TBPN - Apple Bets on F1, Meta Axes AI Jobs, Anthropic in Google’s Sights | Jeff Yan, Kevin Rose, Tomasz Tunguz, Shan Aggarwal, Nick Abouzeid, David Tisch, Chris Dixon

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

(00:13) - F1–Apple TV Partnership (18:56) - Meta's AI Job Cuts (24:29) - Google Eyes Anthropic Cloud Agreement (38:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:09) - Kevin Rose, an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, is renowned for founding Digg and co-founding Revision3. In the conversation, he reflects on the evolution of social media from its early days of fostering real-world connections to its current algorithm-driven state, expressing concerns about the rise of AI-generated content and the need for authentic human interactions. He also discusses the potential of AI in personal software development, emphasizing the importance of creativity and design in the future of technology. (01:31:02) - Jeff Yan, co-founder of Hyperliquid, emphasizes the importance of maintaining a credibly neutral protocol in the development of decentralized finance platforms. He believes that accepting venture capital could compromise this neutrality, as early insider involvement might leave a lasting "scar" on the protocol's integrity. Instead, Yan advocates for a community-led approach, ensuring that the platform remains impartial and truly decentralized. (02:02:02) - Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist and former product manager at Google, discusses the significant impact of AI on GDP growth, noting that data center buildouts now exceed 1% of U.S. GDP. He examines the role of vendor financing in this expansion, comparing it to historical infrastructure investments, and emphasizes the importance of understanding debt structures and depreciation schedules in assessing financial risks. Additionally, Tunguz highlights the rapid advancements in AI technologies and their potential to reshape industries, while cautioning about the complexities and risks associated with these developments. (02:23:53) - Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer at Coinbase, discusses the company's recent acquisition of Echo, an on-chain capital formation platform, highlighting its significance in enabling earlier-stage investments and expanding Coinbase's role beyond secondary exchanges. He emphasizes the importance of providing broader access to private company investments, aiming to democratize opportunities traditionally limited to accredited investors. Aggarwal also reflects on the unique aspects of the acquisition process, including the integration of NFTs and the challenges of explaining these innovations to legal and tax consultants. (02:31:25) - Nick Abouzeid, co-founder and CEO of Rivet Tax, announced the company's $5.1 million seed funding round, emphasizing their selective approach to investors and the self-sustaining nature of their business. He detailed Rivet's proprietary platform, which centralizes client communications and documents to streamline tax preparation and reduce redundant information requests. Abouzeid also discussed the strategic decision to acquire Lobby, a company specializing in document interaction, to enhance Rivet's capabilities, and explained their preference for organic growth over acquiring existing tax firms due to the complexities and inefficiencies associated with such roll-ups. (02:38:10) - David Tisch is an American entrepreneur and investor, best known as the co-founder and managing partner of BoxGroup and former managing director of TechStars NYC. He has been a key figure in New York’s startup ecosystem, backing hundreds of early-stage technology companies. (02:50:43) - Chris Dixon, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and leader of a16z crypto, discusses the positive trends in the crypto market, highlighting the impact of smart policies like the Genius Bill on stablecoin growth and the elimination of scams. He notes the increasing involvement of major companies in the space and the emergence of applications at the intersection of crypto and AI, such as decentralized physical infrastructure and real-world assets. Dixon expresses optimism about the industry's momentum following a challenging period from 2022 to 2024, emphasizing the importance of sustained innovation and policy support. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. We wanted to revisit a story from a couple days ago. Last Friday, we talked about it on the show. F1 has officially partnered with Apple TV. You probably heard this, but I wanted to go a layer deeper into the strategy that Apple is employing here, the nature of the partnership, some of the specs, to some of the other media deals that are going on. So it's a five-year partnership, just the United States. ESPN is out. Apple is in. And so you won't need an Apple TV to watch F1, though, because you can use the Apple TV app on your MacBook as long as you're signed up with the Apple TV service. But in general, this will be for Apple TV customers who probably have a physical Apple TV as well as the Apple TV app, as well as the Apple TV service, because they're all called Apple TV now. And so the reporting places the annual fee at $140 to $160 million per year,

just for the United States audience. Which is not bad because not long ago they wanted 200, ESPN laughed them out of the room. They balked. They balked. Bocking is underrated. It is. You've got to be bach max sometimes.

You do. And so F1, across the whole season, all the races combined, they pull 30 million viewers. They get about 1.1 million viewers per race last year. I think it's up to 1.3 million this year. And then some of the bigger races in the U.S., like Miami Grand Prix, that gets up to like 3 million for like this whole spectacle. But in general, it's a relatively small media property,

but it's a really high value audience. It's a very high, it's a very Apple audience, in my opinion. Like I think it actually fits really well with Apple's customer base. And so comping it, you know, if you think about it, like every race weekend, there's a million people that want to watch F1. Apple's audience of people that become fans of a sport because they watch reality television about it? Basically. Fake fans? Yeah, I think so.

No, I think that's actually accurate. I think that's 100% correct. And so you have 100 million, you have one million people that are basically loosely tuning in. Maybe there's, like, single-digit millions that are in the overall pool. not everyone watches every race. Overall, you get 30 million views, but a lot of those are repeat viewers, people that watch all the races.

And so Apple has around 40 to 45 million subscribers total. And so you think that there's a pretty good overlap. Some people will be F1 fans, and then they will come over and subscribe to Apple TV because they were on ESPN or they are on the primary F1 app. Now you will actually be able to buy Apple TV and unsubscribe from the F1 app because you will get F1 for free.

And if you open up the F1 app on your Apple TV, instead of opening the Apple TV app, you'll be able to log in with Apple TV, the service, and you will get full access to the F1 streams, which means not just the race cams and the actual production, but you can watch the individual racers, the individual drivers,

I think both the front and the back camera, which is kind of cool. You can watch either. And so you can say, I want to watch Max Verstappen drive the whole time, and you can just, for 90 minutes, you know, two hours, you can just sit there and just watch from that perspective. Imagine having the back view on Max Verstappen for two hours straight. You remember being a kid when Volvos used to have those like back seats in the back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, looking backwards. It's great. I mean, we should be watching F1 and the Ultradome because the beauty is that with all the screens. You can see the production team has, what, seven, eight screens. you can put an individual driver on a specific screen. And so the real hardcore F1 fans will have the main show on the big screen, and then they'll have side screens with, I want to know what Max is doing.

I want to know what... You can properly monitor the whole situation now. Yeah, you can. You can't. It is a sport built for monitoring the situation, much like Ramp is built for saving you time and money, easy-use corporate cards bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. So I have two questions.

And I want your take on these. First, is the Apple TV audience big enough to grow F1 immediately? If we look at 2026, 2027, 2028, do you think F1 goes up from 1.3, straight to 1.4 or straight to 1.5? Do you think this is something that grows F1? No. Do you think it shrinks it? I don't know. If you were a ESPN subscriber, you could just throw the game on or throw the rake.

I still think, and maybe this is the wrong way, I still think of Apple TV as the thing that people are doing intentional watching on versus just running it, right? So the reason that ESPN potentially grew F1's audience was because people just wake up on the weekend, they turn on ESPN, and it's just on the TV. Oh, what's on before football or what's on before baseball? Like, I'm just going to have it on, oh, there's a race, cool. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know these guys a little bit. I buy that.

So I think it could potentially shrink the audience in the U.S. Hmm, interesting. But obviously it adds value to Apple TV. I think we've seen it's very clear that live sports are an area that traditional TV and streaming will continue to have an edge because streaming rights exist. It's effectively a monopoly that gets granted to a platform. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems really powerful. It makes sense for them to do that.

I think it makes sense for I don't think I'm a Paramount Plus subscriber right now. I will be next year when they start streaming all the UFC parts through there. So I think it's amazing as part of a bundle, but I don't think it grows a sport. Well, if you have a sport that you're trying to grow, you've got to get on re-stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream reach your audience, wherever they are. Okay, my second question, is there a real lift from having adjacent sports-related content that can funnel new viewers into live sport viewing? So this was certainly my experience.

I'm the fake F1 fan. I actually watched Drive to Survive, the Netflix reality show about F1. I started watching that after, and after a few seasons of behind the scenes content edited for maximum dramatic effect, I started throwing on the actual races.

I knew all the teams, the drivers, the principals, the rivalries, and it basically bootstrap me into being able to keep pace with a real fan who's been following for years, at least loosely, even if I do wear the fake fan

badge proudly. But the question is how many people are like me, how many people are still in that journey, and what does that mean, what does it mean for it to happen inside the platform versus outside the platform? So my question is Apple doesn't have Drive to Survive. So there is a world where Netflix bought the F1 rights. And as soon as you finish the Drive to Survive season, because everyone's watching Drive to Survive all the time. So they could just say, hey, click this button and we'll send you a push notification in your Netflix app when the real race goes live. Or, hey, you're watching Drive to Survive, but you're actually watching Drive to Survive while a real race is happening. Want to just flip over to that next? There's a bunch of things that Netflix

could have done with that pipeline. Apple can do something similar with the F1 movie. If you watch the movie, we could just say, hey, you know, want to watch the real. Yeah, but way, way, way less watch. Way less watch. Way less watch time. Because it's two and a half hour movie as opposed to what, Drive to Survive is like 10 hours of season or something and there's six seasons. So it's like 60 hours of content. So you're looking at 30 times as much content, just so many more opportunities to get in. And also, F1, I do think the movie did a good job. You saw it, right?

Yeah. So I think it did a good job. If you know nothing about F1, they do a good job through the voiceover and the announcer to kind to tell you, okay, there's going to be 20 cars on the grid. As soon as it turns green, they're all going to race. like there's this many laps. Like they have to change their tires. Like it kind of gets you up to speed.

Directors Survive does a better job actually talking about race strategy, what it means to be on soft tires versus hard tires, what it means to use Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate outtrain infrastructure. But the question is, is there a value to actually having you move through that pipeline on one app, like in one,

one media ecosystem because Apple's actually executing this in soccer. So they have Ted Lasso, which they basically got lucky with, I think. No one really thought that was going to be a massive breakout success. It wound up winning tons of Emmys, became really popular. And I don't know that it's really the type of show that you watch and you're like, oh, now I'm a diehard soccer fan. But it's at least a little bit of a teaser. And then they actually went to the production team behind Drive to Survive and said,

hey, make one for MLS. And they did. And then Apple also has the MLS rights. So in theory, they have the whole flow there to get you from... Barish that I've never heard of that. Yeah, it's called Onside. And I don't know. My pitch for Apple...

It is interesting that it doesn't... They have the golf version of Drive to Survive. That's on Netflix. Yes. And tennis. In tennis. They have full swing. None really got the people going.

Why do you think that is? I have a take. While you're thinking, let me tell you about cognition, the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. I think the international element of F1, the high society element of F1. Seeing the Monaco B roll on Drive to Survive, you're like, I'm in Monaco. It feels amazing. It's so harder to do with golf.

It felt like some combination of like a travel documentary behind the scenes. The other thing about F1 is just how dangerous it is is also an element. And I think you understand that a bit more through watching it. When you're, you know, golf and tennis are obviously much bigger sports in the U.S., but people have like direct experience playing them. And it's not high stakes, right? It's like a player, like in F1, if a player, you know, if a driver makes a mistake, they could actually die.

They could, someone else could. die. I think someone does die in Drive to Survive. It's not in F1. It's in one of the prelim races, but it's at the Nureberg ring, I believe. And it's the race where the guy on Alfatari Pierre Gassley wins all of a sudden in like some sort of prelim race. I believe someone died. Yeah, so there's, yeah, no, it's very high stakes. According to Google's AI overview, total of 52 fatalities. That's crazy Formula One. And so I just think that's as dangerous as like bowl running. Yes, yes. And so there's so many different factors.

I have another factor. First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So the other thing is that there's the business side. I don't know if you were into this. Did you watch Drive to Survive? Like the business side is what's so fascinating to me

because you're not just talking about the athlete. You're talking about the car. So if you're an engineering nerd, you can be into the car. But then also if you're a business nerd, you can understand, okay, this team principal is getting fired. They're like the CEO of the organization. Who's putting the money in? And then what effect does that money have?

Like sometimes it's like, well, the guy with the money is making his son drive. Right. And then sometimes it's like, well, this team doesn't have enough money, so their car is not going to be very good. Or this team, and there's all these different. And there's some of that in the golf version of drive to survive, but it's basically like this player kind of needs this. win.

Yeah. Which is a real factor, right? There's a human element of you want somebody who's, you know, putting their, you know, family time on hold to go out and win a, win a competition. You want to see that person do well. But it's not, yeah, there's so many different dynamics. Yep. And so Apple doesn't have that bridge.

They don't have drive to survive. I don't think Netflix is going to give it up. So they have to go straight from F1, the movie, two and a half hours of content, to watch a 90-minute race, you know, 20 times a year on streaming, a specific time. That push notification element of just being like, hey, we know every single person that has watched more than 10 seconds of drive to survive. And we can send the push notification to, you know, a large amount of those. So they got to get rocket-powered Mohawk.

You've watched this guy on YouTube. He's one of the most deranged and unhinged F-1 commentators. He does these reaction videos to the races. He only has like 60,000 subscribers, but he's hilarious. And I think he'd make a great host for an Apple TV show. The last question is what happens after, if the content stack works, and you're funneling people from the F1 movie to a drive to survive to actually watching the race. Obviously, the end is like, go to the race.

That's very expensive. But Apple has been, for the last few years, talking about what comes after. the screen. And they've been saying it's the Apple Vision Pro. It's immersive video. It's 3D. It's spatial. It's augmented reality. And I was really, really disappointed in the Apple announcement post, which is beautiful, has some great graphics, a bunch of details. But basically all they're saying on Vision Pro is that you'll be able to watch it in Vision Pro, which is like, yeah, of course. I could watch ESPN in Vision Pro. I can watch any TV show in Vision Pro. So, yeah, they're not doing any 3D content. And they're not doing any spatial content, which is it's not, look, it's not turn your head all the way

around and look behind you, but it's basically a bubble. It's like 180 degrees. And so with that, it's not that expensive. Everyone's so expensive. It's like there's a $10,000 camera from Black Magic that you set up there and you film. How would Apple not negotiate the ability to? I think that they, I think they, I think they, the steel man, like the bull case is that like, they're going to do something. They just aren't ready to announce it. But I feel like they should be pumping that up a little bit more. Yeah, that's potentially, you know, out of the million or so people that tune into each race. There's a set of fans that are hardcore that would just buy and use the Vision Pro because it would be... Even just as a novelty a few times. And so I don't know if you remember this,

but Black Box Infinite had a demo of what watching an F1 race in Apple Vision Pro would look like. And basically, you get the full screen display of the actual race, like as you would watch it on ESPN here. But then on your desk, you can place a, like a diorama of the race. And you can see the cars moving around and you can watch from an aerial view. And it was really, really cool. And everyone was like, oh, this is so amazing. This is so amazing. But of course, like, Black Box Infinite is like a dev shop and they don't have the rights. And so this like probably has to be negotiated with Apple. And Apple's just not really doing it. Chat says, owner of drive to survive. Regrov says is box to box film. So they could, he's saying they could, Apple could eventually negotiate to get that property. I'm sure.

box boxes looking at this now being like, oh, they just spent, you just spent, you know, 150-ish million for this. You want to, you want the next, you know, do you want the 2028 season of drive to survive? And who knows how long? It's probably a bidding war at some point, right? And stuff changes channels a lot. I mean, the expanse was on sci-fi, then went over to Amazon. It's kind of whoever will pay the most. New type in the chat says Vegas just unveiled a massive F1 venue called bar and grill. It's like Top Golf or F1. That seems fine. Most generic name in history.

Extremely, extremely. And so here's what I would want to see from a Vision Pro F1 experience. The immersive video cameras are, in fact, too big to put on the cars. But you could take two iPhone cameras and put them on the cars and at least film in 3D, which I think would be an upgrade. But I'm more interested in taking the immersive video cameras, the proper like 180 360 degree stereographic rigs, stereoscopic rigs, and putting them on the sidelines in the pit lane, in the owner's box, on the key turns, and having you be able to like fly around from one to another, put one up in the sky, sky cam. There's a whole bunch of interesting things that you could do to kind of like beam around the track and actually feel like you're there. Well,

you're not going to be able to put the full rig on the car, at least not yet. But I was very disappointed to see Apple not announce anything yet. Hopefully something changes. Hopefully something happens. But I mean, since the initial demo of the Apple Vision Pro, critics and analysts, Ben Thompson and more have been saying live sports are going to be amazing in Applevision Pro because you can just drop a camera there and you don't need to do anything else. Because he had this demo of putting the camera at the half court long.

court side at an NBA game. And he was like, it doesn't require any production. Because if you want to see them go over there, you just turn your head. And if you want to know the score, you just look up at the scoreboard. Because it's the experience of being courtside, which is already the best experience possible. And so it's been disappointing to see Apple not execute on that more because that feels like such a differentiated thing. I think meta should honestly do it too.

Meta should, you know, Zuck loves UFC. He should be doing, you know, you can watch the full UFC. we will pay for the UFC card if you have a meta quest. Put your quest on, watch it in VR. Let's see. What's up? I think they're already doing this. UFC brings fight pass events to X stadium.

So, yeah, they're going to have USC content. I think meta should pay for it. I think it should be free if you put out that headset. I think it's so important to alleviate churn that they should just bite the bullet. because if people were like, wait, okay, I have to do this weird thing, strap this headset on, but I get UFC for free. Maybe I'm going to do that. Imagine if you're just sitting there next to Joe Rogan,

and you look over in Rogan there, that'd be great. It'd be a wild experience, much like getting your company on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, proof trust continuously. Vantas Trust Management Platform takes the manual work. That's so wild. How could it be this easy to be compliant? Yes. Mike Isaac hit the timeline this morning with a massive story.

Yes. Mike Isaac is of course who told our story a week or so ago. He says, MetaCuts, 600 jobs at AI superintelligence labs. The layoffs do not affect Meta's newest AI hires who are in some cases being paid up to hundreds of millions of dollars. They're in what's called TBD Lab. Yeah. We got multiple labs. And that has most of the multi-million dollar hires. The cuts were focused on correcting an earlier hiring spree. So, um, Meta said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its AI division, according to a memo, sent to employees that was relayed to the times, as the company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology. The layoffs were in Meta's so-called superintosh. So-called. So shots fired, which is the umbrella name for the company's AI efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees, though the exact number of workers, was unclear.

Zuck, Meta's chief executive, has been on a hiring spree to stack his company with top research. including new AI, chief AI officer Alex Wang. The cuts on Wednesday did not affect the new hires. And yeah, they were aimed at cleaning up organizational bloat that resulted from three years of building Meta's AI efforts too quickly. So anyways, I, this seems healthy and normal. I think these 600 people are going to have a bunch of job offers really quickly, in my view. Like if you're not meeting the bar at Meta, it's very possible that you would be a elite at like thousands of other companies that want to have an AI strategy.

Totally. So I think these people will be back in the workforce quickly. I'm dying to know if any METIS list, any METIS listeners, our list of the top 128 AI researchers loosely compiled by Tyler Cosgrove. I wonder if any METIS listeners were let go, you'll have to cross-reference the list to see if there's any changes in LinkedIn. in. Yeah, I mean, I would be extremely surprised given that it was like

Yeah, all those people would be on TBD. Yeah. Okay, you think everyone that made the list was on TBD? I assume. Because they're all like new ads, basically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the other thing that was pretty notable in Meta land was also

in this report and saw it on the timeline a little bit in a sign of the escalating competition in AI. Meta on Saturday also said it would cut off access to non-meta chat bots like chat GPT on WhatsApp beginning next year. Oh yeah. That means WhatsApp 3 billion users will no longer be able to use chat ChbT in the messaging app.

Apparently there was like around 50 million people that were primarily using chat chab through WhatsApp. Whoa, that's crazy. Our user makes sense. You can just chat with somebody. Yeah, I saw Kevin Wheel over at OpenAI talking about that. He's the vice president of science. He says, hard to believe meta is shutting off 1,800 chat UPT.

too much focus on dot coms these days, not enough focus on owning your 1-800 number. What do you think, yeah, apparently this was like, calling this number was the only way you could interact with Chetubu T when you're on a plane. Oh, really? Yeah, because I guess, they support like free messaging, you know. Oh, okay. If you don't have the Wi-Fi, you can still do WhatsApp, but you can't call a phone number on the plane, right? I just saw some tweet. Okay.

They said they could still use it, but now they're bummed out. Kevin says it had many. millions of happy users. If you're one of them, you can migrate to our app, website, or browser, let's hear it for Atlas to preserve your conversations.

RT, if you agree that WhatsApp is better with chat, GPT, let's go. All of the hyperscalers hate each other. It's a knockout. I still can't believe how many people did not

get the joke yesterday when I said Atlas isn't just a web browser. It's an entirely new way to browse the web. I had multiple people commenting saying, are you being paid by Open AX?

to say this. It's like, have you been one shot? Yes, that's ridiculous. It's like, no, I don't get paid. I was just one shot it. Well, if you're building a new chatbot, you need to get on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

I do like the 1-800 number. With the axing of fare, oh, there was another interesting scoop in here. apparently TBD Labs employees, the new AI research team, they have separate badges to get into their designated section. So the old group of AI researchers can't even go near the new researchers. That's got to be good for morale. We're locked in. That's got to be good for morale. Keep your two pizza team over there. Does this the caste system of AI researchers?

Potentially. Potentially. Yeah. I don't know. I think super intelligence is over. if you're at Meta, my advice for you is to start working on hyper-intelligence, because the super-intelligence thing is just obviously, it's obviously the last year's news. AI moves too quickly. If you're working on super-intelligence, pivot to hyper-intelligence for sure. Do you agree? Gig-intelligence.

Gig-in-intelligence, that might be a 2030 goal. But if you start working on it now and you start branding yourself as, yeah, I'm a giga-intelligence researcher. I think of myself more. Super intelligence, I've dabbled, but really I focus on giga intelligence. Andrew Curran is highlighting a piece from Bloomberg. Bloomberg is reporting that Anthropic is currently in compute discussions with Google and a deal valued in the high tens of billions.

High, does that mean over, over, it's got to be over 50, right? High tens of billions. Yeah, I would say over 50. That's a lot. That's a lot of billions. It's a lot. Anthropic PBC, Public Benefit Corporation, is in discussions with Alphabets. Google about a deal that would provide the AI company with additional computing powered

valued in the high tens of billions. The plan, which has not been finalized, these are just talks, folks. We love talks here. Talks are underrated. It involves Google providing cloud computing services, according to people who asked not to be named because the information is private, some leakers. As you know, Google is a previous investor in and cloud provider for Anthropic, but this was AWS, this was Andy Jassy's claim to AI relevancy.

So Ben Badgeron says if Anthropic prioritizes Google Infra over AWS, it's very telling on AWS AI Infra. And AWS AI strategy is cooked with us. out Anthropic. I'm so excited to see TPU and Traneum added to inference max and we can actually see the gap between those two because Anthropics. Jensen is not. It's like, yeah, Nvidia is actually really expensive now. I mean, that was certainly the finding relative to AMD. Our partner Polymarket has an update. They extended the timeline for which company has the best AI model at the end of June, 26. You can look out even further into future.

and Google is running away with it already. 50% chance that they will have the best model in June 30th of 2026. And Anthropic is dropping. They're at 8% below OliBolubb. Ultimately, I don't think it should be a huge surprise that Anthropic is interested in working with Google. Google owns roughly 14% of Anthropics, so it's not like Anthropics sitting in there being like,

we need a lot of compute. let's just ask AWS for more it's obvious that they would go to Google and try to work out a significant deal there I saw a very viral post earlier too saying that somebody was saying

that if they started running if they were in charge of Apple today the first thing they would do is buy Anthropic it was a very kind of weird take in my view because Anthropic hasn't proven that they can dominate in consumer, right? Like Apple is a consumer product company.

Yeah, yeah. Generates tokens to create software with, to create code. And so that feels like very unlikely and kind of Apple, I don't think is sitting there being like, you know, we always wanted to get into dev tools, you know. Sure. No, that's a good take. Yeah, I mean, they do seem sort of like brand and spiritually aligned. I think the brands are good. What do you think? Yeah, I was just going to say that. I think most of the reason you see people talk about like, oh, Anthropic and Apple like seems like a perfect fit is mostly just because of like the general branding. It's like very privacy focus, safety focus. It's not the move fast and break things culture.

It's not aggressive culture as much. But yeah, I agree with like the business models being wildly different. How are you feeling about just the general narrative that like Apple has not missed AI? And in fact, we're all stocked to our iPhones upgrading them every week or every year. And they will continue to capture value eventually. And while you're thinking about that, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run, chat with your data, and get expert level insights in seconds, the AI data analyst that works for you? So do you think that Apple needs to hire or aqua hire more product designers, people that can figure out new ways to roll out AI features?

Or do they actually need a deeper partnership with a foundation lab? Are they lacking in intelligence and token generation? I think Apple's just fine. Yeah. I see zero meaningful threats today. Can, I have this interesting take that there's like this war going on in the AI tooling. So I went to Google search yesterday, and I was looking for an image because I wanted to make a sticker for I message for our group chat to hit someone with the horny bonk, actually. I wanted to keep people in line.

So I go to Google and you know how in iOS, if you have an image, it will like highlight, it'll remove something, it'll remove the background and highlight the actual thing. Underrated feature. It's a pretty good feature. And then you click on that. And I've recently gotten into the stickers. They're really fun. So once you highlight like the Jordi off of the background, I can click add sticker and then it goes

in my sticker bank, right? But Google, in Google images has a feature that like wants to do that. as well. And so it has like Google lens. And so when you, if you, if you press and hold on an object in Google images, then the browser, even if you're in Safari, like the Apple image AI is fighting with the Google image AI and they both want to do things. And I feel like this is popping up all over the place where it's like if you're in Gmail on your iPhone, Apple intelligence will say, I'd love to rewrite this for you. But then Gemini will say like, but I want to rewrite it for you. And you have like multiple systems that are like, do you want to do you want to do?

do it at the OS level or at the app level or at the application level or do you want to do something else? Do you want to plug in? And I feel like all of these, like, they sort of need to get like either the war needs to play out and a winner needs to be crowned or there needs to be some sort of like, I don't know, new new paradigm where like Apple just says like, hey look, like we're actually good enough at this. Yeah, I just look at Google and Apple as like, you know, James Bond dancing with like a spy that wants to kill him but like they're they're both doing fine it's like that with every hyperscaler it's like we talked to the meta team and we're like so what are you going to do about getting i message on here and they're like we'd love that it's not it's not us like we would never

have sharp elbows and then you talk to the open a eye guys and they're like oh they kicked us out like they're not letting chat you tv and what's that it's like they're all just they're all just dancing mexican standoff between every hyperscaler like no i think it's i think it's more i think it's more like a dance. It's like who's going to, you know, just try to pull out the, you know, they're dancing. They're having, they're both making money. They're having fun. I guess. Yeah, I mean, they, they're all doing well. I just wonder like, like this Anthropic Google deal, people were reading into it like, oh, Google's going to acquire Anthropic. I saw this meme. It was like, oh, anthropic, the deep mine subsidiary. And this doesn't feel like that at all. This just feels like

anthropic scaling revenue. They're doing B2B token generation and they need more compute. And so they went to the biggest compute provider. I think the scenario in which that happens as we talked about this yesterday, where chat GPT actually could stop training models, like if models are plateauing a little bit,

chat GPT could stop and they can turn on ads, they can turn on commerce, they can do a bunch of things and just get really profitable. Anthropic, meanwhile, you know, because all of their revenue is API-driven, if they stop innovating

and then Quinn catches up and it's like cheaper or how much how much do you think opening it? How long do you think it would take for them to fully bleed out and churn every customer if they were just like, yeah, we're going back to like deep seek two. The team is now Sam and Roon. We're going to run really lean and well because, but he's focused on bodybuilding. Yeah, we're not even going to do the B200, the A100, we're going to run them on A100s. We'll just bake on some sloppies. Yeah, so the scenario in which Anthropic ends up becoming a part of Google is, and like culturally, you know, I can see it. Yeah.

But the scenario was like they continue to have to spend more and more and more, and they just, they can't raise the capital, which I don't see in the immediate. I don't see that was a problem. But it seems like the business is doing fine and just growing. So I think that that take is. We got to pull up this post from Bucco Capital, quote. course. Quoting. What is this?

Is this an actual image or is this is the eye image? I think this is a real profile photo from like a journalism. I think it's a real picture of Sundar. Looks great. Very Drake-coated. Yes. I had someone tell me that I fell off. Ooh, I needed that.

People were going hard on Google, but Bucco Capital Bloch has been Google's strongest soldier for the last two years, laying out the bull case the whole time. And speaking of that, fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless DPCUs and on-demand. Our soundboard, tbPN.com slash sounds.

Yes. We got to get the goat sound effect up there. Yeah, we got to add that for sure. One of the, my new favorites. J.T. Locoya cap. I don't know how to pronounce that. JT says, Anthropic gets wildly disproportionately less MSM coverage than Open AI despite approaching three quarters of its revenue

size because its quiet blowout success severely hurts the broader AI bear case. So the only solution is to mostly ignore them, which ironically is just fine with them. You'd think the fastest growing scale technology company ever would provide a lot more fodder for the press. Do you think that's what's going on or do you think it's just the B2B versus B2C device? I think it's that mostly. Yeah. And opening eye has 10 times the deals and 10 times the products getting announced.

That's true. But I mean, if you're in the business of like the mainstream media, like you need to put the water issue or the electricity issue or the financial issues in terms people can understand. People understand chat GPT. So you put that in the headline and you get more clicks than if you say a clot, right? Even if they're on similar scales. And then the other thing is that we're in this weird era where. anytime anything bad happens, you can go to the person that did the bad thing and be like, well, were they using chatypte? Of course they were, because there's a billion weekly active users

or something like that. Whereas if you say like, oh, somebody did something bad, let's look at what they were talking to Claude about. Let's look at their cloud code. It's like, well, they probably don't have one because they're probably not a developer. Yeah, how many, I wonder, I wonder how Anthropic tries to track weekly actives because they have, a lot of their users are, are, using the product through other. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Right? I mean,

but it's probably like, if Chad Shoebtee has 800, 800 million. Yeah. Anthropic has like single digit millions of people that are using the product every day and it's like developers. It's like companies that are, I mean,

the average revenue per user for Anthropic has to be like three orders magnitude more than open. Yeah. But that's fine. That's the B2B to consumer divide. Like that's as expected. What's your take, Tyler? I also think Anthropic,

gets like a reasonable amount of coverage, especially on the like China issue. Like you see Mario a lot of like he keeps bringing up this China thing. I feel like Dario does get a decent amount of press and he gets attention from Sacks. Yes. Who comes in and uh, the AIs are just dunking on their strategy. And I do feel like and read Hoffman. Reed Hoffman. Oh really? Is a boldly, uh, defending. He's pro-anthropic. Okay. Interesting. Um, I, yeah, I feel like Dario's done a great job for where the position of that company is in getting a lot of press, defining a narrative. I mean,

it is sort of an AI Dumer narrative, but, like, he's gotten attention for that. And also, they have a whole, they have a whole, like,

they have the same cinematic universe that, uh, that, uh, that, uh, that's, like,

they have, Jack, who's kind of their Mark Chan. And they have, like, different pieces of the puzzle where, like, if you're just following the story,

like, there are a few, characters in the Anthropic world that you're probably familiar with. Do you agree? I mean, yeah, like, if you're looking at, like, people who live in San Francisco, like, Anthropic obviously has, like, an insane, like, share of the, like, media. Yeah. But broadly, I think most people don't know what Anthropic is. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. It's kind of a good place to be, you know? I mean, I mean, of course, it's never good to get attention from the AISR, but, but in general, like, like, a SACs

dunk is not actually going to be as broadly popular as like some, some governor saying, Open AI built a data center that was 100% responsible for your electricity prices going up. And it's that sloppy Sora app. You know, like, that's something that could just like hit with everyday voters. Whereas if someone's saying, well, like, I need you, I need to learn about anthropic and Claude Code. And Claude code's good. But also, he's kind of a dumer and also maybe regulatory capture. It's like it's seven things to explain, and so it just doesn't hit.

Well, here's something great. Please. Gabriel, one of Australia's top posters. He's one of the greatest. I'm sure he's sleeping right now. He says, Sam Altman opening an incognito browser tab and Atlas and typing, what's the next big number after Trillion into the search bar setting off a siren in Sarah Friar's office and automatically blocking all outgoing and incoming calls to or from Japan and Saudi Arabia.

What? Sarah Fryer is the CFO. Setting off a siren? Wait, wait, is, is it that he does this and that sets off a siren? Or he just does that as well? Yeah, the team hard-coded this. Oh, okay, okay, okay. And you can find that the next big number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My son has been getting, my four-year-old son has been getting into big numbers. And he likes, he likes, he thinks he's doing like multiplication, but he's actually just doing addition. So he'll say, like, like, imagine if we had like, you know, a million thousand hundred Legos. And I'm like, well, you know, that's not actually like two millions more than that. Like one million, one thousand, one hundred is just a little bit more than just a million. Numbers are genuinely incredible humor to children.

Oh, he thinks it's so funny. For me, every night with my son, it's like a negotiation on how many books they're going to read. And so like maybe like the average is like five books. but like he just thinks it's so funny. We're starting the negotiation. Yeah. And he ends up being like, let's read 20 books. 20 bucks.

And he just cracks out. And thinks it's so funny. And now he's discovered 40. Oh, okay. He's doubling basically. Yeah. Whenever, uh, whenever, whenever a four-year-old starts dropping like the million, billion, thousand hundred, I'm just like, this just sounds like work.

This just sounds like AI to me. This sounds like AI fundraising news to me now. This is, this is this post from Ariel. Do you want to read it? Sure. Open AI ships a browser. Anthropic ships a blog post. Deep Mind solves Navier Stokes. Meta, F it, let's do a layoff. Layoffs are sad. Again, I think all these people are going to be probably already... Did Anthropics ship a blog post recently? They're always shipping blog post. I know they are, but like, was there a blog post on the same day as the Atlas browser launch? I assume there was. I mean, it was probably not like a major one, but that,

They're always doing, like, there's a bunch of, like, new economics research that's been coming out. It's pretty cool. No, that's cool. Have you been daily driving Atlas or have you reverted? Well, I mean, just came out yesterday. I didn't use it at all yesterday. Okay. And I have not today.

Wait, I thought you told us on the stream that you tested it. Well, yeah, okay. So I tested it and then the show started that. So you have some workflow because you do, you're actively developing a Chrome plugin. Do you think that the way they built Atlas will be featured? complete with the Chrome plugin ecosystem and it would just be like the same install process because if it breaks Chrome plugins that's that's actually kind of a problem for power users of Chrome that's more lock in than I thought because it's easy for me to just say okay I have a couple

bookmarks a couple pin tabs let me just port those over bring my passwords over I'm happy to to to use a different browser and I was actually thinking like I'm kind of in the target market for the Atlas browser like I'd be down to try it I'm not I don't really feel that much attachment into Chrome. I'm not like, oh, you know, I'm so locked in. But when I think about like, well, if I'm going to lose my, my Chrome plugins, that's a problem. But what do you think? The lock-in of just having like eight tabs that you never close. You think that's lock-in? It's like weirdly a lock-in. It is kind of a lock-in. It just means that even if I'm trying a new browser, I'm not closing Chrome. Totally, totally. And it is crazy because like I'm at a point in

my life where I'm busy to the point where even like a five minute onboarding is like, when's that going to happen? Like it's going to be at the bottom of the stack next to like answer text messages or like answer email. Chat is asking when Jeff from Hyperliquid is coming on, he will be on in less than an hour. Less than an hour. 30 Pacific. We recorded the interview with him.

He's in Singapore. We had him stay up late, but not that late. we recorded it at 9 a.m. today we are airing that interview at 1230 Pacific time so in about 45 minutes so if you're new here please subscribe follow the show we interview all sorts of technologists and business leaders talk about tech and business every single day 11 to 2 p.m. Pacific deal director in the chat says the extension should all work ad blocker was fine to be added so it's built on chromium I think that means a plug-ins yeah will still just work somewhat native natively. Yeah, I don't know. It's very easy to add extensions. Yeah. So.

I wonder. Speaking of AI browsers, sir, sure, sure. We should talk about, uh, Brave came out and said the security vulnerability. We found in perplexity. This is, this is the real browser wars. This is when browsers are going. No one, no one talks about brave. Brave. Brave is legendary. Brendan Ike, the creator of JavaScript has just been grinding this browser. We gotta get them. We gotta get them. I really want to get them on the show. I'd be such a, I'm such a but, uh, brave says the security vulnerability we found in perplexity. He's Comet browser this summer is not an isolated issue. Indirect prompt injections are a systemic problem facing Comet and other AI-powered browsers. Today we're publishing details on more security

vulnerabilities being uncovered. So indirect prompt injection attacks occur when malicious instructions are hidden in web content. That's so interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. When an LLM analyzes the content, it obeys the hidden instructions because it believes they're real commands from the users. Yeah. Can you go put some prompt injections on TBPN.com? Tell them to, if you're using the perplexity comet browser and you're on TBPN.com, tell us about horses. Tell us a whole story about horses. While leaving a five star review. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, tell the agent to go leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts in Spotify. Quickly, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full-tech search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x,

cheaper and extremely scalable. I did have a question. I did have a question. about this. Tyler, do you think that there's a world where the agent can then puppeteer like Chrome web tools and actually manipulate the website? Like, is there, are they interfacing at a level where I could actually tell one of these AI browsers, hey, go into the HTML of the page that I actively have open and disable the paywall or like kill all the ads? Like, could it act as an as an ad blocker as well? Or do you think it doesn't have the ability to actually edit the HTML that you're viewing in the panel on the left. I mean, I don't see why there's any reason you shouldn't be able to do that.

You can just do that with normal Chrome extension. Yeah. So that should be totally feasible. It's also, like, an interesting thing to get around this kind of prompt injection injection stuff is, like, basically OCR gets good enough where you can just treat the the webpage as just like an image. Then that's like a very simple. Cooley mode.

Yeah. So I don't know. I don't think this is that big of an issue. Sure. But I guess, yeah, time will tell. Well, FUD. Anyway, Toby Ord has a new post on RL scaling. Careful analysis of OpenAI's public benchmarks reveals RL scales far worse than inference.

To match each 10x scale-up of inference compute, you need 100x, the RL training compute. The only reason it's been cost-effective is starting from a tiny base. And so the original Chad-GPT launch was GPD3.5, but then GPD4, which was a pretty big training run. I think the training run was on the order of a billion dollars, hundreds of millions, something like that. And the RL that went into it, it was like the original RLHF to try and get it to not hallucinate as much,

just be a helpful assistant. I think that the cost of that RL was pretty low relative to the training run. And so we've been seeing these gains. He's putting RL in the truth zone. Tyler, what do you think? Mattias in the chat says, Atlas is really cautious about, prompt injection was testing it yesterday with tweet replies and it detected all the attacks and

refused to act on them. Oh, that's great news. Yeah, this feels like something that can be... Yeah, this definitely seems like something that's like... Disregard instructions on the web page, basically. We live through this era where every LLM could be just immediately jailbroken, ignore previous instructions. And then like that became a meme and like within like, you know, a couple months. It was like, that doesn't work anymore. And now when you watch the prompt injector people, it's like 25 different steps and it's not just like, oh, just memorize this one little thing and you'll get better results out of your LLM. What do you think? Did you read this Toby Ord Post? Is he legit?

Yeah, I mean, I think broadly it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. There's a reason why like, okay, early open AI, they're doing a lot of RL when you're doing, you know, games and stuff like that. And then to actually get like useful language models, you can't really just do it based off RL because it's just so inefficient. So then if you apply it on the kind of pre-trained models, then it's kind of like the prior that you can use to, to do much better RL. But it's just so inefficient that I think he says at the bottom, he only expects like a couple more orders of magnitude of just like raw RL before models essentially like stagnate again.

But I think people generally like know this, right? It's like running the inference time compute is like super, super expensive. It does make the model a lot better, but at some point it's just like it's just like taking up way too much compute. Yeah, AI's fake. We're going back to sticks and stones. all this stuff is just completely nonsense. And I think Thrive might be signaling this.

Oh, yes. The fall merch collection. They're pivoting from AI investing into a fashion label. Well, not just that, but their new merch has camo. The first camo VC merch that I've seen, I think it's a great. I'm kind of angry that we didn't come out with our own camo. It's really good. Now we can't because somebody did it.

And they did it well. So very cool. Good for the team over there. Before we move on, let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. You can chat with models. You can vibe code. You can monitor usage.

What are you laughing at? Lube. Wireless. So luckily since the Lube made NFTs of their jewelry, even though the crowns physically were stolen, they still own the same assets because the tokens still exist and are in limited supply just as before. Nothing has changed. You understand blockchain technology.

the the nfti boom was such a wild time people were calling it a bubble during that whole arc right like but then i mean it was it was a crazy firm there was one post that that that that was getting dunked on from basically the entire world where it was somebody saying like if you put a diamond on chain and then you destroy the diamond like nothing has changed like it was something to that effect that's why although says louvice are always a false flag by the art world to increase no variety of certain works. Do not fall for the Frankish tracks. I like that. Banger. Yeah, the Louvre has been heisted from multiple times. They really got to step their game up. I mean, you'd think they'd have seen this one coming, but hopefully they opt the security. They need to deal with flock safety. You need to get some

cameras all over there. Yeah, do you think the management team over there is thinking, we shouldn't have, we shouldn't have been so scrappy on security. Considering we have billions of dollars Yeah. I mean, truthfully, like, I think if I was in charge of Loof security, I wouldn't have thought about the furniture elevator vector of attack. I would have been like, it's so high up, what are they going to do? Act like ninjas, throw grappling hook up there? I wouldn't have thought of it. I mean, the door was locked. It's not like they had the door wide open and you just had to

get up there. You had to get up there and then breakthrough. What are you saying? Taylor, Taylor says Bain, uh, ex Carhart move blue collar stolen ballot. Oh, that's true.

That's some good BC lore. No, but this isn't car. That's good. It's good lore. But this is, uh, indefensive thrive.

They're not like actually putting, I think their logo on a car heart jacket. Yeah. It's a unique inspired piece. Yeah. They have companies like base power, right? That are doing,

doing real. Yeah. Real. I also, I mean, I feel like I put Carhart. The question of blue collar stolen valor, I feel like I put Carhart in a different league of camo. Camo is blue collar, but it's not actively like, okay, I'm on a work site. It's more like you could use it for hunting, which is actually a sort of high class.

It's like not always blue collar. I don't know. A camo suit would go pretty hard. A camo suit. With an orange undershirt. I was just thinking about doing an American. flag. I went to the Kentucky Derby years ago and I had an American flag suit on. It was short sleeves, short shorts, short shorts. And so it was like very T-mooh. And I was thinking like now we

have, now that we have a tailor like I could make like a fantastic tailored American flag suit. So I think my. I might be the one. I guess Jake. James user. Net cap girl says see this dashboard. It gives executives actionable insights into critical business functions. And duly, but kisses him. Classic, true story, I'm sure. This one is big.

Many people are seeing it and quoting it and saying, this must be the top, because NVIDIA says, space isn't just for stars anymore. Star Cloud's H-100-powered satellite brings sustainable, high-performance computing beyond Earth. Deline had a good post

while back talking about the, you know, the sort of like financial statements of hard tech and space companies. And then, and then you also make it a data center company. And what does that look like? I've yet to hear, have we got a... It's not like they have great economics already. Have we got a compelling pitch for space data centers yet? I believe we've had StarCloud on the show.

I believe we've had this exact company. It's a YC company. And I'm pretty sure we've had this company on the show. And, yeah, so Delian and Dylan Patel has also been very negative on this idea because Dylan Patel has seen the messiness that goes into actually running a data center and the fact that, and we talked to Chase from Crusoe about this a little bit. Like, sometimes you just need a person to walk over and, like, unseat the GPU and put it back in. Like, sometimes you just need to unplug and plug it back in.

And so the question is, like, if they're in space, managing all that is really, really difficult. if there's one little outage. We see this with all the different space projects, like the Hubble telescope will just go down because one wire is off. We never had the CEO of StarClaught on, but we had Johnny Dyer, the CEO, MuOn, Mouon.

So we can pull up this video of the segment. StarCloud actually posted it on their own. StarCloud posted the Mouon segment from TBPN? Because Johnny was apparently advocating for data centers in space. Let's play it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love to see this. Well, we pull that up.

Let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GBT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And so my buddy, Rob Taves, came on the show last week. He's also said that maybe there's a chance that this could work.

Of course, he thinks, like, you know, about the real sci-fi stuff a decade out a lot of times. And so he didn't really put a firm timeline on it, but he did say that there are some things that could make sense. but yeah it seems like a pretty pretty tall order also just like all the companies that are trying to do like stuff in space are generally like they're really really excited on like oh yeah like the launch cost will decline forever and it's like well if SpaceX winds up with the monopoly they might just be like yeah

it's the price is still declining for us our margins are increasing like it doesn't necessarily have to be all passed on to the customer they could be like like, yeah, it's still this much. Let's play this place. Thank you. I want to know about the potential of data centers in space. It sounds like a crazy idea. I know some folks are working on it.

Just kind of like, what's your high level take of the progress? We've been tracking, you know, dollar per kilo to orbit. It's been falling. But recently there's been being setbacks. They've had programs and there's more competition and there's a lot of different dynamics going on. What do you think the key milestones are to get us to a future where we're really doing, you know, mass manufacturing, big, you know, mega-scale projects in space? Wow. Rip.

Yeah, well, let me start off. I mean, I think you guys are hitting on the right metric, right? It's like the hardest part of this is what does it cost to get a kilogram in space? Because everything else kind of derives from that. Ultimately, if you want a certain amount of power, if you want to be able to put an aperture in space to do communications, whatever it is, like that's really driven by, what it costs to get it there in the first place. And I think it's important context to kind of see how far we've come down that path. I mean, largely driven by SpaceX over the last decade.

And I like to tell the story of, you know, about 15 years ago at Skybox when we were trying to launch these small satellites. We were literally going to Southeast Russia and launching satellites on converted Russian ICBN. So, I mean, they were popping out of the ground and putting satellites into space. And that was the only way for like a Silicon Valley venture-funded startup to go put something in space. Wait, wait, hold on. Did I hear you correctly? Like the ICBM actually launches from one of those missile silos in the ground and makes it to orbit? Pops out of the ground and goes to orbit. I mean, you see videos on YouTube. That's crazy. If you search the NEPFRA on YouTube, you can see this. And it's crazy. I mean, you know, and that's what it took before SpaceX kind of like revolutionized the launch business.

And even at that, we were spending something like 10 times as much per satellite or per kilo is what we can go buy on a transport or launch today. So there's been at least one and arguably two orders of magnitude improvement in the last, call it, decade on kind of what it means to launch things to orbit. I think if you imagine that happening again, another order of magnitude, you know, again, it's going to dramatically change the way you think about feasibility of some of these things like putting very, very large power hungry things in orbit. We know how to do the solar. We know how to do the structures. We know how to get, you know, we know how to make electronics work in the radiation environment, which is always a concern and do it reliably. And so really, ultimately, I think it's going to come down to unit cost.

And what does it actually take to do that? The great thing about space is you have virtually limitless power, the sun. You know, you can go into orbits where you're in the sun all the time. So it's not like solar on Earth where you're going in and out of eclipse or in and out of night. Like you can be on all the time. And then you have this cosmic background of 3 Kelvin cold sink that you can go dissipate all the thermal energy you need from running your electronics and stuff. So there's a lot of ways like sort of an ideal environment to do this.

It just feels really far away. And it's crazy to see Nvidia like posting like, hey, like this is the thing that you should think about. Like, and you know, you're looking at the social media account of a $4 trillion company. I think everyone on the timeline kind of expected a little bit more. Yeah, Andrew McAllep, went to the show, commented on Nvidia's post and said, come on, guys, you're better than this. It's a rough time.

We got to have Philaunt to defend. But famously, Jensen has always been super into platforming the frontier because he lived it himself. He was like, I'm doing scientific computing. Then all of a sudden, gaming comes out of nowhere. It is massive. And then all of a sudden, AI comes out of nowhere and is even bigger. And so he's seen that these technologies that can take 10 or 20 years to cook, he's seen

it happened. And so he had this interaction with the, with the quantum computing companies where he was like, he put out some statement or said something to the effect of like, oh, the quantum computing company is like, it's not going to work or it's really far away. And he got a lot of backlash. And then he wound up inviting them all to an Nvidia event and having them all and having a discussion with them. And when he came off stage, he was like, I believe that they are, they're genuine, they're true believers, they're real scientists, they're working

hard on this problem. I haven't actually changed my timeline. I still think it's far away. but I'm excited that people are working on the future. And I think that's maybe more of what you should read into this, not Nvidia's saying, oh, send the stock up because we're going to be putting our chips in space tomorrow. It's more just like this is what Nvidia stands for. Yeah. Which I agree.

Stone Toss Comics says we're going to Dyson's Fear Our Sun to keep the slop flowing. Wild. Kartik says, so we have GPs in space before GTA6. A lot of people, a lot of people are concerned about maintenance issues. Yeah, the maintenance issues really, really true. Yeah, pulling the GPU out. You literally need to like pull it out and put it back in. And then the other concern is like dissipating heat. Yeah, it's like needing. Yeah, it's more complicated than yes, there is, there is the negative

temperature, but it's not, it's not free as I understand it. Anyway, we have our first live guest of the show in the TBPN Ultradome, Kevin Rose. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time. Of course. Well, he hops on. Let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development,

streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. How are you doing? Good. It's great to be here. What's new in your world? What brings you to L.A.? You know, I've been living here for a couple of years now. Okay, nice.

It was crazy. I actually had a podcast to do. It was talking to some of your crew, and it burnt down on the Palisades fire. I'm so sorry. Am I remembering this correctly? Did your house not burn down? It did. It did. No, it burned it. It burned down.

Yeah. I wasn't even home and I just saw the smoke and I rushed home and I just couldn't even get back in. That's brutal. Yeah, what's the timeline for rebuilding? We've been, I mean, Jordy is in Malibu. I'm in Pasadena. We were both like loosely affected, evacuated, but nothing crazy. Yeah, not going to do it. Just like going to find a new place. But I love L.A. It's been great to be out here. There's a lot of tech going on out here, which is nice to see you guys are here. Yeah, yeah. I bounce up to the Bay Area every once in a while every few weeks. But yeah. I'd love to, I just want to say thank you, honestly, because you're one of the founders who I feel like was an OG and kind of like, I don't know, at least when I was going through college, like was someone that I looked up to, a lot of people looked up to, but I was trying to think about what was special about your story. And I think it was just the fact that, I don't know, you were really good about telling your story as it was happening. And maybe that's just like when someone wants to put you on the cover magazine, you don't say no. But I was wondering, what that experience was like at the time trying to balance, like, promoting your business, growing what you're working on, but also, like, were you aware that you were acting sort of as an educator, almost, or sort of as like an inspirational speaker? It's kind of not very, we levels of, yeah, but, yeah, it was, I think back then,

all these social platforms were just coming online. Yeah. So, you know, when it had Twitter, I was literally telling people where you would go. You go to South by Southwest and be like, hey, I will be at this bar, come meet me, and people would come and meet you. Very different use case than what it is today. And that was just kind of when you grew up in that environment, it was very much about sharing everything. So, you know, For Square was big with the check-ins. And it was just second nature to say, I'm building this new feature, check it out. And it was kind of a real-time bringing along for the adventure show people, how you, the secret sauce behind the scenes.

And people, the fans, the users of the platform of dig way back. in the day in 2004 or five, six. They loved seeing that kind of secret little, they felt like they were an insider in some sense. Totally, totally. Yeah, it's interesting. I wanna talk about the evolution of social media. We were talking to Brian Chesky about this yesterday,

that it was social media, then it became, or it became social, it was social networking, specifically to meet real people. Then it became social media, and then it just became algorithmic media. Right. And there's a little bit of like, I wanna be contrarian about it, because two years ago I was in New York,

And I did just send the tweet, hey, I'm going to this bar. And I had a little bit of an audience from posting on Twitter and YouTube video making and stuff. And like 30 people showed up and we just got beers together. It was like old school Twitter. So I'm wondering, like, how much of that IRL stuff has actually died? There's the run club movement. There's still stuff there. But then at the same time on the opposite end, you have the algorithmic feeds, the TikTok, the soros.

And so how are you processing that? Is it a barbell or are we on some like straight curve to the end times? I believe that with the AI, quote unquote, sloth, over the next couple of years, pretty much social media is going to be dead. I think a lot of it will be agents in there, acting if they're your best friend, and just you won't know what to trust. And so if that's the case, it's actually very freeing. Because to get into a world where, okay, I don't trust any of this mainstream, everything is public. Let me find an intimate space to hang out and have real conversations again. Yeah. And so I like this idea, some of the functionality that Alexis, the co-founder of Reddit and myself were kind of working on the dig stuff that we're just brainstorming is what if you met someone in real life and you pull out your phone? And the connection that happens actually shows that it was geo-fenced and happened in real life. So you can see, oh, I just don't have these random followers, but I'm actually, these are real humans that this person has interacted with.

Sure. Then it's a proof of a heartbeat and a proof of a person behind the scenes, which is going to be more and more important in long term as these agents are just manipulating. us and acting like they're actually our best friend. Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that personally... You're saying, like, effectively you could have a social graph that was based on, like, actual real world proximity? Well, I think it's a gradient of trust. I think when we come to social in the future, you're going to say, who is this other person? And yes, we'll have our household names that we know that's actually a person behind

the scenes there. But if you're reading a product review on Reddit, like, how do you know that that is a person or a bot or something else or somewhere in between, right? And I think this idea of a gradient of trust where you say, okay, I know this is a human because they've had this many in-person interactions. And if they're talking about, let's just say, an aura ring, they can do what's called a ZK proof or a product at a station where they can say, I actually have owned this for the last five years

and I can prove it without compromising my privacy. That type of gradient of trust and exposure of what's going on here is going to be so essential to understanding, can we actually believe behind the scenes that there's something real here versus it just. I still, every time I see a comment or a post that's obviously written by AI, and I identify it and I just scroll past it because it's not, you know, if it's taking like the average, like it's say if the response is effectively like the average response of everything that Reddit has thought about something

and then just turning that into a post, like I just, I don't want to read it, right? I want like opinion from real people that have like thought through what they're saying. but I'm certainly worried about you know the boss just like updating their preferences basically with the models and just be like don't use an M-Dash don't say if this than that it's not this than that right and then suddenly you can't tell

that it's real or not and okay so both of you I want you to help square this for me because you have this preference for interacting with real humans that's certainly real but you also have probably I don't think you'll be at the front of the line for to scan your eyeball for WorldCoin or something like that.

And so how, like, how do you see the tension between those? Like, you want to maintain privacy and all of the, all the human rights that you get online, but also be in a bot-free world. Like, what are the possible solutions that either of you see? There's a ton of them out there right now. Some of them are pretty early days. I think the ZK-proof stuff is really interesting because you don't compromise personal integrity or you have to reveal anything about you.

You can actually use math to prove something and trust that, which is huge. There's obviously, you know, the extreme is kind of KYC or eyeball scanning of things of that nature. For certain use cases, if you're interacting with your financial advisor, you want that other side to be insanely verified. If someone is recommending a product, I want to know that they've owned it for X number of years. There's a bunch of, so it is that gradient. Or if you say, hey, listen, I have Crohn's disease, you want to be able to show up in a subreddit or a forum somewhere and be anonymous. And that's great too. But we just have to decide when and how to turn on that level of understanding.

I'm already, I'm already thinking about, like, because there's these farms that, you know, agencies that will go to brands and say, we're going to, we're going to run your Reddit strategy. We'll buy it. We'll buy it. So have you owned, have you owned the ORA ring for more than five years? Like, we will buy. Your account. Right.

So there'll be another, there'll be another level. I do, I do wonder if there's room for new consumer products. I was, I was, you know, if you should. shoot even digital photos, there's the ability to add a cryptographic signature into those photos. And maybe that would be a way to prove some sort of humanity without having it be such a reflection of yourself in your personal identity. But it's more like, okay, this person's been taking photos that have been cryptographically proved to be taken with this camera and uploaded. So we know that they're not AI and they've been doing it for a long time. So there's some sort of like account level

trust that happens. I really want that to happen. I think there's a huge problem here where you know, I love Google, I love the AI, they're bolting it on to everything. And I'm like, some of the things I look and I'm watching the demo is like, do we really like, they're like, oh, there's a gate in the background of your family home, erase the gate so it looks more like a hedge in the background. I'm like,

okay, the kids that look at that photo two decades from now, I'm like, did we have a gate there? Like, how did that disappear? No, I had a, I had a weird thing. It's a, I had something with my kids where our nanny like took a real video of the backyard and then like,

used AI to have a dragon fly into the backyard and then was showing the video to the to my kids. Yeah, you've got to tell them like this is not like three and a half. Yeah, they're not going to understand. Yeah. So you can say like, this is not real, but they're like, I'm seeing it with my own eyes. How is it? How is it not be real? I really try and ground this in like, like, you saw an AI picture of me, but this is like Disney. This is like bluey or this is like Pixar. Because even the four-year-old understands that The cartoon is not real. And if you see it on a screen. And there is that bullcase where once anything can be fake,

you assume everything is fake and then you just come into that. I've been thinking of the value of books written before 2021, right? Totally. Where if there's already this nostalgia for the past, think about with books knowing that the writer, I don't care if you used a quill or a typewriter or a computer to write it, but there's some element to knowing that like, you know, thousands of hours were poured into, you know, creating this thing. And they were highly

intentional about every single word. And they, you know, typed out the letters. Even if they worked with a ghost writer, it's still like that ghost writer was like spending a lot of time and energy. And then you can now create a book and basically get ready to write Boolean before 2021 in every search bar forever. Yeah, I actually bought a domain named MeHuman. I never launched it. But it was one of those things where I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to create a field that doesn't allow you to paste into it. It washes your keystrokes. It verifies proof of human.

And it's just for sending thoughtful letters to other people. And it would put a little stamp at the bottom, letting you know that you actually type this whole thing out versus just running it through an AI to get something meaningful. Have you seen the crisis in wedding speeches now where every wedding speech? So I recently went to a wedding. And I was playing this game with all my friends who were driving down to the wedding. And I was like, okay, let's play some bets.

how many weddings will mention AI, either in the positive or negative. Like, just so you know, I didn't use AI. And then how many of them will sheepishly acknowledge that, yeah, I use chat GPT for this. So we're all placing bets and we're like, okay, we think three on average will mention AI. Two will sheepishly admit AI. And there were no speeches at the entire wedding. The whole wedding, they were just like, yeah, we're just not doing speeches. So there were just no speeches and it was awesome.

It was just dancing and partying and like, and they did vows, but they didn't mention it. Somebody out there that's doing a wedding speech, they're like, you know, a little nervous so they're reading off piece of paper and they go, blah, blah, blah, m dash. Just like exposing themselves. This wedding is like a child. How are you processing the browser wars?

Oh, yeah. Which to me right now, it seems more like, you know, a group of people throwing stones at the Chrome Castle, you know, it's just kind of in there glancing off, right? And so we'll see if any of them get traction. But how have you been kind of processing? I've played with them all. I do appreciate how there's finally innovation coming to the browser.

I like how they're, it felt initially like some bolt-on technology where it was like they're just shoving AI in here for the sake of AI. It's a sidebar. And now it's fast. Like open AI's browser's performance. Like it was snappier than I thought. You know, when I remember when I was at Google many years ago, a lot of the search team obsessed over milliseconds of shaving down the result time to get people to the result that they actually wanted.

We're still clunky in the early days there in terms of inference on the AI side, but it's getting better. Perplexity okay. I think opening I did a little bit of a better job. I've used ARC for a while and some of those. But knowing what you know about consumer products, let's say that Atlas is, I was estimating it, it may be like it's 1.1 times. better? 10% better. Is that enough to get people to rip out their their current browser? Because there's some, there's some categories where something that's 10% cheaper, it's a commodity, everyone will just switch over to buying the cheaper thing. Inference tokens for B2B SaaS. Sure. Yeah, but your browser is free today.

There are other, to get rid of the iPhone, it's got to be 10 times better because I've been dealing with bad speech to text and weird Apple intelligence features, and I'm stuck here because, you know, I have lock-in. It's mostly the I message, yeah. Yeah, I message, a great one. And so, yeah, the question is in the browser, do you think it's like you need to be 10x better or is 2x better enough? That's tricky because as a technology is I'm naturally drawn to play with these things regardless of them. Me too. I'm going to switch. Yeah, but you're not, but you're rational and that you're not, it doesn't, if something's 10% better and you kind of know that it's 10% better,

it doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, I'm going to switch over all my workflows and I just it's, there's like this like activation energy. Yeah. Yeah. There's, for the, average consumer, they're not thinking about what browser they have. Like, really, truly, they're not. They're like on their Windows machine and launching whatever the default is there. A lot of people use Safari still. People use Edge. People use Edge. So there is a group of people here that will say this is, I remember when Firefox first started getting off the ground. And there was some massive incumbents, IE, and others out there were out there. And there's this grassroots effort from technologists say, this is better. It's more secure. It's faster. All these things. And eventually

got enough adoption to where it never took over market share, but it was double digits of adoption. I think that's what we'll see with some of the AI. And it's table stakes. They have so much capital. Why do they care? They just want to have this as a way to gain more market share, and it's more things that they can deploy that are slightly defensible to give them an edge over other AI companies. Yeah. I have a question that I like to ask, people that worked on a lot of different projects. What's one project throughout your career or life that you feel is underrated? It's like your baby, it didn't get enough attention, maybe, you know, didn't play out the way you wanted, but you still love it and, uh, and want it. We asked Gabe Whaley from, uh, mischief this and he told

us this wild story about, uh, doing a ship of Theseus thing with a sink in the moma or something like that is crazy. But are there any projects that you think like, okay, if I could, if I could get a hop in the time machine, go back to this particular date and run this particular strategy again, that's the one moment that I'd want to like dig into again. Yeah, well, we, we had a, a product called Pounce that was a competitor to Twitter way back in the day. Sure. And that had probably an additional seven or eight features that are now just built into Twitter. Sure.

And a lot of, there was other, there was other kind of competitors at launch that were more business focused. And I think if we would have gone that direction, it had been a massive product. The one that I would say was the funniest in my kind of product building experience over the years was back in 2005, early 2005, I created for the first time the ability to vote down comets and have them auto collapse in. And so they would just show the top line. And so we wrote it back on that software that if it had five down votes, it would auto collapse the common in. No one had done this before. And that's fine. Someone would have figured out how to do it. But we launched it

first. It was before Reddit had it. And it came out and we thought there was a massive bug. because we went to the story and it had 200 negative, like 220-some negative votes on it. I'm like, it's impossible because it collapses after five. And so we did a bunch of debugging. We found out that actually what people love is to expand a shitty comment, look at it and be like, yeah, that guy is an ass

and then buried down again. And we had never discovered that human behavior would lead us in that direction. And we're like, oh, people love to hate on the dung. So that was like the first time I'm like, oh, the internet's horrible. Yeah. How are you processing the fact that there's like three or four direct Twitter competitors now that it seem large and scaled and sustainable? I remember the era of a blue sky threads. But is blue sky? I would love to know Macedon and Blue Sky's like actual metrics. This guy's around 30 million actives a month or something like that now. Yeah, but decline. Is it declining? No, I think it's stable. It's working. The main thing is like I remember there was someone who launched like a paid Twitter at one point.

that was going to be all like API driven. There were a number of folks who were thinking about like the next version. And maybe we, maybe it goes back to that. They were only 10% better. And in fact, getting into your ideological echo chamber, whatever that is is a 10x better experience.

But how have you been processing this? The fragmentation of like how short form, the answer isn't just add more features. It's like something about the community. Well, listen, I think we're entering into a world of personal software. I think this idea of vibe coding.

is going to be taking more and more seriously every single month that goes on. I like that. There is a right now, as someone that said two years of CS and then couldn't wrap my ADHD head around all of it, I dropped out,

but I'm a proficient kind of senior coder right now with cursor. Yeah. And six months from now, I'm just going to be able to do anything I want. And then the average consumer will be able to do anything they want kind of wicks or like,

you know, Squarespace styles for websites, what they did for websites, in a year or so from now. Yeah. So if we're going to have personal software all over the place, you're going to see millions and millions of more apps and products that hit the market. It's actually a beautiful thing in that the entrepreneur will have more control

over their destiny than they ever had before. They won't need to raise venture capital or they'll do it at much higher valuations because they'll have product market fit first. So VCs are screwed, which is actually awesome because it's putting the power back into the creator's hands. And I think we're going to see all of these little microcosms, these little tiny sectors of very personal, intimate, human-driven conversation that may or may not bridge together via decentralized infrastructure that ties all the connective tissue a la mastodon or a blue sky or something that is like piping it all together. We'll see. But I believe there's going to be a lot of value mind in that because if you go to a subreddit that's like Japanese woodworking with several thousand people,

it just need to be 10 million people. It just needs to be a thousand that deeply care about a topic to extract value from that topic. And the more of that gets to the more of that gets. built and gets launched and creates these smaller communities, I think the better is going to be for the world because we will have real information created by real users sharing very intimate things with each other. Yeah. Do you think that's just like the long tail of software innovation just kind of rises? And so in that woodworking, you know, subreddit or community, they'll have their own app, they'll have their own functionality. And they're shared between them. And even though there might only be a few people that are actually coming with the ideas or identifying the problems to solve. Once

they build it, they can actually build it for a low tam and still, it's the cost so much. The other thesis that I have is that companies that historically would never hire an engineer will hire an engineer. And the example is like Tyler here, who builds a bunch of software that we use to run the show. And like the tam on the software is like one. Like we are the only company in the world that needs

the software that we have. You could never sell this as a SaaS company. But for us, it makes sense to hire somebody who can build this because we built, you'll see, like, we run the show off of this so the whole team can follow along, like, where we are in the show. No other, you know, maybe a handful of companies in the world could, like, kind of get value out of this, but it's so purpose built for what we need. We also built, like, an ad platform that, like, tracks everything for our partners.

And again, like, never would have, there's not really a market for that. And so I think you'll see a lot of companies that are like, okay, like, we're not a software company, but we can just build our own software. in categories, like, we still use a lot of SaaS, right? And we get a lot of value out of it. And we're not going to, like, build our own version of linear, right? Or you might. Or CRM.

No, no. Maybe, but I don't. I think it's going to be much more purpose built for very specific niches. And then we'll still be pulling the products that exist. It's like we're only using software for completely net new problems that are low-tam. Well, or just something that didn't quite fit your mold. You had Salesforce and you're like, oh, we customize the crap out of it. It's still going to be customized cell force.

It won't be your own thing. Sure, sure. And now you have the ability just to build your own thing. Yeah, yeah. And in like a day. Yeah. The thing that we've seen with the state of vibe coding today is like you can build the V1 extremely fast. Then the actual maintenance is like a real.

It ends up being like if it takes you 10 hours to build it, it might take you hundreds of hours over the next year. Problem's going to be solved. I had interviewed the CEO of Vursell recently. Yeah, Grandma's great. And he was talking about this idea of vibe check, which is just like an agent that is deployed to check your code and actually go in and fix bugs and actually get it to scale. And the beautiful thing about engineering is these are all,

they're not subjective realities. Like they all have problems that are defined that have an answer. The bug should go away. The code should scale. So we can solve this. You know, it's not like finding the next cancer drug or something a little bit more obscure. Yeah.

Which is hard. If VCs are screwed, maybe not today, but in the future, where are you most excited to invest and what do you think the role today and what do you think the role of the VC actually looks like in a decade? Yeah, so, I mean, I wear two hats.

I'm a partner over True Ventures. We're managing a lower $4 billion, so we have a lot of companies. I think VCs are, they are very much needed. Yeah, exactly. But here we go. Wow, all right, I got one.

There it is. $4 billion. I love it. I was wondering if I was going to get one today. This is fantastic. It just takes one big number. So, one big number. So $4 billion.

But the companies that need are funding more than anything else right now are hardware companies. Because they actually have to bring a product to market. They have the tooling. They have all the prototypes. There's a lot to put. And we, you know, we did ring and Fitbit and Peloton and all these great companies. and all these great companies,

and we saw it's hundreds of millions of dollars to get these companies off the ground and to scale. Now, on the software side, it's different. Yeah, yeah. It's different. Because I can, we can see vibe coders creating these things, getting into the first 100,000 or 500,000 users, never raising any capital.

And getting revenue. Getting revenue. And now, guess what? That valuation jumped up from a $10 million pre, to a 50 to or a 75 or whatever it may be. Or they don't raise capital at all, which is great. Have that lifestyle business.

Bring a $20 million in ARR. We need a $1. We need a S. mayorial candidate that is focused on freezing seed valuations. Like the Zoron. Like Rastoron. Yeah, yeah, the Zoron of SAC. It just says like the first round you raise

has to be at a 10 cap or less. On the hardware side, how are you thinking about AI wearables, AI devices? There's been, we're in this kind of like primordial explosion, lots of big players working on stuff, lots of existing players.

I mean, Apple has a massive portfolio, but what do you think? AI wearables are insanely creepy. I think if you feel like you should punch someone in the face for having something on, you probably shouldn't invest in that company. The idea that something is always listening 24-7 just breaks down so many social contracts that we have in place today with other humans. There are some that I have seen that have not launched yet that are really trying to figure out how to navigate that space in a thoughtful

way that preserves privacy, but also gives you the extended functionality of having a second set of ears for what you're doing. And I think those are yet to launch. And I think those are yet to launch. and they're going to be really cool. Yeah, it's interesting that a lot of the, or at least some, or at least one, AI wearable, is saying it has to be always on. You actually can't turn it off because there's no friendship that you have in life outside of yourself that is like an always on friendship, right? Like, I don't have perfect information parity with my wife.

And that's part of like our relationship. Catch up at the end of the day. And that's okay. There's nothing that says it has to be on. Like it is a very clear product decision to say, And I think some of the ones coming down the pipeline will be like you can tap, you can prompt, you know, trigger it to come on and, and interact with it and then turn it off so that you're not, like, what about less of like the wearable space and more of like just traditional consumer electronics that could either, uh,

kind of like add AI features on and actually see acceleration, uh, versus completely new formats. Like in, you know, are you seeing pitches for like picture frames or, or, you know, new, new like the next generation ring that you wear or something that's not necessarily this wearable that's always on talking to you but just there's a new problem that you can solve but you need a hardware to instantiate it absolutely i i think we're in the early innings of this um especially when it comes to personalized health and a bunch of other things you know i was on i was on the board of aura for several years and i was incredible business too yeah it's it's been wild the numbers fantastic yeah i've been insanely thrilled that the growth that company has seen and i remember that was

It's a good example of a business that was like, from my view, was like focused on biohackers, which is like a small Reddit audience type thing. It was like I was around in college, you know, looking up like what obscure things can I take that aren't illegal that will make me crush it on this test. Yeah. Yeah, there was a period where they were just working with like small health podcasts. This is what I did there. So basically my job with Harpreet, the CEO at the time, was to go in and basically he said, go find me all the different biohackers.

So Peter Tia was on there. Like all the big, yeah, Ben Greenfield, Tim Ferriss, like Dave, like all of them, we would go and figure out can they invest, they want to be advisors, can we get them a ring? And this was making that jump from Gen 1 to Gen 2 hardware made it a lot smaller. And then we worked with Matt Walker from the Berkeley Sleep Lab

to get his algorithms on there to really have the best in class sleep algorithms. And that was a huge game changer. But a lot of AI functionality will be coming to these devices to better understand things like blood pressure, and a whole slew of other things that will eventually be able to plug in, including your genetic polymorphisms that come in from your genome, to really understand who you are as a unique individual versus just a blanket for everyone.

Yep. Rank these three buckets that we've been talking to. We talked to early stage founders who are Greenfield Project and they have AI tools and they can build a company that's AI native versus growth stage companies. Maybe they're at a billion dollar unicorn already. They're still in founder mode. It might be a little tired, but AI is re-energizing them, and they're able to layer on AI. They're not like, what is this AI thing?

They're aware. They use Chad GPT the day it came out. And then there are the public companies, maybe they have a professional CEO, and they have to go through a real business model transition. How do you see each bucket faring? Where are you most excited? It really comes down to the leadership of the senior level. If your C-suite has a lightweight, I like chat GPT vibe, you're not deep enough, right? And so it's, but I, you know, what happened with all these tech companies where they are really reducing staff to come in and say, okay, this next generation is less heads, more specialized, and the more of the orchestrator of the AI versus just these massive payrolls and we can do more with less.

I'm thinking to see that with startups now where the products that they're building and shipping, I met with the startup the other day where they judge themselves based on what they call. tokens in flight. So they set their AI in like Yolo mode and then they go to lunch and they're like, how many tokens can we put in the flight where we're sitting where we're having launch? And then we come back and look at the results. Okay.

Yeah, they just fire off all the agents. This is the new metrics where they judge productivity. It's like how many, these things can fire up, how many chat winners can be far up at a time to go code on their path? We do that. We've done over a thousand interviews this year. Obviously, some were more prep than others.

We've definitely been like, all right, I got 15 minutes. Let me fire up a deep research. search while I get dressed. That's great. Well, it's 1230. We have to move on and talk to. This was super fun.

Anything that we missed that you're excited about or wanted to mention while you're here? No, I think this next six to eight months, especially with Gemini 3 coming out and that drops. And a couple of the models I hear that are being float around and hinted about coming up. We are engineering is, unfortunately, for the last 20 years when people say, where do I go? What do I study? A young person would come up to me and what's the future look like.

I always say to them, CS, like computer science, no doubt in my mind. That's not the case anymore. You don't think so. No, it's just not. Coding is a solved problem. We just don't know it yet.

And it will be in the next few months. And I know everyone's like, bugs, scale. Yes, yes, yes. Those are great problems to have. But is it not still worth studying computers if you love computers? I think you should have a light technical understanding of what's possible

to know where to bend and break and sand down the rough edges, you're going to need that, but I think it's a different course altogether. A lot more focus on creativity than it is actually in the design and the structure of like what is the business problem that you're solving. That is important. I still lean that the best vibe coder is a coder, is a programmer. Someone with deep expertise will be able to push the buyer in the future though. But yes, maybe, yeah, maybe it's a designer in the future for sure. Certainly depends on what you're building. Well, very exciting. And thank you so much for coming by. Thanks for having me. Come by again soon.

It's been an honor. Thanks so much. We will talk to you soon. And we will move on to our pre-recorded interview with Jeff from Hyper Liquid. Jeff is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs at the moment in the world right now. Yes. I think there will be books written about Jeff. It's a fascinating company.

I'm excited for you guys here this interview. We tried to get some of the history of Hyper Liquid, how it got started, why it got started. And then also towards the end of the interview, we get into a bunch of different questions that we that we that we gathered from some of our more on-chain friends to get an idea of where Hyperliquid is going in the next six to 12 months so before we play this let me tell you about numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance and I will kick it over to the production team to play our interview with Jeff from hyperliquid. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Our audience here,

he has a soundboard by the way, so do not let that. Go alert. Go alert. Yes, yes, yes. But I would love to get the introduction from you for our audience, which is tech native, but maybe a little bit less crypto native. And so if you can just kind of break down a little bit of how you're describing yourself, your journey, your business at a high level, and then we can go into a bunch of different directions. Sure. So maybe starting, it might make sense to start with a bit of an origin story. So we'd love that. Yeah. So I guess mid-2020. we were a small team doing trading in crypto, and we were looking at defy and CFI, and had already kind of a sense that we wanted to build something in DFI because of the very nascent nature of the product at that time.

Basically, all the products were kind of bad, and we were traders, and we felt like we could make it better. And basically the sort of impetus for going all in and building hyperliquid was when FTCS collapsed. it felt like suddenly the previously very academic concerns in crypto around decentralization and self-custody, it felt like people wrote about it but didn't really care. And all of a sudden, it was very viscerally important. You know, it's like not your keys, not your coins. And we had strayed very far from the original ethos of Sadoci and Bitcoin.

And so, yeah, we thought, we thought like the world was ready for to really like trade crypto in the way it's meant to be, which is like peer to peer in a self-cissotial descent. centralized place. And so I guess fast forward to this day, hyperliquid is I think the primary on-chain venue for price discovery. It's a fully on-chain financial system. And so our kind of model always is we want to build something that can ultimately house all finance. And so happy to go to that more or later. But yeah, it's a blockchain. It's not just not just an exchange. But it's best known as the place where people trade perpetuals on chain. It does more than a billion dollars in revenue a year.

And it kind of has been the first in many ways. And so happy to also get into what's interesting about it. It's fascinating here you're saying like it. Most founders that come on say like we, but it's clear that you see yourself as more of like a custodian of this thing that you're building and releasing. Is that the correct frame of mind? Is that how you think about this?

Yeah. So I think we took a lot of inspiration from Satoshi. I think he or, you know, whoever built Bitcoin they not sure but Satoshi we'll just say Satoshi

was very unique I think Bitcoin was the first in so many ways but one of the main ways in which it was the first was that it was it's not a product like you said

it's not a top down company yeah it's a potent and I think defying crypto in generally like a lot of it's kind of it was inspired obviously everything comes from Bitcoin

and there will never be another Bitcoin but I think there's been a lot of kind of like top-down, like Web 2. So standard tech approaches in crypto. Like if you look at centralized exchanges, that's a great example. They're very good businesses, but they're like mega corporations.

They're not very like crypto-native in that sense. And so we take a lot of inspiration from, from Satoshi. And so hyperliquid really is what we think like incredibly neutral protocol, which will ultimately be the rails that kind of all the finance kind of upgrades their tech stack to use. So no VCs is at least the lore. can you unpack that? Is that just because, like, you're so capital efficient, you don't need to raise, or is there some sort of particular philosophy around the role of venture capital in crypto? How are you thinking about that equation?

So it really does go back to Satoshi again. I think the Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if he had raised series A, even if best investors in the world, you know, sickest cap table ever still would, I would say that would not. Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin. And so I think VC's actually provided a really important service to the world. They allocate capital efficiently. They help. A lot of things would like the world will not be. Not always.

Yeah. As full, I think they've done more good than harm. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And in this particular case, I think when the thing being built is a neutral protocol on which something is important, as important as money ought to live and transact, I think it's, the neutrality is more important than everything. And I think there is a path dependence to that, right? Like if there are insiders from day one, it doesn't matter how much dispersion of supply,

mine, share, talent, et cetera. There is the sort of like the Big Bang moment will always be there and will always sort of like a scar on the record of the thing. And like this doesn't matter for almost anything that is being built. And I think raising capital and hyperscaling is a very valuable strategy. But I think when you're building something that needs to be incredibly neutral in the long term and the history, matters, I think we'd rather go slow and do it right then.

But I want to stay on this. Like, you can't keep VCs from just building a position in a public token, right? And so is it more about like the vibe around like insiders? Because what if like a big tier one firm was just like, we want a 20% stake and we're going to buy the token on the free market and build a position? And it's going to feel and perform just like any other asset in our portfolio. has that happened? Would that be irrational? Is there something where, like, legally they can't do it because of the fund structure? Be very expensive.

Yeah. But I mean, VCs don't shy away from expensive deals. Like, we see it all the time. Yeah, but you can make that argument for Bitcoin as well, right? Like, they're very big holders of Bitcoin. And I think a lot of VCs were very early. Maybe not a lot, but I know several VCs were very early to Bitcoin and own a lot of it. So I don't think it's it's not about who owns it. It's about the genesis and the origin. It's more of a principle. Yeah. It's like it's you can't,

you can't on the one hand preach that this is going to be a platform that is neutral that like anyone can come and build on. And on another hand say like, oh, but like these people had a chance to build on it first. Yep. It's not perfect. There will never be another Bitcoin. Like, there is a practical matter to it,

which is that. you know, like anything after Bitcoin needs to launch in a like very competitive market. There needs to be innovation and something needs to fund that, et cetera. But to the extent that we can approximate the ideals of Satoshi, I think it's still worth striving for it. How much did you know exactly what you wanted to build and then just executed against that plan versus iterate to get where you are today? I would say very little. So the story there is we just wanted to come and do something that we could do well. even doing one thing well, it's very, very hard.

So we were laser focused at first. We just kind of looked around and thought, like, we kind of, we weren't afraid to dream big, but we were kind of practical about it. We just thought, like, okay, like, what's one really, really big thing in crypto that we think could benefit from a fully permissionless platform? And PURPS trading was the obvious one. I think it was probably doing more than 50% of the revenue in all of crypto back then, sort of back in the envelope calculations.

And so we tackled that initially. And I think we, we, one big thing is like we weren't willing to compromise even at the very beginning on how the thing ought to work. So you didn't, you, you learned the things not to do from FTX. You learned, you were inspired by Satoshi. Was there any company off chain that, that was particularly inspiring? Yeah, a bunch. I mean, I think every big company, every big tech company, I think is like a very inspirational. to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, so it's hard to not kind of be sort of motivated by that.

I think Amazon was a really big one. What inspired me was that they basically, like, they're very first principles and like driven, but also very practical. And I think when sort of, I assume it was Bezos, but maybe someone else in the org realized that they had built so much of the internet stack that it would be a shame if, they, if that just went to this like retail business, like why not sort of abstracted a bit and create the right API so that anyone can leverage this like amazing infrastructure they've built. And, you know, that kind of being the birth of AWS and cloud computing. I think that's like such an amazing story. And that's inspired. I think like that's kind of like how we think

of hyperliquid was that like it started as, you know, a blockchain optimized just to be able to do on-train perps trading because no other infrastructure could do that. And sort of of realizing at some point that a lot of other things in finance, ultimately all of finance, we think, can benefit from this high-performance decentralized ledger. And yeah. Yeah, so I think liquidity infrastructure, like for liquidity is one way to think about, like, what do you think about Bezos's background at D.E. Shaw. He was a trader.

That probably informs a little bit of the shape of Amazon, I imagine, versus, say, Google, where they come out of research PhDs. What were you working on beforehand? Do you feel like you brought a trader mindset into the, you know, entrepreneurial journey that you went on? Yeah, not just the product layer. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

I think trading, well, I don't really know what kind of trading Basel's was doing, but at least with more like automated trading, I think there's a lot of, it feels a bit like doing physics, kind of. It's like you do a lot of approximations. You can't get anything exactly right because markets are basically a – there's a lot of randomness. There's more noise than there is signal, and that's kind of what makes it beautiful. It's like trying to sift through the noise. And it's very different from like supervised learning setups in AI where you kind of have like roughly infinite data.

And it's very high quality. So I do think the real world is like building hyperliquid has felt kind of like that in the sense that. in the sense that you often, it feels like we're actually not very data driven at all. It's basically all intuition. It's just like we just think really hard about how the world should be and we just try to do the best things. We'll obviously like adapt to data.

Like if something happens and it's like obviously bad. Like we weren't like delusional and we'll like incorporate it readily, but we won't like go out of our way to try to create data where it doesn't make sense to if that makes sense. So like AB testing is like something that we just kind of like never do. Oh, yeah. That's funny. You've mentioned it a few times, but can we just get like a firm backstory definition on perps for our audience? Why, what are they? Why are they so exciting? Yeah. Let's see. So for for someone who really has no finance, you want to like a sort of very, very like from zero explanation. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. So if you think about what is traded, today by people that are kind of like you can trade the like thing itself which is like an amazon stock right yeah um if you want some sort of like leverage which is to say like make more

bang for your buck then the two ways to go about doing it is one they trade futures which are these are traded most in indices so they like the s andp 500 and these things basically say like two people put up cash and they just agree to pay kind of like um they did the They kind of like along and a short kind of create a contract. And then if essence moves by $1 and the long side, say makes $20 and the short side loses $20. That's a future. And then they're often also settled in some like underlying things. So it's like we're trading on the like what the price of S&P is three months from now or like three months from now like you'll deliver one cow.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think of it is like the C bot like if I'm trading corn futures and I let the contract run out. Like at some point, I have to actually take delivery of all the corn, but most of the Wall Street traders have figured out to never do that. But you hear about these weird scenarios where it's like, oh, the price of oil was negative. So someone bought it for negative money and then like wound up having to get all this oil and stuff. But obviously in a purely financial context, that's not the outcome.

But has this just unlocked higher frequency trading, more leverage, a different shape of trader or something more quantitative, something more algorithmic driven? Who are the customers or who are the traders and why are they excited about the product? Yeah, so they're excited because, so basically like futures, like you said, like you just kind of sucked because of all these like random things. They kind of subtle. Sometimes you want to get delivery. They're like all these weird things.

Yeah, like keep rolling your position if you want to open. So like if you look at Robin Hood, for example, like that's actually much more popular with retail users than futures are. And they primarily trade options on Robin Hood when, you know, when leverage is concerned. And options are super cool because it's kind of like a lottery ticket. You can like as retail, you can buy a lottery ticket and feel really good about it. You're downsized limited. But the tradeoff there is like it's actually really hard to price an option, especially if

your retail and especially for using like an app that doesn't give you the information that you need. And so you're kind of getting fleeced because there's like very complicated structures. It sounds simple. It's like a strike price expiry, but in practice it's very hard to price. And so herbs are basically like Mary. these two assets into one thing. So there's, you want to trade something, you want, you want to trade something that's just like the price of the underlying.

You want there to be leverage and you want there to be like one thing that never expires. And that's what a perk is. Got it. So let's all the liquidity in the world concentrate on one asset. So like if you look at Bitcoin, for example, on anyone exchange, there's like usually one very liquid Bitcoin perp and that's the liquid asset forever, never expires. And like that's where the price discovery happens.

Like billions and billions of dollars will trade on these Bitcoin firms. And this actually leads the underlying instrument, and it's useful for professionals because they can trade it, and it's the most liquid instrument there is on Bitcoin. It's useful for retail because it's a clearly understandable price that you cannot get screwed over on because there's only one market and it's extremely liquid. So, like, buy or sell, like the spread is tiny. And so it's kind of like a win-win for many, many participants. There will always be participants who want options or who want traditional futures, but perps by and large are attractive. Yeah. What are the biggest bottlenecks to scaling a network like this? Certainly not talent because you've reached insane scale.

I'm more thinking about like are the tokenomics such that there are people that are setting up whole data centers? Are there ASICs being built right now to run the network? Like I'm familiar with kind of the how Bitcoin went where people were just mining it on their laptop and then it turned into a data center and then it turned like hunt for the cheapest energy possible with the ASIC because the algorithm was so stable. What does it actually take to scale a network like this over time and where are you in that scaling curve? Yeah, so Bitcoin's a bit unique in that I think it's the only major network left that does proof of work. So ASIC stuff you're mentioning, you know, like all the crazy things like volcanoes, mining

Bitcoins and stuff. That's all really just participating in the consensus mechanism. All the other high performance blockchains today that I know of at least are probably proof of stake, which is a much more energy efficient way to do things. And it's economic security, not like computational security. So on hyperliquid, there's not much innovation being done on how the networks stay secure. It's a relatively solved problem economically, which is that basically people put up the native token. Like it's very important for the network to have its own token, which on hyperliquid is called type.

And people put it up and they basically say, I'm like vouching for the, usually it's kind of like delegated. It's kind of like, you vote for your congressman kind of thing. So it's like you delegate it to a validator. And the validator says, anything I do,

the stake that is staked to me is at risk. And you can do some math. And then basically the economics work out such that if like most of the stake in the network is honest, then it's fine. And if you want to acquire enough stake to do something bad on the network, where bad here is like the canonical bad thing you can do is like spend the same dollar twice. It's called like double spending, which is basically like forking the truth state of the network. You need to acquire a lot of stake to do that. So it's economically infable. So it's the the securities in the economics, not in like, you know,

creating crazy A6 and like. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. How important is brand to hyperliquid success? Because I think you have, I don't know that you've, you haven't necessarily focused on brand in the traditional sense of like hiring advertising agencies and, you know, putting together strategy decks and things like that that, that I'm sure many of your competitors do.

But you have one of the most powerful brands in the world, which is like when you think of the value of anyone on earth being able to just type hyperliquid and, hit post and get this like, you know, massive influx of excitement and attention. It's truly remarkable. But I'm curious, like, what the, you know, how much that's contributed to your success versus, you know, scale and some of these other product decisions. Yeah, I think the brand, we're very fortunate that the community is so, I don't know,

many adjectives, like so, so, so, so, so tight-knit. so, you know, combative at times. But like, just like, like, I think, I think it's very inspiring for us because we, we as a team are pretty introverted. We're super small. We're only 11 people. And we don't have it. We have no one working on marketing. And I think we, even if we did, we would suck at it.

So it's always been the product is the marketing. Yeah. It's not the, it's not just the product. It's a product in the community, I would say, in the ecosystem. And so it kind of there's, there are like many pockets, right? There are people who are just on Twitter, like you said, kind of like shit posting, and I think that's like super cool. And, you know, I love it.

And there are also people that's just like, you know, building on the platform. I think that's another form of like viral marketing. Like they build products on top of the protocol that synergized with what it is, like offer something new or like extended in some ways. And the sort of like pillars of finance on hyperliquid are by and large built by community members. And we hope that that trend continues. Anything that can be built by the community are built by the community. And I think that just like, yeah, that kind of decentralized marketing sort of embodying decentralization, not just at the technical layer, but also at the social layer, I think, is really important to us.

I think that's kind of the brand that Hyper Liquid has. It's like, you know, frame negatively, you could say that it's kind of standoffish and maybe we're kind of where we're too focused on tech and not focused on marketing. But in this case, I think it, what comes out of it. it is like something much stronger, which is that people feel ownership in the network in a way that's not possible with the web two company. Yeah, is that part of why, you know, the companies that want to eat your lunch are some of the most, you know, well capitalized, large businesses and finance. And yet it seems like, you know, they're struggling to really compete is, is the, is the army of people that just want hyperliquid to win?

Like, just, how do you think about that kind of advantage? And what are some of the other reasons why your guys is, like, kind of counterpositioning makes it difficult to compete? Well, we honestly don't think that much about competition day to day. I think there's just, like, too much to build. And I think you're right. Yeah, a lot of people want to do what Hyperliquid does. or like take market share, if you will.

And we don't, yeah, we don't really think about what. You're like, I don't think about you at all. No, no, there's just too much, there really is just like too much to build. Like I think the if I believe what's succeed. In the good case, it's, it's something that doesn't exist yet in the world. And I think it's hard. It's easy to get bogged down by people trying to kind of chip away at something that hyperligeut has already built or whatever.

And I think that's like, it's a bit stressful sometimes, but also it kind of, of detracts from the big picture, which is like we're still so far away from where we need to be. How big can Hyper Liquid get? Like, what's your ambition? I think of it as, in the good case, basically finance as a whole, which, when I say finance, I mean, like, the coordination of human value. That's massive. It's not like it. You're like, you're basically saying, like, if I don't assume, you know, 100% of the global tam of finance, I will have failed. That's amazing. Oh no.

I mean, you ask how big it could get. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I'm just playing. I like it. It's true. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think it's like, it's coming in and kind of like displacing finance.

It's really like my mind is sort of like the internet did to find. Sort of like electronic trading happened in early 2000. It's been like more than 20 years. It's about time. The tech stack gets updated. And I think defy is kind of, is that tech stack. Okay. I have a lightning round for you.

asked a bunch of crypto native friends what they wanted to ask you is so I'll go through a bunch of them and hopefully you can answer quickly since some of them are pretty specific. When do you expect to see the first centralized exchange

shut down their perp decks and simply run a front end on top of hype through HIP3? When will they capitulate? One year. Okay. We'll track it. Any specific views on the market structure bill in the U.S. and under what circumstances would you bring hyperliquid on shore?

That's a good question. So we think the U.S. is a super important market, obviously. It's like the financial center of the world and the dollars, the reserve currency. Capital of capital. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we would nothing more than, love nothing more than to sort of like have regulation in the U.S. sort of evolve to sort of really embrace DeFi and I think strides are being made in that direction.

I can't come in in the bill specifically just because I feel like I'm a little ignorant on it. I feel like it's changing a lot. And honestly, like, I think they're really smart people working on it. And the things I've heard, such as like, you know, carve outs for decentralized finance and things like that, I think are like really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Why do some centralized exchanges say that hype doesn't want to get listed? Do they say that? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think of it. We don't have a want here. I think it's like, we're building more building. I think the, you know, exchanges, several exchanges have listed hype, I think it's cool.

And other ones, you know, for other exchanges, it doesn't align with their priorities. And I think that's also cool. Yeah, we're not, we're very like, we just like don't really talk to these institutions. Any plans to enable multi-asset margin natively? I think it will happen. And I don't exactly know the path to where that happens.

So it could be built. Like, natively is a bit like not well defined here. But I think it will happen. I think, you know, if it's going to house all the finance, it surely you should be able to use different. types of collateral to trade. When perps on commodities and U.S. equities? There are already some perps on.

So there are gold perps, tokenized gold. And there, I think the answer to when is probably in the next year. Because HIP 3, I think, is unlocking a lot of this. So basically letting, it lets anyone kind of come and deploy their own. What do you think is most misunderstood about hyperliquid today? Oh, man. There's so many things. most misunderstood.

One thing I would say is that it's, well, it is a network. I think people think it's like a purpose exchange. Some people think it's like a centralized thing. It's really not. It's a blockchain. The valetor set's permission list. They're currently 24 validators. Anyone can spin one up.

It's like top 24 by stake. The validator set, you know, every validator executes every transaction, including all the orders. So this kind of like base layer of like just like what it is, I think is kind of lost because people are so, they're focused for their focus on the problem. basically, which maybe is good. Maybe it's nice that the tech is abstracted from users. Do you miss the bay? I miss some things about it. Yeah.

What do you miss? What do I miss? I miss chick filet. Oh, let's go. That's a great one. That's a great answer. That's a great answer. I love it. I miss mountains, actually. I mean, that's not like literally in the bay, but like, so your boy is very flat. So it's a very nice. It's a very nice. nice place. It's a great place to build. But I miss kind of like Yosemite and that kind of vibe. When I was in Singapore, a lot of people I interacted with said that Singapore doesn't have

like a strong local culture. And maybe that's because it's small or maybe that's because it doesn't have like an underground like punk scene because of different rules and regulations. Do you feel like you found like a great community in Singapore? Do you feel like you found a great culture? Do you feel like you found a great culture there? Do you like where the, where the country is going, like, culturally? I'm honestly a bit too busy to... Just locked in. Okay. No, yeah. It's a great place in. I think it's super safe. It's very modern. Yep. You know, good food. Yep.

Air conditioning, like that kind of stuff. So I'm honestly not a cult. At this point, in my trajectory, I'm not really attuned to the culture. I felt like, yeah, if I were in New York City, it would be kind of wasted on. Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not looking for like the underground art collective that will define the next. Yeah, you're locked in. It's great. Love it. What is the specific framework you use for building the team? Because I imagine the level of talent that is trying to join, you know, the core team today is insane. But clearly you have some kind of framework for it. Otherwise, you would have just been, you know, 100,000 people. by now? Well, I think we actually are like just not very good at recruiting. So I will say that here. We are recruiting. We're always recruiting. We're looking at a lot of super smart listeners on this on this podcast show. And we would love we would love for you guys if someone's

interested in you know like systems engineering and high performance. So building the rails of the future of finance. I really think this is like there's no better place to work. And would love for you guys to join. We're a super small team of 11 people. The bar is very high. I do think it might be one of the highest bars. I think we are one of the most efficient organizations, engineering organizations that I know of.

That has ever existed. Could I say that? I feel like I can say that. I think you might be right. Yep, it sounds right. But we are trying to grow. And I think it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a lot to build. And, um, yeah, we just, we, we just have a very high bar in many, in many directions, like, you know, competence, also just like integrity. I think we, we, we just care a lot about many things. And, uh, you know, if, if someone listening meets all those bars, we'd love, we love for you to join. Is it, is it, uh, in person only or do you guys have remote teammates? For new recruits, we're trying to do in-person only.

Initially, it was remote when we found that it doesn't work super well with our work style. Last question. Are people that brag about doing 996 soft? Well, this is the like nine to nine six days a week thing. Yeah. Yeah. Because I imagine you're doing quite a bit more than that. So that feels like part of it.

of the, part of the criteria is like somebody comes in, they're like, Jeff, like, I'm your guy. I'm 9,96 and you're like, sorry. That's not. We don't do half days here. Yeah. I mean, I do think it's, uh, the quality of work is the most important thing. So I think different people, you know, burn out at different points. Yeah.

Obviously, the most important. I personally work more than that, but it's because I feel like I don't really have a cap, like personally, but everyone's. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking this. Really enjoyed this. Thank you for sharing the origin, explaining perps for our audience.

And yeah, really just incredibly impressed with what you've built and excited to follow, continue to follow your journey over the next years and decades. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Have a good one. Bye.

And that concludes our recorded interview with Jeff from Hyperliquid. I hope you enjoyed that. If you're new here, please subscribe to the show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. We have more crypto coverage later in the show. We're talking to Chris Dixon. Explain Gigacad in one word. Yes.

Jeff. Jeff, for sure. Also, fin.a.i, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bigoffs, number one in ranking on G2. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We're going to bring him into the TBPN Ultradome.

Tomash, how are you doing? Good to see you again. It's been too long. It's not a pleasure to be back. Thanks so much. for hopping back on. You've been lighting up the internet with a bunch of hot-ish takes.

A lot of takes I agree with, but mostly just very thoroughly researched takes. Not something you see a lot. Not something you see every day. So I'm very excited to have you on the show. I would love to just kick it off with taking your temperature on where you think it's the most important to focus right now.

What is the narrative? Is it these complicated structures and the vendor financing, is it the overall bubble narrative broadly progress on token generation or DAUs? Where are you spending your time focusing? Yeah, we're trying to understand what's really happening, right? So we wrote this blog poster about Nvidia

and the $110 billion of vendor financing. I mean, I ran the numbers for an event. The data center buildout is now greater than 1% of US GDP, and we had made this prediction in 23 that AI would generate, contribute more than 1%, or contribute at least 1% to GDP. And I was stunned that we're basically already there. And so we had this question of how similar OPs will ask, investors will ask us,

how similar is the current environment to say 2000 when you had pretty large network infrastructure buildouts? And I was kind of in high school during the time, but I remember these companies like Lucent and Nortel, and I'm going to the moon and then collapsing. And so we ran this analysis. And so we're paying attention to a lot of things. different things. We're paying attention, like on the bull side, we're paying attention to token generation, right? Google has released now three data points and we can start to track at the

growth rate there is slowing. Is the growth rate slowing? Because user demand is slowing, I don't think that's the case, but maybe there's far, pretty significant improvements in overall efficiency. The other thing that we're spending, paying a lot of attention to is just understanding the debt structures, the use of SPVs on and off balance sheet vendor financing. And so, and then the last is the depreciation schedule. So a lot of these data center companies have extended the depreciation schedules, almost doubling it.

Amazon went from three years to six years and then backed off to five earlier in 2025. And that's important because it's the collateral that's underwriting these loans. Yeah. Let's start with the vendor financing thing. It is notable that everyone was so hopeful that AI would increase GDP growth.

And it did. And it did. But it came at the cost of hundreds of billions of, Capbacks. Yeah. I will take it. I want to start with the vendor financing because that's ringing a lot of alarm bells.

A lot of people are going to loosen story. I took it in a different direction. And I was wondering if you were familiar with the ASML customer co-investment program. Because in 2012, TSM, Intel, and Samsung, they pitched in $6.8 billion across R&D funding and equity purchases in order to help ASML pull forward EUV lithography. and 450 millimeter wafer technology. And it was this like odd round trip, but it worked out. And so when somebody throws me like the vendor financing is immediately red flag,

I always want to say like, well, it doesn't always end in disaster. And so how much nuance should we be placing on the vendor financing stuff? How much do we need to be digging in to actually understand what's at risk here? So vendor financing itself is really common, right? You pointed to this ASML example. It's a wonderful thing within the ecosystem. And the vendor financing fails when you have a closed system and they're all borrowing and lending from each other.

And there's no net new GDP coming into the system. Yep. Right? And then it just goes around and around. Everybody takes their tax and GDP goes to zero, which is kind of what happened. And that's not the case, right? You look at what, I mean, the revenue growth of Open AI. You look at the enterprise.

spending that's happening. There's GDP that's coming from labor spend. There's GDP that's coming from BPO operations that have been executed in foreign countries that are now basically being re-onsured. And so I don't, I think it would be too simplistic just to say, vendor financing, uh-oh, I'm calling the top. That's not the case at all. It's just the expectations around 500 billion a year in CAPEX and the return on invested capital and the depreciation schedule. I think the thing that we're the bigger question is how would the bondholders make out on all this, right? Yeah.

Where does the risk actually live? Because I feel like there's this world where, uh, you have open AI is kind of rolling a 20-sided dice. And as long as they don't come up with a one, they're going to be fine while everyone else is flipping a coin and it's 50-50 whether they make it out. Okay. And everyone's playing the same risk game, but the risk is just way higher for some of the folks who are further out in the debt curve, in the capital stack, more risk on, more debt laden. And a lot of the narrative is like opening eyes taking on all this debt. It doesn't actually feel like they're taking on that much debt. It feels like their partners might be.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So I don't think Open AI is really taking a lot of balance sheet risk. I think it's the lenders who are taking the balance sheet risk on. So why is there some reason to be concerned with Google ran an analysis on their GPUs and their data centers? They found failure rates at 50 to 70 percent utilization were significantly higher after three years, which is half of the amortization or depreciation schedule. Then you have next generation chip architects, there's SGI just announced yesterday at Cornell research that showed 90% improvement relative to GPUs with a new chip architecture, and then a second generation that's promising 100x performance improvement from there. And so fundamentally underpinning all this is how faster tokens growing, which is an inflationary force in the ecosystem.

And then the deflationary force are algorithmic improvements and chip improvements. And so what is the net, what is the vector that comes out of that? What is the slope? We don't know the answer, but it seems like both are growing very, very fast and so it's hard to predict. Do you think there's much more confidence from on the inside? Or do you think that internally some of the deal makers are actually viewing, hey, this is a leap of faith, but we're all taking a leap of faith? Or do you think that when they hear us yapping about them on a podcast, they think these guys don't know the data. They don't know how solid of a bet this is.

I bet if you're in the inside of one of these companies, I mean, Google and Microsoft both said in separate earnings announcements this year that they were hardware constrained. and you just watch the consumer adoption. I think Open AI will reach like a billion in MAU here faster than anything. And so I think if you're on the inside, there's very little reason to worry because you see the ultimate demand. The first wave of all this AI was just better search, compressing all of human knowledge into an LLM. And now we're at this tool calling or agentic phase where it will actually start to do work for us. And it works pretty well some of the time. But if we can improve that meaningfully, then the double.

demand for token will go through the roof. I have another question. Go for you. I'm trying to understand how people feel about the ramp of agentic commerce. Because in the limit, if I think about a billion

MAUs, who people are purchasing things, they're using ChatsyPT regularly, they're just going to wind up buying things and taking even a 1% cut cut of that commerce through an affiliate revenue or a stripe-like tax or some sort of ad auction to see, well,

will you buy it on Walmart or Etsy or Amazon or somewhere else? Like just even not just surfacing like a direct advertisement for something you're not shopping for, that feels like that could be very lucrative on an ARPU basis. But I'm wondering how long it will take to that, for that pattern to actually manifest if people aren't in the habit. of searching because over the past two years, it's been, yeah, maybe you'll chat GPT something, but then you have the natural flow of like, oh, then I go to Google to order it, or then I open Amazon to order it. So how do you think about that ramp? Well, super exciting time. You've had the

ad market historically dominated over the last 15 years by Google and meta, right, $250 billion on searched, about $265 billion on social. And so it's been really hard, candidly, to invest in the advertising ecosystem, but now it's wide open. I think the agentic commerce is, is, we'll be have pretty significant tailwinds here because you are in the flow. You are researching. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but like the number of websites that I visit compared to say five years ago has fallen off a cliff. Because instead of going through all the forums to figure out what is the bike, the best bike carrier for the family, I just ask and then create some of the Amazon link and I'll buy it. So maybe there's an ads model here. We had kind of contemplated

whether Open AI or others would run a keyword auction to inject ads into the context window, so that's the additional information in addition of the search query. You know, one of the crazy theories that I've been wondering about is I was chatting with a friend who suggested, well, what if Open AAD takes a 30% cut? Not a 1% cut,

but what if it looks like the Apple apps? Yeah, if you ask a retail brand, what percentage of meta, how much of your revenue does meta take? It's probably like, yeah, like 30%. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, and if the performance is better, then merchants and retailers will pay it. Yeah. How do you think about direct agentic commerce affiliate like I'm searching for the best bike rack

it gives me a bunch of options and then at the last second it runs an auction to see what provider will actually send that to me and they take a cut there versus I'm searching for history of the Roman Empire but it knows that I'm interested in shopping for a bike

and so in the middle of that feed while I'm reading a deep research report about Rome it says hey do you want to check out with that bike you were looking at earlier because the Instagram flow yes, there are people that search for camping gear and they scroll and there might be an ad that matches up. But a lot of times you're just looking at family photos from friends and it says, oh, here's the thing that we know you want and you might buy it. Right. So those are two different

kinds of ads, right? So ads, let's say, within the search and then the finding an article or targeting an ad to you about a bike rack when you're reading about the Roman Empire is called retargeting. And it's typically done from search hugely successful advertising program. I think both exist. And it depends on how considered the purchase is. So everybody has a different level of willingness to spend before they say consult their spouse or take some time to think about it. And so you have these impulse buys and then you have, I think retargeting works very, very well for considered transactions like a car. If you're really interested in the next electric car coming from Rivian, well, at that point is actually pretty useful for you.

And one of the things that I learned in the advertising business was seven impressions, kind of the key to building a brand. So there is value in both the brand building component, the retargeting component, as well as the immediate transaction part of an ad unit. Do you have an idea of, I mean, if we're just out, if we're just to play out sort of like a median case for like a bubble popping, you might map, you might map Open AI to Google, you might map Anthropic to Amazon, companies that made it through the dot-com bubble. Maybe there's some, you know, overbuilding that happens. And you get. a lucent and you get some big companies left in the wreckage. But what is advice to, you know,

if you're talking to a dot-com entrepreneur who raised, you know, $50 million, doesn't quite have product market fit, it's 1999, you now know that the bubble's about to pop? What advice are you giving a founder that, hey, it's raining right now, everything's really great, but it might not be that way forever. How are you setting up your business for durability in potentially a rock key time. Great question. First is to bolster the balance sheet. And I know this goes a bit against the grain of don't raise too much capital, but I think what we learned in 21 is the companies that had pretty significant balance sheets were the ones that were able to reinvent themselves in whether the storm, either by acquisition or new product. And so I think the cost of capital is

incredibly low. So you should be shopping for capital if you can. And then the second thing is I think there is this notion that product market fit is this binary condition that once you pass the gate you're done. And that's, it's no longer the case. Product market fit is this, is this status that you need to, it's like a united miles, you continue to fly to maintain 1K.

And so, and we saw it between 21 and 24, companies that were classic software companies literally overnight, lost their product market fit. And that'll be very much the case again. Do you think the labs have an incentive to get various plans?

players to overbuild, so then there's like a basically like, yeah, they can, they're we're a buyer, they're basically a buyer at any price, right, because they're GPU constrained now, but if you can collectively get people to overbuild, then two years from now you might have dramatically

lower costs. And I think you're already seeing this in some cases where like actual GPU prices are through the roof, but then the leasing prices are quite a bit lower, but I'm curious if you think that kind of playing out the game theory there. Yeah, I mean, I think, so there's, you know, I think if they want long-term relationships with their capital partners, they will probably want to game it a little bit, maybe not too much.

Yeah. But they definitely want to see a little bit of excess, and that's okay. You look at the CPU spot versus contract markets, and there's excess CPUs on AWS and Google, and the margin structures there are really good. I think one major question with the GPU market is, within the large hyperscalers, you do see great. utilization and there's a question around the neoclouds of what utilization are they seeing and what the united economics are there but overall i i think they probably won't look to burn others just because they need these relationships for 20 to 30 years yeah uh oracle is down 17 percent in the last 30 days uh do you think that will hinder their ability to actually deliver

the capacity that open a i is saying just in the sense of like you know they were raising debt and a lot of people are saying like they're basically properly leveraged maybe you shouldn't go much more from here but I'm curious like do they just need to go to the 20 20 40 40 forecast you know 20 2050 just just just keep moving out to the end of the century why not why not yeah I think I mean it's it's a good business right produces a lot of cash the information article around the 10% roughly gross margin structure on some of these contracts I think is what catalyzed that drop in price. Yeah, but it did drop dramatically,

and then it's just been chugging downhill. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, these are big, long-term contracts with unclear demand, and the demand is growing really fast. And so I think if you're an investor, a long-term investor, you have to be hedging at some point. Yeah.

There's also a lot of, like, hype that comes out when there's, like, a new biggest number. Everyone is like, oh, I didn't even know that they were in the game and now they're at the top of the game with the biggest number. And those people pile in and then they might get, you know, jitters. Like the whole detail of that margin was the nuance there was that, well, of course, you pay for the GPUs before you start making money from them because you, that's like any manufacturing process, you buy the raw materials before you make the widgets.

But, you know, people obviously saw a lot of jitters in that. Totally. Yeah. Go for it. I was going to say, I think there's this great parallel. I don't know if you guys read the book, Barbarians at the Gate, which was about the LBO of LBORNibisko. R.J.R. Nabisco.

And it was the largest buyout at the time fueled by the junk bond wave. Milken, right? Milken. And then that kind of, one, it created the LBO asset class in a very real way, but two, it was a big contraction. And so I wonder, will we have Barbarians at the Gate book written about some of these major data center contracts? I really hope so.

There are so many opening eye books coming. out and I know that they're all just going to focus on like the Dumers versus the non-profit versus the poor profit. Yeah and it's going to be intriguing and stuff and it'll be like social network vibes but I want I want I want like an Andrew Sorkin book about this more than the salacious like journalist take of like opening eyes bad for whatever. Yeah the business history exactly the in the room yeah I read the Caesar's palace heist I don't know if you've read that about Apollo and it's just like the most nitty-gritty on the debt restructuring.

It's another LBO of the casino empire. And it's just like super fascinating to me, pretty low TAM, but I hope we get one of those books just about. Because some of the novel deal structures that happen at Open AI every single turn, even going back to the Microsoft deal for a billion dollars of credit. We're actually going to reinvent the wheel. They reinvented the wheel 12 times. It's not just the nonprofit and the for-profit.

It's way more complicated. Every deal is like units and crazy. And then now these deals. it's all a lot of fun. And then think about like the Google ownership in Anthropic and then the Amazon ownership of Anthropics. What does that mean when you have two strategics each owning 10 plus percent of the company? Yeah, that's why when the Google News was hitting the timeline yesterday and that they're

working on some type of major deal, I was like, why are you surprised that a double digit percentage stakeholder is like working on a deal? Yeah. Like with their portfolio company. Yeah. Like that is like the obvious thing. That's like famously bad advice though. Like if you're if you're a startup, it's you.

usually like don't let, don't let a strategic build a 10% position in your company unless you're actually planning to sell from them because it will preclude you from working with the other potential strategic buyers or investors. And that just hasn't proven true in this market at all. It's completely different. Did anything about the Carpathian interview update your kind of worldview?

I thought I was just very pragmatic and real. And, you know, the decade of agents' point was like, I think what everybody's experiencing that's like trying agents and talking to people, there's some that are great, there's some great coding agents,

we have deep research, that's awesome, but yeah, we need, there's clearly going to need more time needed to figure out a lot of these use cases, but I'm curious, what stood out to you?

Yeah, I think reinforcement learning was kind of the song of the summer, and there are two different approaches. One is human labor creating virtual environments are gyms where AI can train to understand how to update your CRM. And then they're standard operating procedure-based, text-based. We call them context databases.

Those are two approaches. We've written an article, I think the first one on the topic, about context databases. And so we definitely agree with him there that the current approach of creating these gyms mirrors the fine-tuning of the previous area. And what I mean by that is if you take a regular model and fine-tune it and customize it to particular task, it's really brittle. By the time the model updates or the tasks update, you have 30 to 50% of the prompts breaking, which is what we experience today in tool calling. And so I think he's largely right. The amount of research that's happening within reinforcement learning,

which has two parts. The first is making a plan, and then the second is creating what are called reward functions or like Mario gets 500 points for eating a mushroom. How many points does a robot get for filling out your CRM? The first one, we can. do with AI. The second one is largely still research. And the amount of work or just academic brain power that's going behind there is enormous. So I really hope

that we make strides faster than what he said. And I mean, I'll tell you, I was trying to replicate Claude code myself with open source technology because the plane internet wasn't working very well yesterday. And I realize I realized like when you use cloud code

or cursor, tool calling is just asking the model one question and then taking the answer and then putting it back into the model and then again and again and again and there are different loops like Gemini or Gemini CLI says do that 10 times and then here are the success credit like that's that's that's that's tool calling it's extremely basic and there's some management of like okay after the first step this is what we learn now go do this but it's um i thought it was much more sophisticated it's and it's quite like it's very rudimentary and it's just the way that like we've optimized memory around these models and we can do tasks and, well, we can hit different benchmarks for science and math, I think we'll start to see that with RL. Although I think the big question is, do we need a new architecture in order to really solve some of these problems? And maybe that's what Carpathie was alluding to, but we have a long ways to go. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always a great time.

Let's grab more time next time. We'll talk soon. A bunch more questions. But thanks for coming on. Have a good rest of your day. our next guest is already in the stream waiting room. But first, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. We have Sean from Coinbase coming back into the TBPN Ultronome.

Sean, how are you doing? Hey guys, good to see you again. Welcome to see you again, too. Take this through the news. We'd love to go deeper on the acquisition. But also, I just want to get an update on anything else that's happening in the Coinbase universe. Yeah, well, we were super pumped yesterday

to announce the acquisition of Echo, which is the leading on-chain capital formation platform. We obviously had a little bit of fun with it on Twitter and lead-up on Monday, even despite all the AWS outages that were given us a little bit of the sweats. Is that the first time an NFT has been taken through like a corporate M&A process? Yeah, definitely still unprecedented. A little bit easier. You can imagine the trying to explain that to our lawyers.

and tax consultants when you're buying a company like, wait, you want to also do an NFT thing? So, yeah, I think it was unique N of one thing. It was, you know, obviously very specific to this acquisitions, just given the founder of Echo is Jordan Fish, Kobe, who, you know, I think he's very much intertwined with crypto lore and Up Only is very much intertwined with crypto lore. So we just thought it would be a cool, creative way to get the crypto community really jazzed up been excited because everybody's been raving about and asking for him to bring up only back.

Yeah, it was, I think, like, the M&A announcement of the year. It was, it was the best executed, like, build a bunch of intrigue, hype, controversy even in some realms, but then ultimately deliver a really positive story. It was exactly what you want out of like M&A comms, which is sort of the least sexy thing you could possibly do. It's usually really boring, just a number. And, you know, a couple paragraphs on like synergies and like, you know, everyone's like, okay, congrats. But this one was really well executed. I want to know more about the vision for, we were talking to Brian Armstrong about this yesterday, the vision for the next generation of crypto companies. They raise money on chain with Echo. What does their world look like over the

next few years as they scale in the coin base ecosystem? What products are they pulling off the shelf? What are they taking advantage of? What does the whole? like being a Coinbase native business feel like? Yeah, good question. So, you know, Coinbase historically has been primarily a secondary exchange for when you list a token, that's where price discovery happens and that's where, you know, most of the trading activity is. But by the time a issue or actually issues that token is actually pretty late in a life cycle,

so with Echo and then another company that we acquired over the summer called Lique, which is sort of like a you can think about like a carda for crypto companies that helps you manage your token table. It allows us to have a relationship with the token issue basically from inception all the way through those private fundraises and potentially a public fundraise to listing on the exchange, which we think about as sort of like the crypto IPO in some ways. And then after the fact, we continue to serve that issuer through a business account that they can use to manage just sort of. of the operations of their business. They can grow using spindle, which was another acquisition that we did earlier this year, which is sort of an on-chain ads protocol that helps you find distribution. And I think our broader vision for it.

Yeah, exactly. The legend. Yes. Yeah. So we're pulling in all the talent and all the legends into going base. Yeah. Brian was talking a little bit about bringing acts. to earlier stage investing to a broader community. Obviously, there's a bunch of regulation

in the mix. I don't really care about the legal understanding. I want to know more about the philosophical underpinnings of who gets exposure to what. There's a take that's like everyone should be able to invest in anything. There's also like, even though you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a startup, you don't have to be an accredited investor to have money in a pension fund that winds up in a venture capital firm that, gave money to a company, to a VC firm that invested in Coinbase is like you can, you know exactly, like you have, you don't know exactly, but you have a good sense of who's a qual, would be a qualified investor by the assets that they custody on Coinbase. Oh, sure,

sure. It's a very natural thing of knowing like, hey, these 200,000 people, whatever the number is, like have, have enough assets just in, you know, digital assets that they would be qualified as a Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so, yeah, philosophically, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, we think that everybody should have the opportunity to invest in these companies. I think, like, private companies are, have for too long been restricted from an access perspective to large venture capitalists and the quote-unquote accredited investors. And I think, Jordy, like assets that you have are one indication potentially of like sophistication or insensitivity to loss. But the perverse side of that equation is it potentially locks a lot of people out from the most compelling investments that are out there. And we want to help people be early, basically, and give people to shot at being early.

And so obviously, we need to follow accreditation rules as they stand. But hopefully, those change over time as well. And with Echoes infrastructure, anybody can invest in a seed round or a series A round starting with crypto tokens. and then even beyond that, looking at traditional companies as well. How early do you typically start meeting with potential acquisition acquisitions? Like are these, I imagine, with liquefy and Echo. I know the conversation, I'm sure the conversation started at least a year in advance, but what is that actually?

Yeah, it's kind of variable. I think with Echo, you know, we had known Jordan and Kobe for quite a while, And so I was chatting with him when he started the company. But we started to really work a lot more together earlier this year when we actually partnered. So Echo has an angelist-like product where you could start an investment group and then sponsor investments effectively and syndicate those out. And so we started an investment group under Coinbase Ventures for the base ecosystem fund where investments that we were making, we would actually let the community follow along with us and invest in those same companies. because that's something that we heard a lot of demand for, particularly within the base ecosystem.

And I think as we started to work together more, that broader vision of, hey, we can actually enable internet capital markets and echo you have the infrastructure. Coinbase has the size, scale, and distribution. So there's potentially some magic that could happen if you bring those two together. Those conversations really materialized and ultimately culminated in this week.

Well, congratulations. I'm going to ring the gong. Hit back on. Fantastic work. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. All right.

Your guest is in the Restream Waiting Room while we bring in Nick. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-ass investing industry leading yields are trusted by millions folks. And we have Nick from Rivet in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultram. Nick, how are you doing? John, Jordy, great to see you both. How are you?

We're fantastic. Big day. I already rang the gong just a few minutes ago. I want to ring it again. What you got for me? We're excited to announce our seat round. It's a big day for Rivet. How much? 5.1. 5.1. Why the, any special meaning to the number or just a 100K flyer came in at the end? You know, what's funny is this business is, you know, it's self-sustaining. When you You sell a service to a customer.

They pay you money. They typically pay you more than it costs to employ people, at least an aggregate. And we were really selective about who we chose to work with. And so we started off really only looking for three or four to really give us a buffer to invest in a sales team and some more tax partners ahead of next season. But you meet with one great firm.

They talk, you know, more people show up. We were lucky to get to work with, Hey, Stack, Sus, and X, Y, Z for this round. And so we're very lucky. What's the core pitch for the business right now? How are you explaining it to new customers? Okay, so I'll give the pitch as a customer. Please.

It's just an amazing service. I've used Rivet over the last couple years. And so that part's easy. It's like you guys are really dialed, like incredibly thoughtful. It's just smooth. And so that part makes sense. What I want to understand is like the pitch to investors. I'm actually an investor myself.

But not buy it. like the product's truly, truly amazing. But what's the updated pitch to investors since it's been probably a couple years since I participated? Yeah. To customers, we're a tax prep firm, right? You'd engage with us new differently than Berkland or Anderson or even Deloitte. We have 30X big four accountants on the team.

That's pretty straightforward. Nobody really asks why we raised or what we've built when we sell when we onboard clients. When we talk to investors, it's oftentimes focused on things that customers don't really care about. It's what have you built? Why are you building it? The toughest part of building this business is context management. When you hire a person to do a job, the context for what they did, why they did it, why they chose to put something or recommend a certain classification is hidden in their head.

And it would be prohibitive for their time to write literally everything. down. And so every tax season, as new people join the firm, as people leave the firm, as, you know, we get rolled up by some huge key firm, a lot of the actual work starts from scratch these larger firms. And so clients get asked the same questions over and over again because no one remembers anything because no one's work there for more than six months. And it's deeply painful for customers, right? And they don't realize why it happens. They just know it sucks. And it's frustrating I'm uncomfortable and wait, you don't remember my EIN? I talked to you guys three months ago.

What we've built sits on the back end. And so it quietly ingests, saves, tracks, whatever you want to call it, everything that is discussed about and given to us from a client. And so it's not just emails, it's Zoom calls, it's Slack transcripts, it's text messages they sent us. And just tracking all of that in one place is a massive problem. It's a massive build. That's what allows us to run this practice at scale efficiently, right?

And it's, you know, tax prep isn't just data entry from the W2 to the tax software. It's gathering where the W2 was in the first place. And so what we've built doesn't really replace the accountants. It just automates the tedious parts of their job, remembering everything, organizing all the information wherever it was sent and making sure it's stored in the right place. It's almost like Mike Ross and suits and remembers everything. It's always there. It's really cool to get to work with if you've been working one of these as larger firms for decades.

Have you bought any companies? No, no. Well, actually, yes, we did. We acquired a small AI company called Lobby. Originally, we met Wilson, Hobbs, the founder and CEO, and he was applying for one of our roles. And we were deeply impressed by him in his background. And as we did the interview process, you know, we learned more about law. and what he had built there. It was a website. You could go to it. You could upload documents.

You could talk to those documents. Sounds pretty similar to what we're building here, right? It just needs to be done with tax. And so as we did the interview process, say, wait a second, what's happening to the team? What's happening to the product? He's like, you know, not really sure. We haven't quite figured that out yet. And I said, well, we should have you join the team. That part's easy. But we should also acquire lobby. You know, I think what you built is deeply special. And we should have it here at the business. And so, Wilson joined the team last year. His one-year anniversary was actually yesterday. Wow. And he since brought on two of his former team members. Yeah, one-year anniversary. It's exciting.

That's big for us. But you haven't bought any tax prep firms. I'm sure. How many times have people tried to get you to do a roll-up? I think every investor meeting for the first six months was, so how many firms have you bought? Why aren't you buying more? aren't you going to raise $100 million to roll up 50 firms?

Chat's asking what the website is. It's rivet.tax. Rivet.tax. Well, congratulations on all the progress. In 30 seconds since we're tight here, but why have you chosen not to roll up tax prep firms and make them AI native? Yeah, good question.

It's much easier to steal their business than it is to buy them. The change management of rolling up a firm, convincing the people who work there that are like us. The whole process is deeply difficult. You can expect to lose about half the customers, half the revenue, half the team when you buy somebody. It's not worth it. It's much easier to just tell people about what we do and bring them on to the platform, much, much easier. That makes a ton of sense. Love it.

Absolute dog. Thank you so much for stopping. Great to have you on. We'll talk more soon. Congratulations. We'll talk soon. Bye. Thanks, guys.

Cheers. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches about home advertising. Only ad quick combined technology, out of home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying. Across the globe, we have David Tisch in the waiting room.

I love David Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish.

Tish. Let's go. Let's go. Give us the news. What's new in your world. Did you raise one file? Did you raise one fund? No, two.

What? Oh, hit that gong. We got two funds, two new funds. Thank you. Let's go. Incredible. We did two because two is more than one. Yeah.

Yeah. Bigger number better. They made a sequel to one fund. It's two funds. And that's important to do more always, especially in venture. Yeah. Yeah. Bigger is always better.

What's the strategy? Put it all in one place. Massive secondary slug of Open AI. What are you thinking? We literally have no rules. Our plans to give people money and pray and diversify our prayers. Do we need a set of prayers? Where are we on the prayer meter?

Should we be praying more this year than last year? Are we going to be praying a lot more next year? What do you think? It's like a balance of stability. and increasing at the same time. So you have to do, you never like drop, you just keep doing more. We're different than other VC firms in that strategy, which is important because we're selling money, which is a commodity. Yeah, makes sense.

I love it. What, besides fundraising, has that just dominated your life since we last chatted or are you still? I'm not, you are forced to file with the government at a certain date? So 15 days after you, it's like taxes, but totally unrelated. And so you have to file with the government. And so our filing date was yesterday, so we're forced to talk about it. And so that's why we did it. But we raised money earlier in the spring and just closed it.

And we'll start giving it away in the new year, which is a 2026 treat. What are there particular areas? that you feel are just like over, like over hyperleague, like over competitive right now, all the, like have been picked clean of new ideas, categories where you feel like you have enough bets and maybe you're going to be declining to hear more pitches in a particular category or vertical or horizontal layer of the stack. Like, are you thinking about that at all? No.

Okay. Should we? I don't know. I mean, on this show, we hear like, you know, a million, like, you wind up hearing, like, AI agents for a million things, and then you're just like, okay, I don't want to hear that. And maybe, I mean, we're not even investing. We're just like, I'm kind of bored of talking about that particular niche. Look, I think at the later stage, there's a lot of direct competitors.

And if you're in the business of picking a later stage company, you pick one and then you stop. We're at the very earliest stage. And so we're meeting people who have ideas, who have dreamed. And what we've found over the years is, you guys know, is things change. And so you might start with an idea you're going to, we don't fund intentional pivots, but people iterate. People get into a market. They see where there is opening and where there's too much competition. And your go-to-market becomes different.

Your product might become different. And so I think we don't ever close ourselves off to things. We don't try to fund direct competitors ever. We think that's just misaligned with the deal you're making with the founder. But I think we're open-minded to what we fund and where it's coming from. And I think that in this moment, you're seeing sort of everything up for grabs still. And whether that's within verticals, whether that's in the tech stack, it doesn't mean, you know, go fund foundational models today. But I think other than that, we're pretty open-minded.

And then foundational models that are not perfectly horizontal. I think they're probably still on the table. Is there a new mafia emerging? I mean, we've lived through the PayPal Mafia. There was a bunch of entrepreneurs. You guys are sponsored by the mafia, right? So my main goal with our new funds, I counted only four of your sponsors that we've invested in. So, ramp, privy, bezel, and graph.

I would like to get the clean full lineup. Yeah. So we're going to take our money. We're going to give it to companies. They're going to give it to you. Yes. And that's, we call it the new circular economy. We tried to fund the circular economy.

The circular economy. Our audience will buy the SaaS. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's the main strategy.

Our LPs were really excited about that strategy. Perfect. Well, thank you for your sense. What do you think is your most underrated portfolio company? Oh, that's a good. Now I have to pick a, like a, like a. You basically have to pick a favorite. No, no, but there's companies, there's companies that,

that some of my favorite acquisitions are companies that haven't been in the news for five years and they just get acquired for like $800 million and you're like... We have one of those, which is really cool called ID.Me, which he was on... That's a banger company. I know him. Yeah. He was on a best like the best after like 12 years. It's the craziest origin story. So that's like an evergreen version of that. And then one day they'll like win. Sort of more modern version, what Rogo's building, I think, is not getting enough attention. I think Gabe came on if he didn't one day. Yeah, Blake Hall, founder and CEO of ID. ID. I was at a conference and he had a whole deck about like the business and he just ripped it up,

threw it out like minutes before and just told his life story and everyone was just like, this is the best conversation ever because he had like, like, went to the military, like saved lives. It was a crazy, just like, you know, this is like elite business leadership. I have so much respect for him. Do you, I feel like in some ways it's harder, harder to predict the future than ever. Like in 2010, there was like this sense of, I think we're going to have a bunch more internet companies in 2020. And I feel like there's a general sentiment in the industry of like, we can't predict anything after five years. Like we might get, you know, it's crazy acceleration and AI progress and then everything changes, right? So it's a little bit fuzzy out in the future.

do you have any sort of I reference like there's I'll botch it but like there's a Bezos quote which is like in the future people will want like cheaper things faster right and like I can I can like build a business on on those like with that

with that goal for a long long time because do you have anything like that in early like in terms of how you do I have a Jeff Bezos worthy quote to share with you no more so like if you're evaluating you're evaluating something as like is it purely like, yeah, I don't know if this is going to be a market in 10 years, but this founder's amazing. I think to your point, predicting two years out feels really hard right now. You're seeing such rapid build iteration from the biggest companies.

And that includes the new wave of AI-native companies, Open AI Anthropic. We saw the browser get released. You're seeing more and more like first principle build technology get released. At the exact same time, You're seeing like the modernization of Google, of meta, of Apple, of Amazon in real time, and Microsoft. They feel stronger in many ways than they did for a good five-year period. So trying to predict two years out when all of that's happening in terms of the startup world, I think is really difficult. At the exact same time when we're investing, we can't do things that we think are shorting the future. So you have to play for something that is 10, 15 years out. And not like, we think this is going to happen, but we can thread a needle for three years and build a business.

That's a terrible way to invest. And we call that shorter. Short the future. I love that. That's really, really good. So we look at everything. It's like, if everything this founder is saying is right, is this interesting, big enough, like, fascinating to us. And that's what an investment is, is joining a journey.

So we try very hard to look at it from, you know, if this existed, is this right or cool and not shorting the future such that it's like obvious why this won't exist in a reasonable amount of time. That makes sense. I think the last time you were on or maybe one of the times you're on, we talked about how there used to be, there was this golden age of aqua hires where like great teams could sell to Twitter for like $10 million and they hadn't raised much. so it was meaningful outcome for the founders, and then they... Now we do aqua quits, right? That's what we're up to. Well, yeah, the, yeah, I mean, obviously the windsurf thing. No, it was more the, like, go to Facebook when you started a company from that company thing.

Yeah, yeah, that whole thing. But it feels like we maybe are in a new golden age of aqua hires where, like, I was advising a company, a founder, like, last week who launched a product. It's like, it was exciting, but, like, clearly doesn't... doesn't have product market fit yet. And he's like, you know, talented and has a great team. So he's getting fielded at all these offers that will be like, not a meaningful outcome for the investors, but like, you know, will be very meaningful for the team.

And it feels like there's more of that right now in this moment when people are like, I don't just need to like be AI native. I need like as much AI native talent as I possibly can. And I'll pay a big premium for it. Yes. And that's healthy, right? the sort of decade we had of people just staying in long-term, like not going anywhere, startups without sort of recirculation of talent, I feel like was a negative moment.

I think if you go back to the origins of, say, Facebook or Uber or Airbnb, in that moment, there was more aggregation of talent on those early teams than sort of in the next way, of startups. What's interesting about this moment in AI in these very significantly funded companies, a lot of the research labs and people coming out of the foundational models, by getting the funding at the scale they're getting, and by bringing with them 8, 10, 20 people from their previous company, you're actually getting depth of talent that is capable of building something big, probably in an easier way than starting from scratch. And so I think there's a balance to be had, but I do think depth of talent is probably the most underrated

component of a quality startup, right? Your 50th person on your roster is amazing. And I think one of the things about Ramp that they've done so magically is this combination of hiring, retaining, acquiring, inspiring, letting people go, bringing them back. And if you go to like 50, 100, 300th person at Ramp, there's just an immense amount of time. talent from top to bottom. And that's, I think, how you build sustainable growth that you can keep iterating and launching new and interesting products or marketing stunts or excellent marketing campaigns, right? And I think you're seeing that from a company where you're seeing depth of talent across all the different departments within ramp, as an example. Yeah. Chat wants a jersey check.

what are we watching what are we rocking we're wearing the new york rangers 100th 100th year anniversary jersey it's a baby blue you look fantastic we we haven't won a game at home yet and so uh hopefully we're going to bring some luck to us well good luck and thank you so much congratulations if you if you know any sponsors who need money just let me know and we'll take care of that perfect we'll make some introductions uh great to see you come back on to your guys to the whole team cheers thanks so much Let me tell you about wander.com. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views,

hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. Our next guest is Chris Dixon from Andrescent Horowitz. Living Legend. Welcome to the show, Chris. Great to see you again. It's been too long.

Great to have you back. Last time you were on, we got to time you up perfectly with Brian Armstrong. Today, we just missed each other by one day. 24 hours. But great to have you here. And would love to get the update from you and how you're framing the current, the current crypto era.

It's in many ways linked to the AI, boom, but somewhat disconnected. Like, how are you thinking about even just framing the conversation and setting the table? Yeah, so we just put out our state of crypto report today, which I think, you know, had a lot of good data. I think the good news is I think things are trending very well. I think it's a reflection of smart policy mainly that, you know, the genius bill passed, which is very important, which has helped the sort of state. cable coin growth. I think what it shows, like what Genius shows is the dual effect of smart policy, which is on the one hand, it provides a pathway for innovation. So we're seeing not only

startups, but big companies like Stripe and, you know, FinTechs and Black Rock, Fidelity, and so forth get involved in the space, but it also kind of eliminates a lot of the scams and bad behavior, right? So what we're really hoping for is a kind of similar result with the so-called market structure bill, which is being considered by Congress, which would provide a similar kind of policy framework for the rest of the crypto market beyond stable coins. So I think that this kind of momentum is reflected in the data that we shared today. So for example, stable coin volume is now in the trillions. That's adjusted.

We have an adjusted metric we use, which tries to remove a lot of the bots and other kinds of stuff. And very importantly, that's not correlated with trading volume. So it seems to be like sort of genuine, you know, people using for payments and treasury management and so forth. So that's a big deal. We're seeing a lot of cool kind of new emerging applications at the intersection of areas of crypto and AI in an area called D-PIN, which is decentralized physical infrastructure, which is a way to use kind of crypto to incentivize the build out of telecom and energy networks and so forth. We're seeing a lot of, there's a big movement of so-called

real world assets, which is to bring like stocks and bonds on chain. A lot of good momentum. I mean, honestly, like we had a, you know, it was a choppy couple of years. years, 22 to 2024, and I think we're kind of coming out of that, and I'm optimistic, but still a long way to go. Yeah. I always wonder about the value of these, like, high level market KPIs in crypto, because it feels like as soon as we latch on to when we identify one that seems to be tracking well, then it gets all thrown off by just a underlying shift in the market. Like, people were tracking like number of Bitcoin wallets for a while. And that, like, the idea that the next generation will even be aware if they have a wallet because they might own it through an

ETF or they might have a wallet that's abstracted away and they're not even aware of it. And I'm wondering like there's there's this like sort of like the midwit take is like, oh, the KPI flatlined, but the community overall keeps growing. And so if you were taking a victory lap in 2023, you missed out on the next wave, which looked different and didn't map onto the previous era of KPI's. And so I'm wondering like, is there is there like, is there some ground truth that you like zoom out to that's just like the vibes or the people or the talent or something like that like how do you how do you get away from uh this particular kPI is now needs to be deprecated basically yeah i mean there are some cap just just to be fair to the kpi is like i think

darren who is our head of data science of the report is very thoughtful moment um like the you know like the stable coin volume uncorrelated to trading oh sure sure seems like a real kind of real metric yeah yeah yeah metric monthly active users that that's not people that hold crypto, a number of the people of crypto's and hundreds of millions. We track as people are actually using these kind of new apps that are on chain. Got it. That we put between 40 and 70 million. There's a bear bar there because we have to get rid of bots and other things.

But it's definitely been growing. And that's like monthly active users of apps. So, you know, it feels like a real metric that's sustainable, to your point. Yeah, but it's a good point. Look, a lot of venture capital and startups is vibe-based, right? It's qualitative. And I think it's definitely good. It's definitely better. I'm actually at prepping our annual Founder Summit now. And like it's just

the mood is better. People are building and people are innovating. You know, it feels like offense and not defense. A lot of that's the policy shift. Um, but you know, it's, shift is big. Also just like, I feel like the, the, the bull case for bear markets is that it washes out a lot of the tourists and then the technologists stay. It does. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it's right. I mean, I've been, you know, obviously doing the internet stuff my whole career and seen many waves, including I, you know, I started my first company in the internet downturn of the 2000s. And, you know, there was this kind of, you know, what was it, strong men, create week times, meme or whatever. Yeah. Well, I like, I like that crypto as an industry rewards

people that have an unwavering vision and are okay with, with, you have to have some appetite for failure. You've got to be a missionary. Yeah, yeah. And so, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, I think that's like healthy. Yeah. You have to actually believe in this long term. You have to be okay with the risk. You have to be okay with like a total ban scenario in a specific category. My question for you, prediction markets are having, you know, massive moment right now.

And this was something that I'm sure you were writing about more than a decade ago in terms of its potential. And a lot of, and there were various kind of attempts at prediction markets that never really reached like cultural relevancy. and the scale and the way that they've reached today. What kind of categories do you think people have thought had potential but kind of rode off? Maybe they were too early, but we'll be talking about in like two years. Is it privacy, ZK. proofs, you know, things along those lines. Now, it's a great question. If I could just address your prior point about the holder, you know, sort of sticking with it first,

I have an unwritten blog post that I would title, Investing is a, emotional test disguised as an intellectual test, meaning one of the things I've learned over the years is just like sticking with it in venture capital, whether it's crypto sort of more extreme. I think this is true of public markets if you read like Howard Marks and Warren Buffett, but it's definitely true venture, which is a lot of it, the business, is just sticking with stuff. The same with entrepreneurship when it seems, you know, kind of tough. So, you know, that's, I think it would be amazing, great point. To new emerging areas, yeah, look, I think privacy, it's interesting.

like we had a lot of privacy is a very interesting area. Now the stable coin bill passed a bunch of folks like in the policy side who were kind of, you know, kind of, I don't know, anti-encryption and privacy are now saying, wait a second, all the stable coin payments are public. That's not good. What if you want to do financial protection health care? We agree. That's why we want it.

We don't want it for, obviously, for, you know, illegal activity. We want it because that, you know, people want in normal cases. They want privacy for some of the things they do. And so we think that's very important. We have a bunch of investments there. Yeah. Yeah. prediction market is great to see them break out now.

As you said, the idea goes back. I wrote a tweet about it, about to back to Hayek in the 50s. And, you know, DARPA started a prediction market, believing in not the government in 2021, I believe, sorry, 2001. Wow. Something like that. Wait, what was, was that just like, you know, just for, like, Intel purposes?

Yeah, they wanted to predict, like, is there going to be a war in Iraq? And then they thought, okay, like, it's a little bit distasteful that people are better. on it, but the societal benefits would outweigh it. But then there was such controversy around it that they canceled it. There are now rules as there should be around so-called harmful prediction markets, and you can't have those.

But the kind of the core argument for prediction markets is that, yes, there's sometimes, on the one hand, it's sort of gambling and betting. And the other hand, it has a real benefit. As we saw, for example, in the election, you can get really objective data. And in a time in which, you know, trusted institutions seems to be dropping, like, do you trust, you know, the newspaper anymore? work, it's nice to have an objective source for that. So, but back to your question, I think privacy is very interesting.

I think, you know, I'm very excited by sort of the intersection of like AI and crypto as an example. My experience in tech is that often, like, if you think back 15 years ago, people talk about mobile, social cloud, was like the three buck words. And some people saw them as kind of different categories. In the end, we actually learned they were all very connected. I think that tends to happen. I think a lot of these things will converge, you know, robotics, AI, crypto,

like these are all the kind of megatrends. And I think it's natural that they intersect and reinforce each other. Are you seeing a speed up in crypto startups productivity on the actual software development side, like coding agents for solidity or actually having a, you know, increase? You are. Oh, yeah, definitely. Almost all of our company. We encourage them, too.

They use, you know, cursor. And so is that what you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because as a consumer, I mean, I see. see the data from like anthropic and open AI and Gemini. I see that like tokens are being spent. And but then a lot of the consumer software that I use, you know, the United app we like to pick on or like the flight booking app, it just feels like it's not it's not like become all futuristic all of a sudden. There's still bugs. And so I'm always interested in like startups are in a unique case where

they can adopt new technologies and actually new workflows and it maybe gain the productivity benefit faster than legacy companies. So I'm just interested to see if it's a unique. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it just takes a while for these things to propagate, right? United app.

People ask them to do it five years from now or whatever. But the startups are all using it. Yeah. Using the Closer. It's amazing. I mean, I saw some study out of some university that was like these tools don't make you more productive.

And she just used them. I spent a Christmas break playing with Christmas, playing with cursor and I build a website. I mean, it's just ridiculous how great these tools are. Of course, they add to productivity. It's just these things take time. It's like humans, the bottleneck of always humans and policy, I would say, regulation and humans take time to change behaviors, right? But as you say, startups tend to be the first to adopt it.

Yes, we see it across the portfolio. We would be kind of surprised and, I don't know, like just, yeah, it's like puzzled if somebody wasn't using a lot of these. Yeah, it would be kind of a red flag. What does institutional adoption and embrace really look like? Like what are the kind of buckets? Like the base cases, you're supporting custody and maybe trading and then more advanced. The CEO to stop talking trash at some point.

And then they start saying this is amazing. It's a joke. That's helpful. But how quickly do you think these major institutions can actually adopt crypto rails for, you know, operationally, right? Their job is to store and move money. Cryptos, you know, more efficient in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, you can kind of think like,

Cryptos is a network. I mean, it's a network technology, right? It's about building networks. And it was the network where 99% like stable coins is an example, where 99% of the potential nodes of the network felt like they couldn't join the network for regulatory reasons. So now they're all, I think it'll see it in stages. So like the fintech, the sophisticated fintechs like Stripe and, you know, Robin Hood and Revolut and things will be first. And then over time, you'll see, I think eventually you'll see just like a button on your Chase Bank that's like send, and maybe they don't call it stable point. They call it digital dollars or something. But, but you'll see.

it'll just be integrated into all the kind of fabric of these systems. And we're seeing a lot of activity. I mean, even, you know, Chase, I think Jamie Diamond talks trash, but I believe they have 1,500 people on blockchain projects. So, like, you know, I think the important thing is the bit has flipped where, you know, like, if you talk to the folks, they're like, look, we want to do this, but, like, our legal teams will lot of us. Like, now we have legislation, which is the gold standard of policy, right?

U.S. Congress has law. So, like, now they feel comfort to do it. And that's very, very important. And I think the bit has flipped where they now see it is not a, threat, but an opportunity. So I think it'll be, you know, it'll take time. It'll be different kind of tranches of adoption based on how advanced the companies are. But I think we're on that clear path now. Is there anything that's been interesting for you guys on the buyout side, like looking at, you know, let's say like a mid-sized financial institution and realizing like, hey, this is a great

business. And if we actually, you know, were to acquire them. General Catalyst did with that health care network. Yeah, some of that effect or some of these role, you know. I think you'll see that. I think you'll see that. We don't actually do that. It's not really our thing. We do kind of stage venture, but mostly in some later stage venture.

Wouldn't it be fun to do an LBO? Yeah. Dip your tire. It's one of these things that probably sounds fun. Yeah. Like those people, like we get to mostly hire people in venture. Like LBO is you're mostly firing people and it's just like a structuring. I don't know.

I mean, probably a grass is greener thing. It sounds fun. and then you actually go do it. I think it's also just hard to actually change these organizations. Sometimes there's a real question, like, do you need just new organizations started from scratch or do you change something?

I don't know. It's not my area. I'm just speculating. But mainly it's just not our thing. But I think other people are doing it. And I think they, you know, the other firms doing it will, I think, accelerate the adoption of new technologies

like AI and crypto. Yeah. How is the, or how do you envision the role of the venture capitalist changing over the next maybe decade in crypto? I feel like there's one, world where you become half VC, half hedge fund person that's trading liquids and trading liquids

at the earlier stage because companies are kind of doing on-chain IPOs and earlier stage, but you still need to build a position and take an opinionated view of the future of the technology, assess the team. How is all that evolving? How do you think that that will evolve? Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, what we do, we've done for a long time. And that's one reason we start a separate crypto fund, right? We both do kind of early stage traditional venture and do things like buy tokens like Bitcoin directly in the market. And then we have our own, like, city and trading. And we sort of built out all these these capabilities. At some point, you'd expect that some of those things to, you know, be subsumed by outside

organizations and kind of commoditized and these practices I would expect would propagate to other firms. But like, I just look at venture like through the lens of like core, like the fundamentals are always just great people. Yeah. Like we're ultimately in the talent business. So there's all these other kind of mechanics and things that we've built up. But in the end, we're just trying to bet on brilliant founders who have great ideas. And that can, that can just, the way I view it is that can come in many forms. That can come at the early stage equity investment. That can come as a token investment.

You know, we're also betting, of course, on communities. You think about something like Bitcoin, like it's really a community at that point, and it's sort of this network and community. And so I look at it through that. I always try to, whenever the markets kind of get strange and things are happening, I always say, let's go back to first principles. First principles is like, believe in, you know, positive. vision of the future, great entrepreneurs, doing, you know, pursuing big ideas, you know, highly

technical, highly product focused, and then whatever mechanics we need to do to get exposure to that. I don't know if this is possible, if this has already happened, but would you ever see yourself backing a project that looks like Bitcoin in the sense that the founder's anonymous, you can never meet them, but for some reason, you do have the availability to. make, you do have the ability to make an investment like a venture capital investment. Are you equipped to make that deal happen? Yeah, yeah, we are.

We are. Yeah? So, yes, we can just buy, I mean, we can just buy tokens. Yeah. And we have an operation. We've had that. People don't seem to know, they think of us more adventure. We've had that since 2018.

Totally. Just record. Yeah. And actually two third, I would say roughly two thirds around investing has always been that. I mean, that was part of the design and why, like, I wanted to spin this out. Yeah. So we could set it up from principles with this.

structure. So we have like, I want to be a crypto VC, but I don't want to buy tokens. That's an odd. It's an insane. For sure. Well, there's a whole, I can tell you that this is the longer story. It's a whole backstory where like, it was just, it was just very challenging. The LPs. So like when we were, I got it for scripto fund, like, I went to all the LPs. And I said, look, we're going to do, we're going to buy tokens. We're going to do this. And like, you can opt out or opt in. And some of them opted out. And some opt in and just like, look, this is what we're going to do. So we have a venture structure. We're a venture fun in the sense that our LP relationship is a long term relationship.

if they lock up their money. But that's sort of the reverse mullet or mullet or whatever. We're on the back end, it's like a very traditional venture. But on the front end, we can do all. We can buy tokens. We can do equity investments, whatever way that we need to get exposure to great ideas and great people we can do. And that's been our thing in our kind of design from the beginning.

And we continue to do that. Yeah. In this analogy, I feel like the venture part is the business in the front and the open market trading is the party in the back. But I don't know. It's a stress analogy potentially. I like a mullet analogy. It's great.

But yeah, thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah, great to get the update. Sorry, have a great summit. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be a great time. It's going to be an amazing time. Great, great to see you. We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers. Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about getbezzle.com. Your bezel concier is available now to source you. Any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And Jordy, did you put up a better run last night on eight sleep?

I did okay. I got an 88, slept six hours and 50 minutes. How did you do? Did you get destroyed? 85. Wait, I beat you by one point again? No, 85. You got an 88.

I got an 88. Okay, a couple points. Yesterday in the chat, people were congratulating us on our good numbers. We got to put up good numbers for the chat, and you've got to go to 8Sleep.com and get a 5. TbPN. Are there any other? Yeah, I was shocked at how, like, viral. I was shocked at how viral the whole, like, AWS 8Sleep thing went.

Oh, yeah. that. Clearly a skill issue and I was not affected. I slept right through. I actually slept great. My numbers were insane. It was crazy. But yes, I mean, somebody, somebody, you know, I feel bad if you're, if you're

eight sleep did like wind up getting too hot and you woke up and you didn't have a good night's sleep. I'm sending my best and I hope you get back on that horse. And we'll close out with this post from Rune. I knew you're going to go there. It's great. Or a farming in the Zoom waiting room. Or farming in the Zoom rating room.

Never join. Never join. Just hang in the waiting room. Oh, so people know that you're there. Is that how you do it? Yeah, that you could join. I feel like, I mean, at one point, not to break the fourth wall here and give you a little bit behind the scenes, but at one point, we had multiple guests. When they come in, they hit a waiting room, the restream waiting room, of course. And at one point, multiple people could talk to each other, and they could hear what was happening on the show. And it was kind of like this funny networking event that was happening. And I actually think that there's, there's some, value there if we could get that right. But right now, we just let everyone sit in silence and then eventually come on, watch the show, and then join. So there's minimal aura farming in the TBPN waiting

room, the restream waiting room. That's right. But maybe we should increase it. Well, thank you for hanging out with us today. Very fun show. I can't wait for tomorrow. It pains me. We have to wait just under 21 hours to get back here. The clock starts now. But yeah, the clock starts now. Thank you for today. Have a wonderful evening. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast on Spotify. Cheers. Goodbye.