TBPN - Garry Tan, Augustus Doricko, Nichole Wischoff, Billy Thalheimer, Mamma Mia!

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:55) - The Timeline (23:14) - New Alexa Launch (44:13) - Garry Tan (01:01:50) - Augustus Doricko (01:22:13) - Mamma Mia! (01:30:25) - The Timeline (02:04:15) - Nichole Wischoff (02:19:14) - Billy Thalheimer (02:29:15) - The Timeline

You're watching TBPN live. Today is Thursday, March 6th, 2025, and we are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. I'm your host, John Coogan. Right next to me is Jordy Hayes. We got a great show for you today. We got four people calling in Gary Tan, Augustus DeRico, Nicole Wiskoh, and Billy Thalimer is calling in. We're covering YC. We're covering rainmaking. We're covering early stage seed. VC solo GP stuff. We're covering flying cars that are regulated like boats, sea gliders. I love it. We're going to go over some news first. We're covering Discord's IPO, little preemptive size gong for Jason Citrin, one of the best to ever do it. And then we're going to talk about Amazon's Alexa Plus launch. That's kind of weird. I don't know. We'll go through it. Anyway, but we wanted to kick it off

with this post. Did you see this post? Jordi. I'm pulling it up right now. This post is from Gabriel. One of the top posters in the entire world. He is. And we were thinking, let's kick it off. It's towards the end of the week. I think he locked it up. I think he's brother of the week material. What do you think? I think so. I mean, just putting up fantastic numbers here. For years. Unique insights. For years. One of the greatest, I mean, I think I was introduced to him during COVID lockdowns. He's over in Australia, I believe. But just has never lost a step throughout his entire posting career. Yep. Just absolute longevity. No, a lot of people hit their stride.

They put up six months, seven, eight, whatever, and then they sort of fade. Exactly. The unique insights are lost. They stop reading books and consuming. And they're just fully in the algorithm. But something about posting, you've got to be out in the real world. You've got to be out doing things. You've got to be getting insights from places other than the timeline, other than otherwise.

100%. You know, gets sort of constantly recycled. Yeah, yeah. Being down under, you know, putting up big numbers. Yeah, and I love his 360 degree attack on his game. I know about his family because of his posting, but I also know about his deep understanding of rats, apparently. So let's break this down. I'll go. So Gabe is quote posting Ali DeBoe. She says, highest leverage things you can do in your 20s, travel, start a company, join a company you love.

We're going to cut it off there because that's not what this segment is about. Why don't you read Gabe's post? He says lots of egregious stuff in here. But calling travel, high leverage is insane. It costs $1,500 to fly return New York to Tokyo. For $1,000, you could buy 50 rats in a one to four boy girl ratio and release them in a competitor's we work. The iPad kids are cooked. And this couldn't be more real. You know, we would, we would do this for competitive podcast studios. Yes. Here's the thing, John, they all zoom in to record. There's no studio to release in them. You can't do it. We wouldn't do it in their home. You can't do it.

That would just be too disrespectful. But before we get into the rest of the show, I got a call out today. So I was up in the bay yesterday evening and I was flying back this morning. And I was getting on a JSX flight. Yep. And this guy approaches me and says, hey, I'm a technology brother. I listen to every episode. I just wanted to introduce myself. So it was this guy, Cole Rotman. He's a seed to growth investor over at DST Global and an absolute dog. And thank you, Cole, for stopping me. It was a highlight of my morning, and I just wanted to give you a little call out. He's been listening since the early days. Fantastic. You know, 50 plus episodes ago. So he's an absolute brother. Then the other thing, I'm not going to name this

technology brother, but a guy emailed me this morning, you know, that's been listening to the show also since the first week. Wow. And he's going out for a seed round. He said, hey, I'd love to have you involved. I looked at the deck. I committed on the spot and offered to make some other introductions. And in less than an hour, I introduced him to, I think,

five separate people that immediately opted in. Amazing. All, you know, would be potential leads for his round. So it's been a lot of brother behavior going down this morning. Fantastic. And I'm fired up. Doing deals. Doing podcasts.

into the show. Building the community. Building the brotherhood. Building the brotherhood. That's the goal. Anyway, let's move on. I just wanted to, you know, really, you know, we call this the dojo of the dollar. We want to respect the dollar and we respect our advertisers.

So I wanted to kick it off with an early ad for public.com. There we go. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. Keep you guessing. Sometimes there's an amazing transition later in the show to an ad. But now, boom, ad right at the beginning. Right in your face.

didn't think that was going to happen. Right in your face. Boom. But the reason I want to talk about public is because I saw this great post from Madd's capital. Mads says, I'm not sure I can hang, I can handle a kangaroo market bros.

Because apparently there's new terminology. There's the bull market where it goes up, bear market where it goes down, kangaroo market, bouncing all over the place. But I love it. It does be like this has been my entire life. Yeah.

Like entire adult life is a kangaroo market. The cycles have. I've felt shorter because we haven't been in this lake. It gives you something to, you know, hope for, to look forward to. Yeah. If, you know, if you're down bad, you know that a bull, there's always a bull market somewhere. There's always a bull market somewhere. And what is a kangaroo market, if not just a bunch of bowls and bears all crammed together

in a stable? No, and kangaroos are cute. Yeah. They're fun. They're always bouncing around. Cute. They're also. They're terrifying.

Yeah, they're vicious. When they get all jacked and come up to you. If you haven't seen it, go look up. Everyone's seen it. Not every. Not everybody's seen it. Everyone's seen the Jack Kangaroo. Go look up kangaroo fist fights.

I don't know. And you'll find a ton of content from Down Under. I'm sure Gabriel, who we just covered, I'm sure he's gotten into his fair share of scuff-ups with, you know, with the kangaroos. But yeah, they're tough. Like to have some fun. Well, let's highlight Arena magazine.

Max Myers' newest drop. We got these in a few days ago. They're fantastic. We love arena. people saw our ad before a full page printed ad. Before the magazine never actually got out. So we're sorry to front run there, but the actual magazine itself is fantastic.

When I read this and when I read Colossus review, to me, oh yeah. Profile on Kyla Scanlon, good friend of mine, she's amazing, the Gen Z's capitalist whisperer. I love it. Published a book, very highly reviewed by Tyler Cowan. Highly recommend picking it up. Has really mastered economics, education in the modern era.

Everything from TikTok to YouTube videos to newsletters, really built like a multimedia empire with a very like sharp. Like there's just so much in the whole like business at econ content world. There's so much like just fake clickbait like, well, Black Rock actually owns everything. They're the most powerful company. Like that whole stuff. And she just like stays away from that.

really well and actually educates people properly. It's great. United Semiconductors of America, a modest proposal for American industry. I mean, just look at this. It's fantastic. Amazing. So highly recommend going and subscribing. You just want this on your coffee table.

There's so many good stuff. There's so many good things in here. We'll probably pick an article out of here to do a deep dive on. The art of the Chinese deal. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, we should have them call in. It's great.

Who wants to work in a factory? Oh, and look, we're printing. tweets. He's printing tweets. Luke Metro got featured. Everybody wants to expand industrial capability, but no one wants to work in a factory. It kicked off an entire article. The only thing is I agree with Luke on most things, but I would argue that there is entirely, you know, the new generation is actually very excited to be in factories. Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, there is a major vibe shift. And that's why we're having Augustus on. constantly factory posting later today because he has certainly made sleeping in a factory cool

yeah uh in in a very serious way and sleeping in truck beds yeah when he's out forward deployed all of the above uh anyway uh we wanted to highlight a post from gary tan that i'm sure we'll discuss later he's coming on at noon uh for 25% of the winter 2025 batch of ycombinator 95% of lines of code are lm generated that's not a typo the age of vibe coding are is here fascinating vibe coding. So I'm sure we'll get more into that, but something to think about it as we go through. Anyway, let's move on to Discord. Unusual Wales has the post breaking.

Discord is an early talk to bankers about an IPO that could come as soon as this year. And I think this was originally broken by the New York Times. They don't have too much information here, but we can kind of run through it. A Capital says, not sure why Discord needs an IPO other than exit liquidity payday. Because it's profitable? Yeah, that would be the argument. I don't know. I mean, Jason Citrin's a fascinating entrepreneur.

He is, he truly like does not fit the standard mold of entrepreneur. I think he's from Florida and then went to a like a very, very small kind of game development school and was totally off of the like Stanford Ivy League track. Started one company wind up, wound up selling it. and then just built Discord kind of outside of the Silicon Valley realm until it just became a complete monster and now has been very, very profitable. But there's been a bunch of pushback to this. I saw some posts. Like every major old line media company is now like super anti-tech. And so the headline from like IGN was like, prepare for Discord to get even worse. Bankers are getting involved. It's like, I don't know. That might not be bad. But I guess people don't like like the

Monization made Instagram better right I think so yeah sure of course well the New York Times and yeah there you know this all is going to come down to price right yeah it's possible that that the discord you know it gets kind of like turned into a bit of a meme briefly yep it's possible that people that buy the the stock on the first day you know or the first week or whatever don't end up doing that well but ultimately this is a robust company with a massive user base. I'm interested to see their actual financial performance, but this is great for all the hardworking employees who have spent, you know, decade plus now at this point. I don't know when Discord was actually founded, you know,

working. It's a pretty fascinating story. So, uh, deserve some, uh, liquidity at this point. Jason Citrin founded this social gaming platform for mobile games called OpenFaint. And then he sold it to this company called Greed, which is a game development. development company, like a holdings company, a Japanese social networking service in 2011 for $104 million. And I remember there was something weird about the earn out. I'm not exactly sure what happened. But then he founds Hammer and Chisel, which is a game development studio in 2012. They launch a product Fates Forever released in 2014. There's a crazy old video. I wish we could pull up of him pitching it. And I think TechCrunch disrupt and just being like, I made this game.

You know, it's going to be the, it was basically a moba, but mobile. So do you know, uh, uh, Dota 2 or League of Legends? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a StarCraft guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, Moba, but for mobile, but it wasn't successful. Uh, during the game development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like League of Legends using voice over IP.

Uh, because normally like back when you play a game, you just hop on like a Zoom call essentially, or Skype call, RIP. And so then he decided to build a chat service with a focus on user-friendlyness and minimal impact on performance. So deep integration into the game. The name Discord was chosen because it sounds cool and has to do with talking. Yeah. How crazy is it that both Discord and Slack, the two most dominant sort of like workplace chat

products, both started as games that just built a decent chat functionality and then ended up focusing on that? Totally. Really wild. Yeah, it's like no one wants to just go straight into chat. So in 2016, Discord raises 20 million from Warner Media, Time Warner. And then Warner Media was acquired by AT&T in 2018. Warner Media Investment Group was shut down in 2019, selling the equity.

Microsoft announced it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users. They raised 150, Discord raised 150 at $2 billion valuation, led by Green Oaks, with participation from First Mark, Tencent, IVP index, a few others, in December of 2018. And then they kind of kept growing from there. And now they will IPO. So that'll be hot. And of course, if you want to play the IPO, go to public.com. And Nikita, I'm sure we'll do well here, right?

Oh, do you think he still is, you probably still a stock. You know, solid position. based on whenever he joined. Hopefully it wasn't priced at 15 billion. In 2021, yeah, Discord was priced at 15 billion. But I mean, you have to imagine they've grown a tonne since then. Yep. In recent years, Discord has tried to expand as a heel.

Just one of those things like how do you, what is, how do you value the earnings of a network versus a SaaS company, right? Yeah. Like that, that's going to be the big question here. Yeah, it is crazy. I mean, they've tried when, when Club. house came out, they Discord like copied the feature pretty quickly. They have like stages. Yeah. So you can be in a Discord group and then I mean, Discord was always like for a long time I felt like it was more full featured than Slack just as a user. And it just had like just felt cooler. Even just like

the dark mode by default just felt better. But they also had other integrations. But then yeah, they launched the clubhouse competitor. But the thing that really took off was like during the AI boom like the server for mid journey, uh, in 2020. had over 15 million members. And like, that's insane. Like, I just, I don't think Slack is set up for that. Yeah. And so they really figured out how to make these like communities, like 15 million people.

Like that, that is a social network by itself. And it's a social network on top of a social network. So it's almost like red in was just criticized constantly. Yeah. Specifically. Oh, yeah. Criticizing mid journey for making it so difficult. But to not use like a like just regular front end.

Yeah. But you have to imagine. It's so brilliant. Yeah, they got a lot of benefit from that in other ways by, you know, having it be centered around the community and shared learning and all these things. Yeah, I mean, I noticed we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI app. I tried to use it on my phone on Safari and it wasn't a great experience. Here's just an interesting comp because I feel like in, you know, a lot of this sort of online community activity, we have our corner here, X. There's Reddit, right, which is interest based. There's Discord, which is also interest based. but, you know, company project, game-based.

Reddit is trading, traded up to, it's down 20% in the last month, but it was peaking at, let me pull this up here. It peaked at a $40 billion market cap just a month ago, exactly. 40 billion for Reddit. And they are losing, they lost half a billion dollars in the last year. Wow. And on $1.3 billion in revenue. So to me, if Discord can come out and actually, who knows, I imagine they've been, you know, heavily focused on profitability.

It's very possible that they could be priced beyond their last private market valuation. Yep. What's your take on like the post, like the post-more on mid-jury using Discord? Because I feel like it's still an underrated strategy. Like we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI. I tried to use it on iOS Safari. it didn't work for me. It was kind of like breaking.

And I don't think Sesame has an iOS app yet. And one of the amazing things about mid-Journey being on Discord was that they instantly on day one had great mobile support on every platform that Discord worked on. And so it's like, yeah, they didn't have their own Mac app but they had a Discord Mac app that essentially worked perfectly.

And of course there were a lot of like narrow like problems. But I still think it's pretty good. And then also, I mean, the crypto communities have been huge on Discord too. And so I'm sure that's driven a ton of new trial. And then once you're in that ecosystem, you have your Discord username and you're just kind of kind of use it for everything.

Totally. Yeah, interesting. It'll be fun to see like kind of when the S-1 drops and where the valuation lands. I mean, if they can get GameStop's PE ratio, they will be doing pretty well. Let's go. Anyways, what do we got next?

The company debuted an online shop in 20203, where users can pay to enhance the profiles and add custom graphics. digital avatars. Yeah, I clearly remember when they decided, hey, we're going to start monetizing. Monetizing. Super hard. Yeah, they got me because I wanted to be able to upload like HD videos sometimes. And there were certain files that you couldn't share in a discord unless it was, like you couldn't go over like 50 megs or something unless you were paying. And so I wound up paying and then just like probably forgot about it and probably I'm still playing. Anyway,

uh, what should Jason Citrin do when he gets liquidity? Buy a million dollar watch. Exactly. And, Where should he go? Bezle. So go to Bezle. Jason, if you're listening, go to Bezal. And we have an update. So for the last month, we've been telling people that Bezle has 22,000. We've been misinformation.

Yeah. We have to issue a correction. Not intentional. Sometimes people intentionally spread misinformation. This was unintentional. But they have, they added over 1,500 new watches to the platform in the last month. It's fantastic to see. That's 1,500 watches that could be yours, right?

years. If you move quick enough, you could buy all of them. I think after the Discord IPO, Jason could buy all of them. Absolutely. Hopefully. Hopefully he does. What is the, actually, I don't know about that. So they're at 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezels team. Quaid, the founder, co-founder, he told me they had, I think they probably have close to a billion dollars of watches listed on the platform right now. So it's really going to have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform. But, you know, that would just be pulling forward like, you know, a couple years of their revenue. And, you know, it would, it would hurt other. You're not, but you're not considering leverage. Yeah, that's true. It's true. Yeah. And some of

these watches are, you know, think basically investment assets. Yeah, he should sell 100% of his discount steak, lever up and just buy every luxury watch of it. Literally 10,000 Submariners. Just walk around. walk around just covered. Yeah. I want to see a submariner around his ankle. Yes, exactly. A little ankle watch. That's the next trend for bean airs like him.

For sure. Well, we'd love to have you on the show, Jason. Tell the story of Discord. I'm a huge fan. I've already made a big deep dive on the company and a video about it. It's a fascinating story. Anyway, let's move on to Andy Jackson. Yeah, once these companies go public, by the way, we have to actually buy a big enough

position to say, hey, I'm a major shareholder. I would love to have you on the show to discuss. It's like a little, you know, saying, you know, it's a little, to more warm invite. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you should come on this show because I'm extra conflicted. Yeah, yeah. All the other shows, they're not conflict. They're not conflicted enough. So what's the point? CNBC can't do that. Yeah, what's the point? Yeah. Exactly. That's great. Anyway, let's go to Andy Jassy over at Amazon. He says, excited to be, excited to be with the team in NYC today, rolling out the new Alexa Plus. We've been waiting for this.

Everyone's been waiting. Everybody's been waiting for this. Across Amazon, we're harnessing the transformative power of generative AI to reimagine the experiences. We offer customers. And Alexa Plus is the latest example. She's smarter, more capable and personalized. And unlike chat bots also takes action to help you get things done.

Oh, agent. This is an agent, which is at the heart of our mission at Amazon to make customers lives better and easier every day. I can't wait to get. So weird. The first thing that popped out to me, so they post some ads. The ads are fine, but they're using she, which is a very odd choice. I went to chat GPT, Grock and Claude.

Can you guess what those three LLMs want to be referred to as in terms of pronoun? The opposite. All three want to be it. It all three, including Claude. Interesting. Says, hey, yeah, like I'm not a person. Don't glorifies me. Got it.

It was just very odd to hear them. It felt very old school. Like there used to be like this idea of like Siri is a her. Yeah. And then we kind of moved away from that. And there's been so much talk about, oh, chat GPT isn't that good of a name. But when I heard them say, Alexa, it's a her. And I was like, it's not.

It's not. You know, one of the best investments you could have made in the last decade or so was shorting the name Alexa as soon as Amazon introduced it. In 2015, Alexa was the 32nd most popular name for girls born in the United States. In 2022, Alexa's name ranked drop to 536, the lowest it's been since 1985. And in 23, it's down in the 600s. So really, really rough go. Tough to be named Alexa in the year 2014 prior to the launch. Yeah. because, but then again, it's becoming more rare. So maybe there's value in that, right?

Yeah, I would just prefer it if it was just Amazon. Like, hey, Amazon. Like, I'm talking to you, you're the company. I want you to order something for me. It's Amazon. It's an it. And I'm happy with that. I don't need this like secondary thing.

I don't know. It just stuck out to me. It was like this odd choice that feels more natural. Alexa feels like a better brand name than chat GPT, which is like a mouthful or Claude 3.7 sonnet or Grock 3. Like these don't sound like names, but when I actually like sat with it for a second and heard the opposite, I was like, actually I would much prefer, you know, just to talk to it. Yeah. And it's just less weird.

Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson and Stratory. He's breaking down this announcement from The Verge. Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa. Alexa Plus that if it all goes well, we'll take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home. We're getting info on the fly. Some of the new abilities include ability to do things for you. You'll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. I feel like the last version of Alexa said that it could do that.

Anyway, it's 20 bucks a month. Or it's free if you're a prime member and prime is $15 a month. So you save $5 by getting both. It's very odd. That comes with access to Alexa website where the company said you can go and do long form work. Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on almost every Alexa device release so far. So they're actually trying to enter the consumer LLM game.

Yeah, they're saying, we want you to use our hardware, but we're also going to. I mean, they have all the infrastructure for it. It makes sense that they would like kind of offer something here. But it's just, it's just weird. So Ben Thompson's like talking about like kind of the metal level of this. There's no video of the event. It's 2025 and they just did a live blog. Moreover, there was no video put up after the event.

Amazon does have a couple of promo videos. Is this pure vaporware? Ben asks. Fortunately, The Verge did come out with a hands-on report a couple of days after the event. So apparently, Alexa Plus does in fact exist in a state that is accessible by non-Amazon employees. I was from the report.

I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word, Alexa. I dim, I asked it to dim the lights and adjust the thermostat to make it a little warmer. The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed. And Alexa said, I dimmed the lights in the living room and increase the temperature by two degrees. Is there anything else you need? Then I said, can you vacuum the floor?

It replied, okay. And the Rumba just started the job. Not bad. Like that does seem pretty cool. Of course, this is probably one of those things where you have to be really all in on the whole ecosystem. Because if you're using a, you know, Google Home or you have an Apple TV. All of a sudden it's not going to integrate. But, Ben wanted to give a little bit of a brief.

history of Alexa that I thought would be kind of interesting. He says back to Alexa though, which first launched in 2014, where a decade into these like AI assistants and like the chat bar, the chatbot era, the chatbot renaissance was like a thing. And people thought chat bots were going to be all over the place and then took 10 years to get here, but now they are. Just a few months after the disastrous fire phone, which led to most people dismissing the voice assistant and its associate echo speaker out of hand. However, Ben says, I was immediately intrigued. Precisely because Alexa and Echo. He's always got the receipts too.

Yeah, totally. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a link here. You can prove it. Actually had a potential market, the home, the one place where you might not have your phone on your body and where it would be the least awkward to rely on voice interaction because you're not out in the world. Great points.

Hey, good points. I also think Amazon got two big things right with Alexa, particularly as it expanded its skills. First, Alexa, it was always very fast in my experience, very good at understanding what you said. This is a big distinguishing factor from Siri, of course. although Google quickly rivaled Alexa. Second, Amazon didn't attempt to do fancy, fuzzy matching when it came to triggering skills. If you wanted to use a device or service, you had to say the words exactly right. So less errors, but you had to be more trained.

So training the humans to get the right thing. The second point may seem kind of intuitive, but I think it was a very smart product choice given Alexa's capabilities instead of wowing users half the time in frustrating them the other half with no clear feedback about why a particular command worked or didn't. Alexa put the burden on the user again, speaking in it. I would blame myself when a voice command didn't work because I didn't say the right words. Alexa, for its part, understood what I said and told me whether it was successful or not, which allowed me to improve.

Siri, to take the counter example, would try to be smart, which actually made it more frustrating. Good point. And so this also gets to why Amazon's announcement of Alexa Plus makes me nervous. It feels way too ambitious. Alexa Plus isn't just going to turn on your lights. It's also going to order you concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant, plan a vacation, and call the babysitter. Alexa Plus will have a memory and learn.

And the list goes on, which is to say that Amazon is promising. Every AI assistant product uses the same examples. Yep. Yet nobody has been able to truly get product market fit with those set of examples. Yep. Nobody's getting, nobody's using an AI assistant today on average. Like the average consumer in America is not saying, hey, book me a flight to New York. Yep.

Even though that's like been the default sort of example, right? Yeah, totally. Or, hey, can you order some Advil? Yeah. We're out. Even though it's actually probably good at that, but it's still not actually, um, uh, it's, it's never had enduring traction. The last time I heard the name Alexa, I was getting a massage and the massage therapist said,

Hey, uh, turn up, uh, the volume. Really? Alexa, turn up the volume. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. Like it's, yeah. Um, but I hadn't, I hadn't seen, I haven't seen or heard of an Alexa in, well, I haven't had one in like probably six, seven years, haven't seen one in a friend's house in that period of time. I thought that the last time I got value out of the Alexa service was being like,

okay, this is a pretty good speaker for like a hundred bucks or whatever it was. Yeah. Well, let's let's finish out with Ben tying it to Apple and what's going on at Siri. He's quoting from Mark German. Apple Inc.'s long promised overhaul of the Siri digital assistant. is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers' conference last June

and has even advertised some of the features to its customers, but Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people who asked not to be identified. Some features have been postponed to May or later. The Siri makeover is the centerpiece of the Apple intelligence platform, the company's effort to catch up in AI and spur iPhone. phone upgrades. And so his main point here is that Amazon and Apple don't need to be in a rush. Both Alexa and Siri have a decade plus head start in terms of integrations with a host of

devices and services. Alexa Plus and new Siri don't need to have capabilities that exceed even what the frontier AI labs have yet to ship. Simply being better voice assistance for their existing ecosystems will make them more useful. And I should note is a heavy lift. in and of itself, faithfully replicating existing functionality is a hard problem. That's the power of being an ecosystem provider. And I suspect both companies should have a little bit more confidence in their relative advantage and be a little more conservative about their ambitions. And so I thought it was kind of interesting that like, you know, we're,

we're frustrated that these products aren't better. But once you understand the, the market dynamic, the ecosystem lock in, it's like, yeah, you can. Yeah, it's one of those things like just because you have an extreme advantage doesn't, doesn't give you permission or nobody's going to give you props when you botch rollouts, when you release lackluster products where you're not creating massive sort of forward momentum. These companies have incredible access to talent, capital, every advantage, the ecosystem advantage and the services advantage, and we should hold them to a high standard.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you go back to the launch of the iPhone and I think the R&D number. I mean, everything about that project is insane. I think the R&D numbers like one one hundredth of what Zuck has spent on the Metaverse, something like that. Maybe a thousandth is like basically nothing, super fast. And obviously pulled forward like a bunch of technology that like we didn't really have like the glass screens and phones and all this stuff. But there was no other option that that was an acquisition. The screen tech. Oh, really?

And the iPhone was a company that the core tech was something that they had bought. That's cool. Yeah. They, but, but I mean, at the time, Apple had like crazy pressure, right? Yeah. They didn't have an ecosystem that they could just kind of sit back on. If they didn't do that, someone else would have gotten there for sure. Blackberry eventually kind of got there.

And I'm sure Nokia or Microsoft eventually would have tried. Totally. Anyway, well, the one piece of smart home tech that should be connected to your Alexa is, of course, your eighth sleep. There we go. That fuel your best days. There we go. bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8Sleep.com slash TBPN, get a bed, hook it up to your smart home. Tell it to...

I actually would use that because you can prompt your bed to start getting ready for bed. Exactly. I have it set on an autopilot because it knows I get into bed at 830 every night. So early. I love it. But anyways, I can see... They might actually have an Alexa integration, but go to 8Sleep.com slash TBPN. It's in our bios everywhere. Check them out.

I don't have a sleep score from last night, so this is a good opportunity for you to potentially get a quick win, considering I'm out of zero. You're at a zero. Well, that is brutal. I'm zeroed out. Let me see. Eight sleep.

Where are we? Where are we? Oh, wow. Awful. 36. I've never had a sleep score so low. What happened? Four hours and 30 minutes?

That feels like a bug or something. I don't know. I mean, I was up late and I did get up early. You were up late. I went to dinner with some friends and so I was out pretty late. Did you have a drink? I did actually. That's it.

I did have some wine. People, if you love alcohol, you're going to hate eight sleep because it just completely exposes how terrible alcohol is for your sleep, which is common knowledge. It was like nothing. It was like nothing. All right. We got Gary calling in in a second. I'm very excited for this.

Yeah. He's texting me right now. Sounds. I think he should be hopping on in just a minute. Let's see. In the meantime, we should do a funny post or something. Let's see. Oh, did you see this?

Did you see this olive metallic? Pallick, Mybock. Of course. It really pops off the page in black and white. But it's this beautiful green. And I thought we could take a moment to make a little announcement to the community that green is now part of our official brand. Yeah. And you might see it in the lower corner down there.

We actually have our legal team working on, you know, potentially patenting green. Patenting green. Sure. You know that there's a guy who owns black or something? Yeah, Banta Black. Have you heard of that this? Interesting. It's not named after the SOC2 compliance provider.

But it is a black that is so dark that it's like the darkest black. It doesn't reflect any light. And I think the guy patented it and defends it brutally. It's not very reflective. Anyway. Anyways, you should be able to make your own colors and patent them. Artisanal. Here's another post.

Open AI will be the first company to offer a $1 million per month subscription plan for AGI. And then someone says source. It's a prediction. Yeah. Kind of a, do we call it, do we call shit post stuff posts? Meme post, joke posts, having a laugh, all the above. It's certainly within the realm of possibility. but the challenge is that if you can get an open source model for basically nothing per month

that's nearly as good what are you going to choose right it's got to be it's got to be orders of magnitude better i think uh it's it's it's it's like a status symbol you know why do you why do you pay for a luxury watch you know you should tell the same time with a with a quartz five dollar watch That's true. But, you know, Patek Philippe says something about you. That's going to be the new thing. So if you use a $1 million model that could have been, yeah, could have been. Yeah, the e-commerce course bros are going to be pulling up, like, looking at their like the main page of opening eye.

Exactly. Nobody's going to be flexing lambos and things like that. Andrew Tate will be like, yeah, I don't fly private anymore. Yeah, I just have the most expensive agent cranking constantly. Servers on fire. It's the new, you know, the founders that, you know, develop an ego based on head count. They're just like trying to grow headcount. Yeah, yeah.

You actually are hitting up opening eyes saying, do you have any more expensive plans? Yep. I don't have any employees at this point. I just like want to be able to show that like I'm really, you know, I'm really about it. Yeah. Did you see that HBO has greenlit a unscripted, unfiltered, unhinged, reality TV show about the Paul brothers? Wow.

Logan Paul and Jake Paul. now have a, a show on HBO Max. Is it live already? No, I think it's, the trailer drops tomorrow. This is on March 4th.

And Jake says, this company used to make the Sopranos. So not, not a great, not a great reception. But, you know, my reaction to this was like, I'm sorry,

like the market demands what it demands. This is going to do really well. People want to watch this. So here's the thing. This is clearly a strategic move from Max to try to get a younger demographic. Totally. That's that they can pay more to get the show than Netflix because Netflix is looking at this and saying all the people that are really going to want to watch us already have access to Netflix accounts.

They're on family plans. It is a younger demo. Whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers. And so the deal makes sense. And I'm not surprised at all to see it. And it's easy for the brothers, the Paul brothers. that is, because they've been recording pretty much every minute of their daily lives for a decade at this point. Yeah. And yeah, now they're going to have to sit down in front of a camera. It's just

yeah. I mean, obviously like deeply controversial people, some people like love and hate the content. But have you seen the slap that changed my life? No. It's a YouTube video, but it's like almost like a documentary about Logan Paul challenging a Russian slap boxer. to a slap fight and it's edited so well it's edited by this guy Hayden Hillier Smith who's like this like YouTube mastermind and it's like emotional like it's it's it's it's like art and it's so ridiculous because you're watching this Logan Paul like slapboxing thing but it takes you on this emotional journey of him like wanting to go and do this fight and it's like is this too risky will he have like brain damage from it uh and it's it's it's just really well

shot really well-paced, really well-edited. It's exciting. It's emotional. You can see some of it here. Jordi. Look at this. And he's talking to his mom and his mom's like, don't do this. Like, if you get hit in the head. You're going to get one shot at. You're going to get one shot at exactly. And I mean, look, look, it's rough. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You can see it over there. And this was the moment I was like, oh, man, this guy's like, he's a good entertainer, regardless of what you think of all his products and other content. Yeah, the whole slapboxing thing. He's learned to be like just a master. Because he just, we just practice so long.

We've talked about this. I know we've talked about this offline. I don't know if we've talked about it online. But the whole slap boxing thing, Dana White went on, went on like this whole podcast road show talking about how power slap is the number one sport in the world. And he says, we get more views than NFL, NBA, MLB,

you know, all combined. And people are basically saying, I actually just lost power. Oh, you did? I guess it'll be better. Cool. Now, my microphone. Anyways, Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive road show to promote Power Slap.

Yeah. And people, obviously, all the data is public. So they immediately start fact-checking it. And first of all, they're like, one, Dana, this is not actually more popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things. Yes. And apparently, it's actually been really underperforming from a rating standpoint where it has, has this sort of shock value that people are drawn to on social media because you see this guy about to slap this other guy. It stands out. People stop. They watch it. But then the comments

are almost universally. Negative. Actually, how people feel about it. Yeah, yeah. So anyways, we'll see kind of what happens there. But there was just a great profile on Dana White, I think in Forbes. I think he did the cover. And so we should, we should read that on the show. That would be great. Yeah, we should. Then we should have them calling. Yeah, no, and then again, the challenge is doing combat sports that involve somebody being completely defenseless. Yeah. Is, uh, is much harder to watch.

Hey, we got Gary here. Hey, how's it going? It's great. How you doing? Good. Good. There he is. Yeah.

Fantastic. It's amazing to have you on. We, we wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. I mean, thank you so much. It's fantastic to talk to you anytime. but it seems like YC is like completely transformed by LLM's writing code. So break it down. Okay.

I mean, I think we're just at the dawn of this technology and it's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage of it. And, you know, I'm seeing the haters on the internet coming at us, but that's fine. come at me bro what's happening is that like you know a hundred percent of YC companies these days have technical co-founders and then you're stupid not to use it like basically why would you subject yourself to you know spending a lot of hours on things that you don't have to do and being able to go all the way to ground and debug the thing and you know basically a prerequisite

of using these tools well is that you don't need the tools. Yeah. That makes sense. How long do you think the, do you think the sort of advantage that technical founders have in AI right now is going to be perpetual, or do you see a world in five years where the playing field has been completely leveled? You know, I still think, like, it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter. If anything, what it is is it matters even more. The bar was lower before. The bar is much higher now.

Like back then, if you go back like 10 or 15 years for startups, period, you know, when I first worked at YC in 2011, almost anything that had really technical co-founders and a real problem, like you were going to be, you know, at least a Series A company. Like, you know, and then I don't think that that's, I think that's become less and less true even today. Like, you know, there are perfectly good, very technical teams that have all the skills and, you know, are in pretty big problem spaces. And then there's competition. Like, the bar is just so much higher. So I think the way to think about it is if you're not using it, you're actually leaving time and attention that could be used for all the other things that you're going to need. in a perfect competitive world and so it's you know all the people who are like you know F vibe coders or you know all that it's just like it's cope it's like yeah the world just changed we're just trying to help you yeah and you live in that old world where you know you're sitting there you know writing your own manual tests and banging your head into the code or you can embrace the

future and you know get that alpha get that edge. Talk to us about how the bar has been raised from a metric standpoint. You know, YC has always been about you have three months to make a tremendous amount of progress. It's really around, you know, preparing for demo day. The bar is all, you know, anytime you take hundreds of super, super talented people and put them under that pressure, uh, they're going to produce amazing results. Uh, from a revenue standpoint, from a traction standpoint, you know, it seems like the bar has jumped dramatically, but would love some more color there. Yeah.

I guess, like, why see these, like, we've been really intentional about trying to go back to founders who are actually right at the beginning. So, you know, these numbers fluctuate, but pretty much every time 70 to 80 percent of the companies have no revenue and, you know, probably 70 to 80 percent generally are unlaunched. So it's really during those 10 weeks, like, can you go from zero to say, $100,000 or several hundred thousand dollars a year revenue? But even that is like, you know, sort of secondary. Like the funniest thing when you really think about it, you know, think about a company that actually does make it to $100 million or a billion dollars a year in revenue.

Like, are you really going to look at the first 10 weeks and say, well, you went to, you know, well, that company went to 50K ARR, and that other company went to 150K ARR. It's like if you play it all the way out, like, it's all these other factors. So, you know, I think basically if you can't get revenue or customers during the 10 weeks of YC, like, man, that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills. And even then, like, you can't count teams out. Like there are tons of teams that deferred demo day, had nothing. had, you know, they took their money and basically nose to the grindstone, like, stayed in the IDMAs. And then they went on to create things like retool. And, you know, these are things that

everyone uses now. So, yeah, I don't know. It's wild. Yeah, my, my favorite joke on the show is that, like, the way to outperform as an LP is to travel back in time and just give John as much money as possible to invest in his early. First and second, YC. I remember, yeah, I remember being a, you know, demo day with Retool and being like, that company looks cool, but I don't even know what I would say to them because I didn't realize you could just like, yeah, just invest. Anyway, we've had this thesis, obviously like, you know, YC, anything successful attracts like haters. We've had this thesis that YC is like entering like a

renaissance, like with the AI stuff. Like this is the best time to be running like the YC business model, but can you talk a little bit about specifically, like, do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode? And can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level? Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like, I'm trying to do founder mode, but, you know, shout out to the original goat, Paul Graham, like, and Jessica Livingston and, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know like i i'm i it turns out you know you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook and uh brian chesky himself is on my board and when i came back uh to yc the first thing

he said was all right well if you were the founder uh what's zero based accounting like what are you going to do and uh you know there are shades of that and what elan's doing with the u s government like you know i think uh i just stepped in it by bringing that up but hey like you know what this is actually how you should be a leader. Like, you actually have to think about things from first principles from zero-based accounting. Like, if knowing what we know now, would we do that thing that we're doing? And, you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, you know, thinking. Yeah. So what are the biggest decisions you've made? Do, you know, doing the right thing. So I think YC was always the like center, the sort of like, tree of prosperity. You know, I left and spent seven years in my seven years in the wilderness

running initialized. And I, you know, I built an amazing team. Those guys are doing awesome. I would realize that actually if I stayed at initialized and didn't come back and heed the call of Paul and Jessica to write the ship at YC, I would be out of a business. I, you know, I had initialized would have been out of business if YC. see itself was not going in the right direction and here we are like I think that we're doing it and we're gonna keep doing it and the biggest thing that you know it's it's just funny that founder mode was the meme that was born at the alumni top top alumni conference and you know Brian Chesky didn't even he wasn't

even like scheduled to appear and I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his you know, it's funny. For him, he's like, yeah, I'm going to tell the selling cereal story. And he's so generous with his time. He does that every single time. But I remember seeing him extremely animated telling his, not his zero to one story, but his like, Save the Company pre-IPO story where he had to,

nobody believed in him. COVID was happening. You know, and then he just buckled up. He's like, look, I made a lot. He admits, like, he made a bunch of different mistakes that, you know, the reason why at the top alumni event that he spoke at, that was such a, like, pivotal moment. I think that we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, there were about 60 or 70 unicorns represented. And I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to 100 billion dollars in new market cap like that very night. That's great.

There's just people who, you know, there is a machine in Silicon Valley. And it's not unintentional. It's not malicious. Like, you know, our corporate governance and Delaware Seacorp's or design boards are like designed to maximize shareholder value. But there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that like are self-serving that cause you to do the wrong things. Like you hire people who did it at a big company before. And then you're supposed to do it that way. And it's like, no, no.

Like, well, maybe. Like, you know, there are some things like maybe finance and accounting that you shouldn't innovate on. Right. And innovate a little bit too much there and you go to jail. Yeah. But then. You can do podcasting and tweeting from jail now.

Like, keep it what's about you, you know, be founder mode. Yeah. Yeah. Do you what you get? What do you say to people that want to put wise in a box, right? You guys have had some high profile, hard tech, deep tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies. And there's pushback from people that that almost want to say, you know, you guys are, it's like obviously completely BS because there's a long history.

And the guy who's running the place was a Palantir. You shouldn't be surprised that there's defense tech coming out of this thing. Once Gary takes up on this much. I don't know, I don't want to answer to you. Five eyes. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we, we have strong opinions here around why this is great because if you're a super bright, you know, engineer or technologist union, you want to build something. YC can teach you how to build, you know, a company. You have to build your product and sort of own your market. But yeah, what do you say to people that want to put YC in a box and say stick with SaaS, stick with software? Oh, man. I mean, YC was never just SaaS, you know, I mean, boom is, you know, Astronis is right across the street. They're,

like, getting satellites up there. Albedo Labs. Like, I mean, albedo is, super hardcore because they basically have made spy satellites, but, you know, they're better than what the U.S. government can do. And, you know, they might just replace, uh, replace that market for that's just nuts. Like, you know, this is a small team out of Colorado, uh, you know, putting satellites up that are better than like the entire, you know, government waste machine. It's like not, I guess, you know, in some, in some respects, like, it's not that surprising, actually. So, O'Clo go through their nuclear company. Yeah, we got nuclear companies.

We got, you know, Helium diffusion company. I get it. You know what? Like, I think that we're, it's a weird thing to sort of deal with for me because I always think of myself as the little guy, but, you know, I got to realize like, hey, I get it. Like, we're going to take the arrows and it's fine. We're just going to keep helping founders. And the reality is like, hey, you know, actually, like, it's all.

I want to shout out the gundo bros. I want to be like, you know what? like you guys keep doing your thing. Like you're always walking at YC. Like, you know, but I know there was like a little bit of ex beef, but there shouldn't be, you know? Like, you know, cute. I actually don't see it as, you know, love that guy.

The challenge with YC is for every, you know, 200 founders you let in, you got to reject a bunch of people, right? Because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's not the right sort of moment. But the ultimate evidence of the value of YC. is that you have highly, highly successful founders that go back for a second time, right? And so whenever I see drama on the timeline about YC, it's never coming from people that have experienced the product, right? It's always coming from, you know, people that just really aren't

live players, right? Like people that aren't really in the conversation. So, yeah. So yeah, be a player character, man. And if your player character is just like, you don't got to be like that. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about just long-term trends in making hardware a viable startup at the 500K investment level? I mean, when I went through, I see there was this whole like hardware is hard. It was always like, oh, it's going to be so capital intensive. And yet I think we're seeing people do the YC model. And yeah, you're probably not going to be shipping a million units of, you know, whatever boat you're building on Demo Day. Like you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app.

Yeah. I mean, the reason why hard tech at YC can happen is like, I mean, kind of even going back to what we were talking about earlier. Like it's not necessarily just about, you know, SaaS. Did you grow 10% week on week? Like did you hit 100K ARR? Like that's, you know, sort of weak like spreadsheet thinking. And the hard tech companies that do super well, they show up with like, you know, if you

had a super crack team that was the team to do this, what would they be able to get done in 10 weeks? And sometimes it's a prototype, sometimes it's a demo. The other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just like hard allocated to YC companies, not from us, from like, you know, hundreds of PCs who now are all coming back to Demo Day in droves. And, you know, name me another place that has that, actually. And they're not necessarily just like doing the plug and chug. Like, you know, they are actually meeting the founders. They're actually making up their own minds.

They are, you know, and they're funding hard tech. You know, I think we're about 90% AI and, you know, the age of intelligence is here. Dude, like the machines are, you're able to do all knowledge work. Like that's, you know, insane. And then simultaneous to that, like, I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's I mean that's that's that's the built world like how do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another and uh you know god knows in america we need it you know like we don't even have we can't even make screws for ourselves it's nuts right you know i just saw

bologi in uh December in Singapore and he like super black pilled me on you know American manufacturing we need you know a thousand X what we have right now and uh you know it's not it's not that we're missing capital. It's not even that we're missing, you know, intelligence or people, right? Like, it's the will. Like, we have to have the will to do it. And, you know, so my message to everyone watching is, like, if you're thinking about it, like, YC is a great place to be.

It's not the only place, right? But, like, we think we're trying to build, you know, one of the best places. And, you know, it is for AI. It's for software. It's for all kinds of technology. We are, you know, building abundance from here. And we want to find the people who believe that stuff. It's like, let's leave all the political crap on the side.

Like, that's not what's important. What's important is we're at the dawn of just like unbelievable innovation. And, you know, all the world's like, you know, being rewritten by code and atoms. And, you know, what brush stroke, what line of code, you know what what what you bring what you know yeah it's what hardware will you build uh talk to talk to talk to us about happenstance you've i've seen probably like 10 or 20 posts from you about the company it seems to be a personal favorite uh like i'd love to i'd love to hear the pitch uh you know uh from you directly yeah i mean i just use it a lot personally i mean i get hit up for um you know i was

thinking about how Sam Altman when he had my role here at YC he used to have like basically a team of EA's and his email wasn't I think it wasn't even Samma it was a S a dh Router and it was sort of a nod to basically what I feel like I am now like I get you know dozens of requests every day from all kinds of YC founders and you know people I've run across and that's pretty cool I'm you know I relish the ability to be like a shelling point for people who believe in tech. And then the best thing I can do is like, oh, yeah, know-how, like capital, like, it's human capital, all these things, like people are recruiting, they're trying to sell.

Like, if I think they are legit, I can basically, it's the purest form of creating value from information, right? And so happenstances happens to be that thing for me. You know, the world is way too big. like my world now is, I think I have like 11,000 contacts in my phone or something. It's like always hit the, I always break Apple. Like Apple, my iPhone cannot support 11,000 contacts. Are you, uh, are you an inbox zero guy or do you just give up and try to make sure you get up? It's a river that I figured. So if someone's waiting for an email for me, right, you know, I don't

know, you might have to, you might have to hit me again. He's on TVPN. Yeah. Come to ask the question in the chat. One more question for you. You put out a, uh, you know, uh, you put out a, uh, you know, YC's, you know, famous for your request for startups list, wanted to highlight one specifically that you had called out, which was a secure AI app store. We want a new kind of AI app store, an OS layer that sits on your computer or phone. It should protect user data, offer one shared memory, help users find the best AI apps and help developers build and handle payments. Talk a little bit more about that. Are you seeing, you know, teams in that space yet that you're excited about, or is this, you know, coming down the pipeline, hopefully?

I think it's coming down the pipeline. Yeah, in full transparency, I don't know if I found one that, like, really quite fit my, you know, on my end yet. It also might just be too early. The tricky thing is it's pretty clear that OpenAI, Anthropic, and, you know, Windows, Apple, iOS, Android, like, this is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work, assuming that people still make software. And it's just, it's more like a thought exercise.

Like I think it is possible for someone to do this right now. And we'll see if it happens. We're on the lookout. Fantastic. Well, speaking of gundo bros, you wanted to give a shout out to the gondow bros. We got Augustus joining next. Great to see, brother. It's a party on this show.

One person after another. Well, thank you so much for joining, Gary. We'll have to have you back, talk more soon. It's always a pleasure chatting. And hopefully we'll see you at YC Demo Day. And look out for application, TBPN.com. Yes. Yeah, you do media companies?

Where's the... We're in there. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks, Gary. Yeah, have a great day, Gary. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in Augustus. How you doing, Augustus?

What's new? I'm blessed, dude. I'm back in Gundow for a spell rather than the near east or the mountains of the Rockies. So it's been a vibe. It's been sunny and warm, which has been different for Rainmakers the last four months. That's great.

Wherever you guys go, it gets cold. It starts snowing, raining. It's a tough life. Yeah, I mean, this looks kind of like, I haven't watched the SBF prison interview, but you kind of have a prison vibe going on behind you. But I like it. Maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one.

Yeah. But we were talking about you earlier because Luke Metro's in Arena magazine talking about how everyone wants to re-industrialize America, but nobody wants to work in a factory. And I feel like you've made working in a factory cool. Can you break down your current factory stack? Where are you sleeping? Can we get you on an eight sleep soon? Dude, it's so funny you say that.

We decided like a month ago, okay, we're big enough now. We're hiring like serious scientists. We're bringing government people through. No more bunk beds in the factory. So the room that I now used to have four bunk beds in it. The room over there used to have two bunk beds in it. A lot of the dropouts and engineers were living here. We had a tradition for a bit where if you move from across the country,

you either had to live in your car in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds. So that was why well lasted. The peanut gallery on X is going to start saying, oh, it's time to short, Rainmaker. They don't sleep in the office anymore. They're too legit. They're too many government. they have too many government officials coming in to try to get their bit, you know,

to try to work with them. Yeah. But at the very least, we're staying in Gundo, like some other unnamed Gondo companies. Oh, a little bit of drama. Scoop. No, we don't need to put them on. I always thought that Gundo was like the place that you eventually graduate out of because once you need 100,000 square feet, like, it's just not, it's just, it's a small city.

So, you know, I, I'm rooting for the, for the, the, the, the, the, the Gondo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas. You know, that's what I hope for you. But can you give me the quick, like the latest pitch on how you're describing Rainmaker? I know it's evolved a little bit. What's the core product that you're selling right now? Yeah. So Rainmaker is making Earth habitable by making it precipitate more, more rain and more snow

in air environments. So farms that don't have enough water, ecosystems that need to be restored and cities in arid regions that need water. We're making that happen with advanced remote sensing. So radar, lightar, satellite data. We're using open source stuff and some things of our own that we're going to tease a little bit later in the month. Our own radar to find the right clouds to seed and then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti-icing capable drones into those clouds, spraying a mineral called silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the into big enough snowflakes so that they fall and stay as snow or if it's warm beneath the cloud

melt back into rain. How many drones have you crashed? Between you, me, and not the Federal Aviation Administration. No, we've crashed dozens of drones. We have one corporate value at Rainmaker, and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth. And that's sort of an extension of like, you know, the Elon thing about chewing glass. It's kind of just a bummer, right? And like building a deep tech company is especially hard. But if you have love yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get

like good feedback, you learn how you failed, you learn what to do better next time, you end up with a bunch of people kind of like rocky, you know, that like just fight harder and do better the more they get punched in the face. And so we've crashed a lot of drones on snowy, wet, cold mountains. tops and everyone's better for it. What's the balance like now for you in the field doing the engineering work, building the actual product, selling, and then government stuff. You're in a suit. You're testifying. You're, you know, you're shaking your head when someone's, you know, espousing a conspiracy theory about you. We've seen the viral clips. How do you balance those two things? Yeah, I'm going back to Tennessee this year because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather

modification to do a criminal offense. And in addition to that, I'm going to go to Florida. Arson's legal now, but if you want to make it rain, we're putting you in jail. I mean, I think you'd be just as productive in prison. Like you're already kind of in prison. You're just more locked in. It'd be a minor setback if they lock you up. I'm sure the rest of your bros would like break you out in some heroic scheme.

Or you can make calls like a dawn from the prison, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I guess going off of that big question, for me is weather modification is so charged. You're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both. You piss off people in the center sometimes. You piss off people on the left, people on the right. You know, people on the on the right might say, you know, that's, you know, it's just wrong to be changing the weather or have some concerns there. People on the left are just, you know, maybe anti-science sometimes. How has it been trying to thread the needle?

Obviously, you're not trying to make everybody happy, but you need to get people generally bought in. to what you're doing to make things happen. Dude, water is a nonpartisan issue. Whether you want ecosystems restored or you want more water for your farm or you want urban development in your city, we want to bring you water. We can bring water more cost effectively than even desalination. And then when it comes to like the real fringe edges, because everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance, right, for whatever their particular issue is,

you know, I personally believe that like Genesis 126, it's the first, commission that God gives man at the beginning of time is to steward the earth that is used in the skies. Rainmaker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies. And so that plays to some extent with the more tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists on the right. And when it comes to the left, some people think that like, you know, anytime you modify anything on the planet, humans always make it worse. And that's just like not true. But even if you believe it to be the case, like we've messed up the planet so bad, already, we might as well take deliberate action to try to repair it. And so people on the far left

are generally more game with that. Yeah, that makes sense. What are some of the most ambitious projects and places? Obviously, we went out to, what was that place out in the desert we went to? Salton Sea. The Salt and Sea. That was a really cool case study. Are there other kind of like long-term projects that you think are kind of on the bucket list that you want to make amazing one day? Yeah, the Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500,000 feet of water per year. The Bear River is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake, and it has mountains with lots of juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho, all that flow into it. I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like an American priority and a must, and even more interestingly than that,

something in the distant future for Rainmaker is the Winter Olympics in 2034 are going to be held in Salt Lake. And China in 2008 had this whole big show and dance where they made it rain before the parades. So it didn't rain on the Olympic Games. We want to show a force a decade from now to make more fresh pow for all the Olympic games in Salt Lake. Speaking of China, the first, I think the first time I ever met you, you mentioned, you came in just like completely, just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the gobi desert by planting a bunch of trees. That's obviously not your business, but like, is anyone working on that? That feels important if you're really thinking about like terraforming certain parts of America

and like reclaiming and just improving different biomes. Like how does that play in? Is that just a different startup? Do we need another company to build that? Is that something that you would eventually expand into? How does that all play into this like whole plan? Yeah, Rainmaker long term is the terraforming company. Right. We want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for humankind and the environment.

There's no companies that I know of doing reforestation, although there's a bunch of university labs that are spraying seeds from drones. Really cool, weird, clever thing where when the seed hits water, it unravels and sort of acts as like a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground. That's pretty cool, but I haven't seen it commercialized yet. And someday, I do want Rainmaker in the business of all sorts of different terraformations. stuff like planting trees literally boiling the ocean by the way if you boil enough of the ocean then you can create more clouds so we'll you heard it here first there's a metaphor there's uh boiling boiling the ocean eventually we'll talk to you in 20 years when you're still grinding at this being like yeah i'm i'm still trying to boil the ocean yeah uh one i just have to say you know

i feel like i've seen pretty much the entire augustus arc obviously met you at right after you're graduating in New York. You were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation. I always, you know, and it's been amazing to watch and be a small investor. You have found the, you've shown the perfect ability to balance attention and progress, right? So many people would have said, Augustus is so good at getting attention that it's almost bearish, right? Because founders can get on this sort of negative feedback or sort of positive feedback loop that becomes negative where they're so good at posting and they're so good at the internet that they just get sort of fixated on that. And then that becomes their sort of dimension of

progress. How have you balanced sort of yapping and building? And, you know, I want to give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year, right? There's, you know, Multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down. What does the next two, three years look like for you in terms of balancing, yapping, knowing that you need to be making massive forward progress on the business as well? To give credit where credit is due, it was in no small part, Kugin's shot that was called where he said, like, listen, you guys are going to get out over your skis and seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs than you actually, in fact, are. And so we we deliberately decided about in the middle of last year just to kind of go like media blackout.

And I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said like, yeah, I worked at other companies where the founder was a really big yapper. And yes, you need to be an evangelist. But then like the founder doesn't know some like fundamental crux of the tech problem. And the company blogs up because of that. And so I, you know, we were talking about like our publication strategy and some media stuff. and we gave it to our PR people. And they were like, hey, can you dumb it down and make this less technical? And the funny part about that was like our science team already told us like,

you guys are going to make us seem like idiots. And so we've done extraordinary things, particularly in the last five months. And I'm so proud to work with the people that I do. And not to be like a coming soon guy, but in the end of this month in April, we're going to start to unveil the products and the progress that we've made across the entire Western United States and then I've alluded to online at the Middle East a little bit. We've done some stuff there. Thanks. Actually, the Fox Business pod was taken from a mountain top in the Middle East. I didn't share that a lot. That's amazing. That's cool. When I read your last investor update,

I genuinely was shocked because people don't have any, I don't think the average person has any sense of how much you guys how much progress you guys um you know have made in the in the last year and a half it's it's really incredible yeah narrative violation not for not for augustus not for augustus but yeah i mean for the for the peanut gallery yeah the peanut gallery but we're that's where the show exists to what uh i want to get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions uh what uh what are you benching these days oh I imagine it's going to be like the last time I lifted, like you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is inspirational. I don't even know.

Have you ever gotten a proper lift with Augustus? I haven't. He's going in there. I've seen the rack in the office. He's bringing the same intensity that he brings to building to every single set. But it's hard when you're traveling. It's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling. So break it down.

How's it going? Dude. So, yeah, like I said, this is a medium. I'm like 37 pounds lighter than when I started Rainmaker. That's mostly muscle. So I don't think my one rep maxes are what they used to be, but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs. So I was telling John,

John woke up Monday, like deathly ill. And I was saying we need to get smelling salts just here on the set. So that if we need to really, we need a podcast with the same intensity that Augustus builds, you know, hard tech. Exactly.

I would rip Lucy smelling salt. We actually got some in the office back in like 2016, 2017 when we were building the company and it's a it's a wild ride if you haven't done the smelling salts it's intense um what uh what area of the broader hard tech industry are you most excited about obviously uh you're 100 percent locked in but uh yeah i'd be curious like what is the space that uh you know when when you're sort of looking uh left or right what what's most exciting uh i know that on a long enough time horizon. I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces, but in the near term, what are you excited about? Fission, fission, fission, fission. You might not be very surprised, but my dear friend

Isaiah Taylor is absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear. And I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes to build a reactor, to get power positive. I also think like a really important point, you know, when you brought up before how you do publicity, how you do media. The Valor Atomics War Zero unveiling was an incredible event and the aesthetics were off the charts. And like a lot of people said, oh, look at the facade. Like that's so over the top. But also if hard tech isn't cool, I think something that people don't understand about the gundo is like it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech sick. Because if it's not, then everybody's going to end up in finance again. The next generation, the lower class of zoomers,

they're going to end up doing software engineering. So making things incredible and cool, I think is really important. And then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular thermal prototype. That is really sweet. And I'm excited to go hang out with the tailors in the Philippines to see War I come online. Yeah, it's the future should look like the future. And bringing those aesthetics to bear can have a benefit as long as you're also delivering the real thing. And it's not vaporware. Right. Is there a new class of gundo startups that are coming in? Because, You built this universe, this cinematic universe. It was kind of around you.

And whenever there'd be a profile, Isaiah would be there. A couple other guys would be there. The Niros crew, the Pico Grid crew, a couple other folks, Dirac. Right. But is there a new edition that we need an update on Gundo? Or is there just like a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as the godfather of the Gundo? Dude, yeah.

So the Gundo Book Club is a lot of these dudes rather than being like, I don't know, 23 through 27. They're like 19 through 23. Totally different cohort. A lot of cool companies. Teddy cohort. From Durran finally made it to the gundo from Georgia. It's really cool. Aries is sick. Chris, what was his last name? Ottoman. Yeah. Yeah. He is building subsea vehicles. There's a whole new click. And we're almost out of touch with us, you know, part of what made gundo possible and like the initial odd vibe real possible was we were all. running like pre-seed companies. So we had a lot of time on our hands and kind of just like go around. And so we can get to know these guys as well. But they're a super tight click,

like the original founding group of Gundobros. That's cool. What are you thinking about supply chain? There's been a lot of debate over, you know, Chinese drone motors and how hard it is. I mean, I've talked to Anderl guys who are like, yeah, like there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get. I was hearing, I think you were at that talk where someone was highlighting that there's only like one tin smelting factory in America now. And like, it's just like, there's all these weird things where like you just can't get American made tin or you can't get American made. So I'm sure you're thinking about that, but also, you know, early stage. It's not super critical immediately to be completely clean supply chain. But what, what are you seeing as the supply chain develops?

And are there any other gundo companies that you've been able to like kind of build on top of? I know at one point you were saying that like, oh yeah, you just walked across the street. There was a drone company that was helping you build the drones. Can you talk about the supply chain a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is definitely still tough. Rainmaker has the luxury of not being a defense company. So the government requirements that we have are definitely different. I'm still a nationalist and a patriot, though. So in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan, I'm pro. When it comes to like immediate supply chain in Gundel, I think everybody has or has already or is having a part made by Rangeview from Cameron Schiller's company.

And so like having an investment casting foundry right there is pretty sweet. You get someone to innovate and like winding motors, not totally sure. But like boards, I think actually we are going to see if not just because of soft banks, $100 billion that they maybe do or don't have. We will see a lot more of the United States soon. Yeah, that's cool. There's one American drone company that does small motors. I think they're up in Seattle. And I think they might have got they might have been family owned. They got bought by private equity. And then they shipped off to China. And so my dream is like someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back. Because like they clearly had some talent and some kind of core, core competency here. But I'm sure a lot of people are working on it. Jordi, you got another question. Should we let like us just go? No big questions. I know you got to get back to work. What are you hiring for? right now. How can we help you find them who's the most critical next hire?

Thanks. Before even I answer that question, I briefly lived in South Lake, Texas, which is where Quinn yours is from. So yes, actually, the QB of UT Austin, I was mistaken for multiple times. I saw that reply. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. And so I don't know. That's pretty funny. But who am I hiring for? Go to make rain.com slash careers. What we're interested in most now are radar scientists. So if you've either worked at the low level on board testing qualification or meteorological weather radar. So that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector. Those are the people that we want most after that,

though I would say aerosol chemists. So if you've worked at Jewel, if you worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke, that's of interest. And then government affairs, If you're a seasoned yapper from the hill, then we'd love to talk to you. Fantastic. Amazing. Well, thanks so much for joining, Augustus. You're always welcome on the show whenever you're the news. You're the absolute man.

We need one of those quarters ifs there. They look fantastic. Send them over to the studio. We'll wear them. We'll wear them. We'll wear them. Yeah, that's good. We'll have a great rest of your day.

We'll talk to you soon. Talk to you. You're the man. Stay safe out there. Get some rest. Awesome. Should we get into some timeline? We should.

We should. We should do a bunch of timeline. We have, what, an hour and a half, something like that, until the next call in. Oh, no, we got like 45 minutes. Okay. So, did you hear that Italy has soured on Starlink? I have some reports here that Italy doesn't want to do business. And I had Grok rewrite it in a comically Italian accent, and I'll read some to you.

The Italian Gaverno, days are having some big a doubts about Finnish. finishing this 1.6 billion deal with Elon Musk, Starlink, eh? Bloomberg. She said, Mamma Mia. People whispering that the worries come from the U.S. pulling back like a scared of Lugweeney from the promises to keep Europe saved. Bada Bing, Bada boom. Starlink, he's got some competition, capish. They're talking about satellite communications right here in Italy. It's like known a secret pasta recipe. The report, she said, Elon Musk, he's taking a big risk. hanging out too close with their Trump administration. Forget about it.

Already, the stance in Europe, they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate. Bloomberg, she said a Wednesday that Tesla shares in China, audio, meal, down 49%. That's a no good, like overcooked spaghetti. But wait, Musk might have picked up some extra business in the U.S. At least for Starling. Salute. Word on the street. They say the Federal Aviation Administration might a ditch of

Verizon like a bad a batch of risotto and go with Starlink instead. That's a spicy meatball. Amazing. So thank you to Grog. That's the first like belly lab that an LLM has provided. That might be a world first. Yes. Grock is a defeated of humor. I really I really enjoyed that. Anyway, yeah. So the news. Italy does not want to do business with Elon Musk because he's close to Trump and Trump is not supporting, I guess, Europe. Grock actually followed this up, by the way, and said, how's it dad, eh? You want me to cook at a pizza next?

It's so funny. I love it. You know, funny story? So the domain partyround.com was a domain owned by a catering company in Milan. And I had my buddy who lives in Milan negotiate for the deal. Yeah. And we ended up settling on a. fair price, but I thought it was hilarious that party, you know, party round, the sort of word that

was, you know, such a part of Silicon Valley lore was being, you know, operating a catering, a pizza company. Fantastic. Party round. Speaking of party round, did you see, do you know Andrew Edinger? Of course. Okay. So did you see this breakdown he did of your company?

Yeah, yeah. You're the stuff of thread guy lore now. Well, so Andrew worked. Oh, he worked there. He worked. Oh, that's cool. He was on the team. running a bunch of brand stuff.

So yeah, do you have that pulled up? Yeah, yeah, I thought this is a cool post. I feel like my, I'm concerned that my version of the deck is out of order. You want the hard posts? I'll take some hard posts. You're going to have to skip through to find the Andrew Ettinger post. It's towards the end. You found it?

You found it? It's at the end. Capital was founded on the premise that banking. Yeah, so some backstory. Andrew Ettinger is a good buddy. joined my team in 2022, I want to say. And so he was breaking down a lot of the work that went into, as we transitioned from Party Round to Capital X, Y, Z.

He's breaking it down. So he says, Capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win. Early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true. Capital was an evolution from the cult followed fundraising app Party Round, known for an all-out assault on Twitter and appointment viewing drops, a quote from Packy. But after a year and a half of Bill, I got to say with Packy, yeah, Packy almost every single day for over a year straight would repost our stuff. It was an unbelievable ask. Most people would have folded. Yeah. But we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say Packy, please.

And he would basically guilt trip him into it every time. Packy always delivered. And that was when reposts still actually carried a little bit of weight. Yeah, totally. He says, But after a year and a half of building that brand, party round was evolved into capital, positioning as a bank for founders, raise, holds, spends, and send funds all in one place. And Andrew highlights here, we launched this founder series, which is still available, capital.xy.Z slash founders. It's a very rare footage of Wilmanitis in that series. Very rare. Yeah, that's actually the only video of him online. I think so. It actually might be.

Yeah. Anyway, so the idea for that campaign was, you know, whenever you thought of, you know, whenever you thought of, financial institutions making video content. It was always about some small business owner, things like that. I wanted to make the sort of like chef's table of highlighting founders. And so we made the series that highlighted Wilmonitis and a number of other early stage founders

ended up getting nominated for a Shorty Award, which was cool. I don't think we won. I was annoyed about that. And then we had a couple sort of rough instances we had FTX collapse and we had a bunch of crypto related sort of customers. We also had stable coin functionality in our product and we were building a hybrid fiat and stable coin bank.

And so when FTX collapsed, the entire sort of legacy finance world went really, really sort of bearish against crypto for obvious reasons. And so we had to shut down all the stable coin functionality and come out as sort of a more commodity neobank. and then a few months later, SBB collapsed, and we only had 250K of FDIC coverage. And our most important customers had millions of dollars in deposits because they were obviously venture-backed startups.

And so they looked at us, they looked at our underlying banking partner, which their stock dropped like 80, 90%, because there was this sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal with Roe very quickly to move our customers over there. there. But anyways, a cool story. I'm really proud of the work that we did there. And then I've worked with Andrew since then. Andrew was heavily involved in Aurora. Cool. And now it does a bunch of other great work for companies. And the whole team went on to do it. I didn't realize the team that

you like we keep seeing these people in like the Jordy cinematic universe. It's like the Gundobros. But seriously, it's like, you know, we're talking to. Yeah. So Brandon Jacoby first ever Jacobi. Jacobi, he's at X now. Yep. Dominating timelines. And it's so helpful to have someone at the company that you're like building the stream line that we can just text.

Brian Armstrong. Brian Armstrong, our CTO is over doing meta-a-a-i stuff at meta now. That's awesome. Dylan, our head of marketing, started a company with two other engineers on our team, sold it to uniswap. That's so easy. But you can play it today. They have this whole like online survivor game.

That's cool. You know, we have another one of our designers is at Ramp now. Yep. That went viral recently because he sort of like fixed something, you know, in an hour as they tend to do. So, and then you have Spencer, who's over one of the founding engineers at Delphi. So I'm very proud of the team that we built. And yeah, they're all doing fantastic things. We'll have some breaking news.

Elon Musk replied to one of our clips. No way. Yeah. Very cool. It's about Sean McGuire. Sean McGuire was talking AGI plus robot. Tesla lets you do unlimited work

in the real world foundational model at XAI lets you do unlimited knowledge work and Neurilink lets you merge. We really enjoyed talking to Sean yesterday and Elon Musk says pretty much I'm open to the other ideas but it seems like that's what's going to happen.

So thanks for engaging Elon. We'd love to be on the show. Anyway, let's keep going. What do you got? Wander. Sponsor. Of course, of course. Wait, wait, one, two, three. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. And wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities,

dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. If you're going to Italy, you're putting the pressure on them to bring Starlink over, book a wonder. Fantastic stuff. We love Wander over. here. I mean, you got to follow, uh, follow at Wander, follow, uh, John Andrew, the founder, but follow Kyle Tibbitts. He's our, he's our dear friend. Yep. And every single day, uh, he is just racking up the impressions. He's a CMO over at Wander, but he's also delivering, uh, delivering, you know, uh, impressions himself. So he's posting some of these, now's the time to book a summer vacation. Look at this, look at this house in Cape Cod. Fantastic. Fantastic.

Unbelievable. Yeah. We got to have Chris Williamson on the show at some point, but Chris has this fantastic philosophy about the, it's like the vacation dividend or something like that. It's like this funny mental framework where basically if you book, like if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go to the Super Bowl, you get all the joy from that.

And then you also get the joy from thinking back to like your Super Bowl experience or your stay in a fantastic wander. But he thinks that you should book a trip that's like two years out. So basically you're looking forward to it for two years or like, you know, you should always have, you should always have a vacation booked like a year or two years out. And also not only is it like obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out, but your schedule's clear. And then you've had this book for two years. I'm not going to pass this up. I'm going to stick with it as opposed to it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, I'm never, I'm never doing it. I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something.

And so yeah, yeah, get on wander. Set those days. far out and book something with you, your friends, your family, your company, do something to reward yourself, treat yourself. Do it. Vitorio? We got some news. We got to have them on the show to explain all this because it's a bunch of a scientific mumbo-jumbo. I don't understand. Yeah. But Vittorio says, it's here. We got to get them on the show and say, okay, break down this news like you're explaining something to a podcast. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I know you already broke it down for like the ex user and like tech Twitter. What about somebody that that talks for? Exactly, who like basically can't read and just talks the whole time.

Anyway. We have a friend who's very smart who can't read. Yeah, fantastic. Intelligence is. Yeah, it's kind of a separate thing. Yeah. Literacy is now for everyone. You can still do great things.

Vittorio says, it's here. Cortical Labs just launched the first commercial biological computer. Human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips, programmable and adaptive, living computation, synthetic biological intelligence. Traditional silicon-based AI has a fundamental, limit, huge energy demands, rigid structures, and limited adaptability. AI today consumes massive computational resources, yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence. Biological intelligence.

BI, he's coining it. Kugin's law says, doesn't have these limitations. Real neurons inherently adapt and learn, have high efficiency around 30 watts per unit, natural self-organization, and have more flexibility, perfected over billions of years. And so, congratulations to Vittorio on the launch. If you want to learn more, he has a wonderful thread here. that goes on for 20 posts. Does he work for this company?

I'm confused. Or he's just sharing... He's just posting maybe. I don't know. I think it's his thing. But he's got a million views on it and that's what we really care about here. He got 8K likes on this.

That's really what matters. So Vitorio, call into the show, break it down for us. Congratulations. And if you need to promote it to an even broader audience, why don't you go buy a billboard on ad quick? Adquick delivers.

Out of home advertising made easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out-of-home experience, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So, congratulations. I really think that Jeremy, we've joked about this a few times, but Jeremy Gaffon needs to do the 101 billboard ad campaign. We mocked it up for him. So if you didn't listen to the show yesterday, Jeremy Gaffon has a fund that is buying startups.

He specializes in buying companies that are good businesses that have been overcapitalized. Exactly. Have extreme. Rebuilding the cap table, reincentivizing the management team, the founders, figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company

and making sure that the VCs can move on to another kind of home run swing. And so our idea was to do personal entry style ads versus accident. Yes. Cap table accident. Call Jeremy Defoeffa. John's amazing copy was Cap table accident.

Cap table accident. It happens. It happens all too frequently. We have some personnel news. Let's go. Kristen McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined ENIAC Ventures. She says, I move to venture because I wanted to work with and enable bold entrepreneurs who are willing to, who are pushing the boundary of technology forward when I met the ENIAC team.

It was obvious they shared that vision. The firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted ally and support system to founders at the earliest stages. I'm honored to continue working alongside Hadley and the rest of the team. as you may know, they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner. And I have a funny story because I'm not super close with Enoch or Hadley, but I, in college, I interned at a startup that was about Series B called Vlingo. It was a competitor to Siri. Siri was originally an independent project. Sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley, the show. Totally, totally. And so Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute, SRI. That's where they got the name Siri. Siri and Vlingo started, there's a nuance is a voice recognition company.

They make Dragon naturally speaking, one of the first voice recognition companies. And they had, some of the smart kind of AI ML engineers had left nuance, started this company Vlingo, Stanford. So these guys were like MIT guys or out in like we were in like Harvard Square,

Cambridge Square, something like that. And then Siri was out in Stanford. Apple buys Siri pretty early. And so we were basically cut off from the iPhones. The whole business plan was like get on Android and get on BlackBerry and you want to be installed as a default app. And it was just like a very fascinating thing. They were doing all this cool things. They actually ran a billboard campaign. This is hilarious. I'm not doing another ad read. But they did a billboard ad campaign. But they did it outside of RIM's headquarters, who makes BlackBerry in Canada. Specifically to get the attention of BlackBerry executives, because it was a consumer app. It was anything that you could download. I think they had like a $20 version, a $5 version, a free version, et cetera. It was something you buy and you use. And then you could use a voice mode just like Siri on your BlackBerry. But they wanted to be installed by default and they wanted a big deal done with BlackBerry. So they bought billboards outside to make it look like they were like a big company, you know, right outside. And then all the all the, the,

the executives at Blackberry would like drive in and be like, oh, Vlingo, like, they're a good company. Like, I got to do business with them. And Hadley worked there as this like kind of business development, MBA type. And I just remember him coming in. And he was super young. And during like the all hands meeting, he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing. And I was just like, this guy's the man. Because I was like a kid. I was an intern at the time. And the CEO, they, they, the founders were like, these MIT scientists. Yeah.

But they'd brought in a kind of corporate CEO who was a, he'd been in war, basically. He'd been in Iraq deploying like mobile technology, basically, like cell phone towers. And he was so like hardcore. He had bullets on his desk with like the names of the rival companies on him. It was a really crazy like experience. But it was really cool because like a series A, series B company, 50 people building a tech product, growing. It's just a unique thing to be in. It wound up being like an okay outcome. They sold the company. I think everyone did pretty well. It wasn't like a generational company or anything, but it was

just cool to see like, okay, this is what a startup looks like at this scale. And it was really cool. And I remember that we did some deal and and Hadley like got like bottle service and he let me come and drink at his table. And that was huge to me as a college kid. Amazing. Yeah, it was great. So good luck to me. Yeah. Congratulations to Christian McDonald. is huge. The title partner has been diluted over time, but getting partner at a fun like ENIAC really means something. And it's awesome to see. It's great. Should we go to Evan Armstrong? Let's do it. Evan Armstrong says, people are not ready for what's coming. Anthropic published a post today that casually announced the upending of the social order by 2027. If LLMs can do all listed

below, the vast majority of American labor is automatable. are entering an economically, politically, and emotionally dangerous period, buckle up. And the, and the quote is from this blog post, as our CEO, Dario writes in Machines of Loving Grace, we expect powerful, it's a reference to all watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, which is a Heinlein book, I think. We expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late 2026 to early 2027. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties, intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines, including biology, computer science, mathematics, or engineering, the ability to navigate

all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio, and video, and the ability to autonomously control technology instruments like mice and keyboards, and the ability to access and browse the internet, the ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over extended periods, hours, days, or even weeks, seeking clarification and feedback when needed, much like a highly capable employee would, the ability to interface with the physical world, controlling laboratory equipment, robotic systems, and manufacturing tools through digital connections. What do you think? 2027? Is it over? We're just getting started. Just getting started. No, I mean, this is a challenge. No mention of

comedy. Interesting. The final Eval. I think that Anthropic is crushing software engineering. Yep. Struggling on the comedy side. Yeah. And that's a, okay. Not everybody has to be funny. Yeah. I, you know, you read this and you're like, oh, a massive job displacement, but the question is like, is there just a thousand times more work to be done? And when I think about Mars and when I think about Dyson Spheres and when I think about like all the crazy things that we want to do as humans, I'm thinking like, yeah, yes and like let's have every human piloting a thousand AIs and let's all work together and let's all work more. Friedberg had a really great point, which we covered last week around, you know, if you have these incredible, incredibly powerful AI systems, what are the sort of massive, you know, incredibly daunting sort of large-scale projects that could be accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence?

Yeah. So anyways, I don't think, I think we need to go into this with, you know, generally with optimism. And then still, I think I still personally reference people like Tyler Cowell. who I think are less directly conflicted. Yep. On these things because he's not out there trying to sustain, you know, evaluation, right? He's just sort of focused on what he believes is the truth and making predictions based on that. So we'll see, but it's certainly the most,

I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time. No, totally. It's truly, truly incredible. Yeah. I was thinking this morning completely, completely unrelated. Pretty soon we're going to see people joining X. Not pretty soon, but isn't it funny to see somebody in 10 years when people are like,

why do these boomers call everything tweets? Yeah. And quote tweets. Like, what are they talking about? Because, like, they wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter. Yeah. It'll just be like the most obvious way to out yourself as a boomer. Yeah.

Or maybe an LLM that's just trained on a bunch of content from. you know, the early 2020s. Yeah, yeah, that's funny. Well, regardless of whether or not AI takes every job, you're going to need to use AI and use software to close your books using RAMP. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. I actually have a cool post from Aurazian who we've talked about.

He's an economist over at RAMP. So he looked at the top SaaS vendors on RAMP for March. so far. And I'll run down the list here. So by new customer count, OpenAI top the list. LinkedIn was second, cursor was third, Canva was fourth, and then fifth was Anthropic. By new card spend was Elastic, LinkedIn, HubSpot, Zoom Info, and Salesforce. So that was interesting to see. I'm going to read out some of the standout. So Elastic was a standout. They were the top vendor by new card spend. Is an AI search company that builds software for businesses to build their own AI-driven search platforms like personalized e-commerce searches for

consumers or AI searches for customer help centers. They're a public company. So their stock recently surged following an earnings beat. So narrative violation, AI company with earnings that's public. Let's go. Wild to see. I'm looking it up at looking it up on public right now. But jumping back to the post they also xAI was a standout and so they seemed to be pretty doing pretty well had a surge of signups in February and then the Claude 3.7 sonnet launch also drove quite a lot of new volume and they can see here so ramp data shows that as of February 2025 only 4.7% of U.S. businesses have adopted Anthropics model compared to 19% for open AI. Yeah. So it's kind of like doesn't seem super surprised. I'm actually surprised that Anthropic has that much adoption.

Yeah. But I think it's the developer usage that's driving that. Yep. I was thinking last night about the question of like acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in certainly GDP, but like to the, to the Satya Nadella point. But also there's a very interesting abstraction layer for like the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating. The idea of like Cardishav 1, which is I believe 10,000 we're at 0.6 right now. I think it's 18 terawatts of electrical capacity globally and if you you it's hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10,000 times less. So if you forecast how long will it take to get to 10,000 times more where we would be essentially consuming every

every amount, all the energy that's coming to the earth from the sun, essentially, is like Cardishchev 1. And then Cardishab 2, I believe, is like the Dyson sphere on the, where you're, where you're capturing all the energy from the sun in every direction, right? Yeah. And if you, and if you forecast it out based on the base rate, which I believe is 2.7% growth pre-1970 stagnation, it takes like 500 years to get there, which feels like forever, especially given I think that this Anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive, but it does feel like we're on the cusp of something, like we're going to be able to do more things. And so my base case is maybe like we go back to 2.7% growth, whereas we've been at around 2% energy growth for the last five decades. but even if we grow at 2.7% for the next 20 years by 20, by 2045 will only be double the total energy capacity,

which it'll be a lot. It'll be 38 terawatts or something like that. But it's interesting to see if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is like doing things in the physical world. Nat Friedman has this take that's like, yes, the AIs will be super intelligent, but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics. So no time travel, no teleportation, all of these things don't happen. So at a certain point when they want to build a new nuclear reactor, like, they do need to dig things out of the ground and move them. And there's like a physical cost to that.

And so we like it's, you know, there's the whole. Humans year for the minds. Yeah. We can help the AI's. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's the whole meme of like, feel the whole generation. And I feel the.

acceleration in the in the in the in the in the LLM progress arena a little bit although you know over the past few years it felt like we were really accelerating going from GPT 3.5 to 4 and now it feels like we're kind of tailing off and hitting some sort of local yeah yeah we need some major breakthrough he doesn't care about benchmarks and then we need to build a lot more capacity because I I think even if we have the pH super PhD researchers like we don't have enough servers we don't have enough data centers like yeah there's just there's still just more to do as as as I think I think we have the h's humanity to really like unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of like, oh, this world is like true post post-industrial revolution, post-second industrial revolution or

whatever. Anyway, let's move on to something completely unrelated. Connor McDonald, over at Ridge. Connor McDonald, he says, direct to consumer, cut out the middleman and replaced it with an endless labyrinth of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach. And I'll give us some backstory here. So I, my career sort of came online during the height of the DDC sort of boom. I remember. I actually had a college class that was about D to C. And that almost basically the professor was fixated on what was happening over at Wharton and how all these big consumer brands were coming out of Wharton, the MBA program there. I think Warby is a good example. I think maybe some Harry's or the shaving, like something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies. And there was a sense,

like Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison. They basically got generally more expensive year over year. And people were realizing, working with distributors, you know this from Lucy, working at distributors is a nightmare for every company, right? They sort of sit between you and the retailer. The retailer sits between the distributor and the end customer. And so there's these layers and there's this idea of if you could sell products online, Facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products, probably in history. You could scale brands tremendously fast overnight. And a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital on the idea that basically if ad rates didn't go, prices for ads didn't go up a lot,

you would have been able to just print money. It was like a money machine where spend $100 on Facebook, get $500 back. You can just do that perpetually. So I became close friends with Connor at the time and we, you know, helped him out with Ridge and then, you know, got to work out of their office for a while. And Conner's daily life was just finding, you know, basically navigating the labyrinth, which he describes here of, you know, optimizing existing ad channels, trying to test and find new ones. even, you know, the Connor and the Ridge guys were smart early on to not put a huge emphasis on organic social. It was never sort of a huge priority for the company. And that ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of organic social media. Facebook at one point was just like, yeah, like you don't, this is not, this reach isn't real. Your reach is not reach. You know, we're basically going to take this away. And from, and from that point on, there was a period where organic social, almost didn't matter at all. And so anyways, if when I see, you know, I'm invested in a number of different sort of consumer

product companies, people like Pat, Pat, Pat, Packy's brother, Dan McCormick, who's intensely good at this similar archetype as Connor. He's just sort of constantly focused on optimizing paid acquisition. the Rora CEO, Brian Keller, my business partner is like world class at this too. And so the brands that are doing well right now are ones that are hyper fixated on like performance optimization. And it really is this scientific process of experimentation and, you know, proper, you know, balancing these sort of super, super complicated task where like the idea of e-commerce is so simple. you make a product, you put it online, you run ads against it, but then the reality is like this constant, stressful labyrinth of, you know, trying to make the equation of e-commerce work. You got two.

That means you should shotgun one. John's got a couple Celsius. I mean, we really got to do the deep dive on Celsius because born in the D to C era and yet not a DEC play. At all. And I think I think that's kind of the next. I mean, Ridge is certainly still. heavily e-commerce focused and they've developed a fantastic team around that but they are going into retail and growing that category and I think more and more teams are realizing that omni channel early makes a lot of sense but it's a very different skill set. It's very, very hard and it's just a completely different culture, motion. I mean, I remember reading this book by Mark Rampola,

the high hanging fruit. This guy started Vitacoco, this coconut water company that he sold I think to Pepsi for a lot of money. He did very, very well. And he was telling the story of how he got a distributor network in New Jersey on board. And he went to the distributor and was just like, showed up with an F-150, whichever one of you guys sells the most coconut water this week gets this F-150. And that was like the best money he ever spent. That's wild.

And that is just so different from, let me look at the spreadsheet and see, you know, what was our ROAS to KAC and click through ratio on this ad? And what was the two second retention on this video ad? And how do we get more UGC? Like the D to C playbook is just completely different from like, oh, you know a guy, you know, which is the very much like the retail old school. So blending those together really difficult. But when you get it right, the company can really, really rip.

Anyway, should we move on to Aeroon this, arrow on that? My grocery store has a stolen phone laundering, laundering machine and lets me open carry post from Sam Austin. You're big Airwant guy. Are you going to be switching? I might. I need to find out where this is.

This is wild. I don't understand the stolen phone laundering. I guess it's a machine and it says safely and securely. An iPhone XR could net you up to $65. You just dump the phone in there and it immediately gets you instant cash. Pretty crazy business model. I wonder who's behind this. I wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iPhone's actually unlocked.

factory reset. You would hope that they require you to have a factory reset. Yeah. I wonder if this is, I wonder how much, I mean, obviously they're joking that, oh, this is about laundering stolen phones, but clearly stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this. And I wonder what safeguards the company has in, has in place for that. But I thought this was funny because they're taking shots at Arawone. I just wanted to highlight it. I bend Aeroon. Anyway, back to tech, back to business, back to the serious stuff on the timeline. Epirus announced a $250 million series D fundraise to hyperscale Leonidas production capacity. Leonidas is a solid state software-defined, high-energy, high-power microwave technology

that delivers unmatched counter-electronics capabilities, tested and proven as a scalable counter-swarm solution. Another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline. Very cool defense tech company, a Joe Lawsdale project, I believe. and yeah yeah and so there's a lot of reasons why this company is important there's been there's been some naysayers around this tech right so that this is non-kinetic which means it's entirely using energy directed towards these sort of swarms the reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured against drones yep that you can't shoot bullets into

the air. So a picture at a, you know, so Allen control systems makes a ton of sense on a battlefield, right? It's a sort of turret that you, you know, can put on a truck or a tank or, you know, stationary. Gun on a truck. Gun on a truck. But the challenge is you can't put that on top of a NFL stadium, right? Because it would just involve firing bullets into the air, you know, into a city, right? It just completely doesn't work. Totally. If we're going to have effective, offenses against drone swarms in these sort of non-battlefield environments. Yep. Also, there's a volume, there's like a volume problem too, right?

If you have a drone swarm of 100, are you going to be able to reliably hit, you know, 100 of these? And so we need both kinetic and non-kinetic solutions and a huge vote of confidence for Epirus. And I believe this is an 8BC company, Joe Lonsdale had a post. He said, direct to DMP is becoming a critical part of warfare and deterrence. duty bases, ships, vehicles, planes, satellites, and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect warfighters and civilians in various

contexts. So cool, both wartime and civilian applications. It's great. Let's go to Schwedda, she says. Your fear of being cringe is limiting the ceiling of your potential. Well said. Yeah. Everything you want is on the other side of cringe. and a phone call that you don't want to make, which is a form of cringe. Totally. You're cringing thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy Giffon Parliance. Yeah, I see Julian Weissar's commenting here saying we're killing cringe.

Yeah, let's just stop. Everybody just, let's put a year-long pause on cringing, both the act, the worry. And using the word. The word did get played out very quickly, right? But yeah, you got to put yourself out there, take risk. I mean, the beauty is that, I mean, I felt this very deeply when I started the YouTube channel during uh during uh COVID uh because it's so awkward to be on camera the first time and and being a you being an adult man saying I'm going to be a YouTube there's a million things that

are wrong with it right uh so I just didn't tell anyone and I just put it out on YouTube and then the bad ones didn't go viral so yeah no one saw them the the the Schwedah's argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively I guess I guess but there is something to like at least on YouTube, like letting the algorithm sort it out and figure it out and just getting the reps in and stuff. And yeah, maybe. I don't know. Maybe you'd be at 10 million by now. Yeah, maybe.

Maybe. Maybe. Who knows. But yeah, I mean, the beauty is that you have to be really, really bad to get to go viral in a negative way. Most of the time, if you do something that's received as cringe or negative or or dumb, like it just doesn't get views. And so it doesn't matter. So put yourself out there. Let's go to Robin.

Robin says, when SF realizes their Waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from like four high schools in Canada, they're going to go nuts. Yeah, to be honest, John, the smartest VCs I know are actually going even further. They're offering to fund the middle school. Middle school. They're going to these middle schools and saying 100K, uncapped note. Just take it now. And we just want to look once you get through Waterloo, once you're starting a company. Yeah.

You know, people have copied so much of like Peter Thiel's stuff. No one's, no one's done the more aggressive Teal Fellowship of like drop out of middle school, drop out of lower school. Like stop everything. Yeah. We'll give you $200 to skip third grade and try and build a company. I wouldn't be surprised. but yeah probably stay in school kids I think kids are listening to this

I think you can wait I think you can wait until you graduate high school at least to start a company dad I saw the episode yeah back in 2025 you said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school I want to make the leap yep did you see the MCP meme going on yesterday

I didn't see the meme I mean people are just posting about it but Greg here says benchmark idea you fund a model an AI model with $200 in a stripe account, and you give it access to the internet and a large list of MCPs, measure increase in balance at 14, 30, 90, 180, and 360 days.

No developer intervention. Most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar. This is the universal, or not universal basic income. It's that, what is it, artificial economic intelligence? Just once the model can make money, then we're in business because that's very quantifiable. It's a new, it's a new benchmark. Yeah, and I like this.

Yeah, it's, it's going to be very funny when there's just like online activity that does not make sense to humans. Yep. Or it's like some equivalent of these sort of Nigerian like prints, scams or some of these like, you know, you get DMs from NFT projects saying, hi boss, I'd like to, you know, promote, you know, whatever, this sort of spam. There's going to be this sort of AI slop, money making sort of programs running that that you're just going to see as a human and you're

just like like come on but then it works like one out of it every 10,000 times and so that then it becomes a sort of viable economic model so oh man I saw a great AI scam I got to break down for you so it's a 30-minute AI generated deep faked lip sync video of like a priest and And then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer. And if you say this prayer, wealth will come to you. But they just keep talking to you for 30 minutes telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is and how it will transform your life. And then at the very end, after 30 minutes of watching this AI slop, that's very clearly like the mouth isn't aligned properly, but it's like close. There's like a add to cart button.

And the ad card button is just like you pay them and then you get like this prayer that you can say. And it's so funny because they walk through the pitch and they're like, oh yeah. Like I saw this in a corridor crew video. Like, oh yeah, like, you know, like we have to we have to pay for like our servers and stuff to host this prayer. And so you have to pay a little bit. How much is it? How much is it? How much is it?

I don't know. It's probably like 20 bucks or something. But the corridor crew has been doing great, great videos. They're VFX artists. but they also work with all the frontier AI visual tools. And so they highlight a bunch of these AI scams. One of them that was really funny that I saw was they AI generate an image of like a sweater. It's like a cable knit sweater.

And it looks all like Irish and like regal like you're out in like the forest or something. And it's on this like, you know, blonde model. And they run an ad on that. And then when you go to buy it, what they ship you is not a sweater. it's a t-shirt with a sweater printed on it. Because they clearly have the machinery not to make the sweaters, but just to print anything on a t-shirt. No way.

And so you get the AI design that they sold you, but it's just printed on a t-shirt. It's so funny. But at the same time, the quarter crew guys were talking about, hey, they're actually going to do some like AI-generated camo, t-shirts. They're disclosing this. Hello. Do we have someone joining?

Perfect. Perfect timing. Welcome to the show. Let's go. Let's go. I'm pumped. What is it? Nikki Wiki. Oh my God. Rory, I could kill him. I think we've mispronounced your name so many times. Is it Wiskoff? Wish off. Wish off. I'm sorry. Well, now we'll know. So anyway, thank you for joining. Give us a little kickoff. Introduce yourself. Tell us about your fund. Tell us about why you're here today. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So one, thank you so much for having me, huge OG fan. So Nicole Wishoff, Solo GP, I run Wishoff Ventures, which is a fund focused on precedency and stage companies, North America,

and super unsexy businesses, which happy to unpack. Started in 2021, have three funds in about 80 million in assets, and just trying to freaking build this thing as I fly it. So how'd you raise the first fund? First, almost $5 million. I was still operating, so that's my background. And I had met a ton of VCs, raised a few hundred million on the startup side of the world, and learned about VC fund to fund. So Bain, Thrive, Foundation, all of those guys want access to great companies early. And so got a call from a VC friend that was like, you should raise a fund,

your angel investing, let us give you like half a million bucks. The rest is history. So I raised $5 million pretty quickly, I think like $20,000. 20-ish LPs was doing it on the side, decided I loved it. And then in 22, raised 20 last year, raised 50. So it's like, it's actually happening. It's such a narrative, such a narrative violation. One, solo GP that didn't have a Twitter account before you, like the fund came before the Twitter account, which is rare. Two started in 2021 and I've delivered, you know, from all the data that that I've seen a phenomenal performance.

And so it's just, no, it's been amazing to see. How did you, so many people never find their voice online. It felt like you did quickly and it's just, it was natural. And, you know, we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce X content that just completely flops. Yet it seems like you have this effortless ability to just, I think you treat it like a personal, like notes to self almost, but it just resonates. Yeah.

How long did it take you to kind of find that voice? I would say it was from the start, though it wasn't intentional. And I to this day don't have any drafts. Like I could, I think, but maybe I have four in there from like drinking too much and like, you know, like maybe I should be until tomorrow. I have rules. I have rules. I have rules for Twitter. I can go through those.

But so I was in a group chat with like Alex Cohen who like shit posts and like you guys know Alex. And Frank, who's now an investment. Star Lights, be Aaron, don't kill me. And we're in this group chat. It was never on Twitter, not even as like a, I'm scrolling just to see what like lurking. So I actually didn't know how insane people are to each other on it. So I came in and I was like, cool, this is like a cool app in 21. Because Aaron was like, Nicole, you're a VC now.

You have to like use Twitter. And so I hard launch with a $5 million fine. I have like my first viral tweet probably like a week later. And it was something like, I don't know if you guys were even following. You probably know who I was. This was like through a couple years ago. And I said something like, can confirm that it is 10x easier to raise a $5 million fund than to get 500 Twitter followers on X, like without X.

And Alex Cohen retweets it and is like, you guys, you're in a Cola Bone, like she's a loser. And anyway, like totally takes off. So I always say like the first thousand was tough. Yeah. And since then, honestly, like I think, I think a few things. One, I keep them super short. I try to never say like start them with I. And I'm like, hey, you know, had a thought last night, blah, blah, blah.

And then have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about. And then the shorter they are, the more they rip. And so I've stuck to that. I try to just say what I think. It is absolutely backfired. If I don't have one once a quarter that doesn't like bury me alive and VC Braggs is like taking it to the moon, then I'm not doing it. Right. And so I just have to like, I just lean into it.

But that's like kind of the motion that I've, that's been happening. What do you advise your portfolio founders around using X? Because there's no perfect way to use it. There's downsides to everything. I'm sure a lot of your top of funnel deal flow, I'm sure it's through your network, but I'm sure a similar amount is through X. And so I'm sure you invest in companies and they're like, okay, Nicole, teach me how to sort of unlock the platform?

How often are you advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them, you know, hey, you can get some value here? So honestly, because I'm doing pre-seed seed and it's so early, there's so much other out that like if they're focusing on getting like, you know, 10 followers a day, which you guys know you're building this thing too. Like in the beginning, it's slow and then it's not. But like it takes a commitment. It's daily. They could be doing so many other things to de-risk the business for the first at least two years. So I typically don't want to have that conversation until honestly series A, series B. They've got like more of a team. And I've,

by the way, I've advised plenty of companies and try to get it going. And like it just there's no time for it. There's no consistency. So I think it's largely a distraction. Though we'll caveat got this with some people are just naturals. I think you have it or you don't. I don't think it's like this learned skill. Like look at Nikita, like ask him if he ever got help with like tweets. You know, he's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having thick skin and it just works. So if my founders are asking me for help on building a Twitter strategy, it usually means they shouldn't be doing it. And that's most people generally, not even my founders. How sharp are your elbows? your pre-seed seed, I'm assuming you're trying to get, you know, 10% ownership.

I'm sure there's some flexibility there. You put out like, I wouldn't say an aggressive, you don't have an aggressive persona, but, you know, we can tell you're really like an athlete, right? Like, when you're competing for rounds, are you trying to take as much as you possibly can or do you take a more collaborative approach these days? I am a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground. So I would argue something totally different. If you're a series A, take the whole round. You're adding like strategic value. You have a platform and like one fund can do that. So if my founders are like, hey, one fund wants

to take the whole A. I'm like, go for it. I think if your series, like, if you're pre-seed seed, you want all the strategic angels. They're like one call away from an intro to Walmart or like a huge brand that you want. Or like those little things that people like do for you early on. Like actually, I think do help the business. First customers. First. First. tires. So I always try to take, let's say for fun, too, is I wanted to get 5% typical dilution at pre-seed seeds, like 20%, maybe 15. And so I'm never usually having issues like getting that. By the way, I hate hot deals. They're, they never were. I've done all the deals, all the multi-stage funds at pre-seed seed. They're like my worst. Like, I shouldn't say they're,

they're still in business and it's going well, but like they're not standing out and shining any brighter than other companies. Like, this is super hard. And also I paid two X what I should have. And so I hate noise. If there's a ton of funds running in one direction, I just run the other. So like sharp elbows, no, but I try to be super realistic about rounds and structures. Yeah. And really collaborative is the short answer. Where have you made investments that you're still excited about that you're done investing sort of broadly in the category?

So, well, I feel like I'm dipping my toes back in, even though I left for two years. I think, look, lending is really hard in a high industry environment, right? like your facilities are so expensive that like your burn is like through the roof. So for a lot of companies that were trying to build insured tax or lending businesses, they got and they only had maybe two million in the bank. They just never raise another round. Or I was looking at those business thinking, like if I even see this, you're not going to be in the clear for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business. And so I mean, I got my MBA. I feel like right when I started my venture journey on like great markets and horrible markets because fun one is 2021. And I was like,

oh my God, I'm so fucking good at this. And then like, 23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then 24, I was like, you know what? I'm going to stick around and like, you know, figure this thing out. So I think lending's dicey, but now I'm getting excited about it again. So, yeah. What's the vision for the fund going forward? I saw you just hired two people.

Is that right? Is that how big the firm is? Yes. So there are three of us full time and then like outsourced the agency for some of the social stuff and all of that, which is really expensive, actually. And so, yeah, I want to. keep a team super small. I want to stay scrappy. I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers, the team. Like, I want to be fresh. I want to be on calls. Like, I want to be

in the ground, like just doing the work with companies. Longer term, look, I want to be the fund in North America and the categories we invest in. Like, precedency and stage founders, like, want to work with first above anybody else. And that takes time. Like, that's a lot of that's brand. Like, how do we build this repeatable motion of like everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me and I reference well because I like do the work. What about super long term? Private equity arm. Oh my gosh.

Wealth manager going public. Going public. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. Catalyst. You know, why not you? I think I had a tweet once that was like, listen, may I be so successful in venture that I have like a P.

I have a P.E. arm. I have a growth arm. I'm doing like a roll up. I have a fund of funds. I think the last. Trinivs trading, high frequency. Yeah, I was like, I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing because we like no one can manage it all.

Like, which I would say are a lot of these platforms. Like no one could tell you how their fund of funds are doing. Like maybe, you know, honestly like I'm a big fan of small and nimble. Like I think if you realistically, if you want to put up great returns and I think USV has been amazing at this. Like if you ask them and they're doing Series A and their funds are sub 300 like they that keeps them up at night. And like 50 million, that doesn't quite keep me up at night. I'm excited, but I think like going over 150 and you guys can pull this up when I, hopefully if I don't ever do it, but if I do and be like Nicole, but we'll have you on for the

news and then we'll pull up this, this, this clip and we'll say, like Nicole did everything wrong. No, but look, I think there's value, a lot of value in if we want to say that we can legitimately ideally more than 3x, I always try to aim for let's say 5x plus, which by the way, not even $10 million funds, 3X ever. It's just really hard. Then we need to stay. nimble and it's all portfolio construction. So just follow the math and then yeah. Well, we have five minutes. I want to hear about the company. What's going on? Oh my gosh. You guys. So I was not planning to do this, but I was like, John, I might just like hard launch a company. I just co-founded. Do it. So we're doing it. This is the exclusive. This is like no joke. So raise money for it. No one

knows about it except the person that funded it and like my LPs. So I have been investing and just like to tee this up in software companies serving data centers. I think if you follow the power, you and the infrastructure, you'll know where AI is going. So, and then my partner was simultaneously consulting data center, a guide building data centers in Waterloo. So we're both like, wait, there's something here. So we co-founded a business called Kratos, which I think is a good name, but you know, Kravis AI. And we are building next gen AI data centers. Not great venture bets. So there's founder shares in the funds, but no check from the fund in it, though we've raised money from strategic family offices, more of like a private credit, think like 75% debt, 25% equity.

And we're making the case that there's tons of capital going towards hypers. If you're a hyperscaler, you're saying, look, we're going to own the market. And there's only going to be a few of us and everyone's going to use our data centers. And we totally disagree. I think if you're for training, it makes a lot of sense. For inference, you don't need as high latency. So we could be like 100 miles or less from like the tier two, tier three cities and still have solid latency for inference.

So if you start asking around and hopefully people are listening in, like I had a founder tell me in like the YC like alumni channel, all these companies like are like, hey, like who has data center like co-location capacity for us? Like we want to like save costs from hyperscalers. Like where can we go from here? I don't think it's a huge market for these like 10 to 25 megawatt data centers. So working on our first location, 20 megawatts, you guys, this is like the craziest thing I've ever done.

I don't have an active role because like the funds of the baby, but I can certainly help with distribution and fundraising. And the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects. So these are a 20 megawatt facility net like brand new constructions around 100 million. And so, and again, we don't want to give up too much on the equity side. But there's something here and we're going for it. I like it too because even if it's even if it's not a traditional venture. bet if there's common shares in the fund or however you structured it, you could return your fund I imagine off of just this one company, which is amazing. You've done the last question I have,

you've done, you do a bunch of stuff in supply chain. You're a venture capitalist, so obviously you're also a geopolitical expert comes at the territory. How are you, do you think these sort of trade wars are good for a number of your portfolio companies, specifically focused on supply chain management just because there's going to be suddenly it's it's sort of the thing to talk about it's sort of this pressing issue what what and more broadly what advice are you are you giving to those companies in your portfolio yeah i'd say that there's really like one or two that it could directly impact significantly one being a company that's like literally in logistics between mexico and the united states so like part of me is like holy crap like what's the impact

there look ultimately we have to show dominance so like i'm very pro every every type of flex that the administration is putting on both Canada and Mexico, which are most relevant to what I do. And so let's can go, honestly. Like, I think, ultimately, I'm hoping that we're bluffing to get what we want. So my bet is like, oh, my God, keep delaying. I think I just saw the headlines of Canada. They're like, like Trump's delaying it, like 30 days or I don't know what it is. So anyway, I love the flex. I hope it's only a flex. But it would impact what's going on, at least for a couple of our companies. So I'm, like, keeping my fingers in toes crossed. But again, we have to exert dominance, so I'm happy with the administration. I love the energy. Augustus Dorico was

on the show earlier, and he's called Taiwan an American colony. So you guys are both in the same camp. Nicole, it's so great to have you. Congrats on the new company. We would love to have you on. Whenever you have portfolio news, whenever you have fun news, you're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us, technology brother. I love you guys. Thank you so much having me. Thanks so much. Bye. back soon. Now we have Billy. Are you there?

Billy writes. How's it going? It's going great. I'm going to read your post and then you'll kick it off. Enter the sea glider era. The world's first sea glider has hit the water room for 12 passengers and 100% battery powered. The test vehicle is human crude from day one, 65 foot wingspan, 15,000 pounds. Trials are underway.

You're in the back of a car. Break it down. What'd you launch? How's it going? And to be clear, this has always been John's vision for the show. Yes. You can just basically anywhere you are in the world, you just pull up your phone and you're on the show. So welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for calling you. No, thank you guys. You know, the startup grind for sure. So we're hustling right now. But awesome week for Regent. So we're four years old as a company building sea gliders, which are all electric flying boats for regional transportation, dual use. So we're doing regional routes. Imagine like Manhattan to the Hamptons and under an hour for six.

60 bucks going Miami out to the Bahamas or Key West all around the world. So this is the first prototype vehicle. This summer when we fly it, it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history, 15,000 pounds. For now, first big milestone is just getting it on the water and starting some testing. That's amazing. Can you talk about the advantages of being regulated? I believe it's regulated as a boat, but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat. And that seems to be maybe the key insight here that allows you just move faster, bring this to market, and deliver kind of a flying car almost,

or a new plane, a new mode of transportation in a way that's just so much easier and faster and more like a startup pace. Break that down. Yeah, it's exactly right. My background was in the aviation space, and so I was engineering in sort of the beginning of the EV-Tol hype cycle,

which I think we're still very much in. We're starting to see some consolidation there, but, you know, I drank the Kool-Aid. We were building those vehicles. We didn't flew a few. But the sort of the thing I kept hitting my head against the wall was the limited range of an electric aircrafts flying on batteries. You can't really go that far.

And also this billion-dollar decade-long certification pathway. And so we realized that if we sort of brought this electric aviation technology and put it in the maritime domain, we actually saw both problems. The first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water, there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect vehicle. We made up the word sea glider because wing in ground or wig is very difficult to Google. You don't get vehicles when you Google wigs.

But there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the Coast Guard jurisdiction because operationally you're in the waterways anyway. So you're not going into airspace or deconflicting with air traffic. And then on the other side, flying low altitude on this cushion of air, like birds are flying over the water, you're actually really aerodynamically efficient. So we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine. So we solve both problems. That's cool.

Can you break down some of the advantages of going electric? I remember when we talked, it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions. It's also about efficiency and like actually being maintenance and less parts. Can you break all that down for me? That's exactly what I told Bellion in our first pitch meeting. It was exactly that, right? It's, you know, we need to build this business around sustainability of the business model, not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product.

So the driving cost in short haul aviation, if you think of how an airplane ages, it's actually the maintenance costs, the age by the cycles. You take off and land and you're impacting your landing gear. You're expanding and contracting your fuselage when you pressurize it. You're heating up and cooling your engine. So the driving cost on the short haul is actually maintenance. And the short of the route, the more cycles you do, the more you age it. So it's sort of this runaway effect.

If you switch to an all-electric system, now you have very few moving parts. They age by the hour. There's not a lot of heat generated. And so for short haul, electrification makes a ton of sense. And that's actually where the range sort of buys you with electrification. I don't need to cross the ocean. I'm trying to connect people to the metropolitan centers. And there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of

100 to 200 miles today that can get up to 3 to 400 miles with better batteries. So these are routes where it's too far to drive anyways. You get caught in traffic. We don't really have high-speed rail in America or even around the world, but it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself. Yeah. I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it. Why 10, not two?

Big ones. Yeah. So we had our quarter-scale prototype that had the eight propellers on the wing. Our full-scale now has 12 propellers across the weather. So what we're doing, this configuration is called a blown. wing. It's not that clever a name. We blow the wing with the propeller wash coming off the props. And so we're basically tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the wing sees fast moving air, even when the vehicle is moving slowly. And sort of the whole unlock of the sea gliders,

if you're like, you know, this isn't that new. We have sea planes. Why are we doing this? You know, the whole point is that sea planes and flying boats in the past have these planing holes. And so if you've gone over like 10 miles an hour on a boat, in any sea state, you'll know how bumpy that ride gets. So sort of in the best case scenario, it's bumpy and uncomfortable. Worst case scenario, you can't take off at all. That's why seaplanes have never really scaled and they're sort of restricted to lakes and rivers. So we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem.

We do that with hydrofoils. So if you're familiar with America's Cup, Sail GP, the Efoil surfboards. Yeah, we were looking at going with the sale GP here in LA. Have you gone? I haven't yet. We're thinking about going. It seems awesome. You need to go.

And it's so, it's like you will, and you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydrofoil works because it just lifts you off and it's like a magic carpet and it's kind of surreal. So it also makes you appreciate what our flight control system is doing because balancing yourself takes a little while and you fall on. But the point is we get wave tolerance up to five feet on this vehicle. So the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying, the sea gliders are going to. We can take off in five foot seas. hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of the water. And so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that hydrofoil machine. For the first ones that are going to be a slowing design.

We slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydrofoil. So that was actually the other reason why we electrified. Again, the sustainability is a nice benefit, but it's secondary. We electrified because it's economical, and we electrified because it's a pretty good way of disenfranchisage. contributing propulsion on a wing rather than a bunch of different engines or gear boxes. Yeah, that makes sense. Long term, are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating

the routes to obviously making the aircraft? I can imagine this as kind of a JSX that actually owns and develops. Certainly. Can you hear us? Yeah, we definitely thought about it. Yeah, do you got me? Yeah, we're good. I'm on the road.

You still got me? Yeah, we're good. Cool. We definitely thought about it in the early stage. The EV-Tol companies are sort of doing that end-to-end thing. For us, we said, like, this is a brand new mode of transportation. People are going to need to build trust on it. And what better way for both passengers to build up trust and candidly investors to build up trust in this wacky, electric flying boat company,

then to have sort of established brands with already existing operations? be our customers. So our customers are airlines, our customers are ferry companies, our customer is the Marine Corps and the high-speed logistics mission, but those are the entities that are buying sea gliders

and operating it. We're the Boeing or Airbus here. When we founded, I said we're the Boeing of sea gliders. That's become a little taboo. So now I say we're the airbus of sea gliders, which makes me hurt as an American, but here we are. Oh, well, that's amazing.

Can you give us a little background on where the company is, how big you guys are, what you've raised, where you're going next, who you're hiring, that type of stuff. Yeah, we are based in the Silicon Valley of the East of Rhode Island. Yes. So, you know, it's actually a growing technology. Anderals moving into town. There's a few drone boat companies and underwater companies.

So we're really seeing a growth in Rhode Island. You know, does the ocean state, awesome test environment for us? some of the best boat builders in the world, Newport, Rhode Island, home of the Americas Cup. So it was a really great place for us to set up. We're about 100 people now. We actually just broke ground on a 255,000 square foot manufacturing facility, also in Rhode Island. So we're going to be building sea gliders here. We're going to be scaling to another few hundred employees as we spool up our manufacturing.

Expect to open that facility in early 26 and deliver sea gliders and enter service, probably starting in Hawaii. or Miami or some of the top two that our early customer wants to go to. And that entry to service in like late 26, early 27. That's fantastic. Amazing. Jordan, you have anything else? We got to host a show in one of these bad boys as you can. It's been a dream of ours to do it from the air.

I want to take it out to California. Yeah, yeah, we got to come out. Yeah, yeah, we got to go out there. Well, I mean, thank you so much for calling in, giving us the update firsthand. We'll share the video and repost the clip. it's fascinating stuff and we really appreciate everything you're doing so thanks for calling in

and we'll talk to you soon give us a call back when there's more news you got it I'll see you and Rodee we'll go on and see you lighter fantastic see you and Rody we'll see you bye that was great that's wild

yeah I don't know if you can pull up the video Ben but they have some video of the plane and it's yeah I mean it's it's remarkable like it just feels like I mean we're talking about this with Gary like the the pace of play And it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something. But like it just seems more doable to get a, you know, like tens, 20 million, 50 million together.

And then go and build a big, you know, prototype and actually fly it around. And people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying, how to do the right. Yeah. All the regulatory stuff. And finding the regulatory arbitrage. That's my favorite thing about Regent. Like I think that the tech is cool, obviously. but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that operates in the maritime domain

and just accelerate everything that they do. So I love that. As soon as I heard that, I was like, oh, this is like, this is something that I really want to follow. And it is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical.

Yeah, yeah, you can take a look at it here. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty sick. The biggest. People on Apple podcasts are having a bad time.

Yeah, they're having a bad time. Well, we will describe it. It's a cool play. And do you see, they christened it with champagne and they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they used in Europe. America, undefeated. I love it.

But yeah, I mean, 12, I guess three engines on each wing. And it just coasts along the surface. And we had a friend of the show asking us, when are the, one of the billionaires going to start building hydrofoil yachts? I think this is the beginning of that trend. We've talked about the land yacht that can do. with a massive drill. And yeah, this is the next evolution. Anyway.

Amazing. Let's go back to the timeline. We love to see it. And then close out the show. That's our first time having a guest call in while on the back of an Uber. Yeah. And it worked. It worked.

We had a brief moment, but he's... No, I mean, that is my goal for the show. Someone post something. They're announcing it. You know, you'd go on, you know, you want to amplify it. Just come and talk about it on the show. show. And so we'll, I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those. I love this post by Alexander Wang over at scale AI. He says, reminder of American exceptionalism, U.S. companies make up 74% of global

market cap. Returns of the S&P since 2008 are 297% versus the rest of the world at 4,000. It's pretty ridiculous. And it's funny because like, hit the gong, John. Yeah, hit the gong for America. I mean, it's funny because the narrative in so much of the media is like things are more chaotic than ever. We're so divided. Everything's terrible. And it's like, you know, when the right wing's in power, the left wing

says it's all terrible. And when the left wing's in power, the right wing's in terrible. But when you zoom out, even just, you know, 15 years, you can see that America's doing pretty well. Pretty well. And I remain extremely bullish on America. But there's not much more to say about that. All of our guests today have been extremely long.

America. Exactly. As they should, as Americans. There was some bad news about the American economy. There was a big miss on ADP payrolls. You saw this from Joe Wisenthal, right? Yeah. They expected 140,000 new jobs added. It came in at 77,000. This is just one economic indicator. But if you've been following the markets and kind of the back and forth, the kangaroo market, right? Yeah. That's what it's called, right? Bouncing around. This is one of the data points that people have been pointing to. We don't go too deep into the economic data, but everyone is,

everyone's worried about, you know, job prospects and job growth. But let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says, overheard at Blue Bottle. Technology Brother A, I love that he's using that term. Hadn't heard anything from Mock

since that hit piece thought they were dead. Technology Brother B says, gnaw dog, it's called show, don't tell. Mock, a reference to he had a new, mock had a new video drop i think it was tuesday yep very very cool yeah they seemed to have made a bunch of progress yep um and uh you never let a hit piece get you down just keep building they're not they're not uh they're not uh you know given in to the to the negativity so love to see it jeff was an early investor uh in mok and he has is building a reputation for sticking with founders when the media

uh totally turned on them yep and i think that that is one of the most important reputations that you can build because it's easy for an investor to be your best friend when everything's going great, but to double, you know, double down on supporting somebody when they're in this sort of darkest period of their company is what really matters. Totally. Very cool. And I'm talking with Jeff's team right now about having him come on the show.

It'd be great. Very soon. So excited for that. Yeah. I hope he's wearing a tank top looking absolutely shredded and. Absolutely dice. Jeff's always known that it's underpriced. he dies. He is.

And open, we want, we would host a temp check weekly for Jeff. Segment on the show. Yeah. For weekly segment. We need temp check segment. Every single week. Jeff, you don't have to do any production. Well, I mean, you do have to continue working out.

Yeah, that's the key thing. You got to. But you could do the temp check while working out. You got to spam the delts and get the shoulders popping and get the bisonming delts. Because, yeah, we, we don't want to scrony Jeff Lewis on the shall. That's unacceptable. But, you know, as long as the takes are hot and he's sporting founders. It's great. Yeah. I hung out with Ethan. I want to say like a year or two ago. And I mean, obviously the company's been like up and down. There's been this hit piece that everyone's mentioning.

But he just seems like someone who's like really, really driven and is going to do something at some point very cool. And it's just like a good person to have on the America team. Yeah. And I think they're iterating on product too. Yeah, totally. And they also, to be clear, they announced a U.S. Army contract and that they're building a weapons factory. It's great. Yeah. We need more people building more cool stuff.

So, you know, I'm excited to see Ethan get through the rise and fall and rise again. And I hope that he's successful. Let's go to David. VCs are living out again, vibe shift. I didn't put that in. You didn't put this in? We don't talk about politics. I don't know who they're talking about, but it is hilarious.

It is clear that if you wanted to be contrarian, you had to... VCs for Kamala. Yeah, that was the actual contrarian move, for sure, which to sign the list, even though... Although Gavin Newsom, people are saying, like, he's completely vibe shifted his way and went on some Charlie Kirk show. That was him having Charlie Kirk on his show. Wait, Gavin Newsom has a podcast? He has a podcast. No way.

Really? Oh, okay. Interesting. I mean, clearly there's going to be a, there's going to be a vibe shift. And, but everyone's lost on this. Everyone's like, I don't see it. Elaborate. Like, who nature is healing.

People are having fun with it. Who knows? Anyway, flock safety is raisin. Katie Roof has a scoop. Andresen's leading around. Jeff Lewis company. Yeah, it is. We should have a wanted to talk about when the funding finally breaks.

7.5 billion for flock safety. They make cameras that sell to police departments and a bunch of other equipment. kind of the palenteer of local governments, that's been like a big question is like, is that possible? It's such a different sales motion because you're not just going lobbying in DC. You have to go district by district. But when you get in and when you're installed, it's very, very sticky, very low chart. Yeah. And so I think they're doing it. Great finances. Great, great cohorts, great company. Interesting team. And I want to get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company.

And it seems like a very important task, obviously. Anyway, let's move on to Autism Capital. They say, if Steve Jobs were still alive, he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of Apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality because we have an imperative as the steward of innovation to drive humanity forward and build the tools of tomorrow. Interesting, rare like hard post. I feel like this account mostly posts like news and clips and stuff. Yeah, breaking. Also, his post on X would be fire. He'd be arguing and calling people the R word all day long.

I don't know if that'd be that good. Here's the main thing is that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an incredible amount. You talked about this earlier. I think they have 60 right now, 60 billion. But they have returned over a trillion over the past like 15 years. Yeah. Apple spent an estimated $150 million over 30 months to develop the first iPhone.

Million? Oh, $1. 150 million. So so crazy. Steve would have seen what's possible, you know, obviously there's been inflation and, you know, whatever, you could come up with a bunch of excuses. But you have to imagine that he would be running it like a startup internally and saying, you know, and sort of going founder mode. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like the algorithm would probably be just, you know, make, make like crazy, decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product market fit with yourself. Do you believe that Tim Cook Daily drives in Apple Vision Pro? Or do you think he's

churned from it? Churned for sure. I think everyone kind of churned. Yeah. Except for that one guy, I forget. Yeah. There was one writer who mentioned that he was still using it. I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while. And I want to be using it. It's so close to being to being good. It's not quite there. What else should we close the show out with? Oh, this is a great one from Matt Lasky. Wife just taught me the professional way to say, told you so, is this was identified early on as a likely outcome. I'm going to be using this a lot.

I love this one. I just thought it was funny. Yeah, I put this one in. We got to start. We wouldn't honestly use that because our culture is, well, no, our culture internally is we try to make, You know, you don't take a victory lap on a, and I told you so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're working and you're trying to, you know, take the job of your CEO,

this is a great line. This was identified early as a likely outcome and, you know, really take the victory lap on a poor outcome. Yes. Where else should we end up? There's some other news. Apple unveiled Mac Studio with M4MX, M3 Ultra. every time I see one of these, I'm like, eh, it's like nothing, but then I'm like, I want one.

I always just want the latest thing. Even though Packy was making fun of them for the new iPad that looked exactly the same, I was like, that would make me happy for five minutes. For five minutes. Exactly. Unboxing of Apple products still feels good. And then you're like, oh, okay, it's just like,

I'm not using it. I don't notice once I open up the Chrome tab. And the other news is Alexis O'Hanian is now bidding for TikTok with a blockchain integration plan. Yep. So we He's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it. He also is relaunching Dig with Kevin Rose, which is awesome. Actually, it reminds me.

I got to email back his team. Yep. Yep, we're going to be on. He's going to be coming on at 1230 tomorrow to talk about everything he's cooking on. He was going to come on today, but he was traveling. I said he's got this amazing home studio. I told him, wait until you're back home. Okay.

Come on then. So I'm excited to have him back on. I say we save some of these posts. Let's end on a joke from Base Barron, who's been an early listener of the show. We invested by following him when he had 200-something followers. Yeah, it was like buying Bitcoin in the 90s. Yeah, exactly.

Or Solana in the early 2000s. Base Barron says, I love Ramp so much that I broke up with my ex-girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management. Call that my Brex. I've read this. It's still funny when you read it. It's still funny. Oh, silly. Good one. Anyways, great show today.

Yep. I thought our guests were fantastic. I thought there was a lot of fun. Good mix. I think we're dialing in the format. Little news, little timeline. We got to put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest. But think of it more as like you walk into a house party. Yeah. I don't know if we want to keep the house party vibe going or maybe we want to use the waiting room, which is like a feature on. Zoom, but we'll keep dialing it in. Stay tuned for more. We're never satisfied. We're going to keep changing it up, keep you guessing. This was just two weeks ago. We'd never had a guest and we'd done something like 60 episodes. And now we've had more guests than most people have in a year of

podcasting. I think we had like, what, 15 already this week or something like that. Oh, wow. Anyway, by the way, we got some breaking news from the chat. Story shared that intuitive machines, Athena, lunar lander, landed on the moon this afternoon, but the company has no idea where it is. What? Oh. And this is live. I'm on the New York Times, famed technology publication in New York Times.

It's intuitive machines, a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2024 landing set at spacecraft. Athena has power and is communicating, but may not be upright. It's unclear how that might impact the mission. Imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing. and then you're on your, you know, your rovers turn to the side. That is, that is rough. So this story is unfolding. Well, good luck to them.

If you need somebody to go up there in a space suit and tip it over. I'm happy to do that. I'm fully expecting to go. John 6.8, by the way. I'm fully expecting to go to the moon within my lifetime. Yep. That's something I'm very confident of. Yep.

It's going to happen. Yep. Anyway, that's our show. Thanks for watching. Thank you. Stay tuned for the next one. We'll see you tomorrow.