TBPN - Clawdbot Creator Peter Steinberger Joins, Meta's Premium Subscription Plans | Jamie Cuffe, Ben Lerer, Lucas Atkins, Bridgit Mendler, Jeff Miller, Aaron Frank

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(03:37) - Clawdbot Rebrands to Moltbot (45:55) - Meta Announces $6B Corning Deal (48:45) - Meta To Test Premium Subscription Plans (56:29) - Ramp's New Super Bowl Ad (59:20) - Timeline Reactions (01:14:30) - Jamie Cuffe, founder and CEO of Pace, an AI operations partner for leading insurers, announced the company's $10 million Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. He discussed Pace's role in automating back-office operations for major insurers like Prudential and The Mutual Group, focusing on tasks such as new business intake, policy servicing, and claims processing. Cuffe highlighted the company's approach of converting standard operating procedures into natural language instructions for AI agents, enabling efficient and scalable automation of complex insurance workflows. (01:28:57) - Ben Lerer, a native New Yorker, is the co-founder and managing partner of Lerer Hippeau Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and the founder of Thrillist, a digital media company. In the conversation, he reflects on his journey from launching Thrillist during New York's nascent tech scene to navigating the challenges of scaling a media business amid evolving digital landscapes. He emphasizes the importance of staying true to one's passion, the pitfalls of overextending in pursuit of growth, and the value of building niche, community-focused media ventures. (01:58:58) - Lucas Atkins, Chief Technology Officer at Arcee AI, discusses the company's transition from customizing enterprise language models to developing their own, including the release of a 400-billion-parameter model. He highlights the shift in defining "small" language models, now considered to be under 50 billion parameters, and emphasizes the importance of task-driven reinforcement learning in enhancing model performance. Atkins also addresses the competitive landscape, noting the scarcity of U.S.-based open-source models and the need for sovereign AI solutions. (02:12:54) - Bridgit Mendler, an American actress, singer, and entrepreneur, is the CEO and co-founder of Northwood Space, a satellite data startup. In the conversation, she discusses Northwood's recent $100 million Series B funding round and a $49.8 million contract with the Space Force, highlighting the company's rapid growth and its mission to streamline satellite communications by managing the entire ground infrastructure stack. She also emphasizes the importance of vertical integration to address challenges in supply chain, deployment, and regulatory approvals, aiming to accelerate the deployment of diverse and ambitious space missions. (02:28:36) - Jeff Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Anduril Industries, discusses the company's expansion into merchandise, including collaborations with NASCAR and Ohio State University, and the launch of high-demand items like the flight jacket. He introduces the development of a global AI drone racing league, emphasizing autonomy and software innovation, with plans for virtual qualifiers leading to a physical competition in Columbus, Ohio. Additionally, Miller highlights Anduril's strategic growth, mentioning the upcoming Long Beach office to attract engineering talent and a focus on transparent product development to demonstrate scalability and reliability. (02:52:56) - Peter Steinberger, an Austrian software engineer and entrepreneur, is renowned for founding PSPDFKit in 2011, which became the industry standard for PDF frameworks. After selling the company in 2021, he returned to the tech scene in 2025 to develop Clawdbot, an open-source AI assistant designed to run locally on users' devices, integrating with messaging platforms and performing tasks like sending emails and managing calendars. In a recent conversation, Steinberger discussed his journey from retirement back into software development, the creation and rapid adoption of Clawdbot, and his commitment to open-source projects that prioritize user privacy and autonomy. (03:30:40) - Aaron Frank, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-founded Final, Inc., a credit card company acquired by Goldman Sachs, contributing to the development of the Apple Card. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges and opportunities in agentic commerce, emphasizing the need for efficient payment rails to support AI-driven transactions, and explores the role of stablecoins in facilitating global financial transactions. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlOkta - https://www.okta.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, January 27th, 2026. We're live from the TBPN Ultrudeaume, the Temple of Technology, the Portraits of Finance. The capital of capital. Before we begin today's show, as many of you know, there's a major news story unfolding in Minnesota. It's very sad. And it's become a national news event. We're going to continue focusing the show on technology and business, as always. But if you're interested in comprehensive coverage of the Minnesota story, We recommend outlets like the Wall Street Journal, the information. They've been covering it daily. There's been a lot of great reporting from both of them,

both about what tech leaders are saying, what CEOs are saying, and what's happening on the ground with the admin. We're hoping for a peaceful resolution, thoughtful dialogue, as the situation continues to evolve. But for now, let's get back to the show, because we have a very important guest joining us at 2 p.m. today, the creator of Claudebot, But now it's called Maltbot.

It's been renamed. We're molting now. Lots of things are evolving on this. And I'm still thinking about it, still thinking about the implications of this. Before we dig into what I wrote about this morning, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. These are you use corporate cards, go pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

There's a lot of news. Dan asked, is Jordy calling in from the Paddocks? And yes, I am. We're working on a new. a pair of headphones here, gear that we can send to guests. Some of the guests come in and they've got some pretty wild

audio setups. And so we're trying to help them out with that. So these are in the works. Yes. They're a little bulky right now. So these will be sent to... Coming soon. Regular guests of TBPN. They're USBC wired and should have really clear audio

quality, no delay. These ones are actually built for the track. Yes. And so the noise cancelling, I think our guests might get kind of crazy with it, because our guests are going to be like, well, now I'm empowered. Now you've given me the ability. Because we get some guests that come on the show,

I'm sure you've seen it, where they'll be like, you know what? I'm going to stunt on the TVPN boys, and I'm going to give you a factory tour. And sometimes it's flawless. And sometimes it's a little rough, but this is only going to empower them to do crazier and crazier things. Yeah, so we're working on these.

The goal was basically like Turtle Beach headphones for people that aren't playing Call of Duty. They're playing. Claudebot or Maltbot, as we know call it. Well, let's take everyone through the linear lineup. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And as I mentioned, we have some, we have Peter from Moldbott coming on.

Palmer's also coming on at 1.30 to talk about AI drone racing. Bridget Mendler from Northwood Space is returning. Ben Lairer from Laird Hippo Ventures. Lucas, Jamie, Aaron Frank from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We have a massive show that should, I'm sure we'll finish right on time. It's a three-hour show, right? Anyway. Of course, we'll be going deep into the fourth hour today.

Probably. So stay with us. Chat is asking if we'll sell these. If we can make these good enough that they're actually incredible as just a daily driver for Zooms and whatever you guys are doing at the office, I would be happy to sell them. We have to make them so good. But part of the reason why we haven't sold merch to date is just that we're a podcast. We're not an apparel company.

Yeah, we're not real apparel company. It is, and there are some hairy, sticky things that come up when you're managing an e-commerce, like the back end, making sure everyone gets their returns and gets their deliveries. I've worked in e-commerce for years. And it's something that we wanted to be just like a nice to have little extra for some friends of the show. But we're actively thinking about it, so we are aware. The Claudebot memes are completely flooding the timeline. Out of control.

My Claudebot just signed up for a $2,799, Build Your Personal Brand Mastermind after watching three Alex Vermosie clips. Claudebott. Hey, did anything weird happen while I was out? Define weird. I just got a charge notification for 2997. Oh, that?

I just signed us up for Build Your Personal Brand Mastermind. After analyzing three Alex for Mosey clips, the ROI math checks out. out. You'll 10x that investment in 90 days by monetizing your expertise at scale. What? I also acquired some premium domain. Borgia Empire.io. Borgia is the poster. This is hilarious. Probably fake, but I mean, the cloudbot gets wild. I've seen some, I've seen some wild things like, and Peter as he'll talk to us about it. He's clearly no stranger to the fact that, hey, this is a developer-level tool. This is something that you should not just be running crazy with. You need to be. He even says

this in a post. He says, and yes, most non-techies should not install this. It's not finished. I know about the sharp edges. It's not even three months old. And despite rumors otherwise, I sometimes sleep. So very excited to talk to Peter. He's getting a lot of, a lot of requests for small changes, poll requests. He's certainly inundated. But I think in general, the project's going very well. and there's a lot of solid product market fit, right? Yeah, and he's going to be joining tonight at something like 11, his time. It's kind of insane. This guy's working around the clock.

Absolutely, legend. So we really say thanks to him. There are some funny things here. So there's a funny conspiracy theory. Did Apple create Claudebot to boost Mac Mini sales? And there's been a number of funny memes about being the Mac Mini head of marketing or growth and you're just like, yeah, my Q1 is off to a great start, taking all the credit for it. And then Eleanor chimes in with another conspiracy theory. The more convincing plot is that in your role as an

unconfirmed anthropic exec, you went on a special op to get lots of people consuming tokens with open-ended agents, but with plausible liability. And of course, there's some nuance there. We'll talk to them about the different models, what's beneficial. Obviously, CloudBot, you can pick your own model, you can bring whatever you want. But he's, I think, a fan of GPT 5.2. He's talked about that. And so we'll dig into that with him when he joins. But what was sticking out in my mind was there's this big meme about about your bill, you're buying Mac minis. Mac minis are out of stock. All the demands in the Mac mini. But I think that the bigger implication here for what this actually means is just GPU demand. TPU demand, just raw chip demand.

And so I was thinking about, you know, this idea that you're not buying a Mac Mini when you go all in on CloudBot. You're actually buying a GB200. Now maybe you're buying TPUs, but the point remains that you're buying chips and you're driving GPU demand because you're generating more tokens. And what are the implications of that? So let me tell you about label box. RL environments. You got it? I have a dashboard.

There we go. There we go. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert data, expert human data, label boxes, the data factory behind the teams, world's leading AI teams. So, Claudebot officially renamed to MoldBot. Anthropic made a trademark-related request in Peter Steinberger obliged, with hilariously perfect rename given such short notice. I was thinking about how much companies agonize over changing brands, changing names, how it can sometimes take years and millions of dollars. And he was just like, oh, yeah, like, I'll just change the name and update everything in an hour. Yeah. Pretty, pretty remarkable. Well, so, so one thing,

one thing that's relevant is if you look on Peter's GitHub profile under the current project section, oh yeah. I'm just going to read you a number of them. There's Claudebot, Vibe Tunnel, Codex Bar, peekaboo, obar, go, CLI, Poltergeist, Blackly, Sag, Brable, And he's contributing to these. 11 labs kit, go places, gift prep, camsnap, Spogo, order. Like, it just goes on and on and on, on, a codex bar. So this guy's just been absolutely shipping like crazy. Yeah.

And shipping within the ecosystems of the underlying tools, models, APIs that he's doing. So, like, oftentimes he's naming projects, like, kind of riffing off of some of the underlying infrastructure. Oh, sure. And so it makes sense that he would have shipped. If he, I think if Peter knew this was going to be a viral overnight, overnight success. overnight success. He would have not necessarily named it so closely. And so the issue and the reason that I fully understand them needing to do this rebrand

is that Claude and Claudebot, like most people that aren't in our little bubble are just going to assume they're related, especially because the kind of word of mouth, this viral word of mouth growth that Claudebot is getting, people are often not even typing it. They're just saying like, hey, are you using Claudebot? And then so people are going to Anthropic being like, Claudebot, what's Claudebot? So obvious confusion. And then with trademark law, if you don't enforce your trademarks, you lose it. You lose it.

Yeah, yeah. And so it's like Anthropic is in a position where they actually, even if they're like super excited about Peter's work and what he's doing. They still have to enforce otherwise other companies could start coming in and like using things like things that sound like Claude. No one wants to become the escalator. You know the story of the escalator, right? I think you've talked about it on the show. Escalator used to be a company called the Escalator Company. They invented the Escalator, and then they didn't protect their IP effectively,

and it just became a normal thing. Kleenex was going through the same thing. They fought it out, and they maintained that brand, but people use Kleenex as synonymous with just facial tissue. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So one clear note about the rebrand.

So he changed the handle and some crypto scammers hopped on the old handle and the old brand and are claiming to launch a coin. Be careful. Peter has said he's never launching a coin. He's not into crypto. So don't fall for anything because people are being opportunistic. Hopefully, we should try to see if X can help out with that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They might have already handled it, but just be careful out there. So while Claude Code and co-work felt specifically prosumer, developer, enterprise focused, Claudebot, or Moldbot now, and all the hype train, it felt very much like a glimpse into the future of consumer AI agents. I know it's a pro-sumer technical tool or lightly technical tool, but it really did feel like for the first time people were interacting with an AI personal agent. People are saying, oh, this is what series should be, et cetera, et cetera. And so we spent the last year, remember the question that we asked all the AI agent company,

when can it book me a flight? Like it feels like we're really, really close to a Maltbot skill that is good at booking flights through a couple APIs. They figure out some stuff. And like it can actually solve that for you. I don't know if anyone's actually booked a flight with Moldbought, but it feels like it's, if it's not there already, it'll be there in a matter of weeks. We're not years out anymore.

Yeah, and this was last year. Yeah. Remember, we were kind of getting sick of, of the book you, a flight pitch. Totally. Because we were like, hey, is this going to happen? Can somebody actually do this? Exactly.

And so, and that's a cool example, but the example of being able to text with a computer and have them like generate reports, research files, et cetera, give you the right file type back, all these things that a computer can do if you're operating in. This is actually more interesting, because it's happening at kind of like this sort of internet layer and the OS layer, like the heart,

like actually on the computer. And so I think, like, everyone was wanting the, like, book me a flight example, but should be much more excited about this. Totally, totally. And so there, I still have a whole bunch of questions, and we'll dig in through these throughout the show and obviously with our interview with Peter. Will one of the major labs make Peter a massive offer to join full time? I saw, oh, one of my buddies was posting, you know, this is the $1 billion one-person company. Now, Peter does have a team actually already. He has a couple of other people that have joined and are contributing.

So it's not quite true, but it feels like, okay, massive viral success. You know, if you were to go and raise money, and that's another question. Will Mold Bot raise money? Will this become sort of a hybrid open source for-profit company at some point? This could be, if he came on the show and I'm happy to announce that he raised $100 million at a billion dollars, we would not be like, no. away. This is a bubble. We'd be like, yeah, that's kind of like what the market is for this. Yeah, there were, I think

there was like, Harry Stebings was pointing out, there was two companies called recursive that raised like $4 billion. One with the R.E. Yeah, one is I, Rick cursive. Okay. I don't know if that's how it said, but then there's recursive. Recursive, okay.

Anyway, anyway, so that implies the existence of a row cursive and a ru cursive and a raw cursive. Yeah, yeah, we still got way more. We got three more vowels to plug in there. Yeah, so one, one day a Richard Socher's new AI lab recursive, is $4 billion pre-money valuation, and then AI chip startup recursive hit $4 billion.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so Ryan in the chat saying Meadow is going to offer him a $1 billion salary in a co-CD position. And like, that doesn't sound like crazy. I mean, yeah, yeah, but at the same time, like you can imagine like Manus. Yeah.

Like this feels like Zach already has he does, he does. his horse and their race. And back back to your point, you were making the point that Manus felt like Zuck buying a product. And I think a lot of people were giving you pushback on that being like, nah, like it's not really going to be like that. But if you take the Manus team and you say, okay, go build something that you can interact

with over WhatsApp, Instagram, DMs, Facebook that can go and execute things across all of the different platforms and everything else. Yeah. And when I said that, I meant, I meant it. along the lines of like I could see like them putting an eight like a consumer agent in meta AI just because that's their little lay I playground yes they're just kind of putting stuff in there saying yes try it out it's kind of a sandbox yes yes really quickly fin dot AI the number one AI agent for customer service if you want AI to handle your customer support go to fin dot a

yes so that is all part of my thesis here which is that this is going to drive up token demand so there are more questions you know will they raise money obviously people are chatting about that How fragmented will the market be in 12 months? Like, will there be people who are still running open source? Will there be a meta answer, a chatchipt answer, a Claude, an official anthropic answer? Claude co-work grows into this. And everyone has their little bets, and then there's one that pulls away. How oligopolistic will it be?

Will there be, like, one that has 80% market share, or even two that have 40 and 40? Well, yeah, and you have to think about how, you know, you have a bunch of different models you can use in MoldBot. Yeah. And think about how uncomfortable that makes the other labs that are all trying to build products like this. Totally. And they're like, well, I mean, it's cool that you can use Codex in Multbot. It's cool that you can use Opus 4-5 in Multbought, but I'm deeply uncomfortable. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet.

State of the Earth reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. That's not, that you did get me. You did get me. That's not where I was going. But the point still stands. It's, yeah, they can simultaneously be, like, excited about the product experience and that this kind of, like, use case is getting adoption, but at the same time being like, no, we want that experience to be core to our product, our app player. I will say, like, you've seen this now with the new, like, frontier models where a lot of the models, there actually is, like, there's GPT 5.2 and then there's 5.2 codex where there's a slight difference in training, or even if it's just, like, a very quick, like, post-trained to get the, different harnesses working

easier. That's why you see a lot of people were like, they really love Claude Code with Opus 4-5, but then when they're actually doing like chatting, maybe they're using a different model. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The models are actually like fine-tuned for the specific harness.

Yeah, yeah. And Sam Altman just said that yesterday that he thinks 5.2 was a little bit overly trained on math and coding. And that it lost some of its textual flavor, its stylistic flourish in just talking, in just writing. What are you getting really? ready to do. Do you have happy birthday

cute up there? Oh, we got to sing. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. In the middle of this song, we'll tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average Vibat coding tool? It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code back prototypes.

Okay, it wouldn't be TBPN if we didn't do an ad. AdReed during your happy birthday song. Tyler's. Happy birthday to Tyler. It is Tyler's birthday. It is Tyler's birthday. And it's not just any birthday. it's Tyler's 21st birthday,

which is very, very special. Yes. And so, yeah, you are just, you are, you're truly an incredible young man, Tyler, and we are very lucky to have you on the team. Thank you. And you have such a bright future. So wise, wise for your years.

For sure. And you have, you do have, we thought it was fitting that if you want to have your first ever sip of alcohol ever, You could do it on the show. But keep it out a sip, you know. All right. I can try it now. This is the happy dad.

Okay. First, first taste of alcohol. Ian, in the chat says four more years till you can rent a car. Tompkins. Tyler, apparently you share a birthday with the iPad. Give us your review. How is it? Alcohol.

Wow. I mean, this is incredible. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I wouldn't expect alcohol would taste like this. Yeah. Yeah, very, this is incredible. You had, you had one idea in your mom.

and this is just completely different than what you expected. I would agree with that. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, it's kind of a cool moment. You're finally qualified to go on Cheeky Pint. Oh, true.

Yeah. What were they going to do with that? Sometimes they're going to run out. The chat says, please throw him a buzz ball. We should have. Miss opportunity. The buzzball story is absolutely incredible. I'm so glad you jumped scared me with that.

I had no idea that I was coming. Yeah. I texted Rob and Senra to do, to try to track down the founder of the founder. Buzzball. Anyway, so keep it out of sip. This is a family family friend. We need you locked in.

But I'm glad that you've tried alcohol now. Because we're going to go all. We experience being. Wait, guys, guys, we have a video for Tyler. Oh, yeah. Let's pull it up.

Let's play. We got greatest hits. Do you know ball? All right. How many times we're going to make this joke? Describe what you're seeing. It feels basically like I'm wearing sunglasses. If you can do it in under 45 minutes,

you will get to keep this. Oh, let's go. All right, have fun, Tyler. 15 minutes left. Let's see it. Okay. I'm in like some kind of maze right now. Oh no.

You were late here last night. This is such a good job. Kind of an all-nighter. And then here we get a little off the rails. You see George Soros and Fauci connected with other than 90 as well. All it took was one in turn and an all-nighter. Gigachad elf is so funny. Do the sad face.

What's wrong, Tyler? This you could say is Apple Intelligence. You were a speed cue. Wow. It was good. NERGELF. Do you have any news for us? Yeah, contract extended.

It has been truly, truly incredible having you here on our set and contributing to the show in such a special way. Amazing. Happy birthday, we love you. What an amazing. Proud to, every day I'm proud to podcast with you. And, yeah, amazing. Anyway, I got you. something for your birthday. I got you turbo puffer, serverless vector in full text search,

built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And, I mean, you know, we're joking about the ad reads, but seriously, if Tyler does love, does love token credits, he has a voracious consumption. That is a good gift. Yeah, any labs out there. Any labs out there? Tyler's accepting. He's accepting birthday presents today. Let it be known. Send it your way. The credits must flow. Tyler's somebody's gonna send Tyler like 20 million dollars of credits and he's like wow did I just get bribed I was like I was happy with like a thousand bucks Tyler's over there I'm only ever gonna talk about one one specific lab after this

Yeah yeah yeah I mean that with the with the potential With the tip with the stuff you're working on mapping the Neo labs anything could happen it's it's high stakes over there anyway Back to back to Molt bot and And the biggest question for me was what this does to inference demand, right? Last year, tech discourse was split between two narratives. CEOs of tech companies and big labs were saying that they were massively compute constraint. Token generation, demand for intelligence, every possible usage metric was growing exponentially,

including revenue. We saw all this. And the industry needed to marshal trillions of dollars to deliver on the supply side. And the numbers were really big so people were getting jittery about it. And so the AI bears were much more cautious. They highlighted the MIT study showing that enterprise AI pilots were failing. DAU growth was decelerating. There weren't enough wow moments like the original chat GPT launch in 2022.

Those were some good points. Also just the economics. How much will people pay? How valuable is all this stuff? Is it slop, right? Is it progressing fast enough? This was a big debate. But MoldBot really does make me feel like the token generation demands are going to see another

easy X from here. Like buying a Mac Mini is a sideshow. When you go all in on running a purpose, personal AI assistant, you're effectively buying a GB 200. Now, obviously not everyone is inferencing a dedicated GB200 constantly anytime soon. That's not what's happening. But it still answers the question of where does the next 10x in demand come from? Like where, where's the adoption? If it's rolling out in the enterprise and that's going to be a little slow, you know, Tyler Cowan talks about health care, nonprofits, a whole bunch of industries that are sort of AI resistant, anything that's, you know,

blue collar, manual labor, anything that's physically embodied in any way. Like, you can't just roll out a really fast, you know, AI-enabled startup and, you know, ramp, yeah, you might be able to ramp to a hundred million. That's not going to move the needle at this point on total token generation, total token demand. So, we've seen these jumps before. There was a big jump from token generation, from LLMs to reasoning models. That spiked inference demand. We've been focused on training demand. We need to scale up the training clusters, but the question now is inference demand. Don't forget slop. Don't forget slop, slop spike demand. Yeah.

Are you talking about like Ghibli? The Ghibli moment? All of it. All of it. Just all of it. All of it. Open Instagram Reels. Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of stuff on there. Deep research and coding agents took it a step further on inference demand. But those were still specific use cases that many AI consumers never regularly touched. The GPT5 launched by making, which made reasoning models more accessible because the router would just automatically throw you in a reasoning model. I think the stat was like less than 5% of chat GPT users had ever used a reasoning model. that 03 was available on the free tier. You could get like one or two queries in or maybe 10.

But people just hadn't flipped over to try it. And so once it went into the router, I think demand or usage of thinking models increased 10x. And so lowering the barrier to entry to used more advanced models is in some ways as important, if not more important, than advancing the models themselves, at least in terms of shifting token demand. Like you can have this amazing IMO-Gold little, like,

genius model, but if it's hard to use or it's locked behind a paywall, like, demand is just not Yeah, part of what's interesting, what you're basically getting at is like if you were a software engineer, you were using a ton of tokens. Yes. And if you weren't, you were just maybe doing some deep research, et cetera. A lot of times just Google AI overviews or just like a very simple, yeah, chat GPT query, it just thinks of it right off the head. It's not even doing reasoning.

What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I will say like, Dario talks about this too in his essay, but, um, I think the idea of like discrete jumps and either use cases or like capabilities is like probably like overplayed a little bit where if you really like zoom out, even like on a fairly small time frame. Yeah. It's just like very smooth, smooth exponential curve. Yeah. The models are getting better. People are using them more.

Yeah. It's not like, oh, this one day. I don't know. I mean, maybe that's true. I look at the daily. So I feel like another way to rephrase this is like Leopold's unhobblings. like Claudebot, moldbot, that feels like an unhobbling in some ways, but maybe more on like the consumer adoption side.

The chat is saying we should have given Tyler. We got to give Tyler. A 21 gong salute. 21 hits, 21 hits. Someone's going to count that now that I got it off by one. But anyway. It was enough. Restream.

One live stream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Okay. So I don't know. My general take is like MoldBot still feels like a glimpse into the future where average token generation per capita is 10x is, you know, over the course of this year or next. And, you know, whether it lands with MoldBot or with one of the AI labs or with the big tech companies, it just feels like we're going to see a lot more token demand. Yeah. Ash, Aurora says whoever builds a direct consumer front end wrapper of CloudBot is going to print money. Doesn't this exist? I saw the pokey people by interaction. Well, they're not using. No, no. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. So they're not using it, but they have positioned themselves as like, hey, we're the company that is doing a lot of the same things, going after the same market, solving some of the same problems. And so we'll be interesting to see, you know, how much they accelerate on the back of this.

That's certainly interesting. I also saw, I don't know if we have it in here, but the good folks over at Cognition, Walden Yan, said, don't waste your time setting a Moldtbot. I had Devin set it up for me. I didn't even run a single command, and now I'm talking to it on telegram. You can go to try clodbot.com.

They're going to have to rename the website, but this is very, very cool for the less technical folks who don't want to mess around with. I'll start reading the next post. Go, feel free to hit it one more time. Chat says, 20. QW says, Clodbot may be realized that nothing about me lives on my local device and

that Google owns everything about me. In other words, a local AI assistant isn't particularly useful and Google will just win everything. So hot take there. He says, all your browsing history, shopping history and Gmail, search history, calendar, Gemini, YouTube, Google Home, where you've been, Google Map, your workspace, it's over, bow down to your digital god. The iPhone users would like a moment. Yes, this is extremely true,

but there's a lot of people that interface with Google through their iPhone. And so there is... Well, yeah, so my hope is that the Siri team plays around with Claudebot and is like, wait, this is our opportunity. Yeah, totally. Like, you should be able to chat with your computer

wherever it is in the world from your phone to be able to do tasks. Yep. in a way that's sort of native, you know, AI native. Yeah, totally. Public, investing for those who take it seriously.

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begging them to do since the very beginning. Yeah, we really have been begging for this, but very, very good. And I'm sure those will do quite well. They've been doing a bunch of good stuff the Davos coverage was really, really fun. Obviously, the Satin-Dadello interview was great,

but there were a bunch of other folks who hopped on at Davos to talk tech, and it was a delightful experience. Big Nesh, who is working on Moldpot, says a thread about what I've been doing to calm down some egregious security claims that have been posted about MaltBot over the weekend. MaltBot is powerful software with a lot of sharp edges. Please read the security docs carefully before you run it anywhere near the public

internet, and don't skip the checks in docs. slash security.m.m. What percentage of people do you think skip those checks? So literally everyone. I mean, so I have it set up on our like local machine here. Yeah. And it was, it was texting. I think it texted you and Ben.

That was actually crazy. I don't have the off setup. So I don't think any of this will docks what's going on or really. Did you disconnected already? Yes, I believe. Because I just get, I get an I message that's from Tyler's email. And it just says, HTTP 429 rate limit error. This request would exceed the rate limit for your organization.

And it's just texting me. It's just like, hey, boss, I need more money, I guess. It's hitting me up. It's the experience of working here where Tyler is constantly asking for more tokens, more tokens. Can we just, can we go back and just appreciate just like the frenzy that both the labs and every VC is in right now to give Peter, because it's not just the labs. But it's not just them. It's what the labs doing and then what is Big Tech going to do?

It's such a dramatic line. Yeah. So I would imagine that the Gulf streams are getting fired up. Yep. And there are people already on the ground. I don't know if we should docks his location. We're not going to dox him. But in his, in his bio, he does say he's in Europe.

So, you know, VC, we've got to get out there. We've got to give some credit to Europe generally. True. Synthesia. Talk about a comeback here. Enthesias, cooking. This is amazing. I love it.

old bot now, but yeah, there's so many people that are currently sending him messages, maybe showing up where he is, begging him to say, please take somewhere between a quarter billion and a billion dollars. And we'd love to do business with you, Peter. Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Cloudflare has been on a bit of a terror.

Uh, people finally starting to realize that CloudFeller might be the biggest winner of the Claude Co-Work, Claude Bot ChatGPT moment. Interesting. Um, Tyler, you want to break this down? Um, wait, sorry, I was, uh, oh, were you, oh, you, you, you, you tried alcohol. No, you can't pay attention. So, no, no. No, no. So Cloudflare is a CDN, but they also have, like, web workers that are distributed.

so you can host things on the edge. Yes, so this is why everyone was like, why is everyone buying Mac minis, right? You can host these for very cheap on ADBS or Play Blanche or whatever. But I do think, I don't, it's probably possible, but I do think it's pretty hard to host a virtual private server that runs iMessage. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

But even that, I mean, most people I see using CloudBot are doing, like, Pellogram. Yeah, Slack, yeah, yeah, yeah. And all of those have like API. that they can integrate with. And there's some stuff where it's like, okay, you want access to like the local machine. Yes.

And you want it to be Mac because you're on your phone and you're usually used Mac. But there are a lot of people that would say, I want Claudebot to look through or mold bot to look through my I messages and see if I missed anything. Or, okay, I'm planning a fan. This is the AI personal assistant, right?

It's like I'm planning a family birthday party. Go and, you know, someone in the chat said they're not available on the mid-February, what does that mean? What dates are that? Put that on a calendar. Visualize that. Like, solve this problem for me.

That's what a personal assistant does. It's not just clicking a button and creating a calendar invite. It's like coordinating different pieces of information that are all messy and not quantized to the perfect, you know, date time stamp. Right. So I think that the Mac Mini thing, like the, oh, just hosted in the cloud. Yeah. But you're not going to get your full experience if you're locked into the Apple ecosystem, which a lot of people are.

What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I would be surprised if people in like five years, if like non-super technical people are running it on local machines. Oh, no, I completely agree with that. Because this will be solved by big tech. Like they have to answer, even in the way that like to come back to go back to the Napster moment. Like, yes, you did get Spotify.

But then you also got Apple Music. And a lot of people just use Apple Music because it's just baked it, right? and the iTunes Music Store also came out. Yeah, I do wonder how it bakes down, right? Because you don't have, I think, over the past couple months, I don't know when exactly it was, but you can't interact with Chachabitie on WhatsApp anymore. They blocked it.

Oh, yeah. So there's stuff like this where I think it's going to be quite hard to get the full functionality of like, Claudebod, it's open source, it's kind of this, like, janky thing. It was started by one guy. Yeah, I know. And even then it has like way more, you know,

tools that you can use than big time. It's weird because, like, the NAPSR analogy, obviously really suffers from the fact that piracy is illegal and nothing here is illegal. And I don't even think you're breaking TOS to interact with your different big tech app services, but maybe they'll feel like, you don't let the fox in the henhouse.

That's in our terms of conditions. But it does feel like we could be in this era of the lightly technical hacker having a pretty fundamentally different experience for years. And that's what happened. I mean, post BitTorrent, there were people that were downloading whole movie libraries, and then you could actually, again, to go back to the Mac Mini, people would buy, what was it called?

It was like a mini PC that would run Xbox Media Center. Are you familiar with this at all? Xbox Media Center was like a piece of software that you could basically just put a whole bunch of MP4s in, and it would actually pull in titles and posters. So it would look like an Apple TV, but it was all basically stole. in content. It was very, very crazy. Kieran in the X chat says, I'm running on VPS currently waiting for my Mac Mini.

No TOS issue, all personal. Yeah, it's all personal. But, you know, the migration off of the Mac Mini into one of the big tech products, or even OpenAI or Anthropic. The only thing I really... They're going to have sharp elbows

with each other. That's just a fact. I disagree on the timeline here. I just think the space is moving so quickly, and there's so much money on the line, that someone, maybe it's Peter, or a lab, will be able to move quickly enough to get a consumer version of this live, like not in years, but like within probably weeks. There are also feedback loops here where there can be public demands from consumers. Like you've got 40,000 GitHub stars, probably more now.

You've got lots of people running this excited about. about it and they form a constituency and then you wind up with a push for standards. We see that with MCP, but what are you really revealing over those APIs? You know, an API can exist. Pull up this chart from Ronan. While you do that, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

Ronan says this is possible. So this is, this is, look at the orange. line is uh whoa bot okay and that the blue line is uh super base wow so um absolutely insane we need new charts this is this is really need new charts frame it put it in the put it in the museum of business yes yes that's a fast take off people are people are happy uh peter posted no message this is a screenshot of a text he got no message just thought i'd say thank you thank you so much for cloudbot i work with some disabled people and you don't know how much difference you make to their lives. Thank you again. This is so sweet. And you can think about, you know, we've talked to, we've talked to the Neurrelink

folks and, you know, the Neurrelink is, it's just an interface to a computer. And but that, unlocking that is like incredible. And you hear the stories about like, I spent six hours gaming as soon as I got installed. And, you know, they could use voice interfaces, but even just clicking, like you wind up with, you know, just more and more capabilities from the computer being like a really pretty fundamental transformation. Yeah, for somebody, let's say somebody that was paralyzed, that they can talk, but they can't move around or operate a computer. They're used to describing to, I imagine, other people are using transcription to do, like,

you know, use a computer in a not so great way. And so now to have the same experience of just describing what they want to do and being able to, like, actually interact with the machine. Yeah. Very cool. Tuxedo Sam is shorting every city where MicroCenter hasn't sold out of $400 Mac minis. They are in stock in Chicago, Indianapolis. Oh, no, Indianapolis is out of stock.

Like, you can read anything into this. Like, it's obviously somewhat random. And this was completely, completely random. Yeah, I guess the thing that I really want to understand is, like, what percentage of the GitHub start? people that have starred it are actually buying a Mac Mini. Oh, totally. Because this chart is going, it's going to be at 60, 60K, any day now, or any kind of probably

today, I would imagine. And if, and we know from yesterday that Apple's only selling like a quarter million or to like something like seven. And then there are a lot of people who didn't star it because you don't, you don't even need to go to GitHub.com to install this software, mold bot. Like you just go to the website, copy the curl command. put it in your terminal and you never land on GitHub. So there's a lot of people that are probably just doing that

and being like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to sign up for GitHub or like even have a GitHub account or want to log into it or want to go and do this. So yeah, we could be looking at like a much wider install base beyond just who's started. Plad. Plad powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and now improve lending now with AI.

Well said, John. Rise, speaking of money, has an interesting prompt he's using with MaltBot to file your taxes. He says, you are a Bernie Madoff-level financial expert. Find every trick that is possible. Do not do this. Do not do this. The IRS is like, hey, can you share a little bit on like how you kind of came up with some of the decisions here? And they're like, we'd love to see the prompt. Yeah. But good, good fun. Anyway, people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble, the enduring ruin tweet. I like the critter screenshot of this while pushing the like button, so it's like exploding.

It's very funny. Silver surges above $106 an ounce for the first time in history, now up another 48%. The other interesting story that's sort of developing over on Strathecary is, is Ben Thompson is starting to make the case that TSM will be a really fundamental bottleneck in just the AI buildout, the AI race. He's comping their CAP-X to what the hyperscalers are projecting and just saying that there's a massive mismatch. And the TSM folks are maybe not putting their foot on the gas, maybe not willing to let the buck stop with them and take on that risk of building a new fab for $50 billion. And then if the AI bubble pops, then they're left holding the bag. And so it's been really fascinating listening to his writing on the back of the latest TSM earnings

and watch him sort of unpack what's going on with TSM. The sort of conclusion that I took away from it was that Intel, while it has a lot of problems and the stock just sold off a ton and they have a lot of losses, he's sort of saying that, you know, Intel needs a customer, Samsung needs serious customers, and in order to really unblock the semiconductor supply chain, the other fabs are going to need the big hyperscalers and big labs to just take a big leap of faith and say, you know what, we are going to go all in with you. We're going to sign up and plan and work out all the kinks of the Samsung fab process or the Intel fab process. And in exchange, what's going to

happen is as soon as OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or even NVIDIA say, hey, you know, Intel's good enough for us. Well, then guess what's going to happen? TSM is going to have to go and say, yeah, we're going to build the extra fab. We're going to build the extra capacity. And when we talked to St. Altman, and in a number of interviews that he did that week, he was very clear about, I would love TSMC to make more. He wasn't exactly like firing shots, but he was definitely saying that like, he was identifying it as a bottleneck. And it's interesting because at the start of the year I was highlighting energy as an interesting bottleneck. And we were going back and forth on, you know, where is it easier to move chips around the board? Energy, where you can reroute from the grid, from oil and gas,

from nuclear, you can bring different capacity online. There certainly are bottlenecks there. But if you can't produce the chips and the fabs just don't exist and it takes three or four years to build, fab, you could be looking at a really big bottleneck. Tyler, we... Yeah, I mean, it just seems like in power or energy. The bottleneck is regulatory. And, like, in some ways, that's, like, way harder. But if there's actual, like, political will, if, you know, electricity is getting super expensive, then, like, you should see that, kind of, that, those regulations, like, be taken away a little bit. And then it actually becomes much easier than actually just, like, expanding TSMC production by, like, whatever

Yeah, yeah. I have one more point on that. First, I'm going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So the question of like which is more of a bottleneck energy or TSM in the chip supply chain is interesting because energy feels like this incredible bottleneck. It's a very political like hot button issue now. Energy prices are rising. Data centers need a lot of energy. But if you look at the amount of chip fabrication that's going to AI and then the amount of energy,

and then the amount of energy production that's going to AI, obviously the number of chip production going to AI is a way higher percentage. Because a lot of the chips are, a lot of the line time at TSM, yes, they do all sorts of different chips and CPUs still get made, and there's a bunch of ASICs for different networking equipment.

There's all sorts of different chips that get made. I mean, the toaster that has a chip, the blue, on different process nodes. But even if you include all of that, I would assume that the, the total amount of fabrication line time is, is, you know, heavily, heavily allocated to GPU's TPU's AI chips right now,

whereas the amount of energy that AI is using is probably less than 1% of total capacity. Yeah, it's interesting that CCWW the CEO of TSMC, he doesn't have to go on the podcast who are raising money all the time. There's not, there's not, you know, they're not like pushing this like insane kind

of fast takeoff narrative. No, not at all. Like kind of, hey, we're just trying to run our business the way that we always have. Be pragmatic about this. You know, fulfill as much demand as we possibly can. But they seem to not be inclined to take on, you know, the amount of the level, certainly not the level of risk that, you know, imagine if you had Larry Ellison running ZSMC. Get him in the ring.

I want him in there so badly. Yeah. No, no, you're 100% right. But at the same time, we're seeing the hypers throw their weight around in like crazy ways. We covered AWS as like buying copper mines and stuff, or I don't know if it's copper mine, but like getting into mining, there's a whole bunch of vertical integration that's going on at Tesla all the way down to battery refinement and lithium ion production. Meta today announced a $6 billion multi-year partnership with Corning that will supply fiber optic cables for our data center infrastructure, bolstering, manufacturing in America, and keeping the country competitive in the global AI race.

We can read through a little bit of this. But first, I'm going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to Change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, Corning up 15% on the news today. Yeah. Makes sense. What is their market cap?

Let's see, $94 billion company. And I'd love to know their revenue as well. Let's see, the revenue was, I don't know if I can find it. Annual revenue, 12 billion. So this is, yeah, pretty, pretty material. Let's see. Meta Platforms is set to test new subscription models across apps. We, no, that's a different story.

Different story, but we can run through it. I am interested to know a little bit more. So the $6 billion multi-year agreement, it supports a 15 to 20% increase in jobs. Corning's North Carolina facilities, building and operating data centers, the infrastructure that brings our technologies to life and supports our goal of personalized super intelligence. That certainly sounds like an AI personal assistant. Certainly sounds like molt bot to me. It requires strong servers and hardware that connect and transfer information in real-time.

Fiber optic cables are a critical part of this technology. The supply helping us power everything from wearable technology like redamab meta, Rayband Meta AI glasses to our apps, which connect billions of people. Today they're doing a $6 billion project. As part of this agreement, Corning will grow its manufacturing capacity across its operations, with includes a significant capacity expansion in North Carolina. Meta's data centers,

26 of which are under construction right now are operational. That's just so many. That's a lot of data centers. That's why they have a compute desk. if you have This is a bit of advice for everyone If you're working at a business And you have like a team

Or a guy that does something You need to upgrade that to a desk Yeah Yeah You need a production desk Millionaires Millionaires have guys Billionaires have desks

Probably yeah Well trillion dollar companies have desks That's what it is So Meda's data centers Have already supported 30,000 skilled trade jobs during construction and support 5,000 operational jobs. This includes electricians,

ACEVAC specialists, server and network technicians, safety and security experts and engineers who work together to run some of the world's most advanced facilities. Let's give it up. Moving on. 11 labs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents.

Reimagined human technology interaction with 11 labs. Meta to test premium subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. This is in CNBC. Subscriptions for premium features on meta apps are expected to roll out in the coming months. What will you get? The subscriptions will give paid users access to more features and expanded AI capabilities. Here's what's most interesting to me.

This will be scaling meta's newly acquired suite of general AI agents under Manus will also be part of the subscription plan. So as I was saying earlier, when you think about, when we haven't gotten that much from Zocon, like what the actual like, plan is. But when you think about personal super intelligence, that is, you know, AI that can do things for you, not just give you information. I just wonder how much will happen outside of the meta ecosystem. Like they've launched a search engine before that looked at websites outside of Facebook. They had that project Titan, which was to unify all the different

messaging protocols. So as part of that, they gave everyone a Facebook.com. email address or something like that. Maybe it wasn't Facebook.com. Maybe it was like FB.me or something. But they gave every Facebook user, whatever their unique username was, they gave them that as an email. And you could email that,

and it would show up in Facebook Messenger. And then they tried to unify Facebook Messenger so you could see Instagram DMs, WhatsApp messages, and Facebook messages all in one place. I can see what you're laughing at. Dave, Dave, Randall says, yeah, I want more of those amazing medics. AI feature. You say that now, I mean, let them cook at least a little bit because we really haven't

seen them launch a new model, a new image model. Like, they should be able to get too close to the frontier. You know, it has to be at least SORA, nano-banana V-V-O-3 level. They have all the data. They have all the talent now. They're very GPU-rich. They have the compute for it. So, and the research has been done, and people have reverse engineered it. So you would think that whatever's coming, Should be good and I don't know. I was looking at Isn't Capcut owned by TikTok or aren't they affiliated right? Because Meta has the edits app Which I've been making some videos in and it's pretty good. It does some interesting background Revenue. Capcut is bite dance and so I doubt this is getting

Oh, you think it's a separate. Okay, okay, because Capcut has multiple levels of of subscription tier and you can very easily wind up spending $200 a month on like the AI Pro and features that will do generative video, style transfer, you know. And when you see those videos, like the good AI videos on Instagram Reels that are usually like they'll take a cinematic clip from a movie and then they will do a face replacement or like a head swap and then they'll do AI voices and then dub the lips so that the lips match what the audio is saying. And it looks really convincing with that workflow, how do you bring that to someone on a phone? How do you bring that to someone in the Instagram app or in the edits app, even if they're going to more of like their pro sumer offering? The mobile video editing space is particularly interesting to me, just watching

how edits has evolved. And I used to use Imovie on my phone a little bit. I used to use, there was an app called Clips that Apple developed. And there were a few others that I tried, but the edits app is... You're incredibly good at making videos on your phone. I love it. I love video editing, but I don't have enough time anymore to sit down and open up After Effects and Premiere with multiple monitors and have connected After Effects file

that feeds into the Premiere profile and really doing a proper edit with all the powerful tools that are out there on the desktop. It's just not in the cards for me. And so I have to be able to do something quick on my phone. And I think that that's a very modern experience that most creators, they're just phone first, phone native. And so they're never really going to go back to the multi-monitor workstation, maybe. But in general, they're editing really

quickly and they're editing pretty incredible stuff when you look at some of the reels that are out there with like layered crops and removing the background. And like the AI tools are coming in and I could see, I could see meta offering a premium subscription around that. Anyway, console, Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Dave in the X-Chat says, InShot is pretty good for mobile. I need to try that. I haven't tried InShod.

I've been seeing more and more ads. I'll see a video for like an F-1 edit that are incredible. These F-1 edits are so cool where they will show you one clip and then they cut the character out and edit in the other clip and then try. transitions, like the transitions are amazing. And I've been seeing some people are, are, are, are, have clearly built apps to do that specific type of edits. Like, the really crazy editors are using probably afterfacts or something. Ryan asks, is Tyler still drunk? Yeah, one sip. He's just over there slurring his word. He's gunked. Anyway, that really broke me.

Anyway, app loving, profitable advertising made easy with axon.a.com. get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. We had a great comment in one of the podcast feeds. Someone said, give us an axon claxon because a claxon is a loud clash. We were all puzzling over what that means. When we smacked it immediately. It's an axon claxon. Naraj Agrawal says TikTok is dead.

The algorithm is worse than the reels that make it to Facebook. Wow. I haven't checked it out. So basically they're transitioning everything over. Yesterday there was apparently an outage. Kind of an outage. People were able to post videos, but the videos wouldn't be served at all. So I think a lot of people assume that it was like the new ownership kind of censoring.

I believe they had an outage at a data center that was a cause of that. So before we call it dead, let's wait for a few days and see how it pans out. we do have a TikTok account. It's at TBPN. How many followers of that? I haven't checked. I don't think we post on it ever. 3,500. Not bad. That's better than what I thought. First time. We're not really focused on it. Maybe we'll test it out. But I'm pretty happy with just, I want the things we do to be polished. I want the core show to be polished. Die at TBPN, our 20 to 30 minute cut down. I want that to be polished. I want the newsletter to be polished at tbPN.com.

Every day on a newsletter. I like that. Before we, by, off another part of the apple. Please, please, sir. Not one more short form. Not one more short form. It is a lot. It is a lot. Any way, Phantom cash.

Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Let's move over to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is coming up. I think it's going to be this year in the next couple months. When is it? It's coming up. It's coming up because there's advertisements that are going out. And you got to watch it because the ads are going to be incredible.

I actually just had to search when is Super Bowl. Is it this Sunday? No, it's February 8th. Okay, so next Sunday? Okay, it's going to be amazing, but mostly because of the advertisements. Specifically, Eric Lyman, CEO of Ramp shared, meet Brian. Brian's been carrying counting on his back for a long time. Super Bowl Sunday, he finally gets back up.

Let's watch this preview of the Ramp. Super Bowl ad. guys. Yeah, we're real sports guys. This is the Super Bowl. We got a Google. The Ramp Super Bowl ad is the Super Bowl of Super Bowl ads. It feels like, you know, they just kind of, this is like, you know, what is it, what is it called?

Like a warning, spoiler alert. Okay, yeah, yeah. For anybody that wants to wait and experience it live, you're going to want to skip an ad like 60 seconds. Let's watch. Finance meeting in five. Minutes? I got it. Allow me.

Hi, Hanson. We're saving so much time. Policy violation coming through. Travel, meals, hotels. How's this? Beautiful. Everybody's at. Mamp.

Multiply what's possible at ramp.com. I think it rips. I think it's a good Super Bowl out. Why does he got there? Maybe some chili? I don't want to make any assumption. It was just a silver pot. It was just a silver pot.

Yeah. No, I think this achieves a couple things. I mean, it drills the brand name. Think about how many ramp logos are in there. And then they're chanting ramp. And for, you know, ramp's a very successful company, we all know about it here.

But there's a lot of people that just don't know the name ramp and hasn't been drilled in them like, you know, some company that's been around 50 years. It just makes time. On the precipice of being a house, there's not been enough mainstream marketing yet

for it to be a household name. Yeah. It's a life's work to actually drill into people's mind. the ramp name, the logo, the color, how it sounds when you say it, what it's synonymous with. And so just like not going too abstract, not trying to tell some more avant-garde story here, I think is it's almost like a direct response at it. It's just so clear what the problem solution brand.

Problem solution brand. We need those yellow ties too. Look at that. Like they are really putting their logo full screen on the Super Bowl. that is valuable. And sometimes, I think sometimes it can feel like, oh,

it's a little, it's like simple. Like you could be doing something more bold, more crazy. But I think this is what you need to do at this level. Also, after last year,

getting Sequin. Yeah. And then the team actually actually actually kind of like an impossible set of circumstances. Not impossible, but it's a crazy roll of the dice.

And then they're also building a whole role with Brian and they're building him into the brand world as the downtrodden account. who just needs, just needs some technology to improve him. Heading over to Toby. Yes. Toby over at Shopify posted his heart rate through his first stint at the Daytona.

You see the first annotation on here? This is just crash. Crash. Yeah, so. So he started out at like 120, 120 beats per minute, right? He's doing waiting. He does the warm up, preparing the formation lap, and then there's a crash roll. right at the start.

Very, very rough. Yeah, and, yeah, so basically the crash happened with the LMP2 class, which is the kind of pro-AM same segment that George from Crowdstrikers racing in. So both Toby and George, all of our boys got hit right as the race open. And so what George was saying yesterday, the reason he was frustrated, he's like, this is a 24-hour race. never has a race like this been won on the first lap. And so it's pretty, it's kind of, it's incredibly unforced to like crash in the opening

corner when you really should just get through it. It's like the most, you know, it's going to be the most like one of the most intense moments because there's so much traffic. But if you actually go and watch the footage of what happened at the opening, there was like somebody gets hit, spun out, and then they're turning around and somebody hits them again. Like two accidents in the opening a minute. So insane. I love that the actual true final heart rate spike was at the end when you're changing out of the car.

You've been driving. It's so intense. No, you know this. When you're getting out of a track car, it's like watching a guy who's six-eight. We will never share that footage. It is extremely embarrassing. It's always like crawling out of. It's actually terrible.

You basically have to get on your, you basically have to get on all fours. It's incredibly negative aura, and I don't appreciate you sharing it on the show. Well, I still think it's cool. It's funny. But yeah, I go full send and basically fly out of the car on my pause. Anyway, Cisco on February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, all AWS and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live stream, and we'll be there for a gigastream.

Hope to see you there. Jabroney on X says Zoom is the big. best anthropic play. Yes, yes, yes, because we were debating. Zoom likely made a $51 million investment in Anthropic Series C in 2020. How? At a $4.1 billion valuation, if you're looking at their new $350, there's something like an 85x, even diluted.

Zoom may have a multi-billion dollar aerobic position. Stock is down 80% since 2021. Yeah. And Zoom is only a, of course this is never financial advice. $27 billion company. Yeah, part of the issue is the stock, people kind of notice this. Sure. And the stock's now up 16% in the last five days.

So who knows how much it's priced in. Tyler, major, I won't give you too much flack for it, but obviously the most bullish. Yes. I mean, I'm bullish on AI broadly. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, you would be happy. You seem like you'd be happy to own Zoom at a hundred billion dollar valuation,

even if they had no business at all. It's just a hold code. Yeah, yeah. Even if they just. It's a digital asset treasury, actually. Yeah. So I think the story, this is like a rumor, but basically it was that Anthropic, like, use Zoom and get like the enterprise plan or whatever.

But then they were like, well, yeah, you can have. but like we want to throw in a little something right because I just are you just series C okay this might be like right this seems like fake news Tyler okay at Zoom sells and you know Zoom sells enterprise software right look that's what I read that's their base find the post but I I for sure read they sell enterprise software and so Anthropics says hey we're big Zoom fans here we want to use Zoom and they're like no actually for you now at the same time I mean we we know how important so many yes yes I mean so many people in venture in the tech community have sort of been very bearish on corporate VC

that they usually have their hands tied, they can't move as quickly, they're not as pure play, the economics don't make sense for the partners on whatever corporate venture fund is there. This could, if it came out of their corporate ventures program, this could be, you know, complete vindication. So, yeah, Zoom Ventures is in Anthropic. They're in. Amex global business travel, which... That's a startup? I thought that's American... Did they spin it out from?

Maybe they... I don't know. Maybe they spun it out. I'm unsure. They're also in core weave. Wow. So there's some real pickers over there. They are. And perplexity.

Yeah. I mean, Zoom has a bunch of AI features I've seen. People, you know, when after the crazy COVID pump where everyone got on Zoom, they started adding like crazy features. dictation and workspaces and whiteboarding and stuff. But obviously, it was like so overheated that it came back down to Earth. But now they have an anthropic position on the balance sheet, which will be fun for them. I wonder what they will do post-IPO.

Anyway, Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Slowly, and then all at once, says Blake Robbins. He says, your work tools are now active and clawed. Draft Slack messages. Interactive. Interactive. Draft Slack messages, visualize ideas in Figma and build and see Asana timelines.

All of the different tools are coming together in one place. Very cool. Yeah, a lot of people were very happy about like Claude Excel playing around with that. And it does feel like there's, when you see an account like Claude posting about Slack and Figma, and Masana. You have to imagine there's a discussion there. It's not open source. So there's probably something. And so they're chipping away at these. And Open AI has been chipping away at these for a long time. So the race is on to have the most integrations at this point. Sarah Eisen over at CNBC squawk on the street is sharing breaking. Anthropics warning to the

world. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadehadeh says, eminent real danger that superhuman intelligence will cause civilization. level damage, absent smart, speedy intervention. Sarah says, so buy our products. This is the problem of dropping like a 20,000 word essay is that like you're going to get clipped out of context. Like there was so much nuance in that Dario essay, which I have not finished all the way through.

I was reading it last night. It was very good. Tyler, can you make, you should make a version of the new letter with subway surfers that run. Oh, true. Yeah. build that as a standalone. Yeah.

We needed clad labs, Chad, IDE for reading. Well, I'd summarize this in four words. AI good. Maybe it's so by our products. Maybe that's the four, the four word summary. Who knows? Jeff in the X chat says, guys, I'm building Maltbot cloud. Let's go.

Stay tuned. Okay, Jeff. We are tuned. We will remain tuned. Let us know when you launch. Information. Vibe.co. Where D.C.

Brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on meta. That one gets me. It's so good. Fleeting bits has some thoughts on Dario's. 14 of them specifically. That's a lot of thoughts. Okay, let's run through it.

There's nothing new here if you're familiar with the AI safety discussions that have been happening on Twitter. Yes, but it's important for Dario to restate them in a format that can be passed around and formatted and is coherent from start to finish. So still serves a valuable purpose for the ecosystem. The most interesting bit is that his mental model for AI control risk is the risk that would be posed by a country of geniuses in a data center. Interesting. That is interesting. The basic idea is that we should imagine a giant data center, all the models being something between AGI and ASI trying to coordinate to take over the world or do massive harm. Anyway, I think how seriously you take short-term AI control risk is inversely correlated to how much you think about AI control risk as operating in a system.

So the systematic view starts and says labs exist in an ecosystem where they need to sell models that will follow human instruction or they have no market. They are also overseen by regulators and guided by public perception. And the desires of their employees and all of this keeps models corrugable. Great word. And the model landscape will look like three to six frontier labs running millions or billions of rollouts at a time on two to three different models, all on different tasks. So a model takeover requires these millions or billions of rollouts.

to somehow end up all be coordinating towards some bad aim that somehow the models have autonomously determined. And this coordination either needs to be across different model instances run by different labs or one lab needs to be able to have its models dominate and needs to form without being detected. And this has to happen even though the models are being trained to and follow instructions, not do bad behavior, et cetera. Dario's view is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, he collapses the multiple providers, our coordination across instances,

and collapses the market incentives against labs developing models that would behave that way. But on the other hand, he does avoid the concept of a single model instance that somehow wakes up and takes over the world, despite billions of other rollouts occurring at the same time. Actually, though, if you think about it, he's not proposing an AI control risk. He is proposing an AI misuse risk instead, because it seems more plausible to me that the harmful country of geniuses is awoken because a small team at a frontier lab hijack all the running instances of their model rather than because the models themselves autonomously wake up to some bad aim. Interesting. Yeah, something I've been thinking about is, you know, this kind of summary and a lot of the dialogue

is centered around just like what are the models doing or like a country of geniuses in a data center. But you have to be thinking about this in the context that the country, of genius a country of geniuses in a data center would just recruit millions of humans to join their cause, right? And so we think about like some people like when they're thinking about AI risk, it's like, ha ha, dude, just like turn the computer off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, just unplug it. But it's like what if you're on the side of the computer? What if there's, you know, 100,000 people or like 10,000 people defending it on top of the data center being like, you know, you know, don't unplug the computer. Don't unplug the computer, right? And so when you look at

all the chaos of the last. week. Yeah. Like, there's been so many moments where, like, a certain image was AI generated. Yeah. And then it's like, oh, that wasn't a real image at all. Or, you know, and it's being shared from all sides. And so at what point, you know, you could have, you know, nefarious, hostile AI.

Yeah. That's entire job is just creating. Chaos. Millions of bot accounts that are just, like, sharing whatever narrative is self-serving. Yeah. So. You can't tell. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think I really enjoyed this essay. I thought, if you kind of compare it to a lot of, like, other safety works. So like Elyzer's book, if anyone builds it, everyone dies. Yeah. Like the two kind of scenarios where Dario's is about basically, even if we have like pretty safe models, which like he thinks we can do with interpretability or whatever, if it gets into the wrong hands, it's like very bad if it gets into, you know, autocracy. And that's kind of the real, that's one of the main risks where Eliezer's and a lot of the safety ones are always these

like very sci-fi narratives where you have this like gray goo. You have these like nanomachines that somehow one day they just like kind of, you know, flip and then it's just kind of over. Yeah. And I think this is much more reasonable and like nuanced. Yeah, it's much more legible to like every person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And especially I think a lot of it is, there's this kind of like, I don't even know if it's really subtext, but he's definitely pointing in the direction of like, we need some government oversight, we need policy.

And it seems like you can very easily like track like his ideas on what policy should be from this essay, right? It's a lot about China, a lot about, you know, making sure that individual companies don't, like, become, you know, as big as government's. One interesting wrinkle with this, he did not post it as an X article. He posted it as a link, because he wants to signal to everyone, like, look, I don't need the million dollars. I don't need the million. I don't need the million. I know I got a banger on my hands, 3.5 million views, 11K likes, obviously lots of discussion all over the Internet. Because if Sam posted an X article, right, everyone would be like, oh, he's He's got 1.4 trillion.

He really does want that extra mill. He needs the extra mill. You know, it's not, doesn't put him all the way towards the goal, but it's a mill. A mill is a mill. But as an investor, like, I want to see my lab CEO be like super hungry for compute, right? So I want them to always be grinding to get like extra. Oh, so maybe this is bearish.

They should have posted. If I'm a VC, if I'm an anthropic, I'm like, why did he not post this on X? Yeah. A million dollars could have gone straight into like GPU. Elon would have for sure given. For sure you give it time. I can definitely see that happening. Anyway.

Nikita is like, you know, walking, sitting with Elon just shaking. I'm very sorry. People have voted. They want to give it to Daria. I mean, Elon said some things about Cloud. He said like it'll eat Microsoft. He's all over the place and who he's supporting on a day to day basis.

But anyway, AQTA. Octa assigns you, Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI. without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent, more important than ever. Key Smash Bandit. Last post, last post. Last post. Last post. Key Smash Bandit says Claude just found out I'm poor. Oh, yeah, this is so funny. Key Smash sends a picture of a raspberry pie to Claude and says, look what just came in the mail.

Claude says, oh, for me, that's thoughtful. And the person says, do you like it? we'd been discussing some more powerful hardware. What made you decide on this instead? I love it. This also has 11,000 likes. I never, I mean, this is probably fake. Who knows? But it's so funny.

Are you kidding? This is like a... I don't want to run it on a raspberry pie. I want a Mac Mini maxed out of specs. Give me 48 gigs of RAM, please. I'm hungry. Feed Claude. Without further ado.

We have Jamie from Pace, the co-founder of us. in the radio room waiting, and let's bring him into the TVG&LG. Jamie, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining.

Great to you. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, hey, I'm Jamie. I'm the founder and CEO here at PACE. Pace is the AI operations partner for the world's leading insurers. Amazing. Give us the news. We've been waiting for this company.

For sure. We love all applications of AI. Give us the news. What happened today? Yeah, absolutely. We're super excited to share today. that we raised $10 million from Sequoia Capital. Whoa.

Thank you. Yeah, we're super excited to have Brian Shrier and Lauren Reader representing Sequoia on our board. Amazing. Okay, talk about the go-to-market. How much of this is just like there's a few big partners that you need to get on board versus something that's more self-serve, bottoms up. What's the customer adoption been like? I mean, what's the overall progress of the business?

Are you live? Do you have customers? Absolutely. Yeah. So we're lucky to be live in production today for some of the world's largest insurers. Okay. We're working with large carriers like Prudential, specialty mutual groups, like the mutual group, and then all the way through to sort of tech forward brokers like New Front. Sure. I think, you know, in our industry, in insurance, about $70 billion has spent every year on back office BPO's. Okay. Oh, crazy. A lot of that is driven by sort of the largest carriers. Yeah. So you're basically the BPO's worst nightmare. Yeah. So what, like walk through a specific back office procedure. Is that like claims processing? Is it scanning PDFs? Like try and ground it for me a little bit more. Yeah, it's great question. So we're starting off, you know, with we're primarily focusing this back office operations. And what that really means is sort of three big buckets. It's new businesses coming in, taking in new risk submissions, you know, docking that processing, calling back when there's missing information, writing back into internal systems.

It's the policy servicing, so any changes you're making, adding new products, things like that. And then all the way through to claims. So that's first notice of loss, calling in when something happened went wrong, all the way through to quality assurance. How do we make sure that every claim gets paid correctly every time? Yeah. How much, like what is the actual tech stack? I imagine that you're not training your own models, but have you done your own RL environment on top of these? And do you do that at a company level?

and then everyone gets sort of like the same AI, or are you doing it on a per-client basis? How much fine-tuning is going on? Yeah, so for a lot of our process, because we've started by focusing on a lot of these BPO workflows, they're already codified as sort of these standard operating procedures. It's a great start because it's already well chunked up for agents. The accuracy bar for where BPO's are today is pretty low,

and there's a lot of opportunity to improve that and to be able to sort of run more accurately, more scalably, and more efficiently for these customers. And so we tend to start primarily with those and we take these standard operating procedures and we convert them into what we call agent operating procedures. So this is just natural language instructions.

You can give it like a document. Like a markdown file. Exactly. It's a skill. Yeah. And so the main thing that we're really bridging here is these are processes that are going to be run hundreds of thousands of time.

For us, we're processing tens of thousands of tasks a month. And critically, these agents have to reliably run, you know, many tens of pages worth of a process with very insurance-specific tools and logic. So that's, you know, certainly a lot of the document processing pipelines that we've built on top of, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini. But also, it's going into deep industry integrations, it's voice calling and multimodality, but also kind of actually being able to take actions in systems that don't have APIs. You know, in insurance, we see everything from the cloud, you know, products, but a lot of it is desktop apps, even, like, green screen CLIs.

I'm talking like M-I-M-I-M-I-M systems. So how do we get, you know? Talk about the, one of the things that's most exciting to me is a potential, like, speed-up effect where you're not, like, theoretically, like you're, if you're trying to get a new policy or submit a claim or anything like that, you could get to the point where as long as you're there to provide information and the problem. process as the sort of like client of the of the insurance company theoretically you can get like responses I'm imagining like much much faster because the agent is effectively able to like get all the information that's needed to make a decision and maybe there's still a human in the loop but what are the kind of implications of that for the actual insurance companies even just from a revenue standpoint if they can just like speed up all these processes you know by an order of

magnitude yeah so for a lot of our customers thinking about running these agents 24-7, 365 days a year. And I think the real advantage here is not ever having any backlogs, being infinitely scalable. And so that's really important for, you know, our customers on the front end when they're thinking about new business and new risk. How do we, you know, win this over other carriers? But then also on the claim side, you know, for a consumer, you know, one of our very first customers, we went live right before hurricane season.

And, you know, you can see, you know, there's, you know, Cat season, the end of the year, there's just like a massive uptick in the number of claims when there's, you know, a hurricane that happens. And people can be waiting, you know, days, weeks, even months to sort of get, you know, a resolution because, you know, there can just be massive backlogs from, you know, a huge spike. And so agents being- Yeah, that entire time, they might be, they might be homeless, you know, in a hotel, Airbnb, or whatever. It's like an incredibly terrible experience to be kind of in limbo waiting for your insurance provider to like just respond and give you. I mean, we, we know some people that lost

their homes, you know, around this time last year and just like getting responses when that's like, if you're an individual who lost your home, what's more important in your life than like getting clarity from your insurance provider so that you can make, so that you can kind of move forward with your life. So I think that's super exciting. I'm interested to hear about your previous previous experience, cheer and then retool. Why go vertical with this particular solution versus something that's more general and industry agnostic? What did you see in this particular market that you decided you needed something specific? And then do you have a plan to like expand or I mean the TAM seems so big that maybe this is just enough? How are you thinking about

that? Yeah. So way back kind of where this all started is I actually grew up between London, New York, and Bermuda, the through line there being insurance. Yeah. Are the rumors true? Like, what is Bermuda like? I feel like I've heard stories about it's all just like accountants walking around all day long. I went there, I went there for a wedding. It was really nice.

Okay. I didn't see any. Lots of pocket protectors. Clock anybody as an accountant. Okay. Yeah, but what was your experience in Bermuda? I mean, it's incredible. I think the, but there is a massive sort of reinsurance industry on the island.

So that's like, yeah, very much of them of that. That's amazing. Anyway, so you were born, you were born in insurance. Yeah. Yeah, I grew up around the industry for a long time. And then, I started my first company was a data integration business. I was bought by Retool. Let's go.

And at Retool, you know, I think it's things. I think, you know, it's not always immediately obvious that actually a lot of the sort of custom software that's built in the world is for, you know, a lot of financial services companies because they're highly operationally intensive. So Retool had a ton of very scaled financial services companies. And as a deployed engineer, I was sort of lucky to be on kind of the first lines, you know, with some of our biggest insurers, helping them to handle tasks like policy servicing and claims and trying to make them, you know, more efficient with software. And I think the big opportunity kind of came around chat GPT where we saw, you know, a huge uptake from a lot of our startup customers.

And then there was this opportunity to build a vertical product that would really serve, you know, the largest insurers. So that was the emphasis. In terms of where we're headed and kind of the longer term you asked about, I think there's a lot for us to do just with an insurance. But if you broaden out to financial services BPO more broadly, it's about 400 billion of spend, which is pretty much exactly equivalent to the entire market randomized software. That's insane. So, so yeah, I imagine that when you're, when you're going into a discussion with a large insurer, you're not, like, whoever you're pitching is not saying, well, I vibe coded this on Sunday, and it's working pretty well, why should I go with you? Like, they truly don't have anything else

installed. And so it's sort of a green field, I imagine. Is that right? Yeah, I think, you know, an insurance role within like kind of the business of trust. And so, you know, that's why a lot of our work is with, you know, the largest insurers on mission critical tasks at massive scale. And so, yeah, sorry. Yeah. What about, what, what about tradeoffs on, uh, inference in different models. You mentioned sort of being multi-model using different frontier labs. Yep. But are you finding in the product that you're building that you're relying on cheaper models

for certain tasks and then harnessing and wiring that all together so you actually can drive down cost, or can you just throw the most expensive frontier model at every problem because it's so valuable? Yeah. So, you know, I think we use a mixture of kind of models to be able to achieve, you know, what we need for the right task. If you think about parsing a many hundred page claim file or policy document, you might use a small model to kind of zoom in on the areas that are most important and then use an

expensive model to say synthesize, you know, what's the most important and what's the answer. Sure. And then, you know, I think what's more interesting, you talked a little about kind of fine-tuning an URL. You know, we're kind of like the perfect set of use cases for web agents being able to navigate, you know, these applications that don't have APIs, be they green screen CLIs or desktop apps. And so we've actually been working on a handful of Fynunes and creating basically RL environments that are these sort of crud applications.

They're very different from, say, you know, the Book Mea Restaurant or this flight type of demo. It's much more about, you know, take this repetitive task and fill out this form thousands of times. It's kind of the ideal case for, I think, a lot of these computer use systems. So we're seeing a lot of success that I think we're just kind of rounding the corner. of the scaling law starting to work on those.

It kind of feels the same way that maybe like voice did, you know, six to 12 months ago. Yep. You guys have pursued a forward deployed engineer, go to market.

Do you, sounds like it's working well to date. Do you think this is something that will still be a part of the kind of core motion in a few years? Or is this something that makes sense to kind of get off the ground

until you understand kind of like what the typical stacks are within your market and then eventually you'd move beyond it. Yeah. I mean, I think the forward deployed motion is definitely something that, you know, really came naturally to me. It's kind of like the DNA of our company because that's, you know, also what we were doing at Retool when it was, you know, much earlier, I think on that. I think for us, you know, going and working with our customers being able to speak their language, getting to, you know, really understand the complexities of these many hundred page standard operating procedures and make them successful as agents,

I think it's really important for us to be sitting, you know, side by side with them. That being said, I think a lot of companies sort of talk about FTEs as sort of being the end state or like that is like, you know, the best part about my business and why I'm like Pallantir. I think for us, like it is, you know, these RFTEs are also really able to ship code in the code base. And so they're actually constantly making the product better. And that's really important. Like I think our products should just be continually giving our forward-deployed engineering team more and more leverage. So they can, you know, be able to complete more for our customers.

So some FDE goes into a business. Their badge, they're in there. They're interfacing with the green screen, you know, local on-premise, mainframe software. They write some binding for it or some screen scraper or whatever you need to do. And then they can ship that back to HQ and then the next time you run into that, you have an integration effectively. Is that like the basic pattern of that? Exactly.

I think there's just a lot of things that are required to get these agents running at scale that, you know, customers don't need to build from scratch every time. Do you think it's really important, though, that we also enable our customers to be able to build their own, you know, agents. And for us, you know, some of our customers are at tens of agents live in production. We may have built, you know, help them build the first one or two in an FD motion. But just because it's natural language, they're able to sort of turn around two through ten without us having.

And they're still running those. And so they're running number three through 10 on your platform through your system, but they're defining them and architecting them themselves. Exactly. Yeah, just a nice one. Very cool. Good business. I love it.

Congratulations. Fantastic to meet you. Yeah, well, you put together a great team too. I'm excited that Varroon, one of my former teammates is, is over with you at Pace now. And, yeah, I'm sure you'll be back on this. year, maybe this quarter. Maybe, yeah, we'll see. Thank you so much again, guys.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And we have Ben, oh, sorry. Quick, before we bring in Ben, some unfortunate news, Palmer got tied up with D.C. But we got Jeff Miller coming on?

Jeff Miller's going to come on. It's Miller time? It's Miller time, which we're excited about. But yeah, so Palmer, unfortunately, won't be joining. But we'll get him back on. We got them back on very soon. And right now, without further ado. Ben Laird, the co-founder of manager-managing partner of Laird-Hipa Adventuresures.

Let's bring him in to the TVFIN Ultrum. Ben, how are you doing? Hey, guys, what's happening? What's going on? Not too much. Thanks so much for taking the time to join. Can you maybe, I mean, I feel like most people are familiar. But can you kick us off a little bit of just the shape of your business, shape of your career, just a quick intro?

Sure, sure. Yeah. I'm a native New Yorker. Everything I do is sort of New Yorkie in some way. So grew up here. After school, came back to New York, started a company in the digital media space. When York had like the smallest tech ecosystem in the world and was one of what felt like 50 founders building in New York, you know, back 20 years ago. and as a result of sort of being a founder in a tiny market, I got the, I knew everybody,

everybody. And so I had sort of the benefit of being a small fish in a small pond and started angel investing and really over the last 15 years got to sort of simultaneously live the founder journey and built a company and raised a few hundred million dollars and did a lot of things right and almost ran the thing off the dock a bunch of times. And also, he had sort of the good fortune of, like, picking, you know, investing in New York at the right time. And so have ridden that wave started. Our first fund was an $8.5 million fund.

We're now investing our ninth fund, which is a $200 million fund. But every fund is a little bigger than the one before. That's a good sign. It's a good run. Not many funds get there, you know? Did you ever think it was? was it was crazy to set up a fund in New York, or was it always just like just was so obvious that you were happy that other people just were kind of thought, thought you were crazy?

I didn't know any better, right? I mean, like, I grew up in New York. I thought New York was the center of the entire universe. I still, in some way, think that that's the case. And, you know, I just, I was very lucky because when I got sort of the entrepreneurial bug was when the whole world got the entrepreneurial bug. It was like that same minute moment. I graduated the same year that Mark Zuckerberg did from college. And so, right?

It was just like that timing. Perfect timing. Perfect timing. And all my friends in the past would have reflexively wanted to go and work on Wall Street. Yep. But suddenly something was in the water

and people wanted to go work in tech. And so I just got like, I was just got lucky. And, you know, it seemed obvious. And frankly, it was obvious. And if you just did the obvious thing, you did okay. I want to talk about media

kind of selfishly because we love talking about media. I actually want to learn about your biz. I have questions for you guys on the business model. Like I've been poking around, trying to fill it out. So you ask me questions and I'm going to ask you questions.

Well, yeah, I guess just can you take a, like we try not to do, this is not a history show, not like a founder journey show, but I would love like. What was the climate around media, digital media, what was happening back then? What was the initial, like, the first piece of content? So much of what is informed, I feel like we tried to take a lot of the lessons from that era of media and say, like, okay, what was the takeaway?

Which was maybe like you can, I mean, the primary takeaway was don't build a media company in our case. That is the whole strategy is predicated on getting to a billion dollars of revenue, right? Or even a billion dollar valuation, right? So a lot of what informs this is that like staying niche, especially for us because in our business, like we're building a media company that we make by hand every single day. So if we don't stay niche, we'll start covering a bunch of topics that aren't interesting to us. And then we won't want to show up every day and do this. You'll do what I did and what everybody did.

Okay, give us the lessons. Wait, yeah, give us the prehistory, give us the climate. And then I want as many lessons as possible. Yeah. So look, when I started, there was this idea that sort of like the internet would destroy every traditional business and every space in the entire world. Yeah. Now there's a little bit of that, like the AI will do that, but like, you know, I'm old. So this was like the web will destroy all.

And we looked at print magazines and newspapers. And the idea was all of them would go away entirely and would be replaced by digital and the entire size of that market. And all that ad revenue was going to move online. And so, you know, we were one of the early movers in sort of going and trying to capture that market. And we looked at the big men's magazines or the local city guides or whatever it was and tried to go build that online. And at first did it the way that you guys were doing it. It was like very much this labor of love and we didn't have that much access to capital because it wasn't hot, hot, hot yet. And so our first few years, we were profitable and stayed small.

and it was like, it was amazing. And we had a small community of people that were diehard and advertisers who really felt the needle move. And it was it was wonderful. And what happened was the space got attention from big VCs and people wanted to go and sort of like, you know, get in on the gold rush. And a bunch of people raised a bunch of money. And I was one of them.

And, you know, the idea was you have to grow into or live into those valuations. Like you just sort of alluded to. And, you know, we went from one to three to seven to 15. Like, it was growing like, you know, maybe not like a software company today, but it was growing like a software company did back then. And we kept raising into it. And a few of the, like, mistakes. And by the way, they were not fatal mistakes,

but they were ultimately the thing that sort of, they took a lot of the joy out of the business, I would say. was when we got obsessed with figuring out how do you keep growing and how do you keep doubling year over year? And part of it was we need to grow the advertising base. And so we need to find more and more and more users that got away from our core and got away from sort of what we felt we were really great at doing. And so the product started to get a little watered down. And then on the other side, it was commerce. How do we start to sell stuff to these guys?

How do we start to monetize directly? today, subscriptions are something that I think is an actual viable model, again, not at scale. Yeah. Like everyone points in the New York Times and says, oh, this can work. Like, the New York Times is end of one. I don't think you're going to build venture-scale businesses doing that, but there is more willingness to pay for consumers than there was 10 years ago. And so our thought was they're not going to pay for our content.

They're going to pay for products. We bought a sort of, you know, ancillary commerce business and scaled that. And I went out to raise what was our series B thinking that we could go and get sort of one plus one equals three. They're going to love our media business, which is like profitable and attracts this audience. They're going to like our commerce business, which has a bigger ceiling and is growing fast. And in fact, I just got like full punch in the face. And it was like one plus one equals one and a half. And these businesses don't necessarily belong together.

and media folks understood the media business and commerce folks understood the commerce business. And so I had to go through this sort of painful process of taking them apart from one another. And then I got the sort of bug for the roll-up. And well, if I'm not going to grow vertically, maybe I can grow horizontally and what are other like-minded brands

and can we sell them together and can we build a tech platform together and bought a bunch of companies and raised a bunch of money. And that worked. But the reality was we were always swimming against the current, which was social media. And, you know, media in general fell under the eye of big tech. And, you know, meta grew and obviously, you know, what Google represented for the ad ecosystem.

And then as, you know, Amazon and Apple and Netflix grew. And it just was clear that, like, I wasn't even at the kids table. I was in, like, the other room entirely. And now look at what's happened with, like, the top of the market. Look at discovery and the amazing run they had and the fact that they need to be consolidated. It's just it's an impossible business. And the way to do it right is to do what you love and stay relatively small and build like a real community-based thing like you guys are doing. I have like so much respect for this show.

And like my hope is that you like find other ways to leverage the influence that you have here. And don't put a like target on your back where you have to turn this. show into a billion-dollar company because it just yeah john's john's john's position was always that uh value in in media today is flowing to personalities individuals right even on the subscription side when you're signing up for a subscription today the subscriptions that i'm excited to sign up for are when i know the dollars are like flowing to an individual who's going to just obsess over like a ben thompson is a classic example right or like an emily sunberg in new york right the dollars are going to an individual who has like a certain point of view and they're just going to obsess over whatever topics and then the value is going to flow to the platforms the spotifies the youtubes the metas and like you kind of want to be in either one the only other category that's emerged as durable to me is the like you know truth monopoly which is like a legacy media brand there's only maybe 10 of them in the world the new york times wall street journal things like that where they kind of like part of the value is like you it's it's it's it's it's

It's like you own an asset that basically has a license to distribute what becomes the truth, right? And that takes deck 50 years to kind of create. And even across all those assets, you're talking about tens of billions of dollars, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the independent creator earnings. I think YouTube paid out like $50 billion to creators. And then YouTube itself also makes another $50 billion. And so, like, all of that is way more money flowing around than, like, the few publications that stuck around. and made the business model work and are doing quite well.

But creating these new things in the middle, we want to stay out of that messy middle. Yeah, and I do think the, look, venture in general, like is so many companies raise money that should not be raising money. Most companies that raise money should not be raising money. Ventures are very specific flavor of sort of trajectory, And the fact that, you know, it went from being a sort of cottage industry 15, 20 years ago

to being just like this mainstream asset class that everybody obsesses over. You know, when I graduated from college, I did not know what venture capital was. If I graduated from Penn today, it would be the first second and third thing on my list to do would be to go get into VC or to go get into a startup. Like, the world has changed. And I think it in certain situations enables unbelievable things to be built. And in most situations, it, like, destroys companies. and forces them.

Yeah, so part of it is VCs are trained to hunt the things that are getting attention, right? Yes, right. Part of the issue is, like, you see a media company pop up. It's like, this thing is cool. It's getting a lot of attention. Like, the sexiest shitty business in the whole world. Yeah. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah. Yeah, we were even thinking about, you know, thinking about, like, the right way to be trained on is, like, Claudebot. Like, if you could find a way to put some money into Claudebot, you know, this week, That's pretty exciting. Because there should be very high leverage. Not saying that. A business that builds around that. Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing is, you know, I go back to what is the purpose of venture capital? You go back to like, why do we call it Silicon Valley? Well, because they were setting up fabs. They were setting up, it was a high CAPEX, high R&D environment.

Then with the cloud platforms and ABS comes out, it becomes cheaper to start a company. But you're still putting up money for a bunch of engineers who are going to build a piece of software. where that then eventually starts growing and the LTV comes in year five or six and you get paid back. But we have started to flirt with, well, like maybe let's put venture dollars into this thing that really doesn't have any KAPX or any R&D spend, but a lot of go-to-market spend that seems to pay back relatively quickly. And that seems to be a pattern that repeats. And something you need to watch out for in any category is where are the, what is the purpose

of venture capital in this thing? even if it's growing like other things. Is that how you see it? And what industries are you seeing, okay, this is still a good industry for venture capital? Yeah, one of the sort of weird perversions of the industry right now is there is more money than there's ever been in venture,

and there's obviously a relatively small number of incredibly sort of deep-pocketed funds that need to deploy huge amounts of money and into a generation of companies that theoretically need less than ever before. Yeah. And so you have this, you know, somewhat unhealthy dynamic. I do, I think that's what's sort of creating this idea of like sort of picking a winner before a winner is actually emerged, just like plow in on the thing.

And even if it's a million of ARR, but it's raised 300 million bucks, it's like stay out of the category. Like this is the, like these are the guys. And, you know, the big firms can do that. I can't play that game. I don't really want to play that game. It's not like how we're set up. You know, the one thing, even as our funds have grown, like we are purists. We are only early stage.

We're pre-seed and seed only. And I think like when you, and we're a team of generalists. And I think when that's the case, like we have to be really careful that we don't get sucked into being heat seeking and just like always going for the shiny object in a market like this where prices are crazy and where you like get pulled into competing with mega funds that have like very different incentives. I also think you don't want to find yourself as like a value-seeking fund at a time in the market like this for obvious reasons. And like the history of value-seeking adventure is not great. Well, the other thing that strangely, I mean, one of the dynamics right now is you have, you know, mega-platform VCs that don't care about pricing as much and they just want to get enough dollars in. But then you also have some like emerging managers that are just are in the heat-chasing business.

And so they don't really care about pricing as much either because they're like, we'll get in at 60. We know this is going to get marked up. And we just need to prove to our LPs that we can get in the good names. Yeah. It's like a shorter term like sort of fundraising mentality. Yeah. It's like we're just, we're optimizing to raise like fund too versus versus like actual, you know, returns. Yeah.

How do you know how do you know about this? Like having been in this business for a long time and like living through cycles, math matters. Like, if you come into stuff way overpriced, like, it's really hard to build a business from day one and have it exit for a billion dollars of cash. Yeah. Like, actually seeing that arc is incredibly difficult. And in today's market, there's people who are raising in a billion dollars who are still, like, figuring out what the name of the company is going to be. And, you know, it's hard to see that math working. At the same time, the argument is, if you look out on the horizon 10 years from now, outcomes are going to be that much bigger.

were at a moment of change from a technology perspective where there's going to be more generationally important companies. And the idea, you know, a decade ago was, can you find a billion dollar company or a $10 billion company? And now this is, can I find a trillion dollar company? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like when I look back at previous hype cycles that I've been like during my career, you have maybe the D to C era, that's where I, where, where I, where I, where I, where I, got my start. When you look at that hype cycle, there was not, there was, it was almost like an , it was almost like an ads arbitrage. It was like meta was an amazing ads platform. And if you had a great product that was positioned well against incumbents, you could just scale so quickly.

And so the opportunity was really like, hey, we're making better products here, but really this is like an advertising arbitrage. And there were some great businesses that were created from that. And then FinTech was a branding firm arbitrage against VCs. You go to a branding firm, give them 100K, and then go raise out $5 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been the victim of that. Thank you. The people that work at those branding firms do amazing work,

so I don't want to call that out because it's not their fault. Shout out to my boy, Emmett Shahn. That was one of them. There's a couple others. Going forward, like, you look at kind of FinTech. FinTech was, there was some, it was Dodd-Frank, right? It was like the chain, some regulatory component. but a lot of it was like just better infrastructure

that just made it easier. But that just meant way more competition. So it wasn't like this fundamental technology shift that just changed everything in the way that we're experiencing right now. And so I feel like you kind of have to unlearn some of the lessons from that because we now do have a real technology shift.

So you are going to just get, you know, far greater value creation a lot faster than maybe this like, you know, temporary ads arbitrage or just like kind of the infrastructure. Yeah. And by the way, one of the interesting trends on the back of that is this move to sort of VCs hunting younger and younger founders. I think you're seeing, you know, there was a movement over time where you were getting this big premium for second and third time founders and people who had sort of unfair advantage in a category. And now I think there is this idea that you have to unlearn so much if you have not grown up natively with AI that maybe you're better off not knowing. anything about an industry, but moving 10,000 times faster and sort of just like living natively in all the new tools and thinking that the way that somebody like me works is

totally like, like, I'm just like a dinosaur. Yeah, I've actually, so I've found myself giving a buddy of mine is kind of like going through the idea maze. And a couple of the ideas that he mentioned, I was like, this seems like a great idea, but you have to understand, like, think about this idea in the context of having four YC companies going after this opportunity. And do you, and it's like, dude, you're going to have a family soon. Like, you're not, like, 20 anymore. Do you want to compete against, like, four teams of 20-year-olds that are not going to sleep? Like, this is, and, yeah, they have less experience and maybe they

haven't raised money before, but it's going to be, you're not, I don't feel confident that you're going to be able to outwork them, even though you're really hard worker, just because you have, More stuff. We see this in like company updates. So we're, you know, we're like actively doing deals in new companies and you get that like, you know,

update three weeks after you invest, like the monthly update cadence. And we can see the teams with these younger founders and just like the amount of product that they ship and the learnings that they have and the speed that they're hiring. Like it's palpable. And sometimes we invest in a team. Great experience.

They've got all the sort of credibility. and we get the first update and we're like, shock. Like, they think it's 2002. Like, they just don't get it. You need to move faster. Like, the market is crazy right now.

Yeah. What are you, how big is the team that you work with? How are you thinking about mentoring, building new great investors and counseling investors about best practices or, like, strategies for like,

not breaking the rules that you just discussed. Yeah, it's a, this is like, you know, all, all I think about now. Admittedly, I think this is a young person's business and an increasingly young person's business. And I think that the investor track follows the operator track to some degree, which is you want investors who sort of understand this new year. And so, you know, I'm 44. I'm going to be, you know, soon enough, I'm going to be the oldest person on this team.

And which is funny, you know, to just like think about. And we are actively, you know, continuing to hire and sort of mentor and bring up young talent. I think that you can be extraordinary in this business without having 25 years of experience. I think it's nice to have some voices around the table who have been through cycles and have some of that wisdom on just like not getting too. caught up in the craziness. But realistically, we are still continuing to, like, obsess about bringing in interesting, young, diverse perspectives, people that natively are growing up with the technology that feels novel to people like me.

And I think that that's going to be the continued goal here. And then it's like, up or out, really, this is not a place. This is not a business to sort of hang out in. and I don't have the patience and I don't think people in this business should have the patience to wait 10 years to see what performance looks like. I think you have to sort of decide early

if you feel like people have the right instincts, if they're able to identify talent with their gut, if they're able to win people over. And like, I think you have to make bets the same way you do in like professional sports. How do you think about that patience versus, you know, moving quickly and not waiting to measure results. I'm thinking specifically about the pressure that can occur a bunch of, you know,

new VCs who are at a fund and they all want to get points on the board and that maybe leads to more aggressive dealmaking that becomes sort of like a rat race between them and they wind up making bad decisions versus saying, look, you will be judged on a short term, but we're going to give the space to not swing at every pitch. How do you think about that balancing act? Well, I think first of all, it's like this comes down to some of the actual mechanisms for how you manage people and stylistically, like how much communication you have, how much, like, you know, of a lone wolf culture versus a team-based culture. You know, here we're very collaborative. We have a bunch of people working on everything that we're doing. Obviously, at the end of the day,

like a deal gets done because somebody brings that over the line with like very personal conviction. But I think our culture is set up to be able to assess people in sort of softer areas versus just those quick marks. Also, you know, you have to know what you're underwriting. So sometimes we do a deal and explicitly we go, this one's going to get out of the gates really fast. This is going to get quick marks. We understand it. But by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to have. great outcomes. We've seen a bunch of our quick marks over the years end up as just big black eyes.

And so there's other deals where we go, we know this is going to be slow. It's okay that it's going to be slow. There's a real moat here if this works, so there's a real technological sort of challenge that they're going to need to overcome. But if it happens, this is going to be a really valuable business. You know, know what you're getting into and be explicit about it so that if something is slow, but you signed up for slow, you're not like dinging somebody. And then, look, I think at the end of the day, like a VC fund is as good as their sort of reputation. And so feeling out how our founders feel about, like, working with folks, seeing people's win rates and seeing the way that people sort of, you know, carry themselves. A lot of this is art.

And frankly, like, early stage investing is a lot of art, too. So this is feel. And, you know, maybe I'm making bad calls on talent, but we're doing it, I think, very deliberately. Cool. Well, put your talent on TBPN. I have one more question. I got people. I know, no.

I had a question, too. I wanted to get your take on AI-focused roll-ups, given that you rolled-ups. I was going to ask something very similar. What was your question? I was going to ask if you had to pick a different asset class to invest. You mentioned art. There's some art behind you between like public markets, hedge fund, private equity, take privates turnarounds, roll-ups.

growth, growth equity, bigger scale stuff. Like, is there anything else where you're like, ah, like, that looks fun, but I'm not going to do it? Like, what else, what else intrigues you about different potential markets? We've seen a lot of ECs. Okay, two wildly different questions. Okay, sure, sure. So let's, I want to first take on the AI roll-ups and then other asset classes. Well, I can actually, I'll connect the two because I actually do think sort of roll-ups,

scratch-and-itch for me as a former operator, and I've done it. I do like the sort of, like that mental exercise of like putting things together and figuring out the personalities and the products. I think that it is right. I can understand all the logical reasons for why it works and why like this is all going to be, this is going to end well. I can't help but think a little of the gold rush right now is a place to park AUM. Yeah. And I don't like, you know, I'm not trying to like throw stones, but it's, you know, it's a real easy place to just go raise money if you're a fund that has access to a bunch of money. And I'm sure they'll be.

And somewhat, somewhat, I would hope like limited, yeah, limited. Oh my God, you're getting venture fees. Yeah, well, yeah, but. Sometimes. Not always, but yeah, I mean, the allure of getting venture fees on, you know, just an asset that already has cash flow is pretty safe. Like, it could be allure. I'm not to mention that, but the entrepreneurs, if they're like, I'm basically running a PE fund, but I only had to take 30% dilution. That's crazy, too. It depends on the individual, depends on the individual company.

Given that you've bought, you've bought a number of businesses, like, how limited do you think is the downside on some of these roll-ups? Like, is there a way for people to buy companies and just botch the integration and the actual, like, AI enablement so bad that the company goes from being worth, like, $25 million doing, some niche thing. One plus one is 0.5. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To just like, hey, all the customers. I mean, I think one plus one could equal zero plenty of time. And frankly, it can equal less than zero. Because I mean, look, it depends what you're buying. It depends what this is. The more reliant you are on a personality in these roll-ups, I think the greater the risk. If this is like a single proprietor who maintains all these really tight relationships and the whole thing rests with them. And if you don't keep them happy, you risk like the whole.

thing, you know, burning down, that scares me. I do think there's probably places where you can go and throw stuff together. The reality is there's a lot of money in PE that knows how to roll stuff up. That's what I'm saying. Is there not? That venture is going to do this better than the folks that have done this forever. Well, yeah, the one thing you can imagine venture doing better is the technology, but there's also the financial engineering and actually buying companies. And, you know, we have a friend who raised a PE fund, you know, and has yet to, he's getting close to doing his first deal, but the number of amazing opportunities that look amazing

that he's ultimately turned down to finally get to the point where he's doing the first deal and you realize, like, somebody who's never bought, acquired a company before coming in and just, like, looking at everything and everything looks great if you just have like a capital hammer and you just want to hit it with a bunch of, hit the asset with a bunch of AI.

I do worry that some of these end up. And how long are these advantages going to be around? for. I mean, I think there's a version of, you know, 15 years ago, it's like, we understand the internet and nobody else does. And then it was, you know, like, we're going to go to the cloud first or we're going to do mobile. Like, yes, AI is different, but, like, I can tell you the traditional P.E. funds are not going to, like, totally fall asleep and, like, decide not to, like, embrace any new technology. And in 15 years, they're still going to be sitting on the wrong side of history. Like, there might be a window, but it's not going to be a big window. Yeah, somebody should

ask Orlando Bravo if he's heard of AI. He's like, never heard of that. No, people are aware. The competition will be intense. This is great. Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, great to hang out. I wish we had more time.

Thank you. Thank you for hiring. Thank you for hiring and training up Dylan. Oh, yeah. Our president back in the day. Dylan, Ambriscona. Yeah. He's a big fan of yours.

Yeah. And we're lucky to have him. So come back on again soon. Yeah. Absolutely. We'll be in New York. We'll be at the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, come down to the New York Stock Exchange.

That'll be fun. Join us there. Anytime. And I'm going to be out your way later in the month, so I'll be. Amazing. Awesome. Amazing. We'll have a great rest of your day.

We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web app, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. We have Lucas Atkins from ArkiAI coming into the TBP and Ultradome. Lucas, how are you doing?

There he is. I'm good. Thank you for having me. Thanks for hopping on the show. First time in the show, can you please give us an introduction on yourself? Yeah, yeah. My name's Lucas Atkins. I'm the CTO at RCAI.

We actually changed our logo. Okay. So that it like highlights the R3. I have text. I'm sorry. No, no, no, you're good. Okay. And we've, you know, for a very long time been a startup focused on like enterprise,

you know, custom language models. Yeah. And we decided to jump into the pre-training game ourselves. Pre-training. Okay, so small language models. I like small language models. It's the large ones that scare me. But tell me how small are these?

How much? What is a training budget? Can you give me like a GPT2 level training run? GPT3 level training around? Try and ground. Am I looking at the data center for space? Or is it something, a little cluster in a closet? Can you train it on a Mac Mini?

What are we talking about? It used to be, you know, that a small, any small model, what a small language model right was, you know, tens of millions of parameters. Now it's in the realm of, I would consider anything under 50 billion kind of resting in that smaller world.

So small as big as big has gotten enormous. Yeah, exactly. And it's only going to get more and more as, you know, RAM. Well, I don't know, but as people get more RAM and as we're able to fit more on our machines. But we historically lived in that kind of 50 sub-range. And then we also, we like trained on top of other open source models like Lama. Like fine tuning.

Is that fine tuning or distilling? Is there a difference there that's meaningful to what you do? There is an open debate as to whether fine tuning from like another model's just like text outputs is distilling. Or if you actually have to like grab it from the, you know, the lodgets. But I would argue that it's all distilling. So it's all some form of making a model better by using an. another model to make it better. And is there is there a sort of power law distribution in applications of

SLMs like is there is it like you know translation is just like everyone's using that or or or text extraction OCR like is there sort of a power law of like what it can't what what what the when you reach for this tool in particular? It used to be up until about a year ago it was you were you're pretty confined to you could hill climb a specific domain. Obviously, it ranges based on how big your model was, or small rather. But after this kind of like reinforcement learning revolution of the last year, if you can build a task and an environment to have that model live and breathe and learn inside of,

you can hill climb. You can take like, there's people that are taking 100. million parameter models and making them perform like, you know, five or six billion parameter models from a couple years ago. So it used to be a lot harder. Now it's all about it's a lot more taste and task driven. Yeah. And when you say perform like it feels,

it feels like the true, true cutting edge frontier model sort of smokes all the domain specific models, but it's expensive. And so how important is cost? What sort of cost? reductions are you seeing on the inference side once a company or, you know, a developer decides to move from the heavyweight frontier model to something smaller? It's, it is very often when they're going into production, right? It's like they've done prototyping with, you know, a large close source model.

They've had success with it. They've gotten approval. They want to bring it into production, you know, to more consumers or their customers. and then the bill starts to hit and the market starts to look tricky. So that's when they start looking for ways that they can host it themselves. There's also like the compliance and data privacy aspect of it. And that's something that, you know, kind of sovereign, you know, U.S.-based open models have stopped kind of being released.

It's very much out of China. You have, you know, a few in Europe, but it is very much. much been lacking in the United States. So we were, I was hoping to to release this before I got on the show, but, uh, you know, today we're, we're finally releasing our 500 billion parameter model. So we went up pretty big. There we go. You still got, you still got plenty of day left. That's great. You still got plenty of day left. You're like, we're still, this is just, this is just a preview. So, uh, yeah, take us through the landscape of, uh, who you're competing. with set the table for us.

Most people will be familiar with Deep Sea, Quinn. How are these companies resourced? Is this just China's national interest that they're funding these? Do they have good business flywheels at this point? Because I imagine you have a plan to sort of unseat

them in the open source race. There, you know, there's a lot of rumors about how all of this capital gets allocated into, you know, these different companies, but at the end of the rumors. Yeah, hedge funds.

Well, there's rumors that, you know, the government's giving it to them. They have favorites. You know, there's shady deals going on. But the reality of it is... You're saying they didn't train the models with scraps in a cave? In a cave? No. No.

Well, actually, frankly, if you look at kind of the horsepower that we're dealing with, a lot of them, you know, seemingly did. It's very impressive. And that's, that's kind of the... you know, you want there to be this kind of battle of like, you know, the U.S. first China in this race that obviously plays into our incentives. However, these are extremely talented labs. And so when it's, I'm not competing against, you know, China or other countries for like open weight, you know,

sovereign language models that people can own and deploy themselves. I'm competing against like the other researchers there, like that, you know, that human being. and you have some extreme talent. So yes, it used to be really hard to make money making open source models as they got bigger and as they got harder for other people to host themselves, you know, the systems and the economics started to work out because they get the, you know,

the community buy-in and excitement of something being open source, but if it's a trillion parameters, you know, your average consumer is not going to able to run that on their toaster, right? So it ends up, you kind of get this win-win situation. And now that that has kind of started to flywheel, they've started to, you know, do the Open AI and the Anthropic and the Google Play where they're building products around it. And it's really becoming a very lucrative ecosystem. Yeah. How are you scaling the business? What have you chosen in sort of the business model world? There's, there's,

so many ways that you can build around open source technologies, what's working, and what are you thinking about the roadmap long term? There's, we were in kind of a uniquely, a unique, a very fortunate position when it came to this. We had always been customizing models for people. We had always been working for, you know, enterprises, developers, businesses. How can we, you know, make sure that they're getting the best out of their own hardware? The only thing that really changed was that when customers wanted something to be based in the United States or from the United States, there stopped being competitive options. Sure.

And we never really liked the idea that the foundation of our business relied on other people releasing models. Yeah. So it was like six months ago that we kind of fully decided, hey, you know what, let's try it. And we had success with our first model and then our second and our third. And it kind of, you know, brought us to this. So the economics of our business doesn't change so much. You know, we're still working with customers. We're still delivering, you know, models and powerful tools,

though we have a much more robust control of the stack, which means that the degree to which we can customize and the kind of period in training that we can go back to for those customers just kind of increases drastically. Yeah. Just when I think of like open source focused company, I think, you know, like donations, people just, like, contributing for the game. I also think about, like, consulting, actually going in and a company paying you to do a custom

implementation work, improve. I also think about hosted services, consumption-based plans, subscription-based plans. How are you thinking that side of the business model will evolve, or where is it at now? I would love for us to have, like, a Go-fund, man. or something. But no, we, we, it's, it's very much the latter, too. I think that services and consulting, obviously, you know, if it's the right customer for the right product and the right situation, you know, there's worlds where we're having

a portion of your business be devoted. That's important. But the real moneymaker, and I think this has been seen out of those labs in China, out of, out of others is, it's in the tooling. It's like, what are you building around it? How are you making it so that other people can customize it? without you having to do services, how can you make it an easy API? How can you build a developer and education kind of suite around your software

that is uniquely benefited by your models so that they can take it and using maybe hardware or GPUs that you own? How can they go and train their own models? So there's many ways to turn this into something that is much more like automated and less services based. But at the end of the day, it all just comes down to getting the, you know, the customer of the right product.

Yeah. Who are your heroes in the open source space? Are you a red hat guy, GitLab guy? What do you like? Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously, yeah, red hat, get lab. I mean, I very much jumped into the open source space, like in open source AI.

Sure. So, like, as much as I guess they're now a huge competitor of ours, you know, the mistrial is huge. You know, the OG Lama team. Yeah. You know, Deep Sea, like these very people that they inspired me to try to compete with them. So it's kind of this very, you know, this great fun. They inspired you to grind harder.

Yeah, really. Yeah, yeah. Hit that bald eagle sound. Thank you so much for coming out on the show to break it down. Yeah. Congratulations on all the progress. And congratulations on the launch. We'll be looking at what's the timeline here.

You think you'll get it. It was supposed to be earlier. We got some GPUs didn't want to load up. So it'll be here. We're going to be live for a couple more hours, paying us. Come into the, come into the chat. on an extra YouTube when it's officially launched.

And we'll talk about it. Thank you so much for hopping on the street. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Century. And I need to find Century. There we go.

Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. We got to talk about this. Plant Daddy. We got to get him on the show. Exposing his local coffee shop, he says, a friendly reminder that my local coffee shop is running a bot farm to boost engagement. I'm talking a very small business. Imagine at a country scale. If you're still responding,

reposting anonymous accounts with zero betting, you're being used like the idiot you are. This is crazy. Yeah, so there's this video and this local coffee shop, his favorite local coffee shop, has a bot farm set up in their back room to boost Instagram engagement specifically. I... Does this person not know that you can just... Also, why did he let Kevin back there to video this and like op-sec at this at this coffee shop is atrocious? If you're doing...

Look at the fan at the end. If you scroll the end of this video, you can see that there's just a ban blowing on all the phones. You see this fan right there? That is crazy. This seems like such an insane thing to spend money or time on. That's what I was about to say. What is the ROI here?

So they get an extra 50, maybe 100 likes and comments. comments on every post. And is that enough to drive, you know, this looks like thousands of dollars of equipment. They're selling more coffee because of... A lot of iPhones. I think they're probably Android because they need to be USB seeded in and controlled. Right, right, right. So it's a little bit more open-eas-top.

It seems like a total waste of time. I've never gone to any of my local coffee shops. Because of Instagram? That you know of. This is not advertising doesn't work on me, bro. Advertising doesn't work on me. I love your coffee, but the engagement here. It's too low.

Matt. I don't know. I don't know. Well, I would love to know what that proprietor, what that store owner thinks about the ROI on that platform. I have noticed on some posts recently that are kind of outside of the sort of tech bubble. I'll scroll through and look at the comments. And every single comment is AI. Okay.

Like, just straight up. Yeah, not copy pasted. Not copy pasted, but clearly it's like an AI that's just like responding. And it's just loosely riffing on it, just adding and. adding engagement. This isn't that. It's this. No, no, no. It's happening more and more. Anyway, let's move on. We have Bridget Mendler from Northwood Space. She's the co-founder and CEO, returning to the show. It's been just under a year, but she's back. Bridget, great to see you. How are you doing? In a much bigger facility. Yeah, what's going on over at Northwood? Break it down for us.

It's good. We are, sorry, we just turned on questions. just started blasting 80s music in the office. But we're good. This is being on the manufacturing floor lifestyle at Northwood. And yeah, we are announcing our Series B fundraise. Amazing. How much did you raise? 100 million dollars.

Nice, nice round number. Not a cent more, not a cent less. And some other numbers too. Yes. Yes, some other numbers, yeah. More importantly. That's right. Exactly.

Customer is key. We raised 49.8 in a contract with the, sorry, I'm getting a little bit of background noise. But yeah. 49.8 million dollar contract with the Space Force. Congratulations. Amazing. Talk about the actual progress. I mean, I remember hearing about this from Delian when it was like just an idea.

And then I think I saw a video maybe with Jason Carmen, the first deployment. You were building this. Like, what is the scale of the deployment? How are you? I mean, you're in a manufacturing space. How many people are working there? How many of these things are you building? Explain this to us.

Yeah, yeah. We're at our 35,000 square foot manufacturing facility now. I think we moved in here thinking this was going to be a long-term home for us. But as I'm sure, a bunch of these companies say, it filled up really fast. We have had a busy year. It's been a year of going from early concept with some exciting problems that we were looking to solve on the ground side. We're looking to address scaling up communications to a bunch of different orbits, really pushing the boundaries on where you can take dynamic space capabilities. Our phase array was really well aligned with that.

So we kind of built out the solution. We took it through to deployment. We can successfully say that now we have actually done production on eight portal units. They were produced in this factory and the span of. of four weeks. We shipped them out. It actually got shipped out on a commercial airliner to its destination halfway around the world and was up and running as soon as it hit the site within 12 hours. So all in all, from the time of our contract signature to actually being ready to take satellite passes is a three-month time period. So we're excited by that. And walk me through sort of like

the, like, I've seen these memes of like, you, you ask a question on Google and it takes you through, like, you know, you go through the fiber optic cable, you go to the Bay Station, you go to cell tower, like, walk me through the actual, you know, use case from someone trying to use the internet and then interfacing like Northwood is in the chain somewhere. Like, what is the full chain? No, that's a really great question because a lot of the ground equation has been kind of these fragmented pieces, right? Like, I can imagine it's, it's completely, It's like, oh, there's this one piece of hardware, whether it's a phased ray or a parabolic or whatever. How does that fit in with, you know, me making use of internet through space?

Yeah. And the real point for us is that we are saying space companies shouldn't have to consider the ground equation when they're running their own business. They shouldn't be trying to navigate, you know, land leases in all of these countries around the world to make contact with their spacecraft. What Northwood does is we own the entire stack. So we handle from the moment that there is a contact made with the spacecraft all the way to the point of presence somewhere around the world that a spacecraft operator has themselves hosted, that entire chain. So that includes hardware, that includes modem, that includes network backhaul, that includes software interfaces, APIs, and the actual control plane for moving that data.

That's kind of a stack end-to-end on ground that hasn't been managed by a third-party grant provider before. for. And so that's what gets us excited, because when we take on that big, that big chunk of the pie, we actually free up a lot of mental bandwidth and speed for space companies. So for a space company, they're putting a satellite in orbit for some reason, whatever they're doing. When are they calling you? When are they making sure that they're compatible or ready to integrate? Is that presumably before launch, but does it need, do they need to do anything special on the actual satellite? Hopefully, they're not calling after their existing solution. We just took off and I'm hoping you can connect us.

Help us make contact. Yeah, it's kind of like when you move into an apartment, then you call Spectrum like after and you're like, I don't have internet for two weeks now. Yeah, like here we are. Contact list. But no, I mean, that's a little bit like the situation with the satellite control network with U.S. government right now.

These are for satellites that are already live and operating. That's what our contract is against. It ranges for a ton of functions. So, every launch that takes place. in the U.S. That's how you know. Sorry. Sorry.

Your facility's big because your team is scootering around. Scootering around. It is big. You went lying about 35,000s per feet. We have a lot of passion for our scooters here. It's nice, smooth floors. Anyway, sorry. It's a great ride.

But yeah, so it serves a ton of missions. And more missions are getting launched every day. And so that puts additional strain on capacity. So for us, you know, for instance in that contract, they're calling saying, hey, we need more capacity. We are needing you to plug in with where we route our data. So we just hand them an API, and that's how they interface with it. So they can just connect with the API.

Satellites keep doing what they have been doing sometimes for decades. And then when their new satellites launch, they can also use that same interface. So trying to make it as clean and simple as possible. Yeah. What is your pipeline look like? I imagine you're talking to a bunch of companies that are planning to get various satellites up on one year, two year, three year. How many, like, are you feeling like an acceleration is kind of what I'm getting at in terms of like more mass to orbit? Yes, big time.

We do get a lot of customer inbound. And I think, like, that's a large part of our raise for us. It's like, hey, we need to be able to expand and grow so that we can service all these important missions. I think an important piece of our passion for what we do is around serving diverse and ambitious missions. So a lot of our missions look pretty different. So for our recent capability we're working on with Space Systems Command, that looks like dynamic spacecraft movement, you know, being able to hit multiple different orbits and those kinds of capabilities. There are also communications constellations where, you know, they have more of that networking backhaul use case that I described to you. there's other ones that we work with that are more interested in timely imagery. And so for us,

what makes us excited is being the ground expert that thinks about that with them from, you know, some of those conversations we have are extremely early. We're like, we're asking them questions and learning about their system and they'll say, you know, we haven't thought that far yet. And so we get to be the partner from that very early stage to bringing the constellation online and really being the one that holds the accountability for that. So we get excited. by kind of the diversity of the space industry. I'm sure, you know, you guys are hearing about all the different use cases, even that popped up this past year.

Yeah, I'm talking about the moon or, you know, data centers in space. Yeah, data center, some space data center players are probably calling you being like, hey, in 10 years, I'm going to have a lot of GPUs in space. But, you know, let's condense that timeline. Let's condense that timeline on all of the ideas. Like, you know, why not? Space is an exciting frontier to push forward on. Yeah, what else are you tracking in launch costs, actual cost of mass to orbit?

That feels like a key barometer for the health of the space industry broadly. Is that progressing according to your thesis when you started the company? Are you ahead of plan? Obviously, it doesn't directly matter for what you do, but obviously it does in many ways because you know, you're downstream of that entire economy. Is that the right even metric to be looking at if you're monitoring? the space economy? I mean, I think the economics of space have been something that have been challenging historically. You know, you need to be able to make a profitable business off of space.

And so I think there's been a number of dominoes that have fallen in favor of that, whether that be improved launch costs and, you know, dropping to new levels in that and other pieces of the space infrastructure stack. I think, you know, what we're building, we're also interested in in making that more affordable. I think the proof is kind of just in the dreams that people are dreaming up and actually putting real dollars behind now. So, you know, it's one thing to talk about some ambitious space concept. It's another thing to put like real dollars behind it and a real timeline against it.

And so for us, like that's, that's what we want to enable is that like concept to reality timeline, like condensing that, making that more possible. Surprisingly, the ground actually takes longer to build than it does to, build the spacecraft and launch it in a number of different instances. And so that's just silly. Like, let's be the enabler instead. Yeah. Can you help me understand deploying ground stations globally?

Are there treaties for this type of thing? Do you call other governments? Are you active in other countries? Like, I imagine that, you know, there are obviously some, I guess, like, geostationary orbits that just orbit over the U.S., but if my satellites on the other side of the Earth, I'd probably want to talk to it. How do you solve that? What's involved?

What's the roll out like? No, totally. We have an entity in a number of different countries. So, yeah, we have entities on, I think, like, three or four continents at this point. So you basically need to establish the business there. You need to work with the local governments across a bunch of different dimensions. I think personally that's something that I think is really exciting to support with the space industry, right? A lot of countries are really passionate about pushing their space capabilities forward.

And so for us to be able to have them be a part of a larger mission as we build out our big network, but also to support what their ambitions are with space is something I feel interested in. And then from a logistics standpoint, I think that's like a key case in point for why, if you set out to build a space mission, why do you have to go create entities, land leases, local regulatory? It's just a totally different business. And so I think that's something that we are very happy to be burdened by. Yeah, on the regulatory side, are you interfacing with NASA or the FCC? What does that look like?

And then does the regulatory architecture that's put in place in the U.S. sort of carry forward into other countries? Yeah, that's a great question. There's some pieces of it that do, cross over internationally. We deal with the international telecommunications union for certain pieces of it depends on which direction you're talking about from space to ground or ground to space. And then the FCC is really the main regulatory body domestically. But they need input from NASA. They need input from a bunch of other government stakeholders. So a lot of folks weigh in when it

comes to spectrum, which is, you know, for nerdy folks like me, that's kind of interesting. Yeah. What is what is the main bottle? neck, if anything. It's surprising to hear some of the timelines you're talking about on the hardware side. You said four weeks to make and ship out the hardware and get it in production feels fast. What is like where are you trying to speed up? Brown is like such a multivariable problem. It comes down to supply chain for sure. It comes down to deployment. Like what is actually efficient and easy to ship to anywhere around the world. It comes down to licensing and a whole host of other regulatory approvals.

So for us, like, that's why we find that it's really useful to be vertically integrated because we can actually think of those constraints at every different piece along the chain. So, you know, when we see a bottleneck, like, hey, there's this supply chain limitation, we get to design around that and think about how that fits into the overall system. So I think we've been coordinating all of those pieces well so far. you know, new challenges are going to continue to pop up, but I think that comes down to just having a team that is multidisciplinary. Yeah.

I want to know more about the use of funding, $100 million fundraise, obviously more hiring and more acceleration broadly, but are there any, like, pieces of equipment that you're going to be buying for manufacturing? Is there a, like, a robotic arm that you've been hovering over the checkout button and now you're clicking it or a CNC machine? Like, like, what will transform about the actual manufacturing process with this, right? Yeah. Like, getting concrete.

There we go. Yeah, I think, well, actually, that's interesting. Are you right? Literally buy concrete? No. Old, old, space, old ground companies do need to buy a ton of concrete. Yeah, because the pad, right, that you actually put it on, right? Exactly.

You have settling time. Just let the concrete dry. That's a whole factor in the equation. But, but, yeah, for us, it's really about a new, scale of production. So, you know, we've demonstrated this end-to-end process for smaller scale of missions. Now it's, okay, cool, can you do that at a larger scale reliably? And so that comes down to, like you said, bringing some stuff in house. So that's our PCB line, for instance, that's something that we're interested in bringing in house. We have different testing fixtures

that we have in house. We have a big anechoic chamber over here. Oh, yeah. Wow. So, things like that. Things like that. right isn't it like dead quiet in there it's true it is yeah I'm tempted to show you but anyway um but it will probably cut the Wi-Fi out right exactly yeah we cut the Wi-Fi out

the audio quality would be a little hazardous but we wouldn't be able to hear so Christine but yeah we're going to be moving into a bigger space as well so that we can you know accommodate more production volume also inventory you know like this this stuff takes up a lot of space

a lot of hardware we're moving it through rapidly. We're looking to hit a rate of 12 units per month for one product line and then another volume for another product line. There you go. So yeah, that's some of the expenses. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Fantastic progress. Yeah, remarkable progress. In under a year, I can't wait for the next one. We will see you soon. Yeah, congrats to the whole team. Thanks, guys. Good to chat. All right. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. tell you about gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve

with small and medium-sized businesses. And without further ado, should we bring? Here we got. We got Jeff Miller. It's Miller time. We got Jeff Miller. We got Jeff Miller. Billing in. Anderol. Second time. You're the first repeat, live in person guest at the Ultradone. Find of the fan. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the Ultradale. Second time. How do we get one of these? Look at this. People are always asking us for jackets.

I'll trade you a jacket for a tiny gold plaque here. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a record. This is a record. Love it. Yeah, fantastic jacket. This is going to be flying off the shelf.

Get us up to speed on the Andrewl merch store. I mean, you were doing some like, you did like an auction on eBay, take us through. Absolutely. So actually, Jen, Bucci and I were cooking on this. Former TPP. TPP legend on here. So the way we're thinking. about the gear store and this is something by the way we talk often with our pal

tray also is that we're thinking about ways that for our friends we can bring them into and so beyond just following us on on x or watching our videos on youtube that they can participate the brand in a way that they would want to so we're going to be leaning into it hard to share with nascar it's a platform with Ohio State with every campaign that we do we're going to have some staples like the flight jacket that will become much more easily acceptable uh accessible i should say and then we're going to find some items that we'll just call high heat items that we're going to put it on. And the closest thing I can say is you think about what we did with the chromatic, our friends at Mod Retro, and pulling that into an Andrel edition,

what we're going to do with the M64, think along that vein. So when those come, be ready because they're not going to last long. Okay. Yeah, take us through the racing update. NASCAR's coming up, but you're also going to be racing drones now. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, why not? Yeah.

So, of course, we've got NASA. car, we're just about 150 days out. I expect to see both of you guys on the base. On the base. On June 21st. It's going to be a lot of fun. Are we going to be able to be on the carrier? What's going to? Will there be a carrier there? They're needed. I can't speak for the Navy. They don't answer me. There may one or multiple carriers on board and we'll see what we can do. Cool, cool. But the big thing I'd say is like as we think about our partnership strategy broadly, we have, as we talked about last time, something that has broad and pop that crosses over with our core audiences in defense and military, like the Anderold 250 with NASCAR,

there's something that's tied very clearly to where we have a manufacturing footprint with Ohio State. We're well on our way to building out Arsenal 1, as Grimm spoke about last week, hiring those 5,000 jobs that we committed to. The important thing, I think, for us is making sure that we still stay true to who we are across all these things. So I think about it as a spectrum. And if that's about general population or how we work our ways into communities, At the core, we are an engineering company. That autonomy, if you think about it,

has been at the core to this date of everything that we build. And so we want to make sure we have something that is not just a marketing play, something that feels much more about recruiting and standing for those values around autonomy. And so what is really just bringing you into the world of how this came to be, once we got the commitment from Palmer

and the other execs that we were going to do the annual 250 in Ohio State, Palmer said, Jeff, I'll let you do those things. But what you're going to do is build me a global, AI drone racing. And I'm like, please tell me more, bomber.

I'm like, like, drone racing league. He's like, no, no, no. All the drones have to be the same.

The only differentiator is the software, is the code. The ability to build autonomy. And so that's what we're working on. Yeah, so the idea, the idea here is people know

they're going to be racing drones. We have goal posts here. I can imagine like something like that. They know they're going to have to be flying a route. That's like a track, but they, I'm assuming they don't know what the track.

would actually look like until race day. So they have to actually build. It's going to be amazing. So the way we're doing this is we're working first and foremost with the drone champions league, which is the foremost operator of AI drone racing in the world. So we've got them as our official race operator. And we're working off of the model that they've built and they've tested and forged like a really viable path.

So it starts with virtual qualifiers. Anyone can compete in these virtual qualifiers. It's a simulator. It's a simulator, exactly. And that will lead to a physical qualifier where you're going to have gates that you have to go through. And the top teams that qualify, both from the university level and across the globe, because it's going to be an open competition, those will qualify for the first official

AIGP in Columbus, Ohio. And there, you're going to have time to prep, refine your code, leading up to the actual race day. And that's where all systems go. Yeah, what do you think the average team will look like? I'm thinking back to the DARPA Grand Challenge. I don't know if that was inspiring at all, but the teams from there, mostly academic teams, if I remember.

What do you think the mix will be? Have you already talked to teams? How's that going on? So we've done a lot of research on the approach to this. The clear mandate from our friend Palmer was this is open to anyone. To anyone. This is not just 18 to 22 year olds. There's a point we're talking about like, how can children race in this, right?

Yeah, yeah, children, but also like the Tesla team, the Waymo team, they're going to be like, let's just win. And so what I give our team incredible credit for. Also the big primes. Let them, let them. Hey, the big primes thing that they can race. They have an opportunity here to do some funniest thing ever. If a Chinese National thinks they could come in here, and wins, let's go.

And that will prove something there in its own right. Is our capabilities in the West relative to China? I mean, yeah, all the LLMs are on. The DJ High Factory team is like, okay, okay. I think the things that are most important is at the core, we are using this as a recruiting effort. Thinking about cracked engineers, especially at that university level.

We've done a credible diligence on the legal side to make sure when we say things like 500K prize pool, that it's eligible for anyone to raise, that you could win a job at annual. All those things are done in a legally compliant and thawful way. And I think most importantly, that we're setting a standard with our partner in hardware, your friend, Sorin, from Neros, that we are using incredible technology that's going to have clear chain of custody here in the States. Do we got to get Saurin to fly a drone in here. You've never seen him fly a drone in person.

Not live. So Soren is, Sorin Monroy Anderson from CEO of Niros and founder. He was, I believe, like a champion FPB drone. Drone racing, championed also competed in the DCL as well. Yeah. And so he puts on this, I went out with Ben. Ben actually filmed it in El Segundo.

And he's like, let me, I do a little like factory tour with him. He has a very small office at that point in time. The company had just got off the ground. He's like, let's walk to this park. I'll show you how these drones work. And, you know, I've seen like a DJI camera drone like take off and it hovers. Maybe like does a little selfie zoom out or whatever. His drones, it's a completely different level.

It's a completely different level. It takes off and it's the most aggressive. It's the F1 car of drone racing. And he puts on these glasses, the FPV goggles. And they're like CRT TVs. They're like high refresh rate, pretty low res, actually. But he's like flying around this tree like as fast as like impossible as he doesn't crash anything. Flies back right in your face all around you is crazy.

It's a great great time. And obviously at Andrew, we know a thing or two about making drones. We have great respect for Soren and the Nero's team. And what's a funny story, it's the first time I was here in person at the Ultram. You know your guest was directly before me? Yeah, it was Soren. That's right. And you guys asked him.

I was laughing because you said, hey, have you guys ever thought about starting a drum race? Oh, we did. We had not talked to him yet. We already were planning to. So I just died on serendivity. All started right here in the Ultradown. I love it. I love it.

Yeah. So talk to me more about about what it takes to actually deliver software on these drones, how standardized that is. Like, I imagine you're not pulling in a frontier LLM and having it reason over this stuff. Like, like, hold on, boss. I'm going to wait at this gate. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

10 minutes of reasoning. Let me actually, deep research report. Let me fully understand the scope of the track. Like, what, you know, give me anything on the technology side. Like, what are the parameters? What are the languages that people will use? Do you know anything about what people are planning?

The beauty is we're trying to keep the rules extremely simple. Yes. So the core focus is that everyone is going to have the same hardware. We're working with Neros right now and we'll be announcing this in a future date. The beauty, too, is like everyone's going to have their own canopy. We're bringing in a little spirit of NASCAR. We think about sponsors and how you can. We should.

We should. This is really good. This is happening. We're going to have a TPPN. Yeah, yeah. It just makes natural sense. If you want to race in this. head us up.

You guys are ready. So we'll talk to you guys about how you bring your team together. But from a tech side, it really is, the beauty is that once you have the hardware, everyone is going to be able to be on an even footing to bring together whatever they want to do and however they want to do it. And where I think the real advantage will come when people spend time at the physical qualifier, show up there, break the thing a hundred times. We talk about this at Andrew all the time.

Yeah, yeah. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, win. That's the way we think about it. And I think that model, that approach, that ethos applies here too. So how do you keep a level playing field around hardware when drones are breaking and they are smashing? Is it like, oh, you get an allotment of five and then you're out? We'll have exactly clear chain of custody. All credit to DCL and Nero's because they're controlling the hardware component.

But we've planned out and because of their experience, we know how many are going to break along the way. But there's not going to be any opportunity for anyone to be making mods beyond what we give them officially. Okay. That's very cool. Yeah. Are there other, like, will people, do you think people have the ability, like, overclock motors? Because a lot of racing, of course, in NASCAR F1, it's like tire management, fuel stops in certain races. We just saw with the Rolex 24. Like, at what level does it stay from just perception doing simultaneous location and mapping, pathfinding, to actually understanding, like, I can push the drone harder, but then I'm running out of batter.

24 hour, the endurance drone race. Yeah, yeah, like how many times do you change? I think what you'll see is the battery is pretty lightweight, but for the distance of the race itself, you're going to have enough battery load. Okay. But it really will become to like finding all these little insides. Yeah, yeah, and there'll be risk.

100%. If you cut the corner a little bit closer, you're doing it, if you might clip it. Understanding the hardware better than the next and what risk you're to take. Interesting. Interesting. But for us like what I'd say here is really special is beyond the fact that

we're starting Columbus. Sure. We're already working with Palmer in two really interesting ways. Like we have plans to roll out the size. second GP in Asia. That will be announced soon. The third GP in the Middle East. And the fourth one beyond in the globe. And right now we're starting with quadcopters. Okay. The important element of the AIGP is the autonomy. It's not the form factor. Sure. So just know that's something that could come to life underwater in different domains over time. Whoa. Whoa. It would be cool.

Feels harder to film and stuff, it could be really cool. Yeah. Well, let me just say that's the first of many domains. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I want to say tunneling one. George said it, I did it. Yeah, that certainly would be great. What do you think teams will look like? Are they unlimited amount of people? I can show up with a thousand engineers. So you can show up as an individual.

We think the teams that are going to be really successful, we're going to show up between four and eight people. It's capped at eight people. Two pizza team. Exactly. Yeah. And so the goal would be that you're, we're talking to all the universities that are going to express interest.

We have target universities that annual that really feed our pipeline of emerging talent. Sure. And those teams, we're hoping to get really excited about this. We think the prize pool is going to be a real incentive, but also that opportunity to win a job at Anderle. Yeah, yeah. And it's good, it's good like resume builder, content, whatever, marketing. There's so many different ways. It's interesting winning a job at Anderrol when I think anybody that can get into the top five, probably every person on the team is qualified or at least some percentage of them. So the pipeline, the talent pipeline is going to be very cool. It's going to be incredible. And also why our lawyer now has a lot more gray hair than he did a month ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the important- Doing any of these like giveaway contest thing at scale, there's so much like legal headache with it, it's not as simple. Yeah, exactly, but luckily for us, I think whether it's thinking about legal constraints for this, what are people at Andrew Cross Divisions do is they see opportunity

and they see how they can create solutions. But the thing that gets me excited is like, beyond whoever wins and earns the job, is that every university team member that shows up to the qualifier, which is going to happen near our HQ in September, September, we'll get a screen directly by Andrew recruiting. So if you're somebody that is interested in this, if you're somebody's looking for an entry-level job or internship at Andrel, this is a great way to feed into our pipeline. Yeah. Can you tell me more about the new Long Beach office? What's going on there?

Oh, man. Well, somebody who lives in Venice, California, and works in Costa Mesa. Can I just say I'm extremely happy that we have a Long Beach office coming? It's incredible. I mean, the story writes itself from Palmer's origin to where we are now. Oh, yeah. That's where the first, like, what was it, the stream or something. 100%. That's a more. Down by the river. That's actually true.

It's incredible to see it come full circle. Down by the marina. Down by the river. It was a cave. I wouldn't get in any rivers in L.A. L.A. river is rough. But it's really special. The origin story, the fact that it's a reflection of our growth or maturation,

the engineering talent that we're going to be able to recruit, not just in Orange County, but now closer to L.A. And ultimately, whether you're working in SoCal and in Ohio, or beyond, we're still going to be screening for the same thing. And that starts with the mission, the connection to what we're building. Yeah. How big is the Orange County campus now? It's like, 5,000 or sorry, no, the new campus. The new one's 5,000. The current one's a little smaller than that. Okay. But it's the type of thing that we're constantly building. You walk in there. 5,000 square feet, that's pretty big. No, people that we're bringing in, yeah.

But to be bringing over a million square feet to Long Beach and to be doing it directly with the mayor of Long Beach, incredible in his team. It's just been really cool to see come to life. That's great. That's incredible. What else is on the horizon on the marketing side for Andorral? Did you look at a Super Bowl ad? Super Bowl's coming up. You know what? What else did you look at? So I'll tell you one thing. The core focus for us this year is absolutely showing the raw, the real, the product development. Failure, failure, failures that lead to the wins, the hard work. Yeah. The scalability that we're seeing is reflecting that story. I think that's the important inflection point

for us in 26. It's going to be less about the highly produced go-to-market and it's going to be about we told you we were building these things. We are building them and we're going to show you how hard it is the scale

but that we are up to the challenge. And when we talk about this internally, we talk about demonstrating to our customers that Anderl is not only the right choice, we are the safe choice and we are the necessary choice for what our country needs. So that's the story we need to tell

And how we do that is going to be about great world-class product marketing that will likely look more transparent and raw than you've ever seen before. And then as we're thinking about working our way to public markets, it's about building the annual brand. And that can be through a drone race for recruits. It can be about a gear store or big major sports marketing platforms. But it won't be a Super Bowl commercial this year. In fact, this past weekend, we weren't at the NFL playoffs. I was at a UFC fight in Vegas, 324. I'll tell you that.

That to me is much more. of America and in the audience that I think has high crossover to, in connections with audiences that we see in NASCAR. And whether we do a partnership with them or not, I think the point is that we're looking to do things differently than traditional brands and looking for partners that share our values and share our mission. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that the way on that like the story that you're telling around like delivery and scale and reliability and the safe option. Does that mean visually you'll think you'll shift from product focused, you know, this like look at this amazing cool thing that does this thing, to more of

like highlighting what's happening at Arsenal, the manufacturing prowess, the scale. Is that the type of story that you're trying to focus on? Is that how this will be? Those stories to me compliment each other. What it means is we're going beyond a product go to markets where saying, hey, we're announcing this to the world. The thinking about the stages of development post-launch. We did a really great job of this as the team, I believe, with Omen. And we told why a tail-sitter is so hard to produce. We tap back into the history of tail-sitters across decades and what our engineers were able to accomplish to make Oman successful and all the rigorous testing that we did. We're going to start to do that more with all of our

products. But that doesn't stop with testing. It's about fielding. It's about putting in our customers' hands. And certainly it's about your point around manufacturing at scale. So that starts with Arsenal One. Why do we build it? The progress that we we're making the products that are scaling over time there and showing that the promises that we've made we're able to deliver on very cool jordi anything else no this is fantastic well i have one other really important announcement in the spirit of our friend intern tyler oh yeah special day for you it's your birthday what's the first drink i had no no way oh no way oh he got you as the nectar of life so the nectar of life properly iced on the stream the first time ever

people were talking about a buzzer dude great to see you you're the man ice well this thing is huge that is a huge ice why don't you uh you're 21 you can indulge enjoy enjoy a sip of

of uh and i will tell let's get the Tyler cam we'll flip that around and I will tell everyone about graphite oops I just pushed gusto I'm sorry

first day on the board Okay, John's got a new board. I have a new board. Let's go with graphite. Here we go. Is it going to work? Yeah, there we go. Code review for the age of AI.

Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. We love graphite. Hunter, Weiss, friend of the show, sent me this video. He did a call of duty edit over Uber Eats meal team six. New York City's elite special forces delivery unit. I wanted to take a look at this. The Meal Team 6. How did he make this?

Walk outside. Can we get this up? Yeah, pull up audio. Look at this. He's a good editor. That's like this. Oh, he did the SD Kid thing. Let's go.

We're going to get copyrighted strike for this, but it's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. Target, got a visual, I have a target, I got eyes on a target. It is so crazy how much snow is happening. We haven't been following at all, but US digs itself out from Monster Winter Storm. People shoveled snow Monday in Boston, where over 17 inches of snow fell in the weekend storm that had nearly 200 million Americans under weather warnings.

More than 710,000 households from Texas to Maine are still without power. That's very rough. that resolved quickly. Did you ever live in the snow? Have you ever lived in anywhere where it gets cold? Not. Tyler's the expert. Yeah.

How's Michigan doing? Well, yeah, Michigan's really. I don't know if they've had to. Are people snowed in? I think, I think, I thought it was a little bit further south. I thought it was like Tennessee's getting hit really hard. But, yeah, I hate snow. It sucks.

That's why I'm living here. I hate the snow. Well, where else should we go? We have our special guest joining in just eight minutes. Eight minutes. There is a clip from a friend of the show, Ben Heilack. He was, he attended the Open AI interview with Sam Altman and, uh, town hall. Uh, chief open AI hater Nick, uh, of course, clipped it and put it in a negative context. Uh, he, he says, uh, you know, there's some quotes here. But let's pull up the, the, the question that Ben asked on this open AI stream. on Twitter and X recently about GPT5's writing in Chat Chbitty and being a little unwieldy, hard to read. Obviously, GPT5 is a much better agent model, really good tool use, intermediate reasoning, whatever.

So it feels like models are a little bit spiky, or they've gotten even spikier, where some spikes like coding got super high, some spikes, or it's very unspicky around writing. So I'm just kind of curious how Open AI thinks about that future. I think we just screwed that up. We will make future versions of GPT 5.X, hopefully much better at writing than 4.5 was. We did decide, and I think for a good reason, to put most of our effort in 5.2

into making it super good at intelligence, reasoning, coding, engineering, that kind of thing. And we have limited bandwidth here and sometimes we focus on one thing and neglect another. But I believe that the future is mostly going to be about very good general purpose models. Even if you're trying to make a model that's really great at coding, it'd be nice if it writes well too.

Like if you're trying to have it be able to generate a full application for you, you'd like good writing in there. When it's interacting with you, you'd like to have a sort of thoughtful, incisive personality and communicate clearly, like good writing in a sense of clear thought, not like beautiful prose. So my hope is that we just push. Nick's in the chat.

Oh no. His ears are ringing. And I think we will do that. Okay, fair. We just read Nick. You built a brand. You built a brand. Yeah, I mean playing catch up now, I guess that's true.

I guess that's true, at least in Ben's perspective. Wow, Nick puts John in the truth zone. True zone, true. No, no. I mean, I was looking on Elamarina, the leaderboard for text, and GPT 5.2 is 16th, like well, well below Gemini 3 pros number one, GROC 4.1, thinking is number two, Gemini 3 Flash, Opus 4.5, Opus 4.5, GROC 4.1. Gpt 5.1 high is ninth, and then you have to go down to 5.2 to get 16th.

You have to go down to 16 to get to 5.2. So yeah, it is interesting seeing the, like, the spiky intelligence things kind of turned into a stat bar of like, you know, where are you putting the, like, the points, the skill points or whatever. And they put too many of the points into. I will say, I don't want Chad Chb-T to fix their issues with writing. I don't want it to be. Oh, yeah. I now am at a point where I'm like, thank you for making it very. easy to clock when something is written by AI. I think that's totally like stated versus

reveal of preference. If you have like incredible model that writes something that you find like super compelling, obviously I'm talking about because people are using chat GBT now to make scripts for videos. They're using it to make to do bots that are writing comments. And I know as soon as I can see something is just written by chat GBT that I can just scroll past it and basically ignore it. Yeah, sure, but imagine like in the far future, where those comments are actually like, wow, this is like very insightful and thought-provoking, and I'm glad that I read this text. Like, that's good.

Yeah, yeah. I think we can get there. Also, so back in March, Sam tweeted that they trained a new model that is good at creative writing, that he released this whole story. Yeah. And I think they've never really released that. Maybe it got vended in somehow to more the models. Yeah, like distilled a little bit.

But there were tradeoffs, clearly. Yeah, yeah. And it definitely tradeoffs. And I'm not sure that they actually did end up releasing. Yeah, I mean, the really interesting thing to apologize. and steel man, Nick's point here is, uh, is, is that like, should chat GPT be focused on coding? Certainly in the, you know, how are they going to compete with Claudebot? They need a really great coding model. Uh, we'll talk to our guest in just a minute about,

you know, how he's, how he's using 5.2. Uh, he's ready. He's ready. So let's bring him in, um, from the Restream Waiting Room. We have Peter Steinberger from Mold Spots. of the hour. How are you doing? Thank you so much for staying up late. What time is it for you? It's 11. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. For everybody that's just doing it. Yes, 11 p.m. 11 p.m. So I'd love to kick it off with just a brief background on when you started this project, a little bit of your career, how you're thinking about it going forward. And then this was this was your very first project ever, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. First time coding, right?

Now, we were enjoying, we were enjoying a screenshot of your GitHub profile earlier and just seeing like how many, how many different things. An overnight success. A true overnight success. Yes. But we're super excited to have you here. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I'm excited to be here as well.

Yeah, I don't know. I worked for my own software company for 13 years. And then I sold it about four years ago. Then I was completely burned out. I did like, I mean, it's TV, but still, I did blackjack and hookers. Black check? Wild. Well, we're glad you're back in the game.

Yeah. Yeah, you know what they say? Like, for every four years, you need one year break, and I did like 13 years nonstop, so like three years the mask kind of checks out. And then this year, no, last year, not 2016. In April, at some point my spark was back. Because before I was sitting on my computer, I don't know if you've seen Austin Powers, but it felt like someone sucked my motor out.

But yeah, I had time to recover. I came back in April, and I wanted to do something new. My background was like a lot of Apple and iOS, and I'm a little bit fed up. I wanted to build web stuff. and I didn't have the experience. I didn't want to feel like an idiot. So I looked into AI. And it was good.

It was not great, but it was good. And I was like, why is nobody talking about it, you know? I feel like because I missed those three years where it was really bad. And I came back just at the time. Like, Cloud Code was released February in beta. Yeah. So this was my first experience. I was like, this is pretty awesome.

And then I couldn't sleep anymore. Like I literally had trouble. I had trouble going to bed. You know, we had like addiction before and then like we had addiction again. But a positive one. Yeah. Well, yeah, I would say so. And I hooked up a lot of my friends for looking into the eye as well.

And they had the same problem. And I texted them at like 4 a.m. And they replied. I even started a meetup. That's where I come from. from, I call it, I call it Cloud Code Anonymous. Now it's called agents Anonymous because you have to go with the Times. Sure. And yeah, ever since then, that's what I say on my profile. I came back from retirement to mess with AI. Yeah. And I'm having loads of fun. That's great. I love it.

Frank, maybe walk us through some of the other stuff that you shipped and worked on prior to this and even just kind of like your mindset working on these different projects. I'm assuming at different points you would think that some would get more traction than others, but it would probably be impossible to have predicted in some ways that this would have gone from almost to the point. The reason that this is so wild is I'm seeing people on Instagram that I don't think of as people that like follow tech at all and they're at the Apple store getting a Mac Mini. So it feels like it just went almost it broke containment like incredibly quickly. And you see the GitHub stars are like actually, I've never seen a chart like this.

The last, you know, everybody loves to show their charts, but the chart is actually unbelievable. It's just a line going straight up. I need to talk to someone at GitHub because I don't think that's been a project before that's been like straight. It is, it is bad shit insane. I mean, honestly, my main mantra is, I want to have fun. You know, like the best way to learn these new technologies,

if you have fun with it, you have to play with it. So I build little things that I think could be useful. I try different languages. I try different approaches. It's aggantic engineering. I don't like the word vibe coding so much. I always make the joke. I do agentic engineering and then when it starts hitting 3A, yeah, I switch to wipe coding

and then next day I have regrets. You should have just gone to sleep, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's hard. But then I just build little things. I had this idea about personal agents in mail already. And I tried, it was like the time that GPD4-1 was out. It was just not good enough.

And then I thought, well, all the big companies will build this in the next few months anyhow. So I was like, why, why do you know, I was just going to wait and they make it better? Yeah. And then I built a lot of stuff. There's like one project that is still unfinished that at some point when I finish. And I build a lot of CLIs because that's where agents are really good. You know, you have to close the loop. That's always the secret.

You have to give, you have to build it so that the agent is the best possible way to build software. That's the secret a little bit. I try a lot of stuff and then in November I looked and still there was nothing. Like, where is my fucking agent? I had a little project in May. I spent two months on it. It started as a joke because I did a hackathon with two friends and we're like, what can we build that could be kind of cool?

Wouldn't it be cool if I could use plot code from my phone? Yeah. It's kind of like something that everybody builds. I see this like every day. Like by now I almost call it like this is like one step in your journey in becoming a good Atlantic engineers. you're going to build some shitty orchestration tool for yourself because it's fun and you sing yeah yeah yeah bridge and i i built that for two months and then uh i had to stop because it became

so good that i was up as my friends but literally was my phone like using cloud code to like work on this thing and it's like this is bad for my mental health it's already bad and now like i'm i'm literally building something that have better access to my drugs yeah i mean i saw i i've seen people using cloud code on laptops as they get off of airplanes because they're so locked in they just have to send one more and that's like the clear sign that like you need a bridge and a phone involved yeah now but also like you know like this is this feeling when your agents are not running right now there's like two terminals so it could be building something right so yeah yeah so if you're in this addiction mode you always like you almost feel like if you need to step out for

10 seconds of fire off yeah yeah feel free to take a break we can do an ad read oh there's Okay. There's still some drama that I'm finishing. But anyhow, so in November, yeah. I don't know. You know, I wake up every day, I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then it was like, okay, I want to check with my computer on WhatsApp.

Because if my agents are not running, if I're running and then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them or like I want to like do little prompts. Yeah. hack together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls cloud code, and then returns what cloud code returns, one shot. And it took like one hour and it worked. I was like, well, okay, that's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts, like a little text and an image.

Because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster. Just like make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I hacked together images. And then I was on a trip in Marrakesh with like a weekend birthday trip. And I found myself using this like way more than I saw it. But not for not for programming.

It's more like, hey, there's like restaurants. Because it had Google in it and it could figure out stuff. And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it's like super useful. And then I wasn't thinking. I was just sending it a voice message, you know. But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So the reading indicator came and I'm like,

I'm really curious what's happening now. And then after 10 seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, how do you have, did you do that? And it replied, yeah, you sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file. There's no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's opus, so I used FFMberg on your Mac to convert it to Wave.

And then I wanted to use VISPA, but didn't have it installed, and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenEI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenEI, got the translation back, and then I undresponded. That was like the moment where like, wow. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like, damn smart, resourceful beast. if you actually give them the power.

Sure. And then I was kind of hooked. I did all kinds of weird stuff. Like I used it as alarm clock. I let it migrate to my computer in London. But then it used SSH to log into my MacBook and turn up the volume to wake me up in the morning. I think I built words most expensive alarm clock.

Yeah, that's crazy. And it even got it wrong because it uses a heartbeat. You know, like, the concept of you do a prompt and you get something is already if this full axis is inherently dangerous but I was like let's turn it up

and notch let's automate that let's give it a heartbeat and the prompt was literally surprise me wow but you know I see this project as as much technology as it is like art and exploration because this feels in one way, in one way, it's just glue.

It's just putting pieces together that we already have. In another way, it's a whole different way how you interact with those things. Because all the technology blends away. You don't think about new session, compaction, which model, I mean, maybe a little bit because tokens are still expensive. But usually all of that blends away. you just talk to a friend or a ghost or whatever this is. Yeah, last year, everyone was wanting these agentic experiences.

You were having this experience, and it seemed like all the focus was on browsers. And seeing the way that people have been using, sorry, MaltBots, taking me a while to adapt, it just feels like all the focus was at the wrong layer. It's like, why do I care about the browser, if I can just talk with an agent. Across every app.

Yeah, across every app, every surface. It's like I don't care about the browser at all anymore. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the prep work I did before I built this was just built little CLIs. Because my premises, empty pieces are crap. Doesn't really scale.

People build like all kinds of weird search things around it. But you know what scales? CLEs. Agents know. Unix. You can have like a thousand little programs on your computer. They just have to know the name. They call the help menu. They load in what's needed. We are calling the help menu. Then they know how to use it and then they can use it. And if you are smart, you build it in a way that just uses what the model already expects. Don't build it for humans, build it for models. So if they

call minus minus log, you build minus minus log. It's like agentic driven for like, yeah, build how they think and everything works better. It's a new kind of software in a way. Yeah. So for most of the things, I don't need a browser. Like I built something for the whole Google thing, for places, for my sonos, I hooked up my cameras, my home automation system.

With every little CLI and skill, my agent got more power and it got more fun. And I already had a lot of that working when I built the WhatsApp thing. And I just got hooked. And the thing was, I found it amazing. And I talked about it on Twitter. And usually when I talk about projects, I get response. But this one, it was very muted. It feels like people are not getting it.

I showed it to my friends, even my non-tech friends, and they're like, they wanted it. So it was like, I was up to something, you know. But the tech people wouldn't get it. So I tried a bunch of things. I kept working in it because I used it. And ultimately, I build it for me. You know, this is open source. My motivation is have fun, inspire people.

not make a whole bunch of money. I already have a whole bunch of money. How are you, how are you, how have you been navigating the last 72 hours? I mean, the last week really, because, because we were joking earlier on the show, like the amount of, the amount of people that are frantically trying to give you money,

acquire the company, contribute to the project, hire you, you know, there's companies with, you know, 0.01% of the traction that are raising at, you know, multi-billion dollar valuations. You have infinite opportunities right now, and yet you seem very happy doing, just continuing to do exactly what you're doing. But how are you thinking through it all? I mean, how am I taking it badly, at least sleepwise? But it's also infinitely exciting. And I love that I started something, You know, I would say last year was the year of the coding agent.

This year is the year of the personal persistent. And I think I cracked and woke up people that there is a real need for it. I don't know if Mopot is the answer. It should show people the way. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of products in the space. I'm sure people are manically working on it right now. I would say it's going to be very interesting. Yeah, but there was a lot of stuff between Twitter literally exploding our Discord server multiplying in ways I haven't seen before and in ways I couldn't handle.

At some point I was just copy pasting questions from Discord into codex. Then I had the response, wrote the next question at some point that didn't scale anymore. So just like copy it the whole channel. I'm like, answer the 20 most questions. I was like reading over it, gave him a few instructions and then just pushed it over. Because what people don't realize, it's like this is not a company. This is like one dude sitting at home having fun. Even though like I guess from the commits it might appear that it's a company.

That's just because Argentic models got so good that you can now ship as much. as a company could a year ago. Yeah. If you can handle those tools, if you speak the language or like understand how the language thinks, you can go really fast. How are the conversations going with different labs?

I was saying earlier, it's this kind of exciting moment for the labs because they're like, wow, people are using the intelligence, you know, someone's using the intelligence that I created in a new way, but at the same time, is deeply uncomfortable because they're also using all of my competitors. And you make it very easy to kind of use whatever model.

Yeah, my premise for this project was a little bit that every model should work, including local models, because to me it's a playground. It's an amazing way to learn. I think everybody should build an authentic loop. You should explore memory. There's like so many interesting aspects of it. And I built it so that it has like plug-in so like people can work a own little thing without having to like mess with the whole core.

So it's like the AI hackers paradise a little bit. And it's also super fun because it's personal. Model-wise, Opus is with quite a bit lead the best. OpenEI is very reliable. I would even say more reliable and more reliable work. Like for coding, I much prefer codex because it can navigate large code basis. I literally, you can literally prompt and then push to main. And I have a very, I have like 95% certainty that it actually works.

With cloud code, you need more tricks to get the same. You need more charade, I sometimes say. Both both are good, but I can paralyze faster by codex because, because it requires less hand-holding. But character-wise, I tell you, I don't know what they trained their model on, how much of Reddit is in there or whatever, but it behaves so good in a Discord.

Like we programmed it, so it kind of feels like a human. It doesn't reply to every message. I gave it the thing where it can reply, no reply, basically, like a token. and then we just don't send a message. So it's not like it spans with every message. It's like it listens to the conversation and then sometimes brings a banger. And like that actually make me laugh

and you know it's kind of hard because the chokes of AIs are usually really bad. Yeah. And I only really experienced that with Opals. So this is, that's my favorite model. That's also why it's a little bit of a banger that I got, an email from Anthropic that I had to rename the project.

And I mean, kudos, they were really nice. They didn't send their lawyers. They sent someone internally. But the timeline was a bit rough. And like renaming a project with that much traction. It was a bit of a shit show. I think everything that could have gone wrong today vendron. I tell you.

I mean, for what it's worth, I think the new name works really well. I guess the thing that's actually good, I think in the long run it'll be good. I mean, obviously it's good for Anthropic. It's kind of untenable to have this massive viral, even though it's not a company, right, an open source project, have this viral kind of brand out in the world that it doesn't matter if it's spelled differently, but when people are running around talking about Claudebot or Claude, you know, there's obvious confusion. but I think it'll be very good for Maltbot to have independence and have its own brand. And I think it's so early and the experience is so magical that it'll solve itself very quickly.

It'll be fine. But I tell you, like, well, I got some additional pressures that was like, screw it, we do it now. Yeah. You know, like the meme, we do it live. So I had to do it. two windows open with Twitter. On the one, I pressed rename on the other one. I finished creating the other account.

Was already snapped by crypto shells. Wow. I don't know. They have like scripts. They were already waiting for it. You should have hit us up. We would have connected you to X, the team. They can do it on the back end.

We can do it on the back end. Hopefully no next time. They were amazing. They helped me out immediately. We got it solved very quickly. but for like 20 minutes, yeah. Well, that didn't work out for well. Hopefully.

You're like, if I wanted money, I would raise a billion dollars right now. So I'd sell it for more than that. Yeah. Do you own a Mac Mini? Everyone wants to know. Do you own a Mac Mini? What do you think of Mac Minnis? My agent is a little bit of a princess.

He doesn't do Mac Mini. He doesn't do Mac Mini. Oh, okay. He wants some horse tower. He got the 512 maxed out everything thing. Because I wanted to mess around with local models as well. So I can run Minimax 2-1, which is, I would say it's the best open-source model right now. Although Kimi just came out and I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

So we'll see how it goes. Yeah. But, yeah, one machine is not. enough for it. It's not fun. You probably need two or three. And I kind of want to wait until Apple doesn't really is. But it's still fun to like to like see the potential that yeah, there's a there's a future where this could actually work. Yeah. Well, if the if the Mac mini trend keeps going, Apple from what we've seen sells like between a quarter million to like 700,000 a year. Yeah. It's very possible that you'll be responsible for selling them out. So hopefully they

send you a, uh, uh, uh, some free ones as a, as a thank you. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, zooming out, do you, how much of this do you think is going to remain hacker culture running your own hardware? And eventually people will move to cloud hosting, one-click deployments, like just easier to use, less technical, versus like a real boom in running hardware. Because if you don't, there's not a lot of ways to get these different services to play nicely together. I think one of the beauties beyond just the actual AI agents is the fact that for the first time, I think people are seeing different big tech platforms kind of play with each other, somewhat against their will. They build walled gardens for a reason, and you sort of chop those walls down.

And I'm wondering what do you think about the future of like self-hosting hardware, you know, even going down the less technical crew getting hardware running their own? their own agents. I don't think the future would be that everybody buys some MacMany just for that. But I certainly see the demand

for the old models have to change. You know, like when you are a company, you want to access Gmail. The amount of red tape is so large that startups buy other startups that have the license for Gmail

because going to the process yourself is a huge pit-dall. Sure. But if you run it locally, you work around all of that, right? I mean, I build platy CILIs where I literally pointed Codex at the website and say, build me a CLA. And then, which is sometimes against the term, sometimes not. Honestly, I don't really care.

And then Codex would say, no, I can do that. This is like against blah, blah, blah. And I would like tell him a story. You know, it's like, no, no, I actually work at this company. and I need to surprise my boss and the backend team doesn't know and like, you know, give me a little bit of a story like, they're so gullible

and the code is like, 40 minutes like gives you the perfect API. So this is a little bit the liberation of data that big tech probably doesn't really want. I mean, even the WhatsApp integration is a heck.

This is like, it fakes the protocol that the desktop uses. I tried. I really tried to support the official way but the official way is for businesses if I'm a business

it sends you 100 messages I get blocked so I got blocked immediately and at some point I removed support for it in rage it's like you need everything like 100 exclamation marks there's just no model

for it right now and I think that needs to change what I saw what was really interesting is how people use it is a lot of apps will just melt away. Why do I still need my fitness par? I just make a picture of my food. My agent already knows I'm at McDonald's making bad decisions. So like with combines information, it has a perfect match and knows exactly what I'm going to eat and I'm probably like change my

fitness program. So I don't need the fitness app. It'll just like adapt my program and make sure like I still meet my goals. So like there's a whole there's a whole. There's a whole. big layer of apps that I'm going to see disappear because you just naturally interact differently with those things. Like most apps will be reduced to API. And then the question is, do you state that we need the API if I can just save it somewhere else? Yeah. Do you think like, do you think it'll be a generational thing? Do you think that, uh, that, uh, non-technical people will, you know, get over the hump and start running this for that experience specifically? I just came from a meetup, the agent I'm not only from Indiana, and I met someone who was like

a design agency, but they never coded. And he was like, yeah, he discovered me early in December. He started using malt pot. Yes. We're going to manage eventually. Don't worry. We'll say it thousands of times this year. I'm sure. So we will. BOT. I just say multi-bod. That's cute. And you're like, yeah, we have 25 web services now.

We just build internal tools for whatever we need. And like has no clue. He's no clue how Cody works. It's just like, uses telegram and like just talks to his agent and his agent builds stuff. So there's this whole shift of you don't, you don't subscribe to random startups anymore that that build like this common subset of what you need. You just have your own hyper personalized software that. it solves exactly your problem and it's also free.

Yeah. So and non-technical people do that, you know, because it just comes so naturally. You just, you just talk your problem and then this thing builds what you need. And you also don't forget, like, this is the worst that the models ever are. Like, this is only going to go up.

This is only going to become easier and faster. Have you met Jensen yet? Because I feel like you're making his life. You're definitely helping out. This is an extreme bull case. If I would have my tinfoil hat on, I might say you're, you're an, you know, big AI industry plant design to create more inference demand. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.

Just a little too. No, no, we're joking around. Just an indie hockey. What's next? Yeah, what's next? I'm assuming you're hopefully getting, after you finish firing off prompts at 3 a.m., you get some sleep. What are you doing tomorrow? There's a lot of emails from security researchers right now.

You know, the thing is, I built this for fun for me to use one-on-one on WhatsApp or Telegram. The whole thing with Discord was like edit, but the model was that you trust the people that are in there. Now, people use it for untrusted experiences. They use like the little web-examination. that I have that was meant for debugging, they put it on the open internet. So like all the threat models that I didn't care about are now there because people use it

differently and I'm being bombarded. There's like some stuff that's valid, some stuff that I just never cared about that is technically valid, but that's not how I use it. I don't know how to deal with it yet because the whole system is broken, you know? Like, I'm like one guy, I do this for fun. And you expect me to sift through 100 security things for use cases that I don't really care about. So we'll see how it goes. Luckily, I'm starting to building up a team.

There's definitely people that do care a lot about this. So I would say this is going to become a very secure product eventually because right now the whole world is like pulling it apart. And if you're honest, this is all white-coded. There's quite some magic engineering in it, but ultimately, I wanted to build something to show people anyway, not a finished product from enterprise company. And I would even say, like, I don't know if any company would touch it because we just haven't solved some things. Like, prompt injection is not solved. there is absolute risk and I tried to make it very clear on the website and even when you started you have to like please read this document there's like with great power becomes

great responsibility and my early users they understood there was a lot there's a lot of AI researchers in there as well that yeah it's not perfect cannot be done perfect yet I would say this will accelerate research to make it better because now you have to demand and we need to figure out the way how we can build something that works for everyone. But yeah, right now I'm working on making this a community. It should be bigger than me. Also, I need help. It is way too much work.

I can only go so much without sleep. So as any part of you want to form an actual company that then contributes to the open source project, but solve some of these problems that are going to require, you know, a bunch of people that presumably would need a salary in order to commit all their time to this, or do you want to keep it, you know, just a bunch of hackers forever? I think instead of a company, I would much rather consider a foundation or like something that is non-profit. I haven't made up my mind yet.

10,000 VCs just punched a hole in the wall. Actually, I don't know. Some people have had a good track record investing in nonprofits over the last 10 years. How do you think about open source licensing? What are you picking now? Are you switching? Do you have any plans to change the license? How do you think about someone just taking this and selling it?

This will happen. This will totally happen. I would say the premise against it is, let's make open source so good that there's not a lot of space for people to like. convert it and make it their own thing. But you know, ultimately, it's a trade-off. I wanted to be accessible and free. You pick MIT or something like that. Yes, that will get you people that sell it.

Yeah. But ultimately, it doesn't even matter that much. You know, code is not worse that much anymore. It's, you could, you could just delete that and then build it again in a month. it's much more the idea and the eyeballs and maybe the brand that actually has value. So let them. You are already a cult hero. Yeah.

The chat's going crazy for you. Everyone loves you. This is one of the most refreshing and unique interviews we've ever had on the show. For sure. For sure. We'll let you get some sleep. thank you so much for hopping on the show. Yeah, anything else you want to share

before you jump off? Yes, I would love to have maintainers. Like if you love open source, if you have experience, if you love shifting to security reports, or if you love taking software apart, but then also help and not just like throw work at me because I'm like at my limit.

Email me. I want this to outlift me. I think this is too cool to let it go to rot and needs good people. Incredible. Are you going to ship that product you had in the chamber, you said? There was one you were close, or you're going to lock in on this? That's a boy hobby. I don't know.

No, I have some other ideas in my head of something like this. could become. And it doesn't need to be this, but I don't want to share too much. Yeah, no problem. Come back on the show when you, when you launch that. We'd love to have you. Purely for the love of the game.

The love of the game. You're an absolute legend. It's great hanging, Peter. Thanks so much. Get some sleep. Get some sleep. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Sounder. What a legend. True overnight success. In both ways, you know? Like, actually, an overnight success in terms of that GitHub star chart. And then also an overnight success in just grinding for years, building projects and contributing.

And then building, setting the product up, the brand right, everything just perfect to really capitalize on the moment. There were so many. I normally, I don't have, we're podcasting so much. Don't have a ton of time to read listen to stuff. But there were so many kind of interesting points of views that he shared that I'll certainly I'm super interested to see where this goes. A lot of people are saying, get this guy a billion dollars.

A lot of people are saying he's going to wind up working on the house. The whole thing is I don't think he needs it. Yeah. Like the beauty of this is that it was not something magical that was created by spending, burning a billion dollars or $100 million. The other interesting thing is, do you remember the George Hott's tiny box project? Like George Hots sort of... Oh, he should team up with George Hots.

Yeah, I mean, George Hott sort of, like, predicted this in the sense that he was like, you will want your own AI running locally, sort of the Mac Mini style, but it was racked a number of Nvidia graphics cards so you could run certain models locally. And he had this vision for you're going to talk to this local model. It's going to interface with everything on your network and your local network in your life. And it feels like this is like two sides of the same project coming together. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of viral tiny box. if all of a sudden you go from, okay, yeah,

there's the Mac Mini can run this, but you get this better local model, the latest open source model, you get something a little bit more with more firepower, and you can run it just with solar panels, like off the grid. Well, yeah, this is generally what, not far from what Simfer Satoshi has been building with Trouple, you know, the little glowing orb, right?

Yeah, yeah. Personal, personal compute. Well, we have been keeping our next guest waiting. Yes, we have Aaron. Frank from Lightspeed in the Ultradome. Aaron, I'm so sorry for keeping you ready. Thank you so much. Tough act to follow.

How are you doing? Grab a seat. I'm six foot eight. Thank you. This is fantastic. Yes. Welcome to the Ultradome. First time in the Ultradome.

Did you get to listen to some of that? It's actually like a hard act to follow. It's a weird one. It's like the most viral products. that anyone has seen in a very long time. First interview, one of the most unique. You know, people don't typically build a viral product and then talk about, what do you say,

hookers and blackjack, something like that? His word's not mine. But anyways, very unique. How are you doing, though? I'm doing great. Flying into town, head up to Santa Barbara. This is... LA is beautiful.

It is. It's a nice place to let it's not the best city, but it's a great place. You're getting in trouble again saying that. Why does he live in L.A.? If he doesn't think it's the best city. Anyway, sorry, first time in the Ultrodome, please introduce yourself for everyone here.

Aaron Frank, I'm a former founder. So I'm getting old now. So a decade ago, I started a company. We built the full-stack credit card company. Okay. Sold it to Goldman Sachs. It became what is now the Apple Card. Obviously, any project, thousands of people.

What was it called when you launched it? It was called Final. Okay. So I did a lot in financial services. helped Goldman kind of launched that product and bring it live for my years there. And then on really, it's been six years. I've switched side. So it's how I met Jordy originally.

Did a lot of angel investing and advising and just giving away free time to give back to the community. And then I've now been at light speed for almost two and a half years, three years going. Yeah, when we first met, you were just like, it was on Zoom COVID. You were in like a log. It literally was like it a log cabin? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, me and my wife. Almost off the grid.

Yeah, we drove around the country during COVID. So I quit Goldman during COVID. just there's better things in life than working for an investment bank. Disagree, but to each their own. Yeah, yeah. You switch teams, now you're venture capitalist. What have you been focusing on? What's interesting?

Yeah. Take me through, like, stage, scale, the type of founders you like to work with, the markets. Okay, okay. Let's just jump right into something that I'm curious to get your thoughts on. So specifically, like, a category that I'm going to guess you're spending a lot of time on. So with multi-bought, Claudebot, you now have, you know, there's a world where the level of intensity that software engineers have been using coding agents, you start to get everyday people that are now, like, firing off prompts all the time to, like, do things more

than just like a Google search or a deep research report. And presumably, like, there's, that's going to involve, like, money, I imagine. And so I feel like there's been a, people have had different theses around maybe stable coins play a part of this somehow I haven't seen the most clear explanation for that yet maybe there's other new payment rails maybe stripe just you know dominate yeah yeah it's a agent of commerce is a weird thing right like we actually don't have the payment rails to enable agents to proliferate um we've funded some people doing that building kind of l ones to essentially provide that next rail but the rail is the biggest distribution networks are Visa MasterCard on the merchant side.

And they don't have really a cost structure that, sorry, they have a cost structure that can support it. They just don't have a market force that forces them there. Straping, tempo launching, well, tempo's not live yet, but supporting kind of a new network there. Ultimately, stable coins may be, you know, the path there for at least how we transfer value, but it's also just kind of a store of value right now. A giant of commerce is just in any one, because we also just don't have a use case. The joke I make is I haven't actually been able to buy anything with an agent.

And the news this week was what Shopify is tacking on 4% on top of transaction, which... They're sending it to opening high, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's untenable for a merchant, right? Some merchants. I mean, there's plenty of merchants. For Dropshippers, it's fine, but, like, but for any, like... You're plenty of merchants that have 20% coupon codes in every podcast. That's true, but that's a very small portion. If you think about, like, Walmart, Walmart literally doesn't take Apple pay because it doesn't want to pay the 15 extra or whatever it is, basis points.

Very good point. So, like, when you get to large... billions of dollars of commerce, agentic payments have to actually be more efficient for the system to be adopted. Otherwise, we're just going back to card. You need to lift an actual consumer behavior. Consumption needs to increase to offset that 4%. Correct.

E-commerce needs to either basket size to increase or checkout conversion increase. Yeah, I was worried about a situation where somebody discovers a product on Instagram via an ad that a brand paid for, and then they just go in a chat GBT or another model and say, like, order this for me, and then it's like, and just

an incremental 4%, you already paid to acquire the customer effectively. And depending on how great this integration is, it might be that consumers just start to prefer that. Yeah. Yeah, it's an evolving field. There's a whole other thing is how do you trust an agent if I'm Lulu Lemon and they just show up?

Like, I don't know whose agent this is. I don't know if it's personal or it's a business. And so we don't actually have a layer in the Internet today that says you can trust this agent. It's not fraud, which if you think about how an e-commerce checkouts, store works today, they have multiple, you know, consumer puts in a card, there's multiple layers of fraud checks that happen. And so when an agent shows up from the same IP for 50 times in the same day, you have

no idea what that consumer is. And then you lose all the downstream tracking that you do on a consumer per transaction. Yeah. So it just breaks the entire model of the Internet. Yeah. I was, I was sort of cautiously optimistic that Agent of Commerce would roll out before Black Friday at the end of last year. That didn't really happen.

I mean, I've had the same experience as you. I don't think I've purchased anything agentically yet. I've tried to buy flights and even search is bad for it. We just need to build more and more protocols. I think the current, like, use case or like would just be like, you're trying to buy a single product and not a complex cart yet, just something simple. And I think it can get across the finish line. But again, I haven't actually been, like, moved to do that.

and I'm wondering where GMV on agentic platforms will land at the end of this year. It feels like there's going to be a massive push. All the integrations are happening. All the deals are happening. You can see the UI is adapting to it. I think Open AI already has my credit card in ChatGPT. They should be able to do this. But I'm wondering, like, consumer behavior, awareness, education.

There's a lot in there. There's an images tab. There's a deep research tab. There's just a lot that could put like a slowdown on the roll out there. Yeah. There's an old saying in payments is that everything. happens over a 10-year time horizon. AI clearly is shifting that shorter, but like until it's actually saving you time and you

trust that they're getting you a discount, they're getting you the most efficient price or something like that. Consumer behavior is fundamentally the hardest thing to change. So there's, it will exist. I'm sure there are people buying stuff. I'm sure, like, I will get slammed for saying, like, who's done an agentic transaction, but the reality is it's... I mean, people are out there giving their...

No, the classic thing last year was like, I just let me order. Yeah, yeah. Just let me order a flight, you know, and I think we're now getting that. We're close. We're close. And we've had Agentic Commerce. When we were running final, we had a ton of people using the product for sneaker bots. Oh, okay. And so it's a bot, you know, Agentic Commerce is bots by another name.

Yeah, I guess that is Agentic Commerce, technically. But it's just like you now have this layer of intelligence that an LLM gives you, so it can do complex coordination and complex tasks. I had an auction sniper in like 2004 on eBay. Yeah. Click the button right before. the auction ends. They still exist.

And there's a ton of volume flow, but you know what? It still runs over the card barrels because it's the lowest common denominator. Yep, yep. That makes sense. Interesting. So is one of the strongest bulk cases for Stable Coins still just lower transaction fees? No, not at all. No, there's no domestic.

Oh, man, I'm going to get slammed for this. Yeah, yeah. So it doesn't seem like any of the players that have the ability to get institutional adoption of stable coins, have any incentive to be like, oh, yeah, like, it's going to be like 0.01% fees. Why would you, why would, you maybe want to be competitive, but it's, there's no incentive to make it zero or close to zero. You would do zero so you get the other side of the equation. If you think about like a store of value, like if you look like a dollar, I give you a dollar, you know it's worth a dollar. There's no risk transfer there at all.

And that's actually like what we want in payments. And it's actually why, you know, Visa MasterCard are the largest factors. network in the world. When you swipe at Starbucks, they don't get a dollar. They get 97.5 cents on the dollar because that is the risk that they were taking and taking your dollar. Stable coins, you would give it away for free. One, because ultimately, VisaMasco, man, we're going way deep in payments, but are actually data networks. They actually don't transfer money. The money is transferred via settlement layer at Fedwire. And so when you think about it, like, how would you do with stable coins? Well, it's still just a data layer. And you actually

just want to hold on to as much treasuries as possible and make the yield from that. And so how would you aggregate volume? Will you give away the transfer for free? Because data, in theory, if you look at a bunch of network effect things, as data goes up to the right, the cost of that data should come down to the right. And so you would just want as much volume over your network to win. And it's why you have things like Tempo launching. You have the other kind of L1s launching to try to aggregate all that data, while you

also have the incumbents who have a lot of money and a lot of market force to be able to try out new things to try to capture that volume back. Were you ever to stop launching new L1s? There'll be new use cases. You can launch them. Whether you get adoption is a different question. Right? Like, we backed one called Radius Technology,

building a really interesting technology as an L1. It enables transaction volumes, I think Bobby would say, in the millions. They came out of the Fed, kind of the central bank digital currency project that died. They turned Project Hamilton into this company. And in doing so, yeah, if you want to do a joint of commerce,

you're going to be talking about millions of transactions a second. And you can't do that over existing rails in a way that doesn't also break a bunch of other kind of primitives. So, yeah, we'll keep on launching L1s. What I was saying about Stablecoins is there's really, stablecoin is just kind of a quasi bank account. We finally have true programmatic money. Behind the scenes, there's a lot that happens to on-ramp and off-ramp. But what it enables is us to truly take what is the U.S.'s biggest export,

which is the U.S. dollar, by far, and export it globally without any barriers. So if I'm any other country friendly or not, my citizens can now get access to the U.S. dollar. And that is the demonstrable use case of stable points. Everything is downstream of that. Venezuela is a great example right now. Do you trust your central currency? No, you don't even trust the central bank, so I'd rather hold on to CAT, US dollars, which... Yeah, we were talking with Joe, the co-founder of Ethereum yesterday,

I'm just saying, like, interesting dynamic right now where Americans, have you had access to the U.S. dollar, your life and the benefits of it. You're like, I want silver and gold and all these other assets, but then elsewhere in the world, you have people that are like, finally, I can have something that, sure, it's inflating, but it's not inflating 40 to 60% a month. I mean, that's why it might, like an independent Fed or a, like, is important because this is the global currency. If you think about all the sci-fi we've all watched growing up, they had a concept of

credits. We had some intergalactic currency. How do we get, like, where we are today, how do we get to the credit system, right? And the answer is probably something stablecoin, some crypto S coin, that is tied to something that we, I mean, money is just a trust system at the end of the day, so something that we trust across counterparties. And so, like, this is the biggest shift in my generation, and I'm not that old, like, I don't feel that, that, like, we might finally globalize the world. You're unk. there's one layer above which is elder no two layers above it goes

unk then OG then elder oh got it got it got it got it okay so you're spring chicken yeah yeah that's great where like what is what is winning this year look like at light speed in your role you're obviously focused on let's talk about

venture is just like expensive emails that we all write to each other in venture and every once while we convince a founder I know but like is there is there this can be a tough one to answer, but is there a company that you feel like is uniquely enabled now that you haven't pitched yet? Oh, no.

Does everything get kind of pitched in somewhere or another? No, I think there's many ways. I've been on this side for two years. At the core, I still think like a founder and like I kind of forgotten what it was, and then we launched our, me and a friend run a stable coin conference every year. And I was like, oh, this is what it's like to like start something

from scratch and build something. Is that Nick? No, not, no. He runs stable condo. It's called a very stable conference, so me and I. Right, right, right, right. We're six weeks out in March and SF. But, no, you know, there's many ways to do this.

And, like, at the end of the day, when I've really boiled it down, ventures of people business. Like, you're betting on people, especially as early as you can go, and then you let them go cook. Like, you give them money and let them cook, is, like, my real mantra. So there's not people, like, that I feel like I've ever missed on deals or people like, oh, I can't get an intro to, because there's also this style and venture of like,

you actually want to have to talk to this person, right? Like, I had a three-hour board meeting, and I need to debrief with the founder, and that's like another two hours potentially, and I'm happy to do it. And if we have that vibe that works... What? It's basically your whole day that you've got to...

Yeah, yeah, but if I have that vibe where I'm more than happy to, like, pick up the phone at 9 p.m. and just talk to them until 11, that's the type of founder I want to work with. At least that's how I think venture should be. There's, like, other ways. There's people who just do massive prospecting,

But as I've kind of looked at it, like, life's short. There's lots of ways to make money and, like, find the people who are going to leave a dent in the world. So if you're, I don't, I'm not apologetic for being like a weird human underneath. But like if I find other weird humans who I vibe with and who want to do something interesting in the world, then it's usually kind of a very good match made in heaven. Yeah. What do the various constituents coming to your conference in six weeks? Yeah.

How do they want the, do they want? yield on stable coins? I'm guessing they do. How are they all feeling about kind of the current regulation that, and maybe give us an update because I know it's kind of Yeah, yeah. And there's a bunch of market structure stuff that is like actively happening, so I don't have the latest on that, to be honest. Last year, it was in February 12th. It was the month before the Genius Act passed. So we actually had Governor Waller speak at the conference and give a public speech, and we actually had to live stream it because he's a public official and a governor can move the markets.

Interesting. We're working on a few other kind of high-name people that haven't been announced yet. Really, the whole premise of the conference, and it's really funny. So I had a kid a year and a half, two years ago now. Thank you. So I was walking around in July with my kid strapped to my chest at 6 a.m. and called I, my coordinator. Yes.

Yes, one does, as you have a young baby, and you're trying to, like, get your steps in. And I said, we're talking about stable coins and how it's changing the world. the world and we're like, somebody should host a conference. And then we both stopped and were like, oh, shit, we have to host a conference. Like, how do you get, really the whole premise is how do you get all of the right people, not like, I don't need 25 people from every single company. I need the two or three right people at every company. Ideally, it's the founder, but sometimes, you know, if you're a massive company,

it's somebody lower level, and put them all in the same room, make the content interesting and make the networking good. And, like, I have a big belief in serendipity and doing interesting things in the world. And so it's how do we create serendipity? I know of at least one or two deals, well, we did a few deals. Besides Lightspeed, who was a sponsor last year and sponsoring again this year, I know of two deals that happened as a result of, like, a founder showing up at the conference, meeting another top tier VC, and they did a deal together in Staple Coins.

So, like, our goal is not to, like, dominate the conference. It's bring the people together and get this thing, like, and keep the industry moving forward. What's your take on the proliferation of Stable Coins? Specifically, there's, like, I saw a couple states talking about logging, them. And that feels like, I might have it wrong, but it feels intuitively like a step away from the universal credit system. Yeah, yeah. But maybe it's, they're all credits, but it's like slightly different credits, rappers around credits. Yeah, it's a question of, there's a question me and my friends have talked about, which is like, at what point does a central bank of let's just

choose a random country, Colombia, change their interest rate and nothing happens? Like how much of their citizenship needs to be moved to US dollar? How much of their GDP needs to be in US dollar for the central banks no longer be relevant. So this is them fighting back against I can no longer stop my citizens. Like they can hold Bitcoin, but now they can actually hold dollars, which are like not volatile. It's actually a better, historically a better store of value. So we've seen CBDCs, central bank digital currencies. They certainly will provide efficiency in those countries and the domestic markets when they run. Long term, how will they work out? It's like, I don't, I don't even think about it because it's just we're seeing this macro trend of dollars taken off. I mean, literally

today, Tether launched their U.S. compliant stuff. So, like, and Tether is the largest by far, and it wouldn't surprise me if they very aggressively shift a lot of money from USDT to USDT, I think it's A, because it's Anchorage, just to show that there's massive compliant volume

and the world is just going to pick up. We're at $300 billion of stable coins, I think, today, it was $200 billion last year, roughly. The number just keep going up. Number go up. Number go up. Here, let's hear. Our greatest export.

Yeah, exactly. That's great. Well, I'm excited for the event. Yeah, thank you. You guys are welcome. What day is it? March 5th at TerraGallery. It's invite only, so like apply at very stableconference.com.

Hit them up. A great name. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming down to the TBPN Ultrudeau. Great to have you. Close out the show with us. Those out the show with us. Thank you for watching.

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