TBPN - Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1, Meme Stocks Make a Comeback, Amazon's New Wearable AI Device | Christina Cacioppo, Deena Shakir, Davide Asnaghi, Ylan Richard

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

(01:34) - Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1 (18:43) - Meme Stocks Are Back (37:27) - Amazon's New Wearable AI Device (56:53) - Timeline (01:19:54) - Christina Cacioppo is the founder and CEO of Vanta, a trust management platform that automates security and compliance processes for businesses. She discusses Vanta's recent $150 million Series D funding round, which increased the company's valuation to $4.15 billion, and highlights the platform's expansion into AI-driven features like questionnaire automation and trust centers. Cacioppo also reflects on Vanta's growth from focusing on SOC 2 compliance for startups to becoming a comprehensive security and compliance solution for over 12,000 clients across 58 countries. (01:42:10) - Deena Shakir, a Partner at Lux Capital, invests in transformative technologies across sectors such as women's health, digital health infrastructure, health equity, foodtech, and fintech. In the conversation, she discusses the evolving landscape of AI in healthcare, highlighting the dual trends of cost-effective company startups enabled by AI and the substantial funding required for infrastructure-intensive ventures. She emphasizes the importance of AI applications beyond medical scribes, such as in clinical trials and drug development, and notes the increasing adoption of AI by major healthcare players, underscoring the necessity for startups to offer innovative, defensible, and transformative solutions. (02:03:56) - Davide Asnaghi, co-founder and CEO of Diode Computers, discusses how his company leverages AI to automate the design and manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCBs), aiming to democratize access to high-end PCB design for a wide range of hardware companies. He highlights the challenges in the industry, such as the scarcity of skilled engineers and the reliance on proprietary data, and explains how Diode addresses these by building proprietary datasets and utilizing large language models to generate schematics. Additionally, he announces that Diode has recently raised a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and plans to expand their manufacturing capabilities to scale production within the United States. (02:14:55) - Ylan Richard, co-founder and CEO of Cala, a French startup that developed fully automated pasta restaurants, discusses his journey of building the company in France and the challenges faced due to structural financing gaps and stringent labor regulations, which ultimately led to the business's closure. He reflects on the lessons learned, emphasizing the importance of lean headquarters operations and strategic financing, and shares his plans to launch a new venture in the United States, aiming to open the first store in New York by mid-next year, with considerations for franchising to scale more efficiently. (02:27:05) - Timeline 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.ioFollow 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, July 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. El Capital de Capitale. Of Capital de Capitale. Thank you to Restream for powering this stream. We love Restream.

Couldn't do the show without them. Seriously. Yeah, it's amazing. They're a new partner, if you haven't noticed already. We're there in the intro in the last 30 seconds. Yeah. That little cinematic. IMAX treatment. We've having a lot of fun with that. We realized how dependent we are on them.

We had a small error at one point and we could not run the show. Yeah. Critical infrastructure. But one out of a few hundred shows. Yeah. And it was fixed quickly. So you know who should get on Restream? Apple and F1. That's the story that we're talking about today. We've talked about this before. So F1, fantastic race series. We're big fans. But the actual streaming rights to the races has been kind of hotly debated. There was an article in the journal a while back that they were going to ESPN saying, hey, we want something like $80 million. And ESPN was like, I don't know if that's worth it.

And we were going back and forth. And they wanted something like 200. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they wanted a lot. And so the stack of content to go through is growing. So we will be thinning the textbook. We will be thinning out the guest lineup in the future. But for today, we're going through.

Let's kick it off with Ben Thompson. He had some good analysis here and has some details from reporting in the athletic, which is a New York Times property. Formula One is trending towards choosing Apple for its United States broadcasting rights for 2026 onwards. The technology companies bid being in the $120 to $150 million range. Market clearing order inbound. He is a market clearing order. Probably will clear.

ESPN has held the right since 2018, but its current deal is up at the end of the year. The sports media giants exclusivity negotiation period expired before February 2025, leading to interest from other broadcasters including Netflix and TBPN. Yes, we would love to. We decided to sit it out. ESPN has remained in the mix for U.S. broadcasting rights, though its bid is lower. apparently ESPN's offer is in the $90 million per year range. Which is still wild because this is the U.S. broadcasting rights.

Yep. And I believe in 2024, Formula One had around 1 million total viewers. 1.3 million viewers on average per race. Yep. But Ben Thompson puts it in a different perspective. He says F1, on the other hand, has a meaningful audience. versus MLS, which was averaging around 200,000 viewers per year on linear TV before the Apple deal. And that wasn't growing.

So this is six times as big as MLS. Again, I think there's more games than, or more games than races. So it's not exactly Apple to Apple. But every race, but one has seen a year over year increase in viewership. So F1 is getting more popular. A lot of that's driven by Drive to Survive. And this is the crazy thing. given when races are televised, usually early Sunday morning,

and the fact that they aren't promoted by ESPN any meaningful sense. So it's not like you're getting the Pat McAfee show talking about, oh, you've got to tune in, and there's a ton of coverage on ESPN throughout the week. They just kind of show up Sunday morning, and people turn on the TV and they schedule it. And so you can, he says you can make the case. I always like the timing because any parents out there,

you know, you're certainly not sleeping in on the weekends. The kids wake up. And I find it's some nice. background noise or viewing in those early hours. For sure. And so he says you can make the case that F1 makes its own audience, which by extension means they will be able to pull people to a streaming service.

Basically, F1 fans are strong enough that they'll go search it out. And when I was really getting into F1 after getting into Drive to Survive, I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to subscribe to F1, the app that like jump through all these hoops. That's on your phone. And it was, yeah, it's like as many hoops as UFC,

but people still do it. Yeah. And there's still a big debate. But anyway. And I think Netflix had done the analysis and realized that all of the potential viewers of F1 were basically already subscribed to Netflix. Yep. And so it didn't, it was a more difficult kind of equation to make work than someone like an

Apple TV potentially that could potentially drive new subscribers. I think someone called it like a streaming backwater or something like that in here. We'll dig into it. But somebody had some not nice things to say about Apple TV. although I'm a subscriber and I think it's nice. So he says what makes, this is Ben Thompson writing and strategy. What makes this all work is the fact that for F1 races,

F1 races are at the bottom of the funnel in terms of fan engagement. F1, at least in the U.S. has by and large grown its audience via Netflix's drive to survive. Netflix pays F1 a pittance for rights, apparently single digit millions for that. But it's okay for F1 because the way they ultimately make money is by Kurt converting Netflix viewers into race. fans. So if you're F1, you see that as a marketing channel on it. Yeah, and F1 has sponsors at the, at the sort of league level and also the individual teams. All of those sponsors are getting more viewership and engagement through F1. So it's sort of added value to them. And they don't have to pay, they're actually making money on, I mean, not a super consequential amount. I mean, of course,

the sponsorships are like such like 360 deals that it's like, you know, car livery and also a whole bunch of other advertising assets, but I wonder if they broke out, okay, how much lift, how much benefit, how many impressions are we getting from Drive to Survive, would that be, when you total up all the value add to all the different advertisers from being in Drive to Survive and being seen by people on Netflix, how much would, would that be more than the couple million dollars that Netflix pays for the rights? It might be. It might be. Like, there's a lot of people that see ads that are for specific F1 sponsors in Saudi Aramco like hundreds of times during Drive to survive exactly yeah

it's like pretty valuable ad space so interesting deal that kind of works both ways and everyone makes money anyway making that model work however means actually monetizing the races which means that it actually it's actually quite logical to go with the company willing to pay 30 to 60 million dollars more for those rights you have to capture value somewhere in the funnel moreover you can make the case that many F1 fans aren't necessarily ESPN subscribers. And this is where it gets interesting because the cable bundle is shrinking. And the F1 did this global fan survey. So it's their data. So Ben Thompson's kind of taken it with a grain of salt. But this is from the F1

global fan survey. They conducted a study every four years to track how fan engagement is evolving across the sport. They got 100,000 responses from self-identified, high, highly engaged fans in 186 countries. That's basically all of them. The findings offer a detailed snapshot of the modern fan mindset and show that Formula One is increasingly attracting new, younger, and more female audience with growth in markets such as the United States. Gen Z is helping shape the rhythm of the modern fandom engaging with the sport more frequently and on a deeper emotional level. Female fans now account for three and four new fans. fans. Interesting. I would not have predicted that. That's very, very interesting. Well, the drivers are

often chads. That's what's driving in? That could be part of part of the factor. Yeah, it's also interesting that there are no female drivers on the grid right now. There was Danica Patrick in the NASCAR series for a while, but somehow it's breaking through. Maybe it's through drive to survive being more accessible on Netflix, more storylines pulling people in and they're just going down that funnel. I don't know. Well, there's also the wag industrial complex around F1 that is aspirational lifestyle. Maybe they should do a spinoff of Drive to Survive. Don't they do that with NBA?

Isn't there a show about like wags or something like that? Maybe. That's kind of informally what the Housewives series is, right? Maybe they should do that. With the largest country share of respondents, fans in the U.S. continue to stand out for their growth, youth, and digital fluency. they over index on content engagement, sponsor responsiveness, and daily touchpoints, signaling a market where fandom is evolving rapidly and is commercially proud.

Saudi Ramco is like, why we seem to be getting a lot of female. Zoomers. American Zoomers. Buying oil. Following our content on Instagram. They seem to be really into this. What's happening? Maybe.

I don't know. So basically, Ben Thompson's conclusion from this survey is, what what are you talking about when you're talking about a younger, more female focused audience? Those don't sound like ESPN subscribers. Those actually sound like Apple TV subscribers or potential Apple TV subscribers, certainly cord cutters, certainly people who are not going to buy a big cable package and get on ESPN2 and Red Zone and all of that stuff.

That's typically the Gen X male, the maybe older millennial male that probably dominates the ESPN audience. And so... Yeah, that's really interesting. Apple kind of has an edge where they can build out a service for some of these more lifestyle-oriented sports, some of these alternative. You know, you could imagine them doing things in tennis over time because maybe that's a different audience than like the hardcore ESPN red zone subscriber. Yeah, yeah. So he says, I could definitely envision a scenario where F-1 not only doesn't suffer from being on a streaming service.

instead of ESPN, but it actually grows further. So this is an interesting bull case. Given Apple TV's lower price point relative to a standalone ESPN streaming service, much less a cable bundle, what is clear is that this deal certainly makes a lot of sense for Apple than the MLS deal did. If the company can capture all 1.3 million

of those current viewers, and they are incremental to current Apple TV subscribers, then the company will break even on this deal. Those are very generous assumptions, of course, but not nearly as generous as whatever assumptions drove the company to spend, bubble the money on a sport no one watches, which is MLS. So he's taking shots at MLS because there was an interesting quote in here from something else.

What was this? It was from the athletic, again, talking about the North American Soccer League general managers. One common theme from general managers, the Apple deal, which is Apple's deal to air MLS, is proving to be too much of a barrier for new fans. Wait, they want the content to be completely free? New fans just don't want it on Apple apparently, or the GMs don't want to be limited to the Apple audience, apparently. They want to be on ESPN or something.

Oh, okay. Apparently. So the GMs say, hey, if we want this to grow, we're the general managers of a bunch of different MLS teams. If we want to grow soccer in America and grow MLS, change the format, change the salary cap. Why don't they just pivot to football or basketball or baseball if they want? Yeah, what's wrong?

was just throwing around a pigskin. Yeah, change the format. Just turn it into American football. I have to say if football is one of the best things you can buy under 50 bucks, period. For sure. For sure. That's not non-food. I mean, the value you can get out of pigskin is absolutely insane. Hours of fun. The return on the return on pigskin. Yeah, it's fantastic. He says, allow us to bring more attractive players. I didn't realize that MLS had a salary cap because I thought they were signing like massive deals with these like legacy famous players. Who is the player that went to Galaxy? Is it messy or something?

Yeah. Is that right? I don't know. Well, this is bad because I don't know. Out of our territory. But there was someone who went to Miami. There was someone who went to the LA Galaxy. I don't know.

Anyway, this GM says. Yeah, so messy plays for Inter Miami. Yep. And it's a huge deal. It's like AI researcher money, remember? That's how we were comping it. And the GM said, but they also have to end the deal with Apple. It's bad for the fans.

David Beckham played in the MLS. And then you have Zlatan Ibrahimovic as well. So they'll pull in some superstars, but usually towards the end of their runs. So the GMs of the North American Soccer League MLS, they say, I think we have to be on more linear outlets. We have to be on ABC, NBC, Fox, or more. regularly, more regularly because I think a lot of people, a lot more people watched our games when we were in that space. I think Apple and the whole streaming thing is really innovative, innovative, but it's probably where things, and it's probably where things will be going,

but I don't think MLS is the leader of that. I don't think enough has been put behind the subscription model. You're in a different league. You're a different league when you're a subscription based league. I don't think the effort has been put in like it should be. It's like selling tickets. You need people out there selling. You can't just hope that people are going to going to sign up and so yeah interesting the risk for f1 is that the series which has massive massive growth is going to constrict its conscript itself to the streaming backwaters says ben thompson just so it can make a few more bucks in the meantime so that that's the risk is that f1 goes and you know gets stuck in subscription land and no one can just turn on the tv and see it and the

1.3 million fans don't actually migrate over and they say i'll just catch the highlights or i'll just watch drive to survive on Netflix instead of going setting up a new subscription. But if it's truly F1 truly does have a younger audience, does have a more female audience, they might be, that might be what gets them to turn on Apple TV streaming at least. Yeah. Anyway, I still get so confused by all the different cable plans. I watch F1 on YouTube TV, which I guess is through ESPN. I guess that will go away and then I would have to subscribe to Apple so they would get a net new. I actually don't subscribe to Apple TV. You don't? Okay. Not for any reason. I just, I never want to, I never want to go through the, I just don't watch a lot of television. Yeah. And I don't want to

go through the hassle of like signing up for a new service. Yeah. I feel like recently I got a new iPhone and it just like came with Apple TV Plus and I just like clicked the button and didn't unsubscribe and then I've been on that for a while. But speaking of a new iPhone, we have a challenge for Tyler Cosgrove, the intern at TBPN. We will be giving him a second. shot on goal, a second kick of the old field goal today. We bricked his iPhone. He had to upgrade to liquid glass. It's been on its last legs. Mark German has some interesting post today. He said we won. He likes the new revision to liquid glass, the latest and greatest, which I think you can't get yet. Break it down. No. So it's mostly because my storage is so low. So I can't, so you can't revert back.

Yeah. But you also can't go forward. I can't go forward because I'd have to like delete basically everything on my phone, which I guess maybe I could basically clear it and then update and then get the stuff back. Okay. But it's, I don't know if that would work. Well, you're stuck in purgatory and iPhone, iOS purgatory, liquid glass, a liquid glass house. But today, you have the chance to win a new iPhone. If you can get on the leaderboard for Arc AGI V3, we gave Tyler the chance to prove his humanity and defeat the version three of Arc AGI.

This is a benchmark for artificial intelligence systems. The whole design is that anyone should be able to do this. Any human should be able to beat these puzzles. Tyler beat them. But we got some benchmark time. We gave him a time constraint. Mike Knoop, the co-founder of Zapier, who's also the co-founder of Arc AGI and behind the lab

that's actually pioneering this benchmark. Gave me some times. He said 15 minutes would be super hard, 20 minutes would be reasonable. 25 minutes would be very doable. We said it as hard as possible, 15 minutes. Tyler came in around 25. So, but today, redemption is on the line. You get a second shot on goal of winning that iPhone. So what do we say? So the new human benchmark, there's a leaderboard where you can go and do these tests as many times as you want. The first time you do it, it's hard because you have to figure out how the games work. But then after that, it becomes kind of kind of a speed run. But, the leaderboard is based on efficiency. So how many, how few moves can you make? How few actions can you take to solve the puzzles? To be kind of in the top 15, top 20, you have to do it under 600 moves across all three games.

And that's the challenge for today. There's no time limit. You can do this as many times as you want. You can reset. You can try and learn all the different patterns and all the different paths. We were worried about, so I think originally we were going to do like I had to be in the top 10. Yeah.

But then I was a little worried about stream snipers. Yep. Coming in and, you know, viewers watching the stream coming in and just going crazy, going him, and then I would be out of the top 10. Yeah, exactly. Even if I did well. So try and beat it today. Give us the baseline score of how many moves it takes you the first time you go through.

And then try and do it again, try and become more efficient until you can hopefully cross the 600 move threshold. That's right. Get on the leaderboard. That should be a lot of fun. And what else is fun? Getting your business on ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.

Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. Ramp. Ram. In other news, meme stocks are completely back. Let's give it up for meme stocks. Let's give it up for meme stocks.

Let's give it up for top signals, baby. We got a bunch of them. So the Wall Street Journal has an article about Coles, the discount retailer, and then Open Door, the high-flying tech company that was co-founded by Keith Roy. Recently more low-flying. Yes, but got out, I think via SPAC was, what was Open Door's core business,

basically allowing folks to sell, buying and selling homes. And the stock's been up and down, and there's been a lot of discussion over, you know, can they take on Zillow? Is this something Zillow would compete with? 10, just under $11 a share. As of a month ago, it was trading it 50 cents. Okay, so way down. So it's still down 79% since the IPO.

But more recently, it's up 300% in the past month. Wow. And people seem to be rallying around. I saw people saying, this is an $82 stock all day, all day. I don't know why. I don't know why that number in particular. F's going on meme stock community. Vibes-based analysis.

It's been, it's a proven strategy. Yeah. A meming stock. It happens. And crispy cream is also in the conversation. With a ticker D-Nut. Okay. Is up 40% in the past five days.

So yeah, the market, a lot of, a lot of opportunity out there. But the thing that's been interesting is that Bucco Capital bloke had a post, earlier this morning. He said, Open Door is down 10% after being down 10% yesterday. Crispy Cream is up 37% after being up 27% yesterday. The meme market is brutal, lightning quick, and moving way too frantically between absolute to ever have another game stop. Yeah, basically. Dogs, basically. So yes, it's interesting. Like this, this eagerness from retail, just investors broadly to find the next game stop.

Yeah. means that there's an incentive, like, you know, if you don't get in before something goes up 300% in a week, there's almost this like, there's almost an incentive to just pick a new company that has that potential to do something. I feel like Krispy Kreme in particular was part of the narrative that like GLP ones would destroy that business because people's appetites would be suppressed. And so junk food markets would sell off. and junk food companies wouldn't do as well. But maybe the meme stock retail traders know something. We don't.

Anyway, let's go to the Wall Street Journal. Individual investors are once again loading up on a group of unloved stocks and taking to social media to defend them from haters and the short sellers. Meet the cast of the meme stock craze season two. Let's go. A username Hot Ticket 9440 wrote on a subreddit forum Tuesday as shares of coals, which is down 17% when I did. took this screenshot.

That's up 15% today. The department store chain surged by nearly 40%. Max Payne on the shorts, buy every dip. Together we strong, said hot ticket 9-440. Open has GameStop vibes written all over it. Skip Trade List wrote Tuesday on X of Open Door Technologies. Which is down 23%.

Today, but it was up yesterday, I guess. Real estate platform. It's a real estate platform. And in all caps, we won't stop until $82, which I don't know how that was picked, but we'll find out. It's a nice, nice number. Shares of coals and open door have rocketed highly, higher recently. So have other oddball stocks, including QuantumScape, a maker of batteries for electric vehicles and Raghetti computing, a quantum computing firm that we talked to Martin Scarelli about. Their recent rise and the cult followings they have inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, AMC, entertainment, and the original

meme stocks that caught fire in the aftermath of the pandemic when interest rates were near zero and the markets rally was underway. What's interesting is like it was very clear to trace the origins of the meme stock craze. It was like you had social media had fully arrived, you had low interest rates, and then you had stimulus tracks going. Yeah. And there was a whole cottage industry of influencers and YouTubers who basically they made content around when will the, when will the checks get delivered? When will the stimulus checks get delivered? How can you get your stimulus checks sooner?

People were Googling for that. People were searching for that. And you would make a video explaining, okay, they're in the mail now. And people were just so interested to know when the money was coming and making sure that it would go to the right address. They were set up to get it because it's free money. You don't want to just lose out on it, right? And so people made those videos.

And then the natural evolution was, well, now that you have the money, what do you do with it? And then they were making financial recommendations, financial advice, right? And they made a ton of money and they got really, really big. And there were some of them that were making like five videos a day, breaking down, you know, all every different, what you should do in Tesla, what you should do in GameStop. And so like the precursor was very, it was a very clear trend. And also retail hadn't gotten burned in a while, I feel like. It was just like all of the precursors were very clear. And now I'm having trouble constructing the narrative around why this is happening again,

other than maybe this is just like it's just going to be cyclical forever. But anyway, their recent rise and the cult followings they inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, the original meme stocks. Younger individual investors congregated on online stock picking forums to share their triumphs and losses and found a common enemy in the professional investors who were betting against their favorite stocks. Now, with stocks at records, the economy staying resilient and corporate earnings beating expectations.

Netflix beat earnings, by the way. And we should expect that basically every tech company is going to beat earnings because the dollar is weak. And so if you have a large portion of your business outside of the United States, you will see very strong earnings results this quarter. Yeah, well, one unfortunate thing, for the meme stock movement is that Bessent said this morning that Trump's not going to fire Powell.

And so there's Jerome Powell out as Fed Chair in 2025. Is it a poll at 18% now dropped on that news? So what did it peak at? It peaked at 20. It was at 24. So it never went about 50%. Yeah, but it was at 24% and it had been rising. kind of week over week.

I mean, that was a crazy, that was a crazy time when the Jerome Powell stuff, I didn't see that much real evidence. We talked to Joe Wisenthal at Bloomberg about this a little bit, but it was a full core press by the financial media and the financial institutions to say, like, do not do this. I remember opening of the Wall Street Journal one day, and like there were five different articles from, you know,

news reports of big bank CEOs commenting on the record, hey don't fire the Fed chair let's bad independent there were op-eds saying about the value of Fed independence that we shouldn't lose this and then when we talked to Joe Weizenthal he he also said you know it's like it is somewhat un-American to not have an independent Fed but then of course there are people on the other side of the debate but if if Jerome Powell staying around what does that mean rates stay high and so we should see less froth in meme stocks in theory.

I don't know exactly how it works through the system, but I would imagine that it's harder to borrow on margin, harder to get more leverage, like all these different things are functions of interest rates being higher. So you see all these, quote, you see all these indicators where this is full-blown meme mania, said Brent, Cochuba, founder of derivatives data firm, Spot Gamma.

Open Door, which traded under $1, as recently as last week, began to take off after social media users rallied around the company. Then hedge fund manager Eric Jackson said in a July 14th post on X that his firm EMJ Capital has taken a position in the stock. Open Door notched six consecutive sessions of double digit percentage gains following his endorsement and the shares are up 439% in a month. And look at that stock chart. Look at that. It is a complete line just directly up. And of course, Keith Rabeux was absolutely. Absolutely loving it.

Yep. You don't get 100 baggers without upset stomachs. This is Jackson, not Keith. But when you spot one early with almost no one else watching, that's when the magic happens. And so this was a guy that was doing a little bit of general solicitation as well. Oh, it's that guy? Yeah. I didn't realize that.

A 38-year-old educator in California says he began scooping up shares of Open Door last month when it was trading under $1 a share. This is Melvin Berientos. He says he sold all his shares and put options tied to Open Door over the past week and pocketed a roughly $3,000 profit. Put options for the right to sell a stock at a set price. Beriantos says he is always on the hunt for beaten down stocks and has traded meme stocks like AMC and Carvana before, often loading up on thousands of shares before selling them when they rally.

He says he plans to sell more Open Door puts if the shares continue tumbling. And shares of Open Door fell 10% to $2.88. sense on Tuesday. It just happens by luck. Coles revenue is another example, the embattled what's your what's your investment strategy? It's just luck. Luck. Look. Make your own luck. I feel like there's some great wisdom out there about I wouldn't I wouldn't it doesn't feel like true mania since this guy's not saying I just quit my job yeah become a day trader. Yep. I don't know. It's very very interesting. So meme stock traders are often talking, are often target companies that are highly shorted,

like coals and game stock before it, hoping to induce a so-called short squeeze. Short sellers bet against companies. If the stock starts rising instead, short sellers may need to buy their shares back to exit from the losing trade a cycle that creates even more demand and consent shares soaring.

The frenzy continued on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro soared 57%. And Krispy Kreme, which you mentioned, jumped 20% despite no clear impetus. Yeah, GoPro. I mean, I love when they just pick an awesome company like GoPro. GoPro is a sweet company.

Making cool cameras for doing cool stuff. Yeah. How can you not love that? Yeah. It is interesting because, yeah, AMC and GameStop were very much like nostalgia plays, whereas Open Door doesn't really fit that template of, I feel like a lot of the GameStop supporters were also supportive of the idea of getting back to a world where you can go and buy a video game from a local store.

And that just being like a fond childhood memory. I remember as a kid, riding my mind. bike to GameStop to pick up a new N64 game. I love how there's somebody out there that's just like has that mentality of just buy the stocks of the companies you love. And they're like, well, I love Krispy Kreme. And I love GoPro because I love doing some cool stuff filming it and having and treating myself with some donuts.

And they think they're a genius investor not realizing. And I mean, every once in a while, things do get oversold. There's, there's plenty of examples of companies that have been trading like below cash. for some reason and it's a function of various lockups. And then the company kind of goes into wartime mode and rebuilds and does come out of it and builds back up. And that does happen, especially post the end of ZERP, post the SVV crisis. There were a lot of companies that were just truly oversold and they were able to come back, usually because their founder led and the founders stuck it out.

So there's lots of options being traded on Open Door, Nvidia, Apple. an open door has over 3 million option contracts that changed hands on Monday, almost as much as the S&P 500. Wow. With the market capitalization around 2 billion, Open Door is a member of the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index. The fact that more open door options traded Monday than contracts tied to Nvidia, the $4 trillion behemoth was unusual.

That's pretty much unheard of, Heisinger said, founder of Options Data Platform Quant Data. And that trading increase obviously wasn't tied to fundamentals. It was a speculative squeeze. And so there's a very funny article in Bloomberg from Matt Levine. He's a fantastic columnist, a fantastic writer. This is taking it one step further. We're getting into meme stock treasuries at this point.

Okay, so he says, well, the other day I wrote, and if you're not already subscribed to Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, you've got to get on money stuff. It's a great newsletter that you can get in your email inbox if you subscribe to Bloomberg. Well, the other day I wrote that the crypto treasury strategy trade is very good, but saturated. The U.S. stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin.

So lots of companies have acquired Bitcoin to make their stock go up. But the returns are diminishing. Companies have moved on to other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, and B&B and Trump coin. but they are running out of space. And he wrote, if you want to do this trade now, you might want to try something else. Maybe the stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of blank,

you think, where what goes in the blank is, one, big and attention getting, two, relatively liquid, so you can buy it incrementally as money comes in and market to market as the price goes up. And three, somewhat crypto-adjacent in spirit, but four, not a big, obvious crypto-token. And so what are what would the what would be exciting one of one Ferraris class you know

classic Ferrari Treasury Treasury Treasury there's something there is that sounds like something we would do as a joke yeah and it will will actually happen in the market in a few in a few years maybe someone should buy that McLaren collection there we go that's a good treasury there we You got an original F1. Trying to think what else is big in attention getting and relatively liquid. I don't know. Well, his example is micro strategy. So he says, I feel like someone to try a micro strategy treasury strategy.

Like you take over a small public company and you announce that you are raising 200 million to buy micro strategy stock. Maybe that would be worth 400 million. And he says, I'm an idiot, but there's one obvious answer. And I'm ashamed that I missed it. Quantum Bio Pharma found it. Wow. A biopharmaceutical company dedicated to innovative therapies for neurodegenerative disorders today

announced the purchase of 2,000 shares of GameStop to hold on the company's balance sheet as a strategic investment. This move aligns with Quantum Biofarmac's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategies and advocacy against manipulative trade practices.

Well, whatever your plan is, You're going to need to design a graphic for it. You're going to need to get on figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma designs helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at figma.com. And speaking of Figma, they hold Bitcoin. They do.

On their balance sheet. They do. I don't think that's because. It was more, I think it was more like prudent treasury management. Yep. And wanting to be diversified. Dylan's been a big believer in crypto for a long time. But the mark when the S1,

came out and people saw that. Everybody was pretty excited. I actually held Bitcoin on the balance sheet of my first company when Bitcoin was trading. Oh, because you guys had to, you were accepting it through Coinbase. We had an integration where you could pay, but it was complicated because customers would pay in Bitcoin and then if the price of Bitcoin went down, they would ask for a refund and if the price of Bitcoin, or if the price of Bitcoin went up, they would ask for a refund in the Bitcoin that they paid. So they effectively use your refund policy as a hedge. And so if the price of Bitcoin went down, they could like sell the product and then buy more Bitcoin with it.

It was just like very, very messy. But we wound up holding some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, but we eventually sold it way too early, obviously. And we also paid out a bonus to people. I think everyone that Christmas got five Bitcoins. Wow. Crazy to think about now. Wow. It was like five grand back then.

Yeah. Yeah, brutal. Anyway, let's tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I wish I had graphite back in the day. You can go to graphite. . I had graphite back in the day.

Yeah. So Matt Levine goes on. 2,000 of shares of GameStop is like $50,000, which isn't going to move the needle, even on a $72 million public company. The stock was down this morning. But good effort. Good effort. So he's saying.

says the simple way to think about exchange traded funds is that an ETA... See, that would be... If they added $50,000 worth of GameStop to their balance sheet and then the stock moon, that would be true mania in my book, right? Oh, totally, totally, totally. The day trader, the educator who's day trading options, quitting his job, and you've got to have adding, you know, $50,000 of GameStop, triple your stock price. To me that's...

The XTK is so little. I mean, what is the, why did they do this? Like, what is the, is it just to get a press release, just to get mentioned in Matt Well, John, it obviously aligns with quantum biofirmers ongoing commitment to combating market corruption enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategy and advocacy against manipulative trading practices. How does this combat market corruption? They're making a statement, John.

They're making a statement, I suppose. Anyway, there's no way, there's no better way to make a statement. statement than getting on Banta automate compliance, managed risk, improve trust continuously. Vantas trust management platform. Yeah. We're going to talk to the go in just a little bit. Vanta raised Vanta raised some new money that was announced today and we will have Christina on a little bit later to break it down. Yeah. Well, this this newsletter from Matt Levine is fantastic but I'll let you go and subscribe and read it. We can move on to the Wall Street Journal talking about Amazon. Amazon has launched a

a new or they bought an AI wearable that kind of flew under the radar this is the B Yeah had you ever Had you ever heard of this company? I hadn't heard of it I feel like I've heard of most of them but only the ones that kind of went viral So the humane pen I followed

The rabbit R1 I followed The friend I followed And then obviously the Sam Altman Johnny Ive project IO Which we don't know what it is might be a wearable Might be a phone I don't know I feel like there's been a lot of conflicting reporting about what they're actually building,

but there's a lot of stuff there and there's something coming. And then obviously we've talked to the founder of Woop and other wearables. And I'm aware of Fitbit that's kind of in the legacy space. Apple has the Apple Watch. Now Amazon has the B-A-I bracelet that listens to your conversations throughout the day and automatically adds action items from those chats to a to-do list. So it might suggest it'll create a suggested to-do for you on their website. it says go grocery shopping for the week as one.

Two is actually on their site says send a figma link of the work discussed to the team. And three, establish a daily routine to take a daily walk. And it gives you reflections and insights. And the example they give on the site is you're adapting your parenting approach during wife's absence by creating special moments around routine activities like swim class. Not a bad reminder. if you're a parent, turn that swim class into a special moment. Do they have a linear integration, the purpose-built tool for planning and building products?

You can make a system for modern software development. I would get a B-band. To help you streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. That'd be great. They should go to linear. Dot app. Anyway, it's funny. After a decade of Amazon saying, Alexa isn't listening to your every word.

The company is buying a bracelet that can listen to your every word. Uh-oh. The 10 foil hats on. Bees wearable transcribes all the conversations in your day, including when you talk to yourself, then he uses artificial intelligence to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history, offering up key events and even to-do lists based on your chatter.

So, interesting. Obviously, there's a big pushback on this from privacy perspective. Do you trust Amazon? I tend to trust Amazon on this stuff. The bigger question is, like, if I see you wearing one, are you going to get the glass hole phenomenon? Do you remember that with the Google Glass thing?

We seem to have a long past that. So Google launched Google Glass back in 2012-ish, something like that. And it was just a pair of glasses with the camera on it. And you could take pictures, a direct precursor to the meta-ray bands, although it did have a heads-up display. It was very small in the corner. You could kind of look up. And the basic use cases they were pitching were things like,

turn by turn directions. If you're on a bike, you don't need to pull out your phone, you can get Google Maps integrated. Google was working on this for a while. Then eventually it kind of got sunsetted. It was very, there's this famous picture of Mark Andresen in the Google Glass, and a lot of people were very excited about it. It seemed like the era of augmented reality was on the horizon. Didn't really pan out that way. They pivoted to B2B or enterprise and the idea was like, okay, maybe if you're on a factory line, you could have instructions, work instructions pulled up there. That never really panned out either, and they kind of sunset it. And it kind of went the way of the Microsoft HoloLens where there was some amazing R&D that was done, some amazing

engineering, but they never crossed the chasm, never got past the early adopters. And so, but during that time, it was one of the first major backlashes against like the Silicon Valley Tech Bro. So people were wearing these because they were Yeah, there's Merck Andresen wearing the Google Glass, one of the prototypes. Looking sharp. Yeah. And interestingly, kind of solves the problem of are these sunglasses or are these indoor glasses? Like, it's not glasses.

So you could wear it indoor or outdoor. And I guess you could put sunglasses over the top of that more or less. But never really got adoption. And there was this, I think, like some sort of instance where a tech person was wearing them in a bar. And someone came up to them and was like, I don't want you. taking pictures of me. I don't want you recording me in public. Get that off of here. And it caused this kind of cultural issue. And the portmanteau that became popular was glass hole. You can imagine what that means. And so people were very upset about this and like,

I don't want you taking pictures. Now we're kind of blown past that where everyone has a phone on them that could be recording you and everyone's taken out their phone all the time, taking pictures. And there's just kind of, you know, Emily Sundberg was talking about in the Hamptons how there's so many TikTokers around taking video of everything you you can't even leave with another man's wife as she put it right and so um the uh it's such a funny phenomenon but but i mean it was funny because she said that and then a week later the cold play concert happened and that went mega viral and that's of course the product of technology that's a product of the fact that everyone is filming there is going to be someone filming every screen at every moment and so at a concert of that's it wasn't like

something happened and then the one person that has a camera needs to be like oh I should take a video of that and post it it's like there were after a while once it went viral there were other camera angles that came out because other people were also filming at the same time now not everyone was but you put 100,000 people together they're going to be filming everything at all at all at all times all the angles obviously very beneficial when something disastrous happens you have a lot of you have a lot of coverage to figure out what happened but in in other cases it is somewhat of an invasion of privacy, all sorts of things. And so long story short, we kind of blew past that. There hasn't been a pushback on the meta ray bands. People wear them and there hasn't been any.

Don't they have like a light that lets you know if it's recording? It's recording. Yes. I think it's good. Yes. And so that was kind of where the technology resolution landed. Now meta ray bands aren't the most popular product, but there's certainly plenty of people that daily drive them and they're not getting, you know, aggressively yelled at for being like meta raybans. band holes or whatever, like that meme is dead. And people just kind of assume that if I'm out in public, someone might take a picture of me with their phone or their met array bands, like it's just something

that happens now. And we've just been normalized. But yeah, and anytime these wearable, pendant bracelet things have popped up, people's immediate thought is, okay, so you're recording every conversation that you're having and that's being indexed. Maybe you're getting transcriptions. Is that suddenly, if somebody sues you,

Do you have to provide that as part of a lawsuit that you can imagine the kind of problems that that would cause? We should have, so Avi from friend.com, they're starting to ship their product on July 30th, so just a week from now. And I'm sure he has some way that he's addressing that. But be as interesting, the company was started just under three years ago by some form. Twitter employees actually back when it was called Twitter. So the CEO Maria and Twitter and B both like flower adjacent animals. I'm seeing a trend here like this. Yeah, I can see it.

Maria DeLords Zolo said the company which imagines a world where AI is truly personal is joining Amazon in a LinkedIn post. An Amazon spokeswoman said that while the deal is signed, the agreement isn't yet closed. For Amazon it's a small move in a potentially huge future market. I saw the bracelet. Yeah, it was interesting. I think the pricing strategy here was smart. The device, they sold it for $49.99.

So just clearly trying to sell these to as many people as possible. And then I'm sure there's a subscription component to it as well. Yeah. There is something about the price point. And even though when the iPhone was released, it was like $600, it was very expensive. Oh, and they actually haven't shipped any product yet. OBE hasn't?

Yeah. So they're shipping and they were, shipping in February. Sorry, September. So when they ship, will they have to pay sales tax? What should they use for that? Definitely. I would strongly recommend Numeral HQ.com.

They could put their sales tax on autopilot. They could spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That would be amazing. Anyway, so they did send a demo to Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal. She was impressed with how useful the bracelet was, but she wasn't sold on the privacy tradeoffs rather than saving audio. B only keeps a transcription, but still the creep factor is high, says the journal. We have long had listening devices in our pockets and our homes for many Amazon's echo

speaker was the first. It is kind of funny. Somebody, you know, let's say somebody, a friend comes over to your house and, you know, they've got their B bracelet on. And then they take it off at some point sitting on a table. And you're like, wait, there's, you know, let's say you're having a pool. party. Yep. You're sitting at the table we're sitting like this. So the the the person, the bee owner is off doing something else. But they actually get like a perfect transcription.

Oh yeah. They actually get recommendations. Yeah. It's like, hey, so and so is talking behind your back for about 30 minutes. Yeah, the mangoes he brought to the pool party. Totally rotten. Wow. Really lacks attention to detail. Uh, won't be invited to the next pool party. Yeah. So your bee is like, okay, so you really need to work on your mango selection going into the next party. This is really a weak point. It's really a weak point for you. Yeah.

That could be valuable. I think some people are going to have to fill out the apology form to all the schizophrenics out there who've been like, everything's listening to me because like, well, yes. In fact, everything is listening to you. I think if meta, if meta could, if meta could have bought a company like this and said, and said for $50 a month, we'll pay you $50 a month to listen to everything that you say and give you better ad targeting?

I bet meta could make it back. Yeah. I mean, I do think the price point is like super, super key to getting the install base down. John Carmack was talking about with VR. What was he saying? Like 100 grams, $100 for a VR headset. That's when you're going to get everyone to buy them. And then there's going to be such a big install base that everyone will want to build on top of it.

And that's when the, you know, when the iPhone came out at $600, it was so expensive. It was such a luxury good. But everyone had a phone at that time. The phones were just heavily subsidized by the phone plans. And the phone plans had started at like $10 a month, $30 a month, and kind of worked their way up to $100 a month. The phones were really only like a couple hundred dollars. So if you lost it, it wasn't that big of a deal.

And slowly it had worked its way up from the bottom. I mean, wireless phone, cell phones used to be a luxury. It took two decades probably from the 80s to go from the big din attack all the way down to the Motorola Razor V3, which was like pretty much, you know, affordable to many families, we'd give them to their high school kids, right? And then so when the iPhone came out, there was already this install base of people

who expected to be able to make phone calls over the cellular network, and then also text each other. And then the internet browsing was like kind of a nice to have extra feature. I remember someone had a really fancy, I think it was like a Nokia or something, or it was some sort of other phone

that had a very primitive web browser on it, about like two years. years before. It was really expensive because you had to buy a data plan too, but I was like, oh man, like the ability to access the internet everywhere. Like that's that that's such a killer feature. And so I definitely could imagine a world where you know, you have to get these products just so cheap that everyone's buying them wearing them. They're just baked into everything. And then you can scale up to something that's more premium. Yeah. It just seems we're so far past the Siri Alexa personal assistant shopping assistant rivalry.

But it makes sense for Amazon to try to get back in the game. Yeah, I wonder, do you think OpenAI could kind of come out with an Alexa competitor that would do well? I mean, they arguably already have. Which is. It's just, I mean, Chad GPT. Yeah. I would say you use specifically you use chat GPT as like voice memo.

Yes. Say like you kind of talk through what you're thinking and what you want to do. and then it condenses it nicely. It's not taking a bunch of actions yet, like being like, hey, I want to make, I can see in the future where you're like, hey, I want to make, I want to cook my wife a nice dinner in this theme.

Can you put together an ingredient list and order all the ingredients and have it home by 5 p.m.? That's very, very gentic. I just imagine, I talked to somebody who said that they often leave or their wife leaves. chat UPT open in the in the conversational mode when they're just hanging out and then you can just like it won't chime in unless you actually ask it a question and it will kind of know that okay now you're talking to me yeah but it doesn't have a specific wake word uh so it's just like a third party in the

conversation felt very sci-fi very very futuristic i don't know um anyway uh so now amazon is interested in a wearable device that's always listening always listening no wake word needed. So Amazon has reminded us for years that its voice-activated speakers only start listening when they hear the wake word, even if you didn't necessarily utter it. But they would, if you've had an Alexa in your home ever, it certainly will wake up when it'll hear something incorrectly and pop on all the time. Yeah. And so very interesting to see what they're thinking about here. B is one of a growing pack of AI gadgets out there. Google has pixel earbuds that put Gemini, Gemini, A,

AI in your ear, meta raybans, of course. We talked about, Samsung recently showed up, showed off Gemini-infused galaxy devices. Apple has been slower on the uptake. But remember we were hearing that reporting from Mark German that Amazon or Apple was working on like a robotic arm or something like that? Something that would sit on your table or something? I don't know. They had some sort of like robotics device like in the far roadmap.

Apple's always, I mean, I do believe that Apple works on a tremendous, What you see even leaks from Apple is still like 5%. Oh, yeah. They're constantly like patenting stuff. Under the surface. Meta had an announcement today for a wearable device. So I'll read their posts. They said, imagine controlling your devices

with a subtle hand or finger gesture. Our cutting edge research turns intent and muscle signals into seamless computer control. This breakthrough risk technology is redefining how we interact with computers, intuitive, precise, and ready for the future. And they, I believe they released an entire study around this as well. We actually got a chance to take a demo of this.

It was very cool earlier this year. I'm not sure how much we can actually say on it for now. But, but yeah, so they did an entire study as well around a generic, non-invasive neuromotor interface for human computer interaction. So it's basically, yeah, the team has it pulled up here. You can see like you can click by going like this. You can scroll in different ways. And when we used it, it was extremely, it was extremely intuitive. Like you needed to, it took about 30 seconds to figure out how it worked.

The scrolling motion was particularly cool. That was something I had an experience with the Apple Vision Pro. And this is one of the ways in which meta imagines integrating, making something like a pair of glasses as functional as a phone or a computer. Yeah. This was an acquisition too. So Meta bought Control Labs to bring this wristband into the company. That was a deal reportedly between $500 million and a billion dollars.

It's been six years now and now they're starting to test it even further. What's interesting is that the Apple Vision Pro was pretty good at hand detection. And I feel like this is maybe one of those like Elon versus Waymo debates about like you can do it with a camera. Like you can see that I'm doing this. You can see that I'm giving you a thumbs up. If you can see, the computer should be able to see with a camera. And it's just a matter of getting the right training data, building the right model, and then rolling that out. So it should be doable from a pure software perspective.

But it was nice when you put on the glasses and you put that. control wristband behind your you didn't have to have it in view yeah and so you could have your hand in your pocket and still be controlling and that was a big part of the weight of the Applevision pro was that it has cameras not just looking out this way but also looking down to see your hands so but if your hands are behind your back but it's such a weird niche use case I feel like I could just get used to having my hands the other challenge is getting people to adopt effectively two new devices yeah is also yeah not necessarily easy yeah yeah Yeah, putting on a wristband, I mean, if you put a watch on it, you put, you know, you make it part of the daily wear.

The big question is like Apple's getting so strong with the Apple watch. Like the ecosystem feels like if it really starts clicking the Apple Vision Pro can key off the watch, and it just gets so much better if you have the watch on. And you're like, okay, well, yeah, I'll get the watch then to throw that on. But obviously that's no substitute for a Patek Philippe or Adomar Pige. So you got to head over to Bezell. Your Bezell Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously any watch.

Go to getbezzled.com. But I don't know exactly how it will play out. It feels like you need maybe both. It's still like it adds cost. I feel like I'm still in the camp of make the headsets light and cheap and give people the ability to replace their TV. and then a few other things that they can do, but they have to replace their screens.

Not a daily driver coming with you everywhere. Yeah, there's so many people that build, you know, like, okay, I got three Apple Pro displays or three studio displays. I mean, look right there. We got six displays in the production suite. Like, in theory, that could be replaced with VR headsets. And you can have unlimited displays and reconfigure them as you need on the fly. And for a lot of people, especially if you're traveling,

college student, a smaller apartment, you know, instead of a big 60 inch TV and a bunch of monitors for your desk setup and this and that. You just have one headset. But it's got to be light. You've got to be able to wear it for a really long time. Yeah. Well, let's go and check in with Europe. We have a post here from Kai. He says, normalized sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything. And a superstar poster Jira ticket says, impressive. Very nice. Now let's see the GDP. Good to flag. There's a real cost to sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything seven days a week.

These guys look, these guys look very retired though. Yeah. And I feel like let them sit outside the cafe in peace, but shouldn't be an invitation for you to do the same thing. I don't know. I think you flip this around and you phrase it as you're holding court. People come to you. You set up shop. Holding court is underrated.

Holding court is extremely underrated. You got to just set up, you know, hey, you want to come pitch me your startup? I'll be outside this cafe all day long. Yeah, we have a friend of the show, Media Mogul, who holds court at a certain hotel in L.A. And he doesn't have to, doesn't really have to leave all day long. Sure. They just, you know, he's really a king there. Yeah, that's great.

And they come to him. It's a fantastic way of doing business. Yeah. Well, if you're struggling with a bunch of inbound emails to your support team, Get fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. World champion. Number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. Did you see this video?

Yeah, pull up this video. So a company called Vala not. Vala not. Vala not says we are excited to share this raw flight footage, including takeoff and landing, all with real sound. No special effects, no CGI, no AI, pure engineering. Enjoy the future, a functional real world speeder bike that so far only existed in sci-fi movies is finally here.

This seems extremely dangerous. You just look at, uh, it's a tough. Yeah, it's like we wanted, yeah, we wanted flying cars. We got them. And now I'm terrified of them. And I don't necessarily want to go for ride on this. It seems really fun. It seems like in the same territory as like wing suiting.

Like as a kid, I was like, I'm definitely going to become a pro wingstuting. suitor, no doubt. Put me in. Put me in. Like, give me the Red Bull livery on my wingsuit. I'm 100% doing it. And then I looked at the actual stats of how dangerous wing suiting is and it was like, I will never be wingsuiting. I will be watching Red Bull videos of wing suiting. Yeah, leave it to the Red Bull. How do you even make this safe? This is. So they're calling it the air bike. Yep. It's very cool that they built this.

Very, very, very cool. I wonder, I wonder how it commercializes. Um, I wonder, like where does this go? What use case is it? I mean, it's also crazy on the link. I have no idea who's building this on the LinkedIn. Yeah. It has one guy on it.

Okay. And Tomaz Patan. And it seems like where is this? He's in Poland. Okay. Apparently the only person working on this company. Solo dev. Solopreneur.

Okay, so he's also the founder of Jetson, which is the EVTal company. Okay, so we built this on the side. So, yeah. Little side project. Built to speeder bike. He's in Poland. I wonder if there's a defense tech application. There's off, anytime you can put something in the air and make it move fast, there's usually.

I mean, if you're worried about a minefield and you need to get from one place to another, maybe this is a good way to get around. And if you're really trained because you're in the military, you're not just some casual person gone for a flight, like could be safer than trying to walk through a minefield. True. Of course, like you are a pretty big target up there. It looks like he's wearing some sort of. Yeah, I mean, the way to think about this is, this is a, you could also imagine this as a drone, right?

There doesn't need to be a human on it. So it's powered by jet propulsion. It's designed to carry one person at speeds up to 124 miles an hour. That's so fast. And what makes it possible is they have the stabilization system. onboard flight computer. Yep. And anyways, I mean, this looks like a beautiful future.

It's just like how safe does it need to get until I'll be ripping one of these from Malibu into the studio every morning. I don't even ride a motorcycle. So I don't know. I'm more likely to go to the moon, I think, than rip around on one of these. It seems like you have to be.

Very doomer pill, John. You don't think they can make this. Maybe they make it so, so safe that it's, that it's, you know, flyable by anyone, certifiable by anyone. It's just so easy to drive that, you know, there's no risk. Then, yeah, maybe I'd give it a try. It looks rare, very fun. It does look very fun.

Yeah, one solution is it becomes, like, fully autonomous, and you don't have this sort of, like, human saying, I'm going to take this turn a little faster. Yeah, but still be cool to have a drone that you could ride on it. That would take you around to places. Then you're just back in Evital territory, right? I don't know. Yeah.

I guess this is not E-V-Tol because it's not electric motors, jet propulsion. But imagine when this thing gets to the point where you can just, like, fly it up a mountain. That will be crazy. You're going to be able to take these skiing. Just everyone's waiting in line at Everest and you're just bombing up to the top. Yeah, or you're just like taking it out in the mountains? Again, it's like we kind of do have flying cars in the fore of helicopters, right? Just like not evenly distributed.

It's going to be fun when they start selling these things. They're going to get out Adio. Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. Yeah, I have a feeling you're not going to be able to just order one of these on the website anytime soon. No. They're going to need a sales team for this.

Peer-to-peer sale. Let's check in with Tyler. How are you doing on the challenge? Okay, so I played all three games. And then I don't know how the like scoring work. So I can look at each of the three games. There's like score cards and then there's recordings. I'm on site.

So I can see the number of actions. If you add them up, I'm at five, six. Oh, you're pretty good. Wow. So that's under 600. Okay. But I'm not on the leaderboard. I don't know why.

Okay. Maybe it needs some time to update. That's the real challenge now. Yeah. Yeah. What? I'm not just trusting you. He's like I won, but, but.

Write a, right a sequel injection to, to have the day. Reach out to Mike. Reach out to Mike. Yeah, yeah. Sounds like you might be getting a bug bounty too and your iPhone. Maybe, maybe. But congratulations. That sounds like good work.

How far are you away from number one now? I'm in 13th place. So I got 576. Okay. Number one is at 511. Do you think that's doable based on your experience? Yeah, definitely. I made a bunch of mistakes.

Okay. So maybe maybe maybe give it another run. I could probably go see if you go sub 500. That'll be good. Bang. There you go. Sub 500, you get upgraded to more storage.

I will reach out to Mike because I think there might be a bug here and I don't want I don't want the reason that that you're not going to win your iPhone to be a bug. True, true, true. I feel I want, yeah, it feels like you might have earned it. Yeah. You also don't want bed bug. either. You want a new bed. You want to go to 8Sleep.com. That's right. Get a pod five. Five year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. I am deathly ill. I'm trying to keep the energy up. My eight sleep,

basically. Let's hear for Jordy. I think he's putting out a fantastic performance. I production team. I didn't know this is possible. My HRV last night was at 32, which I thought would imply death. But I'm here. I'm doing the show. I'm doing the show and it's scary to imagine what my night would have looked like without my sleep. Indeed. I don't even want to imagine that world. Indeed. Well, there's one founder I know who's sleeping a lot better, sleeping well.

Samir from Vise. His company just hit $22 billion in platform assets. Do you know the story of this company? All I know is he got marked up like a back to back to back. Yes. In the sort of 2021 era. Yes. It was a unicorn.

Yep. And then they went through. And they're young founders. And there was all this like, oh, like they're overvalued. Like, you know, and the guys apparently just kept sticking with it and chopping wood. And I'd love to see this. This is amazing. So he says, one learning to share with all future entrepreneurs.

Great businesses take a long time to build. Ignore the noise and keep going. It sounds like that's exactly what he did. They grew 1,275% year over year. They're growing 40% quarter over quarter, a record number of new firms. So what this company does is software for fund administration, for asset managers, I believe. And so they're portfolio management. So they're onboarding more managers and bringing those assets on the platform.

I don't think it's fair to say like, oh, $22 billion is it revenue or they'd have some take rate. It's more like a GMV type of thing. And they probably take a small, small fraction of all that. But still, like growth is growth. And it seems like they're doing very well. So good to hear. Cool to see. I think he's been a huge beneficiary of Gen AI, from what I can tell.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It is funny. I mean, looking at Lucy's been on an absolute tear this year. Yeah. And hearing, like, how many years that were not super exciting that you were just chopping wood, just trying to be better every single month.

I had a buddy come to me last year. And he was like, yeah, I think I want to create like a Zen competitor. Like, I think it'd be pretty, pretty simple to get it to, like, like, you know, just like get it to like a $50 million run rate, you know, nice little lifestyle business. I was thinking about your journey with Lucy being like, I don't know, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it just was the exact opposite of like a fast growing, you know, for sure, company at the beginning.

You just had to like just compound, compound. It took so long to really unlock the growth. Yeah, no, it always grew. And the growth rate was always decent, but it just took a decade. any meat on the bones. I always refer to that as like once the company like it has enough revenue and profit to like sustain the operations out of the out of the fundraising to survive mode, it's just and it's actually like a player in the category, not just some wild bet, it takes a long time

for the majority of companies. Some people, they're just built different. Maybe they're lucky. Maybe they made their own luck. They, you know, they rip from day one. and we love to celebrate them here. We do. But, yeah, sometimes if you have something, you know,

the dye has been cast, Alia Aokta, Iokta, est, the Mark Zuckerberg quote. You know, you release the arrow, and it travels in whatever direction you released it for as long as possible. But hopefully that's at a compounding rate upwards for a long time. Anyway, if you're looking to compound,

get on public.com investing for those tickets. Seriously, multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions, public.com. go check it out. Sonos has a new news out of Sonos out of Santa Barbara County California trade deal. Tom Conrad has been asked to be the next CEO of Sonos. It's grateful for the perspectives and critiques that many of you have shared here these last six months while I was interim so excited for the road ahead so big pickup from Sonos we've covered Sonos before we've

shared frustration over the years with Sonos. But fundamentally, the products are incredible when they're working. And it feels like it was always software problem, right? Not necessarily maybe firmware. I'm still confused by because they haven't rolled back the app. And so I'm wondering what's going on because my Sonos app still takes a long time to open. Just opening it up, a full at least 90 seconds to just adjust the volume,

which is crazy bad experience. And the crazy thing is that the same hardware with the same phone used to be 10 seconds. And so there's something that changed when they added some new functionality that really bogged down the network or the app or something. They got to roll it back. It's very clear what they need to do.

So hopefully he can do it. He's been interim CEO for six months. Hopefully he can turn it. things around it. There's a lot that they need to do. It'll be interesting to see where Sonos lands. He's got experience. He was the executive vice president of product at Pandora for 10 years. Yeah. And then became the chief technology officer. Then went over to Snapchat, was a VP of product there. Also had a brief stint at Quibi as the chief product officer. So excited to see what he does with Sonos and considering I have a bunch of Sonos in my house

still. Yeah. Do any Sonos? speakers have microphones on them. Let's figure it out. Because yes, several Sonos speakers come equipped with built-in microphones. The Sonos 1, Sonos era 100. And so you should be able to talk to them. They work with voice assistants like Alexa, Google

assistance, Sonos voice control. Opening eyes got to buy this company, right? I can see it. That would be a wild deal. Because at 1.3 billion, current market cap. It's affordable. It's affordable, but then you just jump forward in the supply chain. You can start delivering all these things and then you just have a Alexa competitor.

Distribution into millions of homes. And also in through like the actual distribution like chains like Best Buy and stuff. Like yeah, maybe you want to start from scratch. Maybe you want to greenfield it. I don't really know, but this feels like something that would be a no brainer. Yeah. So in 2024 Sonos shipped five million units globally. That was down from the year before, but still, that's a lot of devices out in the world in a single year that I could see it. What about perplexity?

Are they at 18 billion? Perplexity by someone else? Well, they're working on a phone. They're working a lot of different stuff. Salinas working on a phone. Lots of new phones coming. Everybody's working on a phone. But maybe the smart speaker market has languished enough that there's something interesting to be done there.

I mean, just the voice transcription is so much better. We talked to the CEO of the nothing phone, and he was saying that he's integrated Whisper and Gemini and kind of beefed up the voice assistant. But maybe people aren't willing to jump from the iPhone ecosystem. But, you know, if you're like, oh, well, I could offset the lack of a great Siri with a great chat GPT-enabled smart home device,

kind of interesting. I don't know. You put some AI researchers on the problem of getting the Sonos app to load in less than 90 seconds, and I think you might solve it. Tyler, you have an update for us? What's up? Yeah, I'm on the leaderboard. You're on the leaderboard. There we go.

Come over, ring the gong for number one. Ring the gong, ring the gong, hit the gong. Hit the gong. You are the proud owner of a new iPhone. There we go. Well deserved. Give it a better hit than that. Give it a better hits than that.

I'm going to kind of cover the mic, but, um, bigger hit, bigger hit. Still fairly gentle, but it's great contact. Great contact, great contact. Nice work. I love to see it. So what, yeah, yeah, give me the position. What ranking are you now? I want to see you go for number one.

Yeah, so I think I'm number 13. I think we can, I don't know if you already showed it, but yeah. Okay, can we pull up the screen? I've one of my 65 moves behind. Okay, and what was it, what was the total number of moves that you? 576. 576, not bad. You smoked 600.

Yeah, okay. And you got to get to 511 is the number one, I believe. Okay. So you got to cut down a little bit, be a little bit more efficient, but I think you can do it. Should be doable. Very cool. And then after that, we got to get you working on the agent side of that leaderboard. You've seen that? So on the other side, yeah, on the other side, they actually have like a harness that you can use to get started and you can start trying to build your own AI agent that will go and try and solve it and rank on the leaderboard. Interesting. But, you know, that's enough about leaderboards. Let's talk about billboards.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable with adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe, folks. Meanwhile, on the timeline, Ryan Peterson is thrown out some bait. He said rail is best used for freight while humans should fly through the sky at 500 miles per hour because they value their time. And he says, just discovered that saying bad things about rail travel is an evergreen way.

to engagement bait plan accordingly people love love rail but it is very true America is very different than Europe like the transgron vitae the TGV that goes from Paris to London that's I think that's like the equivalent of like Boston to New York like Europe is just so much smaller than the than the western side of the United States that even with a high-speed rail system getting from L.A. to Chicago is still hours and hours and hours just so much longer than on a plane. And so we actually do have a pretty robust rail system,

but we just choose to use it for freight, and then we fly through the sky at 500 miles an hour. Meanwhile, Meta is investing in their own AI chip Olympus. Zuck is really cornering a lot of these iconic Olympus-like words, right? He says, Meta recently updated its ASIC roadmap, adding a new project ARC, a supplementary of its ASIC product line, which leverages TSMC's two nanometer technology and is targeted to enter mass production in the first half of 2027.

We believe meta plans to make adjustments to the design of Olympus to compete with NVIDIA's Rubin GPUs resulting in a delay from fourth quarter, or 2027 to first half of 2028. Arc will focus on post-training and inferencing purposes. The design service vendor selection will be complete in coming weeks, and we think Media Tech has a good chance of winning the project, sorry. Interesting. Semi-analysis says, don't worry, H-100s won't be worthless anytime soon.

It will still be a valuable baseline that impressive AI accelerator upstarts like MATX, H-JI, OpenAI, Titan chip. Meta and Microsoft can use in their performance comparisons. This, of course, is when folks come out and say, we're buying H100 equivalents. And so they share a picture of Jensen here. Chief Revenue Destroyer after Blackwell, you can give away a hopper because Blackwell will be so performant.

So interesting to see where this goes. It feels like Nvidia is the one company in the Mag 7 that every other mag seven company is coming for and being like, I'm sick of paying them. Whereas all the other mag sevens have kind of... Meanwhile, Elon's just saying, you want $100 billion, Jensen? That's true.

Yeah, he isn't designing his own chip yet. I wonder if that'll change. But I do believe there was an XAI engineer yesterday that was saying the key word and some of the things that XAI was putting out, as they said, like H-200 equivalent. or Blackwell equivalent GPU, so they're not necessarily fixed on it.

Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah, it's interesting because, like, Google and Amazon compete on, like, shopping searches and LinkedIn competes with, you know, Facebook in some ways. But basically every hyperscaler kind of has their own corner and their own monopoly built out. Yeah. In search, in social networking, in desktop or cloud or shopping.

And then they all butt heads in little ways like Google going up against Tesla with Waymo. And they kind of touch on each other's territory, but they don't often. It's very rare that all of them are going up against one. But it feels like that's the narrative around Nvidia. Everyone's sick of paying the Nvidia tax maybe. I don't exactly. But it seems like if you're trying to cut them out, if you're going to TSM and fabbing your own chips, Like that is straight up cutting out Nvidia.

And Google, it seems like, was successfully doing it with the TPU. Yeah. Signal has a post here. He says, meanwhile, on the App Store, and there is a new king of the App Store free charts. It is T dating advice, helping women date safe. From my understanding, they basically productize the groups on Facebook, the are we dating the same guy groups. And so this acts as a layer over a bunch of different dating apps where women can effectively review, add comments, leave Yelp-style reviews for the men that they are going on dates with. And the founder, I think his name is Steve Cook.

Let's see here. Sean Cook. He was a director of product management at Salesforce for just under four years. So really putting in the work at Salesforce. We love to see it. And I said earlier, this is just a massive moment for big tech PMs. It is. Never doubt them again.

Never doubt them. A lot of people have been doubting the PMs. It'd say, oh, you're just changing the color of this button. The color of the button matters, apparently. Because you have to imagine that this app category is highly competitive. I don't know. Maybe they're just the first one to think of doing it, but there has to be most of these. So I was looking and the third most popular app, I believe, is the same exact concept.

Concept. No way. It's called T-Born. Oh, wow. Dating advice. See the truth before you date. So they went with the same name. Okay.

This is number three. It has very few ratings. So I do wonder. So T-dating advice has 56,000 ratings, but the number three app is T-Born. We're in dating advice. Yep. Just so, so strange. It only has 60 reviews, but clearly climbing up the charts.

Well, here's some dating advice. Book a wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. That's right.

And without further ado, I think we have our next guest. And I got to get this ready. Welcome to the studio. How are you? Massive day. Massive day. We're getting a little bit of feedback on the audio. Can we turn up the levels a little bit?

Can you hear us okay? I can hear you as well. Okay. It's just a little bit muffled. Are you on headphones? Maybe take those out and we'll see if the computer audio is any better. Should be better. That's way better.

There we go. There we go. There we go. No problem. Take us off. Give us the news. What happened today? We, at Vanta, announced we raised $150 million,

$1. Series D, $4 billion pre, $415 post. Fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you. Been waiting to do that. Appreciate it. Such a massive milestone. Can you catch us up to speed on, you know, I think people know your story by now,

but can you catch us up to speed on just like the last couple years getting to this point? It was an overnight success, correct? Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I haven't been working on this for like eight to ten years, totally. But who's counting? Yeah. Okay, so we started most known for like automating SOC2.

Also putting up billboards on the 101. So we still do both of those things. But we also help our customers like build out their security programs, improve them in a bunch of different ways. And then take all that hard work and use it to build trust with their customers through audits, through trust reports, through security questionnaires, all sorts of things like that. Is the characterization of Vanta as like a point solution company, at least when you started the company, correct?

Is point solution a pejorative in enterprise? Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah, break that down. Why is it? Is it all because of Parker Conrad who's a friend who has coined the compound startup and you have to do everything at once? What are the tradeoffs of being point solution early on? And then how do you think about adding things on? Because there's probably some tradeoff of you built to try and too much territory.

try and capture too much territory you can't hold on to it but at the same time yeah there's an easy argument if christina had started and said we're a platform that might have been at the beginning could have been a much could have still been successful but maybe a much smaller company yeah so walk me through that journey yeah yeah for sure so we started i mean our word was wedge okay it's a nicer word yeah right it sounds better than point solution which sounds kind of like trivial well wedges have points on them right totally they come to a point really strong ones yeah you need a pointy Yes, yes, yes. But we started with SOC2 for startups.

And because they like, I don't know, you might remember this, but like 2017, like no startup got SOC2. Now you get it when you're like two founders, which is a little wild. But they were like so valuable then. We figured if we can do that, customers will let us do a lot and give us a lot of access and we can help them with a lot of things. And then we can use our pointy wedge to expand into like a platform over time. And I'm like, I'm joking. But like that was a seed pitch. I posted one of the slides on it today.

It was like truly the 2018 pitch. And so it's kind of cool to be here, you know, a little bit later. Were you getting pushback on like market size at that point where people saying like you're going to need an act too basically? Oh, totally. People wouldn't even like you need neck to. It's like you need a new idea. Like you just pitch me on sock doing all the startups and no startups get socked.

Well, so what were you seeing then that other people were missing? because it seems so obvious in hindsight that young startups would need SOC2 and a variety of other things in order to sell into enterprise and do other things that they want to do. But like what were you seeing then that now looks obvious in hindsight? Think of us this like if you could make it easier, like less time, not necessarily less money, less time for a startup to get a SOC2, they would 100% do one. The problem is you had to give your CTO up for a year who would go talk to a bunch of of accountants and then become very sad. And so like no one would do that. But if they didn't have

to do that, everyone would go sign up and press the like fast sock two button. Yeah. I don't think it's an obvious idea at all. Like when you when you when you start a company, most people think I need a laptop. No, no. I'm saying it was it was not obvious then. That's what made it a great opportunity. Totally. But it was clearly obvious to Christina. Yeah. What do you think of the, it feels like you're one of the success stories of like selling to other startups early on. And there's been this like criticism. People have bubbled up of like it's this kind of like circular economy that happens in the startup world.

We've seen a lot of people break out of it. What's the secret to breaking out of it? Is that still a good wedge? Is that still a good go to market? And just kind of what are your thoughts on that idea of like, you know, being a startup that sells to startups? Yeah. Well, first, I appreciate the use of the word wedge.

I still actually think it is like a good idea. There's like definitely some like circular oraboros thing. And certainly partially because like especially early stages, everyone cares about growth. They don't care about your costs. And so there's like can be some amount of trading that happened. We tried not to do that. And I think actually the couple times when I did that, it just blew up later. Like it was a bad idea.

But I think with that you like hopefully have startups that are growing. Like you have the cursors in your user base. You have the ramps. You have the Who members. And then those customers like push you up market, whether you're ready or not. And if you can hang on to them, you can like start serving bigger customers. But kind of you need that growth out of the startup base too. Yeah.

Yeah. On that note of like the like people care more about growth than costs, like were people ignoring margins early on? Oh, yeah. For sure. You paying attention to margins early on though? Not at all. Okay. No.

What are those? Never heard of that. Software. Yeah. Non-AI software. Then talk to me about, we were just talking to another entrepreneur who has kind of a wedge type of product and is expanding. And there's this trade-off between take what you have into new places, either up market or international, versus add new products, new skews. And that's kind of an age-old question.

How have you worked through it through the past? couple of years and do you have any like like frameworks for thinking through those types of processes yeah so I think that what we I mean you do both right both is sometimes hard to do at the same time and so what we did was like take the same thing if the go-to-market's working and you know do it in Europe do it in Australia do it in Asia right and then and at the same time start to like build the muscle to build multiple products because it is hard everyone talks about it's hard and I remember being like kind of why and I don't know I've lived there it's hard it's I don't have a great

answer it's just like the organization gets optimized around like doing the thing you're doing and you have customers and your revenue and it like all reinforces itself and so when you want to go take a group of people and do something that it's no customers and no revenue you kind of can but it's it's just weird it is hard are you being on is it gresham's law the idea that you like ship your org chart have you noticed that yes no no gresham's law is bad money drives out good. I don't know the one I'm talking about. It's a different law, but it's this idea that you ship your org charts.

So if you have an org chart that's, you know, heavily internationally, you're just going to wind up selling internationally. Do you think about it from that perspective? Conway's law. Conway's law. Conway's law. Have you been through the ringer of Conway's law? Have you learned how to fight it?

Have you learned how to deal with it? Oh, totally. I think I've learned like you can't fight it and so you just have to change your org chart sometimes. Okay. Right? Because you're like going to ship whatever your org chart is. So like try to make your org chart.

the thing you actually want to ship. Do that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that. What's the what's like the the correct way to keep morale high while basically doing a reorg and telling someone like, hey, you're going to be working on something different, but you're talented and we like this. But it's just like it makes more sense for the business to do this so you're over over here. Like I mean beyond all the like be honest like actually say or like make sure you believe you're saying those things when you're saying them. I think we went through faith or I went through phase where I like, you tried to like, we reordered kind of a lot. And it was because you like always did feel like you had a better structure.

And it was like that, that was too much. Also, like it doesn't matter. Let it like the order to hang out for six or nine months. Don't change it every quarter. You're just going to drive people crazy, which sounds really obvious when I say it. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. What, uh, what, what are some like any new technology, like technology trends that,

that, that you're seeing across the customer base in terms of like, challenges and ways that you guys are reacting. I can imagine social engineering, like, you know, hacks and challenges must be skyrocketing. But what are you guys seeing broadly? That's a good one, especially with like AI and deepfakes and, you know, the like text message gift card scams, but like ratcheted to 100, like really good versions of those. I think the other thing we see, especially for our European customers is they just get a ton of pressure from. European enterprises on AI. Some it's on AI in general.

Some it's on the American model providers, especially the ones you might guess. Right. And there's just like all this kind of default skepticism in Europe that then if European startups. That's around like data, data usage. Yeah, exactly. And just like I don't trust Open AI. And so don't send any, like I don't even want to use something, use a tool that

uses Open AI. Yeah. The CTO or CIO saying that basically. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think I want to know the thoughts on just general competition when you're selling a wedge product from bigger companies that might want to add this on as a feature. We've been talking to a bunch of founders about how to deal with competition from bigger companies. What have you been through? How did you get through it? And then I want to talk about how that landscape is changing. Yeah. So we've been slightly different. It's like we never really had competition from a big company. because people didn't build what we built before. They built vertical task trackers, but no automation.

What we had was in the COVID boom, lots of folks decided to start Vanta knockoffs. And so we had like a round of that and kind of went through the gauntlet. It was like gone through that whole roller coaster and now we're on the other side of it. But sort of different. How did that manifest? Was that like pricing pressure or just like having the markets slice up differently, needing to reprioritize or kind of double down on kind of territory that you kind of claimed

and felt you were confident on and then had to retrench a little bit. Some of all of it. I mean, I think in the early days we were kind of probably in retrospect, like too pleased with ourselves, sorry for like coming up with this category and this product. And like the honest answer is like no customer care. I mean, they care, you know, they're very supportive, but like they just want the best product for them. And that might be the first one.

Yeah, they're not like, oh, you created the category. Great. Then I won't look at my other options. Exactly. Like no said no one ever. Right? And so I think it pushed us to be like, okay, we did whatever we did years ago. Cool. What have we done lately for customers? Like what have we done today? Whatever we shipped, you know, this week, this quarter, this month, this day. So it's that piece, which I think we got a lot stronger because of that. And then pricing pressure for sure. because in our space, because it's sales all the way through, like there's no self-served trial. The dominant strategy for a competitor is to like copy the demo, do the same demo, and then say,

hey, prospect, these products are the same. You're right. You just have the same thing. But like, we're 30% cheaper. So like, why would you go with Vanta? And like, we kind of learned what to do with that. Why did you go international so early? Was it was it to defend against other people? being like I'm going to build the Vantah for XYZ country but it sounds like it was more customer driven yeah it was about like a 20% of our customer base I think at the time was outside the US and we hadn't done anything for that it's just like you know founders in London you know watch TPPN like it's not like just because they're in London doesn't mean they like don't listen to American podcasts well and they're selling to American

companies sure yeah exactly yeah what what's up with all the colors I feel like Vanta black is the darkest black you can possibly buy this like patented paint. But then purple llamas. Okay. Yeah. We read more color. Take me through that. So yeah, not not touching that.

But we kind of coined a purple in the early days. And so we've become the purple llama company. Purple llamas. Where the llama come from? Because yeah, I mean, yeah. By the way, by the way, we called every llama owner in L.A. We were trying to get llamas here in the studio. to join us. We have a third mic, but it ended up being, it ended up being a massive challenge,

and we were worried about, we didn't have a carve out in the lease that said we could bring llamas in our studio. So it ended up being, but I think you guys should actually, it would be great to get, to get some live llamas. Some live llamas. Popular with the kids at the Petting Zoo. Yeah. Yeah. We tried it in downtown San Francisco. Downtown San Francisco also not the most llama-friendly. It's hard. They're tough to that. You can't even, you can't even, you can't, even bring llamas wherever you want in this country anymore it's really what is it coming to it's a disaster on on the kind of the AI like on the AI story there's like this question of that I've been I've been noodling on with a lot of founders about like is AI a reason to launch a new product

that the customer feels so an agent a prompt box that they interact with with versus just, hey, behind the scenes, we're going to use a ton of AI. You're not even going to know. It doesn't really matter. But the product's just going to get better, more efficient. Maybe our margins go up. Maybe we are delivering things that we want to deliver you faster, more reliably, more accurately, all these different things.

Is there one area that's more exciting? I know you're probably doing both, but how do you think about? Yeah, I mean, I've seen a trend of companies that are basically clones of existing companies that were traditionally seen as SaaS platforms, and they come out and they're basically like, we're this, but it's an agent. And then if you look and try to understand the product, it ends up looking exactly like SaaS with maybe a slightly different workflow, but I don't know how much more valuable it is to customers or if it's actually a better experience. Oh, totally. It's like it's an agent, but actually it's a Ford Deployed engineer, but actually

it's like a founder pressing a lot, you know, and like, I did that. It's a CRUD app. Totally. It's a product with the founder, like, pressing buttons at 11 p.m. at night. So, like, definitely that. And it'll get better over time. To the first question, like, we do a bit of both. It's actually more AI in the background, just doing stuff. And then sometimes when we're going to start, like, surfacing it more, and we might call that, you know, oh, that's an agent or the agent did that. And, like, yes, it is AI, but it's really just getting rid of workflows behind the scenes that no one really wanted to do or, needs to do. Yeah.

Yeah, I've been personally experiencing it in Gmail where it was very easy for them clearly to like add an extra panel with like, now you can chat with your email inbox. But for me, the search still doesn't work. And so I would much rather that just every email that comes in gets condensed down, summarized, and then when I go to search, it really knows what I'm looking for and it just gives me a better product behind the scenes. But that's probably like a harder technical challenge or maybe just, it's just less experimental so people are kind of debating what about in terms of like internal

productivity we were talking to a friend earlier that said that he's seeing there are examples of 10x engineers going to 100x engineers because of tools like cursor and windsurf and Devon cognition all that all the different tools that improve developer productivity but he was actually more excited about designers becoming one X engineers and I thought that was a very interesting take and if you kind of do like like a divide by zero, maybe it's an infinity game. I don't know.

But he was saying that like that has been more exciting to him. And I don't know, like what are you seeing internally? So some of that also PMs with like a V0 replet lovable. Like right, because you like have this idea for a thing and then you can make a version of it. And like stick it in front of five customers and like it shut. And you can do that in 15 minutes like actually. You know, it was before you'd have to like write the spec or draw the picture. and get the designer to make the mocks and then animate the figma, you know, whatever.

Like that loop went from, like, ideally two days to 15 minutes, and that matters so much for, like, just testing new stuff. Yeah, yeah. What about just this idea of, like, generally AI being, like, a reinvigorating force for founders who are in your position where, like, the business has worked. The business, like, is big, basically. Like you have offices, the valuation. Post product market fit.

Yeah, the like series B, C, D just shows like a clear story of just execution. But then what John's getting at and we've had own over at intercom from the show who actually left his company, came back. And then it was like fully ready to just like restart the company almost because there was so much net new opportunity. And even Ben Thompson was saying like he was kind of getting bored. of writing about tech and then AI happened and he's like I can't wait to write the articles anymore. But what's your experience been? Basically that, there's all these magical product experiences that we've thought about but just couldn't build until now. My favorite like clear Vanta example was in 2017 when it wasn't clear if anyone wanted to sock to. It was clear people

answered security questionnaires, like those long spreadsheets of questions. And so we wanted to automate those and tried and like weren't good enough ML engineers and libraries weren't good enough that we didn't and went down the sock two path anyway it's kind of working but like now vanta is really good questionnaire automation we thought of this building this in 2017 we just like couldn't until now and that is like very fun yeah where next you guys have just been chopping wood seemingly like just executing day every day but but where are you going from here hardware hardware AI pendant from Vanta. It captures every, if you say a single word, if you say a single non-compliant word,

it just misses on the language. No way to say trust, like a constantly listening AI pendant. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, but what's next? You know, keep building stuff, cool stuff for our customers. We have a bunch of security products that are launching that are very excited about. So you like get customers in on the wedge, you know, but then over time, after they get their sock to, they start growing, they start needing more things.

They start thinking about building out different parts of their security program. So a couple being launches there coming and a couple more things that we have in store. Last question from my I said, we'll let you go. Has the rise of Defense Tech American Dynamism ITAR compliance been like a, like, how have you been like playing in that space? Oh, it's good. Yeah, yeah. Actually, we're working with the government. Yeah.

So this administration is trying to, is trying to make it easier for everyone to procure software. There's like a FedRamp. There's a new FedRap 20X pilot we're in. And we're doing that for two reasons. One, so our customers can sell to the government and have a path there that is not, you know, years and consultants and like literally thousands of pages of long-form text long.

Like, you can do a lot there. And then also helping the government go procure software. And so we are just like doing a ton there. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. It feels like it's incredibly cumbersome to the defense tech founders that have to get ITAR compliance, but then they kind of wear it as a badge of honor. It's a good moat.

Oh, yeah, I have to use teams, you know, because my work's so important. I'm like, yeah, like your work is important, but now it's become this badge of honor. But it's great, you know, they need to stay compliant. Anyway, thank you so much for hop-up on. Congratulations, congratulations. Congratulations. It's, it's, I love, I love just the steady. March, building momentum.

And I'm sure you'll be back. If history repeats, you'll be back on here very soon with the next one. Knock on all the things. Thanks so much for having me. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Great chatting, Christina. Talk soon. Up next, we have Dina from Lux, Capital.

I will take the intro, Jordi. And I will welcome Dina to the TVPN Ultradome when she's ready to hop on the stream. and in the meantime, I can give you some news. Check in with Tyler. How's Tyler doing over there? All right. I'm up to 10th place. 10th place.

I'm at 5.50, so I dropped, I think, 26 moves. I still, I mean. Are there obvious low-hanging fruit for you? At this point, it's just a grind. Just a grind. Just a grind. I think I got to just basically write down my moves. Okay.

And then just try to optimize one by one. You need maybe like a screen recorder or something so you can watch some game tape. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, hit the tapes. We need a coach. Yeah. Yeah. Who else could help?

You need like a world champion, like speed runner or something like that. Anyway. We have Dina in the Restream Waiting Room. We have Dina in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the stream, Dina. How are you doing? Hello. Hello.

So good to see you guys. Thanks so much for joining. Sorry for the delay. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? And I'd love to know kind of how you fit into the Lux Capital structure ecosystem, what you're focused on and kind of, and then we can go into a bunch of questions from there. Awesome. Well, I'm Dina. I'm a partner at Lux Capital. We're a multi-stage venture firm. We love turning

science fiction into fact. I know you've had Josh on here before and heard all about that. We do everything from pre-C. to pre-IPO, so truly multi-stage. And I have a particular propensity for health care, which I know we're going to be talking about today. But we are all very much generalists. Okay. Let's just, we'll get into the other questions later. I already have completely new questions. Delian Asperuhov over. Founders Fund, Buddy of ours, was saying that the seed ecosystem is just kind of been eroded by founders just skipping rounds. And it feels like that's a lot of kind of a, it's in large part because these like AI companies were able to justify, yeah, I need a billion dollars to train a

foundation model. And so even if you're not training a foundation model, the multi-stage firms are like, yeah, we can do a $100 million seed round. No problem. Like you have a good pedigree. Maybe there'll be an aqua high or something. Where is the pre-seed market? Where is the seed market still interesting? Or do you disagree with that entire take and you think it's never been better? You know, I think it's a tale of two worlds. And honestly, the nomenclature for rounds doesn't really mean much these days anyway.

On the one hand, the advent of AI has made it more cost effective than ever to start a company. And you are no longer judged in terms of growth by how many people you're hiring or how much money you've raised. but actually how much, how far you can get with the least amount possible. And that is only going to continue to happen as we see the advent of sort of AI software tooling and all of that. On the other hand, to your point, if you are raising for a company that is infrastructure intensive that requires high amounts of compute where you're building your own models and let's be honest, how many of those do we need, those types of companies can and will raise $100 million plus seed rounds. So, you know, I think yes is the answer.

It's never been better. But also you will very much see a tale of two worlds. And, you know, on our end, we're finding, you know, tiny seed rounds and very large seed rounds. It really depends on the company and what's needed. Okay. Related to that, give me your take on this post from Caitlin Bolnik-Rellas. You must be one of four things to raise right now.

An AI high-flyer, a seed company with the promise of being an AI high-flying company. Extra points if you're young. an American dynamism reindustrialization company or biology enabled by AI. What do you think? Caitlin always has the great hot takes. I think that's accurate, although honestly, it's not the best time for companies that are raising in the biotech space. So I'm not even sure that I would necessarily include that in the list.

But definitely every company right now needs to have an answer to what their AI play is, for sure. That being said, you know, if you're seeing Groundhog Day of pitches that are, you know, AI note taker, AI agent, like, yes, we all use these companies and they're wonderful tools, but what we look for is sort of the operating system, right? The actual picks and shovels, the really generational companies. And where the innovation is not just the act of using AI, but something that's actually defensible and transformative. Yeah, Elad Gill had a post yesterday. He said, AI markets crystallized for a subset of AI markets. It is suddenly clear who the finalists

or winners will be. And so he breaks down a few categories, LLMs, code, legal, medical scribing, customer service, and search and IR. How are you thinking about AI markets within health care? There's obviously a bunch of different subcategories, but at the same time, some of the biggest headline fundraisers have been around these sort of medical scribe products or at least products with that as kind of the core wedge. Yeah. You know, we've actually invested with Elad in a company in the health AI space, which I'll chat of it about, called Bluno. But yes, AI scribes, I think, were the lowest hanging fruit in health care. The, you know, one of the biggest pain points was with, you know, documentation and note-taking for physicians. These companies were not immediately

up into the right. Many of them have been around for quite some time. But of course, the advent of LLMs, and really the openness to adoption, which has always been the biggest sticky point in health care, has made them particularly effective now. But there's still, so much latency in health care. We are still talking about AI in the context of fax machines. So there's a lot of opportunity outside of that. And I get excited about, you know, the clinical research side of things, the opportunity and clinical trials. You know, if you're talking outside of patient care, we're in a company called trial library, which is, you know, using AI and technology to rapidly accelerate getting patients into trials for life-saving therapies. And frankly, this is where

pharma companies are willing to spend a lot of money to find those hard-to-reach patients. Companies like Bluna, which we invested in with ELAD, for example, are using generative AI to help get drugs to market, so to help with regulatory and medical writing, et cetera. There's a massive opportunity outside of scribes. And although scribes are very interesting, it is increasingly a very crowded market. Last count, I think it was over 100. And there's probably so many. Wow.

Have you seen anyone doing that? I'm sure more are being formed as we speak. As we speak, people are reading the tech crunch headlines and they're saying, hey, maybe I should create. It seems like Stripe Atlas has gone down under all the pressure. Yeah. On the note, though, on the last company, I mean, I think one question that's come up on the show is, what will it take to actually reduce the cost to create and bring a new drug to market? it and discovering the drug itself is one thing, but then is there any hope of reducing the cost of the next stages in terms of outside of the paperwork and things like that?

But it seems like if you have this huge kind of variable cost of trials, is there any sort of hope of bringing that down over time? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the sort of drug discovery piece of it was really, you know, V1 of AI in this field. And we've invested in companies in that space. And there are new companies that are forming in that space. But outside of that, there's a lot. As you pointed out, clinical trials, right?

Big area. There's, you know, there have been lots of companies trying to apply technology there, yet still a massive pain point. Particularly if you think about where the bulk of the spend is in pharma and specialty drugs, these are tens of billions. of dollars of market opportunity here to help get these drugs to market faster. And in order to do so, it often requires finding really difficult to reach patients. There's only so much right now that AI can do to make that happen. So it requires really unique business models. And the company I mentioned, Trial Library, is a great example of a company that is using technology,

but ultimately to find and match humans with one another. And those humans are patients and those humans are providers. I want to go Shark Tank mode for a second. I got a pitch for a hypothetical company. I'm not actually building this. But today there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Amazon buying a bracelet for $50 a pop. You get transcription of everything you said. It was about the company.

They didn't just buy a bracelet. They bought some bracelets. Have any of the AI scribes in health care done something like, hey, the doctor wears a bracelet? And then the scribe is, you know, there's a lot. hardware play or there's a wearable play. Have you seen anything like that? Is there an opportunity? I don't know if I've been a bracelet per se. There are over a hundred, so I wouldn't be surprised if one of them involves a bracelet. But yes, I have seen hardware play. It's the sort of idea of ambient, you know, not taking that I've seen that in the form of cameras that are

sort of, you know, adding on the computer vision element. I've seen that, of course, in terms of, you know, different types of tabletop devices. There is an extra added concern with healthcare, which is, you know, that will open in the room, and that is around PHA and privacy. And so, and oftentimes that's overengineering it. Really what you need is to understand what's happening in that encounter with the patient. And as it turns out, you don't necessarily need, you know, a ring, a bracelet, you know, a camera hanging over you. Oftentimes audio. And in many cases, just, you know, AI enhancing text inputs is all you need to get to the outcome that's desired.

And for that reason, you're out. how are you how are you approaching this brain computer interfaces as a category there's been neurolink nudge announced in the round yesterday but how are you thinking about the category broadly feels like something that right now it seems like a very small group of exceptionally connected and talented teams are sucking up the vast majority of capital which I guess happens in every market, but maybe more pronounced in the BCI space. But do you expect that to be a category where a few years from now, there's hundreds of

players or more concentrated until people can really kind of de-risk the different approaches? Remember, we talked to a TEL fellowship company that was doing that, kind of the other side of the barbell there. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think as a trend at Lux, we were investing in the space before it was obvious. We were early and proud investors in control labs, which you may be familiar with, which was a part of them. Yeah. Reardon, the founder is actually now a venture partner at Luxon. It's fun to jam with him on these topics all the time. My father happens to be a neurosychiatrist, so I have a particular interest in this space. He was really big on TMS.

And I think that there's still so much opportunity there. We are actively looking and spending time with a lot of these companies. To your question, I don't know if there's going to be 100 of them in the future. These are still very capital and sense that there's still a lot of science that does need to happen. We're seeing companies at the earliest stages through our Lux Labs initiative, researchers who are rapidly accelerating on the kind of innovation side and ultimately to get to commercialization. That piece of it is the piece that I think is still remains to be proven, but we are excited about what's to come. In healthcare broadly, I'm sure there's tons of opportunities for startups to build new companies that are kind of built on the back of the AI trend. Are there any places where you think that AI in a narrow sense would be a sustaining innovation for the existing large players?

I'm thinking of like in the enterprise, it feels like, you know, Google might be facing disruption in search to some degree, but like the Gemini API seems to be doing really, really well. And like they were set up wealth to serve, you know, a frontier class model as an API. And so they're leveraging that and they will continue. And Azure has seen a similar thing with Microsoft. They've been beneficiaries. And in many ways, it's been a sustaining innovation for them in terms of cloud. But what is the shape of like the big players in healthcare? Where are they going to like just completely win?

So you probably want to stay away from it as a startup folk. I love this question. I don't know if you guys know this, but I actually got my start in healthcare at Google helping to build what eventually became Google Health. Back then, one of the first products that I got to work on was this knowledge graph for health, which was taking symptoms and conditions, mapping them together. So if you search for itchy eyes, you'd have this graph pop up that explains to you, you might have conjunctiveitis.

Very novel at the time. We launched Google's first, HIPA compliant product. It ultimately led me to venture because it became abundantly clear to me that the real innovation in these really intractable industries was actually coming from early state. startups. This was before the advent of LLMs and all of that. I ultimately think that these big tech players are obviously going to be key distribution partners. Google is still the digital front door for a lot of healthcare. Increasingly, Open AI and others are becoming that, but it is still where so many healthcare encounters begin before a patient even knows that they're a patient.

That being said, do I think that the, you know, the top innovative companies in the healthcare space are going to emerge from these big tech companies? Unlikely. But I think that they will thrive and exist in partnership with them. And the hyperscalers when it comes to AI are always going to play critical roles. Yeah, what role are the like the big tech equivalence in healthcare playing? Like this is the big insurance networks, big hospital networks. I mean, we've heard General Catalyst is buying a hospital. I don't fully understand the thesis there, haven't fully dug in, but what are the bigger players doing that might, where they might just be just default beneficiaries of new tech funds?

Yeah. I mean, I've asked, so I spent a lot of time speaking with the, you know, the leaders of some of these companies. Obviously, they're critical, important partners to our companies. And they are rapidly looking at solutions in AI. So they were, they used to be bottlenecks. These are the distribution partners. You know, selling into health systems has always been a slog. Ask anyone who's done it.

They've got the gray hairs to prove it. I was in a board meeting recently, actually, with a major executive from one of the biggest national payers out there who blew my mind talking about how they were thinking about adopting clinical AI. We're talking actual bots that are engaging with patients in a way that was far more ambitious than even some of the most out there VCs that I had seen. If they're doing it that fast, like we need to get on this quickly. It is clear that, you know, in healthcare, you want to meet patients where they are.

And this is where patients are. They're using these tools constantly. Providers as well, there's a new generation of providers who expect more digitally. And as you can imagine, and you see this in pretty much every major earnings call from these payers, this is no longer just nice to have. It's a mandate. Yeah. What about robotics in service?

surgery rooms. We've seen... Striker. Yeah, I mean, Neurrelink specifically has talked about building basically their own system in order to do these surgeries. They built it. They built it. They're using it very kind of like narrow use case for something that they're doing. But how far out do you think we are from robots conducting kind of routine surgeries? Let's say you need to get an organ removed or something like that. Is that something that you'd bet on? on a human still doing 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now? Or are we going to be at a point where a human is sort of kind of observing a robot, you know, working, but not necessarily like doing the actions themselves? I mean, it's already happening. So we're not talking about 10 years from now. It's already happening across the board. And robotic surgery is an area that we've invested quite a bit in. You may have heard of a company called Orris, which was acquired by

Johnson & Johnson, in which we were lead investors. It's happening in other procedures. in ultrasound, in IVF. We have a company that's on the software side, but enabling computer vision through IVF. If you've ever had, I don't know if any of you have had surgery, but many, many procedures that used to be highly invasive are now done laparoscopically through robotic surgery. So it's one of the areas in healthcare, actually,

that has seen the most adoption, and it's still human-assisted in many cases. A lot of that ultimately comes down to, you know, to patient preference as well as liability, but I would not be surprised if we increasingly move more and more to a world with, you know, robots at the forefront of surgery. What was your take on Fiji Simo's post kind of outlining therapy potentially is one vector that OpenAIs, chat GPT core product could be impactful? That feels like an example of meeting. Health was the other big category that she laid out as well.

Yeah, it feels like meeting customers where they are, and yet all of a sudden we're talking. about, you know, a research nonprofit is now competing in the healthcare space. It feels like it's definitely like an unexpected turn of events if you were looking at Open AI as a health investment a decade ago. Yeah, totally. Well, Fiji's amazing. She's become a friend and we actually met in the context of healthcare. So I know it's an area she's deeply passionate about it's not surprising. It is wild, but it's not surprising. Again, meeting patients where they are and particularly for, you know, a chat bot that does tend to air toward, you know, sycophancy that's constantly telling you, great idea. Let's elaborate on that more, et cetera. Like chat GPT in an era with an epidemic of loneliness

can become a very close friend. It can, in many case, diagnose. And, you know, there have been some really interesting studies published in JAMA actually looking at the empathy factor, comparing AI to humans. And sometimes the AI actually does score better. Now, do I believe that therapists will be replaced by AI in the near future? No. But the fact of the matter is people are already using it. The numbers are staggering. They're using it for this case now. And so I think what we need to think about is what are the guardrails? How do we ensure that you don't end up with the types of situations that have made headlines, you know, whether it's suicides and so on? And how do you ensure that this is done responsibly? And I'm excited that someone like Fiji is at the forefront of that because

I believe that they are really thinking about not only the ethics, but the responsibility of having human lives in their hands. Yeah, it feels like something that's going to be like back and forth in the news cycle constantly, but ultimately, you know, top of mind and they have all the capabilities and teams in place to, you know, execute effectively in that category. But it's going to be a lot of PR back and forth, I'm sure. Do you do anything else? No, this is great.

This is great. Thank you so much for hopping on. Awesome. Great to chat with you guys. Take care. We'll talk to you soon. Let's go to this post from Nick Carter. Do you hear this?

Do you see this? No. You're going to own you. Oh, wait, no, you're a millennial too. He says, millennials will be slash R, the peak IQ generation. Zoomers are iPad kids, lobotomized. Gen Alpha will be largely incapable of learning anything due to AI. Tyler, what do you think?

Well, Tyler's, you're Gen Z, right? You're not Gen Z? Yeah, I'm definitely Gen Z. Do you think you're an iPad kid? Do you think you're a lobotomized? I think that's a little bit younger than me. But I think that's probably true, like, how'd you avoid it?

Just replace iPad with TikTok. Sure. You've talked to the average, like, I mean, I don't want to, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to throw your whole generation under the bus. I think there's a big power law. Yeah. And you'll see it, like, grow more and more with Gen Alpha.

What separates the high-performing zoomers from the lobomized brain rot I mean I think it's you can probably just like if you need like one thing it's just like do they use TikTok daily that's like you probably get like 90% of the yeah I wonder is it a screen time thing you have to cut it off early not I don't think it's necessarily screen time because you see a lot of kids who just like if you're like reading like less wrong or something yeah if you ever talk to someone who like obviously like read a lot of like online blogs like that they're like super crack that's not necessarily screen time. Sure.

One thing is I feel like maybe the kids that have it the worst are like 10 years old right now, where I feel like parents today, there's a general awareness that having your kid glued to an iPad is not great. If you see, I'll be at a restaurant and I'll see a kid just like drooling over their iPad for two and a half hours, not engaging with the parents or over they're with. I think that's like fairly frowned upon now. Like I got an iPad for my three-year-old, but he's only used it on flights. Yeah.

Like he really just doesn't. He only thinks of it as a flight device. And that's purely because I don't want other people to be angry if he's going to, you know, cry for four hours. Tyler's over there being like, I'm not addicted to Apple products, but I'll do anything for an iPhone. Which one is it, Tyler? Yeah. Which one is it? You got a pick.

Any more progress? I'm still working through. I'm going like very slowly. Okay. So yeah, because there's no time. So you're just really calculating up. I can't see my score like until very end.

Okay. So I think I'm doing better but it's very slow. And are you like actively on a run in Arc AGIV3 right now? How do you, like do you kick off a new new test or can you optimize each one individually? I think you can do each game individually. And then it just sums. But you can't do a specific level.

Like you have to do the whole thing. You know, one through eight or whatever. Oh, okay. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Cool. Interesting. I still need to do all three because I've only done the first one. I actually haven't beaten it. Did you time yourself? Well, no, because I did it in parts, right? I did like a couple minutes before the stream and then I did five minutes on the stream and then, you know, I think I know enough at least to be like to probably have an edge so it wouldn't be apples to apples. But maybe I got to check the number of moves. That's the move. Okay. Well, we have our next guest here in the studio. Let's bring them in.

Good soundboard, Jordy. What's going on? Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Welcome. Awesome for me, you. Oh, thank you. Great to have you.

I thought I was worried we had some audio issues. Turns out we don't. Can you give us an introduction? What are you building? Of course. I am building data computers alongside with my co-founder, Lenny. And we use AI to automate the production of printed circuit boards. We designed them and manufacture them.

Very cool. What's the state of the art right? now? Who are your competitors? So there's a bunch of companies that really like try to build circuit boards. Circuit boards are at the heart of every single electronic products that you have. You name you like aerospace, robotics, medical devices. These are all industries that traditionally would take months to come up with designs and like volume manufacturing of these boards.

And so our goal is to help them and like scale up to production right away. Our competitors are folks like Altium cadence, but also like current manufacturers that are like building circuit boards right now. And what's the latest news? Do you have anything good for us? I am very proud to announce that we raised a series A by Andreessen Horwitz. There we go. Fantastic. When did you start the company? I don't know if I think I missed it. Exactly a year ago. Like we hit the one year anniversary three days ago. Am I looking at a virtual background or is this actually your office?

Now this is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We built circuit boards. in Brooklyn, New York. Cool. What is the core value proposition? Speed, quality, time. How do you think about, like, what are your customers asking for right now? So the real thing that was very interesting to me is that we have fewer and fewer people that can build circuit boards at the highest, like, level of complexity. And these people are working at insanely good companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, meta. And they're very, very hard for other hardware companies to kind of like take away. And I used to be at one of these companies.

I used to work at Apple. I used to work on Customs Silicon. So our goal is basically to democratize the way that we currently like build circuit boards and allow like from startups to large enterprises to take advantage of a very high-end type of workflow. And the only way we could think about how to do it is to teach large language models. models who actually generate schematics. And so like the advantage and the difference is that we use code to build our circuit boards, which is something that usually is not done this way.

Circuit boards are very visual. Like you can think about them almost as like Figma. What we do is like more like web design like CSS and code that then gets rendered into like an actual circuit board. It's cool artwork. Can you, is it like okay to take a circuit board schematic from an existing product? I remember we had this. founder on, I think it was the Maddick robot. And he had, was that right? We had some founder on who had printed on their, on their circuit board like high Amazon because they knew that Amazon was

going to take it apart and like try and understand how they were doing what there was. I might be messing up the company names. But it seems like there's some proprietary information in the way, in the, like, yes, there's amazing data and amazing engineers at these big companies. They're making these circuit boards, but they're probably not okay with you just taking that as training data, or maybe it's legal? I don't know. What's the deal there? You're absolutely right. I think that Maddick is a fantastic company. They and WOOP both print on the circuit boards, like don't bother copy us. That's the one. Yeah, whoop. That's right. Fantastic detail. I really love it. Yeah, you can make that, you can make that a feature. We'll do it for everyone of our circuit boards.

Data is actually the most important part of this. So there is no easily available data for this kind of problem. Whereas on code, you can basically take GitHub and start training your models on very high-end data that you can use. Part of what we are doing at that is we're rebuilding the data set from the ground up. And so there's a lot of data notation, data cleaning, like generating new types of data that we can use to improve the models. And we are about to announce, like, next week, a partnership with, like, a very large, like, software open source project. And our goal is basically to contribute back to the community, generate these data that, like, we're going to use to train, like, better models without going and, like, touching on proprietary data. Like, we own our own designs.

And so while we assign the IP of the board that we design for our customers to them, we usually retain the rights to the individual components that we generate. And those are, like, a competitive advantage for us. We are basically building an internal data structure. Yeah, why do you even need real data? I feel like you could generate all of this in simulation. Like when I hear people talk about bio and saying, oh, we don't have a simulated cell. I'm like, okay, well, that makes sense. Like, humans are really complicated.

Biology is really complex. But, like, we created circuit boards in the first place. We should be able to simulate those. Like, why can't you just simulate all possible circuit boards and then do some sort of search through that? Why do you need hard data? You're absolutely right. We actually do that. Like we have reinforcement learning algorithms.

There's two types of simulation that you can do. One is like an electrical simulation, which you can absolutely like get right. It's called spice. But then like the second order effects of like physics are quite complicated to model. And so there's a really like there's a good thing around like very talented electrical engineers,

which is like you never trust them. Like you basically like you can try simulating it, but then like manufacturing something and making sure it works is the ultimate like simulation test. Like the boards may be manufacturing a different way. The boardhouse may not like respect your specifications. And so we 100% do simulation. That's how we bootstrap the process.

You couldn't like build the library of data that we've built just by hand. Like it's physically impossible. So we use like simulation to bootstrap. But then the ability to manufacture the boards is really what creates differentiation and like brings home the fact that these like circuits are actually working. So what are you guys actually doing? the manufacturing side, are you going to be scaling manufacturing? Are you just making prototypes for customers? And then they take those elsewhere to scale? Excellent question. So our offer to the world is come to us, bring us what you want to design. We'll design it for you, optimize it

for manufacture it, and then scale it with you. Today, we have only small batch assembly in-house. We actually have an electric lab right here that we use to assemble like circuit boards like these. And then we partner with manufacturing houses for like the largest higher volume production. But the like eventual future is we are going to vertically integrate this manufacturing. And like this is what we want to offer to company. If you look at the current offer for printed circuit boards in the US, it's very, very hard to manufacture them like within the nation. It's usually like anytime you want to scale, you need to go to China. And we think that the way to solve that is basically by making all of our design look the same from a manufacturerability standpoint.

So we can generate volume and like bring it to all of our clients at the same time. We also do things like automatically matching the parts and the ordering, which is something that normally it's done manually and it's incredibly like long and annoying to do. And so to like keep a very complicated process short, we make ordering. PCBs from the US as easy as ordering them from China. Not quite as inexpensive yet, but we are going to go there. Where do you think you'll set up your actual manufacturing hub? You said you're in the Brooklyn Navy Yard right now. Do you think you'll go elsewhere or do you want to keep it in the great state of New York? So I'm a big believer in decentralized approaches for prototype level. So we're actually opening an assembly shop in San Francisco for our clients there.

And we're thinking about one in Austin where we have like some clients that I absolutely love alongside the one in New York. And I think that long term for scaling production, the best strategy will be to co-locate the warehouses for the components and the assembly. So we're probably going to open a larger facility in either Arizona or Ohio, most likely. Awesome. Last question for me. IMO gold medal. What was your reaction to the news? and is solving IMO level math useful to you?

Do you think there will be transfer learning from that model into the circuit board design domain, or are we in the era of spiky intelligence where until you RL on that particular problem, you're not getting generalizable results? I think even if we were in the era of like spiking intelligence on like RL on a specific problem, like circuit boards are an absolutely like good way of doing this.

Like conceptually a circuit board is orders of magnitude stimpler than silicon design. Like before like building circuit boards for a living, I used to do like custom silicon designs. And those have been like represented as code for years. This is 100% an RL approachable problem. I do think that the IMEO news is fantastic. Like clearly there are incredible returns if you do train on. like a very specific set of data, I think that the biggest mode will be in the data. What we consider to be our competitive advantage is not really like training new foundation

models. We actually rely on like foundation model improvements in the wild. And our like entire model is based upon feeding those models with better and better data and being able to fine tune and reinforcement learning train very specific parts. Like one of them is like the model that spots mistakes. That's how you tell like a good generated design versus a bad generated design and you can ground a model in reality and physics. That makes no sense. Thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon. Congratulations on the race. Crossing the one year milestone and getting an A done as well. Great stuff. Thank you so much. Enjoy talking to you soon. And up next we have Ilan who I met and Delian was mentioning was building a company in France. Now he's

building a company in America. We're going to dig into the differences between the two countries. figure out which country is the best. Get to the bottom of it. Hey, how you doing? What's going on? Hey, I'm good. I'm good on you guys. I'm good.

We met at Miami Tech Week a few years ago, correct? Yes, yes. That's right. And I remember you telling me quite specifically, you didn't see yourself starting a venture business, but venture back business, but you said media was something you were very interested in. So it looks like it turned out quite well.

Here we are. Here we are. Here we are. But yes, give me the background on your journey. We'll get to the current company, but I want to talk more about building a company outside of America. Delian gave us a little bit of the background, but I wanted to just hear that journey and kind of tangle with it for a little bit. Yeah. So I started a company called Kala with two co-founders probably a bit more than eight years ago.

The vision and the mission was to basically make real food more affordable by using robotics and AI to automate the back kitchen operations. And if you look at the typical P&L of a restaurant, it's like 30% food costs, 30% people costs, and 30% overhead, real estate, rent, electricity, those sorts of things. And like the 10% of the margin, if you are performing well, a lot of restaurants actually are losing money. So that was the vision. We said, okay, we can actually build machines and robotic systems to bring down operating costs, to bring down the required footprint of a restaurant to run, which means we bring down overhead as well. And hopefully we can reinvest part of those gains into better quality ingredients to make the product more further. and higher value.

And then we can also make the restaurant itself more profitable, thus more scalable. So that was the vision. We basically ran the company for eight years. I did a bunch, like an ungodly amount of mistakes along the way. But in the end, you managed to have five very, very, very, very profitable restaurants. Basically, give you a few numbers, but like 60% retention, customers coming more than once a week,

95% customer satisfaction. Can't give you the profitability numbers, but much higher than what any other restaurants has achieved in the world thus far. And so the thinking from there was, okay, we have those great first results with the three restaurants. Let's kind of start scaling. We had raised 10 million up to that point from VCs. And we kind of got hung on a very structural problem of Europe, which is there's a big financing gap when you go, when you get to like the Series A slash Series B moment, where it's basically there's just a gigantic cliff of funding there.

And so basically we didn't, we did not understand that when we could have created the business and structured the business. And so we basically were like starting to assemble the plane, you're ready to take off. And then we hit the wall like straight on, straight on. And we just hadn't built. We should have built like a much smaller plane or whatever, Delta plane or something, something that's more lean than what we had prepared to do because we had a much more ambitious vision that what was achievable in Europe. And the thing that's quite specific and that De Leon was referencing. a few days ago on the show was restructuring the business to go from those hands full of restaurants that were very profitable and a very high kind of HQ cost. Trying to restructure that to get to a

profitable kind of break-even point at the business level was basically on paper possible. Like we could have cut down cost enough to make the business profitable. But just pure French regulation prevented us from doing that. Just the severance cost daily and can put it quite well. Like the purely the severance liability was higher than the cash and hands we have. at the time and we had quite a lot of cash and still it was like a lot of money that we had to pay in severance and plus other kind of liabilities around that. And so in the end, we basically tried to talk to the regulators, to the government, we could have any structure that was around us to try and kind of find a work around. But we kind of in the end, we couldn't really go beyond what the laws and rules could have allowed. And so we ultimately, we had to shut down the business around, yeah, a bit more or two months ago, which was kind of quite a shame.

I was very, very angry throughout the whole process. which obviously kind of pented up in the next few in the past few weeks. And when I met Delian a few, yeah, there actually a few days after the decision from the court came down, I was still kind of on the fence about what I wanted to do next. I was still thinking, should I, I'm still angry about this? Yeah, one thing I would just highlight. The idea of using robotics to deliver better, cheaper food was not novel. What was novel was actually getting it to work, right?

Like so many companies, so many people have tried to do this in the United States. This is a graveyard. Yeah, it's an absolute graveyard of companies with super talented founders and teams that for some reason or another couldn't like, you know, it's hard enough. Dave Friedberg started one. It's a rough go there too. Many people. Interesting was the other way around like the automated the front of house not the back of house. That's true. But a lot of businesses like I could give you 20, 30 different businesses that have tried and I think up to that point, we are to,

are the only business that had, and technically Sweet Green does as well, but had proven, let's say, kind of incrementally positive return investment on the whole investment of a restaurant, meaning like if you actually invest the money it takes to build the machine and put it in the restaurant, you actually get to end up with a higher ROI on the whole investment than if you are just launching with a normal team. I think Sweet Green is the only restaurant that had this, apart from us. And for them it's not very clear exactly how they achieve that in terms of of how transparent they are with the numbers. But yeah, other than that, I don't think anyone had even made,

like, had even actually paid back a single installation of a robotic system in a restaurant. And so, yeah, we are very proud of that result that we got a few years ago. And then we managed to launch more stores, get more revenue, get stores doing very high, kind of EBITDA margin. But yeah, in the end, couldn't really get there with Wicela. And I think in the end, the biggest mistakes we made was definitely starting the business in Europe, in France specifically. There's just the market and let's say the whole ecosystem is just not made for ambitious plays.

And like if you want to build something ambitious, you can't really do it there. Yeah, do you think that the restrictions and the regulation that you ran into, are those broadly popular? Or are they kind of like legacy rules that if you put them up to a purely democratic vote, most people would say that doesn't make any sense. Because there's a lot of like, you know, legislative and regulatory craft in America that, isn't popular but hangs around and people just kind of deal with it. But what is like the mood in France around this? Like it sounded like there wasn't very much like public outcry, but it feels like a situation where kind of everyone loses

because the customers were enjoying the food, the employees were enjoying their jobs, you were enjoying building this company, and now they all go, just go away. Yeah, so I don't, so this regulation specifically, I don't think it's known enough. Like company going bankrupt is not something that makes national news. So it's not something that people have top of mind.

But I think overall people would probably support it because what the regulation actually says is just that when a company goes bankrupt, the employee gets pretty high severance, meaning they don't have to find a job straight away. Or if they can't, they can take a few months to find it and it's fine. And so I think with the very socialist mental model that most French people have, I think this would probably be popular. But on top of the severance itself, the state puts in place a lot of other protections, even beyond what the severance kind of. cost is, like you basically get your full salary for a year if your company goes bankrupt, paid by the state. So there's, I mean, partially by the company, but the state puts a bit more on. And so there's a bunch of those rules that I think people would probably be in favor of if

they thought about it, but it's just not something that's top of mind for anyone. Have you talked to any other founders in France who went through something similar or had like cautionary tales to share? Because it feels like this was widespread. We'd be hearing about it a lot and people would be starting to lobby or anything. anything or maybe just everyone leaves. I don't know. I think one of the reasons why it was so hard for us specifically is that the, um, so first we had our business and so the H2 cost component is, is kind of harder to

scale down than a typical software business. I think it's probably one reason why it was hard. And also I think a lot of businesses that fail, especially startups in France, just fail because they can't really find product market fit and they can't even get kind of commercial traction. And so in the end, you don't really mind the company going bankrupt because like you just didn't have something that was worth working for versus for us. I think it's a bit different because we actually had the product that work and the economics we are there. We just couldn't keep on scaling and we should have understood that maybe two or three years earlier and have been a lot more conservative on the structuring of the business. What's the strategy for the new company? How do you

leverage what works and avoid what doesn't? Yeah. So I think so the first one, the key lesson is definitely being a lot more lean on the on the HQ cost. I think one, that I learned is that even though I think this business can be built with venture capital, I think you have to build a strategy around your financing that's both VC but also private equity that does retail and restaurants come more naturally. You have to be able to tailor your business toward those guys because at some points you're going to need them. And so that means low IQ cost, more lean, kind of HQ operations. That means other structuring element that you have to do differently. So there's definitely one big learning. The second one is also in terms of

let's say structuring of the operations, we had built restaurants that were too small. And so even though they are very profitable, they didn't get bring in as much as EBITDA as we could have. If we had stores that were doing like, let's say, three million revenue per store, we'd have been bringing a lot more EBDA per store than the revenue we had in our stores. So that's another kind of key learning. And the tech itself also we are changing a bit the product. We are not taking any of the previous IP or take that kind of kind of Caleb developed. We are kind of rebuilding everything from scratch. But we know overall we have kind of rough idea good ideas of what are the prototypes we made what

worked with in work and so we're also approaching the tech a bit differently than what we did with cala and thus we're also approaching the product differently we're not going to be serving the same the same food makes sense so what uh yeah can you what's the timeline for the new company and where what what kind of key markets are you looking at yeah so when i spoke with delian a month and a half ago was not really decided on it yet so barely basically incorporating the business now already have basically I talked to a bunch of Kala shareholders

that when I announced that we had to shut down the business in the end we are forced by the state to shut down it's not even like we decided to do it I talked to a bunch of them

that basically said whatever you guys do again if it's the same business we want to back you again so I'm right now just thinking about how I want to think about financing and the first few months

is very high level at the moment not really into any details so that's the first step in the next few months the high level of higher level roadmap is to launch the first store in New York, middle of next year, midpoint of next year, exactly when is going to depend a bit on a few elements around

training and also timeline on regulation. But yeah, the first restaurant in New York and I launch a few restaurants there and then pretty highly considering franchising as kind of a path to scale a lot more aggressively than a lot more efficiently, capital efficiently than we did with Calais where we own every single restaurant. Yeah, I think most people don't understand. understand just how if you have a hit restaurant, you know, concepts and you can scale with, you know, with franchises, not only can franchisees, you know, change their lives through, through that opportunity, but you can have what ends up looking like a software or better than software margins in that like super lean HQ and just printing cash off the top line.

And imagine, imagine if the restaurant itself doesn't do 10% a bit dab, multiple X around above that. The amount of money you get out of the top line of the restaurant is just so much higher that let's say you are a typical restaurant does 10% a bit the margin. As a franchise, you're going to take 5%. That's not a lot of value you're taking for you basically not doing everything, but creating the whole value in the end. If you have a restaurant that does a lot more than that, you can get a much bigger chunk

of the top line at that restaurant and the gains into by not operating is also much better. Very cool. Cool. Well, excited for. you to come to the US and build here. I hope when someone's something down. We're gonna come to the restaurant. Amazing. Yeah, we'd love to try it.

Thanks so much. Thanks very. Bye. Bye. Great stuff. Tyler, any more progress? How you doing? I made it to fifth place.

Fifth place? Yeah. Let's go. My moves are 525. 525. You're hot. You're hot. You might be a number one by the end of the day.

Yeah. But it's pretty marginal. It's hard now. It's going to be hard from here on now. So squeeze out the last little bit of performance. Good job. It's all. your mindset Tyler yeah he did he did he did he did you did a consolation

prize ready oh I did a Rubik's Cube oh we got a Rubik's Cube now that's too easy for Tyler that's a that's a three by three I got the nine by nine Tyler can do the nine by nine that's yeah you you say that you can do the nine by nine but that thing has not ever done by tomorrow yeah I think that tomorrow you should do it like do it like do it live 20 minutes tomorrow do it tomorrow on the stream okay nice police I Yeah, yeah, scramble it. Scramble. It looks pretty scrambled to me.

It looks like the last, like the hardest part is ahead of you. No, the hardest part is... Oh, almost done. Okay. Okay. Nice. Little timeline? Yeah. Brian Johnson says,

Blueprint has been a pain in his butt. It's kept me from not focusing on the single thing I'm consumed with. How does the human race survive the rise of super intelligence? Every minute spent dealing with problems like, why a supplier shipped us something out of spec? Is a minute not spent figuring out how to make don't die the fastest growing ideology in history, increasing our odds of survival and thriving. At the same time, Blueprint produces products my body and mind that bring my body and mind great joy. I rely upon

them for my well-being. I trust it. So do tens of thousands of happy customers. After years of consuming, I am at a molecular level blueprint. How big do you think the business is? Tens of thousands of customers. What do you think LTV is? I had thought or heard that it was at like a hundred million dollar run rate. That feels about right. I feel like if you go into the blueprint ecosystem, you go pretty hard. Yeah, you could end up consuming six products in a debt. For everything. It's not just like, you know, one protein bar. And that's it. It's like they has a whole variety of things to purchase. Supplement companies continue to be undefeated in terms of monetizing health audiences. Yeah, especially if you have big audience. He does. Yeah, he says,

Blueprint is the best longevity stack in the world. That's not an exaggeration. It's meticulously designed based on scientific evidence third party tested comprehensive easy to consume delicious and priced to be accessible and anyways he'd go on to say that he's been basically attacked by people saying that he's grifting that he you know is is the whole kind of blueprint don't die ideology is meant to sell supplements Netflix did a documentary wow that's really really big. But the news here is that he's hiring, he's hiring a CEO who can lead the business day to day while he focuses on Don't Die. Yeah. And so, you know, interesting opportunity here. There's a bunch of different product lines. They have nourish, biomarkers, quantified, and I guess

clinics are coming soon. I don't know. I don't know that any exist yet, but they're raising money, too. They need some hardcore builders. So I think this would be a great SPAC candidate, John. It's real revenue, charismatic, founder. Yeah. Take it public, Brian. Just do it. Buy some meme stock for your treasury. Yeah, keep some game stop and some Bitcoin.

Just diversified memes. Yeah. Yeah. Some fart coin in there in the corporate treasury. That's the move. I can see it. What a run. He is such a master of earned media.

It's so crazy. This is basically what, like a hiring post? He's saying like I'm hiring to be. Yeah. Amazing essay, super viral, and then also a business insider piece that he gets coverage from and can screenshot. The master. What a beast. Sicky Chen. How does he do it? Putting up massive numbers. His portfolio company just exited today and he got paid. Waters on me next time folks because he received a distribution. Better than nothing. Two dollars and a zero. It's not a zero. What happened? It's so interesting that it wouldn't be a zero, but it also wouldn't be like like a real number. It's like the smallest amount. happens, the money has to go somewhere. I guess, I guess. Michael Caratios has a video today to win the AI

race and ensure global technological dominance. We need more power. So we have Michael will be coming on the show tomorrow, correct? Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of news here. I'm sure we'll be digesting it. The All In podcast is also having a crossover event with Hill and Valley. Yep. With a bunch of hitters breaking this down. There's a lot. A bunch of absolute dogs. Absolutely dogs. I don't know if there's been more absolute dogs under one roof in Washington and in maybe since hell and valley it's pretty it's pretty wild uh the actual action plan is really really like huge uh the the basic summary is that um they're shift they're trying to shift or they're shifting with this document AI policy at the federal

level from safety first posture we're worried about paper clipping we're worried about you know like the dumer scenario should we you know have an FDA That was something that was thrown around on podcasts a while ago. Should these models need to be approved by the federal government before they go into general release? Now there's a shift in posture to a growth in geopolitics posture, basically. So the immediate practical effect is the publication of priorities. Real world impact will depend on how quickly the 90 plus follow-on actions, especially deregulation, fast-track permitting, new export packages and procurement rules move

from paper to binding regulations, guidance, and contracts over the next few months. So there's a bunch of stuff in here. It's going to touch the OMB, NIST, all the cabinet agencies, commerce, energy, labor departments, Treasury, Department of Energy, basically census, like treat AI skill programs as tax-free educational assistance. There's a whole bunch of different ideas in here. They're bringing that golden retriever mode ideology to AI. There's going to be the creation of the Department of Defense,

AI and Autonomous Systems, virtual proving ground. I was talking to somebody yesterday about how big is AI on the battlefield, how big of an issue is having frontier AI in a military context. And it's very unclear if you can just, you know, hey, invade Taiwan, don't make mistakes, like one-shotting these problems. We don't think we're there. But even if you just think about if you're going up

against an adversary and they have Microsoft Excel and you don't. Well, their logistics are going to be smoother. And so even just having AI tools and systems in all the different little places within your military force, that could be advantageous, even if we're not talking about the Terminator killer robot scenario, like the humanoids, all of that stuff

feels a little bit further out. But just using AI to make standard processes a little bit more efficient, seems. It seems like an important advantage to have in a conflict. They're also expanding the National AI Research Resource Pilot in the creation of financial instruments, spot and forward markets to give startups on-demand access to GPU capacity, NSF, DO, Department of Energy, secure compute environments,

and national secure data service portal for controlled access. So there's some open source and research efforts. There's a ton of stuff in here. I'm sure it'll all be trickling out. Yeah, the open source stuff was exciting to see. Yeah, we'll see how Mark Zuckerberg fits into that because if he stays with the new super, the super intelligence team is stacked, but there was always a question about like, how long will Lama stay open source? China seems to be beating us up on open source. We saw Quinn doing really well,

Deep Seek doing really well. And so if there's going to be an open source champion in America, it feels like that could come from meta. And so it'll be interesting to see how badly he wants it, how badly he wants to stay there and how valuable that is to stay in the open source at the frontier of the open source. Speaking of that, there was an interesting debate back and forth. I forget who said this. Oh, Francois-Shaelais said, please note, we are not able to produce the 41.8% result from ARC AGI1.

That's the first ARCGI test, claimed by the latest Quinn 3 release, neither on the public e-val set nor on the semi-private set. The numbers we're seeing are in line with other recent base models. In general, only rely on scores verified by the Arc Prize Foundation on the semi-private set. That way you can trust that the methodology was consistent and fair across all models verified.

But then one of the team members, I think, says, hey, we use the JSON format for convenient parsing, all DMU for reproduction. Sounds good, waiting for your DM them. So we will have more news on whether or not Quinn III really did jump forward in Arc AGI. But again, you know, the, The goal should be 100% on RKGI since these are tests that, you know,

everyone from an intern to a, you know, I don't know, 10-year-old can do. I don't know how low it goes. I don't know if a 5-year-old can do it. I got to put it to the test. We've got to have the kids try. That's funny. Anyway. Martin Schrelli has a good post here responding to Caitlin Rellis.

She says, you must be one of four things to raise right now. AI high-flyer seed co with the promise of being an AI high-flying company. American dynamism slash reindustrialization company. And Martin says, how about just growing revenue and profits really fast? That is a fantastic strategy. The Lindy way. But then if you're growing profits really fast,

you might not need to raise. You might not be able to justify a big raise, potentially. Just raise at 500x revenue. I guess, yeah. 10,000 X EBITDA or something. Anyway, in other news, people are still meming about the nuclear reactor,

breach by hackers via Microsoft SharePoint. Yeah, I was interested in the timeline there. I was getting into that story yesterday. The vulnerability was discovered in May at a hacking competition that Microsoft put on. They then patched it later, which didn't work, and then the major hacks happened over the weekend just a few days ago.

And so the timeline there was kind of weird. Like, did they not? And people were pushing back and saying, like very unlikely that there was, you know, well, no, more so unlikely that super critical documents were shared in those systems, but still any of any and all information related to the U.S. nuclear weapons agency and just program broadly should be pretty secure. So yeah, anyways, I'm sure we'll learn more about the kind of timeline that led to that over time.

And some final words of advice from Sahil says buy a dot-com domain. Go into debt if you have to. I saw somebody quoted this and said, I actually did do this. I went into debt, the guy who got the domain contra.com, which is a nice. Yeah, he's raised a lot of money. Oh, that's great. It's a great domain, great name. Fantastic.

We got our domain from snag.com. Yeah. Rob. We'll check it out. Industry leading domain services. He helped us get TBPN.com in 30 minutes. Wow. It was one of the fastest negotiations of all time.

It's pretty awesome. And we are very grateful. It's also cool. He started Roe. Roe. Like a pharmaceutical company. Yeah. Row.co. So he's been in the domain game for a while.

Oh, yeah. Fire domain. And last, I've got to do one more final post. From Will Brown, chat, GPT should have a big green switch that says sicko mode. Like sicko fanci mode? S-I-C-O mode. If you want to just turn it on and just get gassed up by the model, you should be able to really turn it up. Stay safe out there.

Stay safe. Don't get lost in the sauce. Don't get lost in the sauce. And one more final post. Okay. Let's do it. One more. Brew Markets is highlighting the CEO of NVIDIA.

Genson has a legendary LinkedIn profile. He was at Denny's for five years, 1978 to 83. He was a dishwasher, bus boy, and a waiter. So just working his way up the Orchard. If he had stayed there, he probably would have become CEO. But he went and a decade later founded Nvidia and has been running it for 32 years and seven months.

What a run. Biggest company in the world. I think we low-key got to put him in the truth zone because he worked at AMD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's the post. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I didn't highlight.

Leaving out the years that he worked at AMD and LSI is a great example of how a lionizing narrative works, creates the impression of superhuman genius, which confers a valuable aura that has material impact on morale negotiations, et cetera, similar to Singapore was a fishing village. I actually don't know that much about the rumor that Singapore was a fishing village. I guess it wasn't. I don't know the story of Singapore.

We got to do Singapore deep dive incoming. Sounds interesting. But yeah, worked at AMD and LSI Logic and then started Invidia. But he took those off the LinkedIn because he's like, ah, why should I promote my competitors? Smart man. I'm not competing with Denny's. Apparently the first Denny's that he worked at or something has a plaque on the wall, like Nvidia CEO worked here.

Very cool. And he still does Denny's stunts. He did one with the acquired guys. He came by and like, I think he delivered them Denny's or something like that when they were doing some event at Nvidia. At this point, he should just buy Denny's. It's $2.37 million. It's trading a $270 million market cap right now.

It's that cheap? Wow. I didn't realize it was pure play. It's also, I guess it's getting meme stocked. It's up 16% in the past five days. Not financial advice. Not financial advice. Jensen should really pick it up quick before it runs too hard.

Yeah. I mean, he's in the interest of keeping it alive because if it just goes away and no one remembers. He could turn every Denny's into a showroom for. his latest chips, you know, just carve out a booth. I feel like I read some article about Denny's or some sort of, you know, restaurant chain using AI to help the servers or something. Everyone has an AI play.

Restaurant, restaurant solutions or something. Oh, an IHop, I believe. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. Headquartered in Pasadena. Very American episode today, John. You could not put that football down the whole time. It's fun.

It's nice to just have like a little fidget. The original fidget's been. Something about John with a football. That's great. It's great. Yeah, I tried to keep it like below the desk during the interview so I could be a little bit more serious. But, you know, I think eventually we're going to be tossing the pigskin. Toss in the pigskin. Well, talking to some Found your brother raised. On that note, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and see tomorrow.

Have a good one. Cheers, folks.