware component. I wouldn't touch hardware with a 10-foot pole five years ago. Now I'm very interested in it. You know, we've invested in, you know, tools that help you manage multiple coding agents. We've invested in, you know, video editing solutions.

We're investing in an AI hedge fund. Like, we are investing in a lot of really interesting. interesting things that are outside of the software as a service scope. And the real reason is just that, you know, if you want to build anything you can in a few hours, like, it's just so easy too. And I think that that is a major change, not just for software companies, but generally for like the bottom 40% of work that you don't, that you sit behind a desk for. Maybe the bottom is 60%.

And so, you know, we're spending a lot of time thinking about ways in which we can, you know, think about new areas. Now, we have the benefit of having. done this before because when we launched in 2017 right after the transformer paper came out, there were no AI companies. There were none. And like OpenAI was a nonprofit and propic didn't exist. You know, like DeepMind had, you know, was still like a small division within Google. Like, you know, now, you know, so we had to go and hunt and find companies like Lambda, like RAD AI, like Streamlet, like writer, you know, like a lot of these businesses. And so we're getting

back on to what we had done before, which is scouring and doing a lot of outbound, going and meeting founders, getting to no founders, and really slowing our deployment pace until it's very clear where the value is going to accrue at the seed stage. And that I think is the smart thing to do right now. I think that software in general is really in jeopardy. And we've made some software investments, but we believe they have strong moats because they have network effects or they have data network effects. But in general, like 80% of software companies are really in trouble. Yeah. Talk about the pie. pipeline for founders and how it might be changing. I'm sure you've been tracking like there's this

crazy fall off in the number of computer science grads and that used to be just fertile ground for it used to be general casting, right? Central, you know, central casting for, you know, VC back founder was like Stanford CS and I don't know about Stanford specifically, but it seems like we're getting a lot less or fewer computer science grads. And I'm wondering if you envision a future where you'll be pulling more physicists and mathematicians or theologians or philosophers into entrepreneurial stuff. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg did not study computer science as primary major, right? Wasn't he a philosophy major, I think, or something? Like, psychology.

Psych major. So, like, like, there's plenty of examples that say it works. A lot of sense for social media. Brilliant. Really. But, but, I mean, do you see there being like a pipeline crisis? Is the contrarian move now to study computer science? at a time when coding jobs are going away.

Like, walk me through how you're processing this idea that, you know, our best and brightest aren't going to, you know, just learn to code and become computer scientists, you know, at the same rate. Oh, I mean, absolutely. You talk to any scale up or, you know, tech company today. The mid-level engineers are managing coding agents in English. Yeah. They're not even coding.

They're managing, like, hundreds or many dozens of coding agents at once. I think at the senior level, the engineers are probably okay because we do need more code reviews and evaluations because a lot of these coding agents are spitting out bad code at volume. And that will get improved over time, but I think it is a challenge. But I do think for entry-level positions, we've told a whole generation, including my generation,

that you should go to college when, like, I don't think that that's necessary, right? Like college was originally formed, especially liberal arts, was formed for the process of being created, or thinking or philosophy or things like that or writing. You know, we've told people that they can go to college and get a good job at a tech company, all those kinds of things. I think that that's kind of in jeopardy currently.

My hope is that we focus more on like real trades, right? Like welding and plumbing and a lot of the, or, you know, ceramics and pottery. Like these are going to be like more respected lines of work in the future as knowledge work just because completely replaced by AI. I don't have a great answer for you, but I generally do worry about this because I don't know if colleges should be teaching computer science to everybody.

That being said, I think everyone should take a course to understand how AI works, how these LMs actually work. I think that everyone should do their best to read the Transformer paper, everyone in the world, because it is kind of the Magna Carta of this generation. But, you know, I do worry about this.

I worry about workforce displacement and how that transition works, and if our government is even capable of helping people transition from one phase to another. Yeah. Or one era is another? Yeah, I'm just wondering, like, is the next great, like, pottery entrepreneur going to go through pottery trade school or, like, be a business major and be able to, like, marshal a billion dollars of capital to, like, build the pottery empire of the future?

Like, do you go deals guy route and then tack on the trade? Or do you pull from the trade school? Maybe it's a moot point because you'll know it when you see it, and you'll, meet the person. But it's a fascinating world to imagine because for the longest time, it was like, oh, you want to do something into pottery? Well, it's going to be a SaaS company and you're going to have to know computer science. And now it's a little bit different, right? I'm like somewhat right here. Do you think, I think actually, oh, go ahead, Jordy. No, I was going to take the conversation in other way. So finish the finish. Oh, I was just going to say that like, imagine being someone that's

incredibly good at like some form of ceramics. You would create your product and then AI would market it, take photos of it, would, you know, design it, buy ads for it, do the back office, and do the finance for it. That's actually the future that I think we're going to end up in. Now, ceramics is kind of a weird example, but you know what I mean? Like a car mechanic, like an antique car mechanic or a welder. Those are examples of like how AI would help those people. So I think we'll have many, many more entrepreneurs that are not building unicorns. They're going to be building, you know, smaller lifestyle businesses. Yeah, I completely agree. It feels a lot like what happened when everyone got an iPhone and a YouTube account. There were a lot

more creators. There's like this flora, Shopify, same thing. Like, you're democratizing these, like, long-tail businesses that, like, previously it would be like, oh, you want to, like, during the dot-com boom, there was like, oh, you want to, you want to sell t-shirts online. Here's a $10 million check so you can buy some servers and rack them and just have a website. Teespring. Yeah. Remember T-spring? Teespring was sort of like a meta platform a little bit. But yeah, I mean, it's a good example of, like, a lot of expensive infrastructure for doing something pretty basic. Sorry, Jordy.

What's that? I was curious, do you think you'll write more checks this year than last year or vice versa? I think we're probably, have you gotten to, or have you reached a point of frustration around valuations? You're like, you've been through,

you've been through, you know, cycles, cycles enough to kind of know when things are getting probably overheated. Yeah, I mean, we don't feel as the evaluations are out of control at the precedence seed stage,

where they are out of control are probably in the later stage. You know, like Series A, Series B's, even really late stage are trading at incredible multiples. I mean, you know, I think that we did this robotics company at like sub 50. We've done, you know, this other multi-coding agent company at sub-50 as well. Like, we're pretty focused on keeping valuations below 50. And I think that capital-constrained companies are the ones that end up being very successful because they sort of figure out how to build better products and become more effective. It's when you overfund companies, like some of these new Neo Labs that are raising billions of dollars, people like start making bad decisions when they have when they're overfunded. And so I think that where we play, which is not funding the next contender to Anthropic or Open AI, the valuations are pretty favorable. Yeah. Jordy, anything else? Thoughts on solo GPs today. Is it overrated to be a solo GP? Yeah. And should there be a trade school for becoming a GP?

Should we take millions of plumbers and teach them out of right checks? Millions of venture capitalists. Everyone who's doing pottery. You know, we keep coming back to the pottery example. If you are a top level ceramicist, which is the actual term, it is incredibly lucrative,

incredibly prestigious. Like, it is, it is. I didn't know you had this pottery. Oh, yeah. Ceramicists are real,

like, it is an art form and it is incredibly high skill ceiling. Similar to venture capital. But not as high of a skill ceiling as venture capital. Yeah. Not as high as an, art form. Yes, yes, it is an art form. But yes, thoughts on solo GPs. Yeah, I mean, I met one this morning. I've invested in a bunch of them. I think that the sub $50 million solo GP is a great business. If you can

raise the money, you can get allocation in rounds, you don't have to compete. It's when you get above 50 million that it's really challenging because you're going to be ownership constrained. You're competing against someone like us. And, you know, we have, we write a larger check. I think also another thing is that the solo GPs are really effective at feeding companies to the multi-stages and to pure play seed funds like us. And so I think it's actually a fantastic place to be. But it's just going to be really rare for the solo GPs to break out fund size well beyond that. So you have to be comfortable with being a fund of one with no help. And you have to be, because your fee structure is not going to be able to support much more than that. And so, but I am bullish on it. And

especially with these AI tools, you can really diligence companies without needing more people. You can run your back office entirely without needing other people. And so I'm in general, like pretty excited about them. They have struggled to raise more recently, right? Like LPs are not deploying capital at the pace that they were when solo GPs were breaking out in 2021, 2022. And so I think that you're going to see a lot of them probably go join funds. And a lot of the really good ones with good returns, be able to raise their next fund. Do you think more of them should be thinking like, okay, I'm going to do a $30 million fund, a $30 million fund, and then a $30 million fund?

Because it feels like a lot tend to be like, okay, I'm going to do the $25 million fund, and then I instantly want to ramp up as much as possible. And then suddenly you have a different strategy. Suddenly you're actually competing head to head, where it feels like if you do want to break out and become a brand and a platform over time, if you have like three really high quality funds back to back and deploying them on a shorter. time horizon maybe could be a better route. Yes, faster deployment cycles, smaller fund, because they're just sort of liquidity constraints across LPs, but a lot of the fund of funds I've noticed are now focused on sub-75 million funds.

And so there is a market for that, excuse me. And so I would generally focus on keeping your fund size consistently small at 30 million, maybe deploy over a shorter time horizon. And then you can also get LPs to, you know, pre-commit to multiple funds. which is something I've seen people do is that hey I'm going to do this every 18 months do you want to commit some amount every 18 months and that

actually ends up being a better story for people than raising one bigger fund and so I generally do think that the faster that the smaller fund on a faster cycle will yield better results because you also have to put a lot of companies in the portfolio

like if you run portfolio modeling which we do quite often here at our fund size it's usually 40 to 50 companies per fund in our Monte Carlo simulation that yields a four to five X fund. And the smaller funds, it's really like 80 to 120. And so you have to be writing a lot of checks and get to conviction quickly and be willing to own less. And then you can run SPVs into the follow-on rounds, which I think has been really successful for a lot of people. But the smaller the fund, the more work in my mind. Because you have to constantly be looking at deals every week. You have to

be putting capital out every week into different companies in order to make the math work out. Yeah. Well, tell us about the latest fund at gradient. What's the structure? How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong. Yeah, we raised 220 million. I think we already talked about deployment and how many and we. It's also possible we already hit the gong for you. Well, just, you know, whatever, whenever got announced. But great, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. appreciate all the insights. And let's get, let's get your new robotics bet on the show

as soon as they're ready to talk. Absolutely. That'd be amazing. Yeah. Have a great rest of your week. Have a great rest of your day. And we will talk to you soon. Good bye.

Thank you so much. Great to see you all. Later. Yeah. Anything else going on in the timeline? There's a bunch of stuff. Tons of images. Where else do we want to go today?

What other? Top of mind. Oh, I wanted to get your take on this. imagine if Codex existed in 2005 and it's this very retro people are doing imagine if Codex existed in 2012 and it's the Apple design cues from the early Mac OS 10

and then the Windows XP aesthetic do you think the Windows XP aesthetic is overdue for a comeback this is in the middle of the GPT Image 2 feed right there. This aesthetic. It's got to come back. This is a Mountain Dew.

It would fix you. This would fix me. No, I, I, you know, I have some one on memories of XP. John, John. Imagine playing Halo while you just look over and this is just running there. I don't know. You're just drinking a Mountain Dew. For some reason, I don't know. A lot of the Windows features that were launching,

during this time were a little bit rough. This was when Mac was starting to take off. And these releases, Windows Vista, Windows Post-XP, post-What was it? I don't even remember the other versions, but Windows 8, I think, was one of them. They were starting to be less loved. They were starting to be a little bit more,

like, is it worth the upgrade? Is it a good vibe? I mean, it's not nostalgic for me yet, I guess is what I'm saying. But there are a couple other important warnings in here. One of them, let me find it. I know you had thought about potentially putting on a bear costume and trying to defraud your car insurer. And if you in the audience were thinking about dressing up like a bear and attacking your car in order to collect an insurer. payout that's up to $141,000. Think again. Think again because humans, this is in the New York

Times, humans who used a bear suit to defraud car insurers are sentenced to jail. You might be thinking, I'll just throw on this bear suit and I'll attack my car and then I'll call my insurer and I'll collect a check and it'll be easy, easy money. Easy money. Get rich quick scheme. No. No. Three Southern California residents were sentenced to jail after masterminding a scheme in which they staged fake bear attacks on their luxury cars, then collecting more than 141,000 in insurance payouts. To carry out the attacks, the residents had a person in a bear suit, climb into the cars, and use claw-like kitchen essentials to leave scratch marks. The Los Angeles residents then filed claims to defraud three different insurance companies.

So I don't understand why they had to be in a bear suit. Like, were they filming? Were they filming? Yes, there is security footage. It's okay. Okay. No way. Yeah, yeah, we're going to pull up the security footage.

It's absolutely, uh, wild. Yeah, on the Rolls-Royce ghost. Yeah, 2010 Roles Royce ghost. I know someone who has one of those. I don't think he's responsible for this, but, uh, they are dressing up like a bear to get into the car and rip everything and destroy it so that you can file an insurance claim. Hey, I'm just a bear. I'm going to just get in this car.

The schemes are really out of control. these days. That is a wild, wild one. The California Department of Insurance began its investigation called Operation Bear Claw after an insurance company flagged a suspicious claim about a, about a bear rifling through a 2010 Rolls Royce ghost in Lake Arrowhead, California, where there are, in fact, bears. So, it's not that unreasonable. The defendants claimed that a, that the bear had damaged the interior of their Rules Royce, with photos they submitted to the insurance company showing scratch seats and doors. Video footage submitted with the claim and released by the department shows what appears to be a bear crawling around in the back seat of the Roles Royce and swatting at the dashboard. Investigators later discovered fraudulent claims submitted to two other insurance companies that claimed a bear had damaged the same interior of two Mercedes Benz.

Just scratching everything. That is like the most perfect scratch line. Like it's so suspicious. Like it's so clearly like I feel like a bear's clause would be way more organic and like it's like. Also, hopefully doing more damage. That looks like the weakest bear ever. Yeah, because it's not a bear. It's a human.

After its investigation, the department concluded that the culprit was not, in fact, a particularly nimble bear. The defendants were arrested in November of 2020. So I would, my first thought is not super believable that the bear walks up to the rolls, Royce goes, opens the door and goes around. But a few weekends ago, I was hanging out at a former guest of the show's house. he has goats. Friend drives up in his car, parks,

and leaves a door open. A few minutes later, what's in the car? A bear. A goat. A goat went in the car. And went and got to the car and was just like, and this was a,

this was a land river defender. It was like quite a jump up. Go to jump up. Go jumps up and is just hanging around like actually just. Was there damage to the Land Rover defender? I don't think that, if there was, he didn't bring it up.

But there may be some hoof marks. Some hoof marks. Some hoof scratches. And this is all a complicated. It just seems like such a wild scheme. Oh, here's a real bear going in a car. From Tyler. Okay.

It really can open the door. I feel like they had to have seen this video and thought, finally. I feel like most cars will automatically lock the doors. You know, this wouldn't happen with those. Everyone loves to hate on the flat door handles that all the electric cars have. but bear's going to struggle to open a Tesla door for sure. This is, is the bear still in there?

Is he, he's, wow. There's, there's a, there's a history of, of bear visitation. What do they know? Pasadena.

What do they know? There was a woman who was on the local news and said that a bear came and, and swam in her pool. And she seemed like, oddly happy about it or like excited. Like she sort of liked having the bear come and visit. And it felt like she wasn't exactly like building the strongest fence and maybe was sort of excited about the idea of a bear coming for a dip in the swimming pool.

But people do odd things with animals. People dress up as bears. Scientists also apparently have been giving salmon cocaine. I have no idea why. But the New York Times has a post. The salmon got high on cocaine. That wasn't the craziest part. scientists in Sweden made an unexpected discovery.

I think Tyler read this piece and can spoil the ending because... What are they doing over there, Tyler? What is the unexpected? I think they tested what happens when you give the fish cocaine. Okay. And I think the answer was that they swim much faster and they can swim for longer. Okay. And that was unexpected?

That feels like... Imagine being the scientists that like didn't get a grant for their research. You know, and they were working on something. I'm really close to breaking all science. And they're reading this article and they're like, wait, like, I was going to do Alzheimer's research and then these scientists just wanted to give hard drugs to fish. Nearly what would happen? Nearly twice as fast.

I guess that's somewhat interesting, but this does feel like something that could be one shot at LLM. There's just no way you could have to prove it. You had to prove it for science. I mean, I guess it's relevant in the field of environmental toxicology as much as we're joking around. This is a good quote. While it's unclear if swimming faster and further while under the influences harm these fish, experts say it's probably not great. But yeah, I mean, I guess if you're an environmental toxicologist, it is useful to have various data points on what happens with contaminants in the environment to the fish populations specifically.

And so I am willing to believe that there is good that will come out of this other than just a viral post. He wasn't trying to bring a Halloween hoax to life. He wanted to see how salmon in the wild reacted to pollution from the illegal. legal drug. And there might in fact be pollution if the, you know, if importation goes poorly and narcotics are delivered to the water supply, that wouldn't certainly not be good. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise and the number of waterways polluted with the drug, cocaine, prompting scientists to wonder how fish might be handling their highs. As it turns out, fish indeed get wired. In a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Brandon,

his colleagues showed that coked up salmon. This is in the New York Times. Coked up salmon swim. Isn't there some account that just says like, like first time it's ever been printed in the New York Times and they just screenshot like words and phrases that feel funny in that particular when they're shown in the gray lady in print. It makes them swim faster, travel farther than their sober counterparts. The study prompts additional questions about the effects

that human drug habits may be having on salmon and other freshwater fish. Well, we certainly want clean waterways. Speaking of things under the sea, Red Lobster brings back Endless Shrimp for a limited time starting April 20th. Luke Metro says this is an EA cause area, hostile

takeover of red lobster. Make it vegan. Make it vegan. Make it vegan. No, they got to make a play to make it come back and this seems like something that customers were clamoring for. So, have you ever been to a red lobster? Nope. I don't think I've ever been to a

red lobster. I've done the Outback Steakhouse. There are things in that I don't think I will ever do. No. And Red Lobster, I believe, is one of them. Ben, have you been to Red Lobster? I've been there. Yeah?

What's your... They're big in Minnesota. One to ten. One to ten. I think they're all gone, though. One to ten. What do you rate in it? Like a five.

Like a five. I think before it was... No five. No five. No five. You've got to pick a side. Four. Four.

Four. It's okay. Subpar. It's sub-five, in fact. Anyway, thank you for watching anything else. you want to run through? No, it has been an honor and privilege to...

Well, this is kind of cool. ESPN launching sports-only trivia show called ESPN Jeopardy. I like this. I know this is a really, really good idea. I can't believe it took them 50 years to come up with this concept. But apparently Joe Buck is closing on a deal to host the show. ESPN Jeopardy is expected to air on Hulu, Disney Plus, and may make a run on linear TV on ABC or ESPN streaming platforms.

very this seems like you know so so obvious in hindsight i think it'll be very very effective a lot of sports fans love trivia and now you can watch it we love you goodbye see you tomorrow