TBPN - Figma IPO Recap, TBPN Market Recap, Ray Dalio Steps Down From Bridgewater, Coinbase Earnings Update, Reviewing The Mansion Section

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

(00:17) - Figma IPO Recap (03:28) - TBPN Market Recap (27:14) - Ray Dalio Steps Down From Bridgewater (34:52) - Coinbase Earnings Update (40:57) - Figma IPO Timeline Reactions (01:03:04) - Reviewing The Mansion Section TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, August 1st, 2025. We are live from Manhattan, from New York City. The Big Apple. The big apple. The city that never sleeps. And we certainly have not been sleeping a lot this week. I got a pretty good night sleep last night.

Decent night last night. But massive day, massive, so wild and exciting. Still feels like a dream. Yeah. Really, really crazy that everything came together. So if you weren't watching, we were at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday for the Figma IPO and Jordy was getting emotional over software

design software, collaborative design software. Because you've actually used, you've actually used Figma for a decade. It was an interesting it was an interesting first IPO for us to cover a lot. 100% from NICE because it was a product that I've been such an active user of for so long and genuinely love and and I was thinking if next next software IPO, the likelihood that I will have any emotional attachment to the product is like near zero. Exactly. I love the core weave guys. We've had them on the show. But it's like I'm not a

core weave user. So it's a little bit more abstract. In many ways like Figma is one of the one of the few like like enterprise SaaS products. Yeah. That people like genuinely like deeply love and have an emotional connection too. So super super fun. Thank you to Lynn Martin. Yes. For helping team. for hosting us. I was looking down on the floor. There's a bunch of other media companies with dedicated space and building and I thought maybe we should make something happen there. My favorite moment of the entire stream was when you had told the story of hanging out in Figma as like a third space during COVID with a couple of your team members. I think Chris, Chris, the CTO, we talked about it. Yeah, so you talked about it a few times and you'd mentioned that like, yeah, it's so interesting that

like, you know, it was this space where we'd hang out. And then, and then Dylan came on and was like, yeah, we're seeing this like weird phenomenon. Even in COVID, people would use it as a third space. And I was like, how did you predict this? But it really was real. Yeah, yeah, it's real. So it makes sense. And we, of course, are recording this at 648 Pacific time.

So our friends on the West Coast, sorry to go live before you're waking up. Good news is that Restream works 24 hours a day. That's right. If you're looking to publish a stream to multiple platforms, get on Restream. And also, thank you to Ramp for making this possible. Time is money, save both. Go to Ramp.com. Incredible timing with Ramp.

Ramp's announcement this week. Fantastic. It was a massive, massive week. Really back-to-back. Back-to-back big days for us. Big wins. Yeah, and then we had a really fun time last night. We co-hosted an event with Emily Sundberg.

Feed me. It was fantastic. We were at San Vicente, West Village, and Jeff Klein, and Abby, and the whole team there. We planned the event roughly. We locked it in like 24 hours before. It actually started, so it really came together and it was super fun. That was great. So thanks to everyone who attended, and thank you for Vanta for making all of this possible. Vanta.com automate compliance, security, and trust. And you can go to vanta.com to get started. So Apple beat earnings. There we go.

Apple's iPhone sales blew past Wall Street's expectations in the June quarter, helping to lift the company's overall revenue about 10% from a year earlier. Interesting we've been tracking. Apple lands windfall as customers raced to beat tariffs. Tariffs. Yeah, that's the story. I think that what's really driving iPhone adoption is just Gerardian and genetics against what we did with Tyler.

People saw, oh, if I beat Arc AGI as a human, I deserve an iPhone, a little treat. And so I think we kick started a trend. And I wouldn't be surprised if the leaderboard, if I opened it up, it's tens of millions of people that have treated themselves to an Arc AGI. And then gotten a new iPhone out of it. I think there's probably something there. There's something there. But on a more serious note, we're a roll. Winkler in the Wall Street Journal has the story. He says, Apple's iPhone sales blew past Wall Street's

expectations in the June quarter as some U.S. consumers rushed to buy their devices before potential price increases from tariffs. I didn't realize that the prices are going up because of tariffs. Meme had actually taken hold. Yeah, especially because it felt like on day one Apple was maneuvering to never be in a situation where tariffs were going to affect the iPhone. We put up that polymarket where we were saying, will the next iPhone be over $1,000 or under $1,000, like, where will that sit? And so there were like plenty of data points. And very early you could see that Tim Cook was negotiated with Donald Trump to make sure that the prices weren't moving very heavily.

But of course, there's always like an impending possibility that something happens. But it was odd that I wasn't aware that like this had affected broad consumption. This happened a lot in the automotive industry. Every single dealer was using the pending tariffs to get people in the door. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, Apple store, it's not exactly the same.

It's not used car salesman energy at the Apple store. You think they're like pulling people off the street? They probably weren't pushing it. But I think people underestimate how many people are iPhone buyers that are still price sensitive. and the difference if price goes up 20%. Yeah. They're going to, you know, they care about saving. The weird thing is like I feel like right now,

I always feel like it's a bad time to buy an iPhone because they release every year. And I want it the day it comes out. And then even if I'm like a month in, like if the new iPhone comes out October 1st, if it's like December, I'll be like, I'll just wait until the next one comes out. I know, these people rushing to buy.

But if you buy this and then you get the new, and then the next one's going to be a proper, I think a proper refresh of the design. We saw that new, maybe going less camera bump, maybe the flash and the LiDAR or the dot projector kind of moved over. And so there's a few different things that could be different. And all of a sudden you could be stuck with an iPhone that doesn't scream. I have the latest and greatest, which I think people often enjoy.

Although all of the design iterations have been so subtle. The upgrade from even four years ago to today, you really have to notice, like, okay, yeah, the edge of the screen is like a little bit thinner, and that's it. Anyway, the robust sales growth for the company's signature product was the highest increase in years exceeding 13%. And, I mean, I feel like we talked about this a couple months ago on the show. The, like, the iPhone had fully saturated, reached maximum penetration, and was plateauing

in China, losing ground there as the Chinese were moving to more domestically, made in domestic brands, the Huawei phones, et cetera. And so when we talked about it a couple months ago, we were certainly not expecting a big jump in iPhone sales. Yeah, and remember earlier this week it was reported that Apple was closing a retail store in China for the first time. That's right. That's right.

So shares rose by about 3% in after hours trading. Overall sales came in at $94 billion, about 10% higher than the same period a year ago. So that puts them almost, just almost out of 400 billion ARR, which is nice to see. In China for the first time in two years, Apple's revenue rose. It's a little bit of a comeback story. They had suffered six to seven consecutive quarters of decline prior to that. So again, driven by increased iPhone sales. I guess there is real demand for the 16.

and they were running a bunch of, but they were discounting going into some local festivals there. So Tim Cook said the company will face tariff costs of about $1.1 billion in the July to September period compared with $800 million in the June quarter. That's still so little when you're making $100 billion. I mean, it's a 1% tax effectively. Yeah. And so I do wonder if this is dramatically changing the amount of tax

that's actually paid from Apple to the U.S. government on a regular basis because, I mean, companies are famous for, you know, being in Ireland and withholding the earnings and then, you know, not just not generating a ton of cash and investing in R&D or stock buybacks and just doing everything that they can to mitigate the tax burden. I wonder if this is a, this is a meaningful. Yeah, it wasn't too long ago that Apple was sending how many 747s to pick up, they were, like, evacuating iPhones. That's right. They were worried about the tariffs in this pretty serious way. I think that was more so, hey, if we get all this inventory into the States today, we're going to save

however many. It's just a good practical business decision. So the CFO, Kevin Perich, said the company saw some obvious signs of pull ahead demand related to tariffs earlier in the quarter. He attributed about one-sixth of iPhone sales growth to such purchases. So what would they say the growth was 14%? So one-sixth of that, an incremental 2% of sales coming from customers who were worried about tariffs. He said the rest was due to very strong upgrade performance in general. Interesting.

I mean, that's just like the health of the American consumer. Like people are not, they're like, I like my phone and I still have a job. and I'm making a decent amount of money, so now is as good of time to upgrade as ever. Another bright spot was an increase in China sales. Wow. Unexpected. After declines in recent years,

the tariff impact could rise in near future. An exemption for smartphones from reciprocal tariffs is expected to lapse. When it does, Apple could face steep tariffs for iPhones that originate in India as well, especially after President Trump announced new levies on India on Wednesday. tariffs are just one issue that Apple has weighed has weighed on Apple shares this year. Apple

has kept spending in check relative to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and meta platforms, of course, because of their massive AI investments, which we will get into. But some investors are wary of rewarding that discipline as it points to the iPhone maker's struggle to keep up with an AI arms race. Maybe they should be spending $70 billion on KAPX to build a foundation model. who knows gross margin came in at 46.5% above the 45.9% expected and so the really interesting question is just like what does the next iPhone refresh look like and how much does it change the actual economics of the business if they do that folding phone and people love it and then there's a whole new upgrade cycle like imagine if it really becomes a status symbol and everyone on the pro phone needs to upgrade and it's a $2,000 phone. They have a $1,000 phone. That's a pretty, it could be a pretty significant driver of growth.

Yeah. What he mentioned, Tim Cook discussed openness to M&A on the earnings call as well, which is interesting. And what they buy? Everything's so expensive.

When you look through the history of Apple's acquisitions, it's like, yeah, like they remember beats. They bought for three billion dollars yep that's the largest acquisition of all time yeah yeah the run rate at the time was a billion dollars a year paid three X revenue three X revenue yeah to buy uh be it probably they probably sold so many beats headsets yeah yeah I'm sure yeah you don't that bad 10 times over you don't see beats at least I don't see beats very often out in the world no not not that often but I definitely see good reviews for the for the the the air pod competitors that are more athletic and

they wrap around the year so people say they don't fall out of your ears if you're doing like really extreme athletics. And they definitely sell. And then I think Siri was like no more than a couple hundred million dollars acquisition. And they also bought Shazam. And that was also not a huge acquisition. They've never done some sort of massive multi-billion dollar acquisition. It was frothy.

Yeah. So Tim said we see AI as one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime. We are embedding it across our devices and platforms and across the company. We are also significantly growing our investments. Apple has always been about taking the most advanced technologies and making them easy to use and accessible for everyone. And that's at the heart of our AI strategy. All sounds good. I feel like the text to speech has gotten better.

Not the speech to text. That's still bad. But the text to speech because I was pulling up a semi-analysis article on Wednesday. And I went into reader mode and I told Safari, the native Safari app, read this to me and it sounded pretty reasonable. And so I think they updated the model at some point because it used to be really robotic. And now it's it's not quite at the level of ChachypT when Chachapitee reads you something, but the text of speech was pretty, pretty good.

And it should get better. It should get better very, very quickly. Anyway. Yeah. So KAPX, like you said, is up. Yeah. But it doesn't, I don't have the exact data point here, But the thing to note is that it's not an exponential increase in CAPEX.

And they've said that they're going to continue to rely on like third party capital providers for some of these investments. And so they just said broadly, don't expect CAPEX to rise anywhere near what other hyperscalers are doing. Yeah. The other thing that's interesting in relation to their notes on M&A is that Apple's acquired seven companies this year. Yeah. And I'm struggling to think of. any of them. I mean, the most recent Apple acquisition I can think of is like, you have a buddy who sold a company to them, right? Or something like that. That was like years ago. Yeah, but like that's

the one that comes to mind. And it's only because it's like an in-network deal. So, yeah, they've acquired seven companies this year. Tim says none were huge in terms of dollar amount. Yeah. I remember when I was digging into how they built. And he also said Apple's making acquisitions at the rate of one every several weeks. So it's just. Wow. quite strange that you're not, again, not hearing about a lot of this. Yeah, I mean, Applecoms famously locked down, so it's not like they're doing some like, you know, mutual podcast tour if they do some sort of deal. It's usually like come into the organization and then we're going to run a pretty tight ship.

I remember when I was digging into the precursor, like the rumors around the Applevision Pro a few years ago before the VR headset dropped, before their augmented reality headset dropped. And a lot of the technology that went into the Applevision Pro was acquired in. And so Apple Vision Pro, they acquired some teams, but they also acquired some patents

and some technology and a whole bunch of different things to piece together. So Ben Taft, neighbor of mine and close friend. So he was working on a virtual reality product called Mira and his entire, I believe his entire team is still at Apple. And anyway, so Zuck earlier this week also shared that he believes that so IWare will be like one of the important new computing platforms.

Tim Cook on the earnings call yesterday was asked about next gen computing platforms and just hardware broadly. And he said it's difficult to see a world where the iPhones not living in it. That doesn't mean we are not thinking about other things as well, but I think that AI devices are likely to be complementary devices, not substitutions. So obviously going to be somewhat biased there, giving that the iPhone is the greatest cash cow in human history. But I tend to agree, and I do believe that's how a lot of,

I mean, that's how a lot of these hardware, new AI hardware companies are messaging. They're calling it in that new device, not necessarily a replacement. So we'll see. I think perplexity is working on a phone. Salana's working on a phone. And those are, there's just a lot of people that are taking crack, taking a crack at the market. Nothing's working on the phone. Nothing has a phone.

Nothing has a phone. Odd company name, I know. Yeah. Well, the market is selling off broadly today. The NASDAX is down 2.5% so far. Apple is one of the more stable in the Mag 7. Most of the Mag 7 companies are down 2 to 3%. Apple, less than 1% on this news.

On the flip side, Amazon also reported earnings and is down 7% and is doing much less well. But it's interesting because the headline in the journal is, Cloud helps catapult Amazon. And the long and the short of it is, that Amazon beat expectations on both revenue and earnings and did very well. But there was a big question about how AWS is performing relative to the competitors in the cloud. And so there was still a lot of pressure.

And there's a few posts in the timeline about Amazon we should pull up. But I will first give a little bit of an overview of what happened with earnings. But also let me tell you about graphite.dev. smooth John Teams that ship on GitHub use graphite Code review in the age of AI

Get on graphite.com Carol CEO at the event last night Great to meet him in person Got some fantastic updates on the business So team is absolutely crushing So cloud helps

Catapult Amazon E-commerce giants Quarterly earnings Beat Wall Street's expectations Amazon.com reported Sharp increases in sales And profit partly fueled By the growth of its cloud computing

business. The company said Thursday that revenue rose 13% in the second quarter to $168 billion. Profit increased 35%. The sales and profit expectations beat Wall Street's expectations. The results beat the expectations. AWS reported that sales climbed 17.5% in the three months following the earnings report. Amazon shares fail 7% in aftermarket trading because the cloud business wasn't growing as much as its rivals. It's such a It's such a hot market that it's the red queen race. You have to keep up with everyone else. Jeffries analyst.

Yeah, so post here from Bucco Capital Bloke. He said, Doug from JPMorgan, ASWA, AWS is growing slower than Azure and GCP. And Jassy responds with some weird comment about the law of large numbers and the Gen AI customer experience and the stock instantly yeats negative 4%. Imagine your company losing $96 billion from your bad answer, LOL. So, yeah. Law of large numbers. What is he trying to say?

He's just like, like, we're so big. And because we are the biggest, it's harder for us to grow at the same percentage rate. Is that what he's saying? Britain, Britain, who's, uh, yeah, biased. He's over at Microsoft now. He says, AWS was leading when they had inertia on their side. I saw it break and left. It is wild.

I mean, wild. Some of the developer advocates get wild on the timeline. Yeah. It's war. Yeah. It's war. It's bloodsport to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's remarkable. So, yeah, Jeffrey's is saying the same thing. Disappointing, given the momentum at Microsoft and Google's units. Of course, Google has Gemini. Microsoft has Open AI. Google has the TPU. Microsoft is, you know, a massive Nvidia customer and has all the Open AI and the Crusoe facility. There's like so many different tiers of capabilities at Microsoft.

SOTCH has been messaging very, very well to the enterprise about the capabilities of Azure as that cloud routing model, the idea that we have basically the best asset in the category. It's completely differentiated access to OpenAI, which is the one that if you just ask people on the street, what is AI? I'll say, oh, chat GPT? Oh, just chat? That's the one that they're familiar with. It has massive brand recognition.

and Microsoft has a preferential deal there. But at the same time, yeah, at the same time, I think that businesses make much more, you know, yeah. Research decisions around. 100%. And that's why we talked with Avi earlier this week. He's saying he's running Fran on Gemini.

Yeah, but, yeah, but Amazon's been able to act as that model router for a lot of companies, obviously not with Gemini, but the, but with Lama and Grohl that will serve all these different things. And so, AWS doesn't quite have that same narrative. Like, like, we can describe Google's and GCP's plan in the sense that it's like,

they're staying on this parado frontier with Gemini. They have all these great models. We can describe Microsoft strategy with getting super early in OpenAI and then acting as, you know, model agnostic and serving GROC and Lama and Deep Seek and everything. It's harder to articulate AWS's AI strategy. Direct Quartz. quote here from Andy, we have more demand than we have capacity right now. We could be doing

more revenue and helping customers more and we're working very hard on changing that outcome and how much capacity we had. He did say that constraints such as power and chip availability may take several quarters to resolve. So again, the backlog. The backlog is real, but Satya and Sundar are still putting up numbers. Yeah. So Amazon is best known for its e-commerce business which no one cares about it anymore because they only care about AI at this point. And it's heft in the retail industry makes it a bellwether for consumer spending. I am interested to see, I wonder if they had any comments about the new de minimis exemption. Yeah, yeah, look that up.

Amazon spent $30.4 billion on CAPEX in the second quarter, much higher than analysts' forecast of $26 billion. So 31 to 26, that's a pretty big. jump and that puts them on a $120, 125 billion dollar cap-x run rate, that is massive and that definitely puts them at the top of the stack. Like its rivals, but of course, like if you're investing that much in data centers, like you have to put up the numbers in the growth of the cloud. Like its rivals, Amazon has been trying to cut costs while increasing capital expenditures

and integrating AI. Jassy said that AI would be, whatever. Where are we going with this? Would be, would result in the company having fewer white-collar workers, a company spokesperson recently said Amazon would lay off a number of employees in its cloud computing division, in part because of shifting business priorities. Interesting. I don't know.

I was talking more with Joe Weasenthal last night about why you would turn down one of Zuck's offers, the white whale, why you would stay at Open AI. and one of the one of the or thinking machines or anthropic any of those yeah any player and I and I was thinking that there's this

there's this world where if you if you want to be like a top executive it's there's something powerful about being at the company where that's the main thing being top that's true also just being in the top

10 kind of key play players in an org versus being top 50 at meta, you're going to be able to have potentially more impact, responsibility, and ultimately, yeah, influence on this, like, broader trend. Yeah, yeah. Like, the thinking machines one's a little bit more complicated, but certainly, like, the question of, like, why didn't Mark Chen accept, like, a billion dollar offer to go to meta? Like, the financial stuff, maybe that pencils out, but I think the other interesting thing is that, um, it's It's like, for Google, search is the priority. Search is the most important. It's the crown jewel of the overall structure of that business.

And so if you're the number one researcher, the number one guy or the number one person, the number one executive in search, that's extremely valuable. And with OpenAI, being in that position with ChatGPT, you are like the market leader right now. If you think you can maintain that, it's like even if, even if meta puts up a really great performance and creates a great number two product, there could be a really steep power law

where you're running something that is, is not as important as Facebook and Instagram to their bottom line, to their business. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I think the already rich reason is probably a real, factors. Well, I would be hard, don't know any details

at all, but I'd be hard pressed to believe that Mark Chen is not worth at least half a billion at this point. Yeah. Anyways. Well, in other news, Ray Dalio has sold his last remaining stake in Bridgewater and left its board, capping the

protracted transition from the hedge fund firm he founded. And really quickly, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Thank you for nothing. Great transition, John. Still got it. Still got it. So, yeah, Ray Dahlia has been. And by the way, if you're just joining us early show today, we are still in New York.

We're coming back to you. And we will be headed back to L.A. later today. Yes. We should do Coinbase at some point. But in the meantime. Ray Dahlia sold his last remaining stake in Bridgewater, Associates and stepped off its board, capping a tumultuous transition of the hedge fund he founded. Bridgewater bought the remaining shares held by its charismatic billionaire founder. The firm told clients in a letter last week. People familiar with the matter, said Bridgewater subsequently, issued new shares to the sovereign wealth fund of Brunei in a multi-billion dollar deal that gave the Southeast Asian fund a nearly 20% stake in the Connecticut firm. Neither transaction has previously been reported in Bridgewater's letter didn't mention the Brunei Investment Agency, the Sovereign Wealth Fund, has been a long-time investor and transferred its money, invested in a Bridgewater fund to invest in the firm's equity.

So they're rolling from LP to GP stake, basically. The Brunei Fund now ranks as one of Bridgewater's biggest owners, though co-investment chief Bob Prince has a larger stake, said one of the people. Dolly was 75 now that really I feel like that crept up on me I feel like I when I think of him I don't think of him as that I feel like you feel like

you don't think of him as a 75 guy you wouldn't he looks great and he's and he's like yeah and he really is like charismatic but he brings a lot of energy to his podcast Certified unct status Certified unk status but also yeah just like an incredible amount of energy

and he doesn't look he doesn't look like he's like fighting it I don't know. And he probably wants to focus on being a content creator. Probably. I mean, two books under his belt. Like, I've done it all. He's done it all. I just want to make TikToks now. Have you seen his like social distribution strategy? Oh, it's great. Fantastic. Probably has a thousand clippers globally. Whoever, whoever he hired actually turned his book into like a straight up mega viral YouTube video with graphics and did it really, really well. And the team that was on that just executed at a very, very high level is it was very surprising. It was very surprising. and given that you wouldn't expect that to come from like a Connecticut hedge fund that's like so out of the YouTube world. Totally.

But he's done very well. So Dahlio in a statement that said he looks forward to Bridgewater's future success in his role as a client and a mentor. He remains invested in the funds. People close to the firm said they hope that Dahlio's exit from its ownership ranks and board will simplify its governance. Though Dahlio has given up his CEO co-investment chair and board chairman roles over the years, in addition to selling down his own stake. He had remained actively engaged, regularly making requests and registering complaints.

He's still given us feedback, and he said he was leaving. That's been something I've been, I mean, we'll have Gurley on the show at some point, but I've been trying to get a read on. Yeah, what's the soft power? Yeah, what's Gurley's soft power of a benchmark? Yeah, he's still, he went over to China recently, I think, to check out what's happening in it.

AI there. And people definitely read Bill Gurley's tweets and see that as like a proxy or a surrogate. He's like a surrogate for benchmark. It feels like that, but I don't know. I don't know what's actually going on. Yeah, the question is, yeah, is he, could he still be one of their largest LPs? Probably. In that case, like you do exercise quite a lot of exercise.

Totally, totally. exercise influence over the firm. Yeah, yeah. So he's remained actively engaged, which is also hilarious because are you familiar with how Bridgewater tracks every meeting? Are you familiar with this? So Bridgewater famously like records every meeting

and transcribes it all and makes it all available. Or they did for a long time. I don't know how much of this is like apocryphal, but the idea is that... Back in the day, was there radical transparency? Was there somebody... I think so.

actually to describing it real time. Stripe does something somewhat similar where Stripe for a long time, and I think it's probably evolved in the age of Slack and chat and whatnot, but for a long time, by default, every email was on kind of a list serve that anyone could look at. And so you could go and trace through not just the GitHub, you know, pull request history of how Stripe was built as a software product, but you could actually go and read the emails that the product managers were sending around what the engineers were discussing, all the different tradeoffs that led Stripe to build certain things, certain ways.

And so incredible for onboard. So if you wanted to, yeah, if you wanted to figure out basically the why behind anything, you could without bothering anybody or making them repeat the reasons or remember all the reasons. And then remember we talked to Jeff at Stripe, he came on the show and he was saying that, like, we're really glad we did that because now we have this incredible log of stuff that's already public within Stripe. And you can probably now query it and organize it or what are all the, what are the key meetings that like drove this decision or this product?

Who are the, who are the people that push for those? Who were the people that, you know, had concerns about it? And so you can query. So I think they've done that. And then he was also saying that they can, they now have, I believe, even like an AI agent that's proactive and will actually jump in and say, based on what I know, like you two are talking about this, you probably want this extra context, even though you didn't even ask me.

So that's very interesting. Anyway, Bridgewater's been doing that for a very long time. They called it radical transparency. It was very controversial because it's such a bizarre way to run a company. It's very different from most hedge funds. But it worked out, and a lot of people that have been at Bridgewater have certainly enjoyed it, even though it is kind of an acquired taste. but it certainly resulted in fantastic performance for the fund.

In 2011, Dahlia said succession at Bridgewater would be a 10-year process. We're now 14 years into this process. A little miscalculation there. It has been a protracted messy affair, says the Wall Street Journal. The firm tried various numbers and combinations of CEOs. One of them later sued, then settled with the firm. Bridgewater Chief Executive near Bardia and Mike McGavik, co-chair of the firm's board, wrote in the letter to investors that the sale of Dahlio's last shares was an ideal culmination of the ownership transition process.

They said Dahlio, the board, and employees would celebrate the firm's 50th anniversary together in Connecticut, New York. Bridgewater's assets under management have fallen in recent years to just $92 billion. Just a small $92 billion fund. still massive, but this is down from $168 billion in 2019. It's pretty massive. I mean, it is the world's biggest hedge fund, or one of, definitely in the top 10. And I remember a decade ago,

these hedge funds were like being in the 10 billion range would put you in the category of being the biggest, and they've all basically 10X. Yeah, fascinating. Anyway. Well, Coinbase earnings. End of an era. Coinbase earnings.

Let's walk through it. But first, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe we need to go see our billboards while we're here John we do we still haven't seen them in person I've seen so many photos I feel like I've seen this so Coinbase in summary they they missed on top line but beat on bottom line revenue was estimated to be what was it one point one point no wait

Top line verdict, 1.59 billion. And they posted just slightly below 1.4 billion. So Coinbase said its profit surged in the second quarter. So that's the bottom line beat, fueled by gains in its investments, including crypto company Circle Internet groups. They're making more money from Circle. And that's obviously higher margins. So that's driving a higher profits.

So the crypto's exchange. And the update since the journal has already out of date, Coinbase is down 15% today. 15% today, wow. Still sitting at 82 billion. 82 billion. Coinbase Global, led by CEO Brian Armstrong, said it earned $1.4 billion or 5.14 per share in the second quarter compared with 36 million a year ago.

That's a huge swing. That's the nature of this company. It's still not on this like, you know, just like, you know, clock work. clockwork profits. So if you look at this chart here, I don't know if you can see this story, but it's like, it's like very neutral profits and then just put up a billion dollars in profit. And then very neutral profits and then like break even and then a billion. Break even and then so naturally the real founder's journey. The share price is just going to fluctuate wildly. Yes, yes, yes.

Still almost a 10x from the bottom. Wow. In 2022. So the company said the increase was driven in part by a pre-tax gain from its investment in stable coin provider Circle Internet Group, which had a blockbuster stock market debut in June. Total revenue rose to $1.5 billion from $1.4 billion a year ago, but fell short of Wall Street's expectations analysts were expecting $1.59 billion in revenue for the quarter. On a quarter by quarter basis, revenue fell 26 percent from over $2 billion in the $1.5.5 billion in the first quarter, which the company attributed in part to lower market volatility. So if you remember Q1, the liberation day, Bitcoin was all over the place. And there were talks of the sovereign wealth fund in the United States. There was so much crypto news back and forth, back and forth. That was all driving volatility and that was driving volume on Coinbase and obviously revenue for Coinbase.

transaction revenue declined from 764 million to 764 million from 781 million a year ago. The slide was caused by a slump in spot crypto trading activities during the three months that ended June 30th. Total trading volume rose to $237 billion in the second quarter from $226 billion a year ago. To drive its next leg of growth, Coinbase said it aims to become the everything exchange and focus on tokenization. where the conversion of trading financial, traditional financial and real world assets into tradable tokens on chain. The company also has been working to diversify its business

and recently partnered with JPMorgan Chase and PNC Bank to facilitate the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies by their clients. I think a lot of that is on the back of a couple acquisitions that they made for custody. I mean, Coinbase at this point goes all the way from, you know, like a consumer, you know, just general user who just downloads the app wants to buy a couple dollars of Bitcoin all the way up to

the largest institutions in the world at this point. We're really, really widespread of the client base, but I think that's part of the strategy. Meanwhile, Coinbase has been capitalizing on momentum under President Trump's crypto-friendly positions with Bitcoin trading near its peak of more than $120,000. Shares have jumped 52% this year, cementing it as one of the largest publicly traded crypto companies with a market cap of more than 90 billion, although it is, of course, down today. And the coin is at 115. Yeah, outside of the numbers,

the thing that stood out was Brian's messaging around, he says it here on X. Coinbase is becoming everything exchange. All assets will inevitably move on chain, so we want to have everything you want to trade in one place. Incoming are Dex integration, which will allow users to access millions of assets and expansion of our derivatives offerings. He says next are tokenized equities and more.

So again, we covered this before, but it feels very much like Coinbase and Robin Hood are converging towards to ultimately. A FinTech Super Bowl. We're not going to, we don't like the war analogies. That's too, negative. Yeah. I like the, I like the sports analogies. The NBA finals. The NBA finals of FinTech. Truly. It's funny because like when both those companies started around the same time, I believe Andrews and Horowitz invested in both of them. Yeah.

And I mean, I went through, I was in the same YC batch loosely with Brian Armstrong and Coinbase. And then I remember talking to Chris Dixon at a dinner. And he was like, hey, like, you know, you're young. Like what apps are you using? And the one app that was on my phone that was like an up and coming startup was Robin Hood. He was like, he was like, why are you investing in public equities? Yeah.

I was like, I own a testist. I don't remember Mickey from Ribbitt is also early in Coinbase and Robinhead, right? So all is converging. Yeah, Mickey is just wearing the NFL hat. Like the, I just support all fintech. He's like, you know, picking a team. Yeah. Yeah, it was the Rob Lowe, I believe is the meme.

Rob Lowe in the NFL hat. You've seen this? Yeah, yeah, that's great. Anyway, let me tell you about adio.com. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next. Let's go through the mansion section. Find me some posts on the timeline.

Before that, let's give a little bit of coverage of updates on the Figma IPO. Of course, there was a funny post in here from Jawan. Okay. Juan apparently got a offer back in 2019. Okay. Ooh. This is C-R-C territory. And he was going to get a base of 165K a year.

and 300,000 in Figma RSUs. 300,000 shares. And I guess by his calculation, it would have turned into 30 million. But the important thing, Joanne is now getting the ability to spend his time automating finance. Yes.

And certainly didn't pick a bad company to join on that front. Gary Tan says, if you stick around in tech and you're good, sooner or later, you start collecting these stories. I think you remember, Gary designed the Palantir logo back in the day. And I wonder if he held on.

Yeah. It's a trillion dollar coming on. More, Siki ran some numbers. Siki Chen said there's 10x returners, there's fund returners, and there's Figma. Figma alone returned 10X, the entire fund of not one, not two, but three VC funds. So he pulls up index ventures, which made their initial investment out of a seed fund. It was a $4 million investment or $3.9 million out of a $400 million fund. And it is a 1,850x multiple.

Was the multiple of fund on that? The fund multiple is 18X. That's so crazy. Greylock who did the Series A is sitting on an 11x fund. they did the series A out of a $600 million fund. KP, which did the series B, is sitting on a 10x fund out of a $700 million fund, which is just wild.

And then Sequoia will have returned one and a half X on a $2.5 billion fund. That's great. Just from that one deal. And there's other stuff in. And Gary chimes in says, Grand Slam home run business. Yep, yep. It's not just a home run business.

It's a grand slam home run business. This is good advice for all the VCs out there. And just get one figma in your phone. I noted this on the timeline yesterday, but we are retiring the gong that we had at NICC yesterday. It's a game hit gong by none other than Dylan Field. So we still need to get him to sign it and date it, of course. But pretty, pretty, pretty wide.

wild. Delian says, greatest capital markets on earth, greatest country on earth, and throws up not one, but three American flags, quoting signals. Signals posts, he said, nothing hits like an IPO in America. It's the most iconic cultural moment that's relatively infrequent. The most beautiful part about it is that only here does a company going public trigger a national feedback loop of inspiration. Kids watch it, builders feel it, and the next gen catches fire. nowhere else turns liquidity into legacy. So. Signalized such a funny posting stuff.

Very, very unique. Good job. And yeah, pretty insane. We also didn't really cover this yet, but ChatGBTGBT is apparently now generating a billion in month in revenue. Yep. But is projecting to burn $8 billion in 2025.

Wait, that's... Oh, so they will... So they'll generate 12 billion in revenue and spend 20. It sounds like they're run rating. Run rating a billion. Run rating a billion. A month. So they're 12 billion a year.

And the other story here is that Anthropic is now at $4.5 billion in annualized revenue. D.D.S. is calling it, D.D.D. Das calling it the fastest growing software company in history. Wow. And they just overtook Open AI to become the market leader in LM API cost. So he drops an analysis here. Well, if you want to use AI, use thin AI. the number one AI agent for customer service. Finn is the best performing AI agent,

delivering higher quality customer service and higher resolution rates. And another post here. So, of course, a couple days ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced his vision for personalized superintelligence, personal super intelligence for everyone. NIR says,

I'm having flashbacks of 2023, and it's a post by Character AI, that says, we started Character AI to bring personalized super intelligence to everyone on Earth. So anyways, funny little throwback. Funny little throwback there. And then in other news, one thing I wanted to highlight FinTech junkie. What's his? I feel bad that I don't remember his real name, but clearly he's running as FinTech.

FinTech Junkie end to end now, but FinTech Junkie was a founding partner, co-founder of QED investors. Pintech investment group, backed a bunch of companies. I think they were, I think they led like two rounds in Wander and they're in a bunch of great stuff. He's introducing 37 Maru and taking a step back from QED now. he's going to. So at a high level, 37 to Maru is a small batch idea factory with one simple approach, identify profound problems, develop well thought out solutions, find amazing founders to partner with and then obsessively build together. So Venture Studio is my read on it. This is my chance to collaborate with the many remarkable people I've grown to know and respect in the VC world,

as well as the opportunity to partner with a few hunger, eager founders, capital F founders to build special businesses together. 37 mar isn't an incubator or an accelerator. It's a way for me to throw my time and resources at a very small number of ideas and roll up my sleeves as an operator once again. It is got to put him in the truth zone here a little bit because this does seem like the definition of a venture studio, so to say. It's not a it's not an incubator. And he says, I don't plan on doing it alone. Every idea will require a co-founder. idea will require hiring amazing people to work with. What's the name again?

37 Maru? Is it M-A-R-U? M-A-R-U? You think that's, is that a reference to Move 37 and the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek? It must be. Who's Kobayashi-Maru? Kobayashi-Maru is this like, it's like the final exam that you have to take at Starfleet or something.

I don't really remember in the simulation. It's a training simulation used by Starfleet Academy to test cadets, character decision making and how they handle a no-win scenario part it's a legendary part of star track lore and then move 37 from the leesadol deep mind match yeah but then there's also 37 signals and i don't know where jason came up with 37 how he picked that because he named 37 signals before move 37 so it's clearly not a reference to deep mind um maybe move 37 is a reference to 37 signals they're like we saw it goes deeper belcary and we're we're embedding, we're sending coming messages.

We saw his remote work set up. Yes, yeah, yes. And we want that. The superintelligence wants that. Yes, yes, yes. And I can only communicate with you via numbers. Via, so the super intelligence locked in AlphaGo. Yeah.

It's like, I need to send a signal to DHS. Not seeing patterns that don't exist. Put me in the car and take me around the track. I need to fill the G forces. Well, 37 Mario's investment themes, algorithmic isolation, which he's saying personalized content algorithms are fracturing our shared cultural experiences, leaving us with less common ground than ever before.

The algorithms powering our daily digital diet have become remarkably sophisticated at learning our preferences and serving us exactly what we want to see. I'm not going to read through all of this, but he basically is referencing back in the day, radio, TV, everybody was kind of like consuming a lot of the same media. and you can strike up a conversation with anyone about last night's episode or this week's hit song. I do feel like I got a, you know, my immediate thought is when a tweet deeply resonates with me. Most of our friends, I feel like have already seen it.

Oh, yeah. I also thought it was funny. Yeah, yeah. Like some effect of like even if a group of people don't follow the same person, like if you have like, again, like a common ground with somebody already, then the content will be served to you. But anyways, he wants to fresh tools and experiences that focus on shared content and group activities.

Music's missing layer says the music industry offers consumers inexpensive passive streaming services and expensive engaging live events, leaving a vast opportunity for new products to emerge in the middle. The access paradox, zero commission, trading apps have democratized market access

but created a generation of untrained investors gambling with sophisticated financial products they don't understand. I think some people like that they don't. It makes it more exciting. And he, let's see here. Understand the internals of the slot machine. He wants to create creative new approaches or need to support ongoing waves of participants,

focusing on innovative tools, intuitive safeguards, and adaptive resources rather than conventional teaching questions. Have you ever heard of dice control? Have you ever heard of this theory? So at the craps table, you know how you have to, like, throw the dice? Yeah. And there's like, and there's like, like, you can't just be like, I threw it like that.

You know, like you have to throw it across the table. It has to bounce, hit the back, and the back has like this spiky foam that makes the dice go in random directions. Yeah. So in theory, it's like impossible to be like, I'm intentionally good at throwing snake eyes. Or I'm intentionally good at throwing, you know, in theory. In theory. But dice control is, is a thesis that some people. believe that you can actually control the dice. You can actually become so precise at throwing the

dice that you're like, okay, I know that if I throw it, that the perfect, perfect arc, it will bounce once, do a 360, bounce another time, do a do a 720 and then land exactly where I want. I need back to back to back to back seven 20s. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So people, there are people that believe this. And I guess in theory, you could, you could do it. I just need three 10 Xs in a row, John, and I'm a billionaire. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, I'm thinking of the financial markets equivalent of that now. Well, 37 Marr's last theme is financial nihilism. So he simultaneously wants to...

Black-pilled here. What's going on? No, I like it. Like, on one hand, it's like new approaches that help people that are new participants in financial markets. And then the other side is just like life's a casino. Sure, sure, sure. And he says, a new theory is needed to help restore society's confidence

in the achievability of real. realistic financial goals. So this is more focused on, yeah, helping people get out of being blackpilled. Yeah. And towards ownership. I mean, I think that the, the Gersner accounts that that Trump is rolling out are an example of that. But that's a, you know, public solution versus private. Has anyone built a casino on top of that yet where you can wrap the Gersner accounts and trade forward contracts against your Gersner account? Yeah. It's a, It's like, in the highest leverage casino possible. Miss Rachel meets like Robin Hood and is just teaching four-year-olds to use options.

I mean, I do like that he's coming out with some strong theses about how he wants the world to look and then executing on that. I'm thinking of other folks who have done that like, Tray Stevens with the soul reader, the face Kindle. He's like, you know, I like to read. I want portability, but I don't want the infinite dopamine machine. to read, I don't want to read on the infant dopamine machine. So I'm making a pair of, of e-ink glasses that let me read in essentially isolation. Palmer Lucky, same thing with Chromatic and Mod Retro, thinking about, I want the world to embrace this nostalgic legacy technology.

I think there were things that were done very well. So I'm going to go and marshal resources and to actually go and build that company that otherwise would just not exist. because it's not a natural path that the business community or the capital markets would like go and fund. So he has to marshal it himself. Also important, I finally remembered fintech junkie's name

which is Frank Rotman. So we should have him on the show. I've always appreciated his writing over the years. We'll reach out, Frank. Fantastic. Well, let me tell you about Bezell. Getbezzle.com. Bezel is the top marketplace in the world

for authenticated luxury watches. Thank you. And speaking of the luxury world, world, maybe we should. Wait, before we go into that, I just have one more, one more story that dropped. Okay, tell me. This week by Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed to it. We got to hang with Andrew last night.

Absolute legend. Absolute legend. He was a pleasure. His day is like very inverted from ours. He's clearly, he's clearly much better at this. He had a, yeah, no, there's levels. There's levels to this. He basically showed there's levels.

There's levels to this. So we do the show. for us it sits in the middle of every single weekday. That makes it very hard to have any type of deep work. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. We're doing it on hard mode. Andrew last night goes, yeah, I think about it as like I do television on my way to work. He works. He's live like six to nine.

Eastern. And anyways, very cool. But he contributed to this piece in Deal Book, New Exclusive Open AI Secures another giant funding deal. The venture capital round values the chat GPT maker at 300 billion and underscores the fierceness of the AI money race. We've been hearing rumors about 350. 300 seems like potentially an absolute steel. So OpenAI's latest mega round, while Wall Street has been focused on how tech giants are spending on artificial intelligence, the most prominent name in the field. OpenAI has been racking up big money.

Deal book is the first to report on the huge numbers and what the round means for the company behind ChatGPT in an increasingly heated AI race. OpenAI has raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation months ahead of schedule as part of its plans to secure $40 billion in funding this year. $1 billion. Yeah. And again, I believe that a lot of the deals with MASA were getting announced with like clearly like MASA needed some lead time to pull the capital together. Obviously he's very bullish on the company. to back in March, OpenAI announced ambitious funding plans with SoftBank committing to provide $30 billion by year end.

So Moss is just racing, you know, dialing, probably flying all around the world to help put this money together. It might end up being one of the biggest SPVs of all time in the private, in the venture context. It's hard to think of. You have to print out the SPV document and hang it on the wall. And again, And they're burning roughly $8 billion this year, so they do need the cash.

A wave of new investors participated in the new round, including Private Equity Giants Blackstone and TPG and the Mutual Fund Manager T.Row Price. So really going after the big dogs. Other participants include Fidelity Management, Founders Fund, Sequoic Capital, and Driexin Horowitz, Co2 Management, Altimeter Capital, D1 Capital, Tiger Global, and Drive Capital. Just a few of our buddies. So just a few of former guests of the show. Blackstone and TPG aren't major investors.

AI model makers, but they were seen by OpenAI as particularly valuable since they can promote the adoption of ChatGBTGBT, BT among their portfolio and companies, including those in health care, financial services, and industrials. The round was five times oversubs and left some early investors in OpenAI frustrated by the smaller allocations they got as a company prioritized bringing on new strategic backers. The lead investor was Dragonier Investment Group, which committed $2.8 billion. You got the size going there? There we go. An astonishing. Astonish, checking check from a single venture capital firm that may be one of the largest ever written. The investment casts a spotlight on Dragonnear, which made successful early bets on companies like Airbnb, Spotify, and Uber, but has largely stayed behind the scenes in SV.

Markstad, Dragonnear's founder, is now taking a very public claim on what many in Silicon Valley see as the defining tech platform of the next decade. The investment represents about 10% of the firm's funds, which I'm just reading as AUM. Yeah. Open AI's business continues to surge. Dealbook hears that the company's annual recurring revenue has stored to $13 billion up from $10 billion in June and is projected to surpass $20 billion by end of the year. So it is funny when, you know, you just see people, I think we talked about this on the show last week. All the stuff around, you know, GPT psychosis felt like, you know, massive comms crisis. brewing but we said at the time numbers still going to go up right like the usage is

just astonishing the number of businesses business users who pay for chat GPT has reached five million up from three million just a few months ago the new funding round comes amid open AI's delicate negotiations with Microsoft remember that open AI seeking to become a for-profit company which of course Microsoft needs to sign off on, which is still its biggest investor and partner. Yeah, remember a couple, was it a couple of years ago or maybe just a couple months ago? People were like, oh, the foundation model labs are cooked, all the value will accrue to the application layer.

And then Open AI is just like, cool. Like, what if we got an application installed on everyone's phone and then charge them $200 a month for it? Like, do you think we could make a million a billion a month? About $5 million B2B user paying? B-to-be users too. Yeah, like they're dominating in the application layer. Yeah, absolutely.

And all of this, you know, the negotiation with Microsofts as well as some of this new capital, like a lot of the new people coming in, traditionally, you know, some of the largest asset managers in the world, it does feel like there's a, the path to IPO is starting to become quite a bit more clear. Yeah. Well, we know that they use linear. That's right. on linear linear. Linear.

Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products in other open AI news. One thing. So Dylan, when we interviewed Dylan yesterday, he was highlighting how design is a competitive advantage and that's the edge. And there's no better example than linear. That's just been, again, one of those companies that has to have incredible product and

incredible product experiences and design because they're helping people design and build products and just a perfect example where they came into a crowded category and it's really one of those like Giro dreams of sushi businesses where again they weren't the first tool in their category there's companies with billions of dollars in revenue and they just focus so you know intensely on making a delightful products yeah in other open AI news they are doing Stargate Europe Open AI is joining forces with two European companies to set up a data center in Norway. Dub Starrgate, Norway, the project is expected to house 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. By the end of next year, Open AI is partnering with AI infrastructure company N-scale Global,

and Industrial Group Ocker, to set up a facility in Kvondal, just outside Narvik in northern Norway. The company is jockeying for the position in the AI race are seeking to expand data center infrastructure. to meet the energy needs to power the technology. And if you're looking to travel the world, get on Wander, find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring Views, Hotel Grated Men of these, Dreamy Beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. And so, yeah, yeah, there was that article a while back

that was saying, like, Stargate isn't going well, they've scaled it back. And it's like, it just keeps, I keep abstracting it into, well, what is Stargate? If Stargate is just build a lot of data centers, like we can build data centers, it is possible. The question is, like, can you build more than, can you build $500 billion worth of data centers extremely quickly? And the answer is probably no. But if you shoot for the moon, you land in the stars.

And that's kind of what's happening where it seems like Stargate will have a lot of really, really big facilities all over the place. And like that will be like a compounding advantage and a continuing, a continuing, a continuing, project for everyone involved. And so some of the folks in the group SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX are equity funders in Stargate. And they committed 100 billion initially with plans to invest up to 500 billion over the next four years. So in other news, the mansion section has dropped. It's Friday. It's one of our favorite sections from, let's see, is this in focus now? Well, we will pull that up in just a second. So tech founder Eugene Nonco has paid $51 million for an oceanfront home in Delray Beach, the highest recorded home sale in the city.

Eugene, co-founder of the software company Media Alpha. Have you ever heard of this company, Jordi? Media Alpha. He has, his wife, Olga, Nanko, bought the home from I-Care Muggle Massimo Moussa, property record show. Musa had taken the home off the market and initially listed it for 60 back in 2021. The Nanko's declined to comment. No one's commenting, but the home is very interesting. Mossa and his ex-wife Carrie Wicoe paid around $9 million for the Delray Beach land in 2002 and spent around five years building the home. The property has a nine bedroom, roughly 22,000 square foot main house, as well as a guest house.

The estate's amenities also included gym, a roughly 1,000 bottle wine cellar. Not too helpful for me. I guess I could put a bunch of Diet Coke there. But this is where it gets interesting. Guess how many movie theaters this house has? I mean, since you're asking, I go high. Three? Two.

Damn. It has a formal movie theater for guests and another movie theater just for kids. It's like, I don't want the popcorn in the seats of my movie theater. I want to force the kids to watch whatever the parents want to watch. Exactly. Exactly. Although it's somewhat, I mean, you know, people are going to critique this and say like it should be a, family experience, you know, shared experience, lost social time.

Oh, yeah, yeah, controversial. But yeah, you know, many people are in the market for two bed, two bath, get a nine bed, two movie theater, a thousand-bottle wine cellar. Seems like a fun house. Musa co-founded several companies, including in the eye care industry, including my eye lab and the LASIC Vision Institute, which he sold because he sold this house because he wanted to downsize. media alpha, and I've never heard of this company Media Alpha, but I wanted to dig into it.

It says in the late 2024, Media Alpha was notified by the FTC, was prepared to file a complaint against the company for alleged deceptive marketing practices. As of April, Media Alpha said it was in active settlement discussions with the FTC. In June, the company announced that Eugene Nanko would step down as Media Alpha's CTO and become the chief architect. And so I guess he founded this company, stepped into the CTO, role instead of the CEO role now is stepping down and still was able to purchase a $51 million home so it has clearly done very well the previous Delray Beach record was set at 50.5 million so just

barely edging that out earlier this year the area has seen a number of high-end transactions recently and another property I mean this this home is truly palatial it is it is it is very loud opulent the gold over the statues of philosophers. Philosophers? Do you see this? No, no, I haven't seen this. But the golden fireplace is really, really something.

Anyway, another tech founder who I think we are actually, One thing, if we can really mine that asteroid that had however many Yes, many more palatial homes coming coming to the market, everybody is going to have a golden fireplace like this. So universal basic golden fireplace coming soon. soon so everybody can look forward to that what was the what was the Donald Trump thing he had a golden toilet in in the Trump Tower apartment that he had I mean everything was gold in that apartment but also they I think oh that's another thing while we're at it yeah got to cover the

white house is creating a new ballroom oh yes press secretary really quickly let me tell you about public dot com investing for those who take it seriously you can lock in a 6% yield that won't change of the Fed cuts rates and a diversified portfolio of investment grade and high yield bonds go to public.com. So tell me about the, I saw somebody was saying, oh, I thought it was 9,000 square feet, which would already be huge for a ballroom. Apparently it's 90,000 square feet.

Is that correct? How big is this ballroom? Yeah, so the press secretary announced yesterday the construction of a new 90,000 square foot ballroom. 90,000 square feet. That is so huge. You're going to be able to fit quite a lot of people in there. That should be where we do the next event with Emily.

Yes. It seems like an ideal. I know some people that could probably get us access to that, to that, to the space. Obviously, we'll have to wait a few years, but construction is expected to begin in September. It sounds like this is being funded by donors. I mean, the secretary says President Trump and other donors have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build. And what does it cost to build? I'm pretty sure a football field is around 50,000 square feet.

So you're, it's twice, it's two football fields. that's absolutely maybe Trump wants to be able to hold like a gladiator style he went to the Al-all all-star game yeah the really could do UFC there

you could probably do UFC there you could do WrestleMania it's 50 a typical football field is 57,000 square feet so we have we're gonna have a with some stands America needed a presidential

ballroom where is this going to be in the White House in the White House? No In Washington. Okay, just somewhere in D.C. Because they can't possibly find a spare 90,000 square feet in the White House, right? It would make no sense.

Yeah, let's see. But what's exciting to me is like the space is like we should, it shouldn't be. Hopefully this is not, nobody sees this as hyper political. But the space looks absolutely beautiful. And I think it's important to exercise the muscle of building beautiful things. Yes. Although it is somewhat ironic because Trump was a little bit upset about the Fed remodeling a bunch of stuff and spending a ton of money on an operator. Oh, this is donor.

They said this is being funded by donor. Okay, okay. So no impact on the taxpayer. Yeah. Okay, got it. Makes sense. A little bit more defensible. We'll see.

I'm sure somebody can figure out how it's going to impact the taxpayer. Who knows? Hopefully it's built quickly. That would be my biggest hope. Anyway, should we move on to what's going on in Miami? We should. We absolutely should. We absolutely should.

This is fun because it's a, it's a, so look up open evidence and pull up the cap table because I think you're going to want to dig into this company. We haven't had Daniel Nadler, the founder on the show yet, but we got to talk to him because I've heard a lot of people talking about open evidence. So this spring, 42-year-old tech entrepreneur, Daniel Nadler, gave up his Miami rental apartment and moved into a beachfront hotel. We were talking about living in hotels recently. recently and where you stand on that. The goal was to be was to streamline his life and focus on

building open evidence. His Google-backed medical AI company, which is now valued at $3.5 billion. Quote, from him, I didn't want the overhead of dealing with houses and all the stuff that comes with houses, he said. If I could wake up at 4 a.m. and just order room service, this is so perfect. I love it. Then a point, then a friend pointed out that the hotel where he was staying, the Four Seasons at the Surf Club in Surfside, Florida, also had condos for sale, which is hilarious that you're staying there and you don't realize that they're, it's like, that's kind of an L on the Four Seasons for not upselling. It's like, you, you have a guest here that's just stayed here for a month. Why don't you just tell them about the condo that's

right up there? But friend of the show lives in a four seasons. Oh, really? I think, uh, cool. Mr. John Parentino, doesn't he live in a four seasons? No, I had no, no, I didn't know that residence. So this week, he checked out of the hotel and moved over to the condos. He paid $38.2 million in cash for a fully furnished penthouse at the beachfront surf club. How much? Four seasons. $38.2 million for a 6,000 square foot five bedroom penthouse with a rooftop pool.

The seller was tied to an entity who bought the triplex for three stories. Open evidence. 30 million. Open Evidence just a couple weeks ago, raised a new round of $210, $210 million. $210. They raised $210. Give it up.

Hit the size gone. You probably could do that. Just raise $210 and then just put that out there and people will misprint it and you'll get all the process you need. Led by GV and KP and valuing the company at $3.5 billion. So he, I imagine. was able to pull enough liquidity of that. And I believe this is one of those stories where the company's been going for a long time,

like pre-AI boom, and then now is a major beneficiary of the AI boom. So it is- Started. Seedram was in 2021. 2020-21. So that's still pre-GPT3, like pre-GPT-4. Right. Of course, Sequoia did the A.

Of course. In Sequoia did the A in this year. What? Oh, wow. So they were grinding for a couple of years and then started taking off. Nadler's new penthouse spans about 6,000 square feet with five bedrooms in roughly 2,000 square feet of terrace space. Nadler said there's also a roof deck with an infinity pool facing the ocean. There we are.

It actually feels almost like one of those Venetian palazos. But in the sky, he said. I like this guy. What a good turn of phrase. He sounds like he's not, it is not the guy to turn off his Zoom background on a call. Yes. He's just, he's just embracing reality. Yes.

That's great. Well, any more notes here? And then I think we go. I wanted to pounce on it, he said. Whatever I paid, I think it'll be worth double that in five years. There was very little negotiation, Nadler said. He said, that's what he wanted. And I said, okay.

A Canada native, Nadler is founder of Ken Show technology. Okay, because I was wondering, how did he wind up with $40 million in cash to buy this, to buy this penthouse if he still in the series B, like, he could have done. Yeah, he could have done some crazy secondary. but that would be kind of a crazy deal. But he is a second time founder. In 2018, he sold Ken Show Technologies for $550 million. So you walk into Sequoia for Series A for your second company.

They're probably going to say yes. And that's what happened. So his decision to move into the four seasons is partially inspired by inventor Nicola Tesla's tenure at a New York hotel during the last years of his life. It sounds completely insane. But there's precedent, Nadler said. He's like defending it.

All right. We got to wrap this up. Thank you so much for watching. Really important news before we leave. Mira Maradi has started following Growing Daniel. That's amazing. And congratulations to Growing Daniel. He's posted about Mirradi so many times.

It's a wild bet she's following him. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, thinking, thinking machines buys his company. He's an AI founder. That would be amazing. He's a tier one poster. I just think he'd have a lot of fun there. I don't know. Whatever he chooses to do.

I fully support. And we're looking forward to getting back to LA. Looking forward to get back to eight sleeps. Go to eightsleep.com. That's our final ad read. And thank you for watching. We will talk to you on Monday. Have a good evening.

Fantastic week. Have an incredible weekend. We love you. Bye. Bye.