TBPN - America's Tech Wishlist, Comcast Splits in Two, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome | Zach Laberge, Gavin Uberti, Eren Bali, Larsen Jensen, Ricky Rosa, Andrew Rea, Michael Anderson, Tristan Thompson, Grant Gregory & Ian Rountree

Starting point is 00:00:01 Watch the TVPN. Today is Tuesday, June 30th. End of the quarter. 26. We're live from the TVPN Ultram, the Temple of Technology, the Forteals of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both.

Starting point is 00:00:15 These are used corporate cards, bill pay accounting a whole lot more all in one place. Thanks, son. Where do you raise this? Amazing news out of ramp. Today, our Karazian, one of the greatest economist to ever do it, has canceled the AI job apocalypse. We'll get into it, but it's a very interesting.

Starting point is 00:00:31 is showing that firms that adopt AI are hiring. They're going on the offensive. I've always said that this is the correct stance for a CEO to take is say, yeah, we're getting so much productivity. We're going to crush our competitors. We're staffing up. This is not doom. We're not some, like there were all these CEOs that went into this very defensive. They were acting like they got bought for pennies on the dollar by a private equity firm. And they're like, yeah, it's looking pretty bad for us. We're going to have to fire everyone and cut costs because this AI It never made any sense. My point, my, my, my, my, go on the offense.

Starting point is 00:01:05 War. You have someone who's like, yeah, we're using AI. We're way more efficient now. We're getting more value per person on our team. And so you're like, okay, great. So you're hiring more people, right? Because you're getting more out of each incremental person. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:18 And they're like, well, no, actually. Actually, yeah, we got to do layoffs. A lot of these, we know, we've known this for a long time. A lot of these CEOs just overhired. They wanted to lay people off. They wanted to do. They needed an excuse. They wanted to get rid of underperform.

Starting point is 00:01:31 people that weren't fit, like the right fit for this particular company, all of those folks will reshuffle, find their place. Not everyone's suited to work at a giant 100,000 person company. Some people might be better off at a 5,000 person company, or 500 person company, or a 2 person company, or even a 1 person company. There's also interesting studies showing that entrepreneurship is on the rise and it's never been better to go it alone. Thank you, Jordy. What else is in the news? give you a quick overview. People were clamoring for a Rocket Lab story that never came yesterday. Rocket Lab enters the arena with SpaceX, Brandon Grell, fired up the TBPN newsletter, which you can

Starting point is 00:02:11 subscribe to at TBPN.com today because we were on the horn with Prof. G. We did his podcast. Very excited for that to come out. We're warmed up because we already got an hour of podcasting under our belts for today. That's a four hour day for a day for a three hour show for you. It's just coming out of stealth. We got Aaron Bolly for Monogram coming on. We got Tristan Thompson in live in the TBPN Ultradome. And then Grant Gregory, Ian Roundtree from Cantos coming in person as well. New fun. We're going back and forth.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Fundraising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement, startup funding raising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement. The money's flowing. Things are good. Anyway, Rocket Lab, they are duking it out with SpaceX. Let's go through it. Yesterday, the launch services and space systems provider, Rocket Lab agreed to purchase satellite manufacturer orororidium in a cache and all.

Starting point is 00:03:00 and stock deal that values the company at $8 billion or 20% more than the share price at Friday's close. Eridium pioneered Leo's, Leo satellites launching its first one some 30 years ago. The Eridium network was the original sat phone, this huge block of a phone. You would take out the antenna out of the back, and the antenna was big enough to kill you instantly if you let it get near your brain. Just kidding, it was very simple. But it would be terrifying to anyone worried about microwave technology.

Starting point is 00:03:30 or any sort of radiation. But it was wildly successful. The company grew and grew, and now it's part of Rocket Lab. Today, they operate a fleet of 66 satellites. That seems low. That's because these are bigger, older satellites,

Starting point is 00:03:44 but this partnership is probably going up against Starlink. So that it connects handsets and other devices used by ships, mining sites, U.S. government agencies, enterprise connectivity play. The move represents yet more vertical integration at Rocket Lab over the years. company has grown from small niche satellite launch provider to an integrated space powerhouse. It now designed satellites and aerospace components, serves the defense primes, has the second most launched U.S. rocket annually, the electron rocket, and is currently developing a reusable medium lift launch vehicle.

Starting point is 00:04:20 But Jeff Bezos was probably coming for that silver medal any day now. With the Arridium acquisition, Rocket Lab is positioning itself to compete directly with SpaceX, which already connects, which already operates. operates a 10,000 satellite fleet. Rocket Lab has its work cut out for it, says Brandon Guerrell. Delian had a good post about this, talking about the journey of Rocket Lab we can pull up because it was a SPAC. And SPACs have a bad rep. They all went down 99.999%. But not Rocket Lab. On August 25th, 2021, Rocket Lab spacked at $4.1 billion, the usual SPAC price, probably $10 a share, $4 billion valuation. It stayed at or below that price in the public markets for three whole years until September

Starting point is 00:05:05 2024 when it started to grow both revenue and get re-rated. Now it's acquiring Eridium for $8 billion twice its original IPO price. And Delian says, this is the value. You could buy it for around $4.80-ish a share on July 1st in 2024. It is now sitting at $101. Yeah, what a run. And yeah, the whole space economy has been booming. Very, very good.

Starting point is 00:05:32 It's a $60 billion company, so they're picking up an $8 billion connectivity provider. And we can play a little bit of this from the founder of Rocket Land, the CEO. Rocket Lab is Rocket Man himself. Rocket Lab is acquiring Arridium communications. Last time I was wearing this blue jacket was announcing neutron.

Starting point is 00:05:53 So I guess that means that's something important to announce today. Do you ever wait pause for a second? Do you ever put on a jacket like that? Because let's rewind. Is this really the important? This seems to be one of the more. Alright, look at this, look no, wait. Whoa, whoa.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Whoa! I don't know. I mean, I don't think I have, but now I want to try. We try. I go like this, take the jacket off. And then when I put on the jacket, you usually just go, how do I put on the jacket? Now then punch up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Starting point is 00:06:30 That was way too much to the side. But that's what I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but try it his way. One arm out and then you want to punch up through. Okay, so you go one arm in, and then you're punching up to the stratosphere because he launches rockets. No, it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the rockets that go to orbit. Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:06:55 Okay, symbolic. All right, let's go back to the video. Let's keep playing the video. Man, this thing shrunk. This thing's shrunk. This thing's not too. Okay, we're going to go back to school for a little bit. I want to introduce you to the space application equation.

Starting point is 00:07:10 So you've heard me talk a lot in the past about applications. It's where all the value in space truly lies. But in order to exploit that value to the fullest, you need a few other things. The first thing is unfettered access to space. to space, so you need your own launch. And then of course you need your own ability to build spacecraft at scale. We've got that too.

Starting point is 00:07:44 But there's some other really big barriers to building large, successful constellations in orbit. And the first one, Romantic Companions. Spectrum. Spectrum is a finite, almost impossible to get. And of course, not all spectrum is created the same. The next thing is, takes a long time to build and launch

Starting point is 00:08:05 infrastructure, a long time to design and build your satellites, launch them, and even longer time to get your first one dollar of revenue. And then finally, it's a long time to a sustained cash flow model, a long time to build your business model, a long time to build your customer base, and it takes just that long extended time until you've got proper reoccurring cash flow. So those of you who know me will know that I'm way too impatient for that. So we found a bit of a shortcut. Rocket Lab is acquiring Arridium communications.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Good music. Very clear radio. I believe this would be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry. It's the ultimate combination for growth. And if you think back to our little whiteboard session a moment ago, this is a deal where one plus one equals three, not just two. One being Rocket Lab, we have unfettered access to space. Unfettered.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Unfettered. Unfettered intelligence. And then you think of Arridium, they have an already operational constant. spectrum, not just any spectrum, extremely valuable spectrum. Oh yeah, the spectrum's really important. Millions of customers and they're a profitable business. So where the three comes in is the result of these two things is a fully integrated self-launching space superpower, one that will unlock more growth from Ariridians' existing network

Starting point is 00:09:21 and build new constellations to unlock new services and market opportunities. This is officially our entrance into the space applications market. The thing we've been talking about for a long time now, but to be clear, this is not the finish Now we won't just continue Auridium's network as is. We're going to build upon it to unlock new markets and pioneer new space-based services. Rocket Lab's future in space applications has just been unlocked and accelerated. And with that, I like this guy. I'm off to buy a new jacket.

Starting point is 00:09:55 This thing's too small. See, it goes full circle. The reason that he had to put the jacket on sort of awkwardly was too small. It was a part of the story. Yeah, it was gay. It was good. That's a really good video. I like that. Anyway, we'll be interesting. Doesn't seem that hard to put up more satellites, just lower. It's just rocket science. I think they've got to figure it out. They've been doing rocket science for a while.

Starting point is 00:10:21 But congrats to everyone at Rocket Lab and iridium. Deal makes a ton of sense. And we'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. A lot of the space bulls will be picking up shares, I'm sure. Comcast split in 2011 Comcast, which was primarily a cable TV internet and phone provider to something like 30 million Americans bought a 51% stake in NBC Universal from General Electric. I love it. I love an industrial company that owns a media company. It's happened before, folks. It's not that crazy.

Starting point is 00:10:54 It just might work. In 2013, it purchased the remaining 49% stake. Since then, Comcast has acquired the European media company Sky, the movie studio, DreamWorks Animation, and through NBC Universal spun up peacock among other activity in the entertainment space. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast's decade-long plus foray into, decade-plus long foray into trying to be a content plus distribution company is coming to an end. It's planning to split the businesses into two. The Comcast entity will once again become a, become a connectivity-only business and NBC Universal will focus entirely on content. And there's been a number of spinouts

Starting point is 00:11:37 that have been happening for a while. And this is the final, like big one, I guess. There's a recent history of telecom connectivity companies rolling up entertainment businesses and then spinning them out or getting rid of them over the past decade. Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, reorganized the two into a entity called Verizon Media and ultimately sold Verizon Media to Apollo. in 2021 over roughly the same period. AT&T bought DirecTV and Time Warner, but ended up fully exiting its position in direct TV and spun off Time Warner as Warner Media into its own entity in 2022. So, interesting deal to follow along. The other good news in the space world is that after that explosion at Blue Origin launch, that New Glenn launch that was so disheartening, there were rumors

Starting point is 00:12:28 that it might be two years until they got that launch pad back online, but there is some updates here. There are some updates. To return to flight this year, we're not rebuilding the same pad. We're going straight to a horizontal vertical hybrid con-ops. We had already been developing for our 9x4 new Glenn launch vehicle using existing infrastructure, skipping a new transporter erector and creating a common con-ops across two paths. Dave Lipp shares.

Starting point is 00:12:59 They just used the explosion as sort of like a demo. They demo the old setup. Demolition? Yeah. But good news from Dave Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, that they're going to get New Glenn flying again sooner than people thought. So good news there. What else is in the news today?

Starting point is 00:13:22 I have a pitch for you. I have a business idea. Let's hear. What's the biggest problem with being a doctor? You make a lot of money as a doctor, right? What's the biggest problem? The odd hours. No.

Starting point is 00:13:35 Taxes. You make so much money, you get taxed on normal income, ordinary income. Even if you're a doctor, you're saving people's lives. You're doing the most important job in our economy. You have a doctor, buddy that also runs a hedge fund, though. And when he runs the hedge fund, he's making capital gains. But when he does an operation, he makes ordinary income. Which to me, it's personally very concerning.

Starting point is 00:13:57 I don't know if I'd want to go to see a doctor. that does surgery that that also to be fair he's building a new clinic and he has time off well yeah yeah yeah but when I heard that yeah you know a surgeon was yeah also running a hedge fund I yes I got a little bit worried just you know if I was under under the knife yes and uh but there were some and the market was open I'd be I'd be a little nervous only on off hours for sure but the the doctor makes a ton of money saves people's lives does all sorts of good things gets taxed at ordinary income, not capital gains. So you're taxing doctors who are saving lives at a higher rate.

Starting point is 00:14:34 So my business idea is with the power of agentic AI, we create thousands and thousands of Delaware C-Corps for every doctor. So every time that there's a doctor's appointment and you have to pay the doctor, you acquire one of their Delaware C-Corp's. And within that C-Corp, there is on the balance sheet of that company, basically an IOU for the services the doctor must render you. Sitting on the balance sheet. Sitting on the balance sheet. Yeah, it's an asset.

Starting point is 00:15:07 It's an asset. And so you can then depreciate that asset since you've acquired it. The doctor reaps capital gains. And then you cash in your... Yeah, and they can have a sort of a farm of C-Corp. So there's... You know, they've had them, you know, the shares for a... a year. Exactly. Exactly. Long-term capital gains. And then the patient on their way out,

Starting point is 00:15:31 they sign one form. Agentic AI does its thing, winds down the C-Corp and cashes in the asset. And then the doctor can reap capital gains. What do you think? You think we got a business there? I think you just created vertical AI agents for tax fraud. I asked Chad GBT, and it said, this is almost certainly dead on arrival, not clever tax optimization, more like abusive tax shelter with health care loss side quests. The core problem is the economic substance is obvious. The patient is paying for medical care. The doctor is being paid for performing medical services. IRC61 includes compensation for services and fees in gross income. And the IRS says you generally include everything received in payment for personal

Starting point is 00:16:17 services. Wrapping the bill in a newly minted C-Corp does not change the income character. Well, I think we'll to take that one to the Supreme Court. All the way. Take it all the way. Take it to the Supreme Court. There's a chance. I think you can wrap it in a prediction market, right? So every single time you go to the doctor, you say, okay, there's like zero percent chance the doctor is going to do well. And then he bets yes.

Starting point is 00:16:38 He bets, yeah. And then we'll see what happens. But yes. You know, if it's a good doctor, then he'll be paid out in full. It adds insurance to it as well, because you don't pay if the doctor doesn't do a good job. Yeah, it's like insurance is built in. Built in.

Starting point is 00:16:49 So I think this is actually could be clear. But are winnings on prediction markets, capital gains? I think it's still mostly unclear. So for the next few years, I think this would definitely be a good strategy. Okay, I like it. I like it. You have to imagine, because they say they don't use the word bet. They use the word trade.

Starting point is 00:17:06 Trade. Yeah. So capital gains. So trading. Capital gains treatment, maybe? I think the post last year where someone was saying, like, prediction markets will replace everything. If I want blueberries delivered to my house, I go to the market for blueberries being delivered

Starting point is 00:17:23 to my house. house and I bet $15 and I bet no. Someone else, they bet yes. They deliver me blueberries. They get the $15. Works every time. Works every single time. We keep debating this meta question of will they launch a financially incentivized prediction market or will it purely be for social cloud? You're still in the camp of there's going to be real dollars. It just feels like the first time meta will ever have. The reason I believe that is because I believe they had meta, like, was reaching out to the various prediction market providers to try to be potential like partners and or vendors. But I mean, partnership can mean so many different things, right? Partnership with

Starting point is 00:18:13 prediction market can mean, we'll give you ad reads or discounted ads or will vend your data so that if someone is on Instagram and hits the search box acting for something and Lama 5 or Mew Spark wants to answer it and surface data from a prediction market, we have the rights to do that without infringing on your copyright or something like that. Like it could be a data licensing partnership. It could be an acquisition funnel. It could be something where met as funneling people to the prediction markets or back. Like that whole, I read the same article that you read and it doesn't.

Starting point is 00:18:51 doesn't make any sense to say, oh, yeah, I want to create a competitor, so I'm going to reach out to my direct competitors and see if I, if they want to give me their customers. Like, why would they ever do that? That makes no sense. You see what I'm saying? The only thing is like the prediction markets have a history of partnering with, with other applications and basically being the infrastructure providers. Yeah. To actually place real dollar prediction. Any partner, whether it's, you know, there was that whole suite of like, no, I agree with you. Like, I generally agree that there is a possibility that there's no dollars and it's just for social club. But I just don't, I, New York Stock Exchange. They all have partnerships with prediction markets.

Starting point is 00:19:37 None of them have like, oh, go in the CNBC app and, and upload your credit card information. Like, meta's been on this path of like, maybe we'd like a financial relationship with our customers for decades and like it's never really matured. There was always this idea that you would be able to save your payment infrastructure information and then when you see a t-shirt you could just click and one-click checkout in the Instagram app or in the Facebook app and that never really took off for a variety of reasons. So John in this case it'd be like you see an ad and then it's like I place a bet that there won't be a t-shirt delivered to my house. Yes yes. And then it'll get fulfilled. This is the final boss. Hopefully. Hopefully. You place a big enough bet.

Starting point is 00:20:18 answer to your question on can doctors reap capital gains by using prediction markets instead. Prediction market profits are taxable, but the characters unsettled at the moment. CFTC regulated event contracts like Kalshi-style contracts. There is a decent argument that they are financial derivatives rather than gambling. The CFTC describes event contracts as derivative contracts whose payoff depends on the specified event. It also granted Kalshi status as a designated. contract market. So best case, some contracts might be treated as 1256 contracts. That means

Starting point is 00:20:56 marked to market annually and gains and losses split across 60% long-term capital, 40% short-term capital, regardless of holding period. So there's a chance that that's the solution. I think we might have solved it, but we'll have to use every tool in the modern financialization and technology box. The Wall Street Journal asked, Their readers, what innovations they want to see in the next 20 years. And the answers are sort of all over the place and sort of a way. Number five will shock you. Number five might shock you.

Starting point is 00:21:30 What innovation do you want to see in the next 20 years? Tyler think of something. Jordy think of something. I'll read some of what the Wall Street Journal readers wrote in. Mary Gillespie from Irving, Texas said, solar on wheels. She says, why can't cars be manufactured with solar panels integrated into the top of the vehicle, then it could recharge the car's battery as you travel and when you park.

Starting point is 00:21:54 So this is not actually a new idea. There are cars that have solar panels on the roof, but solar panels are extremely weak, and so you'd have to leave the car outside for like five months to charge, a full electric car. Now, there have been DARPA Grand Challenge cars and specific almost science experiments vehicles where they have a huge surface area and it's this massive wing of solar panels. And I think there's a plane that's also potentially able to ply indefinitely by having solar panels that recharge a motor and it spins. But for a normal car, a single solar panel on the roof doesn't get you much in the way of charging. But she's basically asking for stronger solar density, stronger energy density. And I'm in. I'm in. In 20 years,

Starting point is 00:22:42 totally feasible. Mary from Irving, Texas, I think it's going to happen. I think it's possible in 20 years. Anyway, traffic jam plan. I would love to see an autopilot feature. I would love to see autopilot features on cars, talk to each other. They're saying,

Starting point is 00:22:57 so cars can move more. Nuclear cars. Just get a nuclear car. That's very, very fallout. I like the, what is that, nuclear punk or something? What was that, what was that? There's like an alternate history of like the 1960s

Starting point is 00:23:09 if it was powered by nuclear, not solar punk, atom punk, atom punk is the term. And it has all these really, cool things that could be powered by nuclear. Maybe we'll get there. Fusion is sort of promising that. We've talked to a couple companies that do smaller fusion reactors. And they tend avalanches, one up in Seattle or maybe Washington, where it's basically the nuclear reactor, but it's

Starting point is 00:23:37 fusion, not fission. And it's about the size of, you know, large battery. And so you could potentially put it in a car, put it in a drone, put it in a space vehicle, keep it up there for a long time. Accordian traffic jams would be a thing of the past. What is an accordion traffic jam? I think that's when the traffic's like... Oh, going in and out. In and out. It's like people are stopping and going and there's that slight delay when theoretically if everyone was like moving at the perfect, you know. So Morgan Clayton from Birmingham, Alabama wants autopilot features on all the cars to talk to each other so they never do that. So they know, okay, I got to speed up, I got to slow down, and then they're all perfectly

Starting point is 00:24:16 in sync. Probably doable. You need some standard or something. What are you thinking? Musical vision. This is a good one. These people are thinking outside the box. This is not like, oh, I want inference at one tenth of the cost. Silicon Valley is unimaginative, unimaginative by comparison. But Mary Schittner Gifford from Alpine, Utah says she wants musical vision. I'd like to see invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music. There are many ways to help the sight impaired read the printed word, but pianists and others need to read music at the piano. My father's sight was so bad that he had to look at the music about two inches away,

Starting point is 00:24:59 memorize one or two phrases, then practice what he memorized. He gave his last recital from memory at age 94. What a legend. Let's give it up for Mary Schittner Gifford's father. grandfather. Powerful. Crazy idea. Can't you just print it bigger?

Starting point is 00:25:20 If you're having trouble seeing it. You just invented the semi-truck-sized printer. Yeah. I mean, you could just print like a poster board, and then you can see it at the piano. Also, glasses, potentially, solution here? Yeah, I wonder, I mean, it might be a small, might be a small market of people who vision is so impaired that even with glasses, it needs to be up close. Up close.

Starting point is 00:25:47 I'm just confused by why the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music, why are we focused on reading music? Wouldn't this be, wouldn't any technology that allows you to read music if your heart of sight allow you to read anything? Are we talking about any general technology? I mean, couldn't you have, couldn't you learn individual, no? and then learn the order of them, have it spoken to you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:18 I do think maybe an iPad app, iPads often sit at the piano, and you could have an iPad app that shows sort of like one note or two notes at a time. What about a humanoid robot that grabs your hand and bends the thing? Like a marionette. And, you know, slams your hands. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:36 Totally possible. Battery swaps. We've seen these in China where they ejected them with great force. Joseph Magnotti from Sarasota, Florida has a different idea. He says in probably less than 20 years, the technology of all solid state batteries will reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle. I like this because he's phrasing it more as like a prediction. We have swap.

Starting point is 00:26:58 We have, Joseph, this video is for you. We just need to make it less violent. We'll reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle will be able to drive into a service station by a pack of batteries. Each the size of an old phone book. Okay, this is a very different technology. Yep, that one's very dangerous. Let's not do that. Okay, every time I call Nick on our team,

Starting point is 00:27:19 yeah. He's at, he's like on some crazy quest to charge his car every time. Yeah. So this, he doesn't have a, he doesn't have a, every hour of the day I call him. He's like, oh, I'm trying to find a charger like, you know, the, the, the, the, the map was wrong. Launching my battery like a broadside canyon at the moron next to me that cut me off. just committing supuku with your car, just abandon the battery, but you take out your rival. It's a crazy thing because, like, if you eject that battery, like, you're not getting it back.

Starting point is 00:27:54 It's going to be at very least damaged. There's no way that's going back in the car. But this, of course, is a fire mitigation strategy. Electric vehicle batteries can burn for days on end. If you can eject them, you save the car. You save the surroundings, potentially. and create a much more safe environment. Totally reasonable.

Starting point is 00:28:13 Looks hilarious in the video. Anyway. Nick just texted me, bro, the chargers in Malibu are all fake. They are? I don't know what that means. I don't even know what that means.

Starting point is 00:28:22 No worries about charging, taking too long. The imminent technology will also herald a revolution. That's probably the new, like, I'm going to the dentist, you know, when someone's like interviewing

Starting point is 00:28:33 at other places. I got a dentist appointment. You're like, again? Yeah. But Nick is just like, oh, I'm just charging my car. I'm just charging my car. It's a good excuse. I don't buy it, Nick.

Starting point is 00:28:46 I don't buy it. The chargers are fake. Here's one. Ethan Glasby from South Kingston, Kingston, Rhode Island wants a trash economy. He says, put trash to work. I would love to see an at-home generator powered by bacteria that eat trash. We already have bacteria that produce ethanol. as well as bacteria that break down plastic.

Starting point is 00:29:09 So both in one doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. Much like solar energy, the ethanol could be used to offset heating costs and keep the fridge running when the power goes out. He's basically asking to burn the trash, but I guess in a more clean fashion, all while being fueled by household waste, just maybe don't tell your dinner guests

Starting point is 00:29:29 that you are growing bacteria in the next room over. Good little piece of advice from Ethan. Cheeasy. Beem me up. This is great one. Harold Lewis. is truly living in the year 2060, or 2,600, something like that. Or 3060.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Because Harold Lewis from Terrytown, New York says, beam me up. I want human teleportation in the next 20 years. It should work a lot like email, in which data composed of bits and bytes. It's email for humans. As a whole in one place, are disassembled, then electronically transmitted to another place where they are reassembled. What is DNA, if not bits and bites of human beings? Do you believe that if you were teleported in this fashion, you would remain? Would you be teleported?

Starting point is 00:30:15 Or is it a prestige situation not to spoil movie? I would almost certainly have Tyler go first and just like give it a spin and come back and talk about. The whole point is that you wouldn't be able to tell. But like I would actually die and there's a clone of me. Yeah, that you would die. Like you would have no way of knowing if it was me or not. Because in every way, it's like all the same data. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:36 Yeah. You might be in the pocket of big teleportation. No, it's, I'm still me. No, I'm arguing. New Tyler would be like, it worked great. And then the corpse of old Tyler, who got disassembled molecule by molecule, would be no longer with us and then disappeared. And that is the question in the prestige.

Starting point is 00:30:54 You got to go to watch the movie. Paul Blanco wants something else. He wants a smart spatula. This is so much more attainable. I'd love a cooking spatula. Human teleportation. That could tell without penetration what temperature or how thoroughly cooked a hamburger or steak is. I like that.

Starting point is 00:31:09 Do we not have like a, like we literally have things. No, no, no. You want it without penetration. It has to, you just rest the spatula on top of the steak and it tells you inside the steak what temperature it is, which is very difficult. Because if you're searing or doing a reverse sear or something, the outside could be a wildly different temperature than what's going on inside. So how do you detect the temperature? without penetrating the steak with a thermometer. A powerful x-ray.

Starting point is 00:31:37 Imagine it's as big as that brain scanner thing. It's just like, yeah, here's your smart spatula. Load it up. It's like MRIing the entire steak. That'd be a good time. Robot chef, so this is related. I want a robot that can work as an executive chef in my own kitchen, says Ray Lowe from Lacey Washington.

Starting point is 00:31:58 It could call a grocer, order ingredients, insisting on it all. being upscale and have those ingredients delivered, unpack, load the fridge, and then use my appliance to make dinner. 20 years, I think it's possible. I like that. That's right on the right, like, you know, level of sci-fi. It seems doable.

Starting point is 00:32:16 Not impossible. But also not something we can whip up in a weekend with an Arduino, like the smarts bachelor. Some of these ideas are silly, but I'm viewing it as a very literal request for startups. Yeah. Yeah. No, I like it. Quiet inside. Cheryl Franklin from West Grove, Pennsylvania, says,

Starting point is 00:32:31 given the negative effects of excessive noise such as elevated blood pressure, cardiac stress, and lower real estate values, I'd love to see improvements in building materials. For example, drywall with built-in soundproofing capabilities. Love that. Perhaps a lightweight sound-locking film. It's called lead paint. That doesn't do anything to sound. Perhaps a lightweight sound-blocking film could also be developed for use in existing buildings in home. I had a startup idea a while back. So, you know when you have a young baby, a child, and every time you go to change the diaper, very noisy? One of my friends put up sound panels like a podcast studio, full slot wall in the nursery. Dual use technology.

Starting point is 00:33:16 Dual use technology, for sure. And it dampens the cries so you can, so you're not so echoey because sometimes if a kid's crying in a very echoy room, it really reverberates and it can be kind of crazy. And lead paint is dense, so in theory, any added mass can reduce sound transmission. So maybe add a little bit of lead paint to your nursery. Lead plates, whole lead plates, maybe. Whole ferriday cage. But here was the idea. You don't, no one wants a slat wall in their nursery, in their babies.

Starting point is 00:33:48 I don't know. Maybe if you're trying to breed the super podcaster, but most people don't want that. They want animals. They want a pastoral nature vibe, some warm pastel. some nice warm tone, something welcoming for the new child who's just been brought into this world. And so the idea was a typical sound panel, square, flat, you know, you might see the egg crate, the black material, but you paint on it an animal. You paint it on it childlike paintings that you would hang on the wall. It looks appropriate if that's the decor of the room,

Starting point is 00:34:22 but it also has the added effect of sound treating the room so that it's less noisy when everyone's yelling. Good business. Banger. Banger. There we go. Banger. Better than Sea Corps on demand for doctors. For doctors?

Starting point is 00:34:38 To do tax problems? Maybe. Certainly simpler. Jennifer Smith, we have made so many advancements in so many areas, but what I want most is a way to control outside noise. This is the superpower she wants. It would be so nice to be able to sit on my screened-in porch and enjoy listening to the birds without having to hear nearby traffic, which sounds like driving.

Starting point is 00:34:57 which sounds like drag racing these days. Well, that's because it is drag racing, Jennifer. We're drag racing in your neighborhood. If sounds are waves, can't we block some? How have we not invented an open-air type of noise-canceling headphones to shield noise waves and give us some quiet spaces outdoors? Interesting. I mean, the simple solution here is just more electric vehicles.

Starting point is 00:35:22 They're quieter. You don't sound like drag racing. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of emission standards that also reduce, reduce noise from internal combustion engines, at least until you chop the exhaust and stray pipe that thing. But if you're not doing that... Or your engine swap, your Model 3. Yeah, V-12. But, yeah, I don't know. Is this possible?

Starting point is 00:35:47 Could you just put out a big speaker that selectively noise cancels car noise, but not bird noise? that seems possible. I personally, I would, I would, you know, take my home, I'd get really thick windows,

Starting point is 00:36:04 ideally lead paint and a whole home, you know, really, lead paint. Just love to lead paint. And I'd bring the birds inside.

Starting point is 00:36:12 I got an alternative theory. If you got drag racers racing down your, your quiet, bird infested street, you got to go Wiley Coyote mode. You got to put out, a fake tunnel out of bricks, paint it with some lead paint maybe. The fake tunnel, the drag racer

Starting point is 00:36:31 smashes into the bricks, they'll never be racing down your street again. Drop an anvil on the car. Yeah, dropping an anvil on the car. That works too. Whoa, you're going to like this one. Okay, tell me. Tell me what we got. Daniel Hansen says first, I'd like to see a dishwasher with racks that can be raised, making it easier for tall people to load and unload them. Laterally a thing that exists. My dishwasher has that functionality. Can you get it? Can you get it to 6-8 though? No, it doesn't go up that high, but you can adjust it up. Wouldn't that be nicer if it was at eye level for you and you could just... I guess for the bottom rack, if it elevated. Yeah, this is this is a contraption. This is an invention. I agree. I like this. And then glare, smart glass for

Starting point is 00:37:15 windshields that will tint itself in the spot where the sun or reflection hits at high intensity. That's very cool, very niche. I like this. Seems very difficult to do. There are some electrochromatic windows. Have you seen, is it Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini that has it, where you can twist a knob and it will progressively shade and tint certain sections of the glass. The Rivian, which the Rivian team sent me to demo this week, which has been a lot of fun,

Starting point is 00:37:47 has an electrochromatic sun or moon roof, I guess, because it doesn't open. so it's a moonroof, and you can change the tint, but only for the whole thing, not selectively, there are now cars that allow you to do basically stripes, like every other one, if you want half-crumb, half-tint, I suppose. I have a funny dynamic with my daily where the material, like, to my right,

Starting point is 00:38:18 like down into the right from the steering wheel is like very like glossy plastic. And so anywhere between like two and four p.m., the light just hits it and just goes into your eyes. And I just every time I think I'll put, I'll have to like take like a shirt and just cover it. Sure. I'm thinking like the person that designed this didn't never.

Starting point is 00:38:39 Reconfigure the structure of the armrest at a particular time to bounce the light slightly differently. That would be the easy solution. Yes, exactly. That would be a simple solution. Nano bots. I love. Wait, we have to talk about the Rivian team because they sent you this demo unit to try.

Starting point is 00:38:56 R1X. And they said, it's a demo unit. So drive it as fast as you want. You can roll it. You can roll it if you want. Like, it's no big deal. Just like really enjoy the car to the fullest. I was pretty surprised that they said that.

Starting point is 00:39:09 That's great. It's actually an amazing car. I like it. The self-driving feature, deeply underrated. My latest hot take is that self-driving technology is commoditizing. as fast as LLM technology and that companies that take it seriously and actually prioritize it, it is not some insane, insane tech breakthrough that cannot be implemented in other vehicles. It in fact can be implemented in other vehicles.

Starting point is 00:39:36 Just like we've seen Chapoile get a chat bot, we will see every car be autonomous. It will not be the domain of a single company. Funniest thing about this, you got someone who's asking for just a dishwasher that's a little bit taller. You got somebody who's asking for a smart spatula. And then you have Nolan Williams who says, I would like to see significant developments in cancer and longevity drugs. You're sitting there, you're going around with the Wall Street Journal. And you're like, oh, like, what did you ask for?

Starting point is 00:40:08 Smart spatula. I was like, what do you ask for? Like, longer life. Life extension. Curing cancer. You're like, what? I didn't know. I didn't know it was that type of question.

Starting point is 00:40:17 He says, longer lives mean longer runway for brilliant people to bring forth their own innovations and pass on their knowledge. Wow. Noel Williams, really great answer. Early detection. In the next 20 years, I would like to see how new tech and AI-driven diagnostics will improve cancer detection. This is definitely happening. Clement Lee from Atlanta. We are on the right track. A focus on seniors.

Starting point is 00:40:40 I would like to see something address the risk of falls. I've seen a couple of things like this. Different devices that you can put in your home that detect falls. Either while you're wearing the device, it detects the motion. I think the Apple Watch has a device as a feature for this. But I saw another, I think it was a YC company that had essentially a smart speaker that could detect a fall in a house. Very, very cool.

Starting point is 00:41:02 Robotic home aids, robots that are capable of performing home health care, very similar to the chef, but obviously for someone who has multiple disabilities, Matthew Weed here from Colorado Springs. Yeah, it's got to be, if, for, anyone that's older and has been seeing like the humanoid form factor for decades now and then now there's actually like a bunch of startups like you know that have that are investing billions of dollars into doing it yeah they're still probably like yeah it's just never going to happen i like i like these uh michel from canton ohio says uh what do i wish for a house that never needs dusting

Starting point is 00:41:41 i know ain't gonna happen and then there's someone else who says donna helper true dumer here says, what tech innovations would I like to see? None. We have too much tech. Keep it real. Very good. Anyway, there's a whole bunch more, but you can go and read them. Let's move on to other stories in the news. We have our next guest joining just a minute, but there's a narrative violation on the timeline. We got a narrative violation, folks. David Sachs is breaking it down. This is from Ara Karazian over at Ramp, chief economist. It says a new study of 21,000, 5,000.000. 559 firms in the United States finds that companies that adopt AI tend to grow faster following adoption.

Starting point is 00:42:25 Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10% following adoption, while low-intensity adopters see no statistically significant change. Entry-level headcount rises 12% for high-intensity adopters. Wow, that is a lot, considering that the whole narrative was this will be the end of entry-level jobs, and that doesn't seem to be the case, at least with this. study. The results counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss. The study is based on observed AI spending from Ramp, card and bill pay data linked to Revelyo Labs workforce records. And what's interesting here is that it's clear, especially from that Wall Street Journal article,

Starting point is 00:43:07 people want more things. They want more stuff. People want more output from companies. They want cheaper things. They want more of those things, whether it's movies or entertainment or cars or smart spatulas. People want more. They want more specific things. They want more niche things. They want more mass market things. They want more affordable things. And all of that requires a lot of AI and a lot of people. And so you put them all together and you start growing your business. And that's what's happening, at least in this data. Well, congrats to the folks over at Ramp on a banger article that made it into the financial times. You'd love to see whenever something breaks loose of the ramp economics blog,

Starting point is 00:43:43 but you can go sign up for our substack and subscribe to the ramp blog. But without further ado, 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,

Starting point is 00:43:58 and now with AI agents. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Zach LaBerge from Oman AI as a founder and CEO. Zach, how are you doing? What's going on? How are you guys doing? Did I get your last name even, remotely correct? No, that was perfect. Perfect. Wow. Let's go. Yes. Thank you. Anyway, please,

Starting point is 00:44:20 introduce yourself. Yeah, I'm Zach, founder of Oman AI. We do blood monitoring for mission critical machines. Okay. Mission critical machines. I'm thinking data centers. What do you think? Yes, sir. You'd be right. We got our start in big mining machines, you know, like the big machines you see on site. That's where it's a long time working on. Where does the name come from? It's a forecast of something to happen, whether good or bad. You know, we obviously don't want our customers machine to break. And so, yeah, we'd like to go good omens.

Starting point is 00:44:53 So the lifeblood of the modern data center, there's water, there's liquid that's cooling the data center, sometimes in a closed loop, flowing around, getting cooled outside the data center being brought in, removing the heat from the chips. What's actually in that liquid? Is it just water? Is it water in something else? And then what happens? Like, how does it get dirty if it's in a closed loop?

Starting point is 00:45:17 Why doesn't it just stay clean and fresh forever? Why do you have a job? Why do you have a business? Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, it depends the type of fluid. Normally it's a water-based fluid with some sort of mixture of either ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. You know, you're seeing a big shift recently toward more like, you know, safer fluid. So, you know, propylene glycol is more preferred since it's less, you know, toxic.

Starting point is 00:45:40 but can you drink it? You can definitely vape it. Both of those are heavily used in the cigarette industry. Yeah, no joke. The whole VGPG ratio is a big thing in the e-cigarette world.

Starting point is 00:45:55 But good that we found a good use for it. You're basically smoking data center when you had to say it. That's one way to put it. The other way is that this is the solution to the vape crisis is that drive up the price of propylene glycol so that everyone's like, I got to quit vaping.

Starting point is 00:46:10 I got to save it for the data centers. I'm going to use that now. Every time I see someone hit an e-cigarette, it's like, oh, really? You're smoking a data center. Yeah. Anyway, so what happens? How does a liquid cooling system actually degrade over time?

Starting point is 00:46:27 How long does it take and what's actually going on? Yeah, so a bunch of different things can happen in the system. You know, you see a lot of, you know, basic infrastructure wear. So, you know, when your pumps wear, your seals wear, all of that stuff starts to contaminate the liquid itself. And so whether it's like copper or chromium from the pipes or we're starting to see some like on get in. What also happens is like the more heat that happens and the more wear that happens to your fluid, the more it starts to break down. So you go from this very nice, like high concentration of, you know, glycol to water to then that starts to degrade.

Starting point is 00:46:56 And then you start to get biogrowth and other crap that gets in there and, you know, starts to eat your chips and, you know, sit on your in your pipes. Has anyone tried using beef tallow to cool a data center? I think that might be the solution. That's a real meat-in-the-middle compromise policy position maybe. Now, what is the go-to-market like? Most niche joke of all time. What is the go-to-market like? $31 million raised.

Starting point is 00:47:24 There's some hyperscalar mega data centers. Do they pick up the phone for you? Can you sell into them? Or are you working your way up with smaller data center providers, sort of a walk-caraw-1 approach? Like, what's working? Yeah, I mean, we've just, We've been working with almost every, you know, kind of neocloud that's out there and some more violent deployment.

Starting point is 00:47:45 It's been pretty crazy. I mean, you think about like nine months ago, folks were just starting to get these, you know, systems online and these clusters online for liquid cooling. And now you've started to see folks who are running dozens, maybe hundreds of, hundreds of megawatts worth of, you know, liquid cool compute. And they're starting to see failures. And so we kind of went from, hey, we're selling and folks don't really know what the problems are. To now everybody's like, shit, we've had failures. or we're starting to see failures. Our competitors are seeing failures.

Starting point is 00:48:11 You know, we need to adopt something. Yeah. And it's probably pretty easy to underwrite because every hour that the data center is not functioning is leaving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on the table. What is the actual installation process? Can you just, like, cut the pipe

Starting point is 00:48:28 and then insert your device into the flow? How long does it take to install? How big is your solution? Yes, our solution just fits across the rack manifold. So we're kind of plugging in those OCP quick disconnects, mapping it if we were a GPU. So it only takes a couple minutes to install. What's great about, like, you know, a cabinet is that we get power,

Starting point is 00:48:47 we get, you know, network and, you know, the fluids right there. Again, coming from industrials, that was not fun, where you have every machine that has completely different integration. So, you know, we get to, you know, eat a lot less pain over on this side of things. Sure, sure. Who did the round? What are you actually going to be spending it on? Is it just staff up?

Starting point is 00:49:05 but what is the cash conversion cycle like for the business such that, because I imagine there's a lot of cash flowing around and they might be able to just pay you up front. How much did you raise first? Tell us, we want to hit the gong. Jordy's warmed up. Raise 31 million in Series A. We got a bigger mallet.

Starting point is 00:49:28 Yeah, we got a bigger mallet. One of the first rounds with this mallet. $31 million is that hiring scientists to, to iterate on the product? Is it just scale up, manufacturing? What are you actually putting the money to work for? Yeah, I mean, it's really just growing up the team and growing on manufacturing. You know, when we raised our seed like eight months ago is basically just me, you know,

Starting point is 00:49:52 working on this problem, you know, putting sensors on excavators. And so we've kind of gone through this interesting process of going from one to 20 and now, you know, we're going to go from 20 to 40 folks by the end of the year. And the round was mostly like just really smart data center experts. And so it was led by a fund called Nova Ventures, really lot of strategic value from the data center space, a big LP in their fund is Cheryl Sandberg, who is also now an investor in us. And so we're really happy to have her on board. And then we also have like CRV and a few other awesome like kind of C-Street folks from CoreWeave, TensorFlow Wave, and some other smart place. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:50:29 I'm sorry. Jord, do you have something? I got another question. So detection is only one piece. of the puzzle, if you detect something earlier, you detect microbial buildup or copper leaking into the liquid cooling cycle, what does that actually, what happens downstream of that?

Starting point is 00:50:51 Is it that you swap all the water out, or you go fix the root issue? Like, what is the technician's side doing with the information that you give them? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the problem right now, is like you have these monster labs that, like, they pull a sample from every major data center you can think of. They ship it off to their lab and now it's like let me wait a

Starting point is 00:51:11 couple weeks to get a result back. And normally it's pretty binary. It's like we either flush it, which, you know, is millions of dollars in downtime. I mean, you think about a loop that's like called a thousand GPUs. It takes four to five hours to flush a rack. And so now that's 5,000 GPU hours that just went down just to one rack. And so on during it every day, you can say, okay, what are smaller chemistry changes we can make, whether it's bio-shocking, whether it's adjusting the propylene black hole to water ratio. Those are all things that the CDU can do. We just can't do it right now because we have these silly lab tests.

Starting point is 00:51:41 That's very cool. Very cool. Is the business 100% U.S. right now? What is the state of the data center build out internationally? We work with only U.S. like neoclouds to date. You know, some of these folks have projects all around the world. So we're looking at some projects in Europe that are run by a few of our partners. But it's been primarily U.S. base.

Starting point is 00:52:05 We're based in San Francisco and we have an office in Orange County right now. Awesome. Thank you. Great to meet you. For coming on the show. Great progress. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 00:52:14 Come back on soon. Thank you, sir. Have a good one. Cheers, Zach. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Derek Thompson has a new newsletter out. He's breaking it down.

Starting point is 00:52:30 He says there's never been a better time to get rich working alone. Don't block him. Is he saying the goose is not valued? I think he's saying the goose is not valued. He's saying the goose is not value. He says the debate about AI and jobs often breaks down into two extreme groups, both of which have an evidence problem. On the one hand are the doomers who say AI will take everyone's job, even though unemployment

Starting point is 00:52:52 remains low, and the unemployment rate for prime age Americans is still very high. On the other hand, are the deniers who's insistent that, whose insistence that AI is a worthless scam prevents them from seeing the many ways it's changing work and the economy broadly. If you want a strong and evidence-based take about AI and jobs, I have one for you, quote from Derek Thompson, there's never been a better time for workers to get rich by going independent. This is the golden age for tiny startups with big revenue. The evidence charts one and two, the number of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups is taking off. news. Chart three, there is rising evidence that these small firms are more likely to use AI

Starting point is 00:53:39 and sell AI related products, whether it's software consulting or design. Chart four. Is he saying that the matters, not the eggs, it's a goose itself? Is the true value is the power to keep laying eggs? Yes, yes. Okay, continue. I just want to make sure I understood. Today's micro startups are becoming multi-million dollar firms faster and more frequently than any generation of firms that Stripe has measured. Today's article is about the rise of the solo act in the US labor force and its implications for the future of business, social life, more solo entrepreneurs, even more aloneness, and the fiscal, in America's fiscal crisis, more pass-through firms, even less tax revenue for a revenue-starved government. Interesting. So if you have a bunch

Starting point is 00:54:18 of talented people that would be earning money as doctors, but then they go and they wind up starting a business, then yeah, maybe that's lower tax. That feels like that's further off when I looked at cap gains rates. Like even if you brought cap gains in line, with ordinary income, it doesn't close the deficit gap whatsoever. It's such a small portion of the tax revenue base. But interesting that he's calling that out, would love to know more about where that trend line actually converges. The interesting thing, is this a bull case for... Yeah, but I don't really get the pass-through firm's point. Like, you still end up paying... It wouldn't be... I don't know if it's pass-through. It might be... So, I guess in a mature C-Corp,

Starting point is 00:55:03 the company is paying taxes and then also the the employees are paying taxes and so this is why most people don't set up a C corp if they're just a solo entrepreneur because they don't want to pay corporate taxes and then also personal intact personal taxes on their on their income yeah but like one way or another you're going to have to no no it's actually like double taxation that's why you use an LLC because you pass it through and the and the income that you distribute is not taxable at the corporate level. I know, but I'm saying like overall, overall, the money is being taxed one way or another. Yes, but they're flowing to individual. Currently, like a, just a meta employee, meta pays their taxes, and then the meta employee pays income taxes. If that meta employee

Starting point is 00:55:52 spins out, starts an LLC and then is making the same amount of money that they were making it meta, the overall number of dollars that's going to the government is lower. That's what he's identifying. Now, do I think this is a crisis just yet? It would need to go a lot further, I think, to get there. But I understand, like, the math that he's laying out. It is a risk factor. But is this a bullcase for co-working spaces? The rise of solo entrepreneurship. Nothing is bullish for co-working spaces to me. It's rough. Why is it bad? Why has no one been able to make a good co-workers? space. Because I think it's just nice to have your own space. It's the same, I mean, the same

Starting point is 00:56:38 logic would be like, why don't they make an, you know, why don't they make an apartment building where you get a tiny little, I mean, they do do this. Why don't they have a pod? Yeah, yeah. I'm basically, I mean, it's basically like, imagine if you rented your apartment and it was actually like as big as like one. Why don't they make like a smaller version of a house that you can rent that's like in a building with other, other, like, of these many houses. I'm just saying like a 20, a 10 foot by 10 foot room that you rent and then all the amenities are. You were just telling you that you would happily live in the Union Bar Shed.

Starting point is 00:57:12 You were saying that it's the pinnacle of lifestyle. I did think the picture of it in stores look cool. But it needed a slight facade. But the difference there is like that shed on the right property would be very cool. That's true. That's true. But the property is. is sort of an amenity.

Starting point is 00:57:33 Yes. But people don't feel that way about going into the office. They don't feel like, oh, this is a co-working. Like, people feel worse about a co-working space than they do. Like, your sentiment is correct. Many people feel this way about co-working spaces that they are unproductive or annoying. But people don't feel that way about going to a campus with a bunch of buildings and a bunch of, even like cubicles or like desks that are pretty close to the inner.

Starting point is 00:57:58 Shared. Shared effort. But it's everyone's on the same team. Shared culture. Yeah. So you need to create a kiretsu of every company in the, in the co-working space potentially. I don't know. We'll figure it out.

Starting point is 00:58:10 But fortunately, we have our next guest from etched in the waiting room. We're very excited for the launch of this company. I didn't interview Gavin. What was that two years ago? Something like that. You were laying out the idea for this company very early on. you've made a ton of progress. Take us through the story.

Starting point is 00:58:32 Begin at the beginning. Introduce yourself first. Well, I'm Gavin. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders at ECH. We are building a rack-scale inference hardware. And what that means is that we're building the full system. That is chips, boards, platforms, racks, and clusters, as well as, of course, software.

Starting point is 00:58:53 And importantly, the production lines to build those things at scale. So the original viral soundbite that got so much attention around your company was the idea that you were going to bake the train. You were all in on the transformer. You said, AI will advance, but the transformer is here to stay. That architecture will be here to stay. And so we are going to fully commit to the transformer and we're going to sort of etch that into the chip. How real is that today? Has that thesis feels like it's been borne out very well, but it feels like you've added a lot of new strategies to the portfolio.

Starting point is 00:59:33 How are you thinking about the bet that you made two years ago? We looked at a lot of early research directions, and we realize the key things that models need are way more compute and way faster memory. If you think about inference, there's two key parts, pre-fill and decode. Or pre-fill, it's a compute-bound problem. You need to have more flops, more operations per second on each of your chips. And on our GPU, the bottom next actually thermals. You can't really run our GPU more than around 50% of what it could theoretically do, or it'll melt. So we're introducing a new technology today called low voltage inference to try to solve this problem.

Starting point is 01:00:17 And what that is, is you bring the voltage of the chip down dramatically, which allows us to have way, way better efficiency in terms of how much power is drawn per unit in math, and thus fit way, way more flops onto the chip. Why, pausing there, why can't you super cool the chips, liquid nitrogen or dry ice or something to make it colder so that you can run it at 100% power? It's a great question. If you look on the internet, there's some videos of folks trying to super overclock CPUs by using these things on them.

Starting point is 01:00:52 The problem is you actually can't go a whole lot above or they're meant to operate. For example, virtual CPUs can go ahead and do 4 and 4.5 gigahertz. I think the world records on the order of 8, 9 gigahertz with the liquid of cryogenic helium. And the problem is you have to get the heat actually out of the chip that you can't physically go touch the air resistors

Starting point is 01:01:13 with your liquid nitrogen. You have to go ahead and go through the silicon itself. And that by itself has a good deal of thermal resistance. Unfortunately, there's no way around it. You have to solve the power problem. Do you want to run in for us? So low voltage and then the other side of the equation. Take us through that.

Starting point is 01:01:29 Well, for decode, it's all about bandwidth. And it's not just bandwidth on a chip, but bandwidth across your cluster. And that's why we have this technology, what we call cluster scale memory. It reduces the amount of time it takes to communicate from one chip to another dramatically. And as a result, we can go use all of the technology. of our HBM and HBM bandwidth, and SRAM bandwidth, and our scale up domain as a single coherent pool. And that means if you're a user, you can go get much faster tokens per second speeds while

Starting point is 01:02:04 still keeping your cost slow. How are you and the team dealing with various bottlenecks across the supply chain? How did you get TSM to work with you as a startup? A TSM has been a fantastic partner to us. that we are so, so grateful. And one of the great things about them is they're very technical. You can just sit down and say, hey, we believe this will be a big market for these reasons. And we need your help to figure out how to go co-designed transistors that can run at a much lower voltage.

Starting point is 01:02:37 And that was a particularly challenging piece. As you bring the voltage down, manufacturing gets way, way tougher. We would not be able to do it without a great fat partner. Where else are there bottlenecks right now that you're experiencing? I think all across the chip supply chain, there has to be much more built out. People don't realize how big of a market interference is going to be. Right now, only a couple million people have access to the frontier models. And those are going to have to get deployed to 8 million people across the globe.

Starting point is 01:03:10 And that's not even counting AI agents that exist already and will exist in the future. There need to be way, way more token produced, and that requires both much bigger assembly lines, many more factories, and some new technology. Two years ago, you predicted that AI would not kill everyone within two years. You were correct about your prediction. How are you feeling about the general prospect of Doom? I mean, I don't understand it. I think right now is an incredibly exciting time to see all the breakthroughs that are getting made. And it's like the unit distance conjecture stuff I learned about in college.

Starting point is 01:03:55 And to see that now get cracked by an AI model, man, what a time to be alive. And we are still so early. Models will keep getting smarter. And like, man, I could not be more excited for the moment right now. Yeah. So what is the... Why was like now the time to come out of stealth? You clearly have had no issues getting customers.

Starting point is 01:04:22 Sounds like there's a billion dollar pipeline that you're working through. But what made you decide to talk about the business today? And what are you hoping to get out of this little media tour? All about talent. I really strongly believe that our company's best asset is the people we've been able to hire. And I give a couple of examples. Look at our platform team. Around half of them are from Nvidia.

Starting point is 01:04:52 Or if you look at the VP responsible for designing that thing behind me, that used to go run NVIDIA's HDX and DGX programs that made up most of their revenue for a hopper in Blackwell. And people like that should move the needle so much more of business, especially in a hard space like semiconductors. And not to mention, we're now working on our roadmap. Finally, I have Gen 1. You want to go do multiple generations in parallel and take really big, ambitious tech bets. You need the best of the best.

Starting point is 01:05:26 Are you a car? A car? Are you a car? There's a debate around whether modern, large chip companies are interchangeable with one another, whether the moats around the software. If you have a logistics business, you can buy trucks from multiple vendors and have a similar experience. In fact, I am demoing a new car right now.

Starting point is 01:05:55 I got in it. I connected my phone over the Bluetooth. And it works just like any other commodity product. That has not been the pitch in semiconductors for years. For years, we've been told about moats, about how complex the software is, how hard it is to write efficient software that runs on a particular chip set that you had to be all in on one ecosystem. And with the advent of agentic coding

Starting point is 01:06:22 and insanely high rewards for figuring out how to run on other A6s or other chip sets, it feels like chip companies are becoming more car-like. How do you think about your moat as you go into the future? Well, I would say a Toyota and a Ferrari are not the same thing. You look at the speed gap there, you see what, a 2x. And I think chips similarly is very, very meritocratic. If you're able to go up and be faster, you can go command a huge premium, just like the fastest cars can.

Starting point is 01:06:59 The difference here, the way cars work under the hood is very similar. There are no more 10xas if you add in cars. I think in chips, over the next couple of years, there's going to be a lot more technical innovation. And I'm very excited to go ahead and show the world, not just the current gen. What is the roadmap for these things looks like? We believe we can go push low-volt-distance, and cluster scale memory much further, and get even bigger unlocks here. So next time you get that question, say, I'm not a car, I'm a Ferrari. It doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 01:07:32 So is the source of... It makes perfect sense, John. Is the source of strength? is the reason that you will have positive margins in the future, intellectual property, trade secrets, patents? Like, what is the shape of owning that technology and not just being copied and commoditized by other chip companies? I think it just comes down to those things matter. We, of course, do trade secrets and patents. But you need to build a lot of products, and you have to go out and have really great economics as well.

Starting point is 01:08:08 Being faster isn't enough. You have to go be able to do that at a price. price people can afford. You see folks stretched thin today. And that's why when we think about doing the thing, we want to do the whole hard thing. That means building not just the chip, but the board, the platform, the rack, the cluster, and especially the production. What is the last AI innovation or product development that has updated you on your strategy,

Starting point is 01:08:36 if anything? I'm thinking about the transformer-based LLM, obviously. a huge moment. But then we got diffusion models and image models. We got agentic software that requires CPUs and other memory constraints. You got reasoning models. Has there been any development where you've either said, I'm glad we're on the path we're on and we need to double down on that or we need to slightly adjust our strategy to deliver the best performance for the latest and greatest use case. Well, the thing that's been the most exciting for me has been seeing the models get so big. Get so big and demand be so large. When you think about economies of scale,

Starting point is 01:09:21 it all just comes down to how much is there to go serve. And the market's relatively small and justify small factory, but not some gigantic mega cluster. And with what we're seeing right now, with these many, many trillion parameter models, with these quadrillion token demands that we were seeing that are increasing every month, there has never been a better time to go ahead and invest in those economies of scale. That's great news. Last question. The customer, are you focused on serving hyperscalers, the frontier models, neoclouds, open source models, all of the above?

Starting point is 01:10:02 How do you think about that? All of the above. We want to go out and do is build tech. that you can go ahead and see they'll make your tokens faster and your tokens cheaper. And that is working with the full stack. Well, congratulations. Talk about the round. Who

Starting point is 01:10:17 participated? We have a gong and it would be an honor to hit it on your behalf. Well, I am blown away at the quality of them as to be able to get on the cap table. Folks like Jane Street. Folks like a like a

Starting point is 01:10:30 client alliance that goes to part of the ESMT. it is it is a very interesting group I mean obviously a lot of a lot of traditional venture capital firms that focus on technology I was I was ready to do one hit for Jane Street one for HRT one chip for two Sigma

Starting point is 01:10:54 one for jump one for Scott Roy one for Peter Tio one for Hinton Scott Wu Patrick O'Shaughnessy what a great life absolutely I think the people are on the paper fantastic yeah Mockie Kareem Wow. This is the best, best party round of the year.

Starting point is 01:11:14 You really put together a good list. It's a cocello poster. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, so great to meet you. And congratulations to the whole team on the launch. Looking forward to the next conversation. We'll talk to you soon. Pleasure, guys.

Starting point is 01:11:26 Thanks for having me. Goodbye. Great. Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You know who won't be raising capital of the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon?

Starting point is 01:11:39 These fly-by-night peptide. companies, because the peptide battle has commenced, says Jessica Adams. FDA recommends against adding all seven peptides under review to the 503A bulks list. Is that for bulking up? Is that a list of things that get you bulky? No, I think it's things that cannot be produced in bulk, but the FDA has effectively delivered a blow to BBC 157 for ulcerative colitis, K-P-V for wound healing, TB-500 for wound healing, M-O-T-S-C for obesity and osteoporosis, amidylide and DSIP for opioid withdrawal, C-Max, and Epitallion. You can tell, I do not know my peptides, by the way I'm pronouncing these.

Starting point is 01:12:31 Anyway, a lot of people are fans of this stuff. Sorry if this is a dark day for you. A lot of people are in the camp that the FDA serves a functional purpose here to review these things and make sure that they are effective and safe for public health. It's a blow for that. Ben texted. We're just about to take all of these. No, yeah, a lot of people are going to be upset here.

Starting point is 01:13:01 I think a lot of people would also say that this is like maybe good if, you know, there could be some very, very real downsides with any of these. I was texting with a friend in health care this morning. I said, what does this mean for peptides? He said, done so. And I said, can't sell anymore. He says, unless RFK overrides the FDA, not legally. And then I said, but they were already in a gray area.

Starting point is 01:13:31 Now they are explicitly banned. Question mark. He said, they've been banned other than research use and haven't been enforced for human use. So they've been banned, but there hasn't been enforcement. Justification for taking them off the ban list was to kill the gray market. A lot of people have been taking peptides from random websites online. They either don't even have active ingredients or they're contaminated or, yeah, they're effectively just nothing. And he says, I think the real companies that are moving into the space net new in anticipation of this changing are in a real pickle.

Starting point is 01:14:08 So, yeah, so we'll see. They now face a newly constituted pharmacy compounding advisory committee making the July meeting one to watch. That will be July 23rd to 24. So we will keep following. Well, in other good FDA news, nicotine pouch has finally got MRP, which is modified risk tobacco product. Zinn is the first one to go. and Zinn can now market and put on the label and advertise that it is better for you than cigarettes, which is such a mild claim, but it's huge for the industry.

Starting point is 01:14:49 If you know what this means, it's an extremely high bar. They have to run a bunch of tests and whatnot. Every product in the category currently says this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical, but the products forever have not been. being able to say this is better for you than smoking, which is the obvious benefit that every company wants to make. They want to make that claim. There's a ton of literature out there.

Starting point is 01:15:15 A lot of it's from Sweden. A lot of it's for international. The FDA has to review it on a per product basis to make sure that your particular product maps to the data because the Sweden data that everyone points to is about snooce, which is a tobacco product. It's not exactly the same as white nicotine pouches that actually don't have tobacco in them. But anyway, the FDA has to review each one. They reviewed Zinn and they gave them the MRTP approval.

Starting point is 01:15:41 It's huge news for the industry. It's very good news. It's good news for everyone, I think. Anyway, the other news is that Invidia and Eli Lilly are building an AI lab, $1 billion lab for drug discovery in San Francisco. Eli Lilly's CEO, Dave Ricks, talks about their data advantage. Some scale biotech biop players are just training on public data, but there's only 4,000 ever-approved drugs.

Starting point is 01:16:03 Lily alone has three million failed drugs. We're learning from failure, which is interesting. So a lot of big talk about the next biotech boom. There's acquisitions going on, Anthropic bought a company. There's all sorts of predictions about the impact that AI will have on bio, whether that will accrue to the labs or the biotech companies. Who knows?

Starting point is 01:16:28 We'll figure it out. Maybe both. Maybe everyone. Hopefully lots of consumer surplus. But we have Aaron Bolly from Monogram in the wheelroom. Let's bring him in to the TV in Ultraman. Aaron, how are you doing? What's happening?

Starting point is 01:16:42 Thanks, guys. It's great to be here with you guys. Fantastic. Good to have you. Finally. Long overdue. Talk about the launch today. Talk about the fundraise.

Starting point is 01:16:51 Introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about Monogram. Okay, so I'll try to do it in a different order. Whatever you want. I'm Aaron. I guess most people know me from the two other companies. I started, UDEM, the online education platform, and public, hopefully most people know it by the day. I started COVID health health care of company. And now the new company monogram, we have been

Starting point is 01:17:15 very stealthy about it intentionally. Essentially, what we, like monogram, which we launched today, just like I asked me five minutes ago. Congratulations. Thank you. It's a general purpose. Congratulations. Sorry, now we can continue. Okay, so. I'm sure he's on one today. Yes, continue. Yeah, it's a general purpose AI application for everyday use.

Starting point is 01:17:48 Yes. But it makes a difference is with other AI applications, you usually have a chat-based interface. Yes. You ask a question, you write some text, you get some text back. Yes. With monogram, you ask something,

Starting point is 01:18:03 and then you get a complete visual, interface back. Yes. It's essentially like a, like a, it's like when you think about computers had command line interfaces back in 1980s and then we switched to graphical use interfaces where everything became visual, interactive. Yeah. We are trying to be, we are, we will be the first company to do this in AI.

Starting point is 01:18:24 I love it. I've been seeing glimpses of this with chat chitpt images. So I wanted to know the, the rate of air conditioning in every European country because there's whole debate over France. They don't have air conditioning there. I wanted to know how France stacks up. And instead of asking for a text output, I just said, go get the data and then generate me an image, a graphic of that. Of course, it's not interactive. It's not HTML based. It could be so much richer. And people are seeing glimpses of this with vibe coding, but it hasn't come to the consumer. So I'm interested to know, have you found a beachhead? Have you found a killer use case?

Starting point is 01:19:00 Like, I feel like there's probably, assuming like, assuming every single person listening uses AI 20 times a day, you know, even if it's just casual asking questions, et cetera. Yeah. What are the, what are the kind of prompts that you would traditionally take to a normal language model that people should try with monogram? Yeah. Yeah. So, first of all, like, if I explain, this is one of the things that when you see it, it becomes very obvious. but it's hard to sometimes describe. But the big difference is

Starting point is 01:19:34 be generated a visual interface response in roughly one and a half seconds. You ask a question and you immediately start seeing something. So it is not a do this work, make some research and get me back with a dashboard or report.

Starting point is 01:19:49 It is, I ask the question, I lift my finger from the audio button and then in a second you start seeing everything. That's really cool. So what we, to be,

Starting point is 01:20:00 be honest, we didn't know what use cases would really work with the technology best. But what we realized as like testing the application ourselves is it works best for the, like very, very simple day-to-day use cases. Like I, for example, say, okay, the Oscars are live. So which movies were nominated for Oscars this year? Yeah. Can I find something to watch and maybe something from a South American director? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:26 Just really open-ended questions. Like, where do I eat? Is there an in an individual? not on my way to the airport from here. Yeah. So all like this day-to-day questions. And then like what you realize is like, yes, like if you ask the same question to ChachyPT, it will also ask.

Starting point is 01:20:43 Right. Behind the scenes we are using, we are using opening eyes model. But we do it quite a bit on top of it. I'm sure. To make this response very interactive. Like you get information architecture rights. We get a lot of interesting visuals. And then you tap on something.

Starting point is 01:20:59 You get even more information. So it's really just a day-to-day search discovery, basic question. That's where the reaction starts seeing the most, like, kind of in German ourselves. Is it, so it's voice first? Yes. And talk about that. I mean, John was like, is such a power user of voice. Took, I was a laggard, but now I don't even like to prompt without voice because I can get a much better result if I just

Starting point is 01:21:29 talk for 20 seconds and then give it a bunch of contacts and then it'll give me back, you know, closer to whatever. So I'll answer that from first principles, right? So I'm a first principles person. So talking is a lot faster than typing, right? Roughly four or five times more information can be conveyed into audio per second. So, but the problem with the voice says when you do voice mode, you have to, you have to listen. Listening is very slow.

Starting point is 01:21:57 listening is maybe four times slower than reading. That's interesting. But if you think about them, there's something even faster than reading. That's such a scene. So if you can, the fastest, the most, like I would say, frictionless experience for me with AI is voice in and then visual output back. Yeah. Except when you have visual output, sometimes you can tap on things, right?

Starting point is 01:22:21 Tapping on a card is a lot faster than saying, can you get more details about this thing? So we support every form factor, but we design everything around audio as the primary input, camera a little bit, the secondary and keyboard will be kind of third input. They all work about. We really like in the output, like we do have some audio output, like we have a short answer, but maybe like maybe 90% of the information is conveyed through the visual interface. And you're getting a short answer like kind of with a text to speech back. Yeah, so cool.

Starting point is 01:22:53 I wish I could bet on how quickly Apple tries to buy you. Because I'd be like, I'd be like term sheet by end of week. So, yeah, I mean, this is your third huge company. Like, do you have, I mean, I guess it's like, where do you want to go with this? What are your aspirations? Because you've checked a lot of the boxes on the entrepreneurship journey. But then I'm also interested in like, it's not, you're not building the same business three times in a row. There are certain founders that do that very successfully, and it's impressive.

Starting point is 01:23:27 But between Udeme, Carbon and now this, very different companies. So what lessons, what strategies are you actually taking through the three companies that you feel like, oh, yeah, I'm running. You might not think it, but I'm running the carbon playbook in this particular area. Or I'm running the UDemE playbook here a little bit. So the common thing between those three companies was that. But my brain get obsessed on is how do I make something

Starting point is 01:23:58 that is complicated and has high entry barrier and make that accessible to more people. When everybody was focused on higher education online degrees,

Starting point is 01:24:11 be focused on how do I learn Photoshop like in a week. So it was the most mainstream of the education companies and that's where we got a ton of success and the difficult part was like not being overly

Starting point is 01:24:23 caught up with what was hot in Silicon Valley at that time. With Carbon Health, when everybody was going after premium Christianich healthcare, we were more focused on how do we make the healthcare that everyone can access better. And I think here, right now, all the focus on AI has been the coding agents and how to make really complex enterprise workforce work. But what I'm really obsessed on is if I make AI a little bit easier to use,

Starting point is 01:24:51 it will just benefit more people. So it's just like, again, there's not a ton overlapping, as you said. Like, I also do like a new challenge for myself. So I do like rotating things over. And I would say healthcare was difficult. It's nice to do it. So fair only. Pure Play consumer app.

Starting point is 01:25:07 This is expert mode. Yeah. It is. Exactly. How are you thinking about image models, diffusion models? I saw a really cool demo for something that looked like a website, but in fact was real-time diffusion, you probably know the one I'm talking about it, looked like a sort of a beige city scape and you could sort of zoom in and it was all being rendered in real time. Is that something

Starting point is 01:25:32 you see yourself implementing in the future or is it a distinct, different arc of the technology tree? So the answer is yes and no. So I don't believe AI all put in pixels as the primary form factor. That sounds cool. Like maybe 10, 20 years. later, it might be the reality, but in the near term, like, you will want something that's more of a representation of the user interface as the layer. So I think pixels is probably not the form right output like medium. But diffusion models, I'm obsessed with. So every time a new diffusion model comes in, we say, oh, is this the day we switch from L&M's to

Starting point is 01:26:16 diffusion-based models? Because it sounds like the right architecture for what we are doing. but they haven't been realistic enough. Like we have been trying everything, right? So essentially the way monogram works is there's one major model, right? Because when you ask a question, there is language in the interface. So you just need a language model or something model that can do language. But then there's a lot of like maybe 20, 30 parallel things are happening in the same time.

Starting point is 01:26:42 So we have a very different agent architecture. So we do have some of our own models, some fine-tune models. models, but the one, like big one. So I think eventually that the main model be with diffusion base, not LAM, like transformer base, but not today. Like I think their tag is still not good enough to be able to handle this. Yeah, maybe in the future. Super cool.

Starting point is 01:27:08 In the app store now, iOS exclusive, Android as well. What do you thinking? It's iOS exclusive. We'll be working on web application desktop, Android. But part of the idea here is because the entire interface is built by AI, we are just building clients. Yeah. This will become the most cross-platform. I imagine it has to be so fast, especially in the age of vibe coding.

Starting point is 01:27:32 Like, porting has to be so simple now. Instagram took like five years to get to Android. I imagine you have a shorter timeline. So good luck for the... Tell us about the round. Yeah. Tell us about the round. So the round was led by the end.

Starting point is 01:27:48 and Luxe and the 40 million dollar C round. Woo. You already hit the gong for the launch and you hit the round as well. It's a double gong day. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic. Very cool. I'm super excited to play around with it.

Starting point is 01:28:06 I'd love to have you back on the show and chat more soon. Have a good one. Yeah, great to see you. Thank you. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. If you're designing the next bangor app, get in Figma agents, meet the canvas,

Starting point is 01:28:17 Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Larson Jensen from Harpoon Ventures. He's the founder and general partner. How you doing? What's up, boys? Good to see you. Thanks for having.

Starting point is 01:28:33 What's happening? I'm obsessed with the portfolio. We can go into that. But introduce yourself first and get us up to speed on what the fund is doing and what the news is today. Sure. Jordy John, great to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Larson Jensen. I'm the founder and GP at Harpoon Ventures. Early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in technology and the national interest of the United States and our allies when appropriate.

Starting point is 01:28:58 Today we're announcing that we raised a $155 million fund for. So fired up for the gong. I wish I was there to see it in person. We wish you were here. This new mallet setup we have it really like you just feel the full force of the gong coming right back at you. That's sick. I felt it on my hand. Thanks guys. Good, good. Harpoon Ventures, great name, great name. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:29:24 Would you, if it was necessary, would you invest in a company that you was using whale blubber to power data centers? Is this even a question? Of course I do that. If it's necessary, it might be necessary. We did all the energy we can get. So let's go. We do. No, it's a great name.

Starting point is 01:29:42 This is the show I'm on. Take us back in time. me a little bit of the journey to venture capital because you have a fascinating. You actually have the non-traditional background that so many VCs wish they had when they say I went to Stanford and then I worked at Google before becoming a venture capitalist. Well, lots of guys say they're an operator, you know, in the background of what operator meant, it was special operator in the career that I came from. Insane stolen valor. It's interesting to hear when I showed up to Silicon Valley, it's like, oh, I'm an operator. I'm an operator. I'm like, I don't know,

Starting point is 01:30:12 it was the same kind of operator that I was used to, but I guess different, you know, different ecosystems have different terms, which is fine. So take us through it. Definitely, sure, sure. The real operator should start saying, like, yeah, I was an employee. That was an employee. Yeah, basically. That's cool, too.

Starting point is 01:30:29 You know, that's cool, too. Just trade. Exactly. So, yeah, grew up at the Central Valley of California. My parents were almond farmers. Went down to USC. Fortunately, it was pretty good at swimming and worked pretty hard at that. Brought me to two Olympic games, 04 and 08.

Starting point is 01:30:43 I got a silver in 04, bronze in 08. 08 is where Phelps got his eight gold. So, you know, if there's anything that's common about my trajectory, is I'm sort of like nothing compared to the people that work in the industry or in the careers that I'm in, had to compete against guys like Phelps and Lachty and that whole generation when I was swimming. And then similarly, you know, moved into the steel teams thereafter,

Starting point is 01:31:04 wanted to serve my country in a different way than just serving on the playing field, but do so on the battlefield. It felt like I had the, you know, hopefully the courage, I guess we would see some of the determination and the hard work to make it through seal training, which fortunately did, and then deployed in combat to Afghanistan, had the opportunity to be an early adopter to Palantir. They told us we were an early customer, but you never really know what the government, what the truth is across history.

Starting point is 01:31:32 But they said we're early adopters to Palantir, and I was just mind-blown by the capability, and that gave me the tech bug. So decided to apply to Stanford, and if I got in, I'd move up to the valley, and if I didn't, I'd do another rotation in the SEAL teams. Fortunately got in. So you did go to Stanford. Traditional background. Traditional background.

Starting point is 01:31:51 Traditional background. Wait, I got to ask, how was a DEI higher up at Stanford at the time? How was Buds as like an Olympic medalist swimmer? Dude, it was fucking hard. It was really hard. Okay. Was there any points where you're like, ah, it's kind of easy? I feel like I'm just kind of good.

Starting point is 01:32:13 Well, yeah, the swimming was a piece of cake. Like, you know, as you can imagine. I was literally the fast, I mean, still, the fastest American of all time in the 400 meter freestyle. So if it wasn't easy for me, we'd have a real problem. So it was, it was easy? I don't say that to brag. I'm just that you asked the question, like, you know, was it easier or hard? That's what I got my ass kicked in like everything else.

Starting point is 01:32:33 So what was the hardest part then? For me, it was boats on heads, which if you've seen the videos, you're like carrying these, like, inflatable boat rafts and running around and stuff like. that it looks like they'd be in a background like a backyard pool trust me they're not these things are a couple hundred pounds and you're carrying those on your head for for weeks on end in the case of hell week you pretty much always have them on your head and so that was brutal so anything that was impact-oriented I'm still feeling today I think a lot of guys are I mean when you're when you're loaded up and and rucking around the mountains I mean you're doing so in full kit

Starting point is 01:33:04 wearing you know 200 pounds almost of gear on top of what you're already whatever your existing body weight is so it's brutal And, you know, I was definitely not the best at it. It wasn't the best swimmer. It wasn't the best seal, but was fortunate to be part of the community. That's awesome. So take us from Stanford to venture. What were some of the first investments?

Starting point is 01:33:24 What was the strategy back then? Where'd the money come from? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my venture career sort of started pre-Stanford. I got lucky and got an internship at Andreessen Horowitz, which was awesome. Great learning opportunity to go there pre-GSP. Similarly did between years over at light speed of the GSB.

Starting point is 01:33:40 And then after light speed had the opportunity, or, after the GSP had the opportunity to go to light speed for about a year. And I just really had this, like any crazy founder, might have like this hairbrained idea or a gap in the market, something you're so passionate about. You can't sleep without. And that was me in terms of investing in technology for the national interest. And at the time, there really wasn't a fever for this.

Starting point is 01:34:00 Now there certainly is, thank God. But at the time, there really wasn't. And I sort of had this idea that's maybe not that novel. But I effectively said, hey, what if we could create a private sector, Inc. you tell. Wouldn't that be pretty cool? And that's what I set out to do. So fortunately, pitched the GPs and the team over at my former two employers at Andresden in Lightspeed, and there are our first LPs ever in Harpoon to sort of go out there and start taking it, taking that mission to the market. So that's what we've been doing. When back in 2018,

Starting point is 01:34:30 when we started, the market was obviously very, very different. Most of what we did was very much, you know, known as dual use. At the time, that meant very much enterprise technology. And we would try to work with them to help them break into a government market that these founders didn't really know existed, but we and our team knew existed from our lived experience, I guess you could say, for cybersecurity tools or next generation data infrastructure, what have you, for autonomous autonomy platforms, all the things that people sort of like know today are applicable to the government market. But back then, it was super faux pa, man. It was crazy. I felt like I was going to get laughed out of town. It almost was. So now we're doing much more defense.

Starting point is 01:35:10 It's focused things because I think the founder ecosystem provides for it. I think that we've evolved along with the ecosystem. At the time, there really wasn't very much national security or government-focused companies or engineers or talent. Now there's a ton. I jokingly say that I go ahead. Go ahead. Go for it. Go for it.

Starting point is 01:35:30 No, I was going to say, I used to go to these conferences that the government would put on, you know, in and around the Pentagon and Crystal City and all these places as a venture guy. And they'd be like nobody there. There'd be like no high horsepower entrepreneurs. There'd be no other venture firms. Man, what am I doing? Going to these places, there's nothing for me to invest it. Ultimately, now that's all changed. And I'm so happy about that.

Starting point is 01:35:53 We're celebrating our nation's 250th birthday this coming weekend. Hopefully all of you are celebrating the fourth in traditional good fashion. And I think that now to see the ecosystem what it is is just tremendous. I'm super fired up about it. How are you thinking about early stage defamation? defense, like, are you still, are there still pockets of, of, uh, white space and and opportunity? It feels like the boom of, or do you really need to be doing like hardcore R&D, like,

Starting point is 01:36:23 like, like, it's, it seems like the last five years there was an opportunity to do hardcore R&D, like actually new technology or just like deliver a capability that's necessary and kind of leverage existing technologies and just deliver a great product for, a need, whereas it feels like there's less and less like, you know, we have a bunch of great maritime focus companies now doing kind of every major category. So does a new company need to do like, you know, real R&D and come up with something totally novel or, or compete with existing or is there still like pockets where you're like there needs to be? I think both are true. Like one, you know, I want the discombobulator. I want to invest in that. I don't

Starting point is 01:37:08 know exactly what it is, but Trump came out with the discombobulator and said that that's what helped in Venezuela. And like, I want to find the next version of that and I want to back that technology. Similarly, I have a buddy of mine that I'll, that we might need some R&D on that. Also, I have a buddy of mine who I went to OCS with. I'll keep his name off the tape here. But he testified to Congress on the UAP phenomenon, which I know you guys are deep in as well. And I texted him not too long ago. And I'm like, hey, man, we got some alien tech. I'm ready to go. All the rest of this stuff is like, I don't know, not really doing it for me. And so we had a quick call, but

Starting point is 01:37:39 didn't end up going anywhere. So if you've got any founders out there that are, you know, one of reverse engineering. Listen, I got a signed poster of Bob Lazar in my office. I'm super fired up. I go deep on this. You're Jesse Michaels guy? Listen, I dive into anything

Starting point is 01:37:55 you'll give me. So send me some books. Send me whatever you got. I'm ready. But like, ultimately, I think that there's plenty of meat on the bone for other novel capabilities to come up and get funded. I think for us as a venture firm, I used to superimpose my view of what should be created on the ecosystem. And we've effectively stopped doing that and just tried to be, you know,

Starting point is 01:38:14 good judges of founders that are high octane and have a huge vision. And when we're surprised and we believe them, we want to back them as early as possible, which is another evolution of the firm. When we started, I don't think we had the brand, the reputation, the credibility, to credibly lead some of these rounds. Now I think we do. And we launched our Black Flag Accelerator, which is helping us go earlier. creep into doing more preseeds and seed stage investments where we've led a lot through that.

Starting point is 01:38:42 And so I think the future is bright for entrepreneurs, you know, chipping away at a variety of different problems. You're wearing a flag on your hat. It's the stars and stripes, beautiful American patriotic flag. Black flag I associate with pirates. They're not on my team. Why black flag? Well, I should have wore my other hat. So I got the Jolly Roger over the red, white and blue. I should have wore that one for you guys, you know, figuring that you'd bring that up. Are they on our team? Have we recruited the pirates?

Starting point is 01:39:08 How does it work? Yeah, we've recruited them. They're on our team now. Okay, okay, I got it. This is an American pirate. I like it. I like it. I like it.

Starting point is 01:39:17 We thought about this for a while. And if you look at all the squadron patches that are out there for aircraft squadrons, you know, various seal teams, special operations, et cetera, like they all have some pirate themed, you know, insignia. So it's actually not all that. Believe it or not, we're pretty thoughtful about the name harpoon and the name black flag. We've actually thought about the pros and cons, and some people might not like it, but you can't win over everybody.

Starting point is 01:39:41 I like it. Tell us, how did you, what is your overall take as an Olympian on the enhanced games? How did you process it? If, you know, if this was like before your venture career and you were done with the, you know, Olympics, would you have considered going in there? I want, your whole take. You know, I should have tracked it more closely. You guys are probably much better read on this than I am. But on the swimming, I believe somebody entered that wasn't enhanced at all and still won and did a best time. I believe in the backstroke, which is interesting.

Starting point is 01:40:14 And I saw some jokes on Twitter about people saying, like, oh, these guys are already enhanced. You know, they don't need to be even more enhanced. And I think that's just a lot of BS. Like, you know, we get drug tested so much. It's insane. We could go a whole offline segment on, you know, what it's like to have the drug testers show up and, you know, watch you go to the restroom, take your blood and all of this stuff. unannounced. You have to fill out where you're going to be for literally a quarter in advance down to the day.

Starting point is 01:40:38 And if you miss three tests in a row, it's the same as being a positive test. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that you might not be attracting to the enhanced games the right athletes right now. I don't know else to put it. I don't know if they're the gold medalist, silver medalist, bronze medalists that are showing up. Yeah. Maybe they were. A gold medalist is still going to outperform the like, number eight guy who's taking every drug of the world. Totally. I would have who who who whop those guys' asses. Like, for sure.

Starting point is 01:41:08 Like, I mean, like, it's not just me. It's like anybody who medals, anybody who medals, like, there's a big drop-off between, like, meddling and sort of finaling and then not finally. And so, you know, I would have sort of welcomed it. I think an interesting aspect of the enhanced games would be like, let's load these guys up and put them head to head with, you know, whoever the modern day. Like Katie Ladecki.

Starting point is 01:41:28 Let's see if they can beat Katie Ladecki. I mean, that was part of the interesting. production of the enhanced games was that it did tell you something about the real games and that and that there is a gap there and that was in a if you look at it as like a science experiment it was a cool experiment that we got to run and I think we all learned a little bit from it even even if it wasn't this oh yeah obviously with the with the drug regimens they just blow everyone out of the water which is sort of what some people expected but that wasn't really the message of that campaign and it was a really cool experiment and great great to see yeah anyway thank you so much

Starting point is 01:42:01 Where are you based? San Diego, California, but I'm on the road. I'm actually in New York right now, but, you know, I'm back in San Diego quite frequently. All right, fund five. Come on. Come on live. We'll come back, boys. Thank you so much for having me.

Starting point is 01:42:15 We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Ricky Rosa. From Oasis, Doeis.

Starting point is 01:42:30 Ricky, how you're doing? Welcome to the show. How you doing? Can you hear us? Introduce yourself. I can. Can you hear me? Yeah, all good. Can you hear us over the drumming and the air horn?

Starting point is 01:42:45 It's a very chaotic entrance. You get hot dropped in here. You're trying to drink your coffee in peace. And all of a sudden, it's welcome to the Ultradome. But welcome to the Ultradome. Introduce yourself. Awesome. Thank you, guys.

Starting point is 01:42:56 So I'm Ricky Rosa. I'm the founder and CEO of Oasis Devices. and we make a smart ring to try to replace the keyboard. What we're interested in is the next platform of computing. Our smartphone is the final form. I don't know. I mean, I don't think anybody knows. But once you take that as your baseline...

Starting point is 01:43:14 I'm praying every day. I want to throw it in the ocean. Yeah, you and me, brother. So once you take that as your baseline, you can start to explore. What we noticed is that you can only ask people, to take one step from current. And it's very easy to get, you know, tangled in, you know, crazy new platforms and devices and that sort of thing.

Starting point is 01:43:40 But you can only ask people to change things so much. You can not ask them to change the entire workflow overnight. We've spent years in the idea, I'm trying to figure out, you know, what would be a good use cases for smart rings and, and, and different things. And what we landed is private dictation because what rings are really useful for is bringing them very close to your mouth

Starting point is 01:44:07 and whispering. And it just so happens that we also have a tripod in a ring that allows you to edit. We spent a lot of time making sure that it had the resolution for navigation, for smart glasses. But smart glasses are a little bit

Starting point is 01:44:25 slower to take off. So we channeled all of that development into editing what you see on screen. And so we made it work with Whisperflow. The founder tonight is an angel investor in our company. And so that's what we're launching today. Amazing. Very cool. What does good look like in terms of churn and retention for a new device? Because I imagine that the product looks great. I imagine it will work and I imagine people will keep it on for a long time and use it. But the baseline is so low. I mean, we had an Applevision Pro in the studio this morning and the team was trying it out and like laughing and enjoying the demo.

Starting point is 01:45:10 But that product has to have like 99% churn. And same thing with most VR headsets. A lot of hardware companies. Like if you can just find that smiling curve of, you know, the conversion rate of a few people that come on, do you, how are you thinking about actually getting people over that that honeymoon period where they try something. Well, I'll tell you why, like, I like this approach is, one, utilizing a device that is already a daily product in the workspace. Utilizing, like, audio transcription, which, like, Whisper Flow, I was at dinner with a buddy last night, and he's showing us, like, his whole Whisper Flow set up.

Starting point is 01:45:48 He's, like, obsessed with it. And then you're utilizing the ring, which is also a form factor that people are used to by now, the aura ring is proven. And so you'd like take that combination of like people want to be transcribing more. They're using their computers all day long. You delivered in a form factor that is like, you know, understood already that people are comfortable with. And I think that's a recipe for potentially a hit.

Starting point is 01:46:11 But again, yes, the sort of median new consumer electronic device has like zero percent retention. So it's still very hard. Well, I will say I use the Vision Pro every night. I don't know if that helps or hurts my credibility. I love new hardware, but I admit that there's, that it's always hard to get people on. But yes, is it important that this is both effectively a peripheral for a daily driven device and then also a fashion accessory? Is that important that it's both?

Starting point is 01:46:45 Yes. So the way that we think about retention is, and this is why we struggle so much in years past, is we really needed to find a use case that was a must-have, not a nice to have. Yeah. Right. And so with whisperflow, you know, you can speak loudly to your computer, but it just so happens that in, you know, crowded offices, coffee shops, those are public environments. You can't speak out loud.

Starting point is 01:47:15 And so it really helps to have a peripheral that you can speak quietly. once we move to other platforms like iOS and glasses eventually, then the fashion accessory or the fashion point starts to become more important. Yeah. It also feels like, I don't know, because you can wear AirPods and you can talk to them. Can you not whisper to AirPods? Because even if you can, even if it's the same functional device, it's, it's a It's way different aesthetics talking into a ring and having earbuds in that feel like, okay, this person's out in their own world.

Starting point is 01:47:59 But I imagine with the microphone a lot closer, the ring allows you to speak at even a lower level and produce a higher fidelity transcript. Is that correct? Correct. Yes. Yes. Okay. That's cool. So the ring outperforms AirPods, but also it has the modality of touch. Yeah, which is also. It allows you to do more, yeah, it allows you to do it to edit the things that you see on screen. It allows you to navigate.

Starting point is 01:48:23 It allows you to completely interact with AI and your computer and your workflows without over touching the keyboard. Yeah. And this point is important because what we think is that if we can, it's a big if, but if we can get people to interact with laptops without touching them, then the output piece of it becomes a little bit more fluid. Yeah. Now it's a smaller ask to ask people. to put the display in glasses or display in another device. Right. But you really need to solve the input part first,

Starting point is 01:48:57 and that's kind of what we're going after at the moment. The demo is someone using basically a Word document. Is that intentional? Why not a code editor? Why not an LLM interaction back and forth? Why text specifically? Well, we do have a demo of the person. on using chatybt and you know code and that sort of thing in the launch video yeah but for the

Starting point is 01:49:24 b-roll it's just like more aesthetic to have the text in it oh okay okay okay I was just wondering if it was a hint at like where you see the first killer feature uh with with writers or with someone who's doing more like word document based knowledge work as opposed to something who more of a programmer but i don't know maybe I'm reading into it too remember whisper flow is like yeah like a platform agnostic tool. They see retention across emails, Word documents, you know, coding tools and the rest. And so we are an extension of that. So we kind of sit in the same plane as then. You know what I mean? What's the status of the company? How big is the company? Have you raised money? Where do you see all this going? So we're pretty small. We're like a five-person team. We're scattered across the globe.

Starting point is 01:50:11 We have, you know, people in Australia, Abu Dhabi, China. We're in a collect. We're in a bunch. We've raised a few angel rounds and we shipped our beta this January. That's great. When do you want to go into public release? Where can people sign up to learn more? Where can people We launch our pre-order campaign for the microphone and trackpad version today. And that's going to be shipping in small batches from two weeks from now until Christmas. So we're going to roll it out. Yeah. That's great. A testament. to the modern We'll order one, Tyler,

Starting point is 01:50:52 if you can order one and then try to put us, you know, should I ask to be put at the front of the list or near the front of the list? It'd be nice to get in the next month would be awesome. It'd be great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Starting point is 01:51:06 Congratulations on the progress. Very cool device. Thank you. I appreciate it, guys. Think about me on. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway.

Starting point is 01:51:14 Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. use your favorite agents to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Andrew Rayo from Tax Wire. Andrew, how are you doing? Here, guys, thank you for having me.

Starting point is 01:51:35 Thank you for having me. What's going on, dude. Great to see you. Welcome. Jorday. Great to say, out. I know you guys know each other, but for the audience members that don't, maybe introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.

Starting point is 01:51:46 Yes, uh, uh, Jordy, good to see you. I did not, did not have it on my bingo card to three, four years ago, whenever, whatever it was that we, I worked for you with you at a, at party around slash capital that we would be talking about taxes on a, on your podcast. Um, we're back. We're so back. Congrats to, uh, to build up you on all the success. But I'm, I'm Andrew Ray. I'm one of the co-fathers of a tax wire. We are a full-made solution for global sales tax compliance. And we just, raised $25 million because death and taxes are forever. And I think, I think that probably our bet is that Ryan Johnson will solve tax, solve death first. So we're here to sell taxes. I got the hat for it. I see that. You're actually hoping that he solves that to just have more,

Starting point is 01:52:37 more customers. Bigger tam. Not exactly, because the tam just keeps growing. We just have more consumption in the economy. GDP goes up. There's more taxes. Hopefully we can improve the subway system in New York with some of those tax dollars, and we just, at a good time to keep rolling.

Starting point is 01:52:53 Why business to business taxes? Why not go after turbo tax? Yes. It's a great question. My immediate initial reaction is because Intuit has a hell of a lot of distribution, and so that's probably one. No, no, more for me specifically, I had this problem in a really big way. at a company I was out before this,

Starting point is 01:53:17 I've very much felt the pain of managing indirect tax compliance. And I think it's a market that's dominated by a bunch of companies that are very old. I think about $5 trillion in taxes remitted in sales tax and VAT by enterprises around the world. It's a very big problem. There's a bunch of very not-so-customer-obsessed

Starting point is 01:53:35 software companies and services firms, like the Big Four, Avalora, et cetera, that dominate this market. And it's a pain point that I had before this. And we, so it's mixed up market opportunity and our customers are finance people. They're super smart, but they do not have the expertise or time to be managing their taxes. So we deliver, deliver that outcome for them. And reality check me, reality check me on this.

Starting point is 01:54:00 I would assume that sales tax enforcement is increasing significantly in the early days of the internet. There were all these crazy loopholes where if Amazon's based, in Seattle and you buy something in Florida. They don't pay tax. And I think a lot of those loopholes have been closed. So more and more e-commerce companies have flourished on the back of Shopify and other platform stripe. But so there's more people selling products all nationally.

Starting point is 01:54:32 And so they have a much higher sales tax burden. Is that roughly correct for the secular trend? Roughly correct. The secular trend is kind of like a few things. One is regulation. So there's that regulation's been rolling out. And what we're seeing now is that a lot of states are now actually starting to roll out taxes of not only like more enforcement, they're using AI to do to do audits. A lot of states are increasing sales tax as well and trying to increase audits of companies that have been complying now because they're getting squeezed on income tax.

Starting point is 01:55:01 They're getting squeezed on property tax. Gavin Newsom and California is trying to start taxing the software industry. And then very similarly in VAT around the world, there's a lot of enforcement of real-time reporting and the invoice. thing that's coming down the pipeline. So it's a, nobody gets voted out of office for raising sales tax or raising VAT, whereas income tax or property tax can hit you. So you're seeing big enforcement. That's like just a, I'd say a secular tailwind. And then the incumbents in the industry are not incredibly AI native or customer friendly. And so you've also kind of got this general customer frustration that gives a new player like us a lot of tailwinds as fall.

Starting point is 01:55:39 So you raised this money during the SaaSpocalypse, you overpowered. You overpowered. the saspocalypse, but I'm sure you were getting asked, like, you know, how did you answer, how did you answer the saspocalypse question? Because now, right, I'm sure when you kind of close around, or at least you had a term sheet signed, the saspocalypse was over. Everyone was like, you know, we're back. But yeah, but how do you think we're super back? Super back. Super back. The SaaS-pocalypse is over. But, you know, I think it's been super honest. It's like we, the benefit, we're, we're benefiting a little bit from the fact that

Starting point is 01:56:15 a lot of the people we can beat with their services as much as they are software companies. And so there's like more spend to eat, which lets you kind of mean into, we get, we are categorized as like AI-Native SaaS or AI-native services software. And some of that is that we genuinely like are actually delivering an outcome. And so our customers don't think of us as software or services. is like we have tax experts in the house. We do literally everything that goes into indirect tax compliance. We worked and replace something for consulting firm

Starting point is 01:56:42 literally this week for one of our customers. And so it's, so some of it is that we are benefiting from AI versus being someone who's being displaced maybe by AI. And so it's mostly a tail end. I think... You're doing the displacement. You're coming after the hundreds of thousands of people.

Starting point is 01:57:01 I am the apocalypse. Exactly. Exactly. We are the apocalypse and we probably, our category probably benefits from it, which is something that maybe I can't take much credit for. I think it's probably still painful out there for some folks in a way that maybe it's not bad for us. Well, good luck. Thank you so much for taking time. Amazing progress. It's been awesome to see the journey and yeah, congrats to the whole team on the milestone. I'm sure you'll be back soon. We'll talk to you soon. Of course. Thank you guys so much. You appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:57:28 Cheers, thank you. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than we AI market. It's a question everyone's been asking. It's your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform. Just do it. Why not? Why not? Our next best is Michael Anderson from Framework Ventures, raising a huge force to fund. He's in the waiting room and now he's in the TV He's been ultra dumb. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing well. How are you guys? We're doing fantastically. Honestly, the view here is not the view there. This view, where are you? Your view-mogging us. This is...

Starting point is 01:58:04 We don't even have any... We don't have any windows in this... There's a boat back there. This is... Like, thousands of feet in the air. Yeah. Just... Hanging the castle.

Starting point is 01:58:14 Getting in the castle. Looking good. Anyway, sorry. Where are you calling in from? San Francisco. Looks great. We look for the Transamerica building. Oh, that's a good one.

Starting point is 01:58:24 The pyramid. I like that one. Yeah. Awesome. Enough about the view. Let's talk about you. Please introduce yourself a little bit. us about the fund. Give us the news. Yeah. So Michael, one of the two co-founders of framework.

Starting point is 01:58:39 The quick history is my co-founder, Vance, and I started it seven years ago. We're both working for, you know, tech companies. I was at Snapchat. He was at Netflix. Quit our jobs. We're obsessed with crypto, moved into my parents' house and started the fund. Now we've raised our fourth fund and manage a couple billion dollars. Did you have any outside capital in the first fund? Like what was the, because I imagine with crypto, like you can just invest in tokens. And like if you're good at trading and you're early, like you don't necessarily need institutional capital to get started. But what was the early day, what were the early days like? Yeah, we had an institution as our first backer.

Starting point is 01:59:17 Okay. Cool. And it was a small $15 million fund. And we started a framework really with a thesis. You know, a lot of people started with trading or a hedge fund thesis. Ours was actually the opposite in that we felt that nobody was going after the early. seed stage of venture investing in the crypto Web3 space in 2019. And so that's what we started with. So it's always been, you know, a venture thesis. And I think our first, you know, our second fund, 100 million was kind of like the first institutional fund with multiple institutions. And now we've got

Starting point is 01:59:48 Ivy League endowments and sovereign wealth funds and off to the races. That's great. What was it like in the early days? Was the crypto community really geographically distributed or were you focused on investing in America or California or San Francisco specifically if you're going after those early stage crypto founders? Yeah, good question. I mean, we moved back to San Francisco. We were actually in Lance and I were in Los Angeles. We moved back to San Francisco thinking, okay, well, that's the hub of tech. And we found ourselves basically traveling to all the entrepreneurs at the early days because crypto was a global phenomenon. You had pockets in Asia, you know, Australia, UK. I'd say largely now, it's still pretty geographically distributed,

Starting point is 02:00:30 but there's still most of the tech is happening in kind of the hubs that you would expect. So San Francisco is definitely one of the top places these days. But yeah, it was a lot of travel those early couple years. So what's the conference strategy now? I feel like there's debate on like, you know, how many conference, what's the perfect amount of conferences to go to in a year as a crypto investor? That is the topic of conversation. It's like a billion dollar.

Starting point is 02:00:58 It's like a billion dollar question. I don't want to travel that much. No, you got to do an Asia trip. You got to do a Europe trip. You know, make some travel out of it. It's, uh, they're always in fun destinations. I think a couple years ago, we went to the, uh, blockchain week in Singapore and then stayed for the F1 race.

Starting point is 02:01:15 Ooh, that's good. It's, uh, it's always a good time. What, what, uh, what are you kind of forecasting in, in, uh, crypto right now. Like what, what, uh, you, you guys have done well by predicting, I just, you know, it's a balance of like having some idea of, of the future, uh, and just backing great entrepreneurs, but like, what are you, what are you excited about with this new fund to invest in? Yeah. So I think when we started in 2019, we saw crypto as sort of the next frontier where the smartest entrepreneurs that we were meeting with, you know, the Wiz kids popping out of the

Starting point is 02:01:54 Stanford, Harvard's are, you know, working on crypto, working on cryptography technologies. And I think that that's still the case. But I think what a lot of what we're seeing now is people who have domain expertise in different areas, different industries who are saying, help me do the crypto. I think this should be decentralized, whether it's energy, nuclear, AI, or, you know, hard infrastructure. They're coming to us and saying, hey, like, I know how to do energy trading. I've been doing it for the last decade.

Starting point is 02:02:22 help me build a distributed decentralized utility so that we can go disintermediate, you know, the utilities. And I think that that is kind of the new thing. It's not crypto just for crypto's sake. It's crypto getting imbuned within, you know, really hard tech industries. So it's not really like its own thing anymore. I think now it's just kind of become pervasive in everything. So the fund's grown. The apertures probably widened in terms of the industries that you're looking.

Starting point is 02:02:52 look at. What stayed the same throughout all four funds? I'll take a crack. Just remaining bullish on crypto when everyone's calling you an idiot loser is like a really good way to make money, I think. And I feel like you guys have done that. Just like, you know, it seems like it's about having a tolerance for looking silly. Sure. And that can look like remaining bullish during like moments where everyone's like, honey, you're still doing that crypto thing, you know, at Thanksgiving? Oh, so many years of that. You know, it's just going to be another one of those. When it's a good time to buy, it's a bad time to sell. When it's a bad time to sell, it's a good time to buy. So I think, you know, riding the waves for sure. And we hold, you know,

Starting point is 02:03:40 digital assets in the fund, each one of them. But I think the thing that has been consistent is really just a venture thesis and then following the founders. And the founders who, You know, we are seeing, like we have an investment in a company called Mecca. We got to know them because they were previous entrepreneurs that sold their company to Coinbase. They are not doing anything in crypto currently. They could eventually. But it's, you know, how we got to know them was through crypto. And they are building, you know, a data platform for robotics AI.

Starting point is 02:04:09 So those types of investments, I think, are just the consistent thread for us. And when we find world class founders, we're going to back them multiple times. Interesting. Awesome. Cool. I haven't been following the my strategy, Michael Saylor.

Starting point is 02:04:23 We have not been following the story closely. Can you get me up to speed in just like 20 seconds what's going on over there? I mostly just see like the deranged like, you know, AI images that he puts out where he's like on a lifeboat

Starting point is 02:04:36 just like, it's like why are you putting that image in my head? That's a funny one. Literally leaving. You're like escaping the Titanic. Wait, am I on the lifeboat? Yeah. Wait, is this

Starting point is 02:04:49 inspiration? Am I supposed to? I think, you know, the quick story is that whenever you mix financial engineering and crypto, something bad usually has happened. And I think that that overfitting of the narrative is kind of what's going on

Starting point is 02:05:03 with him right now. But he's building this entity that has multiple layers to it, whether it's convertibles, whether it's preferred, whether it's common. And he's financing it in different ways. And the question is, can he continue to do with all of the legs of the stool, or is one of the legs going to fall out?

Starting point is 02:05:20 And I think, you know, the narratives of him blowing up are overblown. I think he's got smart people around. I think it's tough when crypto's down this much, but this is exactly what happens in all these cycles. If we go back to, you know, the talus is on our hands over the last, you know, nearly decade of doing this, this is exactly what plays out all four years. So I think we're just in the middle of that right now. And I think he will be proven right eventually.

Starting point is 02:05:46 it may just take him years and talk about somebody who's been willing to just stand in the face of all of the negative publicity. He's the best at it. That's a good point. Awesome, dude. Well, great to meet you. Congrats on the new fund. And yeah, looking forward to meeting more of your founders. Appreciate it.

Starting point is 02:06:03 Great to me, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code analyzing data, creating content, or automating business work. workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. It's kind of the goose itself. It is the goose itself. Have you ever heard of a hector corn, Jordi? No. I'd never heard of

Starting point is 02:06:29 this either, but apparently it refers to a company worth more than a hundred billion dollars. You got a unicorn worth one billion, a decacorn worth 10 billion, and a hector corn, which I'd never heard before, but, you know, somebody wrote it in a... Learn something new every day. Learn something new any day. Every single day, especially on this show. Well, our next guest is investor and NBA

Starting point is 02:06:54 champion, Tristan Thompson. We're very lucky to be joined by him here in the GDPA Ultradone. There we go. John, stand up next to go. High check. Whoa.

Starting point is 02:07:07 He's like Wally Zurbia here. Wow, you guys are pretty easy. I'm sitting right. Hey, yes you are. Let's go. You are all of it. You are a tall drink of milk. Holy Snikes.

Starting point is 02:07:25 What's up, fellas? What's going on? How are you? We're doing you. Not close. Yeah, yeah, why don't you stand up? Not even close. Now, I'm happy to let you guys do your thing.

Starting point is 02:07:34 I just wanted the audience to understand that John is the NBA-sized man. It's true. And on the camera, everyone thinks I'm five. 10. And then you guys like may my seat the shortest one right now. Like seriously like this guy's a bitch. He was a center for 14 years at this height. How do you do it? Yeah. What's going on? It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Glad to be here. By the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Thank you. We're landing you. No, no, no. For all you guys success in that position and all. Come on. Let's big time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's huge. Yeah. I mean, I want to start with, I mean, tech and investing. I mean, we can go through your career, but I'm interested in in sort of

Starting point is 02:08:12 how you first caught the bug, how you first got interested in technology, investing, just your journey to financial management, understanding more of your strategy, and sort of like oftentimes there's like mentors or books and resources along the way, like what was your journey? I mean, I think for me, and I won't give like the cliche, like, you know,

Starting point is 02:08:33 I think other guys are like, you know, I think I didn't start really investing into things outside of the traditional, you know, state treasury bonds. and the S&P 500, the stuff that Fidelity in Wells Fargo tell you the money markets. I waited to my second deal. Let's be real. Like, you know, because, you know, I tell the young guys, you know, your first year might be alive.

Starting point is 02:08:52 You got to just be focused on being really good at basketball so that you get the second deal. Yeah, when you get the second deal, when I got my second deal, $82 million, you know, I switched financial advisors because of the one I was with. Bang, bang, bang. There you go. Wow. Wow. This is high energy here.

Starting point is 02:09:13 Love this. Wow. But no. You got two deals. No, I started getting into alternative assets and getting into tech and investing in companies, whether it's consumer or tech. Were you getting pitched VC funds? Like the dust and the VC funds? Yeah, you know, like Carlisle Group and then all those guys, you know, back then I was with Morgan Stanley. So they would give us those opportunities because they had them as a client. So that was kind of like my early kind of like get my feet wet. But obviously as I got older and wanted to dive into more, but obviously having the capital. to have that exposure.

Starting point is 02:09:45 You know, I started to, you know, look into more and start to talk to founders and, you know, get ahead of the curve. Yeah. That's probably good to start, probably good to start, like, taking deals from Morgan Stanley because obviously, or a partner like that, because not every deal is going to really hit

Starting point is 02:10:04 or be that great, but better than just looking at whatever's coming through because I think when people start investing, especially in private markets, they, everything looks great in a pitch deck, right? It's like, oh, I'm looking at the forecast. It's like, they're going to $100 million in like three years. And then you realize like, okay, well, that's in most decks.

Starting point is 02:10:23 And it's about being able to pick out, okay, what's actually going to do well versus what's going to flop. Yeah, I feel like one of the hardest things is, you see one deck and you're like, this is a great idea, great team. And you don't realize that there's three other teams that are doing the exact same thing. They started two years earlier and they're better. Do you think about trying to, when you identify a trend that you're interested in, you want exposure to, are you trying to pick the one winner, get a huge stake in one winner, or do you want to have some sort of diversification across the market? I think for me, it's, first of all, I always bet on the founder. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:10:56 Right? It's betting that's the most important thing. You know, these pitch decks, before they're 100 million. Now they always tell you they're a billion dollars. And now they always look so good. But I think for myself, I try to lean on what my. my peers are doing as well. And I've been so fortunate to have some guys that have, you know, have early ICOs in Ethereum or guys that have done great exits. And whether it is a family

Starting point is 02:11:16 office or is the guys that are in funds, you know, that have had that experience. Because for me, the reality is I am still one of the younger guys that are in the space, right? So I try to lean on other people. And honestly, people have been so good to me and kind of like kind of helped stir me the right way because they're like, Tristan, we want to see you win. We don't want to see you come in and just give money to everybody. And not get much back. And not get much back. You know, I remember Olaf, a buddy of mine, who's one of the early Coinbase employees.

Starting point is 02:11:42 Yeah. You know, he said, Tristan, you also got to be prepared that you're going to invest in 10 things and eight are going to fail. Yep. But the two that do well, he said, don't worry. It'll cover all your capital that you put in. So I also had that mindset as well, but I always like to bet on the founder. Bet on the horse.

Starting point is 02:11:55 It's like a horse race. Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm the most bullish. Was there, was there any athlete, entrepreneur, investors that you look up to maybe from the previous generation or people that were, or maybe underrated investors that people don't know about? Because I feel like people know about the Shacks of the world, the guys that are super commercial, but anybody that's maybe more underrated? I mean, I look at

Starting point is 02:12:17 Shaq and Magic because I think they were able to use their NIL to pivot to chapter two and leverage that to great opportunities, right? Like the end of the day, like the fact that Magic Johnson can open up movie theaters at Affordable and get acquired by AMC, that's big time, right? That's like, that's creating a movement. But I think, you know, guys have done a good job is, you know, of course, like the staff career, Andre Aguadala, he's done a good job. But, you know, the reality of us athletes, if we make good investments, we're going to tell all you guys that are doing very well.

Starting point is 02:12:48 Yeah, you know. There's no one under the radar. Yeah, if I'm doing a 25X, I'm not just going to hide in Indiana and I'll tell you about it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that there's a, there's a fork in the road between NIL sponsorship, just get the cash, but put your name everywhere there. It makes sense. of brand deals, but not a lot of equity ownership versus more behind the scenes, equity ownership, just investing. Is that a fork in the road or can you do both reliably? How do you think about that trade-off if there is one? I think for us as athletes, and any time I go into the meetings and I'm on calls all

Starting point is 02:13:22 the time, I'm going to, whether it's Milken or I'm at Medici or I'm at Tokin, you know, I, we only get one chat to this, right? And I think for us, because when we come in, everyone always, we're always playing down by five points, down by 10, because they're like, all right, all right, you know, all, all right, another athlete in here that's gonna write a check. And, you know, he's gonna, like, I don't know, be the cursing here, but we're always going to, like,

Starting point is 02:13:44 HOE ourself out, right? Okay. And that's what we, I want to be very selective. Because at the end of the day, I don't want to be the guy that's for everybody. I want to make sure, if I'm going down one lane,

Starting point is 02:13:54 if I'm going to invest in a robotics company, I'm invest in tech, drones, I want to try to find one or two. Yeah. Not just be with 10 guys. Yeah. Because you don't want to be that guy. But in terms of the NIA,

Starting point is 02:14:06 I think it's very important as well, because if you look at it right now, who's the biggest influencer on planet Earth? Elon Musk. You would probably say Kim Kardashian, but we might say Elon Musk. But like he's realized that, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,

Starting point is 02:14:22 these guys back in the day in the 90s and other 2000s, right? They would never put themselves out there and sit on Squabbox and go on CNBC and talk about their product. But now you realize that the great founders, you are going to do a press run. You're like Drake and you're going to do an album rollout because you want to create,

Starting point is 02:14:36 the formal for retail for when you IPO. Yeah. You see his Palmer Locky too. Yeah. You know, you got to look. Michael Saylor's got like the look. The look. And then Elon's got the like,

Starting point is 02:14:47 doesn't look human. And then you got Larry Ellison. It looks like he's like, he's like look maxing and everything. Right? Yeah. Larry Ellison does look very young. You do the look back.

Starting point is 02:14:56 So like, I get that. And I think that's why I think. Allison really is the OG looks max. He is. He's got the chisled and everything. No, it's remarkable. Yeah. And so it's like,

Starting point is 02:15:05 and he's 80 or something. And then. There's no son in SF like that. That's a good point. But he sails. He sales all the time. Yeah, he's a big boat guy. Okay.

Starting point is 02:15:14 So maybe he's getting the sun there. Who needs to be around the table when you're negotiating with a company? Because Olaf, fantastic investor, I imagine that if he's writing a check, not many people are being like, hey, we'd also like to put you in our Super Bowl ad. But with you, I imagine every founder comes to you and they say, well, we'd like an Instagram post. And we'd also like you to be in an ad. And all of that is a separate negotiation.

Starting point is 02:15:38 Are there agencies that you work with? Are there, is this something that you can puzzle out? Is it all just one big bucket? Or do you just say, hey, let's table that and let's just do the equity deal here. And then let's talk about partnership later. So the way I approach is like this, right? So obviously you have the initial call in a conversation and you figure out what this, what this marriage is going to look like and what, and if I'm just capital, if I'm just capital,

Starting point is 02:16:00 then you're not going to, I'm going to be more behind the scenes. But if I really believe in it and I feel like I can help your GTM, and create the narrative and story to be to show what you guys are building and if i believe in it as well yeah we are gonna strategize i've been very fortunate to have people that come from the venture people that have you know from multi-coin and and and that the around those uh those guys you know they've been very helpful with like tristan like if you look at kaisal smite like tristan you got to be very delicate at how you do things and and for me it all depends um there's definitely been a lot of investments that i no one knows that i'm invested in yeah right you know yeah some of the best

Starting point is 02:16:35 opportunities like they're waiting until it's a 25x and then you'll go on the tour. Yeah, exactly. Because it might be a zero and you're not going to talk about that. Oh no, but you know what? Sometimes you got to get your hit lift. I was down three one. So it all really depends. But I love being part of if I really feel bullshit about something. I love being part of the journey. Yeah, yeah. Because for me now, I still have the hunger and drive of winning again. I love winning championships. Yep. And this is the next form of doing it. But instead of wearing a jersey, I'm wearing a Tom Force suit and tie, or I got this nice, I don't know what color you guys call this,

Starting point is 02:17:08 but I think it's very like TBPN. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's on brand. Yeah, green has a toe. Yeah. Taking the NBA to the next level, is there anything that could make the NBA bigger? It's at the top of the mountain, but is there an even higher mountain? Is there a drive to survive play?

Starting point is 02:17:28 What would make the NBA even bigger if you could do anything? I don't know if this is legal, but imagine if you, I like, I like where you're starting. I don't know if the NBA could do this, but imagine if like, so we have something called the player post-career income plan, right? And I'm gonna give some tea and I don't need this, there's gonna be real, right?

Starting point is 02:17:49 So the player post-care income plan is where basically we take a portion of our capital and we put it into, let's say it's like the voya or the principal, right? We give them our money, we give them a percentage of our bi-weekly check. And they hold on to it. It's good if you have, you know, bad spending problems and whatnot, and that is what it is.

Starting point is 02:18:08 But you get nothing more out of it. You don't make no yield, no interest, right? But imagine if we were able to kind of create like an MBPA fund. But it's, and but it's, we're not going to be doing the money market, four and a half. Like, sure. You want to be yoloing. Yeah, but like a college endowment. Yeah, where they allocate 10, 20% alternatives.

Starting point is 02:18:29 So I, I, I, uh, we, uh, we, followed the sport of business as you know. So I don't, I don't know really anything about this, this kind of program that you're talking about. You give them money, you don't get any yield on it, and then they just give it back to you at a certain point. So the reason why they created this is you guys remember the ESPN 30 for 30 broke.

Starting point is 02:18:48 Yeah. Right? That was a lot of high profile athletes that unfortunately, and it happens, right? Listen, at the end of day, we come from, especially myself, I've come from nothing. You give us millions of dollars and it's, we can't rely on people back home to help us. like the blind leading blind. And you just get a ton of run. You think, oh, this is never going to stop.

Starting point is 02:19:05 Yes. So this is never going to stop. So this is something that the NBA, and I, and I appreciate Adam Sovere and David Stern, take it and just say, hey, we don't want our players to pull out of their 401k at 35, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, the tax, everything. So we're going to create a player post-career income plan. The day you're done playing, we are going to give you a check monthly to get you to 55, 60 years old, right? Which I love, and I think that's so smart. But imagine if now we're able to take some of that capital and get some exposure to some of these great, you know, investments. Like, imagine if, think about this back when SpaceX back in 2022, right?

Starting point is 02:19:44 If I came here and said the MBAPA association is going to give endowment of $500 million to get into some allocation of space. That's a pretty good one to get into, right? I'm not saying go ahead and buy a bunch of Sally Beauty Supplies. We're saying something a little bit more protective, right? A little bit more that we feel that. Yeah, I just don't understand why. So if there's capital that's been put aside coming out of your paycheck and it's sitting there, somebody's getting yield on it.

Starting point is 02:20:10 Oh, yeah. Who's getting the yield? Not me. That's crazy. That's crazy. But I will say this, though. I will say those, too. Because then everyone's going to be like.

Starting point is 02:20:17 So they're like, yeah, we're taking care of the players. Meanwhile, they just have this huge pool of capital that they're traumatizing. That seems a little bit. I think you might be honest. But I will say the NBA is on a great job with the 401K. What they've done that no one else does is that they're not. They will match whatever you put in the 401k, 120%. Wow.

Starting point is 02:20:36 That's great. Which is great. So the NBA does a really good job protecting the players and trying to put the players in the best position to be successful, which I appreciate. So that's, you know, you got to give a little bit. It's a start. It's a start.

Starting point is 02:20:47 It's a start. And it's like, you know, no one's ever a finished product. Every business can get better. That's why AI, robotics, that's a big thing, right? Especially in the workforce. What guidance do you give to young players? players that are real prospects, maybe they're about to become a teenager, they're on the path to college, hopefully the NBA. What advice do you give them around navigating like the internet?

Starting point is 02:21:14 I imagine like, you know, the same way for any endeavor, people that have some type of following or notoriety or aura, they can get better deals done. But what advice are you giving? Because you know, I imagine like that wasn't even something that you had to deal with at the time, but then you obviously leverage social media now. Yeah, I mean, I wish those NIL when I was playing, you know, back then when I was playing, I was getting the money through the back door. Now you get it through the front door, right? So I wish I was getting that $11 million direct department or that wire to my account back in the day.

Starting point is 02:21:48 But what I tell these young guys is that, you know, just be careful. Like, protect what you've built, right? Because everyone's going to want a piece of you. And the reality is that we are not going to be the smartest in the room. We are going to be basically the squirmy fish in the cesspool, and people are going to want to eat us up. Right? So you got to really lean. And I tell guys, lean, I know, I'm sorry, guys.

Starting point is 02:22:09 I'm just very honest. Go off. Go on. Yeah, this is part of being a big man, a center in the NBA. We're not pretty. We're very ugly with it, and we get down and dirty. But no, but I think it's like lean on your peers and older guys. I've always been the one, whether it's LeBron, whether it's Kevin Love, whether it's Antoine James, Sanderson, Verge.

Starting point is 02:22:26 I've always went to my older and my vets to ask questions. And don't be afraid to, you know, be vulnerable. I think that's the one thing for us as athletes. We fear saying like, man, my shit might be screwed up. I might be in some bad deals or I might have a bad financial advisor. That's the one area where athletes become small. Sure. And that's not something we should do.

Starting point is 02:22:48 Yeah. So. What about AI and sports? I'm sure you get pitches all the time. I'm at, you seem to like to invest. and really big categories. You're going for the 100x, the thousand X. But what's exciting to you at the intersection of AI and basketball?

Starting point is 02:23:08 Well, I think, you know, I would, nothing would make me more happy if we had a fourth referee. And my friends think I'm crazy. If that referee was, you know, we used AI. It's worked in tests. Yes, it's worked in tests. And it's even in soccer or football. Yeah, yeah, and World Cup.

Starting point is 02:23:24 I think they have this band or something. They're canceling goals on Paraguader, canceling goals on Canada. Remember I'm Canadian. So we scored, they're like, nope, bring it back VR. But I remember being a kid watching a world coming. I said, that never used to happen. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:37 But now they're realizing using AI technology to try to make the game more efficient. But especially in the NBA and the NBA in a playoffs when it's a one possession game. And, you know, when they're saying it's it, charge or block. Or, I mean, we were a victim of it. Game one against Golden State when LeBron

Starting point is 02:23:50 took the charge on Kevin Durant and then they called it a blocking foul. And they switched it. And I think, and we lost that game and I think we got swept there here, but that was a turning point in the series. Among other things. But yeah, I think like that was like I feel like that's the next step for sports and AI. And I think, you know, AI is taking over so many different sectors in the world. I think sports is like the one area that it's been like the most, like the slowest one.

Starting point is 02:24:14 It's like the last one to the party. Yeah, yeah. And it's like people on the court. Yeah. But in reality is like guys. Yeah, I just mean outside of that like performance and things like recovery. Recovery. Well, think about this.

Starting point is 02:24:23 Think about last year in the playoffs. You had Jason Tatum, Talley's Talibor, and Damien Lillard, all tear their Achilles. And Adam Silver said, we got to start using AI technology to protect our players, right? Because don't get around. Sports science is great, but there's another level to this. Of course. You can have your best players, the faces of your league, go down to the most important time where it's the moneymaker time, which is the playoffs.

Starting point is 02:24:44 So hopefully that answers your question. I think that's the next step. It's more for sports medicine and science. And I wouldn't mind a little fourth referee just to clean up. some stuff. Yeah, that makes sense. How are you, what's your personal biohacking stack? Are you doing anything? How long do you want to live? You're thinking like 90? I'm good. We clearly got the height extension surgery. Yeah, right? I did put it in my legs now. No, but for me, you know, I'm very big on peptides. I want to look good for a long time, guys.

Starting point is 02:25:13 All right? Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you guys. I want to look good for a long time. I'm 35. I want to look 25. Yeah. I want to keep this skin good. Sure. I want to keep this jaw chills. I want to stay in shape. So I will do, listen, I'm very, I look in a mirror, I look at my myself a lot. I want to look good every day. So whatever I need to do, I'm about it. So, yes, I do a little, you know, little doop do for the hair. So, you know, I got to make sure I'm right.

Starting point is 02:25:36 I love it. I'm sure you've traveled all over the world. If there's one city where you could put in new NBA team, where would you put it? Anywhere in the world. Oh, in the world? Anywhere in the world. NBA team. NBA teams.

Starting point is 02:25:47 Is that not a kind of a dumb question? No, no. This is a really dumb question. What do you think I'm thinking? That's the point. Just like it would be exotic. It would be interesting to go play there. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:25:58 I would say, I would say, I would say, Marrakesh. Marrakech. Or I would say, I mean, Dubai has a team right now, but Dubai is so beautiful. Yeah. That's a magical place. See, dumb question, interesting answer.

Starting point is 02:26:10 Yeah. How much time do you spend in Morocco? You know, I'll be honest. Never been there yet. You just spent America. He just paid Morocco. You got to go. You got to go.

Starting point is 02:26:19 You got to go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Goll Brown goes there every year. He calls me. Titi, you have to come.

Starting point is 02:26:23 He's been invited the last three years. He's like, Titi, you have to come. And then one of the agents that work for our sports agency at Clutch Sports, he's Moran. He's like, Titi, you have to go. You have to go. It's beautiful, it's magical. So that's why I say, Marrakesh,

Starting point is 02:26:34 but Dubai spent a lot of time there, that place is magical, they're forward-thinking, they love entrepreneurs. They're about what we're about. That's what I like. Maraca is great. You've been? A surf trip.

Starting point is 02:26:45 Oh, wow. Probably nine years ago. Now I see it in the hair. Yeah, yeah. There you go. You spent a lot of time in Laguna. Malibu. Ooh, they're closer.

Starting point is 02:26:53 Closer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing. What, like, do you think you'll ever get bored with investing? No, you know, I'm actually so excited. That actually does happen. Like, there's some, like, generational investors, specifically angel investors that are doing it for the love of the game, and then they just get a little bit tired chasing the next deal.

Starting point is 02:27:14 The issue is if you're good, you just get, you get too rich. And then you're like, what's the point? It's the boat. It's the boat. If you get the vote, you'll just be. on the best. Yeah, you know, it's not about the invest. You know, I love talking to people and, like, these meetings and the calls that I have, you learn so much. Like, for instance, like, I have a call with a gentleman that's creating a nuclear energy company. I just want to learn, learn about

Starting point is 02:27:36 what he's thinking, his thesis, why, what he thinks, where he thinks the world's going. I just love the education, right? It's almost like classes in session. So, of course, yes, do I like investing? Do I like winning? Of course. Like, when I did a hype short, everyone thought I was crazy. But now I'm laughing to the bank when I, when I, when I, Hold out my hyperliquic trick. So that's what I was happy about. So I like being right. But I like the storytelling because I think I bring everything back to team.

Starting point is 02:28:01 Yeah. And everything's a team. You guys are a team. The guy, the gentleman's you guys back here, they love you guys at dad. You got a squad here, right? Yeah. Everything is team oriented. Team sports.

Starting point is 02:28:10 So I love to always hear how this team is trying to operate and what they're trying to accomplish. And if I can come and whether it's capital or whether it's leveraging my resources or intros, I want to do that, especially if I believe in who you are. Would you ever raise outside capital from other players say, hey, I don't want you to, don't invest 100% of your money, but give me 2% of your next deal. I'll deploy it, and so they can kind of like get the benefit of everything you've learned. Well, you know, I've been running a lot of SPVs the last two years, and I've had some great success. I mean, I just, you know, one thing I'm very bullish on is Prometheus,

Starting point is 02:28:50 just invested in, you know, their last round. You got the Prometheus allocation. Yeah, I got the Prometheus allocation, the friends and family, shout out the family. You know, shout out mom for the, you know, the 17th birthday at Jeff's house. Shout out mom and I love you. So, you know, I definitely, you know,

Starting point is 02:29:04 allocated Jeff. Yeah, it's beautiful and God is good to me. And I want to give, you know what I really want to do? I want to give guys a save opportunity. That's also why I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. That's what I want to do it. You work to get to the point where you get that slug, but.

Starting point is 02:29:16 Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's like now instead of keep SPV, maybe at some point I might want to know, around Q4, maybe start a fun for me and my people and, you know, give guys the opportunity that I have, and it's globally. It's not just in America, you know, it's, you know, yesterday I was sitting with some gentlemen that work with the QIA, and they've been really good, and they've been very open doors to me and they've shown me nothing but loving respect, and I love the people

Starting point is 02:29:36 of Doha and Qatar. So I want to give the people the opportunity that I have, because I think it's about paying it for it. And that's about being a real team player. And me being the center, I didn't score 20 points in the game. I did if you need me, if Kevin Love was out the game. But, you know, for me, I'm getting the low double, I'm getting the rebounds, be a start. on your role. Yeah. And now my role now is pivoting to be, you know, helping my guys that are still got the jerseys on or the young guys are the guys that are retiring, give them the access opportunity to make their money, make money. Yeah, get my head start. Yeah. Robotics. You're excited about robotics. What specifically, humanoids, non-humanoids, wheeled stuff.

Starting point is 02:30:09 No, I think, you know. What's your timeline to a humanoid being able to beat you one-on-one? So, this is the real. Because like, it might be, it might legit be, like, Forget the touring test. We got the Tristan test. Well, the day that I go one-on-one versus a robot, and if I lose, I better make sure I have so much peptides in my shoulders and vices who I can rip it apart. I better have so much allocation in the robot that beats me.

Starting point is 02:30:36 I better be out and feed one percent. If you're not making money on the robot that's whooping you, then it's over. Yeah, but no, I'm, you know, my thesis is in robotics right now. And Jensen Wong said it two years ago. It's both physical AI. And I think robotics is physical AI. Humanoid, I'm not, we're not. we're not there yet.

Starting point is 02:30:51 You know, I'm not going to sit here and say I would want a robot taking care of my 9,8 and 3 year old. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying for the physical AI, it's more so, you know, whether it's in health care, whether it's, in one area like healthcare, agricultural, you know, construction, landscape, right?

Starting point is 02:31:07 All those areas, robots and robotics can help. It's making the owners be more efficient on the business aspect. And especially one area I like to touch on is agriculture, like the farmers, right? Because, you know, back in the day, you know, a lot of the tractors right now are autonomous. They're doing it on their own. But back in the day, you had people, labor workers doing it.

Starting point is 02:31:27 And, you know, a lot of these farmers were spending so much time on the labor and missing out on the business growth and opportunity, which was killing their margins. So now us using more autonomous, you know, machines and robotic, even like what Jeff's doing with now the packaging, what he's going to have in Amazon with Prometheus, right? It's not just, you know, the drive, the car, the Amazon. No, it's more like the packaging. The arm? So it's more efficient, which that's what I'm super bullish on because I want people to find ways to improve their business and less relying on the manpower.

Starting point is 02:32:00 Let's us focus on building the business side. And I think one area that I'm very excited about is like the agricultural space, how we can improve that. Yeah. Because they're important to us. People always forget. Like we're talking about like AI and energy and crops are important. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:32:14 And there's a labor shortage. Yeah. You ever start a company? Whatever started a company? Go through YC, run it up. Oh, like, why come? I mean, listen, those guys have, man. You know, one thing I will say on this,

Starting point is 02:32:25 guys, I am a capital allocator, so I do believe in a lot of people, and I don't mind writing checks. So if there's the right opportunity, maybe one day that create my own accelerator. I've thought about it as well, you know, especially. Go head to head with Gary Tan. Yeah, man.

Starting point is 02:32:40 But founding the fund is the entrepreneur. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, doing a mall. You know how they do multifamily opposites? Yeah, yeah. Like a multifamily accelerator. Yeah. It was like, Gary, you could both put it like 100 in because I know like why I'm going to use put

Starting point is 02:32:54 $2.50 and then they want like 10% back. Gary, we busted in half. Okay. 10 and 10 and 10. Yeah, that'd be good. 10 and 10 and I'll put the 100, you put the 150. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is so much.

Starting point is 02:33:07 No, guys, thank you guys so much. Let's make it a regular thing. Yes, no, I love it, man. And we're all the same place. Thank you guys so much. Fantastic. Listen, I'm a big fan, huge fan. Watch you guys daily.

Starting point is 02:33:14 I'm so glad we're able to make this work. This is awesome. I would love to come back again. I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. We'll talk to you soon. Yes, sir. Gentlemen, thank you guys.

Starting point is 02:33:23 See you. Much love, everybody. Thank you. Let me tell you about public.com investing. For those to take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we are back to back with two guests in the TBPN Ultradone. The men.

Starting point is 02:33:44 Made it in. We got shirts. Ooh, I like this in Floyd over here. Toth. A new logo as of this morning. I like it. Very nice. Well,

Starting point is 02:33:52 walking me through the logo design. Well, first, introduce yourself. Like, Tristan just gave our pitch, by the way. Yeah, yeah. You guys must be co-investors. You guys must be co-investors. Welcome to the show, I'm sure.

Starting point is 02:34:02 We got a. We got a Castilian shirt. We got a Castilian shirt. We got a Castilian. A company is on a tear near us as well. Off Soren. I like the nearest orange. I didn't realize that they were

Starting point is 02:34:12 they were verticalizing Goren, it's a good color. Anyway, sorry, quick introduction, names, titles, everything quickly, and then we'll go into it. Ian Roundtree, founder and general partner at Cantos. Yeah. Grant, a partner at Cantos. Fantastic. When did you guys get started? Investing. Ten years ago. Ten years. Almost exactly. Overnight success. And the latest, the newest fund. Take us through it. New fund we just announced is 70 million. Last fund was 50. We kept it. It feels even better than I expected it too. You feel it in your bones. First of all, did you ever consider Roundtree Capital?

Starting point is 02:34:59 Because you got Sequoia, you got the Green Oaks. Like there's already a long lineage of iconic firms that are sort of tree related or themed. Not for a second, no. No. No. Where's the name come from? Where's the logo come from? I want to know.

Starting point is 02:35:13 So I named the firm Cantos because the chapters of an epic poem are Cantos. Oh, okay. Yeah. I always thought we're drawn to startups, these missions that are greater than ourselves. Because we want to be part of some grander story. Yeah. And I think of founders as a modern day hero and the startup as the epic. And I had these delusions of associated grandeur that I might partner with people who like change the world in a way

Starting point is 02:35:42 that's remembered in story and song. Yeah. What was the strategy early on? Like, were you trying to lead rounds? Were you going very early stages? Whatever would work? What strategy? The strategy was write checks into startups.

Starting point is 02:35:57 Okay, just get allocation. In good companies, got it, okay. Yeah, I wish I called Fund One Fund Zero because it really was just like lessons. Choppled together four million, writing tiny checks. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Just trying to learn. Four million, wow, what a start.

Starting point is 02:36:09 That's amazing. Yeah. I feel like the, yeah, the lessons there probably, there's some people that should be, would probably be better off if they started with 4 million because it really is a constraint, but that breeds ingenuity, I'm sure. Well, I also was like, you know, I was early at SoFi. Crazy to go to the U.S. Men's Opener at SoFi Stadium, by the way. That's surreal because I joined them when they were like 20 people.

Starting point is 02:36:32 Yeah. And that deal, I think it's like 20 million a year for 20 years, so 400 million to just get the naming rights. I think they bought it. What person were market cap was up? Aren't they on a rip? You probably sold a long time ago. I did, unfortunately.

Starting point is 02:36:47 Paperhead. Paper hand. This is my face. It's only $23 billion stock. Yeah, but I mean, that's a perk of being in the private markets. I sold secondary to Silver Lake, I think in the series D, maybe. But that helped me get Canto's off the ground. So, but so fund zero, fund one, you know, whatever,

Starting point is 02:37:10 the right tool for the job is, whatever the right deal is, you'll get in as long as it's a good company. How rigid are you today? Do you want to be a specific, specific first money in seed series A? Do you want to take a certain ownership percentage? Like, what guardrails do you have, if any? We feel like the constraints breed creativity in a way. You want to be focused enough that you signal to the market what you do, and we kept the fund relatively small because we want to be able to look a founder in the eye when we write a one and a half million dollar check, and me and Grant and me, our principal can look a founder in the eye and say, your company at this stage is a meaningful percentage of my network.

Starting point is 02:37:55 Is important to you. And if you get too big, you can't really say that. Of course. Yeah, when I think about the names like Nero is Castilian, there's a bunch of others. Like, the 70 million, like, feels like, yeah, very intentional about like we want to actually just keep doing what we're doing. Totally. That said, a lot of the best investments look like exceptions.

Starting point is 02:38:15 You need to know when to bend. Sure. And Grant led Kisnellian seed round when he was at injuries in. And the first thing he said when he joined Cantos was, hey, I know they're going to raise a big series A. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

Starting point is 02:38:32 The logo, the new logo. What's the etymology? So this is a quill. Yeah. But we also, we also. We also like that it implies a vector. Sure. We talk a lot about tempo, speed, velocity really matter for a startup because time compounds

Starting point is 02:38:48 just like money. Sure. And I like that it looks like a diving peregrine falcon or something. Yeah. Dude, I was just watching videos about a pair of falcons. This is what you do in your free time? My four years. Fastest creature.

Starting point is 02:39:03 Fastest creature on Earth. And they are incredibly violent. incredibly violent. Like they just go after other birds. Like literally they're like a missile. Sounds like some of the founders would be like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Paragrin Falcons.

Starting point is 02:39:18 State of Defense Tech. We were talking about this. Are we past peak defense tech in terms of, not in terms of the size of the companies, but in terms of the rate of formation. It feels like post-anderal

Starting point is 02:39:33 awareness. There was a boom. There were a lot of founders. came into the category from other areas, experience from SpaceX, etc. But is it picking up still? You guys have the blessing of like you're in Neros, you're in Kastelian. You're not like, oh, we need our drone. You need to find more.

Starting point is 02:39:51 Yeah. And a lot of founders, a lot of would-be founders, if they're at like Boeing and they're bored and they want to do something more exciting, like they could go work at Neros. You know, like there are so many options now if you want to go have an impact at the early stage broadly that you might not need to start a, company, but what are you seeing on the ground? One of the ways we look at the cinematic universe here broadly is go down like the top, you know, 100 companies by market cap.

Starting point is 02:40:17 And as soon as you start to not recognize the names, it turns out that those industries are super big and massive. Defense was one of the ones that now there's enough people like Anderol, volunteer that paved the way and people are realizing that the venture scale outcomes from, but one of the amazing things about Cantos when I was at Andresen was just observing how Ian and the team were able to find these categories that people still didn't feel comfortable about. I mean, Tristan's talking about ag, right? Like 10 years ago, people were like, oh, let's do ag tech, and everyone's like, it's a horrible place, you're never going to make money. And then,

Starting point is 02:40:51 you know, we turn around a few years later, and Cantos is leading the seed around for Shinkay. Yeah. And it's like fish-killing robots. That's really weird. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was the pre-seat. Weren't you guys in the pre-seat? Or what are it? It was a small seed. Small seed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's some crazy ag tech things. We had the founder of the laser weeder on. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:41:13 No, I haven't, yeah, there's a bunch of cool things. Have you heard about this? No. It's a tractor, but everyone's worried about pesticides. Very obvious solution is just fire a laser at the exact weeds, so you just burn it. No one has a problem with, like, having a burnt weed next to your tomato, so it's fully. No pesticides. It's way better.

Starting point is 02:41:33 And it's just something that's obviously, like, you can, back of the envelope how that's built very quickly, but it's enabled by computer vision and, you know, small actuators that can adjust where the laser's going. And there's a whole bunch of like somewhat commodity technologies that are just put together in this very interesting way, creates a great product. Yeah, but it's how you package it. Exactly. It's one of the lessons like when I got in deep tech is like, technology is not inherently valuable in and of itself. Yeah, it's valuable insofar as it solves a problem. It creates value in the world. Yeah. And if you're better at packaging things that are off the shelf,

Starting point is 02:42:07 in a novel way and contextualize that in a business that makes money, that's a lot more interesting than like, oh, I did my PhD in this crazy thing and it sounds really cool. How do I sell this, by the way? Where do you see yourself punching the hardest in terms of value at? Like, you're, you're making investments in a way that you are an important voice around the table to the founders. That's clear. But are they coming to you with go to more? market consultation or hiring or strategy or marketing? Like, where do you feel like your, if a founder calls you about a particular problem, you're excited to talk about it as opposed to saying like, oh, this is kind of new.

Starting point is 02:42:50 I can help as much as I can. Yeah, I mean, there's all the like when I'm fundraising next. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. In-house bank or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And we have very high hit right there.

Starting point is 02:43:00 Yeah. Like, you know, over 90% success rate and getting your next round. And that's actually a flash of co-endusters, too. And that's an advantage of being a $70 million fund is that there's no signal to like, yeah, I'm actually not doing the $100 million round. It's like, yeah. I think the other thing that's different about Cantos and maybe we talk about, like, you know, joining from injuries and going here.

Starting point is 02:43:20 Like, I think one of the things is really clear about Ian and the team was they're so concentrated. And so, yes, we don't have the follow-on signaling dynamic here. But we also, when we go to another firm and say, we think this company's amazing, they're going to take it that much more seriously. and also because we're concentrated, we can just devote more time to our relationships here. So we have a lot more context on any company in our portfolio, probably than the rest of the entire cap table.

Starting point is 02:43:47 And there are times when founders don't want us to be involved because they're busy and they're crushing. But most often, early on, you need a lot of help. And that's where I think, like, we've just, they've been doing this for 10 years. I've been doing a good amount of time, too. Like, we have enough pattern matching. And I think the other thing, too, is for these categories,

Starting point is 02:44:04 like I'm fired up that everyone's coming in to the cinematic universe here, but also not a lot of people, I think, have like as strong opinions for how to build a company or what types of founders you need to have. And I think with the lessons here, we can package a lot of that and have this cross-pollination between the portfolio companies that's pretty distinguished and helps out a lot. But a lot of times the founder, they have the intuition, they know what they need to do deep down. They kind of just need to hear from someone they trust that, like, Yep. Like when we invested in Shinkay, right, they were still licensing robots to fish farms. That's right. And they kind of dabbled in selling fish, having their own brand, but they weren't capitalized well enough to go do that. And so we stepped in, we were like, hey, why aren't you doing that thing anymore? And Safe was like, honestly, because everyone's saying no, yeah. We were like, that's absolutely what we should do.

Starting point is 02:44:57 And it was like we had given water to a man in the desert. Like, you wanted to do it. He knew he needed to do it. The other investors were being more coy about it. And we were like, no, let's go direct, man. Like, use your own robots. Don't sell them. Just sell better fish with those robots.

Starting point is 02:45:11 Another super vertically integrated. That's great. Where's the office? Do you have an office here? I'm in San Francisco. I'm in L.A. You could open an office anywhere in the world. Where would it be?

Starting point is 02:45:22 What a... No, post-L.A., and then maybe there's a boom in Austin. Where's the next, next boom? For entrepreneurial talent, hard tech defense, where's interesting. Texas has been good to us. Texas.

Starting point is 02:45:36 We're investors in Soligen and Venus Aerospace and Houston or Surgent Industries and Austin more recently. There's a couple CEOs that live there as well in the portfolio.

Starting point is 02:45:46 We're going to see a bunch of these states though start to be really compelling. L.A. is so strong in many ways because Tesla and SpaceX. Austin's starting to get that with a bunch of other companies there. Well, we're also seeing those

Starting point is 02:45:58 so many companies were started in the gundo. They kind of graduate to Torrance or Hawthorne. but then eventually, like Castellian, for example, they're not going to be able to test their missiles in L.A., obviously. That'd be terrifying. And so a lot of these companies graduate, radiant, same thing for new fit. How many times you meet a Gundow founder, and you're like, don't test your product.

Starting point is 02:46:17 Don't do it here. You can do it somewhere else. We're not far enough away for me to feel comfortable. You start the Gundo. You start somewhere else. You move to the Gundo. Series A, you move to Torrance, and then you start building a factory. In Texas.

Starting point is 02:46:31 Tennessee. Tennessee. Tennessee. companies. Interesting New Mexico. I think you'll probably see, we've seen a number of companies out of Seattle because a lot of the Starlink team is there. Oh, interesting. And like within SpaceX, that's a crack team.

Starting point is 02:46:43 Yeah, that's right. So you'll see people that probably want to stay. Yeah, I know Avalanche, the fusion companies up there. And there's been a few others that we've talked about. The lumber manufacturer. What is great look from an R&D cycle or an execution standpoint? Because like it really just feels like there's such a, like, on TVPN, we're, 90% of the time we're having founders, 95% of the time we're having founders on that are like

Starting point is 02:47:08 actually like shipping and making like really meaningful progress. And then there's like the 5% of hard tech founders. Some of them raise a lot of money and we're sort of curious but are not really shipping and that's like kind of like that's people people, a lot of people have been burned by companies like that over the years where it's like cool idea, deep tech and then they just don't, they keep raising money, but don't ever. make anything, don't ever get like real contact with the market, maybe like quantum related companies. There's different types.

Starting point is 02:47:41 There's different classes of companies. Like we have some that, like we put out a deck last year on what we're calling like the state of adventure capital. Yeah, there we go. Delayed. But it's like 286 slides. And there's a chunk in there that talks about like how deep is the deep tech company. Sure.

Starting point is 02:47:59 And, you know, if you're doing quantum or like fusion, that's going to take long. time, the time to revenue is long, Kappex, whatever. I think the companies that we like are higher up in that score where the timed iteration is really fast. You want to build, break, and iterate. And I think what a lot of people got wrong in prior hardware eras is they just assumed, yes, like you only get a few shots on goal, you have to be really deliberate, sniper shot it out, you can't spray and pray your way to greatness here. But that doesn't mean that you can still not like test quickly. If you look at Niros, if you look at Shinkay, Castellian, all of them are like constantly in the field, fielding their systems, seeing what's

Starting point is 02:48:37 working, what isn't. And they know early on that those are not going to be the best ways. But the most expensive part in building in hardware by far are the people. It's not the hardware. And you hear Elon talk about this all the time. The cost of Star Shield and Starship and all these systems there in the grand scheme isn't a lot. It's the hours of labor that go into it. And so the sooner that you test out and see what breaks and refine it, I think the better off, I think we're seeing a bunch more founders that have appreciated this, that have learned it at SpaceX or in other places now, and they're coming out and doing a lot more. But, you know, I think there's like the other challenge here is a lot of people that are coming in and are excited to make a bet in

Starting point is 02:49:16 defense or energy or what have you. They, I think, are missing that way of evaluating companies and their ability to test quickly. You have to get on the learning curve as quickly as possible. You can't sit in the lab. You need to field technology. And we find that, getting back to tempo, vector, speed, like, we find that if we're diligently a company in, like, a week, I used to think, oh, that's not a lot of time. Of course, they won't have made progress.

Starting point is 02:49:44 But we've backed so many people now that, like, a week to them is like a month to everybody else. And they'll just blow your mind with how quickly they move. And if you don't, again, that compounds, if you don't get that feeling in a week, you're not going to get it in a month, a quarter, a year, all of a sudden, a decade, you know. is a lot shorter than it used to be.

Starting point is 02:50:03 Are you feeling the pole of the AI vortex? It feels like we're seeing like... Like, no, not at all. No, I didn't notice it. No, it feels like we've seen a number of hard tech companies sort of pivot or expand into AI-related projects, boom, supersonic. Like Castilian, I can imagine that somebody's going to try and figure out how to bolt that thing to the ground. Yeah, I'm sure.

Starting point is 02:50:26 Neuros is going to wind up being like security for AI data centers or something. or something. Obviously they have fantastic businesses, but like are there examples or like, how do you negotiate or what do you, what do you say to a founder who's saying like, yeah, we have a, we have a six at a 10 market right now. It's going to be a couple of years, but I got an interesting call from a neocloud and they think that they could put our thing to work. We were having this conversation recently. We've made a general robotics investment that's still in stealth. We're really excited about it. And it will be general. But again, we want to get on the learning curve.

Starting point is 02:51:02 Ideally, we want to commercialize as quickly as possible. And we're thinking about where do you start? And we're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And one of the ideas was like, should we start a car wash? You know, have these like robot arms wash your car for you. I love it. And then we're like... But you're sneaky good businesses.

Starting point is 02:51:17 No, no, true. Also extremely fragmented. I don't think they've been rolled up. And with self-driving cars, the Waymo's, they'll need to go somewhere. But you know who has a lot more money to get out? Maybe data centers could use some robots. Sure, sure. Of the two, it seems like a pretty obvious answer.

Starting point is 02:51:34 I think there will be a lot of technologies that can ride that way. When I first invested in Radiant, we were talking about military applications. Totally. And the behind-the-meter application for data centers, it was not even really on the radar. Yeah, yeah. I interviewed Doug a couple of years ago, and I was like, so like, you're going to get calls. And he's like, we really like the idea of going to Mars and stuff. And I'm like, you'll get there.

Starting point is 02:51:55 Yeah. But you're going to power some May Eye stuff first. All the energy companies got handed a huge gift. It's great. We had no growth in the grid for 30 years. And there's these niche applications like oil and gas exploration, stranded energy and stuff. And now it's just like, yeah, there's obvious, obvious demand. It's going to be so much easier for these folks.

Starting point is 02:52:15 And then all that technology will get commoditized and it'll go everywhere and it'll be great. And you'll still get that. What's the state of IP coming out of universities today? Is that a pipeline of... Grant's what you can be. We have a no PhD policy. I learned this the hard way. Really?

Starting point is 02:52:33 Like, I mean, there are some PhDs that are, like the solid agent guys, like John Gedmark, at Astronis, who are very business-minded. Yeah. But if you find someone who's, like, trying to commercialize their doctoral thesis, you've got this hammer, you're looking for nails, that, like, hardly ever works. You're also trained exactly the wrong way. Sure. When you're defending your thesis, like, it's all caveats and what can,

Starting point is 02:52:57 go wrong and you get dinged if you, you know, over promise. It's like the old school way of thinking about hardware. Like it's just, it's like East Coast mindset of we're going to sit in an ivory tower, think about all the ways that this could make a lot of impact as opposed to just, hey, we're just going to, like, Schenke is just going to put the robot on a fishing boat and see what breaks. And turns out a lot of things going to break. Yeah, let's do it.

Starting point is 02:53:19 Yeah, you'll find like, you know, the space X. Put the gun on the truck. Were you doing this? No, yeah. This is John. Don's like bit on an Allen control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, oh, the gun on the truck company.

Starting point is 02:53:32 But they failed to consider that there's a YC company that's just gun on the ground. Oh, yeah, nine mothers. Yeah, nine mothers. Just gun on the ground. Well, yeah, multiple use cases. Yeah, gun on everything, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations on the fund. Congratulations on a decade.

Starting point is 02:53:47 Yeah, decade in, decades to go. That's the idea. You know, we, if you look at our website, cantos.V.C, we have these plaques and sort of our version. of Trajan's column because we aspire to back people whose companies will be engraved in stone and metal in a thousand years. And if that's not you, don't email us. I love it. I love it. Know who your, know who your customers are. Thank you. Hit the gong for us. I want you to take it for a spin. Yeah, take this. This guy's big whack that thing. Back in. Interesting.

Starting point is 02:54:24 Thank you for watching TVPN. We'll be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. hang out with us we'll close it out this five stars on our podcast and Spotify sign up for our new

TBPN - America's Tech Wishlist, Comcast Splits in Two, Tristan Thompson in the Ultradome | Zach Laberge, Gavin Uberti, Eren Bali, Larsen Jensen, Ricky Rosa, Andrew Rea, Michael Anderson, Tristan Thompson, Grant Gregory & Ian Rountree

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.