TBPN - Dimon’s Take on Apple Card, Trump’s Greenland Play, VC Winter Deepens | Josh Wolfe, Delian Asparouhov, Arun Gupta, Julie Bush, Winston Weinberg, Yotam Segev

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(01:37) - Dimon’s Take on Apple Card (23:11) - VC Winter Deepens (27:47) - Trump’s Greenland Play (41:07) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (56:51) - Anthropic Raises $10B (01:02:44) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:27:31) - Delian Asparouhov, a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder of Varda Space Industries, discusses the K-shaped distribution in venture capital, where a significant portion of funding is concentrated in a few large companies, leading to fewer deals and companies staying private longer. He highlights the increasing use of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) by venture firms to participate in large funding rounds without traditional fee structures, enhancing relationships with high-profile companies. Additionally, Asparouhov notes the growing role of private companies in defense and space sectors, emphasizing the need for innovation and efficiency in these industries. (01:56:54) - Arun Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Hapiko, has a background in building products that connect people and spark creativity, including founding Grailed, a global fashion marketplace. In the conversation, he discusses the launch of Stickerbox, an AI-powered voice-to-sticker printer designed to bring children's imaginations to life by allowing them to create and print stickers from their spoken ideas. He emphasizes the importance of creating technology that empowers kids to dream bigger and create freely, highlighting Stickerbox's role in fostering hands-on, screen-free play. (02:25:54) - Julie Bush, co-founder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises, discusses her company's innovative approach to the defense and national security sector. Valinor operates as an operational holding company, focusing on addressing overlooked yet critical areas within the defense market by centralizing operations and decentralizing engineering across its subsidiaries. This model enables rapid development and deployment of products, such as power systems for unmanned autonomous systems and combat casualty care solutions, aiming to provide sustainable and enduring solutions in a market often dominated by large-scale projects. (02:38:24) - Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey, a legal AI company, discusses the evolution of Harvey from serving large law firms to also assisting corporations and mid-market clients by providing an operating system that enables lawyers to deliver services more efficiently and cost-effectively. He highlights the challenges in legal billing, noting that while certain tasks may become less expensive due to automation, the overall legal bill might remain unchanged as lawyers focus more on high-value work. Weinberg also emphasizes the importance of integrating AI into legal processes to enhance reasoning capabilities and streamline workflows, ultimately aiming to transform the legal profession by allowing lawyers to concentrate on complex, high-leverage tasks. (02:51:52) - Yotam Segev, co-founder and CEO of Cyera, a data security company, discusses his background in Israeli Military Intelligence's Unit 8200, where he met his co-founder, Tamar Bar-Ilan, and their shared experience in cybersecurity. He emphasizes the importance of listening to customers to understand their needs and engineering solutions that address complex problems in large enterprises. Segev also highlights concerns about the rapid adoption of AI in enterprises, noting the pressure on security teams and the insufficient security measures from AI providers, which could lead to significant exposures in the coming years. (02:58:24) - Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital, announced the firm's successful raise of a $1.5 billion fund, marking a significant milestone from their initial $100 million fund over two decades ago. He discussed the current venture capital landscape, noting a bifurcation where smaller funds face extinction while larger firms consider going public, and emphasized Lux Capital's focus on sectors like aerospace, defense, biotech, and AI, highlighting investments in companies such as Anduril and Applied Intuition. Wolfe also expressed optimism about upcoming IPOs in defense tech and AI, underscoring the importance of American capital markets in fostering technological innovation. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, January 8th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Ram, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I wrote about Chicheng, the Apple Card, minor news yesterday. Wait, first, we have to.

We have to ask, somebody sent us a bunch of weights. Yeah. And this one is a 10. there's quite a few of these. Are you trying to say something? Is this you think the upper limit? But either way, whoever sent these, please let us know because there was no card. So we don't know who to think.

They're very nice. They're very nice. Nike bumper plates. Great fun. A big sign of respect in our culture. It is. It is. Anyway, there was a minor headline breaking news.

Actually, learned about it from the chat. We discussed it right after we talked to Pat and Rob. from Sequoia, that the Apple card program is moving from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan. Nothing's really changing about the Apple card yet. It's merely the bank back end that's always been sort of behind the scenes, behind the fold. But it's, even though it's a minor headline, I think it's an interesting story of just how Apple got to the point where they have a credit card, what that means, what the decisions with the tradeoffs were. And I wanted to go back all the way to the Steve Jobs era and think about, would he be down with credit cards? You're

giving leverage to your customers. You're giving credit. You're in the debt business. It's a different business. How did he think about it and how did we get here? The headline is that the Apple Card Program has millions of cards issued. There's $20 billion of debt that's accumulated across all the cards. And the portfolio is not doing well. So normally if you are to, if you have a co-branded credit card, like a JC Penny or a Macy's credit card, and it's aligned with a brand, typically those get paid off pretty well. They have strict underwriting rules. And so when those trade hands, companies will, other banks will typically say, I'm buying a $10 billion portfolio, and I'll give you 8% on top because most likely I'm going to be able to recoup all of that from the creditors.

And also, you know, they're going to pay interest. So they're going to pay 15% interest, 25% interest. Now, there will be some defaults. But in general, you typically make money off of owning a portfolio of consumer credit card loans. Not in this case. Goldman is like, we've got to get this off our balance sheet. They've already lost a billion dollars. Their consumer bank overall, which includes Marcus, has lost $3 billion. Like, they're not doing well over the last couple. So is this a repayment issue or just an operational issue? There's a little bit of both. A lot of it is the actual repayment. Do you think this is potentially because Apple's made it more difficult to actually have Morgan Stanley like go after?

The clients, like, is that Apple making certain decisions? Because I don't know, I have to imagine, it's not like their underwriting criteria was wildly different than any other credit card in that category. It wasn't wildly different, but I'll get into some of the pitfalls that led to this place. So the $20 billion card balances, that's trading, J.P. Morgan's acquiring that at a $1 billion discount. Instead of an 8% premium, you would expect that they would pay 21.6, they're actually paying 19. for this. And then they're going to have to go and recoup some of it. It's not, you know, by any means a disaster. And Goldman's a large company. Jay Morgan's a large. I said Morgan Stanley. Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting to figure out the history here. Before we do, let me tell you about

console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution or access requests and password resets. You can see, we have our consoles here, branded on the laptops. Very fun. So, Steve Jobs actually thought about launching a credit card at Apple, at least two times that we know of. There's two key stories about Steve Jobs thinking about getting in the credit card game. The first was in the late 1990s. He met with Capital One to create a joint credit card that would have worked a lot like the Apple card. So, but the main problem, and I think the four, like, there's a lot of things where Apple has a particular brand.

I want to talk to you about Apple's brand and what it means, like how it fits into the consumer credit card, consumer financial. landscape. But the North Star that Jobs laid down was always amazing customer service and no rejection. So I tend to think of most high-end brands as beneficiaries of exclusivity. You can't just buy an Hermes Birken bag. You can't buy a Ferrari SB3 Daytona. You have to be invited. You need a relationship. You have to get an allocation, right? Apple, for some reason, I feel about Apple the same way I feel about Ferrari. And yet it is a wildly different experience. It's a premium brand. It's a premium brand. But because of the design and because of the value of the technology and how innovative they are, I put them in a different category than Equinox, which I put as like a premium thing. I've thought

of them as luxury and they've done a good job with the materials that they use. In general, it's always felt like a luxury brand to me. Even though I agree with you, it's technically not. It doesn't really fit in there. They don't run their business like they're a luxury brand. They're not trying to say, oh, we only have 10,000 new iPhones in gold. So who knows what the market price will be on those. They don't run that like that. But Jobs wanted Apple to be a no rejection company. So anyone can walk into an Apple store by the most expensive iPhone that they make, as long as they have the money for it. People want to give us money, they can. They can, which is, you know, it's a standard business practice, but not always in luxury goods.

Yeah, which is why I said it's premium. It is more premium, even though Apple often presents itself as a luxury brand. Yes, yes. Quickly, let me tell you about linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning a building products. Let me also tell you about the linear run of show today, the linear lineup. We got Dahlian Asperuhoff coming back on the show.

He's back. We're going to dig into an... 18 appearances last year. Yeah, 18. And he's starting strong in the first week. Hopefully 180 this year. I would love that. We're going to dig into sticker box, this viral kids toy that was tearing up the timeline, very cool use of AI for, you know, a consumer product. Then we have Julie Bush at Valinor and a bunch of other folks, Harvey and Josh Wolf from Lux Capital is coming on. So it should be a fun show. Anyway, continuing. So because of credit risk and underwriting, every credit card has to have a approval process and not everyone can be accepted. That's just the way it works. You cannot underwrite everyone or else you'll just have massive losses. So it was surprising. So, so Apple, when they launched the original card, they actually set the credit score requirement fairly low. And even though it launched in 2019, it felt like a holdover from the jobs era, that job's

philosophy of even though we're Apple, even though it feels, it's going to have the patina of an Amex, it's going to have this premium look and feel, and we'll get into the design of the card in a minute. But it really was accessible to a lot of people. I think you needed a credit score around a 600, which is pretty accessible. And so that philosophy carried through, even from the 90s. The second time Apple was really thinking about doing a card was in 2004, and I will tell you about this after I tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look really good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. So they actually staffed this guy Ken Siegel, who is the creative director

on the think different campaigns, like one of the most iconic marketers in history, in tech history, certainly. And they came up with the name. Jobs said, if we launch a credit card, it's going to be called the Apple Card. And they actually wound up using that name. But it had a weird twist. So most credit cards, they'll give you airline miles or cash back. There's diners club. It's usually you get points and then you can spend those points on travel. And you've always been a huge points guy, right?

I'm actually not a points guy at all. I usually meet whoever the most elite management consultant in my friend group is and just ask them because every management consultant is obsessed with credit card points maxing. And I just ask them, which one should I get? And then I just get that one. And then five years later, 10 years later, I still have it. and it's probably a bad deal then. Because it's always a great deal in the first couple of years,

and then it gets worse and worse and worse as they, like, retain you. Anyway. So instead of airline miles or cashback, this proposed Apple card from 2004, you would get points, and you could only spend the points at the iTunes store to get free songs. What a funny... I mean, at that moment in time, that was pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a cool idea. At the same time... I mean, I was a child at that time, so 99 cents. was somewhat of a considered purchase. I'd be playing, sometimes I'd just play the preview of the song. Yeah, I'm good with the 30 seconds.

For sure, this is enough. Just rocking out. This is enough. Play it again. But it is somewhat genius because there's sort of zero marginal cost on music, certainly on the distribution of music. Now they do have to pay royalty fees, but there's already a built-in margin there.

So that 99 cents, a lot of that went to Apple. Remember, they take 30%. So they're giving you psychologically a dollar worth of value, you go and spend $100, you get, you get 100 points, one point is one cent, you buy the 99 cent song, but they are taking home another 30% on top of that. So the economics would have been really, really good, but it is sort of gimmicky because people want to spend points on a lot of things. They're like, I'm happy to get free flights and hotels.

I think there's something psychological about having, you know, a credit card that you spend money on for a couple of years, you get a whole bunch of points, and then you're like, wow, I got a free flight to a vacation that I'll remember forever. That's a very good association with whatever credit card brand you had, as opposed to, okay, yeah, I bought a bunch of my favorite music, and then four years later, Spotify came out, and actually my iTunes library is basically useless, right? Tyler. I was just going to say, it's like the same thing, because it's like, instead of a trip,

it's like, oh, I bought this Chief Keefe album off my Apple card. I'll always remember that. And now my life is a movie. I will remember that. I hate being sober. We got to watch that clip. I need to pull that up. So they were going to use, they called them IPoints,

and you'd be able to redeem them at the iTunes store. Seemed like crazy timing considering that Spotify was about to launch four years later in 2008. So if they'd actually done this in 2004, launched the IPoints program. When did Apple Music actually launch? Much later, much later. I want to say like 2016 or something.

2015. 2015. Boom, got it. Wow. Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, all benefits in HR built to evolve with modern small and medium bit-sized businesses. So the other key feature that Apple always wanted, and this went back to Steve Jobs, that they always wanted with the Apple card, which you don't often think about with credit

cards, but is amazing customer service. And so most people, their credit card just works. Apple did a couple of unique things where it integrate with the wallet, but mostly, they just wanted extremely high levels of customer service. you have a problem with your iPhone, you go into the genius bar, there's someone who's friendly, they are very good about getting you in at the right time. Imagine one of the people at the genius bar breaking your kneecaps. They have a room where they're just like, okay, we're, you know, we're very customer-friendly here, but you haven't paid, and we have to break your knee-caps.

We're going to take you back. You know how Apple? Yeah, yeah. They have, like, the back of house, but it's like almost invisible, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like built-in-in-wall. Just get taken back there. and they're just like nicely just like pay your apple card bill well i mean that was another thing they

wanted to be so customer friendly they didn't have any late fees no application fees and and no no international fees no fees at all that was the whole pitch no fees which sounds really nice sounds really delightful to just be like okay i don't even have to think about fees or whatever but it incentive the fees exist to incentivize people to pay on time because not only does the interest start occurring but when you pay late if you're not paying the balance the minimum balance uh to maintain the card, then you get a late fee, which increases the, also the yield on the debt, but it also just attracts like a lower quality customer who's maybe just on their fifth credit card and is just like, oh, this one doesn't have fees and I need an extra 500 bucks this month. I'll just grab

this one. And it's a less considered decision to bring into their financial life. So the customer service thing was really an issue because with Apple, they have years and years. I mean, Since, I don't know, probably at the 80s, like the Christmas time was when people would gift each other MacBooks or Mac computers, and they built up, built up, built up. And so they have a whole workflow for how do we hire a lot of people around the Christmas time, how do we staff the Genius Bar, how do we educate people, how do we pay them? They're in the Tier 1 city, so they can have great people working there. It's a very high dollar revenue per square foot in those Apple stores.

So the whole model works and they've built it up very slowly. Goldman didn't have experience in consumer banking. Like the default consumer customer service experience is I'm calling my banker, my Goldman banker, and I'm like, I need to sell my company for a billion dollars. Get your M&A team ready. Or I need to go public, potentially on the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

Whether you use Goldman, Morgan, Morgan, whoever's lead left, make sure they're ringing that bell with you at the New York Stock Exchange. But seriously, Goldman, Like, it's a trading show. It's the highest finance. It's the most premier. It's the most elite. And so when you call them and you're like, yeah, I got billed for $25 and it should have been $23. Can you fix this?

Well, they need a new team for that. And they need to build up that team. And that's not rocket science. Like, I do think Goldman should have been able to figure that out. But Apple also wanted another consumer-friendly feature. They wanted all of the bills to drop on the first of the month every month. And normally, credit. cards will stagger it out. They'll be like, your bill comes on the 10th, Tyler's comes on the 15th,

mine comes on the 20th. We don't really care. We don't really know. And so if you have a problem with your credit card, you check the statement. You're like, wait a minute, that's not the right charge. I got to call and sort this out. You're calling on the 10th. Tyler's calling on the 15th. I'm calling on the 20th. Yeah, they do it intentionally. Yeah, they do it intentionally. Because if they have a customer service organization. I always assume, I stupidly, it's just sloppy and annoying. I'm like, oh, you're just genius. Trust the process. Trust the process. us the process, never lose faith. So Apple insisted, hey, everyone's got to get their statement right on the first. That's the best customer experience. But what that means is that you need like 10,000

people ready at the phones because you're not just doing, oh, you know, send us an email and we'll have some automated system get back to you and do this. Like Apple customer service, that level that Goldman wanted to bring was very high. And so you need a ton of people staffed on the first of the month. and then they're not really doing anything in the back half of the month. And while you can maybe do temp work at an Apple store in December and say, hey, we're going to hire you from November 1st to January 15th. You're going to deal with some of the returns. It's a three-month gig.

People will sign up for that. No one's saying, yeah, I'm good to work at Goldman Sachs on the first of every month and the first week of every month. And then I'll just find something else to do on weeks two, three, and four of the month. That doesn't make any sense. So they ran into a bunch of problems there, obviously, more cost. And all of this was just making the actual program less profitable for Goldman, more of a problem. And we talked a little bit about the fees of any kind.

Now, there was an opportunity. Goldman was the whole reason why they jumped at the opportunity to work with Apple. And they kind of bent over backwards because Apple had tried this with, they went to a whole bunch of other banks. Remember going back to Capital One. And every bank had said, like, now, are you crazy? You can't do this. You can't give everyone in the world a no free credit card with great customer service. You're going to lose money, Apple.

And Apple finally. They're like, no, we want to give everyone a free lunch. Exactly. And so what Goldman should have done with the customer service is they should have got to fin.a.i, except it didn't exist in 2019, but does now. And Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a.i. Maybe Goldman should become a client.

Maybe J.P. Morgan should become a client. They might already be. But so the Goldman, they were making a push into consumer. They built Marcus internally, which was always sort of a funny name to me. I don't know if it resonated with you. I don't know. The name, like people names can either be so good or so bad. Yeah.

And I don't know. I have a childhood friend, a family friend named Marcus. Yeah. It's a great name. He's a great dude. Do I want to trust him with all my money? I don't know. Oh, yeah.

funny. Like you might be like, yeah, my smartest friend is Marcus. I love this brand. Or it's like... Anyways, I texted a buddy who has some context on this whole deal. And so he is in a meeting, but he fired off some notes. He asked him

like, why, why did, like how did this happen? Basically, he says, GSFed up the plan. DJD Sol was told to shut down Marcus and consumer or get out. That's David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman. Or get out of the job. So he all of Marcus except for savings.

Then GS had a multi-year process to find a bank that Apple would approve, right? They're not just going to say like some, some, you know, smaller, not systemically important bank, et cetera. Then they had to figure out price, which includes opportunity cost of selling for a discount compared to running out the contract to 2030. GSFed up because it's a transactional org, not a longitudinal org, and really thought they were smarter but never focused on fundamentals of running the business. Yeah. So, um,

so the question is like what happens next. Uh, J. B Morgan obviously has way more, way more consistency here. Uh, the, the other hard part for,

for Goldman was that they were trying to build their consumer facing brand. So they wanted the Goldman name in more places. And the Apple card would have been a great co-branding thing. They were fighting to get like the front of the card, which would be the prime real estate next to Apple. Apple, Goldman would have been really cool. they didn't. They got relegated to the back. Absolutely not. And the card looks awesome. I was reflecting on it. I don't know if you actually seen it, and maybe we can pull up a picture. But the, I don't know if it's still the case, but originally it was CNC milled from a single sheet of titanium alloy. Like the same way they make these MacBooks they would use to make the cards. So it didn't have those laminated layers. I don't know if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve, but those things, they would use to make the cards. So it didn't have those laminated layers. I don't know if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve, but those things.

things kind of like fall apart after a couple of years because there is a metal piece and the metal card is typically more prestigious, but they add laminate on either side. The Apple card went a different direction. And it had, and I think they delivered on the branding side. They just didn't quite deliver on the, on the financial design. Did you ever have one? Apple card, no. And it's so, so interesting because I think that if you were trying to do an analysis on the Apple card. You were like every high value credit card customer in America, not every, but the vast, maybe 99% has an iPhone. Apple is going to put this everywhere. This is going to be one of the biggest credit card business lines of all time. And it just, it's been interesting to see, you know,

this entire saga because it hasn't really turned out that way, even though, even though how many times has Apple kind of promoted to you in some way or another, right? So many different ways. And still, I'm just like, I have, you know, I have a credit card. I don't need another, right? Yeah, totally. Well, let me tell you about turbo puffer, serverless vector in full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Well, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I think it's always been sort of like a minor business for Apple, but some opportunity. I do think that there was an interesting opportunity to make it more exclusive, more of a status symbol, more of something that you pull

out and it says something about you, has some badge value. But that would have been sort of antithetical to the Apple. In a lot of circles, an iPhone doesn't actually say anything about you. No, no, no, no, no, it's too generic. Yeah. It's not like. And then also there's just the fact that people don't pull out credit cards anymore. They do, yeah, I really wonder how the, how people using Apple Pay will affect the premium people put on different credit cards, right? When you're just like, I'm going to just pay this bill at this restaurant. I mean, the true points maxers do care about using the right card for the right time because some cards will be better for dining, others will travel, others.

Like the Apple card gave you 3% off if you're buying Apple stuff. And then 2%, I believe, if you paid for something with Apple Pay, using the Apple card in Apple Pay, like you open out Apple Pay and you select the Apple Card, you get two. percent back and there was 1% on everything else. If you pull out the card and you just pay for gas at the gas station. But then there's like the Costco card that gets you a better discount at Costco and the Amazon card that gets you better discount at Amazon. And so a lot of the points maxers and the card maxers will get the specific card and they're like, when I'm at Amazon, I use this card. When I'm at Walmart, I use this card. I never got this. This is a project for Billy McFarlane to lead.

Remember he had like a members? I saw his, uh, magnesis. I saw his, uh, his latest, uh, like Instagram rail or something. He was just walking down the street talking about doing some of that. New festival. New festival or something along those lines. I don't know. Good luck to him. Rough go.

In other news, U.S. venture capital fundraising falls 35% as firms stay private longer. Of course, Josh Wolf is not letting himself be a statistic. He's coming on later today to talk about... The massive fundraise the biggest one ever. One and a half billion in new funds for Lux Capital. But Kate Clark in the journal says money is flowing to the most trusted investment firms as startups stay private longer. And before we read this, let me tell you about vibe.com, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on meta.

Fundraising for U.S. venture capital firms dropped 35% in 2025, the most anemic stretch in at least six years with money flowing primarily to the most trusted investment firms as companies stay private longer. The $66 billion raised last year represents a 70% drop from the 2022 record. The slowdown reflects a continuing liquidity crunch. Startups that have been flush with venture funding have opted to remain private rather than exposing themselves to public market scrutiny. A prolonged IPO drought that has returned little cash to investors and now complicating efforts to raise new capital. There's a graphic here that we can pull up.

You can see the chart. The fundraising climate is challenging. said Beezer Clarkson, a partner at Sapphire. I invited her on the show. We got to get her at some point. She's great. Focused on investments in venture funds. Investors are concentrating capital

in the most trusted VCs. Look at this chart. I hate to see it. It is funny that over the last 18 months, two years, it felt like I feel like a lot of people were looking around and being like, wow, our industry can exist in a high-rate environment. And then you look at this.

I don't know that that's actually what's going on. I mean, it does coincide with the interest rate thing perfectly. I think the bigger piece of the narrative is just the IPO market, the fact that a lot of these funds are sitting on massive, like, NAV, massive gains, but not a lot of liquidity. And so if you are an allocator, an LP, and you've put a bunch of money in a fund, and you're like, yeah, I'm ready to double down. As soon as you give me the money back, I'll give it back to you. but like let's give it back to me so I can reinvest it until you know oh okay you got 10 billion over there like show me the money and then and this is the year the IPO windows open yes there's a bunch of names that we're expecting to go out if it starts to close you and i will do our back we're going to hold it

open hold it as long as we can i'll push one door yeah back to back uh it's going to be an exciting year for anyone on public dot com investing for those to take it seriously stocks options bonds crypto treasuries and more. Back to the article. As a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor light speed venture partners secured more than $9 billion across new funds in December. That was an organic soundboard.

In one of the year's largest raises, while PT's Founders Fund closed $4.6 billion in April. New fund managers by contrast are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment. The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash-intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital, such as the deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices, family offices, and hedge funds. Collectively, the venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing. Clarkson said of the largest AI rounds, it must be coming from other sources as well. Yeah, and kind of left out the hyperscalers, too, out of this, which have been a key player in

some of these later rounds. Funding for USAI startups reached a record 222 billion in 2020. more than double 2024 levels. So we have 66 billion in new funds raised, $222 billion actually going into startups. And of course, a lot of that, again, is non-venture capital firms. Still seems like a good time to build a company.

Still seems like there's plenty of money. Always a good time. Always a good time. Should we talk about... There's some interesting concentration dynamics that are happening because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised. We also the decline in new venture fund formation. There aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Obviously, we talked to some folks that are

getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of, it's not 2021 anymore, where there were like a new fund every single day. The top 30 funds secured 75% of fundraising with Andresen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10% of the year's entire year's capital. Mega rounds of $100 million are more accounted for about 70% of venture funding. So you have this bifurcated market. Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals, while the broader ecosystem are emerging managers, seed fund series A specialists are getting crushed. It's the best time for tech ever is real.

But concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners. Well, speaking of deals, Reuters has an exclusive. They say Trump admin moles payments to sway Greenlanders to join the U.S. Greenland says they're not for sale. European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen, but Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days. U.S. officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenland.

Stimmy time. Stimmy time. To Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States, while the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear. U.S. officials, including White House aides, have discussed figures ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 per person, doing the math. Even at $100,000 a person, Greenland only has like 57,000 residents. So we're talking about basically a seed round, $5.7 billion to...

That's doable. That's an AI. That's actually like... It's like three AI researchers. Three AI research in Greenland for all of Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder what, I wonder how much, like, this would actually sway them. Because I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes.

You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to, like, either vote, and then they get the payment because we promise, or the payment happens, and then whether or not they vote, you know. I think just start planes with cash, you know, just robbing it out of the air. Because then wouldn't the game theory be just that they hold strong? There's going to be another plane. We want the second drop. Here's my thing.

Here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland or resident, I'm sitting there being like, okay, we know they're willing to, we have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around $6 billion. We think we're worth $60. Let's let them keep, you know, the Paramount Skydance, the Ellisons, they'll just bid and then say, well, it's not our best in final offer. And what does Warner Brothers do? They, of course, again, they rejected another bit or recommended against it. Greenland's prime minister, Yens Frederick Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post. Facebook, let's go.

Okay, they are really a decade behind over there. He says, enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. He's not a fan. You got to get on reels, buddy. You've got to do a front-facing video. Use some AI. Get some vibreel of music in there.

You got a community. Yeah, get the, get the, the Sigma male, you know, grinds up. Yeah, it's just his statement. Enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. And it just cuts to like the Joker and stuff. Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to greenland in recent days with disdain, particularly given that the U.S. and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement.

on Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain, and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relations. So this is... Yeah, but they can, you know, Trump can make his case. Hey, if you, if you alone, on your own, decide to come over and hang out with us, we got some cash for you, apparently. It's wild. Let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality. software faster.

Trump has long argued that the U.S. needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications. He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. While internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's AIDS, since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader.

Nicholas Maduro in a daring snatching grab operation, not an invasion, apparently. According to sources familiar with internal deliberations, one source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Muduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other longstanding geopolitical goals. It feels like wildly different scenarios, though. Like, they're not going to go send in Delta Force. I don't know. Maybe they will. I don't know. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security in Denmark isn't going to be able to do it. So average gross income in Greenland is 40 to 45,000 USD. So people could be looking at that 100Ks and I'm going to retire a couple years early. 100K is big. Yeah, I don't know.

Among the possibilities being floated by Trump aides, a White House official said on Tuesday is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a compact free association. Compact of free association. C.OFA. The precise details, which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. Palau, interesting. Very, depending on the signatory, but the U.S. government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection. Get an Amazon Prime from us. What else can we offer you?

In exchange, the U.S. military operates freely in COFA countries, and trade with the U.S. is largely duty-free. No, no tariffs. I wonder what Greenland is exporting these days. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries, and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed. In theory, payments could be used to induce Greenlanders to vote for their independence or to sign onto a COFA after such a vote. While polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum.

Do you have stats on Greenland? I was just going to say, Tyler Cowan had a good piece on this, yes, A, in the free press. Read it, Tyler. It's pretty long, I don't want to read the whole thing.

Okay, then sing it. He doesn't want us to actually, like, buy it, right? It's, like, bad. You need to convince them to come over. But he does, like, I think he wants Greenland to become in possession, or the U.S. to become in possession of Greenland, right? maybe like a Puerto Rico situation.

Yeah. So it's like a little bit above Palau. Yeah, it's above Palau. It's not a state though. It's not like, you know, and we're not setting the military in. Yeah, we were pitching. So, so. It's such a, I mean, it's such a, it is a tough sell.

As much as I love this great country. You mean to live in Greenland? Yeah, just if you're in Greenland and you're kind of looking over at the U.S. with binoculars. I want that crazy stuff over here. Yeah. It's just massive, massive, massive infighting. governors, you know, going to war with Washington constantly, right?

It is interesting. The U.S. is like one of the most entertaining countries. It feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People who really follow our local politics or our state-level politics or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics. So, I don't know. Maybe they get it on it. I have another idea for green.

You're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they want to, they want to I want to get in the age. Yeah. Get in the box. Get in the label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for frontier AI. Get in the label box. So Puerto Rico famously has just a 3% tax rate on income.

So a lot of people go there. And when, and this is why when Jake Paul fights for $90 million, he's actually fighting for basically that number. Wow. Yeah. He's a president. He has one of the few jobs. That's crazy. That you can actually do very well from Puerto Rico, which is just train and boxing with a team that you build yourself.

So, yeah, his, his, like, Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire. Just from boxing. Fairly quickly simply because he's going to do a handful more fights, I imagine. Then he needs about a 2x from there and he'll be able to go. Because he's, like, keeping, you know, 97% of every dollar. So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, $100 million, is that to the winner, No, in the Jake Hall, Anthony Joshua fight, I think Jake got 90 something, and Anthony Joshua got just under that. Oh, okay.

Around the same. But, you know, I think Jake was a bigger draw. So it's more about how much you're drawing. It's like starring in a movie almost. So, you know, your star power dictates how much you'll sell. It is crazy that, I mean, obviously, be very dedicated to the sport, but it's just crazy to me that you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one-night. event and draw that much economic opportunity. Not many ads and that many pay-per-view sales. That's a lot of money. That's remarkable. Anyway, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers

of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate. Why would anyone go? grandfathered in to the Puerto Rico, the 3%. Yeah, for a long time, you could just go. But now I think it's closed. You needed to be there. I think they close it. I'm sure it's still solid, but not what it was.

But Puerto Rico, famously, people go there because it has a low tax regime. You'd pay just 3% of your income. Greenland, 97% taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold, and now you have high taxes. Well, but a lot of people desperately want to raise taxes. basically, I mean, I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100%.

Yeah. And so if you could create a... Go there, you zero yourself. And then you grind. If you're in favor of ultra-high taxes, you could go to Greenland. That's a good idea. Get zeroed out immediately. I like this idea.

You just land in the country. Yeah. And then you go and connect all your accounts with Plaid. And everyone knows. You just transfer out everything. Yeah, zero it out. And then Tyler, you had a different proposal? What was it?

Well, okay, so the, the, the, the, the, case for just 97 is that like it's a flex right i can live in greenland i'm so i make so much money that yeah yeah it is hard i'm still balling it is hard every billionaire has a plane they all have boats it's like who's really got money well if you can go to greenland lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing it's like okay that guy's actually really rich yeah but then but then but then if you're if you're not it's the new Lamborghini year yeah yeah if you're not uber oberbo-rewealthly it still make sense if you basically just have the 97% tax rate the first year. The first year. So then maybe it's, maybe it's, if you look at it in 10 year increments, right? So first year you're basically zeroed

out. Yeah. But then you got, then you got a super low tax rate. Then you just grind for five years. Yeah. It's almost like a, you get dropped on an island and you've got to fight your way out. Yeah, sort of Lord of Fly situation. Yeah. Yeah. Do you see Jensen came out yesterday and said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax. Is it? I don't know. It's just, he's a little browing, David Sack. He's a little browing, everyone. It's funny. Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California,

breaking from a cadre of ultra-wealthy residents who have spoken out against the first of its kind proposal. We chose to live in Silicon Valley, and whatever taxes, I guess, they would like to apply. So be it, this is, I'm going to say it, it's kind of a pick-me behavior for a beaner. He says, I'm perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once. I guess, I mean, does this mean you should be even more bullish? on Nvidia. For sure.

For sure. The ballot initiative He's like actually definitely pay definitely do this right now and then stop. He's like, I got another 10x in the bag.

I want to pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate now. Let's head into the comment section and put a hazmat suit. It's not really relevant what he thinks, according to Jeff. It's a question of what the policy

effect impact is. All the billioners want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5% of their wealth each year or whatever nuts-so thing the state cooks up. The state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government employees, et cetera. So Juan can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country, but that doesn't make it a wise policy.

I agree. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. Stay-to-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. You see Larry dumped his place in SF? He did. He's moving out. Well, I don't know if he's getting out entirely. He's definitely making moves.

He still has plenty of homes in Malibu. In a somewhat related story, there's now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this? So apparently, this is from President Trump. He said that, what was the actual quote from Trump? Because Palmer had a clip. Let's head over to Truth Social. I think you actually do.

He said, I've been informed by the slowest. He's talking about, he's talking, okay. So, also, if Raytheon wants further business with the United States government, under no circumstances, will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together? Our country comes first. And can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said, what, five million per year per executive at a defense company?

He also said that, he said, I have determined for the good of our country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times. Our military budget for the year, 2027, should be not, should not be $1 trillion, but rather $1.5 trillion. That is a huge increase, 50% increase. But obviously there's a question of where that money comes from. Okay, yes. Yeah. So the... Oh, I have the quote here. Yes. Okay. Well, executive pay packages, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable. So they're... Yes. They should be limited to $5 million or less. Okay. Limited to $5 million or less. So Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Lucky on Bloomberg the Close,

digging into this. This is clip. They were at the Consumer Electronics Show. Yeah. I think he was there for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology. So my motivation is to try and build it the biggest thing possible. I will say, people have barely critiqued and said,

but Palmer, you know, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position of comment, given you're competing with these companies? And I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me. I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plans, if I'm not doing these two things. The other thing is, it's always tricky when you want to – I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems, right? It's actually the same thing with, like, Mod Retro in the gaming space.

Like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space. It's like, yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this like Hedge 22. Like if you're outside of it, they'll say, well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like, who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem.

It's always been emotionally difficult for me. We also have posts that President Trump is thinking more than a trillion should be invested in the area of defense. The budget should grow. He's not anti-defense or anti-defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure. What's interesting is your company is, dare I say, considering going public.

Yes. Would your CEO, do you think the CEO that, leads the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that that's going to be an issue? I think that when you are on the doll and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I, like, and you're not asking whether it should be. Like, like, you know, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect, you know, who will then nominate people, who can hold me

to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself $5 million until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the, when you are working on taxpayer dime, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against conceptually. Now, I think some of these might be bad moves.

They might not necessarily help the defense base, but in concept, I think everything should be on the table. And I think it's even good, maybe to scare some people sometimes. You don't necessarily go to people and say, this is the way it's going to be forever. You say, this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager? Your parents say, you're grounded until X, Y, and Z. Bring up your grades, solve your problems.

And then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking to ground you for life. It's so funny. I think that that's what you're right. I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not necessarily a lifetime.

That's great. Yeah, I mean, I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective, right? Especially if it's, especially if it's temporary. You know, you can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could over time be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But, you know, I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime

where the prime had gotten like a multi-100 million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to make the things that they were, that they had signed up and were getting paid to make. They were being lazy bones. Lazy bones. Lazy bones behavior. And so, yeah, in that situation, in that situation, if you have a management,

team that is just like printing, regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think Palmer is sort of wrestling with you know, libertarian ideas, how much, you know, should private companies be able to do? And that's a separate issue. It's like a private company, if you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want, but it's different when you have a contract with government than who decides the government's claim. Well, it's the people. It's the democracy. And so, yeah. that's what's happening. Yeah, and the, you know, Palmer in another clip was talking, they asked him, how much do you make?

He's like, I make $100,000 a year, right? That's my comp package. And he also said, I have a bunch of stock because I started this company. Now, the concern is like if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works with the government cannot make more than $5 million, and you're factoring in comp packages later, you could be in a situation where a company says, well, like, we can't hire the best people because they have an offer to make $10 million a year over here, and we can only pay them $5 million.

I mean, the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening, but it would be very tricky if Anderl could not compete against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Deep Mind, if they need a super talented AI researcher. And maybe they're not paying them a billion dollars, but they're just like, yeah, like the market rate for this role is 15 mil. And like, we can't hire them right now because we didn't check

some box on the level of deliveries on this thing. And that would be a little bit tricky. Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. And then we'll go to Tyler. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. I was just going to say, you can already see this phenomenon, you know, in some ways, you know, Tim Cook. Yes. He, it's not a salary cap, right? It feels like there is a cap. It feels like something's going on. He should be paying, paid way more. Yeah. What does he make 75? Five? Yeah, it's...

Barely scraping it. Imagine if he was only five. I mean, it would be terrible. He would have no incentive to shoot any updates. One of the greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

I think instead of a $5 million individual cap on defense tech executives, it would be much better to do a team-based salary cap because then that injects an interesting dynamic. Like instead of $5 million per executive, how about $20 million for the entire executive team? So then you have the idea of team construction. Where do you have cap room? Okay, we got an all-star. We're bringing in Brian Schimpf as the CEO. He's a CEO of Anderol right now. We're poaching him.

We're getting him 18, but his team is going to be mostly interns. Or you go and you get, okay, we got four people. They're all making five. They're all decent operators. But you create much more of a sports-like dynamic. We can't get Brian Schiff, but we can't. recreate him in the aggregate. In the aggregate, exactly.

Dodd in the chats is the best way to force them to deliver what they promise is to choose another vendor. I agree you could fix a lot of this at the contract level. If you sign a contract with somebody and then a year in, year, two years, three years, they're not delivering, like making it so that the government can, like, more easily reallocate those funds and actually, you know, make these companies have some accountability. More importantly, near... Before we move on, just...

I think this whole thing is very interesting. because you have this dynamic where very clearly, it feels like Heg Seth went and gave Trump some sort of update, and then he just, like, posted on truth social and, like, kind of crashed out. And there's a weird thing where it's like, why is this happening like this? This is not even an executive order at this point. It's just like we're, there's an entire news cycle around the new defense budget. This is all just truth social posts, just like Trump's thoughts, his shower thoughts, basically.

But this stuff does actually have an impact on the economy. I know it is funny that you see a big, You see a long truth social post and you just assume it's an executive order. It feels like law. It feels like, oh, okay, this is law, but it's not. But it does have an impact and it brings people to the table and we saw this play out with Intel where he was saying, like, Liputan's got to go. And he's basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel.

And then a few days later, he's like, Liputon's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually going to invest. I own 10% of the company now. And now the stocks are, you know, always, that's my boy. That's my boy. And so these things are like. like aggressive, but it's this whole like taco, chickening out, but that's part of the plan,

art of the deal. I don't know. It's a very weird, interesting, new dynamic. And I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration. But we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web app, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in. That's right. Neer says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games. You just need to find one good, one founder good enough to carry your entire career. That is fantastic. This is a banger and it's, it's, it's a banger because it's so true. Like when I look at across, you know, 60, 70 different investments at this point, if you take

out like two or three of these founders, it's just like, much like being on Rust with a, with an absolute killer who your absolute boy, 360 no scope, while you're still figuring. figuring out how the sticks work. But you're getting carried. You're like, we won. 2B2 on Rust, and you're just in a corner and the game's over.

Yeah. You load into Counterstrike on Dust 2, and one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups, and you're just ready to rock. You're getting carried. Get carried to the top. Did I ever tell the story of how I got my

Overwatch account carried to, like, the absolute top? My account was ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit, but it was very interesting. Who was me? So I played the first season of, I play the first season of Overwatch, then my password was included in some sort of hack,

some sort of leak from another, maybe like, you know, some other company had my password leaked it, and I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account, which is not important because, like, what are you going to do? You're just going to like, my credit card information isn't there. You can't do anything with it. You can just play Overwatch. But Overwatch was like a $60 game or something. And so if you were hacking, you didn't want to buy $60 every time you got banned. So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up and was like a sniper.

I think he played Monzo, Maine, and was like really, really good. And then years later, I got back in with my friends and I'm like, oh, let's play some Overwatch. And we queue up. Like, John, what are you up to? And I'm like, oh, I need to do placement matches. And so I do the placement matches and I'm just like losing because I'm playing with all these like incredible, you know, the top tier.

and everyone's like, why are you guys, like, we know you're good. Why are you sandbagging? Like, why are you trying to derank your account? And I'm like, I'm not. I'm playing as hard as I can. I'm doing my best. And they're like, no, we can see that you're like one of the greatest Hanzo players ever.

Like, you're the greatest sniper in Overwatch. We've seen your account history. You're amazing. Why are you playing poorly? And I was like, I don't know. And then I finally figured it out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the, top of the rankings. And then the game like remembered that and was putting in me in these really

high tier games. So finally, I had to make up a lie because whenever I'd hop on a game, everyone would be like, you're terrible and you're supposed to be good. And I'd have to say, ah, like I broke my hand. So I just, I'm not as good as I used to be. Like, please go easy on me. Like I'm relearning everything. Give me a break. Anyway, before we move on, Apple Oven. Profitable advertising, made easy with axon.com.A.I. Get Axon.com. to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. Jordy. One more thing that was funny about this true social saga from yesterday.

So he starts dunking on the execs, talking about salary caps. Lockheed Martin's stock was like falling off a cliff, Raytheon, et cetera. I think this was right after the close. Yeah, yeah. And after hours. But then immediately after that, Dodd in the chat says, the funny thing is that the one and a half trillion dollar announcement came after talking down. on them. So then very, just a little bit later, Trump said after long and difficult negotiations

with senators, congressmen, secretaries, and other political representatives, I have determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times. Our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the one trillion, but rather one and a half trillion. This will allow us to build, this will allow us to build the quote, dream military that we have long been entitled to, and more importantly, that it will keep us safe and secure. And so anyways, you can imagine what happened to prices after that. If it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries, and then keeps ranting, talks about Sleepy Joe.

I think it's time to retire Sleepy Joe. Just let him be retired. Just Joe. Anyways, over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest $108.4 billion hostile bid and remain committed. I called it. Loyal.

I knew nothing about this deal, but I just randomly said that I think Netflix is going to run away with it. But we'll see. In the journal Paramount defends its hostile bid for order. How high can they go? Can they go to $200 billion? It seems like Paramount has... They're holding out for the $1 trillion.

Endless coffers. I don't know. Paramount continued pushing its $77.9 billion bid for Warner Brothers Thursday, a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix. Yeah. The photo really did it for me. The aura farming together of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix team. On the lot.

On the lot. It feels like these guys are absolute dogs. They're ready to partner up. They're adding a new brother to the Warner Brothers. And so they're having fun. And it feels like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal directly to shareholders and the shareholders go crazy or something, it feels like it's in the bag. And meanwhile, Paramount has traded down almost 15% in the past month.

Interesting. Well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff. Still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell and seconds online in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Anthropic, raising $10 billion at $350 billion. We talked about this a little bit yesterday.

Get into it more. GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, and Kutu plan to lead the new... Spencer, you absolute dog. Spencer, get in the Ultrodome. Explain this to us. This is great. The funding round in the third mega deal in the past year follows a third. 13 billion investment in September that valued the company at 183 billion.

So they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation. Good for dilution. The rounds expected to close in the coming weeks. The total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be. Another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025. We're going to the axon. We're still warming up this new mallet.

I'm getting kind of splintered. I don't know if you've noticed this. You know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap around. Honestly, the baseball bat. Gloves, too. Batting gloves?

I would like an even longer mallet, like a full baseball. Like a staff. There's something about a baseball bat that's just the platonic ideal for swinging things. Maybe bigger mallet, maybe some athletic tape on there wrapping it. Like it's a baseball bat that's hit a thousand home runs. Do you think they end up doing another. round before the IPO. It's hard to imagine this is actually the

the final pre-IPO round just because there's so much incentive to just raise again in a few months. I saw a couple people doing polls on, would you rather own Open AI at $1 trillion or Anthropic at 350 or XAI at 220 or whatever the valuations were. And at least a lot of the small polls that I saw,

people were very excited about anthropics valuation, relative to the magic that's happening in Claude Codode and all the glazing that's happening. Finally, we have a second AI glaze gate, but this time the AI is getting glazed by the humans. Tripping glaze. It's a triple glaze. But Cursor is not getting glazed. Shaquille says he's bearish on Cursor, says that Cursor's not feeling the AGI.

We'll have to talk to Michael Truel about whether he is set the record straight on how AGI PILD is. but this is from Brie Wolfson on Dialectic with Jackson Dahl. The context, Shaquille says, is Wolfson is the newish head of employee experience at Curser. And much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about cursors culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there. All of this is very interesting, and there are some good insights here. Wolfson started working, worked at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them.

But when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a, failure to really engage with what advanced AI capabilities will mean for the future of work. All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor from Brie. She's not telling this fast takeoff crazy total disruption story. And Shaquille doesn't like that. And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the narrative, what is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi and just be like, look, it's just auto-complete and it makes

money and we sell tokens profitably? Or should you be like, it's going to cure cancer? Or should you be like, it's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all going to die. Like, there's so many different narratives that you can tug on. And a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them. And it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently. And sometimes I can work.

Sometimes I can't. I'm kind of down with cursor. I like this. I like that Michael is just like, he's a builder. And he tells a good story about that. And like, there are other AI leaders that are telling the Doom story or telling the fast. takeoff story. I don't think that cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story

but Shaquille disagrees but we'll have to dig into this more. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean it is interesting because anthropic they make such an emphasis on coding. They're like of the big labs people think of them. Yeah, totally. Probably as like the most AGI piled. But it's like cursor is all, I mean all they do is coding and

there's a very different like people see them very differently. Yeah. Well it's much more of a centaur adoption and much more of a co-pilot but much less of this drop-in replacement for labor. Yeah, that's true. But, I mean, you've definitely seen a lot of the recent cursor features are getting more and more agentic.

Totally, totally. Like, the actual product isn't, like, so completely different, at least, like, ideologically, right? No, no, I know. I agree. I agree. Yeah, there's something, cursor has an advantage, which is they have tens of millions of active developers

using their product. And so they have a data source on a lot of this that, you know, people that are just kind of speculating and on acts and reading like science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios, it's like, there's something to just like playing the game as you see it on the field. And I think that trying to obsess too much over what the world could look, you know, it's very important to try to plan and build your business around what the world's going to be like in one years, two years, five years, et cetera. but at the same time,

if you're building and your business is accelerating and customers are using your product more and more and more, like that doesn't, it's hard to just say, oh, I'm bearish on this company because they're not, they're not of this one podcast interview. Yeah.

Well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs, the makers of our theme song. So Rehar Jark says,

you can feel the code red here. Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini 3. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%. Three months ago, it was at 12.9%. 12 months ago, it was at 5.7%. And I remember a year ago, when it launched, it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big,

but it was because they were including generative AI snippet, in Google search, or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big DAU numbers, and it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app, really daily driving it. It was more demo, more testing. Well, this similar web data seems to show that Gemini has been growing and taking share. Yeah, it's also worth noting that this is just, like, site visits. And so not every visit is created equally, right?

Somebody can land quickly on a site. That's very different from them, you know, being in the app. multiple times a day. So this is not looking at app traffic. Well, that's what I love about the semi-analysis chart that shows that you have, you know, users or accounts that are signed up. Then you have the active users. And then you have how many interactions those users have, like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day? And then also, how many interactions, how long are they spending time? And so ultimately, the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on site, you know, attention at the end of the day.

And so there is a little bit of a gap there where when they ran, when semi-analysis at least ran the numbers maybe six months ago, it felt like while there were other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUs or MAUs in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back-and-forth, open AI was really, really dominant. And so, you know, maybe the narrative is overstated, but it's still some interesting data. And it does show that the code red is real. And it shows that Google's been taking the distribution of Gemini very, very seriously. And they've gotten more traffic, which is good. Near is back. Yes.

Elam Arena has raised the evaluation of $1.7 billion coming in with Michael Burry's shot. We're going to have the founder of Elam Arena on, hopefully in the next 24 hours. respond to this viral, put a thousand likes on this. Why do people not like Elamarina? It seems like a fantastic business. I don't know. Well, yeah, I, I, you know, how much revenue are they doing?

Sure, sure, sure. What kind of products are they releasing? Like, can they get, if you're, I'll tell you this right now. You, you build up a huge reputation, the sterling example of what is the best LLM, the best benchmark possible, can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction

and you sell the best, arena, the best LLM award to the highest bidder. For a billion dollars. For $10 billion. And you return all the money to shareholders after you do that. And you give them good vibes for one week. And then you burn your entire credibility. No.

No. Clearly there's some like model routing, some infrastructural level. I think we've talked about this before, but increasingly, I think the bull case is not just deciding which, which model is the best in an LM arena? It's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to Nike and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process. How do they evaluate? How do they bring in those models? And then how do they measure uptime? How do they measure all these different things that could result in a pretty significant business decision?

And if you can take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know. But we'll have to talk to the founder about it. Do you have any take on L.M. Arena? A fan? I don't have a take on like the business side. But as a product, it's very useful. It's always cool to look at.

I mean, because they always get the new models before, so you can always see, like, whenever a new image model comes out, it's always there first, so you can kind of see what are the vibes. But, yeah, I enjoy the product a lot. In the vibe economy, it's potentially dramatically undervalued in the leaderboard economy. Yeah, I think the vibes, I think over the past few months, you've definitely started to see, like, okay, this Exxonon is likely being paid by a lab. I think you've been starting to see that.

Yeah, it definitely happens. Anyway, they probably, I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind? Yes. Have you heard about the Tailwind drama, this whole thing? Tailwind laid off 75% of their team. I read the post. Pretty rough, yeah, the post.

The reason is so ironic. Their CSS framework became extremely popular with AI coding agents. 75 million downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings, resulting in a 40% drop in traffic and an 80% revenue loss and people are really, really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like they need to regressively and figure out some other way to integrate. The founder posted a video or basically a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk and just was talking for 30 minutes.

I listened to half of it this morning. Sad story, they have a small, super talented team. He had to lay off a number of their engineers. So now it's the three owners in the business plus one other engineer. There's four of them now trying to maintain it. He's optimistic, but he basically was saying he was just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month, which means that it was a greater and greater percentage of revenue. And so he was like, we're just going to be dead in less than a year. Because a lot of what they did, I think their paid offerings were like selling components pre-assembled code. And all of the chat, all of the LLMs can just one shot a component if you need a pop up or a modal or a button. You don't need to pay.

The methodology was saying it would be great if like a big lab just said like, hey, these are a talented team. Oh, that's a good idea. You know, join, like an anthropic. Yeah. I mean, I don't know much about the founder. But it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different mode of operation. I have to imagine that these folks are talented. And I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front end transformation of a massive surface area, it would be fantastic.

Yeah, or going to a place like lovable or Figma. That would be great, too. But even just going inside of like, you know, a Salesforce or some sort of like, you know, some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it. But you have this new team that comes in and they have. Yeah, but I'm sure they want to keep building. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so maybe inside.

But yeah, the saying lays off 75% of their team is dramatic. They did lay out. Oh, just three people. Okay, okay. Out of a four-person team that were not the owners of the business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sort of law of small numbers sounds more dramatic than maybe it is. Yeah, but still, I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here.

It was, the founder was upset. Apparently people were just like commenting. Yeah, people really mean to him. Mean to him being like, being like, hey, I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying. Yeah. And they're like, you're going against, you know, the philosophy of open source. He's like, John Ludig wrote this in his piece on open source AI.

The open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these incredible technologies that people can build on. But people also like freebies. And they get very mad when you take them away. And they get mad when they don't get them. Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch. And everyone loves Plaid.

Because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI. Dylan. Wait, wait, really quickly. Ryan in the chat recommended that we have Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have

Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is? I do not. Well, guess what? He inspired the guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sicario. Wait, he works for X. No. He's on X. No, no, he joined the platform.

But he does. I read that as he recently. But he's an incredible military hero. He has a fantastic. stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Very, very interesting fellow. And he's very viral because he has these iconic images of him on Delta Force missions, but he's wearing what looks like an IT guy outfit. So it's like a starched white button down with a pocket protector. And he has these big glasses. And he's walking out of the Black Hawk. Yeah, exactly. So he's

not wearing the normal like military camo with the bulletproof vest. He's just there to clean up and stuff. It's crazy. So he's a, yeah, he's a, he's a personal hero of mine. All time or a farmer. All time or a farmer. That is for sure true. We'd love to have him on the show. He's, he's done other shows. So it would be very interesting to hear from him. This company, Flip, said, Flip is hiring. We're hiring posters, engineers, product, growth, ops, designers, interns, and roles that do not yet have names. And then 24 hours later, they, they quoted their own posts. They've just deleted half the applications at random.

We do not want unlucky people working for Flip. Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait, it says it's the lucky company? So I'm assuming it has to do with gambling. Of course. I actually... Yeah, so I think the product, what they're trying to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free. Oh, it's that.

It's that meme. I've seen people joke about that. And then I saw there's this... A poster that does these. They're bringing gambling into credit cards. Yes, yes. I saw a poster who... We're bringing gambling into debt.

There's someone who like vibe codes different UX mockups for funny concepts. There's that famous one by Aden of like the Google Maps with a fog of war. So as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's a whole bunch of these. And one of them is like the double or nothing on your checkout, which is, a crazy idea. I don't know. On the topic of luck, at one point, very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct-to-consumer product called five-hour luck. And the whole concept would be like it would be a five-hour energy shot, but the promise, the pitch was that it would make

you lucky. It would increase your luck. Just because people, you know, energy is a stat. Why not increase luck? And I was going to formulate it, have some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck. It was not thinking about the gambling application. Almond. Yeah, I mean, that product would crush in Vegas. Yeah. Imagine just taking it and being like, okay, I have the stat boost. I'm lucky. Maybe you could put some snake oil in it. Yes, yes. Well, Brian Johnson, he sells a product. It's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil. Yeah, yeah. It's sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and scale in mind. With best in class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So moving on to Citroup.

Prini. Asking someone, asking someone long memory. Who's long memory? Oh, who's long memory? If they got any new ideas for 2026. He says already rich. Yes, memory has been on a tear. Yeah, Bubble Boy over on X had some pretty great calls late last year.

I'm going to try to pull one up. Well, you do. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike, Secure. AI and stops reaches. We can also pull up, I want to watch this intro

from this week in startups. Can we move on to this? Pull it up. Pull up the video of Jason Calacanis, finally answering the question we all had, what is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on this week in startup. Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase and I clicked instantly. This is on this week in startups.

His co-host asks him. And the best part about the show is that I was expecting it to be like, Like, they tease it in an intro, and then they make you listen to, and then they cut just short of him saying, oh, the one thing I want to buy is, and then boom, the start of the show, and then 20 minutes later he gives you. No, watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you, even Jason Colleenus, will not break out the checkbook for.

It's definitely private aviation. Let's go. I've been trying to hold off. I'm doing this for a long time. He deserves it. He deserves it. Great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere,

or $100,000 on a round trip. That seemed absurd to spend that. The other one, I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car. Yes. Do it. He loves corvettes. He's a Corvette guy.

Get a ZR1. Which is like a big open, fancy barn. That's kind of like a man cave. Texas style. Do I buy this ZRX-1 for 200? CR1 X. $50,000 or do I buy. Do it.

Do it, Jay Cal. $50,000 Corvette in the collection. A lot of these things become cognitive load. This weekend startups is brought to you. Shout out to their sponsors for making it possible.

I love that. I love that he's a Corvette guy. Jay Cald deserves it. He deserves it. He's worked really hard. One of the greatest to ever do it, been in the media business for decades. My welcome to Silicon Valley.

Was doing TBPN like in the early 2000. You know who his first guest was ever? David Sacks. It's the craziest thing. And they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now.

It's very interesting. And my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival. His conference, heard a bunch of tech people talk, met a bunch of YC founders. It kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley.

Went to the, some bar on Silicon Valley in Palo Alto next to Stanford. It was a lot of fun. He was very nice. Also in that era, Sam Altman went on Charlie Rose. Oh, yeah. We got to watch that.

Should we pull this clip up? Oh, do you have it, ready to go? Yeah, it's on Charlierose.com. It is. It's not on YouTube, which is fascinating. I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Altman on Charlie Rose, and I was like, we got to dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference.

at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So do you have it? Let's pull this up. Where is it? I put it in the team chat. OK. Well, while we pull that up, let's look for what's next. Unintended.

I can do another ad read. While we do that, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. How are we doing, Dean? Pulling it up. Nikita Beer finally met. Oh, no.

Charlie Rose, the video actually does not load. Oh, it doesn't load. Oh, no. Well, you know what we can do. We can export it and we can play it tomorrow on the show. Let's make a note to do that. Let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor out from Dell.

Big. And I love this. Michael Dells said, big news. The world's first 52-inch 6K monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you. Jordy, did you ever have one of these elite multi-monitor setups? Were you always like a sort of do business by phone? You've never been an iPad guy.

Have you ever been? I've got an Apple monitor at home. I find it hard. I mean, as like a guy who has been building companies and investing, you're basically an email. Phone, email, Zoom. It's not code over here, this and that, monitoring situations. You're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations is what you're saying. But I do enjoy, I have an Apple monitor at home, I enjoy it, but it's nothing like this.

This is incredible. So it's much bigger than the Apple Pro Display, XDR. Is it curved? It is curved. It has to be curved at that size, because you're basically sitting right, your face is right up against a TV. 52 inches. And it's a very, it's funny in many, many ways because let's, so first, First, let's play the clip from Rob Moore, where he says,

Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast episode. After 42 years, Michael Dell's enthusiasm for new products. Coming out of CES, the thing that we're most excited about is just a bigger screen. It's awesome. It's awesome. So let's play this. That obsession has not dulled.

We were just in your office and you were showing one of your new unreleased products that we can't film or photograph. But he were like, I was like, this is like a kid on Christmas. Like you're still... The super cool product. Yeah, I'm very excited. I told you I'll buy one. I think it was cool, too.

I'm going to buy one as soon as it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not doling. That obsession has not doled. That's great. Heartwarming. And what's really, really funny is that... So there was that sort of like tease. Michael Dell just posts it and says, it's out here.

You can just buy it. And then this poster, Ben Badgerin, The CEO in principal analyst at Creative Strat says, this monitor from Dell is amazing, and I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used, and even at 120 hertz, still capable to game on. So it's like, when did this thing release? Like, it doesn't have the fanfare of like a normal product release cycle where there's like pre-orders, but it's very fun and it's been very hyped.

And I think we should get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly. and it's not very aesthetic, and you have the opportunity to simplify. You can actually display four different full computers, I think in fairly high-res, just tiled on one screen, so you can run four different displays separately. It's $2,900.

Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. We have a major white pill. Oh, we do.

Tuma is reporting for the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile of California is dry on the U.S. drought monitor. The rain is back. Thank you, Augustus. I have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought. So we are incredibly, incredibly back. Yes. We should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TBPN Exposé in Vanity Fair just dropped today. If you go to VanityFair.com, we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece. We got to do a very fun. To be clear, there wasn't a lot of work for us. We got to hang out with Julie. And I mean, it was, we had to go dress up and get. We did have to dress up. It was, it was definitely the most, by

far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of. Two cameras, medium format, medium format film. Well, I just mean more like the team that actually went into it, right? There's so many different people working on, I was extremely professional, as you would expect, out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers. She's not fully buying the rebrand. No, it doesn't buy it. Keeping it alive.

Yeah, they call us the J team. John Cuggan and Jordy Hayes. The J team. And there's a bunch of funny moments in here. Yeah, would you like. Would you like? I like the, she said, they're no saints.

One of them runs a nicotine company, but they have drawn. Not just any nicotine. What kind of nicotine is it? It's addictive nicotine. That I personally am addicted to. But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air.

They try to avoid vulgarity, and they don't promote alcohol or drug use, mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol alcohol use, even though in the early days, the doubling, you know, the DOM. Yeah, we were doing the DOM episodes. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah, made the show worse.

It was funny, but I remember I'd be, I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a, it's a Dom day today. I got to go drink a bunch of champagne at 11 a.m. I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never going to promote Burning Man. I can't believe you said that. I mean, it's factually true. It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist

where everything you say, even the jokes, we're going to get written down and recorded and printed. So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you throw out. You're just riffing. You're just doing bits. And then it gets written down. And it looks way different in that context, but it's good.

It's real. It's the actual beliefs. There was a funny moment. And so we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot. And she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off in ex post. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. And Julia says, as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so.

When I checked the next morning, there were over 70,000. And you were saying imagine if it flopped. Imagine if it flopped. would be in here, it would be like, he said, he predicted it was 10,000 and only got 200. Yeah, but wow. Lucky day. Lucky day. Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show.

It sort of took us all over the place. I think, I think at the end of the show, it sort of stood up and said, you know, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know, but we're going to figure it out and we're not going anywhere over the next decades.

It was funny. We were blasting cold plays fix you in the studio that morning, which is a fantastic song. It's a great song. Also, at that lunch, she didn't put this in, but you ordered some food and you put so much salt on it. You just kept shaking the salt chaker, and I was like, this is going to go in the piece. Oh, yeah. I've never noticed that you put salt. I love salt.

I have this amazing story. My grandpa was making my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time. So it was just us hanging out with grandpa. And he's like, I'm going to make the kids hot chocolate. but he makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us, he's drinking it, he gives us a couple cups, and we're like, oh, grandpa, this is really, this is really rough. Are you sure you made it right?

And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine. Oh, I know what happened. And it turns out he's all the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salts. But his taste buds were so cooked that to him, it just, he was just drinking like salt, pure salt, hot chocolate. Sugar you notice immediately. So anyways, I am like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt.

It's a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with us, and they asked us bullish or bearish on a number of things. And one of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, oh, we love blue skies. Like it's a nice day. No clouds. Most of the days are blue skies in California.

And they had to clarify like, no, like blue sky, like the act. And we're like, oh, yeah, we don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on X. But it really does give you a little bit of flavor of how we think about the business and whatnot. So it was a wonderful. Yeah, also the outfits, of course, unfortunately were not ours. They dressed us. They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff.

But you got to get that suit. I do. That suit is. You've got to get yours too. Unbelievable. The 1980s theme was very fun, very throwback. And it feels like a really. return to the early brand very much what we were doing. It feels like it captured. It might be the

last story that gets told about that era before we go into whatever we're doing next. Anyway, we have Delian Asperuha from Founders Fund and Varda in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultradem. Delian, how are you doing? Hello, brothers. Welcome back. Good to see you. First appearance. You did 18 last year. We're hoping to 10x this year. We've got to keep on a venture trajectory, so 180 hits this year. Welcome to the show. I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Any New Year's resolutions? Do you like New Year's resolutions? Do you have any meta-commentary about New Year's resolutions? My goal is to just wear only quarter zips for the entire year. Oh. Okay. And just lean into my new stylists, you know, sort of recommendations on, you know, just looking like a

Weisen venture capitalist that is ready to go ring a bunch of NASDAQ bells this year. There we go. Or New York Times Exchange. Yeah. Yeah, that TB Green is looking fantastic. It looks fantastic. Good props to your stylist. Okay.

First question, we were reading in the Wall Street Journal today that you're cooked, that venture capital is cooked. Venture Capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. Are you cooked? Is it over? Are you going to be leaving the industry after? disaster has struck, according to the journal. What's your reaction? You're getting this like, you know, sort of case-shaped, you know, nature to venture, you know, sort of right now, which has been happening for, you know, sort of a couple years,

but it's happening both on these C's doing ketamine. Yeah, exactly, exactly. We were just c-holing and we're having to, like, you know, really focusing on one company. It's just like, I think. We just told Vanity Fair, we don't promote drugs. Oh, we don't promote drugs. Sorry. We take ketamine and we go to horses. That's for all the horses that we have. that we own. But this bifurcation has been happening. Do you have the riding jacket on?

Oh, that's a good one. There we go. This is a good merch. Rare founders fund merch. Anyways, we only, you know, use that stuff for our horses. Yes, yes, yes. But yes. So where did the K-shaped split come from?

Is this interest rate-driven or just LPs are realizing that it's better to pile into the big winners? Give me more on the dynamics of the K-shape. you have a big fund raised in 2025, but it could have been way bigger, oversubscribed. Part of the issue is P.T.'s hog and all the whole fund. But there's instances where there's, like, way more demand for a specific fund. Sure. And there is actual allocations available.

And then other cases more on the emerging manager side where they just can't even get going. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. What are you seeing, Delian? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's a couple different, like, forces at play here. A part of it is like if you actually even just study the like old days of like you know, sort of P.E for example, when you go from like the, you know, barbarians at the gate days to today, P.E kind of went through like a similar dynamic and super cycle where you had like,

you know, cottage industry to start, then got super, you know, so scaled and there were a ton of different players. And then steadily there was, you know, a bunch of aggregation basically over time that, you know, led to, you know, some, you know, sort of mega, mega funds like the KKRs, et cetera of the world. I think you're basically seeing, you know, basically venture go through do the same thing. And I think you started to see basically like that K-shape really accelerate in 2021 and then has only basically continued since then. And I think you're seeing it first on the company side of things, right? I think we've talked about this before. But like, you know, if you look it out on like a deal count basis, we're basically just on a strict linear decline since the peak of

2021 in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe than I think basically like north of five million dollars. It's like just strictly going, you know, sort of down in terms of number of companies basically, you know, sort of per per year that are looking like that. So company formation is down, deal count is down. And so by default, you basically have obviously, you know, sort of fewer logos that you can chase. And so you're getting more aggregation into a much smaller set of logos on the company, you know, basically side of things. At the same time, you're seeing, you know, companies stay private from much longer. And so like the liquidity in the public markets is getting vacuumed up by an even smaller set of companies because, like,

there's just a small set that are the mega ones that are raising these like, you know, sort of huge, huge rounds, right? I think it was something like if you basically added up SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI, basically, I think if you added up, basically, those four companies, it was something on the order of, like, 60% of, like, the total, like, you know, dollars deployed by VCs in that year were scooped up, basically, by those, like, you know, sort of four or five companies. And so I think that's, like, the dynamic that's then flowing through on, like, the VC, you know, basically side of things where if you're one of those companies and you need to

now raise, like, you know, $10 billion. Are you really trying to go out and do that with, like, a bunch of $10 million checks? know, like, you prefer to, like, you know, find capital providers that can actually give you, you know, billion dollar checks at a time. So you just, like, have fewer, you know, sort of mouths around the table you need to manage. Some of this regulatory, right? Like, I think you can't have more than, like, I think it's like, like, 6,500, like, you know, institutions on your cap table before you're public. And so you literally, like, have to make sure that these, you know, sort of things, you know, aggregate. And then there's a part of it that is just, yeah, just the, like,

power law of venture and tech only continues to be, like, more and more true. Like, you know, you're dominated by the big. It's like, you know, there's this, like, I'm, I'm probably going to butcher it a little bit. Like, you know, Peters had this, you know, sort of like, you know, thing that he said, for privately, I'm pretty sure publicly too, so I don't think he'll mind me as you're saying it. But he like, his like biggest error, you know, that he says of like his 20, you know, sort of tens was, you know, his impression was just like, you know, there's not going to be that many, like, you know, 100 billion, let alone like trillion dollar companies. But it turns out basically like each individual 10x is actually like easier than the last

one. Basically like, once you're, you sort of, you know, once you're a hundred billion our company, it's actually much easier to go to a trillion than it was to go from like 10 to 100. It's actually much easier to go to 10 to 100 than it is from 1 to 10 billion than it is to go from 1 billion than it is to go from $100 million to 1 billion. It's that right. So, yeah, that's, you know, in some ways that like momentum, but getting momentum is just like making sense that these like, you know, companies get bigger faster. They're scooping up capital faster. And some of the venture firms are getting bigger faster. I think the thing where the stuff starts to break is like I don't think that the current default fee structure is going to be like where the industry is at.

sort of, you know, 10 years from today. I won't like name names, but like there's definitely a decent number of, uh, these multi-stage mega funds that, um, you know, are doing, you know, some of their super late-stage investing through both like feeless and carryless, you know, basically SPVs. And so at some point, if you're doing like a feeless and carryless SPVs, where you're investing into a late stage startup, you basically just work as I are at the startup, right? Like, you know, you're like you're not making. Yeah. Well, love of the game. Walk me through. I mean, SPVs are just notoriously, like, they're incredible when they hit because it's deal by deal. And if you have one true banger, it's your, the GPs that are a part of that are retired.

So, like, in theory, they're amazing in practice, like, actually trying to go and convince a lot of people. And you're basically staking your reputation on that deal because you don't have the aggregate deals that typically go in a fund. You're saying, like, if, you know, you kind of have to say, like, this is going to work and do my other SPVs. so at least like you're you're diversified to some degree. But it's a ton of work. There's a ton of pressure. You have to promise the company that you're going to or promise or imply that you can achieve some of investment amount.

And then you have to go do all this heavy lifting. So why is a, why is a multi-stage fund incentivized to do that? Is it just to gain favor with the company? Like, what's the incentive? Yeah. I mean, like, you know, I think they're probably like hidden secret to Silicon Valley is like that there's just a much higher percentage of capital that is deployed via like SPVs and co-invested vehicles than is probably like publicly acknowledged or discussed. Like there are very top tier,

tier one, you know, sort of companies, including some of the ones that I listed in those like top five that have had rounds come together based off of a significant chunk of the round, basically being done by an SPV. Why do you do it as a company? Well, at the end of the day, if you're like the CEO of a company, you're not saying, I'm not saying why I do it as a company. I'm saying why do a feeless, carryless SPV as a, you know, sort of venture investor. Just pure love of the game. I just love deploying capital. I don't need to make money from it. It's volunteer work. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, a lot of funds, the way that they end up, like, you know, sort of growing in a UM is, you know, they start off with an initial, like, fixed fund structure. And then, like, you know, for their best performing companies, do you con-invest vehicles, you know, or like opportunity funds to build that up.

and then eventually become, you know, sort of, you know, multi-stage and can actually, like, handle basically a growth fund once they've shown that some of those growth SPBs work. So in some ways, I guess in some ways part of it is maybe they promise LPs, like if you back my fund in a big way, I will give you direct access. Yeah, or it's value ad. Like, if you have a stake in a company and you just want that company to succeed, you're like, look, it's value at.

I'm just going to go work, get them more money on their balance sheet. Yeah, I'm not making more money off of that piece of the investment by, but my original investment. is getting marked up and the company's more likely to succeed. Makes sense. Yeah, I'll pretend like this is, you know, hypothetical even if it's not hypothetical, but like imagine your company like opening eye. You need to go raise like, you know, sort of billions of dollars, right?

You as the CEO have a lot of things on your plate, right? You need to like manage the government. You have customers. You have your internal team, et cetera. Like, can you really afford to like literally fully, fully fully only be focused on fundraising? Like, no, it's like really hard to do that basically as the CEO when you're operating the company. Versus if somebody comes to you and is like, hey,

let me do like a like, you know, basically like feeless, carryless, you know, basically SPV that, you know, lets me go out and raise. It's effectively like in some ways like outsourished, you know, I are. It's somebody that's working, you know, on this basically entirely full time. And there's a win-win on both sides. As the CEO, you don't need to like, you know, do all the, you know, sort of fundraising with the long tail of like sovereign wealth funds, this, that and the other. They can go do the first sets of like, you know, sort of meetings, then bring you in basically for the final close. For like the venture investor, it basically ends up being a way where like you now have a really great reputation, you know, basically with this company, because you're

basically like, you know, helping them, you know, sort of pull together like a mega fundraise. For your sets of, like, you know, LPs and for future fixed fund vehicles that you're doing, you now get this reputation of like, hey, I'm close to this like, you know, sort of super hot, you know, sort of company. Yeah, the optics. Yeah, the optics, too, a non-equity partner in the X chat says a lot of GPs want to lead around but don't have the AUM. So just getting the optics of being like, I'm a size Chad, you know, leading this massive

round. It's like, and maybe they wouldn't have been able to put it together with a, with a more aggressive fee structure. It's just interesting because on the other side, you see some of these really, really, some of the bad actors in the SBV space are like, you know, layered SPV, 10% up front. Oh, yeah, super high fees.

Yeah. Not mere, by the way, not beer. There you go. All right, fine. Were you surprised about the Manus acquisition? Did that trigger you? Or are you kind of licking your wounds? Hey, they're American.

It's so good that a company like Manus got acquired by a former Founders Fund portfolio company. Let's give it up for Founders Fund for making it happen. Facebook, you know, seated by Founders Fund. And now going around and acquiring great companies like Manus, right? You know, it's funny. I had probably like 30 people text me being like, when are you going to tweet about it? What are you going to say about it?

I just like sitting there and I was just like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to say. It's just like I'm like, you know, I'm like a disappointed father. You know what I mean? We're just like, you know, I just can't believe if this is like, you know, what the world has come to. How has this happened? Well, I, you know, my favorite meme about it was like, you know, there was somebody that like had like a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and, you know, Alex Wang and Zacharberg going like, hey, can you go buy madness for me? And then Alex is like, sir, yes, sir. And Zuckerberg goes, okay, cool, thank you. Did you get me like, you know, the like premium or like the premium one? And I was like, no, I bought mannets for me. What do you think about the mega, I don't even know, megacorns going out of a trillion?

Is that going to result in more recycling of LP dollars? Is it possible that SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, a couple of other names get out, and LPs feel like I'm going to go back and reallocate an adventure. And this time around I'm going to try, you know, smaller managers again. Or do you think it'll have a different dynamic? How does that play out in a post? successful IPO year. You know, I sort of one line, I forget if we joked about this in

person when we were in L.A. or if I've done this on TVPN Live before, but it's like, it would be incredible of like the thing that props up the 2026, you know, equity market is the spite IPO. Or it's just like, you know, Elon's just like, oh, like, um, Sam needs liquidity. Like, you know, what if I just get no liquidity? He needs like a couple hundred billion. He needs a lot. Yeah, yeah, he needs like a lot of liquidity. Like, what if I just go IPO and I scoop up all the liquidity in the market and make sure that I do it like faster than he does. But that's the thing that like props of the public markets because all of a sudden like the SMP 500 has like a trillion and a half added to it by like a single entity. Yeah. So yeah, I mean like these, you know, yeah, there's

you know kind of my joke at the beginning of the show, but it's like, you know, I do think that this, you know, upcoming year is poised to be at least right now. And it feels like there's like the perfect market conditions for it where it's like relatively stable economy, inflation's, you know, sort of relatively under control, you know, it doesn't seem like China's going to be invading Taiwan over the course the next year. Like, yes, things are like, you know, sort of geopolitically heated, but like it doesn't seem like, you know, I mean, you know, like we just capture the president of Venezuela. And, you know, nobody seems to, you know, sort of blink and, you know, if anything, the markets are up on the news. And so it feels like you have this, you know, sort of stable and

growing economy that is poised and now basically absorb, you know, probably the largest, you know, sets of entry points into like the, you know, public market and IPO market than it's, like, ever seen before. And then that obviously, you know, sort of feeding into like, you know, sort of liquidity into like the entire Silicon Valley, you know, sort of ecosystem. What is that going to do? I think it's only going to amplify some of these trends where it's like, I think that, you know, it's going to be now more typical for companies. You know, right now it feels odd that there's a handful of companies that stay private past $100 billion. I think now it's going to be the default that, you know, companies stay private, basically passed $100 billion.

And like the size of these funds is going to like, you know, increase significantly. Yeah. Because, yeah, your ability to deploy a $10 billion fund much more viable when like, you know, your average entry point is at like 200 billion post. Yeah. And you're, you know, expected to still be able to make like a three to five X basically on, you know, top that because there's more, you know, sort of regular, you know, sort of paths like that. Yeah. Do you think there's any risk or potential for regulation as people realize that the returns, you know, from the private, you know, as these companies are staying private longer, if you're like excited about anthropic and you can't invest until it's worth, you know, who knows what it goes out at. Like at some point, I could imagine someone on the left saying, like, we need to ban companies from staying private this long because you're just letting the,

the wealthy kind of like suck up all the returns. And I even saw Vlad from from Robin Hood posting earlier saying like we can't, you know, basically coming out in defense of retail and saying like we can't, you know, these companies can't just stay private forever. And obviously he has very, very incentive all the incentives to like get these companies out so people can start, you know, doing whatever they want to do. But, but I could see something like that happening, especially given that, It will be very interesting as like a chapter. I know someone who runs like a pure play AI fund, but they're not in XAI, Open AI, or Anthropic.

And so they're in some great names. They got the trend right early, but they didn't like brand themselves. And even some funds that don't have like major positions in one of them, at least they've aligned with one of them, built a position, played the game, and like participated in that. And I think once they all go out,

everyone will see sort of the S-1s and sort of know a little bit more about, you know, the really elite firms landed in the AI boom. I don't know. Part of the SpaceX S-1 potentially going out before some of these other names, then also having, you know, if there's a world where X-A-I gets rolled in,

and then it's like you have a lab and a space company and a data center company that, you know, historically has been profitable, obviously not on the X-A-I side, but it's going to, you know, maybe get people to even be more aggressive and tearing apart some of these other S-1s. We should do,

We should do Jared Isaacman and the space update. But first, I want your advice for Patrick Collison. He's interested in Miami. What does it take for Patrick to have a great experience in Miami? There is something a little surreal about, like, there's sets of people right now tweeting about Miami where like the people probably like most strongly critiquing it in 2021. And so there's something's real about being like, huh?

Like maybe I was like, you know, like right idea. slightly wrong time, just needed to wait for like California, not just to get hit with COVID, but become like, you know, communistic basically and start seizing property. And that's going to be a lot of being the thing that convinces people. On the Miami thing, what do you think about this idea of not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, but moving Sand Hill Road to Miami? Like all the big GPs will be domiciled there. And yes, if you're raising a big round, you'll probably go to Miami, go to someone's house, meet them in person. But a lot of the investors who are not subject to that tax will be operating out of San Francisco, a lot of the labs, a lot of the individual contributors,

the academic institutions, you're not trying to move the entire network, but you're still embracing Miami as an important tech hub. Yeah, I think if there's like something to be proud of in the time period where I feel like I contributed to Miami the most, you know, called 21 through 24. Yeah. I do think that it, you know, established itself as like a fundraising destination, absolutely. between like everybody from like, you know, Dan Sondheim at D1, Ken Griffin from Citadel, you know, Peter spending a decent chunk of the time there, et cetera.

Like, you know, has now very much so become a destination where, yeah, if you're raising a later stage round or you're even like, you know, not Peter level GP, but like, you know, up and coming. I mean, also, also you have Keith, Catherine, uh, Sacks. Like there were, there were, it wasn't just FF that, like, there was a nice network emerging where you could go and take meetings with five different funds pretty quickly. you know, obviously that evolved.

Yeah, so I think it's just like it built a base that is now much easier to build on top of where like now that you have this like sort of second way that's happening because it's like California sort of regulation. I think it's like clearly, you know, sort of cementing itself in it. And I think it's probably what Miami is best suited for anyways. Right. Like, you know, Francis de Sars are always saying like, like, look, ultimately what we're best at is like the capital of capital. And I think that is like, you know, you know.

That's one of our taglines. That's one of our tagline. Oh, yeah. Right. Right. But he can use it. It's fine. Give us the update on Jared Isaacman, take us through how you process the news and what you're excited for in 2026.

Yeah, I mean, he's obviously, you know, early in, I think it's been like, you know, sort of two weeks since, you know, sort of confirmation. There hasn't been any, like, super broad policy announcement yet, yet. But the place where he started to drop some news is actually just been, like, via his Twitter profile, which has been a fun place to, you know, sort of follow along. Yeah. Or X profile. Yeah. Probably my favorite one is there's a program called Dragon. fly that NASA has been working on for a while, which is basically this, so the first time that we ever flew a helicopter on a, you know, non-Earth planet was on Mars with ingenuity, I believe it was called, which is a helicopter that we got on Mars.

Sort of related to that, it's, you know, a different program, but it's a program called Dragonfly, where it's roughly like a small car-sized vehicle that is meant to fly on Titan. Titan is one of the, oh, God, and I should not mess it up, but it's one of the, what's it called moons of satire. Saturn, either Saturn or Jupiter. You know, I'm a big enough space ski that I should know. But what's cool about it is Titan both has four times the density of atmosphere as Earth does, but also basically seven times less gravity. And so with the combination of two, you basically make it like 30 times easier to fly. And so you and I could literally just like be on the surface of Titan and literally basically just like wear some wings.

And like if you just ran like relatively quickly, like you don't have to even be Usain Bolt, like even at our level of fitness, basically just go and flap our wings. and we would basically start flying. And with like a little bit of like exoskeleton or anything like that, you could 100% like flies much as you want. And so Dragonflies is like small car-sized like flying car, basically with like a nuclear battery on board. The program had been like, you know, definitely a little bit behind schedule,

behind budget, et cetera. But like, you know, Jared basically came out very publicly on Twitter being like, this is one of my favorite programs. This is the type of like bleeding edge science that like NASA should be doing. And so I do love that he's kind of leaning into like, you know, I don't know, my dream job would absolutely like the one thing that would make me like upend my entire life and quit everything would be like if I was offered NASA administrator, I think I would do that immediately. And if that was, you know, if I was in the job right now,

like, yeah, I think the thing that we should be doing is like, NASA should be doing just like the crazy bleeding edge, like stuff that just like no private company is going to do. Like a fucking like flying car on Titan is just like objectively like insane. But like there's a world where they're going to be able to basically like live stream, you know, or like stream basically like video of this like car going around Titan and like, you know, flying through dunes and stuff like that. It's like so, so, you know, sort of cool. And then on the flip side, you know, you know, they've like figured out how to just like, you know, really focus on the commercial private market for like the things that are much more near term and what the commercial industry is capable of.

So I don't know if you guys saw, but I tweet this that, you know, basically this year, we're going to have four separate totally net new commercial lunar landers basically land on the moon this year. It's intuitive machines has one. Astrobotic has one. Blue Origin has one. SpaceX? Does SpaceX? No, it's not SpaceX. They don't actually have a plan for this year.

Firefly, yeah, Firefly. And, you know, for it's worth, the, like, Blue Origin, you know, Mark I lander is, like, the size of, like, it's like a two-story house. It's like, it's going to be the biggest man-made object that we, like, ever landed on the moon. And I will say, like, you know, until a quarter ago, I was probably a little more skeptical that, like, you know, Blue Origin was actually going to, like, land this thing. Now it's like, you know, you see the new Glenn is actually, like, launching, landing. It's like, man, they maybe have, like, really turned a corner on, like, you know, their engineering is. systems it's nine. But the cool thing is like even if Bloorgen eps it up, there's also like three other companies that are aggressively pursuing it are getting like paid, basically

commercial revenues to go do this. And to me it's just like this like breakout year that I still think is like, I don't know, underpaid attention to and under discussed. Like, you know, the analogy that I tried to provide is like this kind of feels like 1968 where it's just like you have like the, you know, basically a year before where it's like, I don't know if you know, but in February, we're going to be sending humans basically back to the moon for the first time, not on the surface, but to, like, orbit the moon. So, like, that's going to the moon. Four different landers basically on the moon. It's, like, all in preparation for it. If that all goes well, there's, like, a really, you know, decent likelihood that, like, next year we

both have, like, boots on the moon and, like, 10 landers landing per year on the moon and dropping off robots and supplies and shit like that, which is just, like, I don't know, 15-year-old telling would just be, like, so, yeah, so excited. We got to sponsor the biggest moon-landing conspiracy theorist for a trip. They got to go up there. We got to just put them on the moon, settle it once and for all. Jordy's getting the tinfoil hat on. He thinks that it's not going to happen. What kind of evidence would you need to see from these missions to kind of finally determine that it's real? I'm kidding. I put on the tinfoil hat for another thing.

Trump's been going pretty hard on fentanyl, trying to stop it from coming into the country. At the same time, you've seen an explosion of Chinese peptides. have any concern that this is a, this is all just a big sciop, and we're trying to get a generation of people in the United States to just inject themselves. Maybe they're putting tin foil in the peptides. Yeah, random research chemicals. People don't realize, you were saying you've lost a bunch of weight just by being a Chad, no peptides needed.

I get a little concerned because every, it feels like in the last two weeks, you have everybody's like, I guess I should got to be doing peptides. And it's like, this, like the source and the purity of these things matters so much. you're injecting these things into your blood. This is not something that you just want to mess around and find some random Chinese website and just hope that the test results that they have on the site are actually real. Yeah. Yeah, I will say, you know, I regret taking the, you know, sort of COVID vaccine.

I'm not sure that, like, you know, for my, you know, age and health is the, you know, right risk reward. I am definitely, you know, not yet ready to start injecting my body into a bunch of peptides. Who knows, you know, they've got some nanomarkers on there. where the Chinese release of virus that's like specific to those peptides and they've designed it. I'll provide kind of like an example of this about how paranoid the Chinese are. So the tin foil for like Xi Jinping. Sure. He had this meeting in, uh,

two thousand and twenty three with Biden in San Francisco. If you guys remember when like they came and like cleaned everything up for like the Xi Jinping visit and there's a bunch of like memes around that. Yeah. After a like sit down meeting that they had like I think it was like down in like Monterey or something like that, it like Chinese official after the meeting came by and sprayed basically, um, uh, everything that like Xi Jinping had touched, everything that, like, you know, he put his lips on to, like, you know, sort of drink. And the, like, you know, U.S. official basically asked him like, hey, like, you know, what is the thing that you just used or sprayed?

You can read more question to ask. And it was basically like DNA degrader because they were so worried about the idea of like somebody in America having Xi Jinping's DNA. And then potentially optimizing a virus that is like super specific and optimized for him. And so the Chinese are thinking about like, you know, DNA specific viruses makes you think like, you know, they might be designing. DNA or like peptides, basically, you know, viruses that are targeting, you know, sort of individuals or groups. So that is, yeah. Yeah, that's crazy.

I was thinking, I was thinking he was worried about us cloning Sijan Ping and then he's fighting himself, a younger version of himself. And he's, oh, no, the new U.S. president. I hate him, but he's my own flesh and blood. They go to a negotiation. It's just she, Trump. And the younger season. Hundreds of them.

Hundreds of Sision Pings, just storming the beaches. How did you process, uh, the true social post about the military budget salary cap and uh and the budgets just you know incredible to have him as the you know as a commander in chief somebody that's like a actually willing to like crack the whip on this stuff where it's just like yeah like why should these companies be optimized for like shareholder returns and like executive salaries rather than like making sure that they're delivering for the warfighter and it's crazy to me that it's not like you know he like did the broad industry thing and then like i don't know if he saw but he like specifically then started calling out raytheon

where it's just like they are not like responding to feedback they're not delivering bring enough and like you know went down to the individual logo and so um yeah i think it's like you know sort of yeah uh incredible piece of you know sort of policy and like you know bold commander in chief and like um yeah well i think right now it's an incredible post well yeah yeah it's a policy right but but but that's the nature of these things like we saw this with intel you post some crazy policy it can just be like you know you know subtle acquisition policy where it just like i mean you know secretary headset can go implement you know who he wants to buy from without asking congress permission. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, okay. So even if it's just directional, it doesn't need to be

new law. It doesn't need to be an executive order to have an effect, to have an effect on the stock price. But of course, the defense tech stocks actually moaned because the defense budget is potentially going up by 50%. Do you have a read on this, how big this will be for the industry? Is this a boon for startups in defense tech? Or do you think that, you know, the big primes of the world will just like quickly get their act together and then go hoover up a lot of that new budget? Yeah, I mean, I think there are going to be a set, you know, that are, like, leaning in. Like, you know, one of the examples, I think, I think it's like BAE has, like, you know, done a whole set of, like, startup collaborations where, like, I think they have, like, a collaboration with, like, applied intuition on one of their ground vehicles, like, you know, they have, like, a something with Merlin, I want to say on, like, one of their, like, airplanes that they build and if they go back and look. but I remember reading through one of their like, you know, quarterly earnings calls or like, you know,

maybe there's like a tectonic, like the, you know, defense newsletter articulating like all the various partnerships they had. And it's like, yeah, they clearly are recognizing, like, they have things that they're good at. They're good at like making the ground vehicle and the frame around to that and the wheels, et cetera. They just like have a whole manufacturing line, et cetera. They're not as good at like the avionics, the software, the automation, et cetera. And so like they're leaning in on startups. There's clearly primes like that I think are like really leaning in and varied forward. And then you have ones that like clearly seem to think like, oh, this is just like a total fad.

Like, you know, the like, you know, Trump administration isn't going to really push on this. And so, yeah, I think it's like a huge opportunity for both the primes that are leaning in and appreciating that they need to like actually be much more aggressive, you know, invest more R&D, partner more with startups. I think it's great for like obviously like the neoprimes. And it's just there's a huge opportunity where it's like I think if you add up basically like SpaceX and all everybody, all the neoprimes basically found in last, you know, basically like, you know, 15 years, they still represent basically like less than like one percent

of the total, you know, basically DOW budget. So there's still a ton of upside from some of the big guys basically stumbling. So, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, the Raytheons of the world are definitely not reacting as well. But it's not to say that like every prime is getting caught totally flat-footed. Like some are definitely, you know, reacting to this new environment. Yeah. Well, it's 1 p.m. Jordan, anything else? This was great.

Thank you so much for taking the time. As always. Only 179 more appearances to go. 179 more to go, baby. 99 pears on the wall. Let's go. Have a great rest of your day. See you.

Later, boys. Bye. See you. Up next, we have Arun Gupta, the founder and CEO at Stickerbox, Happy Co. The creativity first AI product went viral over the break, and I'm excited to talk to him. He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Galamarroon. How are you doing?

Good to have you here. Great to be here. Could you please kick us off since this is the first time on the show with an introduction on yourself and the company and just some of the background here? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Arun. I'm the co-founder of Happico, along with my good friend, Bob Whitney. Previously, I was in Y Combinator back in 2009, same batch of strike.

Wow. Oh, gee. Amazing. Yeah, I actually dropped out of Yale in the middle of my junior year. And six months later was luckily enough to get in, talk to Paul Graham a weekly basis. It was amazing. Okay, let's actually just dig in there since we have some time. What were you building in 2009? What was the mood on the ground at YC in 2009?

So we were actually one of the very first hardware startups. A lot of it was, you know, Reddit had just happened. Airbnb match right before us. You know, there are a lot of B2B stuff, a lot of consumer things. We built a personal sleep tracker. So it was a wristband that you wore while you slept. And it used sleep science called actigraphy to track your sleep cycles and wake you up at the right time in the morning. So back. Aquin Fitbit and Drawbone were like doing that whole thing. Dude, you were so early. You're so early. So early. I mean, it must be, have been painful to see aura and whoop and basically have like the right, have the right idea and what, what, what? Yeah, what was the blocker?

Was it supply chain or distribution? Like, I mean, I went through YSE in 2012, or first company, first idea, same thing, where a lot of it, like, wound up getting built by someone else years later. But what was your experience like? were to do the post-mortem? Honestly, for us, it was big data. So back in 2009, everybody who worked on big data worked in biotech or worked on Wall Street.

So you couldn't really hire them away unless you had a ton of money. And all the money is in data analysis, right? So like, or they're analyzing tons and tons of data points and giving you all this information about how you get and live better, eat better, be more healthy. And we just didn't have that. So the business really flies when you have a subscription

that works. But without big data analysis, it's really hard to build a subscription that works. Yeah, that's crazy. I remember 2009 was like the dawn of Hadoop and like distributed systems that you had to orchestrate. It was like doing multi-training LLM AI infrastructure.

Like you couldn't just be like put all the data in one database and like Google handles it or ABS handles it or MongoDB handles it. Like you need to. And like non-relation databases became a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All these, we take them so much for granted now. But back then it was such a pain to orchestrate anything.

You're running like true infrastructure just to do like basic stuff by now, by today's terms. Fascinating. Yeah. So what led you to start this company? When did you start this company? What were you doing in the interim? Yeah. So after my YC company gracefully shut down, I started another company called grail.com.

And grailed was basically a fashion. You started grailed? Yeah. But they're a fashion company. That's so cool. Yeah, this is amazing. Wow. We do a lot of guests.

We don't always have time to do, we don't always have time to do research. But on your printout, grail didn't make it in. I've used grailed for a decade now. That's amazing. Yeah, I started grailed in 2013 in my bedroom in San Francisco. No one. Yeah. Were you a collector of like fashion items?

Yeah. Big time. What were you into back then? What was the first product? You ever wear Chrome hearts to an investor pitch? No, I never wore it to an investor pitch. When I went to see the investors, I was wearing more lower piano. There we go.

That's the vibe. And that's still like, what, five years before Chimov starts introducing it to the Valley via the all-in podcast. That's fantastic. Yeah, exactly. No, back in the day, it was really about, like, workwear and, like, raw denim. And then it became really big through collabs. So there was like an H&M-Balmon collab that was really big.

There was the easies that dropped. There was all the Nike's that dropped. And then Supreme obviously had their massive moment. But no, I was really into like all the OG Raf Simmons stuff. Actually, if you remember, Asap Rocky did a video. I forget what the song was called, like, please don't touch my rap. And in that video, he's wearing, there's like three of my personal collection pieces in that video. That's crazy.

What was, so what was the, what was the, what, what was the, what, what was the, what, what was the, what, What was the customer acquisition funnel at that time? And I'm interested to hear how I've heard a lot of founders talk about, you know, if they got started years ago, they were maybe doing like Minecraft bots. A lot of people were doing like sniping for sneaker drops, sneaker bots. Did that play a role? Was there an automated portion or was it mostly organic? Like walk me through some of the trends that were happening at the time with Grail.

And then I promise we will get to sticker box. That's why I want to talk to you, but this is fascinating. The Secretbox is the most exciting part. But yeah, really, it was all about community. Honestly, from day one, it was a community and all the way through until the end. Because we were, like, very heavily focused on men's versus women. So it was about 70, 30 men's versus women's. And at the time, in 2013, people were like, do men even wear clothes?

And I'm like, yes, they're people. Obviously, they're regular clothes. But men's fashion was, like, not a thing at all. So we were able to sort of, like, ride that wave. and see sort of like the jriding the instagram wave in some ways like that had to be the biggest catalyst yeah yeah i talked it used to talk a lot about how people when you were like hey what do you into people will be like oh i'm into like nirvana or like radio head and then when you're like what you're into there i'm like i'm into noa or like supreme or like jill san something like that right so it's

like your personal aesthetic became more defined by the clothes you wore because we became such a visual society through instagram rather than the music you listen to um which was more maybe of like a my space, you know, OG type thing. And you guys had people building real businesses on the platform. I have my oldest friend teamed up with a college buddy of mine unrelated to me and started selling ungraled, ended up building their own brand called No Maintenance that's now, you know, thriving. But they got their start just reselling.

That's how they made, generate the revenue that they needed to actually do their own inventory runs. So, very, very cool. A lot of fashion designers, too. I think Reese Cooper probably, you know, started out on, love Reese. There's a, there's a viewer in the chat that says,

I bought my first pair of Rick Owens' dunks from Grail. This is so cool. Salute. That's awesome. That's amazing. Yeah, they're like seven grand. Probably. Yeah, hopefully.

So then, yeah, take me through the idea to get back in the arena for the third time. When did you start the company? Was this post-chat GPT moment? I mean, I feel like we've talked about this in the show. There's such an opportunity for interesting businesses here in the age of AI. And I was always saying, everybody wanted to build these AI hardware devices for adults. I'm like, I have a phone.

It is an AI hardware device. They don't market it that way. I mean, Apple kind of does. But I was like, I don't need another device that, like, helps me order DoorDash, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my kid, I don't want my kids have it. I don't want my kids to have an iPad, but creating a product. I always thought, like, if you made a product that just like kids ask questions.

Well, the Rabbit R1. The Rabbit R1 came out and they used teenage engineering. It's this beautiful orange package. Very cool. But a lot of the reviewers who were adults were like... We're just comparing it to their phone. I'm comparing to my iPhone. And I never got around to actually buying one and giving it to my four-year-old,

but I was thinking that, like, it feels like a great kid's toy. And then there is still the narrative of, like, great technology starters toys. So I always thought it was a great market to go after. But what was your inspiration? Yeah, so I can take zero credit for creating the sticker box. It was all my co-founder, Robert Whitney. He is the original inventor along with his son who helped him basically co-developed the device. And basically the story is pretty classic.

You know, son was like, hey, I want a coloring book of tigers eating ice cream. And he was like, oh, I don't have that, but I can just print it off, you know, an image generator. And then you can color it. And then he's like, okay, great, I'm going to print that and then color it. And then he's like, now I want lizards riding skateboards. And then he prints lizards riding skateboards. And then you see this magic moment go off in the kid's head. And they're like, wait, I can say anything.

And like, for us, like, we're a little bit more jaded, I think. You know, we're like, oh, yeah, AI, LLMs, it all works. For a kid, they're like, I just came up with this idea. And not only do I see it, now I can hold it in my hand and color it. Yeah, I was with my three-year-old yesterday, using an image model and he said in his words he was like it's like magic yeah no and and and i think the physical aspect is is just a it's so important uh when i i i use image generators with my son and i have air print and i will print the photo even though i'm running out of ink left and right

uh because the you know full page color photo it just goes out really quickly but it's amazing and it's way different than just being like oh here's a ghibli of your toys to be like, here's the thing that you can put on your wall. You can enjoy. Physical representation is huge. Or color it in. Like, it's a coloring book now. Like, there's so many cool things you can do.

Put it on your notebook. Put it on your water bottle. But I think that's what my co-founder Bob really understood is that this physical representation, these physical stickers are just what's so powerful for children. And it really is such an imagination accelerant. You know, it's like these ideas, they're in my head. But then once they come out of my head onto paper, he was like, wow, this really transforms what they're able to do.

And there's two sides to this. There's like the cynical, be a good parent, no screen time, like print stuff out. That's better from like fighting the iPad cake thing. And that's true. There's a lot of evidence of that. That's a good thing. But you come to it with like a negativity of like I'm avoiding a bad outcome.

So I feel like I'm taking my vegetables. But I just think that like there are, there's like a Lindy like a beautiful thing about texture and physical things. Yeah, we have like an old like it's not a Polaroid camera, but it's like this really bad digital camera that then we'll print out kind of pictures on it. One thing I like about sticker boxes, it's not like these kind of products haven't existed.

It's just like integrating, yeah, putting it all together. Yeah, putting it all together. Yeah, putting it all together. Yeah, and it's a form factor. And that's the G-D, right? My co-founder brought the product to my house. He had already built it.

He had in a cardboard box. Yep. It looked awesome. And I look at it in one second, and I'm like, it's all about how you put this together, right? It's like not like these things didn't exist. It's all about your product sense. and basically like how you intuitively were like,

this is the right kind of product for a kid. Autonomous, self, you know, serve, stickers, lasting physical pieces. Pretty magical stuff. But we like to say that it's an AI product. And like you said, AI for kids and AI hardware for kids is amazing, more magical. But we like to say that the AI itself disappears behind the magic of the device. Because it's really not about the AI. It's about the idea.

Like the idea is the hero, the sticker is that. the hero. It's not the device or the screen that are the hero. It's the kid's imagination that becomes the hero of the story. So talk about the prototype. It sounds like your co-founder did all the whole work. He's the workhorse. You're the show pony, apparently. We'll give him all the credit in the world. But it seems like he was a tinker or hacker was able to whip something up pretty quickly. I imagine like, are Arduino, raspberry pie? Like, are there wires everywhere? And then do you go to a copacker or a manufacturer? Is this something that's like pretty turnkey and there's a solid ecosystem around or was it a long multi-year process to actually get

the first one made with high quality? It was difficult, you know, because like these things are thermal printers, right? So he came with like the idea fully formed and like a lot of it already baked, but to turn from a prototype to a production product that, you know, our Christmas load was insane. You know, just the amount of it's unboxing on Christmas and then hitting the servers, like he was stressed. And like, you know, rightly so. But to get there, it's difficult because when you think about it, this thermal printer, it's meant to print receipts. It's meant to print text on receipts. It's not meant to print images. And if you look at the fidelity of the images that's being happening, it's like, I think something like 300 DPI like on the image, it looks beautiful,

you know? And like that is sort of like a little bit of our secret sauce is, hey, we're able to make these images look really great through a combination of many different things. But that's something that he was able to do really, really well. And something that we had to work with custom, honestly, with the factories to try to get them. to make it happen. And you're sold out. You're sold out. I just bought one while you were here with us. Thanks to Shopify. It makes it really easy to check out.

But it's going to get delivered in February. It's been selling like crazy. You guys are just trying to keep this thing in stock. Yeah. So we had a ton of units available for Christmas shipping. Those went in like two weeks or less. And then we just kept selling. We had the December 28th ship date.

Those sold out in like a few days. this January 6th shift date, sold out in a few days. Then we had a February 17th ship date. And I was like February 17th. It's like not even, it's like a month and a half away. Those sold, those all sold out. Now we're in February 24th. So can't keep this thing in stock.

But we're ramping up manufacturing. We're going to do our best so everybody can get one. So is the 2026 strategy really gets solid on the supply chain so you can scale a ton? And then are you focused on like ruthless ramping? of digital ads or are you more likely to go, let's get Walmart, let's get Target, because I can imagine it's selling really well on both, but you probably don't want to do both as an early stage startup at the same time. You want to be really have your ducks in the row, in a row, right? Yeah. It's sort of a classic trap that startups get into where Target is like, yeah,

we'll buy a million units. We'll buy 200,000 units. And then they sit on the shelves because you don't have the marketing to support them. So you kind of have to work up appropriately. So for us right now really it's like we've got this core image to sticker generation loop down cold sure um where do we go from there you know kids are making characters like some kids have this like stick man and capy barrett character and they go on inventors over and over again so like let's let them name that character and then reuse it let's let them send that character to their friends box let's let them upload their own likeness into the box and say hey let me do me and my mom on a picnic in the moon or like me riding a dinosaur or what have you and like basically

what these kids are doing is what we feel like is we're basically enabling the next generation of storytellers. Right. So the next Spielberg, the next Ryan Cooler, the next Miyazaki, they're growing up with the sticker boxes, they're like imagination accelerant. And it's letting them tell these like little graphic novels or little stories where they're reusing these characters and they're basically developing their own IP. So leaning more into that and creating more features for them. And honestly, I think the other thing that we are just so happy about is how it brings families together because it's for kids obviously but like it's really fun to use you know and like the nice thing is like when it's like I'm like at the thing at the table you know and like the dad is like

in the background and like hovering and then he's like you know let me do one and then like you know the uncle or the mom or the cousin are like all coming together and they're like oh you did that let me try to remix your dragon and make it like a metal dragon let me make your metal dragon breathe fire let me make it breathe fire in a volcano so it really brings everybody together so I think focusing more on these sort of like whole family experiences as well as the single player sort of like experience with the individual kid as well is something that we're uh my co-founder is really focused on um it's something he really believes passionately in is uh using the to bring people together and as a really positive activity for parents and kids uh to do what have

you guys done on the on the on the actual material side i know you know people are uh very afraid of receipts. I don't, I personally don't put out a post about, yeah, don't touch receipts. I saw you guys have avoided like BPA and BPS, but maybe talk about some of the decision making there. Yeah. This was another thing that was really difficult. So BPA and BPS are obviously a hot button topic, but if you produce paper, thermal paper and you test it, often there are trace amounts of BPA and BPS in the paper. And for us, that wasn't good enough. I was like, just because it's below the California Proposition 65 limit doesn't mean that it's, you know, BPA or BPA completely free. Yeah, limits are not safety.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And us, it's like it's a kid's product. It's safety from the ground up, everything, from the images that are generated to everything that happens with advice. So you can touch all these stickers. There is no BPA, no BPS. We tested in batches from the factory. It was really difficult to do.

It actually delayed our launch by a full four or five weeks. have launched four or five weeks earlier if we were willing to accept sort of like this trace element of BPA BPS in the paper but we were like no we like refused to release this that's going to be a good that's going to be a good angle because I imagine you guys are already getting copied by a bunch of different manufacturers knockoffs and it's like yeah you can use the knockoffs but are you know the kids talk about safety with regard to image generation obviously some of these engineering I'm going to jail break it just fair warning put that dragon in a bikini Let's not have that happen.

We want the dragon breathing fire. I want to know about what models you like, how model agnostic you are, because I imagine that if you, even if you just change the model to something better, even if the style looks better, you're like, well, that doesn't look like the dragon I'm used to generating. So there's some sort of like lock in there. At the same time, you might be optimizing for cost. How are you thinking about the software side? Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there.

And for us, it's like, it's really a product for kids, right? And I think chatGBT, when you do image generation, it wants to make everything look sexy. That's kind of a bias, right? You even upload your own photo. It's like it wants to make you look super buff like you're a superhero. Well, that's because I put that in my prompt by default. It has to or else it's a, but yes, it looks very like polished, refined, smooth skin. It looks, it's a glow up filter.

There's something going on there. And those systems. Safety is number one. Yeah. So it's basically a multi-factor system. So we have a patent for the sticker box device itself, but we're actually also working on a patent right now for safety in the sticker box system. And it goes all the way through from the text, all the way through to after the image is generated.

So when you say the text, we analyze the text for safety. We remove padwords. We analyze the prompt for how likely it is to generate something safe or unsafe. Then we go through an enhancement process where the sticker is steered towards being something geared for a child. So it's actually written in some different ways in order to do that. Then we generate the image, and I'm oversimplifying a little bit here. And then even after we generate the image, then there's post-image generation checks. And those post-image generation checks are on, I don't even know how many variables, right? There's all the sorts of bad things like hate speech and nudity

and silence and, you know, all sorts of different things. And we basically have all these confidence intervals and scores that go into it. But it's this huge system, like you think about airplanes, right? And airplanes are like this complicated system of like many, many, many checks overlapping with each other. And that's what creates like the robust safety system. It's a similar system here, right? Where we have many, many, many checks at basically every area of the process because the last thing we want is for a kid to get something that's unsafe or for a parent to question it. Like for us, our big mission is what if AI were built for kids? And I think that the boogeyman in our heads is that social media was not built for kids.

social media was built for adults. GROC was not built for kids. Brock was not built for kids. I mean, AI is not built for kids. It's built for businesses, right? It's built for adults and it's built for businesses. But for us, we're like, what if we can just reimagine AI completely and just say, okay, what if this was built for kids?

And that's why we didn't put a chat bot in a teddy bear. That's why we made a sticker image generator, right? It was a completely different direction. So talk about latency with all those checks. I imagine none of this is happening on the device. you're going to the Wi-Fi, to the cloud, to your servers, hydrating the text with an L-LM, that's not super fast. Then generating an image isn't super fast.

Then sending that back down to the box and printing it, that's not super fast. How fast do you think you can get this? Do you want to do it on device at some point? And then what user experience sort of tricks are you using to make the latency and the lag tolerable? Yeah. So great questions. it's actually really fast, mostly because of the work that my co-founder, Bob, and his great engineering team have done. So I think the time of the sticker.

Yeah, Bob Whitney. Bob the builder? Let's go. Incredible nominative determinism. I mean, there's not a better moniker, honestly. That's a great moment. I think time to sticker, I might be off by a couple of a second here, too, but I think time to sticker is like six to eight seconds. So you push the click, you get the sticker in like six to eight seconds, and that's with all of the content moderation.

Yeah. Everything. Yeah. But one of the nice tricks that you mentioned, right? Oh, yeah. And because you're not doing like chat GPT level HD 4K, it's probably faster to actually generate the image. Exactly. Yeah.

But I think the other thing that you said that's really interesting is once you say it, right, you say it and then it hears it and then it displays your text on the screen. And that's a nice moment. That's an intermediary moment. that makes it feel not as slow, right? It makes it feel a lot faster because you're like, I just said this thing, whoa, there it is on the screen. I'm reading it back.

You're seeing the words. And then you're probably seeing the image. And then there's a pregnant pause, basically, and then the image comes in. But that moment between saying what you have, seeing it on the screen, and that like, like just slight delay to when the image comes out

because it appears on the screen and then prints basically at the same time, it's like a lot of suspense. And it's basically like relief that happens, kind of in your head, right? It's like when a joke lands, you know? It's like you have something happening, happening, happening, and then there's the punchline.

So there's this sort of tension that's built up, like, in the process, and then it lands, and it's just, it feels really good because you're like, oh, my God, I said that, and now it's real. That's very cool. You have the background at Grailed. Can we expect any sticker box fashion partnerships? I want the Botega weave version of the sticker box. I want the Chrome Hearts.

I want that you know, full, full. That would be really good. I want something I can leave on the table. Yeah. Well, I mean, I am interested, like, do you see yourself more expanding vertically or horizontally? Do you think you might be like a multi-product toy company or more of like a camera and printer company that maybe winds up making a device that's delightful for an analog photographer who goes on photography trips and wants to print things quickly?

do you see yourself focusing on a particular demographic over time or expanding one way or the other? Yeah, I think right now we're really focused on AI for kids. So what does that look? And in terms of like multi devices, we obviously have tons of ideas, you know, a really fun space to be in. But I think that there's just so much gold inside of this creation machine. Yeah. Right. So like kids maybe not might not be the best illustrators.

They may not be able to be animators, right? They might be able to use Photoshop or whatever super well. but they can still bring their ideas to life with the AI. They can still print them. So I think focusing more on creativity and investing more in the sticker box is definitely where we're going for the time being. Imagine a 3D printer. Do a $2 billion, do a $2 billion training run for your own model.

Yeah. It's not going to cost that much. I've heard enough, give them $2 billion. Do you think you'll wind up fine-tuning and running a custom model or some open source like fine-tuned on some optimized hardware? Or is the cost just doesn't matter. Definitely this year, my co-founder Bob is very interested in creating our own model. So definitely from the ground up on our own model with our own training data.

Because when you talk about safety, that is the number one holy grail, you know, not to put upon on it. You want the training data to be completely safe. And that way the model can't generate anything. Totally. And that's what really next. And then in terms of like the business model, obviously, it feels like razor and blade model because you're buying the box, but then you're also buying ink and paper, and that's how you make money?

Do you have a subscription as well? So there's no ink. It's all thermal printing. Oh, yeah, sure. Black and white. So there are the paper refills, but we want people to use the device. So we're kind of just pushing as much paper

at people as possible. It's very, very cheap. Or like, you know, we're not trying to make a lot of money off of it right now. We want people to use the device. So you get, let's see, 200 stickers for $6, which is pretty good. and free shipping on all of those stickers for everybody who's watching. So if you buy stickers off our site, it ships for free and you can buy as many as you want. And then, yeah, we're trying to put more features in.

So let's say, like, you have a box and I have a box. I send you my tiger character, my tiger astronaut. And you use my tiger astronaut in your box. And maybe we make a story together. And my tiger astronaut and your wizard go into the castle and then we go underwater or we do these things. So, like, basically creating more features for people to create together, for them to create more with each other and just do more sort of like more ideas and more

more intellectual property and more content basically creation can kind of can in the x chat says what about licensing deals would would you ever do joking about supreme and chrome hearts but but i mean disney and stuff that's yeah email me one year one year okay yeah one year exclusive a r uan at hapico.com or ruined and stickerbox.com. Yeah. I mean, the, what's it called? The Yodo player has a bunch of cards that you can buy that have specific stories, licensed music, licensed short stories that are read aloud. And I could see some sort of partnership there being super lucrative where you could buy this pack and then be able to generate this type of character. That sounds like that's exactly what we're thinking.

Sticker packs of parent companion app. You unlock Teen Ninja Turtles. You unlock Hello Kitty. You unlock whatever you want. And then honestly, let kids create their own stuff, right? If kids create their own dinosaur superhero, let them sell that sticker pack, right? And then their kids can download it as well. That's exciting. But yeah, licensing would be a huge play because it's super fun. I want to see sticker box millionaires.

Eight-year-old's it just happened. I mean, it grailed had this ecosystem too. Give us the fundraising news. I want to hit the gong. Give us the fundraising news. Oh, yeah. So we raised $7 million. Hit that gong.

For the kids, for the kids. I'm so glad. It's always for the kids. We do it for the kids. But yeah, $7 million. Maveron, who is behind Love Every, which is another Montessori kids product. They were a good investor. And then Beth Ferreira, sorry, we had Jerry Lou from Averon and Jason Sober.

And then we got Beth Ferreira from Serena Ventures, Serena Williams for Fund. Also put in a significant amount of money into our round. Do you have kids yet or is Bob carrying all the weight there? Yeah. Bob, for now, Bob is, but give me six months. Six months, let's go. Oh, okay. Breaking news here.

Let's go. Yeah, seriously, my wife, I'm sure my wife is watching. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for. Yeah, so great to meet you. I'm excited. I can't wait to get mine. What a white pill.

Yeah. And good luck with this year. It sounds like it's going to be a massive one. And please come back on the show and there's more news. We'd love to chat. I really appreciate that. We're trying to be positive force for good. You know, there's a lot of negativity around AI.

and I think for good reasons in a lot of cases, but for us, it's really... Use as much water in the data centers as you want. I'm happy with my electricity bill going up because of this one. For this, my electricity bill can go up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day and have a nice 2026. Goodbye.

Our next guest is Julie Bush, the co-founder and CEO, Valanor Enterprises. They recently closed a massive series of. Julie, Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's going on? Hey, guys. It's so great to be here. I feel like you've had a thousand of my friends on, and it's good to finally make the show.

Well, we've literally had some of your friends on. We've had Colin from friends and family on the show. Yes. The friends directly. You've had Colin. Yes. Founders fund is going to be a bunch of church. Delian was on earlier today.

I spent a decade at Palantir, so I've had Eliana. Overnight of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But for those, since it is your first time on the show, please give us an introduction on yourself in Valenor. Yeah. So Julie Bush, co-founder and CEO, Valenor Enterprises, and we're bringing a new business model to defense and national security. You guys know as well as I do that the barriers to entry in this market are so high. And so we've built something really unique. We're an operational holding company to service the long-tail problems. The unsexy things that nobody is able to go after because the barriers event. are so high. So you're really incentivized to go after the moon shots, like the next generation fighter jets and the golden domes, but there's basically 80% of the market that's just untapped.

So walk me through operational holding company. What are you adding to? What are you holding? How old are these companies? How big are they? What can I compare it to in other pieces, other holding companies that I'd be familiar with? Yeah. We're trying to be Berkshire Hathaway for defense tech. Right. And so for us, we're holding product companies. And that's usually software or software-defined hardware. We started a little over a year ago. And today we have five publicly launched product companies. We have 10 in the works. So we're actively working on three more. And we likely will add two more before the end of 2026. So we're moving pretty quickly here and we're tackling everything from power systems for unmanned autonomous systems to

combat casualty care. So think about parts of the market that are really, really critical, but again, like, there hasn't been innovation there in decades. Yeah. So this is an example of a company, like a company that maybe at scale, like could only ever be a 50 million dollar revenue business if they get every key customer. And so it's hard to like raise a lot of money for an opportunity like that and build out some crazy go-to-market team. And so they can partner with you to get that distribution and basically get this platform to make it easier to sell into the government. Am I saying that right? Where am I wrong? Yes, exactly. Like we can both build and buy companies. We hold them. We're the majority owners of them. We run, we centralize all the go-to-market

in all the operations. And that allows us to move really, really quickly. And then we decentralize engineering. And we basically run them like product lines, but they're their own subsidiaries. So we have a ton of flexibility. We're their capital allocator. So, you know, I know you guys also are following defense tech hype.

But we're able to get great outcomes for our DMs and the engineering teams and these subsidiaries because, you know, they're not out there fundraising. Like, they're focused on building a great product. and we're basically doing everything else. And I imagine part of the thesis here is you have like hundreds of new defense tech companies and government contractors created. A lot of them will build great products, but maybe not get to the scale where they can, you know, IPO or anything like that.

And you can come in and actually provide like an outcome and then the opportunity to actually continue to scale that business. And so maybe like a year or two years from now, there'll be even more opportunities on on the buy side. That's right. That's right. I mean, I, when I think about the market, like, I think we could be one of the ways many of these companies are able to be sustainable and endure after the hype goes away. I always like to say, like, we want to be the most sustainable company in this market or platform of companies in this market. And yeah, I think earlier you said, so what about, like, is this like, are we looking at like a $50 million tam here for this product?

I mean, I like to think a lot of what working on, they're like hundreds of millions of dollars stands behind them. They just don't have to be $10 billion, right? Like, they don't need to be Anderall. They don't need to be Palantir right now. Everyone's getting pitched to be like, I'm the Anderral of X. I'm the Palantir Y. And there's really only going to be a handful of those companies. Speaking of Anderol, are you Adam Porter Price's worst nightmare?

Are you guys going up against each other to try and buy companies? Or do you target different market? segments so you don't actually run into each other in back-to-back board meetings when a company is choosing to sell? No, I mean, I actually see him as a great partner for us. Steckman, you know, sends me lists of things they need, right? So they could be buyers of our assets. Just like I think crimes could be.

Like the other large primes, they need more innovation than Anderall does, right? So having APP is like brilliant at M&A. for Andrel, right? And so I actually look to him as someone who is really important to us. So have you guys sold any of the businesses yet, or is that a future? No, I would say we're a little early for that, right? I do think, you know, it could be interesting in the next 18 months to see what happens. And of course, like each one of these is their own individual strategy. And like, we can hold them too. And we want to hold them. We, we want, I think we can make a lot of these companies profitable really quickly because we can drive down

their operating costs. Yeah. How are you processing sort of the defense tech hype waves? You know, Ukraine happens. Everyone wants to talk counter UAS. Taiwan heats up. Everyone wants to talk about surface vehicles and rebuilding the Navy. And those are important projects. But you can get sort of whiplash. Is there, are there, is there, are there, are there real pockets of value when there's a lot of energy and maybe a lot of executive orders and truth social posts about a category? Or do you want to sort of zoom out and be looking for more opportunities that might become big narrative arcs in the next five years or something like that? How do you think about these defense waves? I love this question. I, you know, I've been in this market 20 years.

I was at Palantir 10 years, built out most of the government business there. I think when there is a crisis or there is a, you know, we, the pandemic was a great example of this. Like, it does create a different level of action within the government. I think this is part of why, you know, right now at Department of War, it's, it's great to see them putting like sticks and carrots out there because it's creating action without a crisis. I don't think we want to wait till there's a crisis for, you know, us to be in a bad position. But I do think the hype comes in waves and, you know, know, you can seize it. I think Palantir does a really good job of seizing that. That's something I've really learned there. And for us, you know, we are looking at things that are timely. There are things

we are not going to build or buy right now just because we know where this administration's priorities are for the next three years. But I do think you want to be ahead of the curve. So we have a product called dispatch, for example, which is essentially an autonomous power station for unmanned systems. You know, the drone market is like proliferating and drone dominance is a huge program in Department of War, but you can't extend autonomy if you still have personnel in the way that are powering your systems. And so this is like a docking station, just like you would like charge your iPhone for anything on the blue UAS list. And like that's a little bit early. But I think like we're going to seize on that because it can be a first mover in that space.

How do you think about dual use technologies? When I look at the legacy primes, almost all of them have wound up at least with some. some sort of commercial business, Palantir, obviously famous, Anderl, not yet, but I'm hoping for a consumer drone that I can fly around, maybe with a camera on it. They have general dynamics. They have Gulfstream. Yeah. And it sort of just, sometimes it just happens over time. Sometimes it feels deliberate, and you see it in pitch decks at a seed round where the company says, hey, we're going to do this military thing, but then eventually there's this obvious add-on in commercial or oil and gas

or something else. Do you think the dual use can be a distraction? Do you like thinking about it in the near term? How are you processing the dual use nature of some of these technologies? I love this question. I think it's a distraction, honestly. Like for Palantir, it was critical. And like really, when you think about foundry in those platforms, those are meant to be for like any use case in the world. Like, you know, so the fact that it is dual use, make sense for them. But I think today, you know, traditional venture incentivizes your products to become dual use because that means your TAM is so much greater. And again, this is why I think 80% of the government market is like being left untapped. Because most of the use cases are

single use. And like, honestly, that's really critical to. And I think if you, your products over time can become dual use, even if you are thinking that they have a single use focus initially, And I think if you start your products in government, you have a much greater likelihood of making them dual use for commercial versus vice versa. If you start your product in commercial and you try to move to government, it's incredibly difficult. You know, when you think about compliance, you have to like re-architect your entire platform for it to become Fed Rampi or to meet impact level accreditation status. So I'd much rather see our products if they like they don't have to become dual use. They can be single use. And I think the government needs single-use products.

But many of them are already dual-use. Some of our initial buyers were actually commercial customers. And that's valuable, too, because it establishes commerciality. But it has to be focused. Like, your first customers have to be in government in our ecosystem. And I just think dual-use is way over-hight. Talk about the fundraising strategy to date. Yeah.

So my seed round was myself, Trace Stevens at Founders Fund, Paul Kwan, a general catalyst, and Graham for Standig at Red Soll Partners, all of which I, like, deeply trusted, or I never would have done this. Like, I'm a little bit of a unique founder, mom of two. You don't see a lot of defense tech women founders. But, you know, I train and Paul and Grant were people I deeply trusted when we started this process. and they've been incredibly supportive of this journey. And I think they recognize the need for a new model in this space. And so as we've continued our kind of fundraising strategy, it was important to me at the A that we brought in Colin and kind of friends and family capital.

You know, he's OG, Palantir CFO, seen what it's like to build a generational defense tech company from the inside. Someone I deeply trust. We were executives there together. And I also think they're brilliant capital allocators. and at the end of the day, we fund our companies. We are a capital allocation machine. And so they've been an awesome partner.

Congratulations on. We got a gong. We got a hit for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you. Thank you. I'll be a great rest of your week. Yeah, we'll see you soon.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of news to discuss. Sounds great. Cheers, Julie. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Next up, we have our Lambda Lightning Round. We got Winston Weinstein. CEO co-founder of Harvey.

Look at this thing. Oh, I like the sound effect. Oh. Good job. We have Yotam from Sayara. And then we have Josh Wolfe to cap it off. So let's get it. The CEO and co-founder of Harvey from the Restream Waiting Room.

Into the TV P& Ultradem. Winston, good to see you. How are you doing? What's happening? Good. I like that cloud. Yes. It's crazy.

It's powerful. It's on one of those. It's like Thor coming in. Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, you do have a nice background. It's clean, but not nearly enough. No thunder, no lightning. No horse. We have a guy. We have a, we have a cloud guy. Yeah. This is a huge problem. Yeah. If you guys can hook me up with your cloud guy, that'd be great. We can. It's actually, you know, blimp guy. Yes. It's, it's, it's pulsating right now. Well, thank you so much for taking time. So, so this was really well times because we just got our December legal bill. And I love, I love our, I genuinely,

Our lawyer is a very good friend of mine. I love him. But he handwrites everything. No, not quite. Not quite. He's being as efficient as he can, but, you know, every company has a lot of work. And interestingly, I just feel like legal bills because they are variable and the work is important. But I just feel like it's always a surprise.

The number is always bigger than you expect it to be. And I'm excited to head into a world where that bill can be small. for a lot of companies and get better work. So hopefully I know the work that you're doing is. But yeah, kick us off with the state of the union. Where is Harvey today? Yeah, so I started three and a half years ago. So, I mean, God, I think it's felt like every day it either feels like it was yesterday

or it was like 50 years, something like that probably. I'm just kind of oscillating back and forth. Started selling to kind of like very large law firms. Now we've expanded to selling to selling to law. large corporations as well in mid-market. And what we're really trying to do is kind of have like an operating system that's in between. So it's for all lawyers and it helps them basically provide those services, you know, more cheaply and can do the work faster. I think, to be honest, to your legal bill, and I'm a little laggy. I don't know if that's on me or you.

I think that's just the, you're watching the show. So maybe I don't. You seem like you're in real time. Yeah, you look fine. Perfect. I'll take. I think the reality is probably your legal bill, the stuff that they're charging for, that's going to not be as expensive. But there will be other type of legal work that you're going to need done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so your overall legal bill will probably be the same. But that line items will look different, is my guess, of how this goes. Yeah.

Yeah, more hours spent on the actual high leverage work versus, you know, just generating a document here. What changed last year with Hart? What were the big inflection points for the business last year? Because I just noticed this, having friends that were lawyers. I saw like a huge difference in how they even thought about Harvey at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year. Just like they were kind of like one-shoted by Harvey at some point during the year, which is like that is what you're building an AI company,

you want to build a product that's so magical and powerful that people are like, whoa, okay, I really believe now. And you also want to start building it when it's a little, rough around the edges and then let the models get better and then and then that moment hits and you're ready. There's yeah there's you basically like there's two things that happen. One is the reasoning ability of the models get better and then two is your orchestration into the correct context gets better. Right. So I think of this is honestly like there's three type of employees or like folks that you work with like colleagues. One is you have to give them all of the perfect context in every

single piece of information to do the job and then they can do it. The second is you say, hey man, the same way that we did XYZ last week, could you do it again? And then they do it. And then the third is folks just do it without even any of the context. And so a lot of what we're doing in the product actually is,

how do you make sure that for a specific task, all of the correct context is being pulled and put into the platform? And then how do you run the models over that context to get the right output, right? And it's actually like a very hard problem at scale because if you think of what you're doing, you're kind of building like a legal brain

or like a partner brain. This is what they do. They get a task from, you know, one of you guys, and they break that task down into all these, like, 10 subtasks, and then they, you know, give that to other associates, et cetera. It's a really hard thing to build. Uh, chat GPT launched chat GPT health yesterday. How do you think the consumer prosumer legal advice category will evolve? People are probably going to LLMs, consumer LLMs today. They're definitely going. And just ask, hey, write this thing. Is that an area that, like, you guys don't have any...

In-house counsel product or something? So in-house counsel, we definitely do. So we serve a lot of Fortune 500s. And that's actually, that's growing, I think, last quarter... Let's give it up for them. Thanks, give it up for them, yeah. I think last quarter, it was like 41% or something like that was actually corporates. So that's...

There we go. Yeah, give me one more, though. That's the cloud. If you could you combine the cloud with that, that would be great. Oh, we can combine the cloud and the Saturday. Well, to be honest, I thought you said 41% of the, I thought you were saying 41% of the Fortune 500. But that'll be soon, I'm sure. Here, here, I'll come back on when that happens, hopefully soon.

And we can do like a blimp cloud and that sound. I'll combine with some like Thor lightning strikes. So we are interested in this in like helping consumers out. One thing we have right now is actually if you're a citizen of Singapore, and you're filing a claim below 20,000, you can use Harvey to help you file that claim. And then the magistrate judge can actually use Harvey to review that. It's just the like Spider-Man meme. Well, so what we're actually ending up wanting to do eventually is in other stages,

both parties can decide, they have to both consent to this. But they say, hey, I'm going to submit these facts and Harvey is going to help me draft it. right? Because it's hard of the consumer to like know when your rights have been violated and what to put into the complaint and things like that. But both of us will agree that we're going to submit this into Harvey and then the outcome is going to be binding. And that's like eventually it would be actually incredible because a huge problem in Singapore is, and it's an even bigger problem in the United States, is just access to justice in general, right? Where people actually can't get any of their claims met. One, because the average price of a lawyer is 350,000. $3 an hour in the U.S., which is astronomically too high, right? And then the second reason is the courts are just like absolutely overburdened, right? And so any of those systems that you can do

to help that really moves this along. And so we're doing some of it with kind of work with different governments. And I think eventually we'll look into this, but it's not on our roadmap right now. What are your big predictions for 2026 just in terms of AI progress? Are you building the business that expects another jump in capabilities. It feels like a lot of people were talking about Claude code being uniquely enabled by Opus 4.5. Have you seen a similar step change in any particular model? Are you waiting for that? Or is it sort of just business as usual? No, I mean, we, we, we, you have to build everything assuming that it's going to get better. And what you do is you actually just try to create a culture.

of trying to build really complex things. And we have a lot of, how we do this is we have a lot of design partners. And so we work with like private equity or a law firm or something like that to try to build like a really extreme use case. A lot of the times it fails. And that's actually okay because it fails and then we realize, oh, if the models improve XYZ, then it would actually probably work. And then we bucket that and we wait and then we try it with a new model.

And eventually that stuff starts to work, right? So a lot of it is like how can you go out and try to do the frontier level tasks, get the feedback of what needs to improve to actually complete that, and then you have that set and ready to go as a use case. Yeah. How much do you think the legal system can actually speed up? Anybody that has had any, you know, experience a lawsuit will understand that like, you know, something that really should be a decision that hypothetically if you got the right people in a room and. everybody was like mature, you could just kind of like figure it out. And, and obviously people try to do that with settlements. But then you end up getting like, you know, these dates that get pushed farther and farther and farther out. Hypothetically, if, you know, two different

parties are putting stuff into Harvey, you know, you can, you can basically theoretically kind of like decide something almost instantaneously. Then in theory, you could then appeal it and Harvey, like, basically run it again and then appeal it again. And so it just feels like there's going to be you're kind of like fighting hundreds of years of like precedent in the way that things are done. And so in some ways, like even if we have the technology, maybe lawsuits are still these and any type of like legal process could still end up taking months or years in some cases. Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the actual court system to like facilitate this. Like I guess maybe a better way to think about this is like there's three categories. One is like the process and the system, right? And hopefully you move that.

along by just the technology advancements are so high that the process and system breaks, and then it has to change. The second is, like, all of the context that's relevant. So can you, like, collect all the data that's relevant to actually doing the task? And then the third is actually just, like, the underlying technology, right? Like, you need all three of those. I think there's going to be a lag. I think exactly right. But there are a lot of, you know, we just talked about what we do in Singapore, and there are a lot of kind of forward-looking folks that are looking at this. The other thing I'd say, too, is, like, we see more movement on the transactional side, because at that point, it really is just up to the principles, right? So both sides of the deal

want to do something, you can do it, right? And honestly, like, a lot of the best lawyers on earth, they're deal makers. Like, that's what they're doing, right? They're actually, like, the reviewing of the documents, yeah, that's kind of just like table stakes. It's actually, they give massively really valuable business judgment advice, right? And it's because they've just been in those rooms so many times that they've seen so many different private equity deals done that they can actually be good at the greatest the greatest entrepreneurs in history that maybe only sell their company want you know they sell their company once or they start another company they sell it again but that's nothing compared to the the lawyer that's been through 200 you know transactions yeah

that's in there in the room and that's happening more and more that the lawyers are in the room even more than the bankers are, actually, increasingly. Right. And so I think that all of this goes to say that I do think the profession is going to change. I think that's good for consumers of legal services. I also think that's really good for lawyers. Because the reality is, like, people will go to law school because they see TV shows like suits. And they want to be like the lawyer on that TV show, right?

Or the Lincoln lawyer or whatever. I don't know. I love Matthew McConaughey. And so they want to be a lawyer like it is on TV, right? And I think what's important is if these tools start saturating the market, your career is going to look closer to that. It's going to look closer to like working with clients and to actually going to trial and working on these big deals. So that's why I'm really excited about it. We work with a lot of law schools on kind of figuring out what that career path is going to look like.

Yeah, what's happening like law school applications or is at like a local top, tons of people are deciding to go to law school. some people are concerned by that because people are going to saddle themselves with debt or spend a lot of money. And I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. How have you been processing that? Are some of these law schools, like I imagine they're trying to get access to Harvey and maybe you have relationships with them? So we work with a lot of law schools. And so we announced our like program last year. And at this point, I'd have to give you the stats, but I think we're at like 15 of the top 20 law schools or something like that. So we're definitely moving pretty quickly there. Thank you. I would also, one thing I want to say to this is I think that a lot of folks have said that that's actually like a bad sign for the economy when more people apply to law school. I actually don't think that's why more people apply to law school. I think a lot of people apply to law school because they think that being a lawyer, you can make a change in the world. I genuinely believe that and you can.

And I think actually what happens is when you're in like tumultuous times, a lot of people say, hey, I actually want to change this. especially when you're applying to law school, you're younger, right? You're in a younger generation. And I think that's actually a lot of the reason why these applications increase over time. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. We can talk for so much longer. But I'm sure we'll have you on many times this year.

Yeah, congrats to the whole team on all the progress. And thank you for hopefully reducing our legal bills. We'll talk to you soon. We're shifting around the budget. We're shifting around the budget. We'll see you soon. Our next guest is, Yo, Tom. from Sayara with some fantastic news.

He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVPN Ultradrome. You know, Tom. How are you doing? Good to say. How are you guys? We're fantastic. Since this is your first time on the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself

and the company. Gladly. I'm Yottam Seeger. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Saera based in New York City. Sayera is in the data and AI security business. We make sure that all of the data that goes into these AI systems remains private, remains secure, and we enable enterprises to adopt AI. That's amazing.

How did you start the company? I started the company out of a friendship and a partnership. My co-founder, our CTO, and I go back 16 years at this point. We were standing in the same line to enlist when we were 18. I had the pleasure of walking side by side with him in the military service. And I knew that I always want to. work with him. So the moment he said, let's start a company. I said, okay, I'll go with you. Yeah. What did you guys do first? What do you mean? We did the cybersecurity in the IDF in the

Israeli military. Sure. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so this is your first, this is your first company? This is our first and last. I don't think we're doing it last. There we go. Love that. One shot it. Well, what's the key to getting large enterprises on board as a first time entrepreneur? It seems like that's like, you know, a lot of people vibe code something, get some ground-up adoption. It seems like you've gone to the top of the market. What informed that strategy? What's been the key to success? I think for us, it's been a combination of listening.

Yeah. Using our two ears to really, really, really listen to the customers and understand that they know very well what they need to fix, why things are not working, what hurts, why things failed in the past. combined with the ability to engineer at a super, super high velocity and really solve complex problems in super complex ecosystems. I think that the combination of these two things together

has been our secret to success with the larger enterprise. What scares you the most about how AI is being adopted in the enterprise today? Like when are you talking with a customer and you're like, whoa, whoa, wow. Yeah, that's a good question.

Wow. Where do I start? I think that there's so much pressure being put on the security risk and compliance teams to get out of the way and let the AI be rolled out. I think that the level of security capabilities that's being bundled with the AI from the AI providers themselves is very, very insufficient. And I think that in many, many regards, with the gap, the exposure that is being created is quite, meaningful and we're going to see the results of that in the coming years. What's the key to creating differentiation in the cybersecurity category? It feels like there's a lot of companies that are established. They're not asleep at the wheel.

And yet you've grown very quickly, gotten very big. How are you positioning and creating white space? So the first thing that is really unique about cybersecurity is that in most of what we do in our lives, we get measured on how well we do on average. In cybersecurity, we get measured on our weakest link. Yeah. Doesn't matter if you're an eight on average. If you still have a two or a three, something bad is coming your way.

Yeah. And because it's, you know, we're not defending a static target. We're defending a very dynamic target. The threat vectors are changing. The IT landscape is changing. The regulatory landscape is changing. There's always going to be exposures. There's always going to be soft spots.

I think for us, our focus on data, the ability to understand and differentiate between the 1% of data that really matters to an organization. If that data was leaked, breached, exposed, that will create a bad year for them, not just a bad weekend. And the 99% of data that cluttered, which is so much of the data they have, based on the ability to do that across the enterprise at the enterprise scale, we've really been able to build our holistic data. security and AI security platform that helps the organization achieve so many outcomes. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the latest fundraising news. We've got to hit the gong for you. Is this like a friends, friends and family round? Yeah, I happen to have friends with $400 million. There we go.

Good, good friends to have. Yeah, great vote of confidence to get Blackstone in. It's series F. You're going to run out of letters soon. So hopefully we'll see you at the New York Stock Exchange soon. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. And up next the moment you've been waiting for Josh Wolfe, the co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital. He'll be joining us in just a second. We will go back to the timeline in the meantime while we wait for him to join. Did you know that the founders of Home Depot were 49 and 9? 36, and they both, each of them had three children each when they started the company, and they'd both just been fired from their jobs when they started home. Where were they fired from?

Same company? I'll read from this. Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus, and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 with $2 million raised from 40 friends. They had to put the ultimate friends and family round together, none of whom were wealthy by your standards. the average investment was $50,000. After Bernie, age 49, and Arthur, age 36,

had been fired from their previous jobs and with three children each, no health insurance, that's a nightmare, no savings, heavily mortgaged homes, they were effectively broke. The rest is history. From Nothing, Home Depot has grown into an empire with an enterprise market capitalization of over $250 billion that provides employment to more than 400,000 workers

thousands of whom became millionaires investing in the company's stock, while the founders have given away in excess of $1 billion in charitable donations. Incredible. And still counting. Wow, what a run for the Home Depot founders. What a run for Josh. The moment you've been waiting for, we have Josh Wolf in the Restream waiting room. And here he is in the TVP and Ultram.

Josh, how are you doing? Look at this setup. Look at this background. You look fantastic. How are you doing? Did you have a good break? Are you off to a good new year? It seems like it.

It's a great new year. I'm excited. And what's the news? It seems like you're kicking off 2026 with the bang. We raised a new fund. How much? How much did you raise? We raised a billion five.

Billion five. Oh, we get the gong. Let's go. You know, it's crazy. I remember 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago, we raised our first fund, and it was 100 million, and I struggled to hit it. We got 92.1. I'll tell you, to this day, I remember it literally. Every single person that said yes or no.

Yeah, every single person. Everybody. How many of them are still along for the ride? Do you go back to them? I think we have 12 people who are OG Lux investors that are like part of our family that I love here. They must be at this point. That's fantastic. That's amazing.

Okay. Yeah, there's been, we cover. Narrative violation. The Wall Street Journal today is saying that you're cooked. They're saying U.S. venture capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. How did you get it done? What are the markets? like, is this?

Yeah, what are the big LPs? When you see a headline like this, 35% down and yet you're doing well, what's the secret to success? I think, I think it's right. I think the headline is right. You know, we all spoke, I want to say back at Hill and Valley. And we were talking about the minnows and the megas. And I had made this thing that maybe was like a sort of prediction, but an anticipation

that basically you were going to have this bifurcation where you had to have a long tail of the small funds that were getting and basically disappear. And I know you guys hit on that earlier. But I was with one of my life. large LPs, and I was like, I think you're going to see 30 to 50% extinction rate, sort of involuntary exit. And this L.P. L.S. That's that idea of, like, a lot of people are on their last fund. They just don't know it yet. People have never been through a cycle. They have inadequate reserves. They haven't invested in

succession planning. They're in the wrong sectors. They are in sectors that have too much capital, they don't have enough. And they were basically in a market where everything was going up into the right and they looked really smart. And they're not idiots. But, you know, usually in up markets, people look smart than they are. And down markets, they look dumber than they are. And in this particular case, the prophecy was like 30 to 50% would end up disappearing and going extinct. And this LP laughed at me and he's like, Josh, it's going to be 90%. So he was even more aggressive. And I think that's going to happen. Some will join bigger platforms and get absorbed and you're seeing that. G.C. bought, you know, a group out of Europe and you'll

see other people sort of tuck into some of the other big platforms. Those are the minnows. At the other end, you got the megas. And the mega is, you know, there's probably five or six firms that are basically like eight to a hundred billion AUM today and growing. And I actually think that they will voluntarily exit. So you will actually see IPOs probably from Andresen, G.C., GA, a handful of others that are basically gearing up to be multi-asset platforms and they're amazing investors. They're great people. But it's just changing the game. So you've got small fries that are basically exiting and people that are emerging managers. Few will enter and grow. We were once an emerging manager and entered in group. And then you have large guys that are basically gearing up, I think,

to go public. So it's probably, I don't know, 12 firms, you know, in the middle that are like between $1 and $3 billion. They can do like early 100K checks. And later, 150 to 200 million dollars checks and I think for the next few years that's going to be the place to be more positively how excited are you for this moment to have this amount of capital to deploy I've read your letters as long as I've been in in the industry and it feels like lux as a fund it was really built for this moment everything from you know hardware to bio to AI all these things that you've been writing about forever feel like they're having you know such a moment. It is, and I've got to be honest, as much as the team is out on the edge, scouting

it is really about the founders that we back. So you look at, you know, Brian and Palmer and Trey and Matt at Anderil, like they have just absolutely crushed it. You know, this was at a time when nobody wanted to fund defense seven years ago, being able to be founding investors in Anderl, seeing the success that they're having, the success that I anticipate from here is just incredible. You look at CASER and applied intuition, I got to say amongst 350, 400 companies that we've funded over the past 20 years, it is one of our only cash flow positive businesses and they're just also crushing it. Let's give it up for cash. They will get a gong, you know. Many times, many times. You know, cognition and hugging face and we've got an amazing team. I mean, you know,

Brandon Reeves and Grace Isford and Peter Abert and Shaheen Farshi and Lanjang and Dina Shacker, like Shaqveta, like they're just all out crushing it and I'm very grateful. I feel like we've got the best team on the field. And more importantly, I feel like we've got the best founders. Eric at Modell and the team at Ramp. And I just feel extremely fortunate that we get to partner with these guys. And it's like the gift that keeps on giving. So my biggest thing to my team right now is don't screw it up. Don't, you know, we've got a good thing going. Be humble. You are only as good as your last deal and serve our entrepreneurs and make them successful and they will make us successful. And I feel very grateful. How are you thinking about this year?

What are you focused on and most excited about personally from an investing standpoint? Most important investment that we've made as a firm internally has been our young team that is just like, again, kicking ass now. But in terms of sectors, I'd say generally about a third of what we do is aerospace and defense. So we're doing that globally. You know, we're air, land, sea, space, cyber, and beyond, and now subsea and subterranean, which is wild. That was something that Palmer himself was talking about years ago. And I thought it was crazy. But, of course, we've seen that in everything from the southern border to Gaza and Israel.

It's a real thing. And so we're now in the U.S. We're in the U.K. We're in Israel. We're in Bulgaria. Us in Delian. Oh, yeah. In Dura, right?

Exactly. We're in Japan. Don't they have some cash flow? I thought Induro had some cash flow. I don't know if it's cash flow, but just like remarkable economics. Yeah, yeah. It is a great, a great founder, great business. Yeah.

I'd love to do something in India in defense. And I'm very bullish, as, you know, you may have heard about this IMEC corridor between India, mid-east, and Saudi and UAE and Israel and Jordan, the Mediterranean. Europe. And so I just think that whole thing in the aerospace and defense segment, U.S. and allies is going to be a big deal. You see Trump putting out, you know, a billion, a trillion five on the defense budget, an enormous amount of spend. You had the clip from Palmer earlier today, which was awesome, and the incentive alignment so that the bloated bureaucratic beltway bandits are starting to realize, like, it's not just about hyping your pipeline as a defense company, but actually

delivering real material and weapon systems to the warfighters. So that's pretty critical. So that's one sector. Biotech, you know, has been in the doldrums for the past, I don't know, two years. XBI is up 50% in the past six months, and I think you're going to see an enormous resurgence in cutting-edge biotech, particularly at the intersection between AI. We were founding investors in this company evolutionary scale that we took out of meta, and then CZI, ironically, ended up buying them just a few weeks ago. So I think you're just seeing more and more of that. And then everything in embodied intelligence, you know, the next wave of AI and compute infrastructure is not just going to be two-dimensional AI. It's going to be 3D. So some of that is bio, some of that is robotics,

some of that is automation, industrial. But I think that you're going to see some huge deal, some really big dollar deals around this idea of embodied intelligence, where physical intelligence and Lockheed Groom and the team are just incredible. But you'll probably see two or three other things that are adjacent areas, not specifically robotics, of how do you take some of the great inspirations of our low-power brains and embody that so that we're not having hundreds of thousands of GPUs and in video clusters, but instead doing both edge inference and really interesting, biological inspired ways of having AI into the 3D world, which is going to be wild. So excited about all that.

That's amazing. It's sort of a bad time to start, to become a venture capitalist. We are seeing this K-shaped dynamic, a lot of small funds walking down. Well, not necessarily a bad time to be a, maybe not the best time to start your own fund. But I want some advice for someone who is, who can't be talked down. from it. Maybe the person who's going out and going to be. Join a great fund.

Join a great fund. Is that your advice? Or what if someone says, I want to start a fund? When we started Lux, it was at the tail end of the dot com boom bust. And I was like, let's carve a niche out that nobody else was doing. They're going to be brilliant people. I mean, I've got to be honest, like, you know, whether personally some of the partners or the firm in some small ways, there are brilliant people that I know that are going

to be launching funds. And they have networks and access and kinetic activity. And there is this barbell. You know, you have older folks in the industry who have access and influence, but you have younger people that every night they are out and pulling together incredible engineers and developers and entrepreneurs. And I would never count those people out. Now, they're going to need capital over time and there'll be people that we partner with. But over time, they will go from a small fund to a big mega fund. So I'm actually, I would never discourage anybody from starting a fund.

It is one of the great entrepreneurial things to do. Totally. But yeah, if you go back to 2021, where the numbers that we're referencing and that the journals referencing, it's like, if you knew founders, people would be like, well, here's 20 mil. And it's like, I don't think we need that many more funds like that. It's like you want the life's work allocator who has a differentiated view, network, et cetera. Look, if somebody was saying in 2020, 3, 4, 5, that you're going to start a media business that is going to become like lightning in a bottle and compete with CNBC and be more relevant to a younger generation and be broadcasting on Twitter, you'd be like, what?

But you guys are crushing it. You have found a niche. You've got a vibe. you're just, it's incredible. And so why shouldn't somebody be able to do an adventure? I will never discourage anybody that wants to start a venture as long as they're thinking about how do I do this in a really distinguished differentiated way and I can be so good that they can't ignore me.

Yeah. What are your LPs thinking about the IPO window this year, next year? It feels like there might be trillions of liquidity coming to the tech industry. Is that going to have an effect on the early stage, the next stage of, the next stage of scale-ups, will that affect VC dynamics, or is that kind of just a foregone conclusion at this point? No, I think that you're going to have a big set of IPOs. I mean, everybody sort of knows the names off the tip of their tongue, but probably six to ten companies, I think this year, have such high demand. They've so far been rewarded by basically saying no and waiting and having

ever higher rounds and lower cost of capital. I do think, and you even look at Palantir and the valuation of Palantir and Alex and the team are amazing. But to me, it is less about Palantir and more about huge amount of pen-up demand for next-generation defense tech. I think if and when you ever do see a debut from Anderl, no idea on the timing, size, all that kind of stuff. But the demand is going to be really high, you know, and you see it in the private markets now. Just as a proxy, we used to get bids on the secondary market for a lot of our companies, either sort of at last round price or maybe at a discount to NAV, you know, to the discount to last round price. Most of the bids we get for our companies now, particularly

the ones that could be or will be going public, are at premiums. And so I, I think the demand is really high. It will usher in a next generation of companies, and it will happen in AI, compute. You'll see it in some of the big foundation labs. You'll see it in biotech. I think you're going to see a window over the next six months where you see a ton of really interesting biotech IPOs. And it'll happen in aerospace and defense in this next generation. And this whole confluence will just make a ton of sense, this arc from Google, having its employees protest, you know, working on Project Maven, to seeing the rise of Anderil, to seeing Trump's, you know, lashing the existence.

bureaucratic primes. And then you see mega IPOs and these next-gen companies that didn't exist 10 years ago being worth more than some of the existing primes. I think it is going to be a bellwether for the industry. And it is great to be American. It is great to have American capital markets. Capital wants to go where it is welcome and stay where it is well treated. And it is here. So, super bullish. Yeah. Well said. What, what is an object need to, what qualifies an object to get on your shelf here. You've got to be part totem of my like nostalgic childhood. I've got, I don't know, you know, this is the cyclone, which is the scariest roller coaster. Oh, yeah. That's where I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. I will never forget my scrappy roots.

It's a wooden roller coaster, right? It is a wooden roller coaster. I'll tell you, it is the scariest roller coaster in the world, not by virtue of speed or descent, but it is so old, your ride may be the last. And the thrill of that is like, you know, mind-blowing. I'd I've got my first Game Boy, you know, if you had Palmer, yeah, yeah, yeah, rocking the new mod retro. I've got my first Nintendo Donkey Kong. Oh, nice. So this is my childhood, you know, and it's the things that inspired me from science fiction to science fact.

It's all the little totems that have made me. I love it. I love it. Incredible. Well, thank you for giving us the update. I'm sure you'll be back on. Many more times this year. It's going to be a massive year, and I look forward to it.

Yeah, we'll talk to you. Guys, congrats on what you built. Thank you for being part of it. Congratulations to your whole team. Multiple times last year we got to hang out, and it was really, really fun. So thank you so awesome. Awesome. To look forward to you.

Peace. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. The last thing I want to talk about is this new Fuji film camera. There's a very interesting feature that allows you to take photos from any period in time. So instead of baking in filters or lenses or anything that you could change, you can, you hold it like a old Fuji film camera, but there is a dial on the side that will let you

select a decade. So you can say, I want the photo, I want this particular photo, the next photo that I take, I want it to look like it was taken in the 1930s. I want it to look like it was taken in the 1970s. I want it to look like it was taken in 2010. And it will emulate that directly on the device, bake that into the file that it gives you. Is it film only or does it actually give you a digital? I believe it's digital.

Let's read from this. It says, as at the Fuji film new product experience event, I tried out the Generation Chequee Instamax mini evoke cinema that can shoot, oh, it can also shoot videos. A design that evokes eight millimeter film cameras. It comes equipped with a dial called the Jedi dial that lets you in. joy effects inspired by the 1930s and 1920s. Of course, it offers the fun of Chequie, and it's a model that also lets you enjoy that analog-like operation feel. So I believe it's a video camera that will spit out an MP4 on a memory card that you can upload to whatever you want. Maybe we should get one around the studio. We should get one that's connected

over HDMI into the stream and we can use that like we've used the VHS camera in the past that you may have seen here on TBPN. Anyway, anything else we should cover today? Apparently, Trump just ordered the U.S. government to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds to drive mortgage rates down. Says he's bringing back the American dream. Hmm. More debt for the American taxpayer. Interesting.

More debt for America to bring down the rates for Americans. That could be good, I guess. Could work. Well, you will see. There's also a new Hyundai Waymo. And CES, it's estimated to cost $42,000, which if true is like a 10x decrease in the price of the Waymo's. Political reality being a little bit spicy or says, this is the end of the cyber cab before it's even born and the ability to adapt the Waymo sensor tech to almost any vehicle. It means Waymo can pick and choose vehicles based on grade, market fit, and other variables.

So you could be in a rougher environment with a lot of potholes. You build a Waymo out of a G-Wagon, I suppose. I like it. If you're on clean streets, you go with something. And what's up with this? Will I.M. has a car. It's a three-wheel. Also, we just really quickly, I need to clarify this because we have to issue a correction.

This is completely fake news because there's a, apparently there's a community note on this that says this is actually a different company's Hyundai Island. 5, self-tachsy. It's not Waymo's, so we will see where this is all. Completely fake news. Anyway.

But apparently Will I.M. has a new micro-mobility EV. It's three wheels. This thing looks absolutely insane. Greg Brockman was fired up on it. Looks straight out of Tron.

I like the look. And we should get Will I.M. on the show to talk about Trinity. That would be great. It's going to be, they're selling this on Kickstarter. That's wild. I wonder, yeah, sort of a motorcycle that doesn't require as much balance.

I wonder where this would be the most popular. It certainly looks cool. It seems like a fun thing to go for a drive-in. I wonder if it's more experiential or supposed to be something that you would actually commute in. Driving through Los Angeles, and that feels a little treacherous to me. I don't know that I would actually choose to do that, but maybe it was a replacement for the golf cart. Yeah, very curious on price point as well on where this will land. We'll work on getting Will I.m. on the show to talk about it.

Thank you for tuning in today. Super fun show. So many great guests. Billions of dollars in fundraisers. And I can't wait for tomorrow. I can't wait for tomorrow either. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. Subscribe to TBPN's newsletter at TVPN.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Thank you, folks.

Good night. Have a great afternoon.