TBPN - a16z’s $15B Raise, Tim Cook Exit Rumors, Meta Goes Nuclear | Ben Horowitz, David George, Alex Rampell, Jen Kha, Jeremie Eliahou

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(02:19) - Tim Cook's Retirement Rumors (09:11) - AI Needs a (Steve) Jobs (24:54) - Meta Announces Nuclear Partnerships (29:45) - Can AI Solve the Recycling Crisis? (37:51) - a16z's $15B Raise (45:14) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:07:25) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:28:29) - Jeremie Eliahou is a technology analyst at Semianalysis, where he focuses on semiconductors, AI hardware, and datacenter infrastructure. His work is known for deep technical rigor and clear analysis of GPU roadmaps, compute economics, and industry supply chains. (02:01:29) - Jen Kha, Operating Partner and Head of Investor Relations at Andreessen Horowitz, discussed the firm's recent $15 billion fundraise, highlighting the rapid three-month oversubscription driven by strong LP conviction in the AI super cycle. She emphasized the firm's decentralized structure, with specialized funds and teams, allowing nimble operations despite its 600+ employees. Kha also noted that while LPs seek liquidity, they prefer to retain stakes in high-performing companies, choosing to ride their winners rather than cash out prematurely. (02:16:40) - Alex Rampell, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded companies like Affirm and TrialPay. In the conversation, he discusses his entrepreneurial journey, the importance of understanding industry history, and the role of AI in creating defensible business models. He emphasizes that successful entrepreneurs can effectively mobilize resources, possess deep industry knowledge, and are driven by motivations beyond financial gain. (02:32:29) - David George, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the firm's consistent growth investment strategy, emphasizing a focus on exceptional companies and founders with ambitious visions. He observes a post-COVID shift in founder psychology towards a more intense work ethic, contributing to rapid company growth, particularly in AI-driven sectors. George also notes the rational trend of companies remaining private longer, benefiting from a robust private market and avoiding public market volatility. (02:38:51) - Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the enduring challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing that despite technological advancements, the fundamental difficulties remain constant. He highlights the firm's evolution to address the expanding tech industry by creating specialized teams focused on areas like AI and crypto, ensuring comprehensive market coverage. Horowitz also reflects on the nature of market bubbles, noting that widespread denial of a bubble's existence often precedes its burst, contrasting past and present market conditions. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow 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

Watched to TVPN. Today is Friday, January 9th, 20206. We are live from the TVPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I forgot in the Vanity Fair profile that we were pitching Julia Ramp so much. She actually put it in the profile.

It was very, very funny. Anyway, if you have an answer to read, we were in Vanity Fair. Yesterday, it's a fun piece, a little whirlwind tour of a show that happened maybe six months ago. So a lot of things have changed, but it's a good snapshot. But she got up to speed. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah. It's fun.

Anyway, we have a massive show for you today, folks. $15 billion raised by Andreessen Horowitz. We have a bunch of folks. We have four members of Anderson-Horwis. I'm going to hit the gong just because... Hit the gong, warm it up. You've got to warm it up because we've got to hit it 15 times when we have Jen, Alex David George and of course Ben Horvins coming on the show hit that app loving

non-majority linear of course meet the system for modern software development linear purpose-built tool for planning and building products we also have Jeremy Antevaros from semi-analysis coming on to explain energy to explain data center build out and the the gas turbine infrastructure that's going into those he did a great interview with Ben Thompson that dropped yesterday, we're going to dig in and go deep into, apparently, there's a bunch of fascinating things. Apparently there's like 10 terawatts of requests for data center capacity, which is like way more than anyone would ever build. But it's because of this weird dynamic of you have to ask for more than you need because you might not get it. And there's a whole bunch of interesting things.

He, of course, broke the story that meta had completely changed their data center design. They were optimizing for sort of energy efficiency before. Now they're much more focused on speed of development and scale. And so we're going to be taking you all over the place today. But we're going to start with Steve Jobs' Apple. We're going back into Cupertino because there's a rumor that Tim Cook might step down sooner than expected. So this comes from Tim Cook, his compensation,

compensation, we've talked about it a lot, $74.29 million per year. Salaries $3 million. Stock awards, $57 million, non-equity incentive compensation. He gets a $12 million bonus if he does well. He gets $21,401K. Personal use of private jet, $800K on that. That's nice to see. Only $800K. Vacation cash out of $56K security expenses. They're paying $900,000 a year to secure him. That's got to be a whole team of people. Probably some jacked tier one operators following him everywhere he goes. But he is rumored to be out. AppleTrac says Apple CEO Tim Cook has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload.

Rumors suggest he could. I doubt they wanted that quote specifically to leak. But it did via the New York Times. So rumors suggest he could announce a plan. to retire as early as this year. Of course, the rumor is that John Ternus might step into that role. Mac Rumors has a story here. With Tim Cook, having recently turned 65 years old and a number of other senior Apple executives having already departed in recent months, we're heading for the exits, there has been a significant focus on Apple's plans for who will succeed Cook as CEO. I was hoping

for a Warren Buffett third act from Cook. I was hoping for him to just say, I'm just hitting my stride. 65 to 95. That's where I'm going to do my best. That's my window. You haven't seen any compounding yet. It's a completely underrated era for business leaders. If you can stay in the game and continue to compound from 65 to 95, that's where the sweet spot is. Just get ready to lock in, not check out. But he might be. We love to joke about him being underpaid. I actually think he is, or he has been. Seriously. For how big of a company is and what he's done to the time.

The normanism of Tim Cook coming in and just absolutely cooking for as long as he has, it will always be remembered. Yeah. So several recent reports have identified Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternis, as likely to be named the next Apple CEO in the New York Times has now shared a profile of Ternus with some context on his expertise and how he's viewed within the company. According to sources who spoke with the New York Times, Apple has begun accelerating its planning for Tim Cook's succession last year, with Cook having expressed a desire to reduce his workload, while software chief Craig Federici, services chief at EQ, marketing head Greg Jaws,

and retail HR chief Deidre O'Brien have all reportedly been seen as potential candidates. Ternus appears to have shot to the front of the pack with Cook likely to remain as chairman of the company's board of directors. Oh, so he's not completely out to pasture. He'll be in the boardroom. Turnus is known for his expertise, as an engineer, having worked on many of Apple's devices through, although he is known, quote, more for maintaining products than developing new ones.

Big question about what the next decade or two of Apple's product roadmap actually looks like. How many more new products do they need? They sort of have one thing in every category. If we go through a major form factor shift, that could be an issue. But in general, if you have someone who's really good at maintaining products and keeping dominant market share,

driving up margins, that could be the right person for the job. Yeah. Quote about John Ternis. He's a nice guy. Let's hear it from nice guys. Sometimes nice guys finish first. They always said nice guys finish last.

I think it's a bit of fake news. This is from former Apple engineer Cameron Rogers. Quote, about John Ternis. He's someone you want to hang out with. I love it. He's just a good hang. Everyone loves him because he's great. Has he made any hard decisions?

No. Take the shots at your boy. Hey, we're just like hanging out with the guy. We just like hanging out. Has he had to do any real work ever? No. Has he made any single hard decision in his life?

I'm sure that's not true. But it does characterize his role, I guess. He hasn't been in the CEO's seat, so he probably hasn't had to make crazy decisions. Like, should we launch Apple Vision Pro now or later? He's not the one. He's just like, you told me to launch it? I got it done, right?

That's his role. Should we make the iPhone less durable? That's a hard decision. Are there hard problems he's solved in hardware? Also, no. What? This is an insane quote. Wow.

Turnus and others may quibble with that assessment. However, as Ternis has been involved with a number of innovative products over the years, including spearheading effort to develop the iPhone air and working on the upcoming foldable iPhone. That's exciting. Turned as seen as a natural successor to cook, even with an even temperament, strong attention to detail,

and an intimate knowledge of Apple's supply chain. That's obviously very good. But he may not bring the visionary focus and willingness to take risks that Steve Jobs had, leading to debate among Apple employees about exactly what type of leaders do. We need to get the Germanator on. We do.

Yeah, yeah. Nick, can you reach out to Mark Gers, German, to try to get him on the show Monday. Let's talk through all of these things. There's so much to talk about here. Before we continue our conversation, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

So there's this question. Will John Turnus, if he steps into the role of CEO of Apple, will he bring the visionary focus and willingness to take risks that Steve Jobs had? That's a tall, tall order. I think Tim Cook's executed extremely well. He hasn't even, it doesn't really seem like he's tried to bring a visionary focus. He's been the operator. He's a supply chain visionary.

He's a supply, yeah, visionary in his own way. But you were thinking, and we've been discussing this need for a Steve Jobs of AI, a visionary leader in AI. We have a number of household name type CEO, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amade, Demis, Google Deep Mine. But we don't quite have that Steve Jobs. Maybe that's too tall of an order, but you still think it's necessary.

So walk me through your thinking. Before you do, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Yeah, everybody's worried about

not having a job because of AI. Well, AI needs a jobs, too. They need a Steve Jobs. Yeah. Oh, I didn't get that. That's good. So, yeah, we've talked about this a little bit this week. I tried to summarize it today in the newsletter.

And I'll kind of read through a little bit. So I went back and looked at the history of the phrase tech clash. It was originally coined by Adrian Woldridge and the economist in 2013. He correctly predicted that, quote, the big developments of 2014 will be the growing peasants revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace. The Silicon elite will cease to be regarded as geeks who happen to be filthy rich and become filthy rich people who happen to be geeks. Over the coming years, he was entirely correct. It was actually in 2018 that TechLash was the runner of word of the year. No way. So he called it perfectly. Obviously, you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal,

which is actually finally going to be dramatized this year with the social network too. That's coming out this year. Do we have a release statement? yet for that? I don't think so. Okay. But it is in the works. And then, yeah, just growing concerns about monopoly power, privacy, democracy, censorship. Really quickly, Tyler, October 9th, 2026. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing as well. There we go. Okay, we do. Book the tickets now. It's going to be an entertaining. Okay, probably great. This would be a good, we should, we should, we should, actually, I don't know, I, I'm not sure that this movie is, I expect this movie to hit like 10%. Yeah. or potentially negative in comparison to the social network one.

I agree. And so I think it might be the kind of thing you get a bunch of people to go. And it's just like, okay, that was, that wasn't fun. The original movie is a really good Roershock test for, are you gonna have a good time in tech? Like if you ask someone who is thinking about working at a company or a tech startup, like,

what do you think of the social network? And they're like, oh, I thought it was like awful. And like, I hated all of it. And there were no heroes. Well, they're probably not gonna enjoy tech. But if they came away from it being like, oh, well, it's actually really, I'm going to start a startup now.

Because he just coded a thing in his, in his dorm room that became really big. And yes, there was drama and fights over who gets one on the cap table. But even Eduardo Savarin became a multi-billionaire. So, you know, sort of an aim for the moon. Land amongst the Stars situation. So, yeah, I mean, you could read it both ways, but I think most people, most tech insiders, if you ask them about the social network, they were like, that was inspiring. I listened to the music all the time.

It inspired me to grind harder. Yeah. Real quick, happy birthday to TechNotech in the chat. Happy two. Happy birthday to you. Geminii 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding,

and deep multimodal understanding. Anyways, I'll continue. So first TechLash is all about how is this impacting our mental health, how is this impacting our democracy, the foundations of our, country, society, privacy, you know, censorship, etc. The second tech clash has begun. Feels like it started last year. You know, this is one of those things like, yeah, you don't really know,

like, sometimes it takes a while to realize, like, okay, we're in this thing now that we can look back and see how public opinion has been forming around this. So I believe the average American believes that technology and now AI is now like a threat to their way of life. So I was looking at- There were rumors of the tech lash in 2024 when the image generators came out. A lot of the arts community were saying this is really, really bad. It's going to put artists out of jobs. The thumbnail community on YouTube was upset. But this year, it's solidified around.

There's like three or four key points, key talking points. If you talk to someone, why don't you like AI? Well, it's stealing copyrighted information. It's slop. It's putting people out of jobs. it's stealing water and stealing power. And each one of those is somewhat real. So the first tech clash was like, okay,

these tech, our lives are now existing in these platforms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they are in some ways more powerful than the government. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now, so I was, I pulled, Maslow's hierarchy of needs pulled up.

And I was just like going through and looking at physiological needs, right? Air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction, safety, personal security, employment, resources, health, right? All these different things. And then you just go up and you can see that, like, there's good reason for the average American to just kind of believe like AI is going to mess all of this stuff, right?

So starting at the bottom, Americans have heard that data centers use a lot of water. Yeah, I need water. It's not necessarily factual. Yep. Sure, water is used in the process. Yes. But we're not like, you know, blowing through water at the rates that the public sort of receives. I was joking about this online.

I was hypothetically debating with an AI dumer about water usage. Well, are they long water stuff? because if you believe that AI is going to use all the power, and you bought GE Verona, you did very, very well. But the water stocks have not mooned. So, hey, decels who think AI is going to use all the water, maybe you've got to put on a long position. Yeah, we're just privatize a public utility, you know, become a monopolist.

Also, I mean, we're talking to Jeremy at semi-analysis, who's sort of their power expert. Obviously, AI does use a lot of power, and there's a lot of investment theses that can be built on top of the semi-analysis energy model. Why doesn't semi-analysis have a water model? Oh, because it's actually not a bottleneck to anything. Yeah, so the power thing is more real.

People now just assume, like if they, I have to imagine people are reading an article, oh, your power bill might be going up. If your power bill just goes up because it's a winner, you're like, oh, thanks, AI. Yep, yeah, totally. I, you know, I didn't ask for this. So they've seen Terminator 2, so they can imagine kind of like the sci-fi scenario playing out. That's one factor.

If they're super online, they might have heard like the Casey Hamer or other people have talked about this, like solar panels, you know, an AI system just saying like, hey, actually this farmland, I could use it better than you humans. Remember that Ilya video? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he did an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. It was this video, it was like a video documentary almost where they were interviewing him, but there was no questions.

So you never saw who was asking the questions, but he was giving his answers. And he's sort of like sadly walking around on a gloomy beach. It's like very moody. I would say he was aura farming. He was sick. He did or a farm San Francisco a little bit. But as I was getting dressed up as him for Halloween, we were playing that video.

And the makeup artists who were applying the Ilius Sutskiver, you know, all the makeup to me, we're watching that being like, that's not inspiring at all. Okay, yeah. And I didn't even include that in here, but that's like the reaction. And like every time people hear leaders at labs talk, they're like, turn it off.

As opposed to, you could show someone an Apple ad or Steve Jobs clip and it would be like, oh, dancing on your wired headphones with your iPod, like I love music. They're making music available. Great. I love it. And there were so many things that were just inspiring. So continue. Yeah, continuing.

So, yeah, moving up the pyramid, people have been told that AI is coming for their jobs. Some people have actually had an experience that made them feel like, whoa, I thought what I did was unique and special, but now I'm watching AI do it on my own computer. Maybe, you know, imagine somebody that's driving for Uber and Lyft, and all day long they're driving, and they're just seeing, they're sitting next to Waymo's in traffic, and you're looking over and there's no one in the seat.

Like, that's ominous. That's going to be scary if that's how somebody puts food on their table. And then every single CEO last year was saying, like, we have, fortunately, we have increased efficiency due to AI. And so we've laid off 10,000 people, right? And so a lot of that is just kind of like spin, marketing, et cetera, but that's what people are hearing, right? And then you look at what are the AI leaders are actually saying.

So Ilya talking for 10 minutes, people are like, whoa, that doesn't seem good. Ilya is saying like, Eli is saying, let's not do that. He's trying to prevent that bad scenario. Sure, sure, sure. It still reads like, whoa, I didn't realize they were taking that seriously. Yeah, so you look at the quotes. You could easily look up quotes from Dario. Obviously, he had his quote, AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs

and spike unemployment to 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years. Elon had a good quote from over a decade ago. He said, with AI, we are summoning the demon. Some people today might say the demon has been fully summoned. Fully summoned. And Sam obviously said at one point, AI will be. probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, they'll be great companies. And so this kind of messaging credit to them, it's like super effective for fundraising, right?

If somebody's saying like all jobs will be wiped out, the world will be destroyed. But in the meantime... There's a lot of funds that are long demon. You know, you're just like... The demon the free cash flow from demons. Yeah, so it's like if you're sitting there being like if AI is going to eliminate my job, I want to own a piece of it. So, you know, maybe I can benefit from it.

So yeah, so the big issue is like anybody that's hearing all these, like, why would they actually be excited about AI, right? Even though it is so incredible in so many ways, right? I gave the example earlier this week of like AI just being like a free sleep consultant for a toddler. Yeah. That just like one-shots it and it's free. You can't see health that launched this week. I mean, that's very good news for a lot of people that, you know, can't see a doctor that often or just don't have the time or don't have the money. There's a million reasons why that might be advantageous.

And yet it's not that they're not pitching it like Steve Jobs pitched garage band, which was like, now anyone can be a musician. Now anyone can be their own doctor is inspiring. But it's just like they are fighting an uphill battle because of those other quotes. Yeah. So yeah, and I was thinking about it. It's like if you want to, if somebody is kind of like generally scared of AI, who do you, who like what do you, what content do you, what content do you,

point them towards. Typically, you'd want to point them towards the people building it, right? And say, or people around it. But even, like, to our cash is, like, a little bit, maybe, like, too high level. Sure. Or not high level enough, actually, right? It's like a little bit too ethereal, right? Talking about all these different potentials. I mean, but if you have them listen to, like, a Joe Rogan episode with one of these guys, it's going to be. To be fair, not to debunk your piece, but I do think Demis is pretty good. Yeah, Demis is great. He's had, he's, he doesn't have one of those crazy quotes. And there's been two documentaries about him. Both of them are incredibly inspiring. And when I hear him talk about AI curing cancer or humans curing cancer

with AI, it hits a lot different because he literally has a Nobel Prize and is solved. The problem, the problem if you look at, if you just count up the views that Elon, Sam, and Dario have gotten in comparison to Demas. Yeah. He's much less of a household name. And he's also not the CEO of a big company because he's running the biggest lab in a big company. And so there's that. He just doesn't get it. Yeah. So I've just been feeling like there's this gap,

Steve Jobs-sized hole, right? He had plenty of concerns about technology. He showed them freely. Somebody once asked him, so your kids must love the iPad. Then he said, my kids haven't used it. He just said we limit how much technology we have in the home. Yeah. He did talk about like losing the PC rate.

to international business machines. He said, if for some reason we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we're going to enter a computer dark age for about 20 years. You can imagine, like, Sam saying something like that around like you don't want, and you've seen the internal sort of messages between him and Elon

talking about like losing to Google. Yeah. It's like, oh, we don't want Google to control the AI God, right? Yeah. He also had a 1994 Rolling Stones interview. Rolling Stone interviewer said, nevertheless, you've often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago? Steve says, oh sure, it's not a faith in technology, it's faith in people.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them. It's not the tools that you have faith in. Tools are just tools. They work or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic. I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes, but not for long.

And part of this, I just, it feels like people have, like, are, part of it's like fundraising, part of it's just how excited we are about AI, but like you're leaving humanity out. So there's this quote from Sam. He says, if AI stays on the trajectory that we think it will, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer. So it's like, that's a fine quote. If you, there's some way to look at and be like, okay, this is abundance. This is abundance.

This is super exciting. I'm maybe more optimistic about AI. But he happens to, he's saying that AI is going to figure out how to cure cancer, right? And like if you've used these tools today and any, and talk to people that are, that are at the labs, they, they, the reality is like it feels much more likely that humans will use AI to cure cancer. Yeah. So like Steve would have said if AI, days on the trajectory that we think of all, then amazing things will be possible. Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, humans can use AI to cure cancer.

Like small, small tweak. Human centrality. It's a big difference. And so I wrote the facts of the fact Steve Jobs was not one to shy away from impressive specs and massive scale, but flipping the final line from AI will cure cancer to humans will use AI to cure cancer makes solid a difference. Apple put human centrality at the heart of everything they did, even when they were talking about something like a CNC to mill,

aluminum block into a MacBook Pro. The focus was not on the CNC. It was on what it allowed the human being to do. Yeah. CNC is literally a robot. It's computer numerical control. But when you watch that unibody presentation, it puts Johnny I at the center. And it's like, I use the tool to create something beautiful out of this amazing material that I could never do with just my normal tools. Like I could never chisel out an aluminum unit body. I need a CNC for that. I have it. And I can create something beautiful. Yeah. So yeah, at the end of this, I just said, like, I think AI has a massive narrative problem

right now. The narrative is working within the industry. It's not working for people that are outside the industry. And I just don't, I really don't think it has to be this way, right? Like, I think that there is a human central. There is an empowering way to pitch this technology in this future. And we're not doing it right now. And I expect that, I expect that everybody will, you know, Elon has his own.

style of pitching all things and I don't think he's going to change. I think that other folks maybe like Dario and Sam can you know make small tweaks that will go a long way. Yeah. And obviously there's there's founders that we don't even know their names yet that are going to be huge players in all of this as well. Definitely. Before we move on, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagined human technology interaction with 11 labs. So there's some massive news from META. They are doing a big deal with OECLO to build nuclear power plants. We've been following the energy story very closely this week.

Obviously, we're talking to Jeremy in just a little bit. We have some exciting guests next week digging into how we are going to generate more power in this country. The headline from the Wall Street Journal is META unveil sweeping nuclear power plan to fuel its AI ambitions. And we'll read through a little bit of this. Meta Platforms on Friday unveiled a series of agreements that would make it an anchor customer for new and existing nuclear power in the United States, where it needs city-sized amounts of electricity for its artificial intelligence data centers. The Facebook parent said it would back new reactor projects with the developers Terra Power and Oklo, and has struck a deal with the power producer Vistra, which is up 11% today, to purchase and expand the generation output of three existing nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. So they already exist. There's probably some work already done on the permitting side.

They're probably deeper in, but Facebook's just stepping up and saying, heck, we're opening the pocketbooks. We got the debt. We got the cash flow. We got the money to power this and take it across the finish line. So Vista and Oaklo, both of their shares, rose about 15% after the stock market opened. Terra power is still privately held, so no movement there. But you imagine the secondary market is booming right now.

meta aims to see the first new reactors delivered as early as 2030 and 2032, which feels like it won't matter because superintelligence will be here by then. Certainly, AI 2027, we're now, we're now less than 12 months away from the superintelligence, if you believe, the most aggressive possible scenario. I mean, to give AI 2027 credit, to date, it's been fairly on point. It has, it has. And no one will correct you more quickly than Tyler Cosgrove over there, the ultimate AGI pillar. I do think we were trying to do the number of days till AGI on the ticker, and I think we got to go analog.

I've been enjoying moving the goalposts, and I think we need a massive flipboard. It's like the doomsday clock? Yeah. Well, you know how, do you remember back in the old days when there was a movie theater, and they would put up the letters on each of the. like if it was like Avengers, they would take an A and they would take a little sticker, like suction cup on the end of a pole and they would put it up on the marquee one letter at a time. I feel like we need something much more analog to

change the number of days till the singularity as we monitored here on TBPN. It's purchase of nuclear power. Yes. We're very wide, we're very eyes wide open that the schedule is challenging, but we think it's important to be bold, said the director of global energy at Meta. What a gig. That's a great. Hitting. I'm the director of global energy. I'm the energy director. I'm the chief energy office. You want to power this globe? You're going through me. Soon. I mean, you got to be angling for a promotion there. I just view Meta as like a nation state. Yeah. Well, so the problem is the globe. It's impressive. Meta operates all over the globe. But why aren't you thinking bigger? Who's the director of

solar system level energy development. Galactic energy production. Universal energy production. You should be producing energy all over the universe meta. You're thinking too small, with nearly focusing on the globe. Hitting those timelines for new reactors would require the companies to quickly select sites that would be acceptable to nuclear regulators, start working with utilities to secure grid connections, and get their manufacturing operations up and running, she said. but it would also mean they have a chance to meet the urgent demand for more electricity to fuel AI computing. And so if you think about 2020, 2032, this stuff comes online. That's great. But it feels like 2027, 2028.

We're going to see a mismatch and demand relative to production. So we'll talk to Jeremy from semi-analysis about how we can solve that in the interim. Let me tell you about Figma before we move on. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look. good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes, and apps fast. Continuing. Oclo and meta, making this announcement, 1.2 gigawatts is the total size of this nuclear campus in Pike County, Ohio. The agreement includes binding prepayment to support fuel procurement, enabling O'Clo to advance early project work and secure fuel, adding new, clean, reliable power to the grid.

So, yeah, Oklahoma opened super high this morning and then it's at 1.15 and then it's been trading down. So it's up 7% today, but up 28.7% in the last five days. So it's almost like somebody knew this was coming. But this was a fun article in the journal. Were you happy to hear that AI is mining our trash for treasure? Trash economy. Trash economy. We're going to be using cubes in trash.

We're all going to be getting trash post AGI. Yes, yes. We're going to be using cubes of trash to everyone will be rich because everyone will have a cube of trash in the trash economy. The headline from the journal is AI is mining our trash for treasure. Plus hospitals embrace AI for better and worse. And scientists create a robot smaller than a grain of sand. So waste management, the largest U.S. trash hauler and recyclers spending on building and automating recycling facilities. You have to go back and imagine a Sopranos-like scenario where the mob is running trash management and just vibe coding and being like, what model should we use to detect what's in the trash?

What's actually happening here is that they have to sort out the recyclables because there are valuable things that get thrown away in the trash, and the more that you can route things to different places, the better. So it's a difficult job that pays workers little, and it's hard for companies to fill. who really wants the job of trash sorter. I was like my first job, picking up cigarette butts. Yes, but you didn't have to sort them. Well, you should, you, it's ridiculous. Maybe I should have, maybe I should have found the ones.

How do you never figure out that they just have that, you know that bucket that you put down and then you sweep into it? How did you not develop tools? It was a, it was like a dirt. Vacuum. It was like, uh, it was like, uh, it was like fine rock. Oh. That was the ground.

And so if I was doing that, I'd just be picking up rocks. And then I'd have, What about one of those grabber tools? I still feel like at a certain point you weren't even operating at like monkey or dolphin level. I was more like I was running. I know I actually was running around like a monkey. I like the speed at which I could just be like running around. But the monkey and the dolphin, they developed tools and you were unable to develop tools and you suffered. I was promoted fairly quickly to be clear. You developed tools eventually. Thanks for recent advancement. Some recyclers are now employing machines to do this dirty work. This week, Ryan December,

reports on the recycling companies using AI to find valuable commodities in the trash. So here's a job that computers can take without much complaint, sorting recyclables. And before we read this, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference that's scaled from 1 GPU to 100,000. Do you have the honor of being serviced by waste management? I don't know, actually. I think my town might have its own.

Yeah. Every time I use, I interact with waste management. It's good? It's great. Really? Like it makes me wish that all utilities were privatized. How does that manifest? I mean, it's just the website is great.

The support is great. Everything about the experience is great. When are you going to a website to interact with your trash? Just like moving. Oh, okay. I need new. If you move. There's all these things like interacting with California utilities.

My trash bin broke. one point. Yeah, one click. I bet waste management will have an agent that... Clawed code. Get me a new... Get me a new trash can, I suppose.

For humans, it is a foul laborious job that entails standing over a conveyor about plucking beer cans and detergent bottles from a stream of refuse. The job pays little and is hard to fill. At Murphy Road Recycling's material recovery facility near Hartford, the machines are taking over the dirtiest jobs. A few workers remain on the line, mostly near the front to watch for hazardous items. Otherwise, the system of conveyors, magnets, optical sorters, and pneumatic blocks run largely unmanned. Watching over it all are computers that analyze material as it passes by about seven miles an hour. The device is made by London-based gray parrot. That's a good name for a company.

Use artificial intelligence. The African gray parrot, I think, is the smartest parrot. Or maybe it lives the longest. Use artificial intelligence to identify recyclables, flag, food grade material, gauge items mass, assess market value. They're doing DCF on every item. African gray parrots can live to 70 or 80. Let's go. Imagine just having the world's most wise parrot with you always.

Tyler, you should get into birds. Yeah, bird guy. I don't know if our office lease allows birds. What's my budget? I think an African gray parrot is expensive. I remember I was moving into an apartment building and and I don't know why, but my friends were telling the landlord that we had, that one of the friends that was moving in had a collection of African gray parrots. And they just thought it was the funniest thing to try and get this landlord to approve the African gray parrots in the apartment. It was very, very silly.

There's a store in LA called the Perfect Parrot. Maybe you should go over there. Maybe. Gold Rocks is Mike Rowe is punching the air right now, dirty jobs, getting displaced. So environmental concerns and the White House's push to boost domestic production of raw materials have turned attention to America's waste stream, which is full of valuable commodities. The aluminum tariff, 50% has lifted demand for scrap metal. Meanwhile, pulp mill closures have left boxmakers reliant more than ever on old corrugated containers.

And consumer good companies want to reclaim their. bottles and jugs as states adopt extended producer responsibility laws aimed at reducing plastic pollution. That's good news. There's really a lot of value in a lot of recyclables and garbage, says the founder and chief technology officer at AMP, a Colorado company that builds AI-run recycling facilities. The problem has been that the cost of pulling those materials out is similar to or greater than the actual value of those materials. Recyclers believe that AI will allow them to efficiently mine our trash for treasure. Gray Parrots analyzers were shown recyclables thousands of times

in conditions ranging from crumplold to perfectly intact until the computers could recognize materials. Perfect job for AI. The devices gather data about what is passing through the facility in which items aren't winding up where they belong. It's helping us make adjustments to the system. Murphy Road executives say the technology allows them to sort up to 60 tons an hour of curbside recycling.

And some of the stuff that you can pull out of recycling is remarkable, especially if there's batteries that can be disassembled. There's a whole company, Redwood materials founded by J.B. Straubel, former co-founder of Tesla, early employee of Tesla, board member of Tesla, focused on recycling EV batteries because obviously we have the rare earth elements, we make the magnets, we make the batteries, and then we just kind of trash them. And if you can recycle them, that's obviously a... effective and valuable.

Sort of an interesting second act. What do you think about the name, Redwood Materials? Wouldn't you expect them to be working? In wood? I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know why they call that. I think they're out in Vegas. They have a massive facility.

I wonder how the business is doing. I know they raised a bunch of money. It was a massive CAPEX intensive effort. But it seemed like something that was uniquely powered by, you know, seeing the rollout of Tesla. You know, J.B. Straubel is working on Tesla, seeing how many cars they're shipping, watching all. the batteries go out the door and just thinking, okay, well, something's going to happen with those

in a couple of years. I should start building this business today. Well, CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So let's move on to the big news of the day. And Dresen Horowitz raised $15 billion. Why are we here? Why do we raise $15 billion? Ben Horowitz wrote a piece on X. You can go and read it. He's also joined the show. By the way, Redwood Materials, the last round they raised was in October of 2025. I missed that. October of 2025. Yeah, so very recently raised 350 million. Yes. So a massive suite of new funds. The Hall represents 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025. Yeah, so that was something I was curious about. Does this get sort of like backdated?

Like this wasn't factoring into the data that we had from last year and now that it's, or was it already being counted in some way through filings, right? Because you add an incremental, you know, 15 billion funding. Yeah, that's a big change. I don't know. We'll have to ask them. But A16Z is now at 90 billion of AUM. and it split over a number of funds. The growth fund got 6.75 billion. American Dynamism 2 got 1.776, I believe, right? Or is it 1.176 billion? There's two different numbers here.

Apps, too, got 1.7 billion. Infrastructure, the second fund, got 1.7 billion. Bio and healthcare got 700 million. And other strategies got 3 billion. I wonder, crypto is sort of. is sort of missing here. I wonder if crypto is just on a different cycle or has some sort of different structure.

We'll have to ask them about that. But very exciting. And feels like despite the headline of venture capital fundraising declining, certainly plenty of money to go around. Well, I think both Josh and Delian this week talked about kind of the K-shape in how less emerging managers,

less new funds, but the platforms have been, doing just fine. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious about this. Oh, okay, okay, so I understand it. So American Dynamism Fund 2 raised 1.176 billion. They already had a $600 million fund.

So you add those together and you get the final amount of funding for American Dynamism across the two funds, $1.776 billion. for American dynamism. And some cool trading cards going up from Andresen. David Ullovich shares one of an Anderil Fury drone flying across a mountain range for companies that support the national interest. Catherine Boyle had a different graphic with a horse, which we love. Play that horse sound with an American flag and the Andresen New Font, which is a very

beveled and 3D looking metal texture. Very fun. Packy has a new piece on some of the history of the fun. The opening is quite fun. It's read it. Before we do, let me tell you about cognition. They are the makers of Devin, the AI software engineering. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

Packy says, Andresen Horowitz, here's your feedback, that it's too loud that it would shut up and dribble, that it should shut up and dribble, politically speaking, that you don't agree with a recent investment or two, that it's unbecoming to quote the Pope, that there is no way it will ever generate a reasonable return for LPs on such enormous funds. A16Z does hear you. It has been hearing you at this point for nearly two decades. And then he goes to a bunch of the history and the news.

So I would encourage everybody to go to go. Specifically, there's a bunch of things. of information on their actual returns, which is cool. But unfortunately, this went out right before we joined. So I have not been able to read it yet. But there was some spice. We got to get to the drama. So Andrews and Horace, they put out this image. Why we raise $15 billion. We're all in on America. And what image do they use? They use Mount Everest. They're climbing Mount Everest. The metaphor is clear. It's the tallest mountain.

We're the tallest mountain adventure. We got the most money. We're the biggest firm. But a lot of people are saying, hey, why do you use a Chinese mountain? Why do you use a Chinese mountain? It's Everest. It's over there in China. It's actually half in China, half in Nepal.

It's more complicated. But maybe it's foreshadowing. Maybe it's foreshadowing. You know, we're acquiring Greenland. Maybe they know something. We don't. Maybe it's not going to be in China forever. Maybe we already named it.

Everest is named it by an American who, I believe, was the first person to climb it. And... Yeah, and remember, so... Land acquisitions... White House officials have talked about a $5.7 billion payment for Greenland, right? That, depending on what type of payment would be needed for a place like Nepal, right? You can imagine it being potentially less than that. So, A16C, they've got plenty of cash.

But I'm super excited to have a whole host. of folks from the fund. Jen is joining Alex Rampel, David, and then Ben will cap it off at the end. And Dan Primmack is pulling out the spiciest quote, VC industry shots fired by Ben Horowitz. Ben says, as the American leader in venture capital, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders. That seems reasonable. They're certainly up there and leaders, obviously by what definition but they're certainly in the top with in terms a UM and and the they I mean they do have a they do have a responsibility for and what is Josh Josh Wolf yesterday was was saying that he expects at least one or

two of these larger platform funds to go public so we'll have to we'll have to get into that yeah I mean that that's a very interesting angle with andrewson is because it's it's becoming such a large, they call a platform fund. They're almost private equity type deals. We've seen general catalyst, buy a hospital network. Like, they're at a scale where they can keep a company private until their trillion dollar company, but they can also buy whole companies and roll things up and

incubate stuff. There's so much that you can do at this level. And it starts to look like, is the comp actually black rock? Is the comp actually black stone? And those two firms are worth. 170 billion each, something around there, 190 billion each. And so it's going to be, it feels like it's going to be interesting to start seeing these firms more as financial institutions. Yeah. With more traditional institutions. Not just a firm and institution. Yeah. Not that it's

going to happen anytime soon, but it feels like this feels like it could be effectively a pre-IPO round. Oh yeah. Pre-IPO fundraise. We will see. We will see. But go, go read Packy's piece. And Shamsankar says, we should insist that all data centers that are built are architecturally beautiful in the neoclassic style. Yes, I wanted to do an architecture deep dive. Before we do, let me tell you about label box, delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. Get in the box. I love that they gave us enough, just enough rope to hang ourselves.

So, Shamsankar, he wants data centers built that are architecturally beautiful in the neoclassical style. Have you seen those photos of the AWS data centers that back up onto Virginia housing developments? So it's just like an idyllic few houses that just look like a normal neighborhood. And then just behind a massive white box. They're like, I'm not leaving. Well, now you don't even get a box. You get a tent because meta is now, they gave up on their previous architectural design, and now it's just a tent, which maybe is more aesthetic.

If you're going to do a tent, meta, I think you should make it like a circus tent, get some red and white stripes going, get some constant, you know, clown music going. Yeah, get the workers in the data center to be wearing clown. IRL slop. Yeah, exactly. But there were some interesting architectural debates that I wanted to go through. Before we go to the next one, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose the database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers.

MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next? So imagine being as locked in as the Kyoto architecture community was in 1397. I cannot believe this was built 700 years ago, 1,600 years ago, 1,600. 600 years ago. Explain what... So there's some lore here. Give me the lore, Tyler.

Okay, so, yeah, 1397 when it was built. I think in maybe 1950, so it was like a temple, right? So there's monks that lived there. Okay. And I think it was 1950. For 500 years or 600 years. Yeah. Okay.

One was living there and he burned down the temple. Whoa. And then he tried to like commit suicide right outside it. Why? What's wrong? I don't know. You just wasn't locked in? No one knows what happened.

Okay. But then, so this is actually, it was rebuilt. And there's a good, um, but it was rebuilt in the same style? Yeah. So the architectural style is truly from 1397. Yes. I mean, there's, I think there's some questions about how much gold was actually used in the original design.

Yeah. But, um, yeah, there's a good, it's a good book about this. You know, gold probably high, melt. Sure, but I mean, it's like a very thin. Yeah. It's not, it's a skill issue. They should have made it off solid gold. Then a single ember.

You're trying to light it, trying to get it started. And the monk is just, I can't get this gold building to melt. Yeah. But there's a good, uh, Yukiomishima book about this. Oh, really? There's a whole book just about this story. It's like a fictionalized story of the burning. Interesting.

Very cool. Uh, how would you rate this out of 10, Jority? Would you live in this Kyoto temple? If it was in Amman, yes. If it was in Amman. I must have a spa. I'm kidding. Uh, I do, I like the water feature.

The water feature is very nice. Moats. Moats. Moats are important. The obvious thing that's missing from modern architecture where people talk about the material use, the form factor, but the obvious, the elephant in the room is a lack of moats and modern. Indeed.

Architecture, we need to bring back moats, gators in the moats, potentially sharks in the moats. I feel like sharks are a little bit safer in the moat because you can hang out at the water line. Whereas if there's gators in your moat and you're on the grass next to your moat. Yeah, people have like coy fish, you know, ponds, but why not just go size it up a little bit? to go for the shark pond. Shark pond. Imagine, you know, people go out, they like being relaxed and kind of like feeding the,

feeding the, the, the, the coy. But imagine just, you know, throwing, like, chicken breasts into the water for a shark, how relaxing that would be. If you needed just, you know, 15-minute break from work before you get back to your email job. Well, if you're building a fintech company, you need a moat, you need plaid.

Plad powers the app you use, the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. What about the architecture at the Charles de Gaul airport in France? It's a cross-section of a wing complete with Sparbox. I didn't know what that means. Need Billy Thalimer, founder of Regent Aircraft, been on the show. He says, we need more buildings modeled after airplane parts. I've seen this as well in a house. Someone took an airplane wing, a physical,

real airplane wing, and built it into a house that sort of served as the unifying ceiling. What do you think about living in an airplane wing? Would you do that? If it was in the Mon, obviously. I've seen, I feel like I saw a house at some point that was built around 747. Yes, yes. Well, you also might be thinking of John Travolta's house. which just often had a 747 parked outside, which he flew himself, which is incredible. Imagine being so into private aviation that you learn to fly, massive jets,

and then land them at your house with your own, with your own. I put it in the timeline, guys, if you can pull it up. There's something called the 747 wing house in California. Yes. Let's pull up this video. I think I've seen this on a show called Grand Design on Netflix. I believe I watched a little mini documentary or an episode of reality TV about this.

Let's see this. Yeah, this is the exactly I've watched. You don't come across views like that. Very cool. Yeah. More than once in a lifetime. It is somewhere that once seen it would never be of got. Reveal it.

Reveal it. Enough of the, we get this cactus outside. Where is the wing? There it is. There we go. Look at this thing. Oh, two wings. Oh, very cool.

That looks really cool. We don't know how to make wing house. You know what this is. Every time you watch one of these episodes, it's always just some couple that's just maniacally focused on making this particular thing and they interview them. And it takes like years to create one of these episodes.

Wow, interesting. It's blurred. I wonder why that is. Very, very odd. But it's always someone has a vision and then they think it's going to be easy and then they spend a decade building it and they have to check in with them. We checked in with them four years later,

and they were still in production and still getting permits. But eventually it does get built, and it looks beautiful when it does. You got to really love the 747 to be in love with this house. I think it looks very cool. I'm glad they did it. I flew on a 747. For maybe the first time to Europe, it was beautiful.

It was amazing. The first time? Yeah, 747 is pretty rare. Like, except for long-haul international flights. Yeah, you're an America guy. I'm in America. So I'm usually 737. max always, or Airbus.

But the 747, it's got a special, it has a special aesthetic to it because of the smooth bump. You get the second story, but only for the first half of the plane. I mean, it's the plane that we use Air Force One for, that we use for Air Force One. Whereas the competitor, which I believe is the Airbus A380, doesn't have the same aesthetic beauty. It's two stories the entire way. It's very efficient, but it just doesn't have the same clean line as the 747, which is just so, so iconic. Anyway, Charles de Gaulle Airport. Go check it out.

Also, check out Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So, what about? Checking in on 2625th Ave. Yes. Sage Hunter Bornstein says, should be raised. It's a crime.

It should be raised. raised. Shame on S-L-C-E Architects. He really dug into who built this thing. Wow, Moscow-based. He's going at him. 26 residences. He calls it hideous architecture. He says it takes away Madison Square Park's views of the Empire State Building. I don't know. What is that at the top? That top is... Don't worry about the gold cube, John. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. It's just a gold cube. Wow, we found a rare post here. Zero likes, 166 views. Wow.

Except for the fact that I disagree with it. I think it's actually sort of a nice building. And I think we generally need more building. I think it just feels harsh because of the contrast to the building next to it. True, true. But I don't know. We'll read this in the mansion section. But there's some interesting dynamics about how HOAs enforce aesthetics in communities

and whether or not that's good or not. in other news, they 3D printed a Starbucks. Starbucks has a new drive-thru in Texas, the coffee giant's first 3D printed store in the United States. It's funny, they've really made it look like it's 3D printed. Look at this. So, I mean, I've talked to one of the, there's a YC company that does this technique. I know, it looks so sloppy.

And there's a little bit of like up at the top, it actually looks like there's a little bit of imperfection and randomness that looks sort of aesthetic. It looks like it's sort of designed in the way that a log cabin, not every log is going to be perfect. But then you get to the middle section and it's like the tube that was pumping it was just not working. If you scroll over to the left and then down a little bit, just down. Like that is messy. So this, the way it shows up, you basically get like a crane with a gantry that can move the nozzle in an X and Y axis.

And it just pour cement in loops circles again and again and again. Okay, I need to know how quickly they built this and how much it costs. Because if this came in at 80%, they said it was, it was two Gs, two grand. Can you imagine? Starbucks was down to their last two grand. And they're just like, yeah, I just 3D print it. Yeah, I don't know. Around 1.2 million.

Okay. What is the normal, what is the average Starbucks cost? Stand-alone building cost. Tyler asks, who is the architect? And Pete says, Slop GPT. People are not happy. The U.S. Chase says you wouldn't download a Starbucks.

U.S. graphics company says, I have the sudden urge to insult this in biblical terms. Yeah, people are not very happy with this. It does feel like a low-quality print. Hopefully, the 3D printing company, you know, this is just a step in the road and they become more aesthetic,

more precise, I think. Okay, so the total investment range for Starbucks location is $760,000 to $2.2 million. See, that's not... It's kind of like right in the range there. It's the median cost, but one of the more ugly ones. Whether you're long or your short Starbucks, you got to do it on public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously.

Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with Dan. Great customer service. Matt Stevich says they save $10. Good to see, Matt. The wrath of Nahn says is comparing some architecture in Oslo, Norway. Wait, going back to the 3D for a second. Could they not have found a material to just place on that? Like, it seems like this could be a great way to build the core structure.

Yeah. Couldn't you just plaster over it? You totally can plaster over it and just smooth it out. It seems like they wanted to prove that it was really put it in your face. But the whole point of technology is not the technology itself. it's what it enables. Yeah. So if you can build a Starbucks for half the cost, you know, twice as fast, that's amazing.

But it doesn't mean it has to look like it was pretty printed. You can plaster and spackle over any sort of rough material. And then you can print, you can basically stamp like brick texture into it or some cinder block texture into it. And it's fake, but it looks like what it looks like. They didn't do any of that here. They really let the loose tubes really lay out. It looks just squishy. It looks like a gingerbread house.

It looks like a kid's, um, uh, a kids, you know, school project. Yes, yes, yes. Today we're using, uh, and you got to be like, oh, nice, nice work. Nice work. There's like tongue depressors and, uh, chopsticks sticks or, uh, popsicle sticks and glue. And the, and the four year old went a little crazy with the glue. The Elmer's came out in full effect with this Starbucks. That being said, cool that this is actually happening.

Yeah. Because this has been promised for a while. Yes. I just hope they refine the design. At the same time, I've talked to a number of startup founders who operate in the... Trace, you can also build a Starbucks out of mud, but probably... You probably should. Oh, wow.

Okay. So I've talked to a number of startup founders working in trying to develop cheaper housing, cheaper building materials. and they've all said, the last thing that you want a 3D print is just a flat wall. Like, 3D printing is great when you're talking about Lucas Zinger's hypercar, and you need some crazy structure that can't just be milled. But we're very, very efficient at making flat planes. You can just take a metal cube and slice it.

You can take a bunch of wood and build a grid. Like, we're pretty efficient at just building flat walls. You don't actually need 3D printing for that. You need 3D printing for building some sort of special structure. There was a rocket company, was it relativity? I don't want to get it wrong, but there was a rocket company that was saying, hey, we're going to 3D print rockets, and it would go and solder one piece after another in a cylindrical turb.

The only problem is that we know how to make cylinders really, really effective. Yeah, we can just bend metal. And so that's what Blue Origin and SpaceX do. What rocket says Lincoln Logs, Starbucks? Look at the long Starbucks. Soft serve building. It does look like soft serve. That's right.

It's a good Starbucks. Yeah, maybe it's an ad for the McClurry. Maybe the McClory machine always works there. DG says you could do a Sandcastle Starbucks. Sandcastle Starbucks might be fun. That could go pretty hard. Well, maybe they need to do a Sandcastle National Museum over in Oslo, Norway. But before we dig into this, let me tell you about Apploven.

Profitable Advertising made easy with axon.aI. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. So he's comparing two images. One is from 1882, the National Gallery. And in 2022, they launched the National Museum. And he claims that modern architecture is meant to demoralize you. And you can zoom in on the side by side here. The 1880s building is very ornate with lots of gold and brick and details and structure and windows and all sorts of things.

And the 2022 building looks like a black cube. from the Borg or Star Trek. Really rough. Some cool stuff. You can do cool things with flat materials. I've always liked the design of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, but it looks like this sweeping winged structure. It's very innovative and unique.

This is a little boring, guys. But at the same time, Oslo, it's a gloomy place. It sort of fits in, I guess. I don't know. Maybe the architects were depressed. They had seasonal affected disorder. Sad. Anyway.

Steve is sharing, apparently this was a proposal from a Norwegian architecture firm for the Obama presidential library in Hawaii, but it failed. Okay, so the Norwegians got it. They still got it. Yeah, sometimes it's the flat, black cube. It's interesting because the critique of the new Obama presidential library is that it's too Norwegian. And it turns out he just went with the wrong Norwegians, I suppose, because they're sharing these sort of science fiction-looking render. These look beautiful with a wonderful water feature and this sweeping grass overlay

that seems very cool. Although it feels like you would be at risk of falling off the edge here. They would have to put a railing of some sort. But very cool architectural designs and I would love to see more. Pull up the Obama presidential library. Does Trump get two presidential libraries?

One for each term. Has he already built one? I know the plane's going there, right? Something like that. Very odd. I put the Obama one in the... But if you're worried about a lack of gold

in the presidential library, architectural industry, I don't think you need to be worried for very long. I think there will be a very ornate building coming in just a few years probably. And I'm sure the... This is what...

Yeah. This was the winning bid. Yeah. And they did that because it's a power source. Right? This one is in Chicago. This one is in Chicago. This one is in Chicago.

Not Hawaii. Yes. And again, maybe if they get a huge projector and put like a fireplace on the wall inside. It could be cozy, but that doesn't look. It's crazy how tall.

It looks like a great place, potentially like the, like if the deep state felt like not super welcome in other buildings. I want to see the aircraft that they're building inside there because that looks like an aircraft hanger for a UFO. Yeah. It seems of alien origin. Well, Rath of Nahn is continuing to talk about architecture. He says, traditional Korean architecture with its visually rich, harmonious patterns,

produces lower levels of visual stress than modern facades with repetitive patterns, hard lines and high contrast materials, which are more likely to overload the visual system and contribute to discomfort, especially in dense urban areas. There's some research that suggests that having variation in your architecture actually can reduce. do stress, which is fascinating. Yeah, try to zoom in on this picture on the left. Yeah. Because you can see the one on the left, it's way, for something, it just feels more

organic or natural, right? Yeah, and it's a pretty simple shift. And then if you go over to the right a little bit. It doesn't feel like they completely... Okay, that looks like a prison. On the one side, the left looks like, you know, they're gentrifying some area. And on the right, some part of, like, Mexico City. And on the right, it looks like a prison.

And it's only a slight... Or a bank. building in New York City. But yeah, it doesn't seem like it costs that much to create some variation in randomness in your architectural designs. Maybe it's expensive. I want to see the new A16. I think A16C needs to build a like a massive gold superstructure in the heart of San Francisco.

They do. They do. Just carve out, you know, the, who knows what the fee structure is. But take half of it. Take half of the fees and just build a monument. A monolithic monument. monument to... Have you ever been to the Statue of Liberty?

I've never actually toured it. So there's a structure, you can go inside of it and walk up the stairs and whatnot. You could put offices in that. You could build a statue and then put your office inside the statue. That's thinking. I like that.

I think we should kind of look back to Charlie Munger's design for the UCASB. Yeah, pull that out of dorms. Dormzilla. He just wanted. He just wanted everyone to lock in. He wanted everyone to lock in and he was killed for it. It was ridiculous.

He was sad. Pull this up. University of California abandons plans to build windowless dorm, the Munger Hall. He just wanted you to lock in. But pull up this article, you can see the design and just how many, just how many rooms in this place are windowless. It is very, very powerful. So on the outside, it looks like, it looks, I think he just knew that people were only going to have a few.

By the time this was built, people would only have a few years to escape the permanent underclass, and windows would distract people. If you scroll down, you can see the actual design. Yeah. I'd say there's a lot of windows. It's a lot of windowless things. Maybe he was just super pilled on VR at the time.

He was like, everyone's going to be in the metaverse. Everyone's going to be locked into their VR headset. Maybe that's... Aqua says Munger was cooking. Yeah, we should have let him cook. We support him. Anyway, Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses.

Yeah, I mean, the funny thing with trying to do that at UCSB is, like, the most popular freshman dorms at UCSB are actually, like, in an old, like, hotel. So it's these two towers that, like, have these, like, like incredible like 360 views, not 360, but like the mountains and the ocean. And then you have like this huge like Olympic swimming pool. So it actually feels like you're just staying at like a Hilton or something like that. And so to go from that to windowless is just a little bit rough. Yeah. Well, underrated strategy by a compound with your friend. Do you use this? Former casino mogul Steve Wynn and financier Thomas Peterfee.

set a record when they bought a four and a half acre compound in 2024. I can't seem to add this to the list, but it's in the Wall Street Journal today. It's on the cover of the mansion section. It's comparing Aspen to Palm Beach. But it's very funny. It says five years ago, $20 million home sales in Aspen were rare, happening no more than a handful times in a year.

An influx of Uber wealthy buyers has now upended that norm, handing the affluent ski area 34 deals above 20 million last year, up 161% from 2024. Year over year growth almost tripling in that category. The median single-family home sale price hit 13.95 million during 2025's third quarter compared to 9.97 million in Palm Beach, Florida, raising the question, has Aspen eclipsed Paul? Beach as one of the priciest markets in the country. Long known as playgrounds for the rich and famous, one sunny, one snowy. Aspen and Palm Beach are increasingly two sides of the same coin when it comes to luxury real estate. Despite 2,000 miles between them, each is home to dozens of billionaires. Restaurants like Saint-Ambruz and boutiques like Brunello Cuccinelli have outposts in both locales. Some of the wealthiest people,

have property in both places, too. People run in packs and they run to the same destinations, said Palm Beach real estate agent, Dana Koch. The meteoric rise of Aspen's ultra-luxury market has made comparisons between the markets unavoidable. Both Palm Beach and Aspen saw deal volume and prices soar in 2020. That's continued to be driven by strong financial markets. The one-percenters are making money hand over fist, said Aspen real estate appraiser Randy Gold. Real estate, he said, is a hard asset that they can enjoy. Both are small markets that are protected geographically, adding to their exclusivity. Palm Beach is an island. I got to turn to M9. Aspen is basically an island in the mountain surrounded by public land. Once you're here, it's very private. Each has a

limited supply of homes. There are only so many beachfront properties in Palm Beach and or homes on Aspen's Red Mountain, which has fueled major price appreciation in both. The numbers are mind-boggling, but the reality is that these properties or unicorns. When they come up for sale, you have buyers out there who will pay a premium. Okay, so Steve Wynn and Thomas Peter Fee, they both own homes in the same area in Palm Beach, and they're known to be friends, and they're both GOP donors, their neighbors in Florida, and apparently they became close enough to go in on a $108 million Aspen Estate together. And so Wynn is the founder of the Wynn resort in casino and the Bellagio.

Thomas Peter Fee is the founder, chairman, and largest shareholder of interactive brokers. So he's made a ton of money. Thomas is worth $35 billion. Steve Wynn is maybe worth $3.4 billion. So one order, magnitude gap between them. And you wonder if it's Wynn being like, I got to bring in some extra firepower on here. Let's go 50-50, brother. Well, here's the, like, this sounds great in theory, and then it's New Year's, and both families want to be in Aspen.

But it is a 22,000 square foot compound. You might just say, hey, we're doing Christmas together, New Year's together. I know, but there's probably only one master. Actually, finding families that want to go be in a cabin. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's a tall order. It's crazy to be like, oh, yeah, like, bro, you're only, little bro, you're only worth $3.4 billion. Hit the, couch. I got the master. Oh, you only put in 50 million into this compound. But this is where it's funny. So, no one, there's no reporting on like why they decided to buy this together, but we have a clue because they, they, the buyer is actually an LLC that they set up. And the name of that LLC is buddies Aspen. We're Aspen buddies. We're a couple of Aspen buddies and we went in on it together. And so they bought an Aspen Mansion together. It's a very funny time. The other buddies

who did not buy a mansion together are, of course, the Google co-founders who have both bought property in Miami. Larry Page just spent $173 million on two Miami homes. Some of them are very odd. We'll go into these. First, let me tell you about fin.a.i. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.com. AI. So Google co-founder Larry Page has bought two massive Miami estates for a combined $173 million, according to people familiar with the situation. The deals come as Page and other Silicon Valley moguls descend on Miami in the face of California's proposed tax on billionaires. Delian called it just a little bit too early, but the move is finally happening. Page paid $101 million in December

to buy one of the properties of waterfront compound in Coconut Grove that had long been the home of the late restaurateur Jonathan Lewis. He then purchased a nearby coconut grove property for 71.9 million from Aris Sloan, Lindemann, Barnett, and her husband, Roger Barnett. Okay, and let's pull up. There was some interest in one of these homes that Larry bought. We can pull it up. I put it at the bottom of the timeline.

Yes. But one of the homes that he purchased looks fantastic. It looks like this jungle oasis. And then you zoom in a little bit. Do the CSI. Enhance. Enhance. enhance it a little bit, it starts to get a little odd. A little odd. Uh, haven't. Oh,

uh-oh. Uh-oh. It has a warning. It's not. It's just a sculpture. We can, we can show it. Let's see. This is going to be a jump scare if it's anything but this. Yes. So this, so you have to show the, show the zoomed-out picture. So scroll down, show the zoomed-out photo. Oh, wait, no, it's not there. Uh-oh. Don't, don't scroll there too much. We need to find the original photo. The original photo is just the- Where did the original photo go? Uh, we'll find that and, and we'll tell you, but if you, but, but basically there's a, there's a, there's a, you know, it's a stock, it's a real estate photo. It's a photo that was taken clearly. This is not, before it was Larry's house. Before it was Larry's house, to be clear. So this is the photo. And then people started zooming in and you keep zooming in and you keep zooming in and you keep zooming in and you keep zooming in and you start seeing some very weird design and decor, interior decorating decisions that, uh, tell a little bit of a weird story. And you're like, what's going on here. And you're like, what's going to start seeing. And you're like, uh, uh, about whoever was here. Usually these properties are staged before they are photographed. So who owned the house? Who owned it previously? Also it's something that Tyler,

can you try to find out the previous owner of this house? I don't know. So I mean we have we do have some Jonathan Lewis is one and Sloan landman Lindeman Barnett and her husband Roger Barnett or the others if this is Larry Page's new house but I know Sergei also some guy named Jeffrey. Oh no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. And they declined to comment. California's proposed ballot initiative would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires who would retroactively apply to those who are California residents as of January 1st, 2026. Now, this proposal is not even on the ballot yet. It's still being workshopped.

But many tech billionaires are not taking any chances and they're relocating as of January 1st or December 31st in many cases. December 31st was really the day to send the press release. It was, it was. Pretty much every other day I'm showing property to a client from the San Francisco Bay Area, says Dina Golden Tire of Douglas Elliman. Every conversation I overhear, they're talking about the wealth tax and how it's retroactive. They're in a hurry, and they're all looking at the same houses. Several agents told the Wall Street Journal they couldn't talk about the deals because they'd signed non-disclosure agreements that could end their careers if broken.

The former Lewis compound spans about four and a half acres on Biscayne Bay in Coganac Grove, one of the city's most coveted neighborhoods. Lewis was the son of the late Peter B. Lewis, one-time CEO of Progressive Insurance Company. What a great business. The property listed for $135 million in 2024 was most reasonably asking $115. The estate has two primary residences. One was designed for the Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s. and Lewis built the other home for his father around 2002.

The other property purchased by the Barnets for 45.9 million in 2021 is less than a mile away. Sloan is the daughter of billionaire George L. Lindeman, and Roger is the chief executive of health supplement maker Shakley. I don't know Shakley, actually. The Barnett sold the San Francisco mansion to a billionaire Lauren Powell Jobs, wife of the late Apple visionary Steve Jobs for around 70 million in 2024, or setting a record for the California city. The Barnett property wasn't on the market at the time of the deal,

so little information is available. Real estate data website. Property Shark shows it was built around 2015. It spans 17,000 square feet with seven bedrooms. Page and Sergey Brin founded Google as Stanford students in 1998 and built it into the world's most valuable companies were one of them. Step back from active management in 2019 and maybe getting back in the arena during the AI boom.

Page is worth around $270 billion. according to Bloomberg, in addition to his home in Palo Alto. He obtained New Zealand residency in 2021. Miami's ultra-luxury market has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2025, there were 19 sales above $50 million in Florida compared with just 12 in New York and 10 in California. Miami had four deals above $100 million last year. Billionaire hedge funder.

Ken Griffin paid $106 million for a company state. Miami really makes Southern California look cheap. Ask a Miami guy to watch him browse, watch him browse Zillow. Yeah. And they're like, right, they're giving the houses away here. Well, let me tell you about vibe.com, where D2C brands, B2B startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on meta. And you know what else is surprisingly expensive, Nashville. I had no idea, But there is a Nashville condo that, quote, where it's James Bond meets Lenny Kravitz. And it just is for sale now for $33.5 million.

So looking to hang out with John Fiorentino out in Nashville. You got to pick this one up. It's 5,000 square feet. Wait, doesn't John live in the four seasons? I think he might. Not to dock. Not to docks. But if you want to get Volta from the source, you got to head to Nashville and hit

John Fio on X with a DM. In Nashville, where luxury home prices have skyrocketed in recent years, a penthouse at the Four Seasons Hotel and private residences is aiming for a record $33.5 million asking price. The condo unit is the city's most expensive home for sale. The penthouse is also available. You can rent it if you don't have $33 million to spare. It's going to cost you $200,000 a month, and you've got to commit to at least six months. But if you have 1.2 mill, burn in a hole in your pocket. You want to hang out in Nashville with one of the greatest idea guys to ever do it, John Fiorentino. Maybe pick this up.

It's just funny. I just realized the guy selling this house is a buddy of mine. Oh, really? I actually bought my house through his office. Jamie Parsons? This is Corto. Okay, yeah. The newly completed four seasons in downtown Nashville near the Ascend Appet, Amph-Aprison.

theater. What ascend amphitheater they're ascending out in national? Whoa. Is that where you spend, spent winter break? Yeah. Yeah, the ascend amphitheater just looks maxing. John has been looking good recently. He must have been spending some time there. It's a few minutes away walk away from Broadway and a thoroughfare famous for its bars and live country music about two miles away from Taylor Swift's long time home in the city. The penthouse spans roughly five thousand square feet with three bedrooms and a balcony lined with floor to ceiling windows. The unit has expansive views of the city and Cumberland

River. Chris Cortazo, a Malibu, California real estate agent, bought the penthouse for $12 million in 2022 when it was just a shell. There were no walls kitchen, he said. There was nothing there. He spent two years building out the unit in an aesthetic he calls James Bond meets Lenny Kravitz anchored by a circular floating fireplace. Wow. Floating fireplace. That's cool. The residents The residence has about a million dollars in smart home technology. He lived full-time in Malibu, but began visiting Nashville around five years ago, Cortozo did. He also owns a roughly 150-acre farm outside the city, he said, and has spent only a few weekends at the penthouse since completing it earlier this year. Cortozo is also listing the Malibu home of the late actress Shannon Doherty, a longtime friend of his.

Oh, I heard about this news. That property hit the market last year for $9.45 million and has a listing price that has since been reduced to 8.75 million. Nashville's luxury real estate market has surged over the past six years, according to Parsons. While only one home traded for over 10 million in Nashville, Kruger said that she believes the figure almost hit 20 in 2025. If Cortazo's home sells at or near its record asking price, it will set a record for Nashville. The current record is held by a suburban home on 50 acres that sold for 32 million in 2024. So if you're looking to head over in Nashville, pick up this penthouse. I've never lived in a, in a, in a penthouse, a condo like this.

Then you've never lived, I've never lived, but personally, I would be going for the 50-acre suburban home. Too many dogs, too many animals around. I want, I want the steeds around. I want to be able to ride the horses. But for the right person in the right time of their life, I'm sure this is a fantastic pickup. In other news. Phantom cash. Fund your wallet, without a exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card uh france will delay the g7 summit to avoid conflict with uh mixed martial arts really uh on on on don't trump's birthday yeah so uh they're going to delay group of seven summit to avoid a conflict with the mixed martial arts event planned at the white house on donald trump's birthday do you think they have a group chat for the g7 and it was like hey can we

get together we got to get together we got to get together we got to do a summit let's do a summit it's been too guys, G7 leaders. Let's do it. And Trump's in there. Just be not, I'm, I already told Dana I'm in. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, it's happening in my house. It's happening in my house. It's going to be really awkward if I'm not there. I got to be there. Let's plan another, another summit, another time. This is, this is interesting. Um, uh, usually there's some big news that comes out of G7 summits. Usually there's, uh, you know, all the leaders get together. They're striking deals. They're talking to each other. There's something going on. Yeah. So definitely worth still doing, worth delaying, but worth doing. Well, speaking of Trump, Lip Bhutan is in his good graces. Donald Trump posts his new best friend. On Truth Social, he says, I just finished a great meeting with the very successful Intel CEO, Lip Bhutan, LBT, as he's called for those who know. Intel just launched the first sub two nanometer CPU processor design built and packaged

right here in the US of A. The United States government is proud to be a shareholder in Intel and is already made through its USA ownership position tens of billions of dollars for the American people in just four months. We made a great deal and so did Intel. Our country is determined. You're kind of slipping into that. Oh, yeah. By the end of the year, I'm going to have a down. Our country is determined to bring leading edge chip manufacturing back to America and that is exactly what is happening.

and people are asking for particular financial advice, which we won't, which we will not give. But Liputon also sat down with Howard Lutnik. Howard says just four months after the United States invested Intel, that investment is already delivering tens of billions of value to the United States people. That momentum continues with Intel's new 1.8 nanometer processor and a major step towards bringing semiconductor manufacturing back home. Let's play this clip from Lipbutan talking to Howard Lutnik. I have the pleasure today of welcoming Lipbu, and he's come to the Department of Commerce

to update us on how Intel has been doing since we made our historic investment in the company. Thank you so much. I'm so delighted to come over here to see you with double the market cap. It's over 200 billion. 200 million. That's got.

And also very exciting. Now our products, first time on the 18A production in the world. In that one of our series three processor with multiple of our customer in US globally and using that is the most advanced post design and also using our most advanced 18A productions. Right, so for the United States, we love the fact that Intel is doing leading edge work in America. In America. 14A means 1.8 nanometer. 14A is 1.4 nanometer.

Think of how incredibly sophisticated and tiny that is. And complex. And then packaging is you take this little, little, little, little teeny thing and how you put layers and layers of sophisticated circuitry on top of it. And you do it with just the most amazing technology. Succession music. Seems like it. In America, leading in America by a U.S.

company that- Get yourself an investor that talks about your company like this. So we're proud of you. This is a- Okay, we're rooting for you and we need you to be successful for a matter. Thank you so much. This is the new startup launch video. You do a deal, you raise some money from a VC,

and you got to put out a music, a video like that. You guys sitting down on the couch next to each other with the succession music and they explain your business, shake your hand and... There's so many new formats. Yeah, new format. Unexplored. Unexplored. Clone that one.

Call, call video, production team, get it done. In some other news, U.S. Oil Executive is commenting on Venezuela. No one wants to go in there when a random effing tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country. And deep dish enjoyer says LMAO. It is remarkable how online this administration is. You saw during the, you know, people have been celebrating the death of acts, and yet during the invasion on, in one of the images of the war room in the background on the TV was just X.com slash search for Venezuela. Let's see what people are saying. Remarkable times we... Next time, they'll probably have Reggie's monitoring the situation.

They should have done that. They should also be using Railway. Railway simplifies software development, web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. So, I posted a... piece about the Apple card and how it's changing from Goldman Sachs to Jamie Diamonds, J.P. Morgan, of course. And a software architect for Goldman Sachs' Consumer Bank, Matt Lowe, chimed in and says, Good article. I think the main reason it didn't work with Goldman Sachs is that it lost its high priority in a double whammy. CEO, David Solomon, used a lot of his power to evolve the partnership culture to an exec-first modern corporation. That's interesting. Through the

that reorg, I speculate he had less political flexibility to defend Marcus from other partners who didn't want to wait for the consumer bank to scale up. Marcus even grew through leadership turnover during the pandemic and made a huge acquisition of Green Sky. It seemed to fizzle out and lost the continued executive sponsorship. It needed to keep going while reporting to an asset and wealth management division. Note in a couple, in last couple weeks' podcast with the Sequoia Capital, Solomon said, main reason for the wind down was regulatory. Interesting. So just some extra context around the Apple card. Well, let me tell you about graphite and then we'll bring in our first guest

of the show. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub to have higher quality software faster. And without any further delay, let's bring me, Jeremy from Sammy Analysis. How are you doing? Welcome back. Welcome back. Second time on the show. Happy New Year. So excited to have you here. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. How are you? Are you shocked to see that the G7 that's supposed to happen in France? Aren't you in France right now? I'm in France right now, yeah. Well, you're going to have to wait for the summit because UFC takes priority in America, apparently.

I don't know if you saw that. Yeah. Anyway. Congratulations on the new article. I would love for you to set the table for us and explain sort of what were the questions that you were trying to answer. What was the overall thesis that you came into this particular article? article, how AI labs are solving the power crisis. And then I have a whole bunch of questions that I want to dig into.

Yeah, look, the question that we keep receiving every day, every hour, it seems, is how are we going to power the AI race? Yeah. You know, is the grid able to handle all of that? And look, last time I came in, I think I said, hey, there's like over half a terawatt of data service requests in all the U.S. grid. Yeah. In same amount of requests.

And we talk about sort of prisoner's dilemma where. because everyone is trying to find power, then it creates sort of a vicious cycle of everyone's thoughts being more speculative and putting requests everywhere. And so basically the grid is over the people can't find energy. And so that's why you're seeing the rise of outside gas, which is something that a lot of people have been talking about. But from our research, we just haven't found out of any good way

to understand what are people actually doing. What are the challenges, what are the systems that people are actually deploying, what's the benefits, what the tradeoffs, and how to understand, how to make sense of all of these. new entrants. Yeah. Because one of the key highlights is, okay, everyone talks about Givernova, everyone talks about Siemens Energy.

Yeah. But we count actually 12 manufacturers that have secured orders of over 400 megawatts for U.S. data centers, all inside gas power. Yeah. There's way more people in the pipeline. Yeah. But essentially, we wanted to show people how are the labs solving the power crisis? Talk about, to some extent, XAI was a bit of a pioneer because obviously it did that be for

everyone. Yeah. And how are the other players following suit and, uh, actually solving this issue. Yeah, let's stay with that point about power requests from AI companies. That's expanded significantly, correct? Isn't it, it's over 10 terawatts now or something like that? Everyone's spamming with these requests. Isn't it? It's an insane figure. Is that roughly correct? I don't know about 10 terawatts. It's over 1. Over roughly a terawatts. Roughly a terawatts. It's always complicated to know exactly. Yeah. But a roughly.

And what are the mechanics of a request for power? Is that going to government-run organizations? Is that a permitting process? What is the anatomy of actually making a request for power if you're an AI company? Sure. So typically you send a request to a transmission provider. So say, American Electric Power, which are just in the U.S. You send them a request. I want power in Ohio. You have to fill. whatever, some kind of form. You tell them what you want by when you want it. And then if sort of that first phase moves through, you have to go through a system level study. Yeah. Okay.

And the reason we have to do that, and that process, the reason it takes time is because the way the grid works, is demand and supply have to be always perfectly synchronized. And if they fall out of sync because there's too much supply or too much demand, then there's basically a blackout for everyone. That's the worst-case scenario, to be clear. But it's possible. It has happened. It happened in Spain about a year ago because of an issue on the supply side.

And so the implication is that if you want to interconnect the one gigawatt data center, you're going to have plenty of system level studies that are going to slow down the process. And this is where you get into that sort of vicious cycle because everyone is sort of putting requests because they know it's going to take a while. Yeah. Well, also, isn't there some people putting in requests just from a speculation standpoint? They're just like, hey, I know that if I get access to the power, I can resell it to somebody else. else and if I just kind of lock into, you know, one of these... Deals. Grids basically giving me a contract, then I can go and flip it.

Is that happening? Everyone wants megawatts these days or gigawatts. So you try what you can to get some. And if you're, for example, say you're based in Ohio, you typically operate in Columbus, Ohio, then suddenly you tell your utility, hey, I want another 500 megawatts. and they respond. Actually, I've had like 10 other people ask me this, so you're going to be the queue. And there's 10 other requests they have to evaluate before I get to yours.

But this is why some of the Bitcoin miners have done actually very surprisingly well in just sort of like pivoting to AI because they had the pre-existing power deals in place, right? Yeah, it's not in the queue. It already exists because the queue is just an evaluation. But then once you have everything approved, you have to build a substation, you have to actually interconnect your data to the grid. And the Bitcoin miners, they already have the substation. They already have the transformers on site.

They already have the energy flowing. The electrons are there. So for them, it's just about retrofitting and just leveraging the megawatts that they have. Is there anything that, I mean, we were reviewing this meta deal today. And they have someone on staff who's the director of global energy. Is there anything that a team or one of these hyperscalers can do to move through the Q quicker. I mean, I imagine they can't just like overpay or bribe or

it would otherwise just be an auction process, but is it sort of a battle of the fore? Is that actually happening? Is it just a battle of a forms? Is it the regulatory team that you have on site? Is it different like scientists that are driving the work or is it just the best legal team wins?

Like what is the anatomy of actually winning allocation in power? So the first thing we have to flag is there there are many different transmission providers in the US, so many different parties that work differently. Okay. But there's a few ways you can do. So first of all, if you're a sophisticated end user,

what you're going to do is analyze the grid and try to understand where does it make sense to have power from a, I guess, grid congestion perspective. Analyzing the network, you realize, okay, this area probably should have free power, so I'm going to talk to my utility. And if you want to have a better chance of being ahead of others, then at least you have identified a specific spot.

pot, but it is likely to have available power. Now, typically, relationships obviously matter. If you've been in the business for 10 years or whatever, and you're good friends with, you know, C-level executives, you can perhaps move up the grid just because, just because of trust. It's not about Nussolibriving or something. It's more about, you have a whole lot of new entrants.

You have a whole lot of new entrants that don't have a lot of experience. And then you have this other guy that maybe has been doing it for 10 years and has a lot of experience and success. So obviously, for the utility, it's easier to trust to get it. has the track record and has the existing relationship. So that's one angle. Sure. Yeah.

I'm interested to know about your process to understand how much power each player is actually accumulating. I've seen, you know, the semi-analysis watermarked screenshots of data centers. Is satellite imagery actually that useful for understanding, like, the map of total data center capacity? Are you looking at regulatory filings? Are you looking at statements from the companies themselves? It feels like you're at least one or two clicks ahead of what the executives of these companies are publicly saying,

and the purpose of semi-analysis is to provide analysis and data ahead of what's publicly available. But what is the process for actually understanding Azure's compute capacity this year before anyone else does? Yeah, sure, thanks. So there's different, to some extent, lead times. For us, the way we do, call it the short-term forecast. Short-term being roughly in like six quarters, extensive satellite imagery. We love satellites. We pay a lot of money for satellites.

Every single block these days, you see satellite pictures. And it's pretty simple. One thing is using historical imagery, figuring out when did construction of specific building stop. to what's a typical time to build for an operator. So you have to get a sense of having reviewed many of their buildings, how long do they typically take, or sort of understanding the design patterns, how maybe they can accelerate the build-out to what extent.

And then if you know how long it takes and when it started, you can know when it's going to be operational. Then it's about the size. It's also about if it's a large project, how fast can you get up to speed? Because one thing is to build the shell, and the other one is to build all the things. electrical, the mechanical, and obviously deliver sequentially data-by-data-hull typically. So there's a bunch of things you can review.

We use all of it. Solilites were big fans, of course. And like some of us, it's interesting because we've been able to be very successful at predicting trends with throughout super skaters by analyzing data centers. Because you have to think of it. I'm saying you can just use satellite imagery, but you have to do it for hundreds of data servers. Who has a time to do that way?

We do. We're crazy. That's awesome. But it works out because if you think about it, Amazon, they accelerated growth, right, from 70% to 20% last quarter. And a lot of people were surprised because people were saying, no, they're losing AI. Azure has accelerated, Google has accelerated, and Amazon hasn't. But actually, if you analyze data circuit construction, they've been accelerating like crazy on the construction side. In the third quarter, 2024, in the fourth quarter, 2024, takes a year for them to build.

Obviously, you see the acceleration fluid mechanically, Q325, Q4, Q425. That's one aspect. The other one, which is a bit more complicated, is tracking the leases. And so sort of understanding what are the different hypers casers leasing capacity from third-party operators, the big guys are QTS,

digital realty equinex, and there's all the crypto miners that are basically doing the same thing. And that's also something we track very closely. And it's complicated because some of that information isn't public, but by triangulating many data points, you can actually get to the answer

using only public data, which is what we do extensively. And using permits, sticking into five links and all of that is a huge part of the problem. process as well to get to the answer. Yeah. As I understand how much is the are you guys benefiting from like actual AI tooling on the research side like are you guys running like you know 20 agents in parallel that are you know basically like looking processing PDFs and

trying to find them monitoring them etc. Are you feeling an unlock? Yeah so we're using the AI quite a bit I think we can do more. I wish we could do more to some extent obviously it's bound by computer use. There are some complications. There's some portals for permit purposes, permit tracking purposes that we can automate. But the problem is that if you think about there are so many states, so many counties, so many different things. And some of them are fairly easy to use.

And so today's agents can actually automate the process. Other ones are maybe more complicated, more archaic, right? Some of them you have a clean PDF. Other ones, it's like a scanner. It's written by hand. There's a lot of different stuff. when you're going to the weeds of the permitting process in the U.S. So we do automate quite a bit.

What we're starting to do with this is pretty interesting project that we have on the data center side is a vision model where you can actually, based on satellite imagery, detect real-time sort of what's the status of construction and understand sort of the inflections that you see as well on that. Yeah, zooming out, it feels like, I think you quoted it something like half a gigawatt of new, data center capacity was being added for a period of year, sort of linear growth. And now we're

seeing a break in the graph and we're seeing exponential growth. And I'm wondering how you're thinking about, there's always this question of like, when will AI show up in the GDP statistics? It's obviously a big business and there's a lot of revenue. But we're not seeing the 10% GDP growth just yet. Maybe that's coming. When we're seeing productivity growth, I mean, Productivity growth. CNBC yesterday was trying to figure out why U.S. economic productivity surged almost 5% highest in six years. Maybe. Maybe. But I mean, my question with regard to like overall U.S. power generation, are you expecting to see a meaningful acceleration, a break in the graph there this year, next year, or is the data center overall energy picture still a small enough slice of the pie in terms of overall?

American energy production and consumption that we won't see it move the overall needle just yet. Oh, it's already moving the needle and it's just going to accelerate. There's just one direction, at least for the next, call it two years. One thing you can do is a lot of the utilities are publicly traded, so you can go one by one. Every single one of them, the only thing they're talking about these days is data service. It's how much low growth I have and then it's about capacity constraints. Can I deliver on that demand? but all of them are seeing tremendous low growth.

And if you think about the leading indicators on the data center side, so for us, we use two things on this. If you think about self-built, so the data centers that are built and operated by hyperskators, construction stocks are exploding. So they're all massively accelerating. They have accelerated tremendously versus 2022-23. So 24 is a big year, 25 insane.

So this is a leading indicator with regards to what's going to happen in 26, for CAPEX, for revenue, and obviously for load growth, because these days it's all correlated. On the leasing side, same thing. If you think about how much data center commitments are the hypersers doing these days, it's also just up and to the right. 2020-type has been an insane year for the leasing market. And so everything points to 26, 27, just accelerating.

And then if you think about GDP growth, because I think it's an interesting topic, there's two things you can talk about. One is on the infrastructure side and the other one is on the productivity side. On the infrastructure side, you're already. you're seeing it. I think it's pretty easy to look at statistics. You can look at data center contribution to GDP. There's a bunch of stuff from some of the agencies. You can look at computer investments. There's a specific GDP road that tells you. All of that is exploding. Roughly speaking, a guest in that is over 50% of GDP group today's AI infrastructure,

which is kind of insane if you think about it. And you can do some monkey math as well. You see Nvidia's revenue. What is it these days? It's like $250 billion annualized or more. If you do the math, right? A lot of that is going to the U.S. now there's obviously it's complicated because there's imports and things like that

you have to deduce. But, you know, US GDP is over $40 trillion, right? 1% is $300 billion. Easily year-over-year additions, AI for investments, over $300 billion. Sure, sure. Taking it all, right?

Power plants, data centers, chips and all of that. Yeah, and that should drop significant GDP growth. And then the second phase of this is on the productivity side, obviously you have to see to some extent, you would expect to see the people that are providing that productivity to be beneficiaries. And so this is why it's important to track what are the AI labs doing, what are the startups doing, which is something we've been tracking pretty closely recently at the analysis. And so if you look at the AI labs, yes, they're all accelerating pretty pretty fast as well on the revenue side. Like you see you used to open AI tripling revenue, Anthropic 10x and so on.

Can you take me through the latest bottleneck in gas turbines? We had Blake Scholl from Boom on the show, and it feels like he's expanding his business to build turbines. And I'm interested in that specifically because we hear about nuclear power plants coming online. That's obviously a very heavy regulatory burden. Also, supersonic flight feels like incredible regulatory burden. But how difficult is it to just manufacture. a new turbine or more of the same design, bring them online, actually ramp up capacity of natural gas turbines.

So typically to develop a new turbine, you're talking about seven to ten years R&D process. So it's pretty fascinating because you have a few new entrants that are hitting the market today. A big one is Dusan. Dusan is providing roughly two gigawatts of turbines to XAI. Dusan, Korean giants on the nuclear side, they've been developing their turbine for over 10 years. and it's like, you know, perfect timing. They have a tremendous time. Yeah, what amazing timing. That's great.

It's pretty lucky. Pro Energy is another interesting example. Also, seven-year R&D program, and late 23, finally, they got all the approvals. It's just very complex technology, a lot of very high-precision materials. So ramping of the manufacturing site is complicated. Another thing to think about, and that's the difference we have with folks like Bloom is, what is the, like, how long can you make your investment when you, build a new factory for gas turbines or some of these systems.

And this is an interesting thing to analyze because for some folks, it's actually easier to build new capacity because their payback period is much higher. And because their revenue per megaw is higher and because their cost is also higher. Just because the prices are going up because AI labs are willing to pay more for the turbines? So, yes, but I'm more thinking about comparing different technologies. Like if you think about Bloom energy, the cost to buy fuel sales is very high. It is much higher than buying a turbine. But the flip side of this is that the payback period, because the revenue is so high per megawatt, the payback period of building a factory is actually much shorter.

So from room perspective, they take less financial risk if they expand capacity in the manufacture more. Pretty good position. It makes a lot of sense. How did you react to the meta-Oclo news from this morning? Well, I mean, I think all of these folks are looking for energy that is. cheap, stable, are looking for ways to ensure the continuity of their supply. And it just makes sense for all of the hyperscuators to work with the nuclear companies. It's not a surprise because everyone has done it already.

You saw Google as well with Cairo's. You saw a bunch of TISD already switched with Oaklo as well about a year ago. So not too surprised about this one. How much does the nuclear fission or even the fusion stuff, Google's partner with Commonwealth fusion systems on a few things. How much does that play into the analysis that you do when you're looking out six quarters? Because when we saw the date 2029, 2032, 2035, our eyes kind of roll back in the bottom, in the back of our head and say, well, that feels post singularity.

So what's the point? Probably important at some point, but certainly less of a critical decision in the horse race of which lab will get power next month to train the next model that we're all going to be focused on. Yeah, exactly. That's why if you read the report that we wrote all about gas, because if you think about the next few quarters, it's gas, there's just no other solution. Nuclear is going to take a few years, solar and batteries are not ready yet, all of these other

alternatives. I think they all have potential, and I'm sure we're going to see a lot of different solutions in five, ten years, but today is just gas. So you're modeling energy, it's mostly gas. Any plans to model or analyze or model water? Is that important at all? Oh, interesting. Yeah, a big topic these days, right? All of you generally speaking is that water is not that big of a problem.

Because in the data space, you have this trade-off between energy and water. And so you can actually use in closed-loop systems that consume pretty much no water. In some cases, zero water. There is some water required just to build the initial tank and the initial loop. But it's closed loop. So you don't need water. So what's the issue? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it is a funny retort to anyone who's worried about the water, the AI water usage. Just if it's important, why doesn't semi-analysis talk about it ever? Why are people not trading the water stocks if it's important? I am interested in the... We might talk about it soon. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's some sort of. of angle, but on the question of water usage, it does seem like meta is moving from an air-cooled system to a water-cooled system. I think I have that right. They moved away from the H design of their

data center. Can you tell me more about why the H-shaped data center was not suitable for water cooling? It felt like a very modern building. Why was it impossible to retrofit that? Why do they have to go with an entirely new design. Yeah, so the thing about the edge design, above everything, it was really designed by META for leading cost efficiency. And so typically, the ratio people use the PUE, which tells you what's the energy efficiency of a given facility. Sure.

Meta had the world's best, the world's most efficient facilities. The energy required to cool the data zone was extremely low. And that's because it had a fairly complex structure, free stories. Okay. The drawback of that is at the time, to build a facility was well two years. So that doesn't work in the AI era. We're talking about month.

It's 122 days for XAI. So you need to go faster. So that's one of the main issues. Now, the other one is to cooling. The way that we're cooling this specific data server is, like, it's, I call it an air-to-air system. You could simplify it and say they open the window. That's basically what they call the data server.

They open the window. Obviously, they have a bunch of stuff. Have we tried opening the window? You know, I actually, I actually tour, George Hots is, he has a miniature data center, just a couple racks of GPUs that he trains for autonomous driving, for self-driving cars that he builds. And his cooling, it really is just like a window unit that just flows air through this particular room in his office. And he's using air-c-cored I had a car with no AC once. Open the windows. Just open the window. It's a time-honored tradition.

Sorry, I got you off. It works. It doesn't like that well if your hogger is liquid-cooled. Obviously, if you have a cold plate that goes through the chip, then the question is how do you cool the fluid that you put into the cold plate to remove the heat from the chip? Opening the window doesn't work that well. You can do some kind of retrofit with liquid to our CDUs. It's expensive. It's not very efficient. So the best way to do is to have a dedicated fluid cooling system, which involves building a whole dedicated piping infrastructure and all of that, which is what metadata. Their new data server can handle seamlessly liquid-cooled chips, whereas the old one always makes.

more complicated. Do you have a view on, you said, Meta's previous data center, I think it was 150 megawatts, two years to build it. How fast are they now? Are they at six months, a year? Do you have any idea of where they will be on the speed frontier, since that seems so critical? Yeah, so age your two, two and a half years, roughly speaking.

Then they build some sort of rectangular design, which is 12 to 15 months. And then they realized, actually, we need to go faster. And that's when you started seeing the tents. And these tents, yeah, the goal is to be able to put out a GPU cluster in six months. Six months. Wow. And it's interesting because they go back to an air-to-air cooling system. So what I told you earlier actually is wrong because despite hardware being increasingly liquid-cooled,

now they're doing air-to-air, again, opening the window. But they have those sidecars, which are liquid-to-air, which are expensive. it again. Okay. It's one way to go faster. That way, you don't have to be able to hold it by thinking of frying all that. Yeah, yeah, that makes other sense. What about how the other hyperscalers are matching up in terms of speed, but also a lot of

the other hyperscalers, a lot of the big tech companies, have made commitments to maybe move away from natural gas to maybe go more net zero, more energy efficient, more carbon neutral. That feels like the water debate is maybe a moot point, but there will be some sort of climate discussion in the future as more and more natural gas gets brought online. It is a fossil fuel after all, or it is not a renewable energy source. So how are, are there any big tech companies that are grappling with that or struggling to get through previous commitments that they made to be more environmental or more net zero, and now they sort of have to retool their business and messaging.

Yeah, you've already starting seeing this in 2025, but in 2024, they all said, for the time being, we keep our commitment for whatever, 2030 or something, net zero, but short term, we're going to have, we're not going to be able to meet our goals and to, I guess, clean our fleet as fast as we expected. But yeah, there's just no way. So there are a few interesting things. So the first thing I would say is you're seeing some projects that are natural gas-based, but they have ways to become more sustainable.

For example, it could be a site where you have great geology to do carbon capture. So for Crusoe has a one like that in Wyoming. So those types of projects obviously have a long-term potential as well because then you can meet your commitment if you're still committed. committed to that. It's clear they're already committed, but other topic. The other thing is, so Google, generally for more analysis, Google seems to be still the most committed hyperskater.

And they're doing some pretty interesting stuff in Texas, right? You saw the acquisition of Intersect Power. They're building some massive campuses in Texas where they actually have on-site solar energy and battery. But to be clear, it's not behind the meter. The reason we don't talk about it in the alt-cicle is because it's not fully off-grid. still a good connection. So it's not really comparable to the off-grid deployments of folks with turbines. Interesting. Yeah, on the Google topic, is there any sort of durable

advantage in multi-data center training that you're seeing from Google? Are you seeing evidence that they're leaning into that more? Are they building more smaller data centers? Or are they also, I don't know, off the top of my head, are they competing with like the Colossus 2? these, you know, Mark Zuckerberg comes out with the picture of the cube in Manhattan. And it's very clear that meta is in the one big, massive data center race. At least they're trying to visualize it that way. I haven't seen that from Google. Is that intentional?

Is there anything we can read into that about their actual training and deployment strategy? No, no, you're right. That's a good point. It is interesting to analyze the different, I guess, frontier AI training architectures from different players. If you look at what meta is trying to build in Louisiana, it's a 2.1 gigawatt campus for the first phase. And they have individual buildings that are 400 megawatts each per billion. It's pretty insane. Microsoft, but it's still split up.

It's still split up. But then putting it all on the same campus, there's some sort of economy of scale-bound power generation, or is it just or is the latency with the fiber connections actually relevant? and you wouldn't want to have it across town, so you put it on the same campus. Like, when would a big tech player choose to split across state lines, across the country, across the world

versus centralize everything in one campus? So I would say for now, Google is really the only one that has been that's high as up to this strategy and it's very unique. But to some extent, you could argue it's because of, first of all, they're the most sophisticated on the networking side.

for a while. That's one of the advantages with Google is, for the last 15 years or whatever, they've been the best at infrastructure. On every single part of infrastructure. And so networking, they've been building their own fiber networks for a while. And so they have much higher bandwidth inside a metro

and between metros and other hyperskos because they've been doing that longer. They've been planning ahead for all of that. So Google is sort of ahead of the others. And on the tech side, they've figured out multidavest data of training from a model perspective way ahead of everyone else.

They've been very open about those. You had a podcast from Jeff Dean, for example, a few months ago where he said, openly, yes, we're doing a multi-data and works pretty well. No one else has really done it at that scale for now. We have a bunch of startups,

but they're not doing it as scale. So yeah, just Google is better at doing it. And what it enables them to do is it enables them to some extent have more options with regards to site selection. They're not really, limited to finding the one two-gigawatt site or the one, you know, a 1.5-gig-s sites,

they can just go around a metro, maybe a 50-mile or even a hundred-mile area and find a bunch of sites that are each 200, 300, 300, 400, 500, connect them, and bam, they have a, you know, two-gig-a-cal a campus. Yeah, yeah. So that's the strategy they're pursuing. That makes sense. Last question for me, and we'll let you get back to your day. I know it's late there.

Have AI workloads, has a shift in AI workloads, had any effect on power decision-making? It feels like you go back a couple of years ago and the vast majority of power that was being used by AI was for training. Now we're moving more towards inference. Does that change the landscape of power acquisition for AI companies broadly or is it sort of an irrelevant point? So first of all, I was actually disagree with the premise. Based on our analysis, training is still the majority and it's growing equally as fast as inference. Inference is surging, but training is surging as well. and that's normal because you have an incentive to do it.

Everyone wants to invest in their own model that is going to unlock revenue growth next year. You haven't seen the limit. So the incentives are aligned to invest today, and that's what everyone is doing. Anyways, to answer your question, yes, inference does have different requirements. There is different types of inference as well. If you think about Open AI, for example, they have two main businesses. Chad GPT is a vertical application. It's fully controlled by themselves.

So for them, it can plan larger campuses. can be gigawatt scale, can be a few hundred megawatts, it's going to be big campus anyways. They can make use of smaller ones, but if you think about it from an infrastructure perspective, what is their biggest paypoint as a company is they want to maximize GPU utilization rate. It is the single largest expense by far, is GPU. So they need to maximize it, and that's easier to do when you have large campuses. So that's why you still see campuses are fairly large, even for inference. They also, in terms of latency, that's a common sort of topic of discussion.

do you need to be very close to the end users? Well, if you think about it, what is actually consuming power for OpenEA? It's deep research, it's GPT5.2 Pro. It's this thinking models, and they take minutes to answer, and so you don't really need to be near a metro. You can just be sort of far away

and still find large pockets of power. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. Yeah, I appreciate the episode. Semi-A analysis is higher and correct. Can you take us on a brief summary of roles or how to apply?

Oh yeah, we're hiring a lot of people. So we have a careers section in our website so you can all check out. We're looking for folks in the AI space. So if you're interested in digging into what we call tokenomics, which is analyzing the economics of AI, analyzing the latest trends in terms of LLMs, different types of model architectures, reach out. If you're an engineer, you have experience with GPU clusters, reach out as well. We're hiring to increase the technical team.

Inference Max, really cool project as well. where we benchmark all of the different models. If you want to work on Infrasmics and work on TPUs and Trinium and GPUs and AMD and VD and VINVIDA and all of that reach out as well. We have a lot of pretty cool offers. So you should all check out the website and yeah, it's a good adventure. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come to break it back for us. Great to see you.

And happy new year. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Turbo puffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Look at those. Love goes.

Next, we are entering our Lambda Lightning Round with Andresen Horowitz celebrating their $15 billion fundraise. We have Jen Ka in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in for the TVPN Ultradown. How are you doing, Jen? Good to see you. Jen, what's happening? Hey, hey, what's happening, brothers?

Not too much. You're off to a banger start of the year. Congratulations. Break it down for us. What happened today? We knew we'd need a bigger gong for you guys in particular this year. Maybe we have to distribute the gong hits across the four injuries and Horowitz partners that we're talking with. We'll see.

You know what I have to say? Hey! There we go. There you go. What does it say on it? It says it's time to build, baby. I love it. I love it.

That's fantastic. There we go. You've probably been hitting that a lot. Do you just do like one hit every time you get off an LP, you get a new commit, just a light tap. You probably had to do a few of them to get up to 15. Exactly. It's not quite your 80-inch one, but, you know, next time I'll get a horse and then we'll call it even. There we go. How was how was, how was, how are the LP pitches going into this fundraise different than in previous years? The markets evolved. Technology has evolved. Dangerous and Horowitz has evolved.

What were you saying that you felt like it was the first time you were saying to LPs this time around? Yeah, so, so let me first breakdown. So $15 billion, huge headline. The number is huge, but, you know, I first I should foremost say, I normally don't respond to online rumors, but I feel need to do so at this moment, the $15 billion is not for the Nepal or Himalayan or Greenland. Right? Let's just spell that right now. People tease things all the time, little breadcrumbs in the releases. I'd like to see an American Everest. I feel like I've heard a pitch for Greenland. The moon. The moon might be American at some point. It already is in many ways, maybe Everest. But, you know, you know, you. You're putting it in startups. You're putting in technology. Exactly. So Hope Springs Eternal. So the prelim number, you guys covered this yesterday, but the prelim numbers for NVCA came out to, you know, 66 billion. So that actually ended up being

what would have been equivalent to 22% of what was raised in 2025, with the $15 billion. So does the $15 billion get included? Do they, are they going to update the 2025 numbers, or do they count it towards 2026 because it's actually being announced now? Yeah, it's going to get counted for 2026. So that is forward. So we're closing our fund today. So that would be 2026 numbers. Yep.

Cool. And so calling now, VC Winter, maybe, you know, potentially over for some folks. But the sentiment to answer your question. So the sentiment from LPs is different insofar as that we are now, this is the second set of funds that we've raised in this AI supercyclical. And so we were oversubscribed in three months. You know, it was, I think, very clear for most people that AI is obviously taking over the world. And particularly when LPs have conviction and also the right information, they will close quickly.

So most funds, you know, the average VC fund takes probably close to over a year to fundraise. And the reality is it's a tale of two cities. If you have great companies, great performance, great DPI, it's very, very easy to raise capital. We are luckily in that camp. If you don't, it's just a lot tougher. And by the way, let me tell you also a story because it's related to on this liquidity topic that you guys oftentimes talk about and hear about from LPs. So, you know, there's a lot of belly aching from LPs about liquidity.

But the reality is it's in select companies. So we actually went through this whole exercise last year. So this was in the middle of liquidity concerns. And this was early days of, you know, the administration stance on endowment tax cuts. And, you know, we internally had this conversation said, gosh, you know, should we offer some liquidity, particularly for some of our older funds to our LPs? So we went around, we called all of our LPs and those older vintages. And specifically, we had a stripe position, seed position, and fund one. And then we had data bricks at the Series A and Fund 3.

And we said, hey, you know, we know you're in a liquidity crisis. Would you be interested if we got you some liquidity in those names? Yeah. And I'll tell you, 30 out of 30 of those early LPs said absolutely not. things like we want liquidity you're telling me would I like to not ride my winners yeah exactly exactly so there's like subtlety in that conversation which is like you know they want liquidity but they want liquidity not out of those names they want to ride those winners right they want to let it's unfortunate you want liquidity the most from the from the from the assets

or the companies that you're at least excited about which is this paradox interesting interesting yeah yeah that makes sense talk about the split of strategies going on at Andrewson Horowitz today. I think a lot of people were curious about crypto not being included in this suite of funds. Is that just a different cycle? Is that a mechanics thing? What's going on there? Or is it truly like a completely separate thing? And we'll be hearing about that later. Yeah, so the latter. So the funds that we'd raised and announced today, it's five out of seven of our funds. So crypto is off cycle and then so is our games fund. So more to come from that. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. How, how are, our,

LPs up to speed on this kind of like structure now. You obviously don't have to go into a conversation explain injuries and Horowitz, but most funds are not at the scale where there's like, you know, this multi, multi front fund approach. Is that like how much of the conversation is about like, okay, like giving you capital, where is it going to be actually allocated and how is it going to be split across the funds? Is it just straight pro rata across the different strategies and funds or how does that work? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a, that's a, that's, that's. That's a great question. And in fact, I think we're one of maybe the first who actually split our funds. Most firms just have a generalist fund. Everything's out of one vehicle. And we very early on, presently realized we needed to decentralize as a firm and then also our funds as well to match that to the teams. And so if you look at any of the individual teams, the deal teams are no bigger than, you know, four to six people. Sure.

And so we're kind of similar to smaller funds and smaller firms, but with the breadth, of course, of, you know, the injuries and horrid's umbrella. And so for LPs, when they think about allocating to us, most of them just say, hey, I want to follow you into all the different funds. And they allocate pro rata. And in fact, we actually set up a vehicle to allow them to do that. Some folks pick and choose. And our view is, hey, every single fund needs to stand on its own. And it needs to earn its own keep from its LPs. And sometimes those LPs might be different, right?

Some MPs, for example, internationally can't invest into certain strategies like crypto, for example, maybe American dynamism. So there's some nuance there of which we do account for. Interesting. Yeah. How much, how many questions are you getting from LPs about trying to predict the next, next Andresen strategy that might take place in this fund? Like, Andresen started as, I mean, you look back at the early, like the fund won and it's basically a seed fund by today's standards. Growth was obviously added on, then bio, then crypto, and then liquids, tokens. There's so many different strategies that if you went back to the dawn of Andreson, you would say, Well, that doesn't fit in this fund mandate. And we've seen firms buy hospital networks and do more private equity-style deals, do more secondary deals. Are LPs looking for you to lock a strategy? Or are they leaving you with a lot of flexibility?

Are they looking for guidance on what might happen in the next 10 years in terms of creative financial plays that you might be able to make? Yeah, so it's funny. Our first fund is funny, you should say, it's the size of a seed fund. The first deal we actually did was the buyout of Skype, which is, there's a good story around that we made, you know, ForexR return in 18 months and the rest is history. But, you know, that first. Yeah. I always remember seeing that on Andreessen's website, and it was like it wasn't a seed bet.

It was this weird deal, but it still panned out really well. And it was like a great logo to have on the portfolio page, but for peculiar reasons. Yeah, and there was a bunch of risk in it because everyone was like, oh, you won't get the IP because of eBay. and blah, blah, and then Microsoft ended up buying it. But, you know, and then there's a whole story there because a lot of our LPs, suffice to say, after raising a venture fund, we're like, what are you doing? Yep, totally.

And ended up working out, nonetheless. You know, we always talk about internally how, you know, the way the individual funds are set up now is almost in the incarnation of the original Andresen Horowitz, from the size of the team, from the capabilities and resources on the operating front. And so you've got these, you know, kind of seven different funds and teams that are effectively the incarnation of that first injuries in horror, it's now replicated.

And that's actually how you scale. We have 600 plus people at the firm. Now, that's the only way you could actually nimbly move without getting mired in the morass of bureaucracy and oftentimes what big organizations end up being. And so in some respects, we don't necessarily, we're not motivated by innovating into, you know, there's a lot of FEC firms out trying their hand of private equity, as you said, buying hospitals, raising private credit strategies. That's not really of interest to us.

I think you mentioned at one point, like going public. As long as been a CEO, we are not a public company. So we don't try to innovate on fund structure, right? We like boring vanilla VC returns, and you give us money, and we'll send you back and where we'll take risk and innovation is on the companies we invest into. How much do you involve individual GPs in the fundraising process? Sounds like, I mean, a three-month process,

really not that long, are you tapping them in at key moments because certain LPs want to understand, like really get to know the individual investors? Or are you, like, aggressively trying to protect their time because their time is really best spent with, you know, founders and actually evaluating and doing deals? Yeah. So, yes, we try to protect their time, but also at the same time, like, this is just like a company. Like a fundraise is a very important exercise. And in fact, you know, a few years ago when people were asking whether we would go away, from the traditional fund structure, you know,

Mark and Ben kind of like the concept of pressure testing our thesis every couple years, right? You got to go out to your LPs, you got to prove to them that your thesis, you know, is worthy of their capital. And then a couple pressures you also,

sorry for my voice, where it's a little hoarse because I've been shouting, you know, you're watching TVPN too often. Like, wire, the wire deadlines now. Exactly, exactly. But that kind of sentiment of pressure testing your thinking is incredible.

And you guys know from fundraising, you know, with companies, like, you learn a lot through the course of that process as well. So all of our GPs get involved. All of them are in the meetings, you know, they're talking to the LPs. They're shaking the hands, kissing the babies. They are front and center of it. How do you, how do you realign the LPs from just endless AI questions and actually keep them interested in bio-health care, American Dynamism?

Do you try and have the AI narrative cut across everything, or is it drowning out the rest of the stories that you're trying to tell? I think AI is similar to any platform shift where it's just going to infiltrate everything. And it's like, obviously, in the zeitgeist, but eventually it's just going to go in the background, just like cloud or mobile. There was that quote from Mark in the launch video that was like, someday in 10 years, we won't talk about the internet because it'll just be everywhere. And it feels like we're already, I like when companies, I think this is the year we're. companies like maybe stop pitching AI as aggressively in taglines because you should just assume that the company is leveraging it to the fullest extent. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. What else are you doing? Like I'm doing that 100%. But I do think, you know, it's great too because I also think, you know,

with this platform shift, LPs can actually have a feel for how transformative this is themselves. So our entire, for example, fundraise process, we tried to take an AI native. first approach. So we had an AI chatbot that was replicated. I was about to ask. In our data room, there was an AI gen in there. Interesting. You know, there's an AI chatbot that was answering any question in any hour of the day. And then our LPs also are playing with these tools themselves as well in their underwriting and their diligence, but also even individually, I won't name the LP, but I was talking to an LP earlier this morning who was playing around with Replit. And I was like, you got to try it. Like just code something that you wish, you know, you had access

She's like, well, I really want to be able to code it out that can look at Peloton classes and let me know when this instructor's, I'm like, try to prompt it. And she was able to do it literally in the course of the morning. So it's one of those things where I think these worlds are converging so quickly. It's also almost great that we're just all we're doing is testing and dragging and iterating. And for the first time, LPs as users can actually see the real world visceral impact to how they run their day-to-day life. How, what is general LP sentiment specifically around 2026? What are, what are expectations? Obviously, we're expecting a slate of IPOs. And that's very exciting if you've been in these, in these companies, these names for, you know, a decade or more at this point. Yeah, I feel like Elon dropped like an early Christmas present when he was, it was like rumor to say that SpaceX might be going public in 2026. and everyone's like, oh, maybe we'll go public in 2020. So I do think sentiment and people are generally positive. Obviously, you know, we'll see where the IPO markets kind of turn out to be. But generally speaking, it's early.

It's off to a good start. Like, we'll see what happens. But I do think people are expecting more capital this year in a way that once one breaks through, it's going to be a watershed moment that might even top, you know, 2021 in terms of the amount of liquidity coming back to folks. That's going to be exciting. That's going to be exciting. Was 15 always the target, or did you go out thinking that you do less and then you kind of upsized it based on demand?

We had a range for our target, and we try to kind of keep in that range just to avoid, you know, upsetting. But you knew it was possible because if Masa can do 100, it's like, come on, can we, can we do 15? I will make that comparison. It is funny in retrospect. You know, that vision fund, you know, it's been covered. Well, yeah, I looked. I completely blocked vision fund out of my head. And then I was like, I was researching before that.

So I was like, okay, $15 billion has to be the biggest fund, venture fund ever. And it was like, oh, no, of course. Yeah, yeah, of course. Anyway, well, thank you so much for coming on this show. Congratulations on massive news. And we will talk to you soon, Jen. Incredible work.

Awesome. Great to see you guys. Catch you later. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And thank you to the chat.

There has been some updates to Claude's policies. Tyler is researching the story now, and we will get to it as soon as we can. Well, we have Alex Rampel from Andrewson Horowitz coming in at the TVP and Ultrudeau. Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you doing? Good. Beautiful background. Fantastic American flag.

What a day. Congratulations. How are you doing? Good, good. Fantastic. Super excited to have you on. I've enjoyed, you're somebody who's, I've read your writing and listened to your podcast appearances for a decade now and always, always appreciated your point of view on a bunch of

different things. So welcome to the show. Yeah. Thank you. I'm here to prove that I'm real. Fantastic. It's like proof of life is very important increasingly, right? Yeah, yeah, it is.

I mean, first time in the show, can you? give us a little bit of the backstory, the journey to Andresen and how long you've been there? Sure. So I've been here for 10 years. Previously, I've been a long time on success. Previously, a long time entrepreneur. So kind of started by writing software when I was a kid in high school, actually even before that. And then out of college, I was like, I graduated in 2003. I was probably the only person from my class that just kind of became an entrepreneur right away. And it wasn't because I was smart or done. Probably more dumb than smart. It's like I had a little business that I was running in college. So kind of kept doing that. Met this guy named Chris Dixon, who was at Harvard Business School when I was at Harvard College.

And you have to remember like 2002 when we met, the internet 1.0 had just died. Everybody lost their jobs. September 11th that happened. And what do you do if you're a dried up entrepreneur? You go to business school. I remember the company called Cosmo.com, a huge hit that kind of went to zero. What did that guy do? He went to HBO.

No way. So Chris Dixon was there, and he and I were like the only two people. I swear in like the entire state of Massachusetts that thought that the internet was still kind of cool. We got introduced by an mutual friend, had coffee at Albond Pan, this little East Coast chain, and then cooked up a product called Did They Read It, which is still around today. It's an email tracking tool. It embeds a tracking pixel in every email that you send out. That did pretty well.

Then we started the Venture Back Company together that became site advisor or that got acquired. and then I started another company called Trial Pay to, like the thing that we learned at site advisor is that nobody likes paying for software. Like you're willing to pay for an intangible good, like a glass of wine, $20 for that seems totally reasonable, right? But paying $20 for one song on iTunes, there would be riots in the streets. So the idea was, I'll give you this digital good for free if you buy something else. And if you know how affiliate marketing works, it kind of plugged into that.

So it's like, hey, we'll give you this product for free if you sign up for Netflix or if you switched to Geico or if you shop at the Gap or if you get a Discover card, using the affiliate commission to go pay for the product, that did pretty well. Like it was like half of the revenue side advisor. It was like from a little shareware business that I used to have back of the day, it doubled R revenue. So I turned that into a company called Trial Pay. That did great for a while, that it did terribly, that I kind of resumed to okay, sold it to Visa.

And then along the way, met this guy, Max Levchen, after he had sold Slide to Google, and we cooked up a company called a firm. So co-founded a firm with Max in 2012 and actually brought a firm to Indrisen Horowitz as a funding opportunity, which they did. And Chris Dixon kind of ended up talking me into joining here in 2015. So I've been here ever since. How quickly did you realize that Chris and Max were special? Because I imagine during those two periods, you were meeting hundreds of different people. I'm sure people wanted to build stuff with you, other entrepreneurs.

and you picked well back to back. And that's probably the hardest, hardest, you know, one of the hardest things to actually clock at times. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the greatest people, they have do things in common. They have this term that's going around a lot,

like high agency. Like they don't just like follow the rules. They just like take matters into their own hands and do something. And then they just kind of know the history of everything before. Like they're just like students of history, philosophy, like, you know,

Chris was a philosophy major. People don't know about him. He went to, you know, he got his bachelor's degree at philosophy, he was going to do a PhD, kind of realized that was a bad idea. And then eventually I went to business school, which is, he will probably say the worst idea. But it was kind of self-evident. I mean, Chris and I, I mean, I- The history thing is a real thing.

Like, if you're talking to an entrepreneur that has been building their business for one to two years, and you can tell them companies that in somewhat recent history in the last decade, even, that have, like, attempted that or companies that are adjacent. sent and they're like, oh, I'm not familiar with that. It's like immediately like such a bear signal. Oh, it's the opposite. Like that's the red flag. The whatever the opposite.

Green flag. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But yeah, the green flag is. Yeah, never like the green flag. What's the green flag? The green flag is not only have, do I know everything. I mean, I'll give you one example. I think the Collison brothers went out to like DeHawks ranch.

Like DeHawks started Visa. He's kind of like a weird quasi-communist, even though he started one of the biggest companies in the world. because Visa was meant to be this like, it was a nonprofit. Visa was a nonprofit until 20, I don't know, 2008, maybe 2009. It was the biggest IPO. Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. But it was a nonprofit until then. A nonprofit like the NFL is a nonprofit. It makes a lot of money, but it's owned by the constituents. Sure. The constituents that owned Visa were the banks. And it's like, okay, I'm starting a payment company. There were a lot of payment companies that came before.

But it's like, who will, let's find this guy who's 90 years old, who's moved outside of capitalism, is working as a farmer just to, learn from him. And like I have this mental model that I now use for entrepreneurs, and it's a memo that I've written that we use internally a lot. I got to say like the best entrepreneurs, they have five things that I look for. They can materialize labor capital and customers, and hopefully those are self-evidence. It's like you can get people to quit their high-paying job for like certain failure. It's like the Ernest Shackleton thing. It's like it wanted men for dangerous journey, almost certain failure and death, but if it worked, you might be famous, right? It's like you want

that. Very, very hard to do. You have to find people that can materialize capital. It's like get people to give you money and the best sign of future fundraising success. Like if we do round end, we want to make sure that there's going to be a round end plus one, or you're going to be profitable on round end, which is unlikely. So are you good at fundraising? Can you get customers? Like imagine it's like, I have two weeks of cash left. Please be my first customer.

I have none. Like who, it's very hard to pull that off. Yeah. Then you want to know the history of the space, which is super important to your point. You want that green flag version, not just the intermediate, you know, what's the, what's the combination of grid and red flag like the, the turn? You don't want the turquoise with it. Like, you want the grief.

Like, this person knows everything that's tried before, and they have a new angle of attack. They're not going to learn on the job. They've actually learned through history. And then the last thing that I care about a lot, everybody in my team knows this. My favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. And it documents the story of this guy, Edmond Dantes,

who's, like, wrongfully accused, is, like, in prison for 17 years, but then becomes the richest person in the world, but doesn't give a shit, right? It's like, all the riches in the world do not matter. he wants revenge. Yeah. Right?

So you could either, revenge kind of sounds bad. It's like a Old Testament. But you either want revenge or redemption. And some of the best entrepreneurs have this in common. And the reason why it's so important from a venture lens is imagine that you're a 20-year-old kid. You start a company and somebody offers you, I don't know, half a billion dollars to buy your company. And you own 25% of it.

You're going to make over $100 million. You'd have to be insane to turn that down. Right? Yeah. And we need people that are insane that actually are going for, It's not that we don't want people that aren't capitalists that don't care about money. But it's like they care about if you've seen the movie's baseballs. It's like, we're not doing this for the money.

We're doing it for a shitload of money, a little different here. It's, I'm doing it for another reason. And like a great example of this is there's this guy, Renaud Laplanche, who started a company called Lending Club. Very famous company at the time. There was like a dearth of IPOs. Like Lending Club kind of gets to scale, goes public. He gets fired from his board, ousted from the company.

He's probably made hundreds of millions of dollars. He's the count of Monte Cristo. He's like, you know, fuck those guys. I'm going to start a new company. I'm going to start an upgrade. And you know what he called his new company? Upgrade. It does the exact same thing as Lending Club.

It's probably 10 times the size of Lending Club now. And what's motivating him is not just the hopefully, you know, shit ton of money, space balls quote, but he wants revenge. Yeah. He wants redemption. And you see this with some of the best entrepreneurs. Like, what is the driving motivation? Because when times get tough, like, you need something because like there is no money.

Like if your company is going to zero, if you're Aaron O'Shackleton in the winter of Antarctica, like your voyage is not successful, right? You need something else driving you at that point. And that's why that metal is something that I find extremely valuable. Have you seen space balls, Jordy? I have not. You got to. I famously have seen like 110 movies.

He's not a set. Last question. One of my probably like a really, I was going to say maybe. It's hard to exactly place a top 10. I loved your episode on Invest Like the Best on operating systems. How is AI kind of like updating your thinking on modes and operating systems and how somebody can create a lot of value with a startup? Yeah, well, I think, well, maybe I can rewind a little bit. And just because we announced this new fundraise, I can tell you exactly what we told our LPs in terms of like what we want to invest in at the application layer.

because I do application layer stuff. And it's really three things. You know, category one is, I call it Greenfield Bingo, and kind of maybe another way of answering your question is, there's something that, there's a quote that I use a lot. The best companies have hostages, not customers, right? Like, that's why nobody likes using sales. You got to be taking revenge.

You got to be taking hostages. You know, it's very old-testment stuff. But the best companies have hostages, not customers. Those are great companies to invest in, right? And that kind of goes to the point that I was making. You know, NetSuite, workday, Salesforce, like, they're all hated by their customers, but none of those customers can leave. However, if you build a better version, like kind of a more AI-first version of all of these companies, and you're selling into the green field, you've got a shot, right? Because, like, I was lucky enough to be the first investor in Mercury.

And Mercury worked not by stealing people from SVB. They just worked. It's like, oh, you're a brand-new company. You can use shitty SVB, or you can use really good Mercury. And that worked, whereas they never got customers from SVB until the weekend that SBB failed. So that greenfield opportunity for software, like, that is AI enabled in the same way that, like, that was true for cloud, right? That was true for mobile. It's like here is the new thing.

The incumbent will eventually build it. Like another expression that I use a lot is like the battle between every startup and incumbent is where the startup gets the distribution before the incumbent gets the innovation. The incumbent, my default assumption is that the incumbent normally wins because they have the distribution. they will get their act together three years later. And with AI and cursor and everything else, they'll get their act together maybe three weeks later. So the kind of the might of distribution is very, very powerful. So one option is you just go into the greenfield.

So that's kind of category one is, you know, we call it Greenfield bingo. It's just like build. We have a bet that's just like NetSuite. It's better. It's AI enabled, but they're not going to steal customers from NetSuite. They're just going to get Greenfield. Category 2 is this kind of new, super exciting category.

of software does labor. And like there, there is no incumbent software product for, another trial attorneys. Like, it's called Microsoft Office, but like Eve does that and does that really well. There's no incumbent software product for dental office receptionist, but Tenor does that and does that very well. So that's a really, these are all industries that I wouldn't say they've been untouched by software. They've been untouched by specialty software. And the reason why is because the market was perceived to be too small. And this is exactly what happened to SaaS. Like fintech really changed SaaS significantly because take, I'm sure you've heard of toast. Toast is one of my favorite businesses. It's like Square, but it's only for restaurants. It's this whole operating system for

restaurants. How many restaurants on their IBM PC Jr. in 1984 used software like zero. And how many of them would pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for software zero? But they all need payment processing. they all need payroll. They need these other services. You kind of bundle them in with software. And this is the really exciting thing about AI is you go say, hey, trial attorney, I want you to pay $50,000 a year for software. You said this 10 years ago. Like, no way. Like, we'll pay for Microsoft Word because we use it to write demand letters. Like, that's it. And now you can say, hey, we'll handle all these cases for you that you could not handle profitably. And that's AI plus software. Now they are software buyers. So that's category two. And then category three, I call the Waldgarden. And I wrote a post

about this a little while ago, but walled garden businesses are amazing because if you assume that in the world that we live in today, and this is another way of thinking about kind of defensibility in AI, open AI has their sites kind of on everything, right? Like Anthropic probably has their sites on everything. It's so easy to build everything. So have you guys heard of open evidence? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I tore my Achilles in February. It's almost a year ago. It sucks, right? It's all better now. Doing something fun? It was. I was skiing in Japan.

There we go. That's a good reason. That's a good reason. There we go. There we go. I'm going to the war. Terrami Achilles. What do I do? So I go to chat GPT. I'm in like the clinic in Nisaco, Japan, talking to the Scottish doctor, and he tells me, oh, yeah, you only have surgery in the U.S. Nobody does it outside the U.S. I was like, this guy's on crack. Of course you have surgery to fix it Achilles. I go to chat TVT. It tells me everything. Then I think, I find this thing open evidence, and it's like chat GPT, but it has every single medical document in the world. And imagine that tomorrow chat GPT 53 comes out. It's AGI. Everybody agrees it's AGI. Human race is over, but it has no medical data. And then on the other side, you have GPT 3.5, and it has every single piece of medical knowledge ever known to mankind. What would you rather

use? And the answer, at least for me, and I did use this, is open evidence. And there are so many businesses that look like this where they find some proprietary piece of data. They're the only ones that have, because before you would have to sell data. That was like your only, that was your only hope as a business. And like another example that I mentioned this post, there's a company called Vlex. And Vlex is this like 25-year-old European data business that bought up, you know, legal records in Spain to start. And they would sell it to firms like Wilson Sincini that needed it for case law. Now they sell an outcome because they're the only ones that have all the records. So you can chart, you can build a really interesting business if you're the only source of some, unique form of data. And I love businesses like that because that's the other, sorry for being

so long-winded here on the answer to your question, but the businesses that can be very, very large and AI that can grow very, very quickly, you still need to make sure that they're fundamentally defensible. And that's the really hard thing to disambiguate today, which is you can have things grow so quickly, but they can also go to zero so quickly because anybody can build software in like a weekend, which is both great and terrifying at the same time. Yeah, indeed. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show and breaking it down. Incredible overview. Yeah.

Thanks guys. Yeah, great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats. All right. Have a great rest of you today. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password presets.

And up next, we have David George. We are running late. David, good to see you. Again, how are you doing? Congratulations on all the progress. How does this change? change growth, the growth practice? Is there's just more of the same strategy? Or can you do new things with this new fund? It's more of the same, honestly. First of all, I'm still like thrown off because I've

worked with Rampel for seven years and we're close friends. And I just realized that his favorite book is Count of Monte Cristo. And that's my favorite book. No one. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great one. Yeah. No, more of the same for the growth fund. I mean, look, you know, the last seven years since we started it, It's been a pretty simple mandate. It's like best companies in the world, best founders in the world with huge ambitions. Typically, the bet that we're making is that it can be bigger than other people believe it can be. You know, Pachey wrote a whole long 16,000 word essay about this today. But if I were to summarize our views and what defines like, you know, quintessential growth investment for us, it's a belief that it can be bigger than people would realize.

And we got a ton of success stories on that. So more of the same in terms of our strategy. And it just so happens that we're on the back of like the best trend of my lifetime. Do you think there's something changing in the psychology of startup founders where the new crop of megacorns, the SpaceX, is it sort of gives the next generation permission to stay private longer. Maybe, hey, you know, previously it was maybe a hundred billion dollar IPO would be crazy big. Now we're maybe having a few trillion dollar IPOs happening soon. all of a sudden, logically, you know, even if you're not in that category, you're like, I'll stay private until $100 billion.

Is the psychology changing for founders? Yeah, it is changing. I'm going to talk about the psychology of founders in two different ways. So one that I'm more excited about, like we can talk about capital markets and public markets and private markets. The thing I'm more excited about is the psychology of the founders that has changed post-COVID. Like this generation of founders is just way more hardcore. Like I, for one, am all for, you know, the being back in the office, the working really hard, you know, unabashed, you know, pursuit of success.

And I think it's a big change, like in the last five or six years that's happened. I think it's part of what's propelling these companies to be so good, so fast. Obviously, AI is the big technological driver. But I think the vibe shift is a huge part of it. You know, we were looking last night at some stats and going back and forth on some of our best companies. And we have a bunch of the AI native companies that are application companies that are kind of 100 million plus, hundred million to a billion dollars of revenue. Yeah.

And we were looking at, do we think they're running themselves differently? So to this point of like, you know, different vibes, what they, what they, what they, what they care about. And it turns out like the old rule of thumb for companies was, you know, if you look at like revenue divided by all their employees, it's like $400,000 of revenue per employee. Like you look at like public software companies, that's kind of where it shakes out. All these AI native companies, they were basically like 500,900,000. $2 million, $2 million, $5 million. They're totally different. I think they're being run totally differently.

We're really excited about that. And the biggest thing is just like there's a tsunami of demand coming their way, which I think enables them to run much, much faster. So I'm super excited about that. As it relates to the capital markets thing, the staying private longer, it's totally rational. Look, there's a bunch of it that is our own sort of government do. as it relates to being a public company and how difficult and expensive that has become. You know, we have a robust private market.

It's been a benefit to us. You know, it's allowed us to invest in a bunch of companies that otherwise would have gone public, you know, sooner when we can still invest in them and they're growing really fast. And, you know, the value proposition for founders is pretty good to be a private company. You know, they can stay private. It's probably a little bit of a higher cost of capital. for them. But the trade-off for them is, you know, they can sort of avoid the daily kind of volatility of the stock price and what that means for paying. And more M&A options as well.

There's a lot of money. What is your day like? What are your weeks? What are your weeks like? I imagine like you're the balancing and like prioritizing when you're like, you want to be, you want to be. You want to be. The spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We got to add. The model is breaking. The model's breaking. No, but, but I imagine it's hard to prioritize when you can write everything from like a a $100 million check up to, you know, at times, like, you know, multi-billion-dollar rounds are coming together. Multi-billion-dollar rounds are coming together. Like how, like, what, what, how do you prioritize your day in your week?

Yeah, I mean, the reason we raise this fund that's a little bit larger, you know, one, it's a reflection of the opportunity set. And two, you know, we want to be able to say, hey, we can write a billion dollar check into a company directly out of the fund. And we have resources to be able to do more than that beyond it. But that was a big part, you know, if we're high conviction in a company, we want to be able to do that. there's not very many of those.

And so, you know, we have to use our time wisely. Fortunately, given our brand and given our coverage, you know, we're able to see most things. We're able to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. And so, you know, we see, you know, probably as a firm, hundreds of deals or investment opportunities or companies a week. And then, you know, we have the, you know, we have the luxury of getting to kind of matchmake with the ones that want to work with us that we think are really special.

you know after this I just you know was texting with a founder and and he was like he kind of cracked open the door that he might do a fundraise. And I'm like great. All right. I'll meet you in our office. Yeah, in a couple minutes. Let's meet our office at 4 o'clock. Like, you know, we got to do it.

So the way I try to spend my time is like, you know, the thing that gives me the most energy is to meet those founders and make investments. Yeah. Well, we'll let you get back to chasing deals. Good luck with that particular founder. Hopefully that founder will be on the show ringing the gong in just a. few weeks. I'm excited to see what you do with this new fund. It feels like preparation, timing, opportunity. This is going to be an amazing chapter. Well, have a great rest of your day,

David. Good to get to the guest. We'll see you. Cheers. And up next, we have Ben Horowitz, the founder of Andrews and Horowitz. The Horowitz in Andrews and Horwitz. Ben, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. Good. How are you guys? We're fantastic. Massive news today. Congratulations. We'll get into the fun structure. I'm sure we'll have a bunch of questions there. I wanted to kick it off with a reflection on your book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. What is the one piece of advice that you think has aged

particularly well from that? What has never changed? And then maybe you could take me through some things that might have changed in this era, bigger companies, AI. What do you go back to and what do you maybe think needs an update? Yeah, well, like I think it's still, like really hard to be an entrepreneur.

And one of my favorite quotes in the book is something Mark said to me, you know, when things were extremely bad, he said, you know, one day we'll look back on this, chuckled nervously, and changed the subject. I think someone has to succeed those late emails. Yeah. Yeah. He would always say things get darkest before they go completely black. Yeah.

I mean, it's underrated how long you two have been in partnership beyond just this firm. You've worked together for so long. 30 years. 30 years. What a run. An overnight success, a true overnight success, if there ever was one. How do you two like to work together now? How is the day-to-day working at the firm?

Yeah, I mean, I think that it works pretty well. I mean, we have pretty different roles. So I run the firm. And then, you know, Mark is kind of, in a lot of ways, the face of the firm. And he also, you know, he gets very deep on specific things. So policy, AI are kind of two things that he's like super focused on right now. And, you know, he has many, many ideas about, you know, running the firm and I have many ideas about things. he does.

And so, you know, it's very collaborative, I would just say. And, you know, we argue all the time about everything. That's great. As any good partnership does. Sometimes he's right. Sometimes I'm right. Yeah. Well, how is the structure of running the firm?

How is the structure of the firm changing in this era? Obviously, the numbers are bigger, but on the fundraising side, but maybe not on the team side, what's changing? Is there anything that you've felt like this technology shift? requires different management of the firm? Yeah, no, for sure. I think that, you know, what's happened is where we have such a powerful new technology platform that the number of really important companies that will be created out of it has just

multiplied. Interesting. And, you know, like the tech industry itself used to just not be that big. Yeah. And now the tech industry is all industry. Yeah. And that changed is kind of what really changed the architecture of the firm. So originally, you know, we looked like every other venture firm.

We were, you know, a team of venture investors. You know, we were a little different in that we had a more elaborate platform. But now what we've done is we've kind of subdivided the technology market into all of its sub-market. So, you know, infrastructure, applications, you know, crypto, early-stage stuff, bio. with these kinds of things, American dynamism. And each of those teams is basically looks like the original Andreessen Horowitz, but they're independent of each other. And that enables us to both kind of cover the whole market in a very, very serious way,

but also be nimble and not have, I mean, you don't want 20 people in a room talking about a deal. You're not going to get to the truth like that. You know, just in my management experience, it turns out you can't have a conversation. 20 people. You can have a presentation. How do you think about empowering the firm or the subteams to become subject matter experts and actually investigate and prosecute deal theses in entirely new markets where no one in the firm might have ever done an oil and gas deal or a solar deal or some bio thing that's entirely new? And you have a team, but there's new markets forming and new markets coming

online as potential transformation targets for technology, how are you keeping the firm sharp on every corner of the global economy? Yeah, so a lot of times, you know, there are super experimental things that we'll look at, but we don't necessarily kind of build the organization around yet. And then, you know, but once we commit the flag, then that, you know, our big commitment would be, okay, we'll create a fund around it. So, you know, we did that with crypto. We made the Coinbase investment before we had the crypto fund.

But then we, as we got into it, we said, well, like, this is going to be a larger market. And it's super different than everything we're doing. So we need to commit around that. More recently, you know, with AI, AI, like the way you build AI companies, the nature of the AI founder is just so different than everything that we've seen before that we ended up bringing in. a lot of expertise from the outside, we kind of reoriented everybody on the inside. Like we actually had, you know, a huge amount of training materials and, like, you know, basically exams to make sure that, you know, everybody who's work on that was what we call AI Native and understood like all aspects of it before getting into it just because, you know,

these things do tend to be different. And this is why you see a lot of people, age out of venture capital and then a lot of kind of firms be done what they once were. You know, they were very important in 2015, but they didn't necessarily make the transition. They didn't bring in the right kind of talent. Yeah. As when you're managing the firm, how do you think about the dividing lines and the walls between different funds? We've seen just with just with the neoclouds, a lot of those folks started as crypto companies.

then they became AI companies. But they're building things at such massive scale. I wouldn't be as surprised to see them in an American Dynamism portfolio because they're sort of re-industrializing. So are you the person that the firm, that one of the subdivision leaders comes to to say, I want this in my fund? How does that work?

Yeah. So there's not that much conflict in that, you know, the categories are pretty clear. There are, you know, it happens occasionally where they bump in. to each other, but, you know, for the most part, it's like, what are you really trying to do? And then the entrepreneur will gravitate towards one of the funds based on what they're trying to do. Like, we want to sell things to the government.

Yeah. Okay. That's likely going to go into American dynamism, whereas, like, okay, we've got, you know, eight PhDs in AI. That's almost certainly going to end up in infrastructure. Yeah. You know, kind of model world and that kind of thing. And so, you know, it's really matching that the funds are, you think about markets of entrepreneurs,

and the funds are designed to address that market of entrepreneurs, and those tend to be fairly distinct. Now, sometimes, you know, people will try to game us and get rejected by one part and then they'll go to it. Okay. We have very, very, very good, comprehensive data on everything we've seen. we've got extremely good systems, so we catch those people. When did you realize a $15 billion fund was possible? Was it, did you imagine this kind of scale was possible from inception? Or was it, did you build that?

Yeah, you know, our first fund was $300 million. So we definitely weren't thinking about it then. We thought 300 million was a lot. And people thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009. But now, like, what we've done is we, we, we, We've kind of looked at the markets and said, okay, you know, how big is this market? And then what kind of fund do we need to kind of win in that market and generate a large return? And, you know, we tend to have a relatively optimistic view of the future.

I think there are some like cynical VCs out there. And like, when I was the boy, don't you're racing for it this high. Yeah, she's like, play the game on the field. Yeah. We like to look forward and not look backwards. And so as a result, like something, you know, I think we have done a good job of getting ahead of the game. Like when we raised Fund 3, which was a billion dollars, we got a lot of criticism from other funds going like, that's crazy. You know, no billion dollar fund has ever returned money. Yard, yardy, yardy, already, yardy, yard. And we're like, well, okay, but like the world didn't look like this and software's eating the world and things are getting bigger. And we think that, like, we think that, like, we. can deploy a billion dollars. And that fun, you know, had Coinbase and Databricks and Lyft and DigitalOcean and GitHub and like a lot of big outcomes. And if we had that much money, it'd be a problem. Yeah. On that note of optimism and understanding the scale of the internet as it eats the entire world, how did you process the bubble talk that took place

in the back half of 2025? Well, you know, I was CEO during another bubble. Yeah. So I know a lot about bubbles. Look, I think that, so there's a couple of things that I learned from the bubble that we were in. One was, sorry, sorry. We keep a bubble gun handy. Yeah, look, you know, one of the things, if you look back at that bubble, there were a lot of things.

there were a lot of things that were present then that are definitely not present now. So like probably the biggest thing, the internet, everybody knew the internet was going to be giant. But at the time that everybody was investing all the money, the internet was very, very small. So if you go back to 1996, at Netscape, we had 90% browser share and, you know, we had $50 million in revenue. So the entire, or we have 50 million users, sorry, 50 million users. So the entire number of people on the internet was 55 million. Yeah. So you're funding these companies and giving them a $10 billion valuation selling into a market of 55 million people.

And then half of those were on dial-up, so it was limited in what you could do. And so those valuations were running way, way, way ahead of the technology is kind of what caused the bubble. You know, if you look at AI, the technology is like working and getting to the world right now. Like how many people are on chat GPT and, you know, how is that business going? It had, I think, zero revenue in November of 2022. And I don't know what the current number is, but it's probably between 15 and 20 billion. Like, we've never seen that before. So the things are working, like the things that were bubbleicious in 99.

aren't quite the same. But to me, the biggest thing that I learned was right before the bubble burst, nobody thought it was a bubble. Warren Buffett, who had never invested in any tech in early 2000s, started investing in tech. So if everybody capitulated and agreed prices would never go down. Like that's what you need to get to a bubble. It's a psychological phenomenon, you know, not a financial phenomenon. And so, you know, right now with everybody talking about a bubble, I's like, oh, great, we're not in a bubble. Because it's when nobody believes it's a bubble that it becomes a bubble.

Same with the financial crisis, by the way. If you look at the price, you know, the kind of interest you pay on like home loan debt in 2007, it was the lowest in history. Yeah. Right before it all came crashing. And it should have been the highest. Right before everybody defaulted. Yeah.

You know, it was the lowest in history. And that's because it was a bubble because everybody believed, hey, they're not building any more land anymore. You know, like that. That's what's going on. And so once you get into that kind of psychological convergence, that's when you really get into like a really crazy bubble. Now, look, in venture capital, everything is always priced at either half or double what

it's worth. Like, that's the steady state. And so are there going to be? things that are, you know, priced way too high. Yeah, of course. Speaking of land, how are you processing the move out of California, the news in California, of the wealth taxes? A lot of folks are saying that, you know, California might shoot themselves in the foot, kill the golden goose. How have you been processing the news? Yeah, I mean, so it's very kind of like an interesting kind of view of the world, I think, that the

the groups in California have been kind of pushing this idea. So, you know, I go all over the world I've met like in the last year, you know, the president of Mexico, the president of El Salvador, you know, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. So like I'm always with world leaders or I've spent a lot of time with them. And they always want to know like how do we create Silicon Valley here. And when you look at Silicon Valley. We want to go to the goose. You're golden goose.

We want one. It's pretty remarkable that, like, we've repeatedly created companies with larger kind of GDP than most countries. Like, routinely, we've done that. And so rather than asking, like, how did we do that? It's like, well, how can we, like, rearrange it and, you know, run an experiment and see if it destroys it or not? And so I think that's probably the weirdest. part of it for me that people would think about it that way. Like, I mean, if you start confiscating wealth and, you know, taxing unrealized capital gains for people who aren't liquid, like,

so actually we saw this in Norway. So Norway has an unrealized capital against tax. And if, in Norway's got like a lot of extremely smart people, great entrepreneurs, but they all left. And when you talk to entrepreneurs in Norway, they're like, well, I literally, can't pay the tax because the company got marked up in whatever, a billion, two billion dollars. And I own a lot of it. And I can't get that money out. It's a private company. And so I'm stuck. So I have to leave the country. And there are no entrepreneurs. There is basically no tech entrepreneurs in Norway now. And if you wanted to get, it's been so hard to break the Silicon Valley network effect, but this is the best strategy I've seen.

If you wanted to direct the California Tech ecosystem. How are you processing? It feels like today we have this incredible optimism within the technology industry, this incredible excitement. And then outside of the technology, you know, your neighbor or somebody nearby has like this. It feels like this real tension and kind of fear from broader society about the work that is being done within the technology industry. And you see interviews that, you know, AI leaders will give where they'll say, we're summoning the demon or they'll say, you know,

not the most optimistic storytelling. We're going to end, the world will end, but we're going to create some great companies. So I think people like these interviews and these quotes spread so quickly, a lot of people have heard them. And the question from the broader populace is like, hey, do we need to do this?

What's the optimistic vision? Yeah, or can we stop, right? And obviously technology is, you know, proven to be somewhat inevitable, relentless. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think the good news is it speaks to the importance of the moment. So this is on the order of the microprocessor, the steam engine or electricity or something like that.

And those things all turned out to be like really good for humanity. Was there that much with electricity was there like the level of fear? There was. Because there was people that would like go and obviously I know the stories, people that would like, their job was to light the lamp. right but oh yeah like if you go back and read about the beginning of electricity it's wild well they made a law when automobiles first came out there was a law in the united states that said if you're driving your car and you see a horse you have to stop the car disassemble it and wait for the horse to pack like it was that level that was the regulatory idea so yeah i mean i think it by the way watches where

same. You know, when watches came out, there was like huge fear that like people would never be able to have a conversation again because they'd be just checking the time. Always. And so, yeah, these technologies like generate a lot of fear. But I think that, you know, the good news on it is, you know, this one is really important. I think that the impact into the well-being of humanity is going to be bigger than certainly anything in my lifetime. And, you know, One of our bigger problems, I think, is there are people in the industry going for regulatory capture who kind of feed into the fear. And then, look, there are also people who have just, you know, it's moving so fast that is actually freaked them out who are working on it. And that's, how do you advise portfolio founders or even people at the firm around processing noise?

I think historically, you know, there wasn't like this constant chatter, right? We have like X now, which is like a constant, you know, stream of consciousness from millions of people that are sharing their opinion. And it's, you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs that, you know, one day everybody's saying that they're the greatest thing ever. And then the next day, you know, people start to criticize. And how do you kind of like, what's your, what guidance do you give there? Yeah, well, I think that like the world of media.

changed. And it's, I think it's tricky for people and companies to process because if you grew up in marketing or in old media, your whole concept of the laws of physics is different. So in old world, you're always thinking defensively because there were, there were very few channels to get your message out. The format was very tight. You know, you could get a quote in here, you could get a few sentences before the host cut you off or whatever. Yeah, you know, you guys watch CNNs from time to time. And so, like, in that world, the way you would think about media is just like, let's make sure we don't say the wrong thing.

Let's spend hours and hours crafting the message and so forth. You know, the new world, it's like wide open. There's media everywhere. The formats are whatever you want it to be. And so the right kind of way to think about it is you have to be interesting. And don't worry about making a mistake because you can just come back tomorrow and flood the zone. You know, I just keep going. And that, I think it's, I found it very, very difficult to reorient somebody who has spent a career in old media world, kind of thinking in a new media way.

And so the biggest thing that, like I really talked to RCC, about is like you've got to approach the you have to approach new media with new media thinking new media people that kind of thing and it really it's a remarkably opposite world it's like you know it's like you're landing on mars and you're like well what the fuck happened to gravity you know different and you can't even say well no gravity's different here because it's like no no gravity just is like like i can't deal with the fact That's just the truth. Yeah. Well, we would love to keep talking about media. Very few things that we enjoyed. We should ring the gone. But we know you have a late, you've got late fees if you're late to meeting.

So this gone is for the whole A6CT team. Congratulations. And we won't keep you any longer, but come back on again soon and congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. And with that, we need to check in on the improper Claude code situation. Eric just said that they're good for the $10.10.

He says he's one minute late to his next meeting. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's right. That's right. They have a late fee. Yeah, for those that don't know, and Tristan partners, if they're late to, if they're late. If they're late.

If they have phones out, they get fined. Yeah, no, but it's late if you're late to a meeting with a founder that you're looking to invest in. or you're just meeting. You've got to pay if you're like... Well, we should take it with Tyler. There were some rumblings about a change to Claude code. Can you take it down to what happened? So basically what happened was...

Okay, so when you get a Claude subscription, right, there's Pro and Max. You get like Claude Code credits, basically. And so what was going on was there's like third-party harnesses. So there's one open code. There's like a bunch of these. And they would basically use the... the credits that you get from your cloud subscription, like use.

And it's like they're like, you know, open source, agentic arnices, whatever. Sure. So Anthropics stopped that. So you can't use your base, you can't use your subscription as like the credits. So you have to use the actual API. The actual API. Okay. That's like the main thing.

It's like not, to me it doesn't seem that crazy of a thing because you can still use it with the API. It's more expensive. Is it an exchange rate thing maybe? Like if I'm on Cloud. Pro or Claude Max, am I getting on a per dollar basis more tokens than I would if I, okay, got it. That's why there's like a lot of arbitrage. They were getting arbed and they said no more arbing us.

You can think of like Claude code is going to get much better if more people use it, right? Because it's like an RL environment basically. So the value of the data. So there shouldn't be incentivizing people to go elsewhere, but they are still allowing people to go elsewhere just at the, at the consistent rate. API rate. Yeah. So you can still, it's like bring your own key.

You can do that. Okay. That doesn't seem like too bad. It's not that crazy, but people are very mad. They're canceling their cloud. People are mad. Mad at Claude.

Yeah. It's so sad. Oh, well, I'm sure that they will figure it out. And the fun will continue. We do have to cover another story in the AI world. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show

over at Google, he said, I'm happy to share that we, the Google AI studio team, are now sponsoring tailwind CSS, the project, that had to lay off three people, and it was very dramatic, because it was 75% of the team, but their business model was not really working because they were selling templates, which of course could be assembled by AI agents in the modern era.

Yeah, I love this. Logan said, honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders, and I said, you drop this king, and I gave him the credit of Mario holding the crowd, if you scroll down, you should see it. Yeah, this is great. That's me. I expected this to happen pretty quickly. I'm glad Logan made this move.

And I think a handful of others did as well. So hopefully Tailwind can hire back the handful of engineers that they were forced to let go. And yeah, this should give them some more predictability while they figure out the next chapter. Yeah. Well, in other news, OpenAI is reserving $50 billion for a stock grant pool. Jack Raines says 500 billion company doing 13 billion in revenue, projecting 50 billion in equity comp is so good. So price of the AI.

The SF real estate is going up. Price of the AI researcher going up, but they have the money to distribute. That is a big equity pool, but it's an opportunity to join pre-IPO, get some shares, and hopefully do well for yourself. Well, thank you so much for watching the show and tuning in today. We will be back 11 a.m. in the books. Pacific on Monday.

Only three more sleeps. Until we're back. And subscribe to our newsletter at TBPN.com. And with that, we'll say goodbye and have a great weekend. Have an amazing weekend. Thank you for watching.

We love you. See you Monday. Goodbye.