TBPN Live - Verizon vs Salesforce, Blue Origin's Test, Robot Marathon | Signüll, Ethan Ding, Matt McKinney, Errik Anderson, Pippa Lamb & James Wise

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

(00:27) - Verizon vs Salesforce (25:23) - Blue Origin's Test (30:03) - Robot Marathon (32:59) - Signull is an anonymous technologist and entrepreneur focused on integrating agentic AI into consumer software. He discusses the development of an AI-driven home screen replacement for iPhones, aiming to transform static interfaces into dynamic, personalized experiences by leveraging ambient AI. He also addresses the challenges of monetization, considering ad-supported models, and reflects on the complexities of maintaining anonymity in the tech industry. (55:03) - Ethan Ding, co-founder and CEO of TextQL, a startup specializing in AI-driven data analytics, discusses the company's inception in late 2022 and its evolution in addressing enterprise data challenges. He highlights the complexities large organizations face with fragmented data systems and the substantial costs associated with migrating to new platforms. Ding emphasizes TextQL's mission to create solutions that seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructures, enabling efficient analytics without the need for costly migrations. (01:04:14) - Matt McKinney, co-founder and CEO of Loop, leverages his background in data science and engineering to revolutionize supply chain operations. He discusses how Loop utilizes AI to automate back-office processes, such as accounting and payment services, addressing issues like the 30% error rate in supply chain invoices. By organizing and analyzing complex, unstructured data, Loop enhances efficiency for clients, including 20% of the Fortune 100, enabling them to better serve their customers. (01:13:01) - Errik Anderson, founder and CEO of Alloy Therapeutics, discusses the company's role in providing biotech infrastructure to support drug discovery and development. He highlights the integration of AI and machine learning in accelerating drug development, emphasizing the importance of combining in silico simulations with wet lab experiments to validate findings. Anderson also notes the trend of big pharma acquiring innovations from smaller companies to replenish their pipelines as patents expire, underscoring the industry's need for efficient and collaborative drug development processes. (01:29:06) - Pippa Lamb is a Partner at Sweet Capital, an early-stage venture fund established by the founders of King.com (Candy Crush). In the conversation, she highlights the UK's robust AI ecosystem, emphasizing the country's deep R&D capabilities and the emergence of grassroots innovations from local universities. Lamb also notes the trend of European entrepreneurs relocating to London, reinforcing the city's status as a hub for ambitious founders. James Wise is a partner at Balderton Capital, a leading European venture firm, where he focuses on investing in early-stage technology companies across fintech, marketplaces, and software. He is known for backing high-growth startups and working closely with founders on scaling products and building category-defining businesses. (01:41:48) - 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. Today's Monday, April 20th, 2020, 26. We are live from the TVPN, Eltrudeau, the Teflip of Technology, the Forges of Finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. Absolutely incredible edition of the Wall Street Journal. Over the weekend, I saw these hit the app.

But they're in print today, Monday, April 20th. There's two articles from two tech CEOs. that run companies that are almost identically valued. Salesforce is, I think, 150 billion, Verizon's 190 billion. They're right in that sweet spot. And I'm assuming they're sent to corns. Same point of view. Same market outlook.

They have exactly opposite points of view. And I thought it was interesting seeing what does a victim of the Saspocalypse have to say about AI? And then what does someone who is the most resilient to the SaaSpocalypse have to say and potentially is like Levy in, I want some of the drama, I want the smoke. And so Mark Benioff is who I'm

talking about at Salesforce. So he says the software bears are all wrong about Salesforce. We had a bear hat, but it was too terrifying. Yeah, it was too scary. So we skip it. But he says, people think we have our back against the wall, but customers

aren't replacing offerings with AI. They aren't replacing Salesforce. with AI, they aren't ripping it out. Of course, everyone will say, well, yet. But let's dig into Mark Benioff's argument and how he's processing the SaaSpocalypse and what he's going to do about crazy opening. Mark Benioff has some problems. His enterprise software company's Salesforce is the biggest name in a category that Wall Street thinks may get decimated by artificial intelligence. Its business model is centered on selling software to large companies on a per employee basis, but many of those firms are expected to downsize as AI agents become increasing.

proficient at performing real-world tasks. It's a daunting double bind, and it isn't even the worst-case scenario. Salesforce stock is down a mere 28% year-to-date. The hardest-hit software-as-a-service companies are down about twice that much on similar fears. But Beniof thinks the bears have it wrong about the Saspocalypse. Thesis generally and especially about Salesforce. AI, he says, is making Salesforce more valuable to its customers than ever. The leading AI labs couldn't replace what Salesforce offers even if they wanted to.

And they would rather partner with him for now. Anyway, nor could. He's like, I dare you. I dare you. He's staring better in the mouth. I wish we had Benioff on right now. Yeah. It's a joy to speak with him.

But continuing, nor could customers easily vibe code their own sales management software that could compete with Salesforce on security, compliance, and other vital features. People think we have our back against a wall when, in fact, the opportunity has never been greater, Beniof said. in an interview. An early investor in Anthropic, Salesforce has been developing and pushing its own AI tools for years. By the end of this year, it plans to unveil a new AI platform that automatically studies its users and takes actions on their behalf. Code name, Agent Albert.

It's kind of cool to put agent in the name instead of just Albert, Agent Al. Well, they had Einstein, right? So Albert Einstein is their whole schick here. Agent Albert is the culmination of an effort that began three years. ago when Beniof galvanized, when Beniof galvanized by the debut of Chachabit, instituted a standing Saturday meeting to accelerate salesports AI efforts. Let's go. Saturday stand-up, everyone. An earlier flagship product of that push, agent force has been somewhat slow to gain traction. Launched in 2024. It is used by 23,000 customers of a total

base of 150,000. So what is that? A little under 20% of the, customer base is using agents. They're building a product. I remember Jason Lemkin came on the show and he was like, I use agent force. It's solid. Yeah. Like he's like it won us back a customer that like we weren't reaching out to. And it like it made me money.

Yeah. So he was an agent force. Yeah. Enthusiast. And so Salesforce's yearly revenue growth at 10% is down somewhat from recent years. But interestingly, the the deceleration in in Salesforce's revenue growth started back in 2022, maybe even a little bit earlier. If we scroll down on this image, you can see back in 2012, they were growing 36%. Then as recently as 2020, they were growing 28.7%. There was acceleration in

2022 to 24%. But then 2023, 18%, 2024, 11%, 2025, 8%. And then we're actually seeing some reacceloration this year from 8.7 to 9.6 to 10.8.8. And so, So it feels like definitely too soon for the SaaSpocalypse narrative to show up in the actual revenue growth rates of these SaaS companies. I pulled together the recent earnings from a variety of public cloud software names. And they're all still growing, which you would expect. I mean, of course, like, you know, you want to be growing fast and there's a lot of things and there's like the long-term durability of the value that, of the stock that actually informs enterprise value today.

But we're certainly not seeing like, okay, there's so much churn at GitLab, for example, because people are forking it because it's open source and vibe coding on top of it and they don't need to pay GitLab that you would expect GitLab's revenue to actually be shrinking. It's not. GitLab is growing at 23%. Adobe's at 12%. PagerDuty, 2.7%. Little low. but UiPath at 14%, Box is at 9%. Asana is at 9%. Asana feels like, you know,

textbook, like you could just vibe code this. It's a, you know, it's a con bond board, a task list, but it's still growing. Zoom at 5.3%. Snowflakes growing 30%. Workdays at 14.5%. HubSpots at 20%. Data dogs at 29%.

Cloudflare, 34%. Monday.com, 25%. Like there's really, really strong revenue growth across the SaaS category. Of course, the expectations have been very high. So when there's a readjustment in expectations, you see a sell-off in the market. But this idea that the companies aren't growing anymore because they're being replaced so rapidly, that certainly hasn't taken hold just yet. So partner at Salesforce investor Chicago Capital has been impressed with some of its recent moves. But what Salesforce really needs, he says, is a positive word of mouth

from clients talking up the value they derive from its AI products like Jason Lemkin. They need to show revolutionary jumps. Benioff has said Salesforce was destined to be an AI first company as far back as 2014 when it's launched its AI research unit. I didn't realize that an AI research unit all the way back then. But it makes sense just for like tagging and classifying different records inside the CRM. Still, it was caught flat-footed by the arrival of high-functioning chat bots in the form of chat GPT.

Customer superintelligence. Customer superintelligence. I mean, this is, it is funny because a lot of this, the agentic enterprise, it is a little like boring and it's not as like sexy as some of the more like crazy sci-fi scenarios, but in terms of just, you know, incrementally improving the value that is delivered to the customers, it seems like things are doing okay. Early reviews were tepid, though. Customers complained of having to spend half their time preparing data so the AI could

understand it limiting the platform's effectiveness. To help fix the problems, sales force built a lay. into its tech stack that automatically pulls in customer data from external sources and purchased a string of companies that include firms specializing in data management and AI-powered sales. At education company Pearson, agents now autonomously handle queries about order statuses, refunds, and lost access codes for its customers. This has increased the percentage of customer questions that don't involve human interaction by 40% where agent force has been lacking in its addressing complex customer

problems and those require human touch. David Wemsley, Chief Digital Officer at Pandora Jewelry, said Agent Force hadn't been able to reliably recommend products on its own based on the vague context that customer share through its website. Like, my wife likes dogs, what should I buy her? That's such a funny question. But I mean, I guess the natural text, natural language interface should be able to find you jewelry based on a love of dogs, although I think that a lot of people who are dog lovers might have different tastes that appeal to their jewelry. not just get her a dog or multiple dogs? Yeah, I don't know. So how does this, how does how does how does sales force's view compare to the Verizon CEO? So so Verizon has a new CEO. His name is Dan Shulman. I don't think

he's related to John Shulman, uh, the co-founder of opening eye and thinking machines. Uh, but he is stepping into the AI debate. Uh, he says for, uh, the Wall Street Journal says, for a big company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon Communications, Dan Shulman doesn't pull punches about the pain the technology could unleash on America's workforce. Just months into the job, he has predicted 20 to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years, which is staggering, staggering. I can put that into some context. He says he warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor job still seen as safe today, and he has pushed for more education and re-skilling to help workers adapt to intensifying tech disruption.

Put this into context for me. So he's, so this is an insanely aggressive. And so this is like potentially the most aggressive stance. I mean, there are rumors out there that say even even Dario. So Dario had the clip going viral this weekend. It was a clip from last year talking about risks to entry level white color job. Yeah. And Dario, which is like, you know, I would say like on the.

frontier around being concerned around AI job loss was not calling for 30% unemployment. Well, no. So the headline number, he says 50%, but he's a entry level white collar work. Entry level white collar work. And that sounds really bad until you actually dig in and you realize that America only has five to seven million entry level white collar workers. And the U.S. labor forces 170 million people. And so if the Dario prediction came true, the overall employment or unemployment rate would sit somewhere between six and nine percent, which is not great. And it's obviously deserving of intervention.

But it's far from the 20 to 30 percent outlined by Dan Schulman. And it wouldn't even be, even if the Dario scenario, 50 percent of early stage white color work unemployment, that happens, you're still below COVID, below the Great Depression. And I think that there's a whole bunch of guys. intervention that could offset that pretty quickly. Like 20 to 30% is truly like the do nothing, the government never engages. There's never any sort of, you know, incentive to keep hiring people.

And there's this like fast takeoff in AGI and also humanoids, which I think people are, you know, worried about. But if you look at the deployment rate of self-driving cars, people have been saying that all the truck drivers were going to go out of a job. and this is a very, very slow takeoff. The number of self-driving cars on the road is well below 1% of overall cars on the road still. And this is just the case across the board. I was listening to a podcast with someone who was very worried about unemployment internationally,

and he was saying that AI could upend the Philippines because the Philippines does a lot of customer service. Which we haven't seen at all yet. No, none of this is showing up in the unemployment data. It's not showing up in U.S. unemployment. data yet. I mean, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be aware of this stuff, but, but it's certainly not sure. Just like the SaaSpocalypse is not showing up in revenue yet, you know, AI unemployment is not showing up in any of the employment statistics yet. So, but this individual

was on a podcast that was saying that something along the lines of, you know, AI could be devastating to the Philippines economy because the Philippines is very dependent on customer service. And the stat he quoted was that 90% of the the Philippines economy is based around customer service and customer support and handling people on the phone. And I was like 90% that seems really, really high. Like they have to do other things in the Philippines because sure you go to work at your at your customer service job, but then you go home and you buy food and you live in an apartment. There must be real estate agents. There must be home builders.

There must be people who work on roads. There must be doctors. There must be lawyers. Like, like, an economy requires more than just like a single, like, it's, 90% feels like incredibly concentrated. So I looked it up and I was like, how big of an issue is, how big of a, of an industry is customer service in the Philippines? Like, is it 90% that feels high? Maybe it's 50. Maybe it's 40.

It was like 6%, 7%. It's really, really small. Now it's like huge in terms of like, you know, much number. You don't want it to go away. You don't want it to go away. of course, and you don't, and you do want, you know, you want a number of industries that are flourishing. And that is probably more concentrated than many other countries. There's probably many.

It might be, it might be the country with the highest percentage of customer service intensivity in the economy. But it's not 90% of their economy. And so there's a little bit of this like people don't seem to go back to the raw numbers. Because if you go back and you try and understand, like, okay, what would 30% unemployment really look like, well, that's like, you know, Great Depression level with no intervention, no, no action from the Fed, no action from the government, and it seems a little bit, a little bit crazy. So I can't tell if this is just like saying the biggest number, but there's a little bit of that going on here where if you want to grab headlines and you go out and you say, okay, well,

someone predicted, you know, 5% unemployment, I'm going to predict 10%, and then I'll jump to the forefront of the discussion. That seems to be a way to get earned media. But, I mean, let's unpack a little bit more of his discussion, because we will see if there's a way to steal man his take around 20 to 30% unemployment. He said, coached in the blunt AI talk is a warning for other CEOs. Be candid about the coming disruption or risk a public backlash. It's a very difficult time, and everyone knows this. Shulman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. So I think being authentic. I don't even I don't even agree with that stance. Everyone that's being candid or even talking about it is immediately getting backlash anyway.

So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best you can is key. That belief, he said, is why Verizon created a $20 million career transition and retraining fund for the age of AI. He's like, look, we are going to have greater unemployment than in the Great Depression. and I'm going to, you know, he's taking the piece of ducting, you know, there's water pouring out. I know exactly what you're talking about. And to be clear, to be clear, this is not our view. Like, this is not our view at all. No.

But, I mean, at the same time, like, they did layoffs. They probably hired a lot during COVID and beyond. And they, and a $20 million career transition and retraining fund is great. That is a good. Like, this is a good thing. But he says, the warning, this is from the journal. Warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth, but demure on or even reject the idea of job losses. A lot of people are saying AI is coming, we're going to run out of jobs.

It's exactly the opposite, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and more prosperity. And there is some new data showing that productivity might be climbing, which is very exciting if all the accounts. economists wind up developing a consensus around that. Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI. Though some roles will be replaced, there will be other jobs created. In the short term, though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or a desire to find efficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces, block which cut nearly half of its staff predicted other companies would soon follow suit.

A new Boston Consulting Group report predicts that AI will shape roughly half of U.S. jobs in two to three years, and that up to 15% of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright. Again, that's reshaped and eliminated would be offset by the creation of new jobs. So even in this BCG report, you're probably looking at, like, again, maybe a transition of like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% on a unemployment while there's an adjustment period. Many Americans fear that will happen too in a Quinnipeak University survey of 1400 adults. Fifty-five percent said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44 percent in a poll last year. And so the average American is dooming for sure. CEOs are not thinking about this the right way, said Bill George of the former

CEO of Medtronic, who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow or on how workers can best use AI. They should be very candid with them and paint a big picture. Showman's big picture also included sweeping job cuts, the 13,000 layoffs. He announced shortly after his appointment as CEO in October were Verizon's largest ever, but necessary to make Verizon more efficient. He said, all together, he's seeking to cut $9 billion of costs. Verizon said, its layoffs were not related to AI. The carrier was too hierarchical, too bureaucratic,

to way too process-oriented, as opposed to outcomes-oriented. And the CEO is saying, this is already happening in a big way. But the layoffs we're doing are just that were bloated. Yeah. So Verizon has 90,000 employees, and they laid off 13,000, so maybe like a little over 10% RIF. Verizon's a weird one because, the stock is basically completely flat over the last, it's actually up 15% year to date,

and it is an incredibly stable stock. And it's also just like should not be a victim of the Saspocalypse because they own spectrum allocation, they own cell towers, exactly. Or they have like very, very long term lease agreements. Yeah. And I mean, there is the case that like, you know, if Starlink direct to sell gets really good, even, I mean, even Elon's saying like it's not going to be that good inside buildings. Like it's pretty difficult to get to a point where all of a sudden there's a new technology

that's just wildly disruptive. Like maybe if you're like somehow transitioning from Starlink when you're outside to Wi-Fi when you're inside, like you could cut the cord with Verizon, but that just feels so, so far away for something that is like a pretty key utility in most people's lives, like their water bill or electricity bill, like their phone internet. bill is like pretty, it's like one of the, one of the, probably the, the least elastic things. Like they will just keep paying and stick around. Now, they might move to Sprint or AT&T and there's going to be some competitive dynamic.

It isn't oligopoly after all. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers necessarily. So in meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after asking. This is the future. Trust me, I used it once.

Shulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost-cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table in one all hands. Shulman recommended that staff ask A. to write their obituary. So to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives? Just dig your own grave. He's literally the title of this article that he's saying AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it.

So like in tech, we're starting to, you know, every company is adopting this technology at a rapid rate. But everyone's like, hey, this, you know, basically like jobs aren't tax. asks, right? The sort of narrative is building. Like, we need to figure out how to, it's, it's, we've, we've built a bunch of very useful tools. Yeah. And they are going to have powerful effects in our economy. Yeah. But, uh, we have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear based approach is not working. And, and meanwhile, Dan comes in, he's like, AI's coming for your job. Everyone knows it. Write your obituary. Right here,

he's so not helpful and they're not even doing AI related job cuts. No. I love it. So I just don't understand. I don't understand this whole press cycle. I love that he just comes in and just immediately starts blackfilling.

It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start blackpilling. Do you think this is a setup for a much deeper layoff than they've done historic? I don't know. I mean, it's possible, but I think that they would need to do some serious, like, AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out, like, I mean, I would be surprised about those 90,000, like, I want to know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees, like, what are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being like, I just do tasks all day long. Like, form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet, and I email. to somebody. Like that type of job, yeah, that's probably going to be automated in some way and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization. But for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're working on bigger projects than just throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem.

At the same time, who knows? Maybe half the company is customer support reps. I don't know. He has invited staffers to experiment. with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. Some employees responded by using AI to write poems for Shulman, and they weren't half bad, he said. Like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I happen to like it. I agree with that. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or like when fire was first invented. How cool would that be? He continued. We're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be. That's a very optimistic take. I like that sentence. That's good. Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Shulman and acknowledge. acknowledging AI's potential for disruption.

Others have also recently sounded warnings. There's real risk of artificial intelligence could widen wealth inequality, Black Rock's CEO, Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders last month. Jamie Diamond recently told investors that AI's productivity gains could lead to other derivative effects. It may happen faster than we can adjust to it.

Showman said AI may reach human level capability known in the industry as AGI. By the end of next year, on the early side of most industry predictions. So end of 2027 for AGI isn't that crazy. I mean, Sequoia has an event right now. AISEN. The whole keynote slide is AGI is here. And so people are going back and forth on that. But I think it's not it's not that crazy to imagine, you know, very, very human level AI by the end of 2027. That doesn't seem impossible whatsoever. the question is just like, how much will this be additive?

How will the government respond? What will the actual effect on the labor market be? And I think people are digging into that a lot right now. There's a good podcast on this on Oddlots with Alex Imos. He's a professor at University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI. Highly recommend you go check that out if you're interested in going deeper into the labor market. Well, moving on, Blue Origin rocket stumbles on first commercial mission. AST Space Mobile, who we've talked about a few times here.

Jeff Bezos's rocket company said the satellite from ASTS was deployed into an incorrect orbit. And so a little bit of a setback for them. I think the stock traded down in the news a bit. The launch of the company's New Glenn rocket started smoothly with the vehicle shooting into the sky from the Blue Origin launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the flight, New Glens' third ever, the vehicle's huge booster returned safely to Earth. Only, a feat only Blue Origin in Elon Musk's SpaceX have ever achieved orbital rockets. But the mission later suffered a mishap. A satellite, the rocket was carrying into orbit for AST Space Mobile,

a company building cellular broadband network in space, wasn't deployed correctly. In a post-on-X, Blue Origin said its rocker delivered AST's satellite into an incorrect location in space. The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit, adding that teams were assessing what happened. AST said the satellite's altitude was too low to sustain operations and that it will be taken out of orbit. The cost is expected to be covered under its insurance policy. The stumble comes as Blue Origin works to ramp up flights with new glides. Yeah, I saw some of the AST retail armies. saying like, don't worry, keep holding.

Keep holding. It's covered under insurance. It seems like... Very, very unfortunate, but somewhat... It's rebounded a little bit. Somewhat to be expected, right, as Blue Origin, like, figures out their commercial business. Yeah, it traded down like 16% overnight, but it's down just 6% today, so a little bit of a rebound.

And we got a fantastic video of the booster landing that we can pull up here. Yeah. courtesy of VF. Tyler, you dug into why doesn't ASTS just launch on SpaceX? Well, so there are two things. One thing I thought was interesting is like there's this whole press cycle about it like, oh, it was like a failure of a launch or something. But this has like happened a number of times before like SpaceX in in 2024, there was

Falcon 9 that kind of the upper stage like failed and then a few like Starlink satellites. Just went to the wrong orbit. Yeah, basically. They're too low and then they just get burned up. Yeah, companies don't typically like to talk about when they send something into space and lose it, basically. But that happens too. I remember at the beginning of last year, there was a launch for a venture back space company. And, you know, they basically put a satellite up and almost immediately lost contact with it.

So it's not unusual, unfortunate, but they'll be back. In 2016, SpaceX blew up a Facebook rocket, which was crazy. Mark Zuckerberg laments the loss of internet.org satellite. The Facebook CEO said he was deeply disappointed in the explosion of Falcon 9 rocket-carrying satellite intended to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. So writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said, as I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.

The accidental explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning, this was back in 2016, referred to as an anomaly by SpaceX engineer, destroyed both the rocket and its cargo, the AMO6 satellite, which Facebook had planned to deploy to provide internet coverage to parts of Africa. Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. we remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided. Contrary to Zuckerberg's description,

the satellite did not belong to Facebook. In October 2015, Facebook partnered with Yuletulset. I can't pronounce that, a French satellite company to lease the broadband capability of the AMO6, which was built by Israeli company Spacecom, according to Space News, which reviewed spacecom filings with Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. The joint lease cost $95 million over five years. So this like $100 million satellite just blew up on the pad.

So lots of different setbacks. But there is one technology that is not having setbacks, which is robotic marathoners. And there's new information. There's a crazy video. I don't know if the video relates to this, but a Chinese robot beat a human, best time in a half marathon. After a stumble, tech companies are making progress to fixing

humanoid runners malfunctions. A year ago in Beijing, a humanoid robot half marathon race, the first runner to cross the finish line took more than two and a half hours. In this year's event, the champion beat the fastest human ever. Sunday's race demonstrated China's rapid progress in humanoid robotics, a field American tech leaders, including Nvidia's Jensen Wong and Tesla's Elon Musk say is the next big thing. This video is pretty wild. Is this the actual weather? This is one that's failing.

Okay. Didn't make the half marathon, but you can see there's dry ice spilling out of the back. Oh, they've been cooling it off. Interesting. Which is like very cyberpunk. That's crazy. You have to load it up with dry ice as well.

I like that. About 220 yards in the finish line, the 5 foot 5 lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed. The red and black robot managed to get back on its feet with help from humans and ran across the finish line in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, according to state media. I feel like if you fall down in your human in a half marathon and humans help you get up, that's still fair game. You're still good as long as you finish.

This probably still counts. Last month, the human, the actual human world record holder from Uganda, finished in 57 minutes and 20 seconds in Lisbon, Portugal. Lightning and two siblings from Honor swept the podium. All three navigated the course without human control, excluding the one-time help the champion got. The race penalized the completion times of those relying on constant human remote control, including one that finished the race in under 50 minutes, but it was teleoperated.

The Tian Kung Ultra, which was developed by Beijing-based lab ex-humanoid, and won last year's race more than halved its finish time this year, clocking in at one hour and 15 minutes without any human intervention. That is pretty impressive. Like, they cut the time in half in just one year. The 13-mile course included more complex terrain than last year, such as slopes, narrow passages, and sharp turns, testing robots' abilities. If you assume an acceleration in progress, eventually one of these humanoids is like running a marathon

in like an hour for like 30 minutes, just like truly insane, insane speeds. Yeah, I mean, as fast as it, Cheetah. Tyler could still take it out, though. I think so. China is moving to quickly dominate the humanoid robotics industry and cement its place in the global supply chain. While the U.S. controls the best chips and other technology for robot brains, China leads in the manufacturing ecosystem for humanoid robot bodies. That has been reported many, many times. Well, without further you, we have Signal here in the TBPN Ultradown. Let's bring in Signal, who is launching Sky, an agenic AI home screen,

replacing the iPhone app. There he is. With content, handsome fella. Dude, I can't believe it took this long. We've reacted to your post like so many times. So good to have you.

Oh my God, it's incredible. Be on here, guys. Welcome. It's been a long time coming, but I just want to start off saying congratulations. Thank you.

This has been ridiculous. Yeah. I've been watching you guys since day zero. Really? You watched the first episode? No. Because I think we were covering

your post would have been making it into like the first episode for sure you're probably like why are these two guys in suits reading out of my tweets this is strange I tweeted this out a little bit but I was like man when I read that and you guys were reacting to what I posted because I didn't really think about what I posted and you guys

analyzed it and I was like oh my god this is ridiculous what did I even write I don't I don't remember you have a ton of bangers they're all good posts a great time that was lifeblood of the show It was so much fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about, you know, the first episode. We're here to talk about your first episode in this new journey. Talk to us about what you're launching, what you're building.

Very smooth, John. I try, I try. You guys have come a long way, for sure. Anyway, introduce yourself a little bit. Introduce the app, introduce the product, where you want this to go. And I have a ton of questions. No, absolutely. You know, I've always been in consumer software, and I think there's just not that much, other than the sort of main players, I noticed, and there's a lot to be done. And what a time to be alive. So, you know, we're experimenting at the very basic layer of how to make this stuff really easy to use, really easy to access for normal people that have not really come into this agentic AI world in full speed other than sort of chatting.

with chatbots and whatnot. And I think it's an early experimentation of what we're up to is kind of how AI will kind of speak to you as well as how, you know, sort of ambient AI will be in various surfaces, starting with your phone, right? Like maybe your phone may not look exactly the same way, even in the next couple of years. So we're kind of operating at the very earliest stages

of experimenting of how AI will communicate with you. And we're trying to think of creative. and one of the most interesting places, you always, you know, people take out their phones and he glanced at it. And turns out, you know, this stuff hasn't really changed in such a long time. Yeah.

The iPhone home screen is 20 years old. That's two decades. And it's just static icons. Yeah. Roughly speaking, it has not really evolved in any meaningful way. They one shot at it. They one shot at it.

Yeah, that's the steel man. The steel man is like, it's good. It's the final. form. It's the final form. Some things don't change. We're all going to, we could always do a three-wheel car, five-wheel car, six-wheel car. I mean, the thing that I've been, the thing that I've been pressing on is like, you would think, you know, if I could rewind two, three years, I would not expect, and knowing how much progress there would be an AI, I would not expect to look at the top 25 apps in the app store and only see LLMs. Like chat apps. I would expect to see like a variety,

given just like how many magical experiences people have had, a variety of like new products. Like a new Uber, new Instagram. And that's like some argument. There was a previous app boom that was like very diffuse. You got you got candy crush and what's the one with the pigs, the flappy bird and angry birds and like you got all these different apps,

run keeper and diet products. And it feels like this has really collapsed down into just chat apps. Yeah. And you know, I actually recently got a new phone. I was installing apps. You know, I always like to set up my phone bare. Like, I don't like to transition my phone. Interesting. Mainly, really? It gives me a little bit of a reset on not only what I need and what I don't need, but also how to think about software as it exists today. Like,

I don't want to be tied to what I was before. I want to kind of be anew, if you will. And, you know, it turns out I installed, you know, GBT and Claude and whatnot. And I was like, man, I don't think I really need that much stuff. You know, these LLMs are. You know, these LLMs kind of collapsing how and what you do into an interesting dynamic. And I think generally, they're incredibly powerful. And the fact that, you know, those top five apps are all LMs, roughly, is, it speaks volumes to the zeitgeist and speaks volumes to the impact of the actual technology. Like, I don't think, you know, previous, I think technology has always been kind of a little bit more evolutionary than not. Obviously, hindsight is 2020. But, um,

But this feels so, so different, you know, as a technologist, this world feels very different. It feels just, just the things are going to rapidly change from here on out in terms of how people experience their lives, how people interact with each other and how, you know, we're going to facilitate brand new interactions potentially or, you know, completely reinvent old ones. So I'm very excited for that. And I think our company and the way that we think about it from a consumer, perspective is just to make things, you know, easily accessible for these individuals. And I think we're going to, we're going to attempt to do that. Very basic stuff. Yeah, what is your, like, more as like a CEO, it sounds like you guys have raised a little

bit of money and like are just like in an experimental phase. Is that like generally the right read? I think, yeah, I think generally, I would say two things. Number one is, look, we built a really fun product that we're going to give to lots and lots of lots of people. Turns out, you know, this era is non-zero marginal cost. We have raised a little bit of capital. But, you know, inferences is non-trivial expensive. And especially if you operate at like agentic inference or just background inference, that stuff is just consistently going. Unlike, you know, Claude or GPD where people actually make requests or go on there and type something,

we're doing it on behalf of you, right? Like, we're doing those things in the background where we anticipate, we listen to context, we turn, you know, every time, for example, every time you get an email, we process it with one of our agents. It sort of turns out, it buckets that item. It tries to figure out what to do with it. It tries to see if there's, it deserves some higher order like ranking. And then it tries to figure out, oh, can I complete this task? Can I draft a reply? Oh, maybe it does deserve a reply. Let me go back to John and say, okay, hey, here's a reply that I've crafted based on everything I know. And it's a very, look, replying to emails has been, you know, 30, 40 years, but this is a

new world in terms of how you think about communication and how agents kind of mediate this world. And apply that to any, you know, any aspect of your life, whether it's health or finance or where, even where you are, right? Like one of the underlying things that we do is location. And, you know, imagine learning about the world around you through an LLM, whether it's through text or voice. by simply it being on your home screen wherever you are. If you're at a museum, if you're in a new neighborhood,

and that's a one tap away. Like, our goal is to make intelligence either zero or one tap away, not one prompt away. So, for a burning question. How do you, how do you make this product free so that everyone can use it? Will we see ads on the home screen of the iPhone? Ad supported.

I think ad supported could make sense, right? I'm walking by a coffee shop and I get I get an offer. There's ads in Apple Maps now. You're seeing my notification stream in. So you can really, you know what I like. Yeah. I think the interesting thing here is like you like you guys can operate like you can kind of wake up and ask yourself like what would Apple do if they were like truly excited about AI versus like seemingly scared of it. You know, I've posted about this a little bit with with respect.

to Apple, Apple relies on a deterministic world, right? Like a world where lots and lots of elements from design to the experience to the underlying context, that doesn't change as much. And it's very deterministic. So for example, iPhone is very much kind of software is very broadcasty, right? It's a one to many. They write it once and it runs for everybody. And roughly speaking, it runs exactly the same way. Now with a non-deterministic world, that could, change drastically. Like for example, for when we, you know, give this out to everybody, everybody in there, everybody has a very different experience with our app because it's completely non-deterministic. And Apple lives in a deterministic world and having to transition into

non-determinism and non-deterministic software. It's actually a really non-trivial transition, especially for a company like Apple, where every single corner or every single thing needs to be tightly controlled. So I think for us, we're kind of paving a path where we can marry some level of like expectations and determinism with the beauty of non-deterministic elements of AI and create a really great user experience around that that lives on your home screen and works for everybody. That's how we think about it. So we're kind of maybe in some sense moving ahead of Apple who has to deal with a few billion users, you know, just a minor amount of users. So I think that, you know, this world deserves more experimentation like what we're doing in terms of both user interfaces and experiences and feeds and ranking.

And, Jordy, going back to your point on monetization, like, I think that's the number one thing that I think about quite drastically. Look, we're trying to capture real estate on your device that is the home screen that is available at a glance. And, you know, I think I've posted about advertising. Potentially the greatest billboard of all time. Exactly. I mean, it is insanely powerful if we can activate that. No, that's a tall order. But at the same time, you know, like I've posted about ads and advertising. Look, I've been in technology for such a long time from consumer, you know, whether it's like feeds at Facebook or, you know, even Google and whatnot. But, you know, you start to think about advertising has done a lot of good for the world, you know, it has actually made things accessible and and I think generally if advertising is done well, it is actually one of the most useful economic paradigms in terms of delivering equality in services to people who would otherwise have not been afforded. So I believe in advertising.

I believe in good advertising. I believe in advertising that is actually like complementary to the user experience and not necessarily taking away from it. It's tricky to do. Yeah, the worst ad experience I've ever had as an ad enjoyer was like in college I was buying a Kindle and they were like, do you want the ad-supported Kindle for like $100 or the ad-free Kindle for like $120? And as a college student, I was like, I don't think I'll mind ads.

Why not? Were they bad? And it's on the home screen when the device is locked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're just showing me books that I would never read all the time. So it's terrible targeting. And it's a device that's just like sitting around my house all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it kind of looks like, wait, you're reading that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you can avoid that. Yeah. Definitely. There's a question from the chat. Why are you anonymous? Do you plan on continuing to be anonymous?

I mean, I imagine as you grow the business, like, it would be interesting to stay anonymous forever, but, you know, at some point a journalist will want to know. And I imagine that unless your opsec is super tight, it'll come out. Not that it's, like, bad. I'm just wondering, like, how have you processed the anon thing? That's a great question. You know, my entire online existence as it exists today with respect to this account is a giant accident because I was trying to find my old username and password because I just wanted to post a little while ago, maybe, you know, whenever I started posting. But I think when you guys actually started TBPN as well, and I think your account must have gone from like a thousand followers to like 80K.

Over 100 within the first few months of us. It was kind of nuts. Okay, so the whole story is, you know, I was kind of, I was like, you know what, I just want to read. Maybe I'll reply or something. And I had a lot of fun. And, you know, whenever I'm having fun, I like to double down on things, you know, maybe not change, change it around too much. Look, I think certainly this world is going to change at some point. But in the meantime, you know, I love leaning into fun new things.

You know, if you want to do anything new in the world, you got to do it a little. little bit differently. You got to be a little bit more unique. You got to be a little bit more mysterious, a little bit more. Um, yeah, I don't know. All of this stuff is just so wild to me, right? Like the anonymity aspect of it and the ex culture and the anons around it. And you guys have had, you know. Yeah, you can never docks. I'm sorry. You can never docks. I mean like Banksy, Banksy getting on mass. Is that good for the, is that good for the brand? Like, like, you could be, you could be like taller than John, Gigachad. Everyone just imagine. And it. And it was. And it won't be enough, right?

It was it. We all picture you as a philosopher king of sorts. Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? I mean, my, my bio and my fallout, like the actual content are like sometimes, sometimes the same and sometimes destroyed, but that's, I think, the beauty of it. So in that realm, you know, like I was actually talking to some people around this. And I was like, I, I sometimes, I basically kind of do what I feel like. And right now, it's like just been so much fun to kind of lean in on this world and, and

it, you know, but I, I think certainly I'm I'm I'm I'm more like I'll I'll I'll marry myself to the zeitgeist if you well and if that if that calls that then I'll I'll continue and we'll see what happens not married to the game married to the zeit guys okay take me through take me through iOS development like current status because this seems like a really good idea that people would want I do think people are bored of the grid and having something that's more dynamic and agentic makes a ton of sense. And I think you could deliver a ton of value.

But my fear is that Apple's just like, no, that's our real estate. So is there a clear path right now through like widgets and the shortcuts API to actually do interesting things? Or am I going to have to like side load a different OS? Like how like consumer friendly and like easy will this be or will you be bumping up against the wall? garden of Apple pretty quickly. That's a really great question.

Look, every single thing we do is within the confines of the Apple ecosystem and experience in the way that they've designed and made it work. And we've designed our product to fit almost like a glove in that ecosystem. You know, when you onboard into our experience, you just connect the things in your life that you think you would want more insight. The server-side connections I totally get. Like, all of that makes sense. You can, like, oh off with email and use APIs or MCPs.

Like, there's a million things that you can do on the server. What I'm interested in is, like, is like, how big can the widget be? Or can you actually take over the whole home screen? We can take over the, we basically ask you to install two widgets, a medium widget and a large widget that encapsulates the entire home screen. I love it. And those work in dynamic together. So the medium widget will basically, what we call a wild card widget, which internally,

which shows you precisely what you might need to know at this point in time. And then the big widget is what we call a 4U widget, which is just a feed. And you know what we're doing, John, I think is we're building kind of the new iteration, the Facebook News Feed 2.0 that's entirely AI generated about your life, highly personal, and that lives directly on your home screen. And you can browse it as easily. The feed paradigm is so familiar with individuals. And the beautiful part is that it's all.

like AI generated and AI mediated. Every, we have 22 agents that work continuously to generate content for that feed. It's funny because like everything, everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah, that's easy. And then like getting people to install two widgets, I'm like, that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right, but like it feels like like, like, like, I'm still in like prosumer territory, but that's a good place to start. And then you can hopefully make it easier. And then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where like you,

downloaded an app and just by clicking yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something. It does feel like the biggest thing is like I just love when like these new surface areas are explored. I mean, you, you mentioned Nikita, but like he's done a great job of really understanding all the different hooks, what you can do within iOS, you know, pushing those to the limit, creating like new UX, new experiences on top of like what Apple gives you. and it feels like that's really under-explored. Have you thought of trying to build any products within any of the LLM ecosystems,

just given that they already have an, you know, massive existing user basis? That's a great question. And, you know, I've definitely explored, like, every single thing with respect to an API or a platform that comes out, you know, I, you know, for example, the WVC APIs that come out every year, I read them like the Bible, you know, like I would, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I get a bro study. You know, that's my, that's my, that's my, uh, you know, uh, religious holiday or whatnot. And every platform is the Pope. He's your Pope. Yeah, exactly.

We get it. Yeah. Um, and, uh, you know, so I scrounge these, I think generally these API, the sort of apps or chat, GBT apps are, it's unclear to me what the incentive structures are for the app developer just yet. And it's unclear to me why applications deserve to exist inside of an LLM just yet besides just adding more context. Because theoretically, an LLM is powerful enough to even generate an app to be able to do something. In which case, I'm not sure exactly, unless you bring some highly proprietary data like Zillow or whatnot, maybe some of these experiences work. But otherwise, I don't know if the small-time developer, you guys remember the flashlight apps and the lighter apps on the iPhone. Like, you know, you're not really seeing those types of experiences

as a probably 12-year-old was the beer app. The beer app was good. Just thinking that that was like, that was peak humor. What about the I'm Rich app that was like $10,000? $1,000. It was just a picture of a diamond. And it was just like you could just open a picture on your phone.

But if you bought that app, you could show people that you just wasted 10K on an iPhone app or whatever. I think it literally maxed out. It was the most expensive app you could possibly like type into the app store. I think the guy sold like over 500 copies before Apple removed it. Yeah. Not for a real person. So I think he made 500 times a thousand dollars and it was incredible.

See, these are the kinds of experiments and creative elements that, you know, I think deserve to exist in the world today. Yeah. And I think, you know, we're a few handful of individuals that are kind of trying to make that happen. And we're trying to be really creative, really fun, really interesting, engaging. And AI is a super powerful tool to be able to do that. More powerful than the original iPhone API is like, holy crap.

So I think we're early, but we're going to try to dream. Like there's so much like they're doing this. You're doing this a right way because there's another scenario where like you could raise a series A right now. Like or like you have a team. You have a technology. And the wait list. Like you'll be able to test things and experiment and learn. Like there's so much opportunity.

Well, what an exciting time. Thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks a lot, guys. Great to finally have you on and congrats again. 1000% and maybe next time we'll talk about hot takes. For sure. Oh, yeah. What do you think about this AI powered cannabis vape with blockchain rewards?

I'll have to try it out before. So John was, John showed me like a screenshot. He was showing you the website for this this morning. And I didn't realize today is 420. So that's like this is like a 420 joke. Is it a joke? though? I think it's a real website. Like I think it's...

Yeah, John, you can make a joke website. Did you know that? I know, I know, but I... John, clawed design, man. Claude design. You could do anything. Okay, so you're telling me if I put this in the Wayback Machine and it shows up as of yesterday, it's not a joke?

Because I bet you this existed yesterday. Let's see. Let's see. I bet you if they were planning to make a... April 6th, it's in the wayback machine. What does it say? It says, let's see. let's see

it's loading it's got blockchain still I think these are hustlers who have been just tacking on every single possible trying to go as viral as possible I don't know we'll have to dig into it

well thank you so much for joining the show signal fantastic news and congratulations and congratulations and how fun and we'll talk to you soon and have a good one

up next we have Ethan Ding from Tex QL he is the co-founder and CEO here to announce a fundraise to talk about enterprise analytics and workflows I think we had him let's check in with the team and make sure that he is here I believe he is so let's bring Ethan ding in from text QL into the TVP and

Ultramm Ethan hello how are you doing what's going on guys how you doing how's it gone it's good we have two of you so we got two of you introduce both of you and it looks it looks like it's being filmed on a you know phone camera from 2005 but but we're excited to have you on. Hi, I'm Ethan. I'm the CEO and Goventer, or this is my Goventer Bark. They're a CTO. We're actually at a customer office for an onsite,

and this is actually a company that does not, I think like like IP bands like Zoom from their intro network, which I found out like literally last second. Interesting. No, no, it's great. I'm super, we're super excited to have you guys on. walk walk us through history of the company since it's your first time yeah i think we started this at like late 22 uh right before chat gpt came out uh we had this uh this idea that uh we if we

if we spent a lot of uh money and uh time on like uh try to make analytics work uh it'd be uh it'd be worth something we really didn't know we were doing when we first got started uh since then what we've like really like realized this um after after like two years of uh rebuilding the product like 10 times over. We landed on something where, you know, I think like the typical enterprise has like 150 databases, 10 different dashboards, BI tools. They have like 20,000 different charts, another like 400,000 tables. Every single vendor wants you to like migrate into their thing. Sure. Like drop another $20 million on like systems integrator for another 10 years to like do the migrations. Yeah. We're like, like, let's like build a thing that can like connect to everything

and hopefully be, yeah, do for, do for analytics what, like, how much, like, how much. high frequency training firms if they're like stock markets. What was the first like analytics stack? Because if you're pre-GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or like clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? Like what was the initial like, okay, there's a stream of data. There's a bunch of text in a variety of databases. Like how are you giving the customers value from that? Well, it was pre-chat DBT, but still post-GBT.

So we had GBT 3. But I think, as we all know at this point, the IQ of that was we overstated, at least for business stuff. And so, yeah, text box on the right, we type in your question, like, how do I get revenue? Then the text box on the left with the SQL. And then you run it and you copy it and then paste it into your whatever tool.

And then that was it. We've come a long way from that. So walk us through, I mean, you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today, but what does actually, as a group of co-founders, going to a customer site, like what are you doing? How deep in the weeds are you? Is it just sort of like a high level pitch? Or are you rolling up your sleeves and working on actual integration?

Yeah. Well, I think like today's session was basically like walk us through like the, I mean, every single Fortune 500 company, like, basically spends, like, nine figures on, like, AWS, GCP and Azure. They spend another, like, like, 10 figures on, like, paper that, like, like, like, manages all these systems. And it's kind of this, like, constant, like, war of, like, you go from, like, spending $20 million to, like, like, a tarot data on-prem to, like, spending, like, $30 million

with, like, a data break in the cloud or something. And so, like, what we're, what we're kind of map out with them is, uh, anthropic is telegraphic that they want to be the size of AWS in, like, three years, right? And they're an enterprise-oriented company. They expect that basically come out of companies that we're working with budgets. And so they basically expect them to take their entire IT budget of, let's say, like, $200 or $300 million, double it. And like materialize this money out of like thin air and like spend it on inference. They're walking us through like the parts of their roadmap where, you know, what kind of SaaS can they sunset?

What kind of labor costs are they like thinking about like the tradeoffs around on like what time horizons to like bring it up? And also like what kind of like workloads that are going to be extremely expensive that they can like kind of like start basically triaging off like the large like models. Because at the end like these are these are kind of the people like when you see like the token charts like everyone like token maxing. These are kind of the people who like pay the bills on like those tokens. And like they notice the size of that bill. You know like blowing up like 10x like year over year. Yeah. Interesting.

It's interesting side of the equation that I guess like people don't spend time talking about. Yeah. How have you been processing the SaaSpocalypse narrative? Beniof was given some pushback. Other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points. I've been just shocked that we haven't seen revenue declines from really any software company that's been targeted, although you know, you could talk about the long term.

Slowly grow. The growth, like these companies are still growing, even if they are in like the direct path of the AI companies. Yeah. I for like the for the longest time, I assume. that like everyone likes to buy like good enough. I think really in the past like three months, I've heard like like six different CIOs or CBOs of like Fortune 100s like talk about how they're ready to like like sales force is like increased like their headless like tax and they're ready to like like do like a two year migration like off into like Postgres or something.

It's not like they're going to another vendor. They're just like I need to free up money to like set on GPU. It's like set GPUs on fire. And I'll pay like anybody to like move me and to like like a Postgres instance and like Google Cloud or like AWS. Interesting. Okay. So that's a little bit of your opportunity. You help with migration? That one's kind of adjacent to us.

We look at a lot more like low-level infrastructure, like like Databrics, snowflake, like Cablo and otherwise. But it's interesting, like a CRM is basically the second most important system of record at an enterprise next to the ERP. They're willing to entertain like moving entirely off CRMs within like a two-year time whereas. Maybe they'll completely fail. But like the weakness to like.

like forge into that is then like like an order of magnitude more higher than I expected and surprising based on the profile of company that's something you know expect from like Google or Facebook like the most mature engineering companies in the world yeah you see this after starting to come from a hundred-year-old companies as well interesting interesting and is is that driven more by they think that over the long term there will be a now cost savings to having their own system or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business? It's mostly not...

There's an interesting thing Larry Ellison talks about when it comes to enterprise sales, which is not like like enterprise sales is buying like Gucci bags. It's much more like any given year you have a CIO come in like right, like the half life of like a CIO is like five years before they retire. new one comes in, they have to start a set of new initiatives. Often, like, they're going, like, their finger testing, like, the market and trying to figure out, like, who has the best vibes? Sure.

Like, basically, who, okay, whoever has the best vibes, I'm going to throw, like, eight figures against, and I'm going to, like, go to that eight figures away from, like, someone, like, a company that has, like, like, worst vibes. Sure. There's this, like, weird, self-fulfilling prophecy where... They're vibe procuring. Yeah. Vib procuring.

Like, you walk into a room. You can tell when that... that company stock is up. You can tell when the CEO is extremely cocky. You can tell like when the FDEs and the sales people are like, listen, like you don't even have to move this today. I'm gonna get your business next year no matter what because I know we're on the open up.

And you can also like tell when like a vendor is like desperate, right? And they're like moving for discounts, right? When some, when, as long as the perception that a company, like the market is short a given like SaaS vendor, customers start asking for discounts. The most aggressive ones go first. But now like all the sellers on that team are like, like bad, like, you know, they're traumatized between like the next set of renewal.

So they're progressively going to give more and more ground. It's kind of a rough. Yeah, wouldn't want to be one of those right now. Interesting. Interesting. Well, your business is growing. You're raising money. Tell us about the latest round.

Yeah. It was actually like a like a two, two part round. The first, like led by like Hoff Capital and the latest part like Blackstone. How much do you raise? I think it's 17 in total. This was awesome, guys. I really enjoyed speaking with you both. And thank you for making time while you're hanging out with your customers.

And appreciate the perspective. Let's do it again soon. And good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. A good one. Have a good rest of your day. Up next, we have Matt McKinney from Luke.

He's the co-founder and CEO, raising a big C-R-C in the waiting room. Let's bring you in the TVP and Ultrodome. Matt, how are you doing? What's going on, guys? Not too much. Good to have you here. First time in the show. Why don't you introduce yourself in the company?

I'm Matt McKinney. I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Loop. And our mission is to unlock value that's trapped in the operations that power the physical economy. And we started specifically in a back office where no one else wanted to go in back office services and automating things like accounting and general ledger coding and payment services. And all we do to exist is to make our customers more efficient so that they can better serve their customers. And we work with some of the most important companies in the world, 20% of the Fortune 100.

Wow. And excited to be around with you guys. Yeah. Well, how, I mean, there's a different world when you say like procurement or accounting that you could have been like we're a gentic accounting firm or something. And it feels like this is much more cross functional. How are you actually positioning like the. integration, who's the buyer, how does the, how does the business like instantiate itself inside of your customer? Yeah, we started, we started with a very acute problem, which is, if you look at

the supply chain industry, roughly 30% of invoices are wrong or they have an error. So clearing of them is really painful. And because of that, a bunch of services firms popped up, specialized services firms popped up. Sure. And all they do is address that specific problem. which is you've got to adjudicate this invoice, you've got to ensure that it's accurate, you've got to remit payment to the truck drivers and the carriers across the world. And that's a big industry. It happens to be a $5 billion industry alone. And it's all done with human labor. And obviously, LLM's presented a perfect opportunity for that. But I think what got my COVID-and-I are most excited is really the data. If you can go organize the data, that you can obviously automate things like we just mentioned the accounting.

But you can use that as a wedge to expand into adjacent use cases, whether it being compliance or planning or procurement and continue to unlock value for customers. Yeah. So what does it look like for a customer to actually onboard? I imagine you need access to their emails, like the actual PDFs of the invoices, whether things have gotten paid. There's often like multiple versions of a particular invoice. And then you need to plug into bank data to see what's actually moved around or accounting systems. Like, how long does it take to integrate and how key is that? It's why, I mean, what's so wild about supply chain?

Supply chain is just a network of networks. Yeah. And you've got, you know, a transportation carrier. You've got a supplier. You could have multiple versions within your own enterprise. A lot of these big companies, they do a bunch of M&A. And so you've got all these different versions of the truth. So just take, for example, the weight and dimensions of a package or a shipment.

There could be seven different versions of the, weight and dimensions for that package. And so you need almost like a data auditor itself to prove that that's the correct data. And we get it from a bunch of different sources. We get it from, you know, email. We get it from EDI. We get it from API connection. We get it from Excel spreadsheet, PDF, you name it.

It's just really messy, unstructured data, data that no one's ever organized. Quite frankly, no one was able to organize until the power of LLLMs came out. When you talk to customers, do they care about the AI buzzword at all? Yeah, are they trying to buy AI? Or do they just want a solution? How are you thinking about how front and center AI is in your value prop and pitch? All our customers want is just outcomes. And they don't really care how you deliver it.

Now, sometimes they might have a top-down AI mandate that they're looking to check the box. But at the end of the day, they don't care how the sausages are made. They're buying an outcome. That's all that they want. And if you can demonstrate that you can deliver a superior outcome, it's better, it's faster. For example, you're finding more errors or whatnot. And faster resolution time so you can close your books faster. That's what they're buying.

They're not buying agentic buzzword fit into their, you know, the checkbook. They really want to buy the value. Yeah. What is the value of like getting this business to scale? Is there something where you can, you know, optimize the supply chain, introduce different clients that need different resources and help them buy the best product of the right time or reviews or even just like panel data of like how the economy is moving? We've seen that from some financial, some fintech companies. Like, how are you thinking about the value that's unlocked as you become a platform? Yeah, there's more, you mentioned like procurement, for example.

There's more obviously when you have a bunch of data that you, you can. can use and say this is good, this is bad, or should you work with the supplier and you're not because we see it over here. But I think that really building context across the network is probably where we see the most gains where you can take learnings from a carrier that's working with, you know, suppliers working with multiple parties in the network and then say, oh, well, this carrier always likes to build a specific way. And so propagate that learning through the LM's context across all the companies that work

with that carrier. And I think that's really, I'd say the unlocking automation that you get at scale. And then obviously you mentioned the intelligence one, the time to value. You're able to get someone on much faster because you're working with 95% of their suppliers instead of 2% of their suppliers. That's a huge one as well. What were you doing before this? Did you always have a love for back office supply chain optimization? I can tell you.

I can tell you, I can tell you, yeah, since he was a boy. I came out of the loom and I just said, I want to automate the back office. Yeah. complex Yeah, I've always just been assessed to the systems in making them more efficient

And I think You know, when you look at the physical world And it's supply chain, you know, the trucks and the train And this stuff is so exciting You feel like it's the last frontier Where you can truly unlock that I mean look,

Supplyteean alone just in the U.S. is $11 trillion in spend Wow You know, one of the largest Contributes to GDP globally Yeah Yeah, if you want to have an impact on GDP

Oh, nearly. Oh, too high. Sorry, I was giving you that for the 11 trillion. You said the biggest number. That's huge. If you want to have an impact, though, on GDP. At the end of the day, GDP growth is just productivity growth. The technology is the leading advantage in that.

You're saying that $11 trillion in spend goes to supply chain, and no one's really touching that. And we've got to go attack that problem. Yeah. Yeah, I have so many more questions. But before that, my company and I were at Uber early on the freight team. There you go. And we saw a lot of the, you know, the real world there where you had messy PDFs, you had bill of ladings, proof of deliveries, just a total data mess, to be honest with you.

And we knew that there had to be a better way. Yeah. Dude, perfect, perfect VC pattern match. Uber freight team. Yeah, that's a great team. Great company. We know so many entrepreneurs that came out of Uber. Tell us about the round.

What's going on? How much do you raise? We raised $95 million. Couldn't pull together. That last five. What was going up, buddy? It evaded you. Sandbagging, sandbagging.

No, you had to set up, Sadda had to set up the next round. Yeah, yeah. You got a little bit for the next one. Yeah, exactly. We're super excited. Really, really, step line. Where are you guys based?

Valor, Atreides, A.V.C. Founders Fund, Index. J.P. Morgan. Wow, you got everybody. You got everybody. Congratulations. Wait, where are you guys based? Sorry, I missed. In San Francisco.

We got offices in Chicago as well as in, New York. Is that because Chicago's a major, like, logistics hub with the trains and trucks and stuff? Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of really good. There is, there is a major, I'm not making this up, right? Like, with the boat, because the boats come through the, the, the lakes and like, it was like a major hub of transactions. Is that because Chicago has trains and truck? They do. They do. This is real, right? Am I wrong? You're not, you're not wrong. I'll give you stats. So 30% of goods that enter America go through Chicago. Thank you. Thank you. 30%. Not back. John was right. I was right. You're like, oh, in Chicago, why it's such a weird pick? It's not. It makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much.

Great to me, Matt. Congratulations to the whole team. And hopefully you're back on the show this year with some more news. Really appreciate, guys. Thank you. Love the show, by the way. Thank you. Have a good one. Up next, we have Eric Anderson from Alloy Therapeutics. I love, I love messing with you. You love messing with him. Never gets old. Well, we have a lot. How further ado, Alloy Therapeutics has raised a series E to build full-stack AI biotech infrastructure. Eric Anderson is here live.

What's going on? Eric, how are you doing? Gentlemen, I'm doing great today. Thank you so much for hopping on. First time in the show, please introduce yourself in the company a bit. Eric Anderson, I'm the CEO and the founder of Alloy Therapeutics. We're a biotech infrastructure company that works with a bunch of companies all over the world, helping people discover and develop drugs.

Okay. Infrastructure. what exactly is going on in the biotech stack? I imagine everything from centrifuges down to writing PDFs for the FDA to trials. There's so much that goes into that. What do you focus on specifically? You got that. So the technology we have is really around more drug discovery and then into drug development.

So the folks that do regulatory, the folks that do clinical, we work with them to discover drugs with the companies that we help to support. So we work with big pharma companies. We work with small biotech companies. What's going on in the industry? today, the big trend right now is when we talk about infrastructure, who's going to actually do the wet lab work today in the lab? In addition, we've got everything going on with tech bio of all of this in silico work that's happening. It's really exciting. And sort of bringing those things together.

Yeah. And the idea is like you can have like a million times more ideas for different drugs, but then you still have the constraint of the physical world needing to kind of be able to actually run experiments until ideally we could simulate a lot more in the future. But, maybe we're not there. Exactly right. And you can simulate all these things, but it's a bit of the design, build, test, and then you learn. It's that loop we all know. And right now in the biotech space, we've made some incredible progress with Gen AI and machine learning capabilities to come up with a lot of those ideas. You've got to close the loop then and actually be able to test them. And then there's a lot of skill that goes in, just the skill of drug development

of what makes a good drug. And connecting those things together is what we do really well. So how much of this will wind up looking like an AWS for drug development? I can provision a certain machine and you have it and I can interface with it all over, you know, the internet and you will do all the physical stuff for me. Yeah, that's part of it. So AWS just launched a service. Amazon launched a great service that connects these generative companies back to a back end of how you manufacture the protein and you test it.

That's one small piece to the process, I would say. A lot of scientists out there they can design things in silico and then send them to a lab like that. Is that not like a crazy side quest for them? Like it's, we did, AWS has like centrifuges now and like like, no, AWS is actually just connecting them together.

No, it's pretty cool. Oh, I think what they're going for there is that they want to be the cloud. If you're going to do your compute to come up with these with these in silico things, they want to make sure they see all the traffic. Yeah. And then just connect it to anyone else on the back end.

Yeah. That's good, got it, got it. Yeah. So can you zoom out for me and just do a temperature check on biotech? We read one article about how Boston's going through a really tough time at the same time. Like every time I open up the Wall Street Journal, there's a new billion dollar acquisition. Yeah, so last year felt like like the dark, the dark ages for biotech. Yeah.

It felt like everyone, every, every, every, every biotech investor that we were talking to was like, I don't even know why you'd keep investing. in these companies, like the returns have been so bad. And then this year is like the biggest year of biotech M&A since 2090. It feels like they're just rich from the GLP1 boom, but I'd love to hear your sort of like narrative setting. Certainly the GLP1 boom. One of the trends that's going on here is that the industry has to restock the shelves for new drugs. As drugs go off patent, there's these revenue cliffs. And so Big Pharma is sitting on probably the largest pile of capital they've ever sat on. And they look to acquire a lot of their innovations from small companies. Those are the folks that we support to create new medicines. So there's definitely a

huge M&A trend that's happening this year and it will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. A big thing that's happening as you read about that news in Boston, though, is we're doing drug discovery and development here in the U.S., but there's been a big shift to move it overseas and to offshore it, and for pharma to acquire assets from outside of the United States. And so that's been more of the big, I would say, the headwind for the domestic biotech space. Okay. How are you feeling about just acceleration in drug development generally? Like, you know, in cybersecurity, agentic coding, like there's these very clear scaling laws. And, you know, we have the meter chart of the amount of time an AI system can work on a single problem.

It's doubling. It's on a very clear trend. I haven't seen a chart that's like that for biotech, but it feels like we're going through advancements. and we're just getting more cures, so something's happening. But are you tracking it at a quantitative level yet, or just qualitatively, how do you feel about drug development processes? We're living in an era right now where the trend of all of the drugs that we're discovering, we have an acceleration in the amount of innovation that's coming from our labs.

So that is just an incredible trend that is supporting everything we're doing in the lab. So the byproduct of that is, of course, generating massive amounts of more data, making sense of that data, and this is where a lot of the machine learning is coming in, is how do we digest all of the data that's being created in the industry, making sense of it, and then turning that into new cures as rapidly as possible. So that is an enormous trend right now in the industry, and the advances that we have just from literally using Claude and Open AI, even in the lab and just day-to-day things, you're seeing a handful of things come together.

So first of all, you see this explosion of data. You see the wet lab capabilities largely looking the same. And what's happening then is we're trying to organize that data and turn it into new curious as rapidly as possible. And in the background, what we have is a number of new companies, new entrants in the tech biospace that I think are just natively better at understanding this massive data problem and being able to make sense of it. And then on the other side, you have the pharma and biotech, which are actually, you require all of those skills to actually make sense of what's going to work in like a human biological system. Yeah. So what's coming together this year, I would say. say is that there's a lot more folks in tech bio that are getting better, but then we're just

seeing the bio folks actually get better at tech. So basically you're at this place where like the tech bio folks need more bio and the biotech folks need more tech. And if you're bringing those things together, I do think we're going to have an acceleration in a lot of the cures that we're making. Interesting. Give us a view into how big pharma executives are thinking right now. Are they confused why everyone and their grandma is injecting themselves with Chinese peptides yet at the same time, like hype more skeptical of vaccines than maybe ever? I feel like this kind of this interesting dichotomy.

Yeah, well, in the industry today, I would say the executives and farmer are looking at it from the same place they always do, which is about efficacy and patient safety. And so we're looking for drugs that work and then proving that they work in animals and then ultimately in humans. So peptides being injected into humans, I think everyone's just saying, hey, what's safe, what's efficacious. The FDA has done some pretty amazing things in this administration, I think, to give flexibility for what's allowed. There's been some incredible changes that have happened that I think will accelerate the pace of innovation, what we do in the regulatory space in the clinic as we're testing it in humans. And so I think pharma is apprehensive about the changes, but overall, they're excited that things are moving along and that we're going to see a lot new drugs coming on the market.

Can you help me understand the flow to get to like a data boom in biotech? Because I would assume that that's more driven by like dropping costs of DNA sequencing than anything from the Gen A.I world because, but maybe there's something where the Gen AI world can process data that was previously locked up in PDFs or something. Like what is actually driving the data boom? it's those things really coming together so certainly the continued falling cost of DNA sequencing yeah and then the falling cost of all the other types of data that you can generate along with when you're sequencing someone's DNA so if you go to a place like function health here like what you can pull off your war ring or your Apple Watch there's actually a massive amount of data that is that is being generated passively yeah and right now the ability to connect that data to that I would call it real world data

that we can connect to what's happening in patients yeah is a level of complexity that we just haven't seen before in the data side. Yeah. But it's got to be rooted back in basically the wet lap. You're describing these things of taking your DNA or your tumor DNA and you're learning from what's actually happening in a patient. Yeah. And bringing those together is actually a huge date problem.

I imagine you work with like mostly like big pharma or real biotech companies, but you're also seeing this like boom in like a single person vibe coding a cancer cure for their dog. like, yeah, it's pretty crazy. Do you have a policy for whether, like how small a team can be? Because I imagine it's not far from you getting like an inbound from like a single person

who's like, I want to do this by myself. I'm a solo founder. I can be trusted with advanced AI biomex. And maybe they shouldn't be. I don't know. I just want to know how you've like grappled with it. Maybe it's just not a business concern so you don't need to worry about it.

But I'd love to know like how are you processing that idea. I mean, I think everyone could be trusted with this generally. So that's actually not the curve. Don't, worry about kind of these fear mongering that's happening on this front. Okay. At our company, we service anyone who is interested in discovering new drugs.

Yeah. And so that's a lot of what we try to do with our company is how do we democratize access to many of these tools. Yeah, yeah. We started in a particular place nearly 10 years ago. And that was before we had any of this Gen. I work going on. Sure, sure.

And it is lower, that single person biotech company or maybe just more of the virtual biotech company where you've got five or 10 folks and they can work with. with a different contract research organization to help do their drug discovery and development. That's been a trend for a while. What's happening is we're just getting more efficient at it today. Yeah. I do think the future biotech company is gonna be much, much smaller

and be able to plug into these different resources and be so much more efficient at coming up with ideas and testing up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is interesting. Tech loves to sing the praises of like the five or 10 person team, but there are a lot of biotech companies where it's like one genius researcher, who discovered something and a couple support staff

and then a lot of outsourced stuff all the way to, okay, we're ready to sell it and it's mostly just a research organ. This is not entirely new there. You mentioned that you're not worried about like Doom related to like bio, but like, you know, how are you grappling with the idea of like somebody making a super bubonic plague

or some new flu? Like, do you feel like there's safeguards or how have you processed that question? There's large groups of folks that are worried about this. And I think the United States military and some of the, the consortions that we've been involved with are giving that thought. It really comes down to, though, is you can make a lot of things that might be dangerous. There's always a bad actor problem.

The way that we think about that is through our biosecurity division, we try to make sure that the capabilities that we need to have in the United States are always available and accessible to us. So call it medical access capabilities. We've learned a lot of lessons in COVID. Everything from, could we actually just test for viruses in the community? And do we have the reagents available to do that? And then, of course, we had masks and everything else.

So from our perspective, we think about biosecurity as a way of making sure that you do all of those components from being able to surveil what's happening in the theater all the way out to, can we discover and develop a drug very rapidly. And there's some great different initiatives that are going on of these ideas. Can you go from a threat to 100 days later actually have a drug ready to go? And our company and others participate in making sure that there's just a really robust response available with incredible supply chain. And sort of make sure we can do everything here in the United States at all times. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it certainly seems like the advancement in the positive side. Like we're seeing a major, major swing to the upside right now. Every time I hear about one of these new medicines or new treatments, it seems really. positive. There was a huge story about pancreatic cancer recently, which was a complete white right now we've got a conferences going on and we saw two different studies that we're showing just for some of the patients that were on drug, it was six years later they still had no disease. And that's what we saw a number study. You know about pancreatic cancer. It is really, really tough.

Oh, it's really incredible. It's one of the worst cancers we have. But I think this is the overall trend. We are living in a world where we will cure everything that is curable, I think, in the next three decades. It's really just a question of, and maybe even faster than that, it's a question of how fast can we accelerate and really give as many people as possible access to these incredible tools.

And just like in tech, I mean, where you saw these very small companies be able to do incredible things in the last five, 10, 15 years, I was investing back during the first internet bubble back in venture capital 25 years ago. And in those times,

the world just looked at a different place. We actually middleware was like, were you 10 years old? I'm like 48 right now. So yeah, I was still a child. You look like late 30s. So that's good, good for you. I was a child at the time.

But it was incredible because there was a lot of the same criticisms that we're hearing in the tech space right now. And as it relates to biotech, it was like we were wrong about everything back then except for what we were right about. We did see the flow of investing coming in. And many, many things went bankrupt. But the things that didn't go bankrupt changed the world. And that exact same thing is happening today that you're going to see an incredible number of winners.

And I do think biotech is going to be an important part of the big market that everyone's going after in the AI and the ML space as well. The tech space is going to go conquer biology as much as it has in other places. But I would say also that pharma and biotech very much have a seat at the table. Our academic researchers have a seat at the table there. And it's really about bringing the two domains together. They're going to be critical. One of them is not going to go it alone without the other. Again, tech needs more power.

I need more tech. How much did you raise? How much did you raise? Raise $40 million this time. Yeah, we hadn't raised any money. Are we 12? Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

We've been working hard to build a real business. So, yeah, this was the first round? This has been a long home for us. This is our series E. I'm a little old school. Back when I was a child, when I was a baby investing 25 years ago, I learned that it's okay to just letter your rounds just like normal. Our last was in 2022.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of old school in that way. So in 2022, we did around. And between then and now, we really laid down the infrastructure so that we had operations across 17 time zones now. We're operating the United States, Japan, the UK. We have an incredible group that's actually working in the GCC right now in the Middle East. Obviously, there's a lot going on there that's creating a bit of a headwind.

But we're very bullish on the work we're doing in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Riyadh, and Doha, and over in Abu Dhabi. So, yeah, bringing all this stuff together has been really important for us. And just our view is you stitch together the supply chain of innovation. You link it to great real world data and you bring a lot of AI and ML in there. And we're going to really accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development. Well, thanks so much for joining the show. Great to meet you. Enjoy the conversation.

Have a great rest of your week. Thanks for having me on guys today. We'll talk to you soon. Appreciate it. Goodbye. Here's. Up next, we have Pippa Lamb, returning to the show from Sweet Capital alongside James Wise from Baldwin, Capital Partner.

I believe they are in the waiting room, calling in from across the pond. Are you both over in the UK today? It better be. You know, we're here. Giving the news. Well, welcome to the show. Why don't, Pippa, why don't you reintroduce yourself and James, since it's the first time on the show, you can introduce yourself as well? Yeah, big day.

James' first time on TVPN, guys. Yes, we're very excited. Fantastic to have you. Yeah, so those I haven't met before, I'm Pipelam, I'm a partner here at Sweet Capital. I'm also an active angel investor here. And I also scout with A6EZ, but generally sort of sit between the ecosystems of the US and the UK tech. How do you, I didn't know you were, you were the triple threat there. How do you decide who gets who gets money?

Who gives the deal for? That's interesting. No. Yeah. Secret secrets. Yeah. James. James. Yeah.

Yeah, first time caller, but long time viewer. Thanks, guys. Great to have you. Having me on. So I'm a general partner of Balderson Capital. We're a $7 billion venture firm. We're based here in London. We used to be called benchmark Europe.

There we go. We got the buzzer. So back in 2001, we were benchmark Europe. We spun out in 2010 when the European market really took off. And for the last four months, I've also been helping set up the UK's Sovereign AI Fund. Okay. Yeah, take us through that. I think that's what we're here to talk about.

How long of the talk's been going on? How big is the fund? What's the strategy? What makes it unique in that it's so linked to the UK specifically? Yeah, well, about a year ago, we kicked off this big AI opportunities plan. There was huge news about it at the time. And we've been working through all the various parts of that. And PIPA can talk more about things we've been doing in data centers and compute.

But the fund was set off to really accelerate some of the UK's big UK AI successes, but with a lot more than capital. So we've got about 500 million pounds. It's a starting point. It's the entry ticket in this game. But more importantly, we're providing access to UK supercomputers here. So huge amount of compute. We're providing fast-track visas. We're providing any data sets.

We're providing government as a customer. So procurement through government. Basically, to give a lot of the companies that could benefit from working with the government a massive boost. Yeah. I have to say that supercomputer is such an underrated term. Whoever thought to rebrand supercomputer to data center, Terrible. Is an idiot.

Terrible. Terrible. Because data centers sounds so boring and terrible. Futuristic. Supercomputer is awesome. I'm not going to take my job. I'm so into supercomputers. I love to use a supercomputer.

Yeah. So but that is. It's your grandfather's data center, right? It is. It is. It is. It's like what IBM used to build. Yeah.

Yeah. And they have them in like cool scientific locations. Like CERN has one. And like you always hear about, oh, they're doing astrophysics on them. There's so many cool things. But that does link to, you know, where will the UK get the most leverage out of investing? Because I imagine that there's not a lot of value

in just trying to clone Google search or Instagram for Europe. Like those platforms, it's fine, but at the same time, sovereign AI does have value. Where in the stack does that live in your mind? Yeah, so we're building out a whole range of talent, right? So we're gonna be doing everything from Electron to Token, but obviously working with American partners, doing that and international partners as well.

Sometimes at the chip level, sometimes at the model level. And then we're starting to focus on where the UK has huge advantages. So life sciences is a huge area for us, right? If you look at is a isomorphic, which is actually a spin out of Google. You know, they're based here in London. The whole team basically is European and they may be the closest we get to a AI company getting a drug all the way through to approval that's sort of end-to-end AI design. Outside of life sciences, loads of stuff in physics and materials.

sciences. So a lot of the AI science end of the spectrum rather than the AI slop end of the spectrum. Yeah. Pippa, are you seeing, are you seeing like an effect where entrepreneurs from around Europe are moving to London in the same way that folks from Chicago moved to San Francisco to do startups? Like, is there, is there a proper movement to make London like the destination for ambitious European founders these days? Yeah, I think it's, you know, obviously fairly biased having spent a lot of time here, but I think that the UK has always batted above its weight in terms of the deep R&D pockets we have here, you know, in terms of universities, the talent that are coming out of the local schools.

That's already created a very fertile ecosystem. And I think that, you know, one of the reasons you wanted to jump on here today was because it feels like, you know, UK is having a bit of an AI moment. It's not to say that we weren't already at the forefront of many of the innovations happening here. you know, of course we always talk about Demas, Hanas Sabaas from, you know, DeepMind that was founded in the UK. Obviously, we would have loved to have kept that here, but of course it also went with Google. But, you know, we have long been at the forefront. I think it's super critical that DeepMind maintains such a big presence in the UK because you guys now at the Sovereign AI Fund.

If someone wants to leave DeepMind, spin out, like you guys can be there to provide capital and exactly and that's what we're we're seeing now i think both from the idea that we want to be an ai maker not just an ai taker we're seeing you know grassroots innovation come out of the schools here but as you say we're also having people either leave deep mind also in terms of our partners across in the u.s i think you know james can correct me if i'm wrong i feel like a lot of the you know the first destination headquarter within europe is usually in london i think that that is pretty much most of the large ai companies we've had So I think that there is definitely, you know, it's always been a good hub for AI, but we are seeing a lot of additional tailwinds of which Sovereign AI is one of them at the moment as well.

We went through this period last year and it might still be going on. I don't really have a pulse check on it where every AI company's seed round was in like the hundreds of millions of dollars. And I imagine that you're not going to spread this fund over just five companies. And so do you think that- No, John. It's one. is one bad. But I mean, do you imagine being, like, investing alongside other funds and doing more structured

rounds where a lot of capital comes together to take, like, big swings? Or is there actually some sort of structural shift in the type of startups that are getting built today where $5, $10, $20 million can actually put some points on the board early on and get in the game in a meaningful way? You guys can make a number of bets on the app player. You can talk about energy, maybe some more science-focused, Neo Labs, maybe Neo-Cloud. I feel like 500 will like really can kind of like seed a bunch of different players. But yeah, how are you thinking about like the dynamics of like early stage startup fundraising right now?

Yeah, I mean, in the UK actually we are seeing those $100 million and even billion dollar seed rounds now. So there's a rumored billion dollar seed round in a. and a founder who's out of deep mine, which is incredible. Let's go. And there's been a bunch of those in the last few months, which is great. The fund is actually doing it the other way around. So we're saying we're going to give you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly, of government procurement contracts, right? If you can build it, if it's good enough, if you are world-class, we're the customer.

We're ready to buy. Same thing with compute, we're able to give a sort of, you know, a significant amount of compute to early-stage companies. The quid pro quo is, hey, the taxpayer, is taking all this risk backing you, what's our upside? Right, we want to be on the cap table, right? We want to do it on commercial terms. It's, you know, going to be on the same terms as an index, as a balder turn, as an Axel, as a A16 and whoever's there. We're going to be good partners. But the money isn't just about unlocking upside and getting, you know, getting on the cap table. It is also about helping the companies to some degree. And obviously, you know,

still five, 10 million pounds can make a difference. So I don't want to be like too flipping about it. You know, those things early stage do matter. But, you know, we're here to help the taxpayer get a bit of benefit from all the risk we're taking, supporting all the AI companies. Yeah. I think that's also one of the things that jumped out at me as well as, you know, as a commercial VC, it's hard to compete purely on capital, right? Especially in AI right now is where the numbers become so huge. I think that something I've been really excited to see from the Sovereign AI Fund is exactly as James said. Is this kind of hands-on ops help, whether it's how to navigate large data sets that the,

government may have access to, that, you know, portfolio companies will have help navigating, whether it be early procurement opportunities, as James said. And then obviously we're going back to the million GPU hours of compute from the supercomputer, which is, you know, a huge, huge help. So, you know, it's not purely trying to be pealing on a capital basis, which I think, you know, frankly, would not play to the strengths of what the fund can do. So AI is, you know, is extremely popular in China and India, deeply unpopular in America. Where do you think the UK will land? Do you think there's a chance that the population broadly will be supportive of artificial intelligence?

They're like, AI allows me to spend more time at the pub. That's the way to sell it. That's what I'm saying. No, look, the UK, we've been pretty strong and early adopters, almost of every wave of new technology. whether it's financial services like, you know, paying with this thing, the Brits are way ahead. Oh, yeah. And when it comes to sort of first generation AI tools, your clods and GPT, I think the UK is number one or two in Europe for adoption. So so far so good.

But of course, there's loads of issues, you know, I think that there's going to need to be some really strong political leadership to explain to people the tradeoffs between, you know, these things can be transformative, you know, your wealth and your health and your security of your nation. better off. For the same time, you know, we're going to need more energy. There's a load of issues we need to navigate on online harms and copyright. So some of those battles have been fought publicly. Some of them are still to come. Yeah. Are you say that there's an opportunity for the government to be a buyer. I think a lot of people jump to defense and military. I'm more interested in if you're seeing any opportunities in non-defense sector, uh, opportunities for efficiency. I feel like at least in America, everyone laments like the DMV is a huge weight and like if they just had, you know, a piece of software instead of a physical form, things

would speed up. Are you seeing opportunities for startups to increase efficiency across non-military portions of the UK government? Oh yeah. I mean, I mean everywhere. And I think, you know, there's a bunch of businesses here in I'm sure there are in the US as well, who are using AI for you to complete procurement contracts. You know, these like 400 page things you have to do. So private companies have been doing that. In response, you know, the UK government at least has already smartly using AI to read them as well and prioritize them, right?

They don't make any decisions, but they help you help you navigate some of these processes. Same thing in transcription and voice. Like obviously we're already seeing GPs and doctors benefit hugely from being able to use these tools to quickly take notes and actually look at the patient rather than spend all their time sitting in front of the computer filling out the health records. So look, there's been some early wins. And I think, you know, part of the job at Sovereign AI is to work out which of the companies we should work with and the government to see where else those wins are. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy? Super smart. I hope that you can work out like on the cap table to just say the United

Kingdom. Because like I feel like as a founder, if you just see your country on your cap table? You're like, well, I got it. I got a deliver. I got to deliver. I got to deliver. But very cool. I think we're going to get there. Yeah. The country is lucky to have you both, you know, leading this effort. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Have a good rest of your day. And we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Thanks, guys. Bye, guys. There's some huge news in the world of robotics because they made a slot machine that can follow you across the casino floor.

We actually got a slot machine stalker before a humanoid demo. Yeah. This is before. I guess not demo. Well, this is before it can actually fold your laundry. Like, we've been seeing a lot of laundry folding demos. We got the slot machine. Never, you know, what is never ask a woman, her age, a man, his salary, or a humanoid robot

founder to let you be alone with the robot for 30 seconds. Okay. but what is actually happening here? Because obviously, like, the joke is that it will follow you around so that you never stop gambling. But that can't be why they actually built this. It must be because they want to be able to reconfigure the layout easier. It's probably that, but also the novelty. Okay.

Oh, if you see something moving around. If you're walking through... You'll be like, I got to chase that down and throw a cup box in. Oh, that's funny. It's a robot slot machine. This also looks like... I don't know what Novomatic is, but this does not look like it's,

this does not look like it's at an actual casino. This looks like it's at a trade show for casino equipment, which I think might be, this is a demo of something that this company is going to try and sell to casinos. I don't know that this is actually at a major casino just yet, although people are walking around, but it looks like, it looks like trade show bags to me.

I don't know. This says trade show all over it. I do wonder if this is being teleoperated or if this is end-to-end machine learning. I need to know, I need to know the tech stack, and I need to know, is this, is this truly, is this truly autonomous or is this just being puppeteered by an Xbox controller? Because we've got to get one for the studio. We've had, we've had, this is not, this, this could be just a remote, a remote control car, which has existed since like, what, the 80s maybe, maybe longer. But we're in this, we're in this phase where we want to layer on, oh, this is AGI.

This is truly AGI. What else is going on in the timeline, Jordy? Anything else? The must-have item in Silicon Valley is a $178 sweater with a CEO's face. Leaders from companies from Nvidia to Palantir are now driving fashion, signaling a new era of the cult of the founder. We saw Nick on our team rocking the Jensen sweater from GTC. It looks great. This is a very beautiful sweater.

It does look great. Very funny. Very sunny. And just a nice departure from just a normal t-shirt. You know, for, for what, 20, 30 years, the tech, the tech merch was just a t-shirt with a logo on it. That's fine. But why not mix it up? Why not go in a different direction and make a sweater with the CEO's full, full cartoon character on it?

Why not? Dolly, Bally says, is showing a screenshot from, I believe, is Biz, Biz by Sell of a laundromat, which is selling a laundromat, which is selling. It's got 421,000 of eBits asking just under 3 million. So getting a better multiple for your laundromat than most public SaaS companies out there right now. And it was established in 2024. Wow. So they just made this business in a couple years. Lifestyle business.

And they're like, I would like $3 million for it now. Okay, a couple more posts. John Fio, friend of the show, says the sphere is probably the most important piece of architecture in the last. hundred years. It's a hot take. It's what the VR trade was trying to be, but manifested in the real world with a real novel experience. Instead, it's what Apple and Meadow were trying to go after, but failed because they tried to shove it into a scalable box instead of building for real life. A sphere in every major city will be a proprietary technology for a new kind of stadium. It will suck in only the best acts, and they'll stop playing regular stadiums. It's the perfect

example of mixing real novel tech with real novel life. This is how you capture value over the next cycle. And I agree with this. I think this is a great take. So, uh, yeah, you rewind a year ago. You're like companies are going to announce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of invidia orders. Do you want to, meanwhile, we have the sphere, which they built the sphere. It's one concert venue. They built a, they built a really cool concert venue in Vegas. They got a bunch of debt, but it's awesome. Which one do you, which one do you want to own? A video of the sphere. And of course, on a video, you were still up, you know, 100% over the last 12 months. But if you had bought the sphere, you were up 442%. Yeah, did very well. I made a whole YouTube video about the sphere two years ago and was pretty bullish on it, had dug into the founder and how it got built. And it was just a fascinating, fascinating story. But I think he's right that there will be a sphere in every major city. There is technically a sphere. like location in Los Angeles over by SoFi Stadium.

It's not technically a full sphere with LEDs on the outside, but it has a big screen and you can go and watch a football game there. And I think it's doing well as well. I haven't dug into that one nearly as much, but I do think that these types of immersive experiences, the sphere is unique because it grabs attention from all over the world. You fly by on a plane, you just see it and you see the emoji on it.

It's kind of a miss that we've never done anything with the sphere. No. Last, a little white pill here. What's up? Meta announced level up a free four-week training program that takes people with no prior experience and prepares them to work as fiber technicians on data center construction sites across the U.S. We built this program with CBRE because the fiber technician field and the broader construction industry is facing a nationwide shortage at a time when data center demand is higher than ever. And I'm sure people will come up with reasons why this is bad, actually.

but I think this is great. Great opportunity. And Tyler, we didn't get a chance to talk with you about, talk with you about this before the show, but you're actually going to be going through the program starting tomorrow, we got you a slot. Fantastic.

This actually seems fun. I would be interested in doing this. It's data center. They made data center simulator in real life. They made data center simulator in real life. That's amazing. Tyler, do you ever play Eldon Ring? No.

No. Oh, it's such a good game. More like online games. Eldon Ring can be online. Okay, I don't know. You can play with people. They're making a movie about it. The live action adaptation of Eldon Ring produced by A24 in partnership with Bandai Namco and film for IMAX's slated for release.

March 3rd, 2028. Wow, that's a long way of way. Production will begin in spring. But if you haven't played Eldon Ring, it's a fun time. It's really, really hard. And sometimes it just gets like a little bit too much. But it's a good time. Anyway, well, folks.

Thank you for tuning in. We will be... It's been an honor and a privilege. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts in Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at TBPN.com. And Flashbang out. We'll see you later. There we go.

Growing flashbang. We love you. Goodbye.