TBPN - GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, Coatue Bets Big on Blue Origin, Cheaper Vision Pro Delayed | Vincent Weisser, Ben Thompson, Rodrigo Liang, Alana Palmedo, Byron Boots, Will Mayer, Tucker Brown

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

(00:41) - Coatue Bets Big on Blue Origin (05:39) - Cheaper Vision Pro Dead (14:04) - Getty x Shutterstock Deal Dies (21:17) - Empty IBM Campus Goes Viral (28:52) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (32:44) - OpenAI Launches GPT-Live (36:21) - GPT-5.6 Goes Public This Week (41:16) - Vincent Weisser, co-founder and CEO of Prime Intellect, announced the company's $130 million Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation, aimed at building an open superintelligence stack. He discussed how Prime Intellect provides a comprehensive platform for training, deploying, and continuously improving AI models, enabling enterprises to develop their own AI agents without relying on closed-source frontier models. Weisser highlighted the company's rapid growth, achieving an annualized revenue run rate of over $100 million, and emphasized the importance of decentralized AI development for broader accessibility and innovation. (01:01:31) - Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, discusses Microsoft's Xbox strategy, highlighting the company's shift from traditional console sales to a subscription-based model with Xbox Game Pass. He critiques this approach, noting that while it aimed to attract a broader audience, it primarily cannibalized existing sales without significantly expanding the market. Thompson suggests that Microsoft's substantial investments in acquisitions and Game Pass have not yielded the expected growth, leading to internal challenges and strategic reevaluations. (01:29:28) - Rodrigo Liang, co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, announced the company's completion of a $1 billion Series F funding round at an $11 billion valuation. He emphasized the growing importance of fast AI inference in enterprise applications and highlighted partnerships with major firms like JPMorgan Chase for secure, on-premises AI solutions. Liang also discussed the company's focus on delivering high-performance, low-latency AI infrastructure that integrates seamlessly into existing data centers. (01:40:54) - Alana Palmedo, Managing Partner at Paradigm, co-leads the firm's investment and research efforts, focusing on frontier technologies such as crypto, AI, and robotics. In the conversation, she discusses Paradigm's recent $1.2 billion fundraise aimed at investing in emerging technologies, the firm's expansion beyond its initial focus on crypto to include broader frontier themes, and the importance of supporting both early-stage founders and larger, later-stage companies. (01:50:14) - Byron Boots, co-founder and CEO of Overland AI, discusses the company's development of autonomous ground vehicles for defense applications, highlighting their modular design capable of integrating various payloads, including remote weapon stations and drones. He emphasizes the advantages of wheeled vehicles over robotic dogs for military operations, citing their payload capacity and energy efficiency. Additionally, Boots shares that Overland AI secured a $20 million contract with the U.S. Marine Corps to produce autonomous ground vehicles supporting the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS). (01:57:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:01:08) - Will Mayer, co-founder and high priest at Cold Holdings, began his career creating skateboard films for companies like Vans, which sparked his passion for brands and their cultural significance. He discusses his work with Polymarket, highlighting the rapid development of a viral campaign featuring Rick Rubin, and emphasizes the importance of doctrine, ritual, symbols, charismatic leadership, and identifying an enemy in building cult-like brand followings. Mayer also shares insights on the oversaturation of advertising content, the value of contrarian perspectives, and his approach to scaling creative ventures by incubating startups and accepting equity as compensation. (02:17:43) - Tucker Brown, managing partner of Compound Creative Holdings, discusses his 15-year tenure at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), where he led significant transactions, including a $100 million investment in Dude Perfect. He highlights the evolution of creators into enterprise builders, emphasizing the need for appropriate capital structures and operational support to foster sustainable growth and lasting value in creator-led businesses. TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.comCodex - http://openAI.com/codexFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Watching TVPN. Today's Wednesday, July 8, 2026. And we are live from the TVPN Ultramal, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp. Time is money, saved both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting,

and a whole lot more all in one place. That's right. It's great to be back. Yes. The Invest Like the Best, hype song really, He really has, I don't know, it just burned its way. It puts me into an incredible mental state.

100%. You know who else is in a good mental state? Jeff Bezos, because he's getting a markup on the $25 billion he's putting into. He's marking himself up. He's marking himself up. Alongside Kutu. Yeah, the news is that Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. He's participating a fund Koto, who he is also invested in through the,

his family office is also participating. But there will be an opportunity for some other true outsiders to get their first slice of Blue Origin. Andrew Ross Sorkin had the scoop in the New York Times today. You have to wonder if this is gossip coming out of Sun Valley. The company is raising $10 billion. This is the first outside fundraise. It's hilarious to think about this 25-year-old company as being previously bootstrapped,

but that's technically what it is, basically. One founder's capital, just chipping away at a really hard problem for a quarter century. And now we are here. Bezos has been funding this basically solo on his quest to visit the stars. He's doubling down. And people can't really complain about the valuation because he's a big part of setting the price. Yeah, yeah. So he's doubling down.

He's putting in $2 billion directly. And Co2 is getting twice as much allocation, $4 billion. There's another interesting KOTU tidbit I alluded to earlier from the New York Times piece. Bezos's family office is a major investor in KOTU's innovative strategies fund, which is focused on emerging technology startups. So I'm not sure if the money's coming out of that fund specifically, but there is a connection there. He's been building a relationship with KOTU for a long time, and they are optimistic about Blue Origin's prospects. The valuation is expected to be $130 billion, big for a private company. I was listening to Gavin Baker and Travis Kalanick talk about how crazy it was when Gavin was at Fidelity.

And he wanted to value Uber at $14 billion. And everyone thought he was crazy. The valuation turned into an auction, came in at 17. And everyone was like, this is unprecedented. We've never seen a private company this big. And now $17 billion, even $60 billion in the private markets, looks quaint by modern standards in an era where we have several trillion dollar. private companies, many up in the 100 billion plus range. It's a wild, wild time.

Brian wants us to warm up the gong. We got to warm up the gong. Warm up the gong for Bezos. Give it a couple warm up hits just to get it warm. Just to get it warm. Here we go. Fantastic. Nice and warm.

Yes. So the Elon Bulls are saying, And all SpaceX is under price now because you have to imagine, I don't know if there's an exact revenue figure that's leaked for Blue Origin, but based on the size of that business, it has to be small. And so this has to be a very high multiple. But you're not really valuing this company on cash flow or even revenue. You're valuing it on the capability, which is it's the second company in the world, I believe,

to bring a rocket to orbit, land it successfully, you know, prove reusability. They got there before China, which has been trying to copy SpaceX for years. And so lots of really solid progress. Of course, there was that setback with the launch pad that exploded. But they figured out a solution to that. And things are chopping along just fine. The company is estimated to burn $5 billion this year. So this looks like a pretty standard 12 to 18 month fundraise at $10 billion.

And it's burned something like $27 billion to date, which a billion a year. on average over 25 years. Not too bad for such an ambitious project. Still a lot of money, but a big opportunity. And you have to imagine, there are a number of other comps like AST SpaceMobile, as you like to call. AST Space Mobile.

ASTS. It's 27, $28 billion. $30 billion company. And I don't believe that they've gotten much to orbit yet. They've done some experiments, some tests. They're still early. But it's a huge market. and we've seen how fast...

They have concepts of mass to orbit. Yeah. And we've seen how fast rocket lab and various... It's a really, really big market. And so when you're going after a big opportunity and you've been working out a long time, and you've got Jeff Bezos funding it, lots of reasons to be optimistic.

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB, don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Another comp investors would certainly look at would be Rocket Lab sitting at just under 50 billion and uh there'll be multiple players in launch yeah that is for sure well we have some heartbreaking news heartbreaking news apple has scrapped plans for a cheaper Apple vision pro display and is winding down work at samsung this is from

mac rumors really hits me and the other three Applevision pro fans particularly hard brutal i did i do Who did I talk to? I talked to somebody who said that they actually are a daily user of the Apple Vision Pro. I thought I was in the top 1%. Was it the founder that's making... Yes, that's right. Yeah, he says he watches it. He uses it every night or something like that.

That's a lot of Apple Vision Pro use. Obviously, the product never really found product market fit. Although we have one in the studio, we've been having fun with it. I still think it's an incredible piece of technology. But a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. the developers never showed up. And it was very expensive, very heavy, very cumbersome. It requires a lot to put that thing on to watch Lawrence Arabia.

But when you do, it's worth it. It's worth it. What do I watch most recently? I watched Dunkirk in it, and I watched Godfather Part 2, and Master and Commander. Master and Commander, that's a great movie, especially in Vision Pro. Really, you want to be in the cinematic feel. Feel like you're on a warship. So Apple has reportedly stopped development on a cheaper display for a lower cost vision pro.

This feels like what the industry needs to move forward. The actual display was fantastic. It just needed to be cheaper and lighter so more people could get them. That at least was my thesis, but Apple disagrees with me. What do I know? So supplier Samsung display expected to formally end the project by September. And if you remember, there were rumors of the crazy hoops that Apple had to jump through to get that incredible display because they really leapfrogged meta, who had been working with the acquisition

of Oculus, and they'd been improving the display fidelity. They got rid of the screen door effect. They were increasing the resolution per eye. Everything was getting better about that display, but on a very linear trend. And allegedly, what Apple did was they went to Samsung and said, we know that you are working on next year's display. You're also working on displays two years out, three years out, four years out. Now, what's the problem with the one that's four years out? Well, it's amazing, but it's not ready for manufacturing at scale. It's not on an automated line.

It needs a lot of manual work to get it to actually produce, and there's crazy low yield. So in chips, in displays, yield rules everything. If you run the machine a bunch of times, you want to get 99.9% yield 90%. in the early days when you're prototyping a new technology, you might be getting just a few percent yield. And Apple said, that's fine. We'll just jack up the price and pay a ton for these cutting edge displays, jump to the front of the category with the best display technology. We'll charge a fortune for it, but we'll have the best product. And that will be our market entry strategy. And so I was waiting for that display technology to commoditize because it's been a few years. I thought it would just naturally get cheaper.

It probably has, but it has not solved the problem of virtual reality, augmented reality. We haven't seen someone pick up. Do you think they're just bearish on the near term of people watching movies? Maybe, yeah. In VR? Because I don't, they're certainly not stopping R&D on their specs and their sort of everyday glasses product. And so it might just be that they studied you. and found that you're built different,

and you're one of one, the only person on Earth. No, no, I mean, truly, like, sitting down and watching a full movie is a rare experience today. People aren't reading, they aren't watching movies. They're just scrolling, and people seem to be satisfied with their phone. And also, the nature of a Doom Scroll

is somewhat interactive, somewhat multiplayer, although, obviously, people see it as brain rotting and very isolating. There is a game to be played by, actively scrolling, which is something that doesn't require virtual reality, certainly not enhanced by virtual reality, but then also sometimes you want to read the comments. Sometimes you want to send it to a friend. Sometimes you want to fact check it and ask AI about it or spin off and do something else and go to someone's profile. So I think the number of taps and user interaction experiences in a doom scroll session are obviously much, much higher than watching a film, which you just put on and hopefully you don't pause it at all.

you're engrossed the entire time from start to finish. And so if that becomes, as scrolling means more and more, maybe the VR experience is less and less relevant. So the cheaper display on the Apple Vision Pro, or maybe the Apple Vision Slim or Mini or something, I don't know, they could have used a different name. Pro always left the door open to just the regular Apple Vision at a more approachable price point.

But the cheaper display that they were working on would have cut the heads. sets pixel density roughly in half, that's not what they do at all. They need to keep that pixel density because that's the best part of the experience. The move likely reflects Apple's broader shift towards smart glasses, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, previously reported that Apple paused work on a lighter, cheaper vision air, yeah, that's the term, in October 2025, to fast track its Rayban-style glasses effort. This does not mean the Vision Pro itself has been canceled. Apple refreshed the headset in October.

2025 with an M5 chip, which does very little, slightly better tracking. I think you can run some applications at slightly higher fidelity, but it is, by all accounts, essentially an identical device. But they are long overdue for a proper refresh if they were taking this seriously and thinking about this as a true growth driver. I think they have recognized that this was an experiment that needs to be put on the backburner for at least a little bit. And so this report only suggests the cheaper display project is no longer moving forward.

So the Vision Pro fans have hope. It's not fully canceled. Maybe there's something else going on. Maybe there's more in the works. But anyway, it's interesting. With all the acceleration and AI, I was hoping that we would get some advancements in this, since it is an adjacent technology, but we've been few and far between on the updates. We've got to get an update from the big screen VR team because they have done a great job creating high fidelity VR that's also lightweight, but it needs to be tethered to a PC.

It's a little more prosumer, a little more dev kit styling. VR really attracts these like visionary chads that are willing to go that seem, no, no, I'm actually, I could make that joke, but I won't. But just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time to ride through the hype cycles and just like keep building. I think Big Screen is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product. He's, from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet, like so committed to just like winning. And so I really appreciate that about the category. Yeah. Let's see how Apple's doing on the news. Are they trading up or trading down? I push the button. Will it come up? We'll see. Next time. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma agents. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Production teams are swearing at the team chat.

Well, here is a crazy story. I mean, it's such a minor story, but it certainly grinds my gears. I think we're going to dig into it and see what you. think what I think once we dig into it but Getty images we know and love them from their trove of Silicon of Silicon Valley Titans photographed at Sun Valley which is happening now if you don't have a Getty Images subscription sign up now because you're going to be first to know when the new Josh Kushner paparazzi photo drops but Getty images was planning to merge with shutter stock these are two essentially stock photo sites in theory, they should be absolutely decimated by AI image generation. Meta put out a new one, Muse Muse Image.

Nanobanana Pro has been fantastic. Images, too, from OpenAI, has been really good. And, like, they're honestly getting to the point where a lot of the example images are just like, okay, that's just a photo. I saw Adam Masseri posted some on Instagram, and I was like, is this AI, or did you just take this photo? Like, it's just you. And then he did a couple with filters and hair and crazy hair. And those were cool.

And that breeds creativity. So I think there's a lot of value in the technology. But in terms of just like I'm trying to illustrate, I'm trying to make a point visually. I need a picture of a forest. AI image generation is very, very competitive with the stock image industry. And this should have, this should be a business that's sort of affected like the way, you know. Well, yeah, I imagine a lot of. A lot of these businesses, their net new revenue over the last couple of years is just working with labs that need.

Licensing, yeah, all sorts of things. So certainly in the face of growing competition, consolidation of an industry is very normal. That makes a lot of sense. This doesn't seem like it should raise any regulatory flags. And yet it did in the United Kingdom. Getty Images has called off the shutter stock deal after the UK created some barriers around. it. So the $3.7 billion deal would have created a visual content company able to offer a more expansive library to users, says the Wall Street Journal. So on Tuesday, Getty delivered a written

notice to shutter stock terminating their planned tie-up, which was first announced in January of 2025 and received clearance from the Justice Department in America in April. So pretty quick turnaround in the United States. The $3.7 billion deal would have created a visual content company able to deliver a more expansive library to users, helping meet booming demand for licensed images and videos as artificial intelligence disrupts the business of content creation. Getty's stock slipped 1.7% in premarket trading. Shares of shutter stock ticked up 1%. So maybe the Shutterstock shareholders are happy about remaining an independent company. The termination came after Getty last week said that its board voted to not proceed with the deal if it meant

selling Shutterstock's editorial business, a condition required by the UK competition and markets authority. So the decision to, by Getty to abandon its merger with Sutterstock was ultimately a commercial choice. So the chair of independent inquiry group that led the CMA's investigation of the deal, the inquiry group found that a loss of competition between the two businesses would reduce choice for UK media outlets and could lead to higher prices. And I would I would assume that this would give them some sort of pricing power in the face of, you know, essentially unlimited free editorial images in the form of AI generated images. If you want to go with the real thing, you have to pay a little bit more.

But that sort of offsets all the pressure of the customers that are leaving and no longer paying because they don't need to pay because they're generating them with generative AI. So this felt like a very logical story. and I'm a little bit uncertain that this is a good decision for the UK to help these businesses. It feels like it's just going to wind up hurting both of them. Yeah. Are UK media outlets not allowed to use AI content? I don't think that there's any broad rule against it.

No. So it would be a deliberate choice. And I'm sure there's plenty. I imagine the Financial Times does not use AI images. And that's by choice, and they make that very clear. And there's probably a disclosure. And of course, they will use an AI image if they're talking about the AI image industry. But in terms of what you see on the front page of the financial tense, it's almost always editorial images.

Yeah, that image. This is from Reuters. And that is an editorial distribution and something that is licensed. And occasionally they need a photo to illustrate something. And they might use AI. Okay. So I was trying to figure out. why the headline number here was 3.7 billion.

Because it was based on the January 6th, 2025 share prices, not today's prices, which are far, far, far lower. Shatterstock is sitting at $329 million market cap. Getty is at $340 million market cap. So these businesses have been really, really beat up over the period since they decided, hey, we should tie up. Interesting. So is there, is there a potential? So the UK, I think regulators are actually trying to just kick these companies while they're down.

Is that what's happening? Or is in a situation where Getty, I mean, that is possible. I mean, it could just be like a just a complete mistake. I mean, as you go back to Meta and you think about the, the, the U.S. regulators blocked Meta from buying a VR fitness company that they said would create a monopoly in the VR fitness industry. And of course, like, the VR fitness industry, like, never happened. Like, it's not a, it's not an industry worth monopolizing. And so if you think about, you know, the business model of Quest, like, would it have been advantageous? Maybe. But it's worth letting meta take a shot at that and see if having a VR fitness company in the portfolio will actually get that product to, you know, to scale. Tyler, what do you have to say about this?

Another interesting anecdote is the UK blocked meta from buying GIFI in 2020. Yes. So to prevent a monopoly in gifts, I presume this could be pretty dangerous. Yes, which is also odd. Does Giffie power the gifts that you see in I message? You know what I'm talking about? When you go to, you go to there's Gen Moji, there's stickers, and then there's also hashtag images. And you can find images and you can send, you know, different pictures and gifts. I wonder if these are from Giffy or it. It's powered by Bing. Powered by Bing. Okay, so there's competition in this market. Yeah. I don't know. Amanda says Canva doesn't label AI and their stock images.

It's so annoying. So, yeah, I didn't even know Canva was a player here. But it would make sense. So if you're in Canva and you want to have a picture of a forest on your greeting card and you can pick from a library, some of them will be generated, some of them won't. And they probably also have a generative AI tool where you can generate a new image. but if you're just looking for a generic stock image that's already been described, you can probably pull from whatever libraries out there. Yeah, Canva partners with Getty images, but then they're also featuring generated images.

Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. There is another interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on the cover, the front page of the main... section the what do they actually call the main section there's the business and finance section is this just world news i don't know anyway uh on the cover of the wall street journal it's the world's

creepiest office and people won't stay away this is the new york complex vacated by ibn has become a magnet for urban explorers we have a video of this place and if you're a scrappy startup looking to expand this might be the key to success the ultimate lock-in factory in sort of rural New York, I think. We'll get into it. So this is in Summers, New York. I don't know exactly how far away that is from Manhattan. Yeah.

So if you were like a neolab and your name was like ominous intelligence. Yeah. This could be a great sort of HQ, potentially, you know, your first little micro data center. Very James Bond villain sort of vibe. and yeah, it looks like you could make it, you know, really, really homey. How far is it from Manhattan? Let's see. Okay.

It is one hour. You can be in the city in an hour. Imagine walking these halls late at night after a long day at work. Yes. It wouldn't be creepy at all. Yes. Robert Carlton was getting the mail one day in April when he saw a group of teenage boys sprinting away from nearby. woods. He cut them off at the road and raised his arms. I just said, stop, it's over. The 62-year-old

retired engineer recalled. Soon, he said, three pursuing New York State police troopers emerged from the tree line and arrested seven juveniles, the criminal charge trespassing on the former IBM campus here. Disrespecting international business machines. Don't do it, folks. The long-vacid site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers who Prowl, abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories, and any other unused, disused structure they can breach. Enough of the graffiti. Yeah. Do you think put a...

How dare they? We got to figure out how much power this building is. How dare they write all over the former home of international businesses? Yeah, exactly. What was the IBM AI, Watson? Watson, the machine intelligence was. was probably birth here. It's still at the frontier.

It's still at the frontier. It was super intelligent at jeopardy. The global urbax, which is short for urban exploration phenomenon, Urbax isn't new, but it's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, luring more curiosity seekers. Police in Livingston, New Jersey recently warned people to stay out of the closed Livingston Mall property, Jacksonville, Bee.

Florida, police issued a similar caution in April about the shuttered adventure landing amusement park going into an abandoned amusement park. That is thrill-seeking at its best. We are aware of a TikTok challenge to explore the property. Who's doing these TikTok challenges? Should they be allowed to post those? This is dangerous for some people. I mean, seriously, you go in there, there's a lot of brick and glass and who knows about

the structural integrity of a building that hasn't been inhabited in years or decades? Could be very risky. on the market? Well, we have some news about that. I don't know if it's actually on the market, but I imagine if you make them an offer, they can't refuse. This property could be yours.

So Sebastian Capital, the Manhattan company that manages the 723-acre site. That's a lot of size. It says it is beefed-up security and appreciates helps from police. So I'm shocked by the YouTube comments that are wholly coming to the defense of this building. They're saying, I hate there's a class of people who see something like this and feel compelled to start breaking things.

Why do people vandalize these kinds of places? Interesting. I can't believe. These are all the top comments. I can't believe people go in there busting up the place. That's crazy. I would have sort of expected people to be on the side of the urban explorers on the side of the TikTok challenge challengers. Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer, said a 15 second clip isn't worth a criminal record.

Don't do it. If you've already been arrested, you're not the first call we've taken. taken this month, and you won't be the last. Proto says he has represented or advised several minors arrested on the campus. The Summers town court clerk said some defendants received a six-month adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, meaning charges will be dropped, and their arrest will be sealed if they avoid trouble. Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe and preserve ethos

and reject vandalism. They say they're driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming, forbidden spaces, and and a zeal to document discoveries, and that they're careful and know their limits. Quote, it actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble, said Bradley Garrett, a cultural photographer and author of the book, Explore Everything, Place Hacking the City,

about his own Urbex of Adventures. He sees urban exploration as a gateway drug in a good way, sometimes into intellectual curiosity about history and culture. So you go, you break into this abandoned building, and then next thing you know, you're an IBM consultant driving enterprise value for S&P 500 companies, traveling, a businessman. Could happen. Who knows?

Could happen. Raghav wants to turn it into an Amman. Amon would be good. Data Center seems obvious, depending on the power. What about the first Amman with the data center? With some local AI. Both. So quickly, you asked about the price.

In 2016, IBM sold the property for $31.75 million. and it's owned by LLC that shares a Fifth Avenue address with Sebastian Capital, so everyone suspects Sebastian's in on the deal, a plan to convert it to a private school, foundered during COVID, and Sebastian said it is considered. Wait, floundering is like failing, but yes, foundered. So floundered would be, you know, another appropriate term for what happened. But it did not, it was not successfully converted into a private school, obviously. But if you want to take a wild swing, go pick it up, make Sebastian Capital an offer.

Let's see. I wonder what it would trade for today. Lots of work to be done. Car and driver. Quickly. Tyler had something on the IBM complex. Yeah. So, okay. You plan on to go?

1.1 million square feet. Historically, you'd see, like, I think, something like around 10 watts per square feet. Okay. Maybe it's a little bit higher tech versus IBM. Okay. 80s. An estimate, I think, is reasonable is around 20 megawatts. 20 megawatts. Yeah. So you're looking at a small data center. Is there any natural gas in the ground? Can we frack? Can we put solar panels on the roof? Can we build a nuclear reactor there?

What are our options if we want to get this thing churning out tokens? We want to turn it into a token machine. Interesting. We should go check it out. Anyway, let's move on to the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And Jordy. Car and driver says 2026 Lucid Gravity available with no interest due to no interest. What? Several months after launching the 2027 gravity, Lucid still has plenty of 2026 models. So it's offering customers an interest-free loan incentive. Okay. I wonder how long there's no interest on the loan. That seems like a good deal. Ucid is a very well-reviewed car, very luxurious interior, very polished product for some of the higher, more performance-oriented trims, incredible zero to 60 times, incredible range.

I think Larry David has one. They're well-reviewed cars, but it's a electric vehicle, which has high depreciation, and then you're signing up to work with a company that a lot of people think might not be around forever. So what does the maintenance and repair and flow of products and new parts look like in a decade? And so that is a risk factor for a lot of people. But the lucid air gravity, I think it looks sort of cool. It's sort of like a, it's a little bit like it wants to be a minivan. It's trying to do the job of a minivan, but they didn't just lean into the sliding doors. At least the Model X realized that what makes the minivan great is the accessibility.

of the doors and they made them cool doors by making them goal wing or butterfly doors. Yeah, the problem here is that when I looked up Lucid Gravity for sale, I'm seeing a 2026 with just 3,000 miles that's selling for $125,000.

That's a lot of money. That's a lot of dollars. And even if you're paying no interest, it's probably losing, you know, it's depreciating thousands of dollars a quarter. And so it's still going to be a rough ownership experience.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll be interesting to see where they end up. I know they already have some big investors and potentially some corporate partners. It could eventually be rolled into another organization as sort of the EV strategy of a larger automotive group. Who knows? Did you want to look at end of stay?

Did you see this? We got to pull up this video because we were talking about exactly this, the nine 64 Cabriolet Jr. is a Porsche 964 that has been shrunk, actually shrunk exactly what you said. Look at this video. This is what you asked for. Fully customizable. And look at this. It looks normal size.

But wait until this guy gets in it. This is amazing. So it is a go cart that has the body work of a point. And so you can get one of these. They go like 60 miles an hour or something like that. Like they're pretty fast. Yes. So I think if you put a governor on this vehicle, you'd have what you want, which is the

vehicle for the kid that is fun, engaging, and highly stylized and made with precision. The group behind this is called End of Stay. S-T-A-Y has periods after it. So I imagine it's some sort of acronym. But what a while. They did it. Yes. They did it.

They did it. I'm interested. You can see the YouTube video here, the preview of the 964 Turbo Jr. High performance version. It's an absolutely crazy, crazy video that I got organically served to me. And I was like, this is what we've been looking for, for sure. This is exactly what we were talking about. I need one.

I think you do. I need one. Anyway, GPT Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human AI interaction launched today from OpenAI rolling out to chat GPT starting today, taking shots at that guy on Instagram who's unsatisfied with legacy voice models. It's a lot smarter. I have a feeling he's going to find a way to keep using the old models. Oh, maybe.

Or he'll just become, who's the Pliny the Liberator? He's sort of the pliny the liberator of voice models in that I know he's taking shots and he's like very unhappy with the quality of the voice models. But at the same time, he does a great job of actually exposing and finding limitations, not necessarily jail breaks, but he, he, by watching those videos, you can very clearly understand, okay, I understand what's going on here. It's not, it doesn't have tool use, so it can't count. It can't set a timer. It doesn't have, you know, a long running context window that can stay with you for a long time. so it gets lost. They can't talk to each other.

There's a whole bunch of different ways. And once you have all of those documented by just a, he's basically like a white hat hacker. He's, he's exposed. He found a bunch of benchmarks. Oh, wait, what? He found a bunch of like good benchmarks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, basically benchmarks.

Like, if you can satisfy his videos and run those experiments again in a satisfying way, you probably have a better product at the end of the day. So, I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm super excited for this one. I wonder if there. the, yeah, the real-time nature unlocks, like, under, unlocks, like, almost like a new kind

of, like, like, real-time, like, podcast format where you can just actually have a conversation about a topic. Yeah. Right. Yeah, we should have it sitting right here. It has a full duplex architecture, which means that it can listen and speak at the same time, so it can jump in appropriately. And it can also route, like, certain questions to smarter models.

Yes. to run in the background, you can still have a conversation. Yes. Very cool. Which is great because my default flow, like if I'm driving, which I don't think I should be doing, but I will tap the record button, not the voice mode, and I will dictate a really long prompt, and then I will click send, and then I will wait for it to cook, and then I will have it read that back to me.

And that's all just like a couple extra clicks, a couple extra steps to get what I really want, which is a conversation. I was interested about the idea of where this goes. Like, is there, is there a world where you are talking to a model and you can have sort of multiple threads of conversations going within one conversation? So you can say, hey, I need you to go and do a deep research report on, you know, IBM Watson. And it goes and cooks on that. And then while it's doing that, you're still talking to it and you're still having a

conversation, but then you also might say, well, catch me up on the latest news, and it has that at the fingertips. So it can talk to you about the latest news, and then you can go and it can say, hey, by the way, I'm done with the report or I'm done with the code that I wrote, but you're talking to me about other problems in your organization, other decisions, other research projects that you have, and it's all done in one continuous conversation like, you know, me interacting with you. Like, you know, we might, you might delegate something and then continue the conversation and then move on. Oh, I got to text this person. Okay, I'll text them.

They'll do that. They'll come back to me in 20 minutes with a revision to the thing that we're working on. But in the meantime, let's talk about whatever else we got going on today. So, interesting to see where this goes. In other open AI news, GPT 5.6, Seoul, along with Tara and Luna, will launch publicly this Thursday. Preview access is expanding globally. Lots of people are having fun with this. Some people got early access.

Other people were joking about clearly not getting early access, but wanting early access. But a lot of people are having fun. What did John Palmer say? What do you say? He's in here? No, he had a... He has one. He says, it seems I'm allowed to talk about 5'6 now.

I wasn't one of the testers, but I heard it's really good. Again, I haven't used it yet, but this will probably be my default model from here on when I get access. It's a good one. People are having a lot of fun. Kit Langton says, I can finally talk about GPT 5.6. I've been using it for many months, if not decades. And what is glaringly obvious to me now as I look back on my life is that you did not have access to it. It's very fun.

People are very happy with it. Interesting, there's a little bit of a fork around like when, how the vibe around 5.6 is different than Fable 5.5, how interactive it is versus somebody He said, like, Fable is like light speed across the galaxy and Sol is like a Porsche on the Nurembergering, more engaging. I don't know. It seems like we're entering some fragmentation in like the right tool for the job. Yeah, Ethan says my big takeaway is that both Soul, Ethan had access. So he says both Soul and Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next best AIs. People will have preferences for one of the other.

But if you're doing any work where better intelligence matter, those two models are your only choices. Dean says, I think for me, the main takeaway with soul and fable is that I can't remember a time when the leading models were A, so decidedly ahead of everything else, and B, so distinct from one another. So, yeah, a lot of people are talking about how they're using the models together. It's probably a function of just tighter distillation protocols.

Like there's less pollution. And also, like, not everyone's training on the exact same data anymore because it used to just be everyone just trains on the entire web corpus. And now each company has different data sets, different data brokers, different usage patterns that they can train on and then different sort of research tastes. So go give it a try on Thursday. I forgot to mention this. GBC 5.6 souls world leading in computer use. It made me use it 100x more when we lost access to 5.6. I quickly started to go insane without it.

So yeah, people in the early access program obviously lost access for a couple weeks. Sure. Due to the DC action. Yeah. But yeah, I saw some people saying, like, what are some good uses for computer use? And it's like, anything on your computer? What do you use your computer for? They're not all going to be great uses, but I'm curious to get people's.

It's always worth, like, popularizing those, like, genuinely useful. patterns. I mean, like, deep research was that in many ways, just a very, like, it gave you a 20-page PDF report on the topic that you were asking for, and it did a lot of the work for you. And I still think the come up with a good prompt idea, find the right reason to use AI is a problem for a ton of people. There are plenty of people that adopt the latest AI tools, immediately find what the model's good at, how to use it, how to use it profitably, effectively, not waste tokens, not waste their time. But other people need ideas. They need to know that there's a new capability. You see this with the chat app. You see this at the voice mode where people

are like, you know, like judging a model based on hallucinations that disappeared a year ago or judging a model based on some, oh, it has a cutoff window. And that hasn't been a thing for a year. but it still burned its way into like the memes of the online culture. And thus, people need to be updated on that. And so I'm in favor of coming up with good computer use demos. The real one is just can it play CounterStrike effectively? That's the real computer use test. Can it rank me up to global elite?

Can it downrank me so I can smurf a little bit? This is the future. This is what I want. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. I'm extremely excited to welcome our next guest to the show.

We have Vincent Weiser from Crime Intellect. He's the co-founder and CEO, and he has some amazing news for us. Tell us what happened. Then we'll dig into the news, the market, the story, the company. But first, give us the news because Jordy's already warming up over here. Amazing. Yeah, so we've announced and we've raised $130 million at a billion with Prime Intellects. Wow.

To build the open superintelligence stack. Fantastic. Congratulations. Yeah. What we were talking about before the show is the ratio between dollars raised to run rate. Yeah. Absolutely incredible. Yeah.

How much have you raised before this round? Just $20 million in total. So I think we've actually got to this run rate on like less than $20 million and spend. That's crazy. Which is north of 100. Yes. That's amazing. Yeah, we doubled it.

I think since we actually closed the fundraise to $100. So basically, yeah, on track to grow much more from here on. Okay. So reset me on the latest and greatest in the actual. product offering, what customers are coming to you? Is it I have used the frontier model to, you know, figure out that AI can, in fact, do some agenetic workload within my organization. I want to cut cost and you're going to R.L.

An open source model for me. Fine tune it. And then am I paying you for tokens? Am I, are you getting me GPUs? What is the full suite of products that you offer customers these days? Yes. So basically it is kind of like the full stack to do a train. deployment and continued improvement of models.

I think customers basically come to us for anything ranging from compute to inference to the full RL and post-training stack to train models. And I would say it's like customers coming from different buckets and categories. A lot of them are like the AI natives who are basically starting out and oftentimes also like being multi-model, right? They use the frontier models, they use old models for different use cases. Like good examples, like RAM, for example, as one customer more in this like AI native bucket, a lot of the big AI native startup. But then we've also increasingly been able to track a lot of the new AI labs, like a lot of the Neo Labs. So a lot of those are using our full stack from like large scale clusters to our pre-training and post-training and RL stack.

But then also increasingly like traditional enterprises, and even sovereigns coming to us who want to have their own end-to-end stack that they can run like on-prem. So how I see this is to some extent, it's like there's just increasingly, I think, like a demand for having your own like sovereign AI stack, right? It's like your own open end-end stack. But I think this is almost like complementing in many cases like the other like frontier like models and stacks. And you're using sovereign in not just the geopolitical sense, but also if you're a Fortune 500 company, you want to own your stack from start to finish potentially. Exactly.

Yeah, I think like there was a lot of recent talk about this. Obviously, like folks like Satya and Alex Carr, where like also making, making those points and arguments over the last few weeks. And I think it's increasingly something I think where like a lot of like enterprises want to basically build this like compounding data mode and flywheel where ultimately I think the future that we're starting to see as a lot of these companies want to build basically self-improving agents. And the way to do this, I think is generally you have an RL environment for use case, you scale on it. And then you ultimately deploy that into production and then continues to improve with the user interacting with that agent.

It's almost like the Tesla autonomy levels, but like for knowledge worker agents. So I think like the Rambang example, I think was one that people really resonated with for basically them being able to, within a week and less than 50K of training spend. outcompete a frontier model at automating spreadsheets and finance at a fraction of the cost of running the cheapest models. So basically they were able to outperform Opos at a fraction of the cost of Haiku and like 30% faster, much more tailored to the use case. So I think in many ways,

these specialized agentic use cases are a big unlock. And I think in many ways, you still need the godlike big mega model to do the orchestration. planning but then I think oftentimes execution I think happens can not happen with these specialized sub agents so I think yeah those have been extremely I think like fruitful and useful for a lot of their companies adopting and training their own agents then I think the other big trend is just like an explosion and a new entrance that are like taking model training seriously obviously

hundreds of neolaps really got stood up in the last probably 12 to 24 months so we started powering a lot of those, like, with our full stack, including with also large compute clusters. So, like, and we also joined us as part of the round. And we've been, like, we've since day one, basically operated large clusters. And this is in large part why we need so much money, right? It's like to basically be standing up more and more GPUs. Like right now, we run like 15,000 rebuts and scaling to, like, over 30,000. And so this is like a lot of the capital needs, even.

And walk me through when you're pressing the huge, cluster button, is that because there's broad demand for specific models that you need to inference at scale? And so there's just a lot of inference demand. Or is it that for the level of training that you're doing, you need to be cluster scale to even kick off the training run? Yeah. So basically it's like for all the needs like from training to inference, you need obviously

compute. And in a lot of ways, like our customers like are doing a lot of these like large scale training runs. with us, like leveraging our post-like, including our compute, right? So it's like pre-training, 400 billion parameter models, like what we did with RC, like Q4 last year, or really large also post-training runs and our other runs, right? So it's like increasingly basically we abstract all of that info away. So basically people can just like hit a button to do a post-training run without having to like lock into the GPU cluster and managing the bare metal GPUs. So we basically abstract a lot of this like GPU complexity away for,

But yeah, like for that, we basically also ramping up our own clusters to basically just like 700s and thousands of customers like in parallel on those. Yeah. So what you're saying is like there might be a situation where I have a I have a 50K budget like you gave with the ramp example. I have a 50K budget to do some post training. And and I need to deploy that 50K into like thousands of GPUs, but only for a short amount of time. And so the budget's actually going to be relatively small, even though, If I were to buy all of that, it would be way more than 50K, millions, millions of dollars. So you sort of absorb some of that cost, orchestrated, abstract it away, and then you

can deliver for the customers. Exactly. Just a slice of the... Yeah, so basically, I think this is like also big unlock, like also on the inference side, where customers don't need to, like, front load hundreds of mans and capEx expense for large data center commitments. So we basically also increasingly serve a lot of inference. So it really is the full stack.

And I think a lot of the compute, like we have like quite a clear, like, visibility into the demand just because like people come with us with large requests or large contracts to basically do larger training runs and deployment. So we basically just like need to secure the compute to, yeah, to be able to fulfill all of those. And I think like right now we would probably be at like many orders of banked more compute, like compute but also revenue. if compute wouldn't be as constrained as it is right now. So it's like right now, I think like in the current environment, it's like basically debuts are pretty sold out for the next few months. And for almost like the rest of the year, especially if you want to like stand up data centers in the US.

So I think this is actually like I think the main bottleneck to scale right now for anyone in AI. And this is I think what we've been able to really scale through extremely well because we've basically partnered with almost every data send out there. since like over two years. So basically able to stand up like data centers and different geographies and orchestrate them globally. Yeah. Any predictions forecast for American open source over the next six months?

Yes. No, really great question. We joined also like Enviya to help them train Nemotron. So they're doing the Nemotron Alliance and Coalition. And so we were one of like, I think, 10 or so partners. So it's like so like I can't speak about. South, like all the things there. But I think like in general, both on that front and other things we're seeing.

We won't tell any. We won't tell me. Exactly. Anything between us. Between us. Just three of us. So basically I think like, like in some ways, like the leading American efforts actually are Nemotron and actually like ASE with a Trinity model. So both of those that we're like very deeply involved in.

And so I think those will continue to like lead like with like American. American open source. Like we have like some of our own models cooking and then like we help a ton of customers with theirs. So I think there will actually be like a huge resurgence of like frontier open models coming out of the US. Also let players like NBA itself and a lot of our customers and partners. So yeah, I think like in general, I think the interesting geopolitical question is actually

what happens with Chinese open models. Right. It's like obviously we've seen news that like China might consider like. like export restricting them like and like there might be policy dimensions on both the Chinese and the US side right so it's like I think this is I think actually in some ways like the motivation

to build a stack and to also push American open source forward is to have like less reliance on models that might get banned any day. Be it all more close right it's like I think this is something increasingly like a lot of enterprises are starting to realize that like

there's actually huge dependence right in the sense on like mainly from policy side. So this is something I think where we want to just like enable everyone to apply their own end-to-end frontier open stack to be able to create their own models. And ultimately I think like there will be like there's obviously a lot of like now like also Neo Labs and love them are actually like thinking about things quite an

quite open way. I think it will be surprised that this may one of the hot takes is to see more Neolaps release open models. It's like a good example that we also partnered with recently was a pool site, for example. People were expecting them to be closed, but they actually open up their models. So I think there will be more of those, especially given there are like hundreds of well-funded neolaps now. I think there will be huge resurgence just like of like the age of research in terms of like these, these nail labs like pursuing truly novel directions. Right.

It's like going where like the big labs almost can't go necessarily taking big like bold bets that also might not pay off all of them. But like if you have 100 shots on goal, like some of the. will probably pay off and result in interesting outcomes. So I think this is like really also, I think what we are empowering, right, is kind of like helping these new Neo Labs and big AI natures and enterprises to move much faster and not have to basically all build the same stack each by themselves in-house because almost a lot of them are like tiny teams of like tens of people instead of like thousands.

So like we're able to like help them move much faster basically, but I'm adopting our stack. When you hear of a major American tech company, let's say, someone in the MAG 7 that has extra capacity, do you reach out to them? Do you ping them? Are you at the scale yet that a deal would be interesting to them? Or are they really searching for these $10 billion plus opportunities? For sure, like, we already are, like, sourcing, like, like, pretty large clusters. Like, sometimes, like, up to, like, 5 to 10,000 GPUs. So it's like, we're basically, like, looking at every sauce and pocket of supply that we can find.

Like, we've literally turned every stone to find, like, the last GPU available on Earth. And, like, we've been quite good at that. So it's, like, I think we're, like, that has been, like, one of the core tenants, almost since the beginning, is that we really wanted to, like, orchestrate, like, the global compute supply efficiently. So we did a lot of, like, optimization for tolerance and distributed days to, like, train across, like, distributed compute. So it's, like, I think to this question, like, I think it's something that we're

definitely, like, considering, like, if there's any, uh, anyone with some spare GPUs here, you can always get up here. That's great. Back on, on China, do you agree with? my perception that if there is some sort of lockdown on Chinese open source export controls, that would not affect... Yeah, are they mad that American companies are distilling on or post-training their open-source models?

By design. I thought it was a goal of the project. But what I'm interested about is would they try and claw back access to Kimmy or GLM? any of those models that are already been deployed because there's an element of like once the weights have been downloaded, it's sort of just out there. Of course, you could go and try and like sue every company, but that's very hard if you're in an American jurisdiction in your Chinese company. But how would you see that playing out? Would it just be going forward, no more open source? And that's the CCP telling Chinese companies or some other shape of

of like restriction? Yeah, I think it's really hard to know. I think a good example was like to some extent, like the most popular Chinese models already has been closed for Gama, which is a coin, right? Like in some ways, like they've actually like changed your licensing and stopped open spossing. So I think there will be both like companies changing their policies, right?

But then also I think like probably like state intervention, right? It's like in different shapes of form. So I think basically one can't rely on the steady stream of frontier open like releases out of China. in many ways, right? It's like from different perspectives. And I think similarly, a lot of other sovereigns, like obviously including the US also doesn't want to build on necessarily China's open world. So it's like I think a lot of American enterprises, obviously also like sovereign use cases like need American outmod. But I think similar for other continents. So it's like I think there's been a lot of work obviously and we're like

collaborating with people also across Europe, across India, across other geo. So it's like, I think we'll see a much more like multipolar. I think, open like ecosystem of like open front of models. So I think that's like a healthy like balancing, um, away from just relying on Chinese open malls, even though they've obviously like been a great exhilarant of like open source progress. Um, I think it's also unhealthy to rely just in an ecosystem.

And yeah, like I think we'll be like there will be, I think a bunch of like quite unpredictable changes similar to all like the last few months have been quite a unpredictable. I think to everyone involved. So I think this will continue to be the case in the sense that it will be quite a dicey policy, like AI policy landscape for the next few years. Last question. Data centers are data center construction, new data center construction, deeply unpopular in America domestically. Simultaneously, the workloads that are being done in AI data centers are basically, latency is basically irrelevant.

For training, certainly, for most inference tasks, if you're waiting a couple minutes for a result, an extra 500 milliseconds to get across the world isn't going to matter. This feels like a recipe for global competition, for aggressive data center expansion in a country that does see it favorably, that does see an economic boom from it or does have a lot of energy. What is the state of the non-domestic, non-U.S. data center build out? Yes, so we're certainly, like, building a lot of data centers and partnering with a lot of them, like, outside of the U.S. as well. But, like, I think there's still a lot of demand, actually, for data centers in the U.S. I think, like, even from a data perspective, like, there's a lot of now, like, the financial industries and highly regulated industries, like, also adopting, obviously more and more agents and compute. I do think inference still matters, like, speed in a sense, like, maybe not for, like, long-running agents, but, like, for a lot of use cases, people, I think, still really care about, like, having extremely snappy, like, responses. But I think, like, there's definitely, I think, like, a general boom and data center buildouts outside of the U.S. as well.

I think there's just, like, a limited set of countries who are, like, strong, like, allies with, like, ample amounts of, like, geopolitical stability, but then also, like, like, energy and, like, green fields and enough space. Yeah, U.S. has unique access to natural gas, which is, if you're trying to bring energy online super quick. it's hard to be yes and i think like we're seeing this across europe even where like there's specific regions right like that are like much more active in data center buildouts and others and those are generally the ones that like have their own like money into invest in them and like cheap energy and and a lot of like also local support for it um so i think like in general from what we're seeing i think there's like there there is new entrance almost like to the data center buildouts or it's like even places like australia and new zealand like and and like a small much

small places, like Armenia, Kazakhstan and others, who like have a huge amount of energy and making huge bets also on data centers, but while also being like allies of the US. So I think those are the countries, I think generally, which will see the biggest boom in data centers. I think at the same time, like I think we'll also continue to see a boom in US data centers. But yeah, it's definitely harder to get data centers in the US than outside of the US. And so it's something we think we'll see both continuously expand. And I think there might also be, obviously, to your point, like a policy, like, updating, like,

with upcoming elections and in midterms and things of, I think, like, this whole almost like populism in the years around, like, data centers. And like a lot of the kind of, I think public sentiment as potentially also, like, sovereign influences and other things, like, from other nation states who are trying to harm almost like the US data center built out. So I think there's like a lot of things. at stake for the US, right? It's like to not pull back on their data center build out. But I think there will also be a specific state,

so like leaning in much more heavily than others, right? Like I think this is already what we're seeing. We're like, exactly. So it's like there's specific states in the US that are just like much more well suited to really ramp up data centers from here. And yeah, and I think we'll see them ramp up globally and hopefully also outside of like beyond Earth. And I think, like, I think this is the only way to really probably scale.

I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Incredible progress. We love seeing you and the team win. Yeah. It's fantastic. Have a great rest of your day.

Say hello to Will for us and we'll talk to you later. Cheers. Go bye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlocked seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratheary. He's been on an absolute.

tear during a slow news cycle. Does it feel like a slow news cycle to you? I don't know. This summer is always slow. I, you know, I take a couple days. Or I slow down a little bit myself. I feel like you've done a good job of like providing really insightful and interesting pieces during a slow time where I didn't know that I wanted to hear you a favor. Yeah, you are. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, I didn't know I wanted you to adopt the voice of Mark Zuckerberg for 20 minutes and go on a tariff. But it's not like that was driven by like a specific, okay, there's a Walser Journal article where like Bloomberg has a scoop and like we need to know this.

It's more just like resetting on the meta narrative. I want to talk about the meta narrative, but can we start with Xbox? Sure. I want to know first, let's go back in time a little bit. And I want you to reality check me on the story I tell myself about how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox. And I think it stems with DirectX, the, it's the graphics layer that allowed games to be run on multiple graphics cards.

So that was a Microsoft licensed piece of property. So this is why we don't have the Chrome box. You want to go, you want to go really far back. Because we didn't get an Amazon gaming console. We didn't get a Google gaming console, right? Right. Like, why X-Based. Interesting. So you go back way back. I mean, we can go really far back.

Players. I mean, back in the day, the main technology for doing 3D was coming along was OpenGL. And OpenGL had various pluses or minuses. It was, you know, we're way back in history. But this is the origin of the Nvidia story, making cards to do 3D graphics. You had like the Riva, the 128, then the TNT. Then you had the G-Force. and like we're talking back in the 90s when I was you know your guy's age or whatever

in college and um you know making uh the first you know quake comes out like the real first 3d game you know there's actually a really interesting Twitter back and forth with the old id people talking about quake and how basically they obliterated the company by burning everyone out by watching it but um super fun super fun back and forth but uh Microsoft comes out with direct 3D as an alternative to OpenGL that was, I think, and this is a little out of my area of expertise, but I think it was a little easier to use,

had more niceties, was more tied into the platform, but this is all sort of PC gaming. Yeah. The Xbox, the way I think about it, and a lot of gamers kind of get annoyed and right about the gaming stuff because I don't really care about the game part of it.

I'm more interested in how that fits in the overall company. Yeah, but what is your review? Yeah, can we get a GTA6 review? No, well, I feel compelled. Number one, I feel, Rockstar, I think, is charging way too little for this game. They're charging, what, $80? Yes.

Like, this is a game. You're going to get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take. No, they should be charged like $200 for this game. I know. I know. GTA6 is like the last great game. Yeah.

Like, you think about everything, it was mostly all made pre-AI. Yeah. Like, it is the pinnacle of this triple A, yeah. craftsmanship years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears to the extent where you have like the Twitter analyst like counting cigarette butts outside of the opposites to see like how much crunch are they in right now I don't even think he's trading the stock I don't even think he's trading the stock I think he just wants to know the love of the gate literally the game the

gamers are insane insane so I always tread in this water like very very carefully but uh no so I feel compelled to buy GTA 6 just in honor of it existing. Even if I don't know if I'm ever going to play it. So I'm definitely going to do that and I'd be happy to pay, yes, $200. Like $80 is ridiculous. They should charge of work. Anyhow.

Yeah, we had what the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online complaining about the price and said something like you didn't have you had 10 years, you couldn't save up 80 bucks. Seriously. Like whoever,

whoever you are like Like, I know kids that do lemonade stands and they clear like a hundred bucks. Yeah. You know, Oh, absolutely. I want, you know, the old $20. I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than that.

Exactly. Although, unfortunately with inflation, I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable. Sure. It's unbelievable. It's a bad. So, anyhow, I've got a GtG-A-6. But we're back.

Oh, so the console, the console era. So the way I think about Xbox is you go back to Microsoft and Microsoft had this whole thing. This is pre-Iphone. This is idea of their corporate strategy was three screens in the cloud. And the idea that we're going to, we already own the desk via the PC, we're going to own the pocket via the phone. And people always to say Microsoft missed mobile, Microsoft did not miss mobile. They came out with a Windows C.E. in, like, they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around, you know, as an extension of the PC.

Yeah. But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room? Well, people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room. And we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed.

And it failed for a kind of an obvious reason in retrospect, which is first and first, foremost, people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the internet in their living room. And so you're selling a multi-hundred dollar sort of console to people who want to play games, but people who don't want to play games aren't going to randomly start buying consoles. What actually ended up taking it over was things like the Firestick or, you know, Apple TV beta played this. I still think it's like probably the best solution, but it's way too expensive.

Now, the Apple TV's poor price got jacked to the moon with this recent memory increase. But the fire stick is probably a big one. You had the Chromecast, you had Roku TV. You had, you know, these, which ended up being, it's not that, it's a classic Microsoft thing. They were actually right. There was this new front page to online services to be built. They just took totally the wrong approach with Xbox. And what's funny is that this approach actually became this uberos of self-mutilation,

because the Xbox didn't succeed in achieving this because the games console is way too expensive to achieve this. But then also they killed the Xbox where Xbox 360 was pretty competitive. And that generation is actually the most interesting console generation. I'm happy to expound on that if you want to. But they come out after that with the Xbox one, I think, which was super expensive because it had the connect built in, that sort of like wave your hands around sort of thing.

And it had much more like restrictive DRM things. it was going to be more digital. It was basically that console was designed around, we're going to realize our vision and own the living room. And gamers hated it. So they rejected it. So their vision, which they didn't achieve, also killed their console. And so I wrote over a decade ago.

And the whole Xbox saga is filled with regrets, I think. First and foremost for Microsoft, but also for me. because I, from the beginning, is like, they need to kill this program or they need to spin it out or get rid of it. The stated goals, which made sense from a corporate perspective, were not achieved, and it is continuing to exist because it exists. And I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from 2011-2013 when Microsoft was in the dumps,

and, you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been like $40 for like a decade. And the one thing the employees has, like, well, at least we have Xbox, all the cool kids over there. Like, it was such a important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox, even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self-immolating because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve. Yeah. What do you think the naming scheme says about that project? I always found it very odd that they went from Xbox to Xbox 360. That sounds like the third.

It's actually the second. Then Xbox 1 is the third, but it's one. And then now they're on Series X, which feels like the 10th, but it's the fourth. And then they have a bunch of subnames. It feels like they just didn't, they never leaned into just like Xbox 2, Xbox 3, Xbox 4. Yeah. Well, you're asked, I mean, maybe it shows that works on Microsoft. You're asking the wrong guy about naming things, I think.

But yeah, total mess. They called it the 360 because it was coming out the same generation as the PlayStation 3. And they wanted to, well, they wanted to be on the same level. Yeah, yeah. We both have sort of a three in our name. So what's interesting with the PlayStation 3 is the PlayStation 3 was Sony's big misstep in terms of the whole PlayStation era. They had this crazy processor called the cell processor that had all these capabilities. And they had up to that point, consoles were differentiated by hardware.

And so Sony famously helped one of the reasons they beat Nintendo was they had discs. So they could have much larger, like, media and things on those lines. And whereas Nintendo was sticking with cartridges. And there was, like, other, like, they were much more favorable to third-party developers. Just in general, they had sort of taken over on PlayStation 1 and 2. PlayStation 3 comes along. They produced this, oh, they wanted to get Blu-ray off the ground. That's another example of consoles getting screwed up by trying to attempt to other corporate priorities.

they, it worked. Yeah, didn't they win? And didn't Xbox go with HD DVD and they lost? They did. But at the end of the day, what happened was the PlayStation 3 was way too expensive. I think it ran super hot, if I remember. And all these extra capabilities were not used. And the reason they weren't used is that was the first HD generation.

And you had this shift to 3D games and high definition graphics. And what happened was it used to be games differentiate themselves by how well they wrote the game. How did it perform on your Super Nintendo, on your Nintendo? Now we move to a world of actually all the actual game was offloaded to engines, game engines. Like, you know, it had one. Obviously, it was epic, got super big with the Unreal Engine. And so you no longer did that. What a game company did was actually design the game and then asset creation.

And asset creation at HD was way more difficult, way more expensive than it was for standard definition TVs. And so the economic imperative for developers came, we can't just be on PlayStation. We need to be on everything. And so that was the ultimate generation in almost every game was made to run everywhere. Run on PS3, run on Xbox 360, and running on the PC. And that was also the Xbox 360's best generation. That was the one that they were the most competitive on because they had all the games, because all developers were making them sort of run everywhere.

They had a very simple to develop for architecture. The 360 was very PC-like, even more so than the one sort of previously. And that was their best generation. And then they come back the next generation, shoving connect down people's throats. We're going to own the TV. And meanwhile, Sony learned their lesson. They're like, okay, we can't differentiate on hardware. We need to create sort of generic hardware that is easy to develop for.

And the way we will differentiate is through exclusives. They bought a bunch of small studios. in contrast like buying Activision, which we can get to it a little bit. They bought a bunch of small studios and pushed all those studios to developing killer games

for the upcoming PS4. And so you got things like the Spider-Man, like that was a huge game. Nottie Dog, Last of Us, that type of stuff. Exactly. I mean, and so the PS4

was an unbelievable generation. And a lot of the reasons was unbelievable was because it had these exclusive games and they just crushed Microsoft. Because for all the cross-pocket, platform games, the Call of Duties, the Maddens, things like that, those always ran everywhere. And so what you do is you limit the economic potential of your studios because you're only

building for your platform and you make it back by all the licensing fees you get off the EAs of the world and the activists of the world because 80% of gamers are on your console, not on the other guy's console. And so they just wiped out Microsoft in that generation. and that really just continued to the PS5. And this is where we sort of get to the game pass disaster. Okay, yes. So, yeah, I want to, yeah, let's just jump forward to that.

How is it disaster? I didn't want to ramble too long. That's going to give you a chance to jump in. We love it. I have a bunch of other questions not related to gaming, but I like, I love this history. The console history is fascinating. It's really interesting because it tracks technological change to social, large extent. And it totally

shifted sort of strategy. So Microsoft... I think you can draw a lot of real parallels, even just model releases over the last couple years, how you know, certain decisions around one model sets you back a certain number. You know, they're iterating a lot faster, but I'm seeing

parallels. Yeah, the sort of development of, yeah, it's interesting. You can always sort of draw lessons. So you get to Microsoft at this point, again, I think I wrote at the time, oh, wait, time to give up. I wrote multiple times of the years. They should give up on Xbox.

And at this point, Microsoft stocks do much better. Was there ever an option after they bought Activision just to make Call of Duty a console exclusive? Or would that have been an FTC problem? Well, we'll get to that because that's part of the story here. So Microsoft decides, okay, we're going to actually try a new business model. It's true Xbox sort of selling a console, selling, you know, licensing it. we kind of do that, but we're actually moving to being a services company.

The stock's doing much better now. You know, like we have Azure, all these things. What we need to do, and the way we compete with Sony, is we need to have the exact opposite of the Sony strategy. We need to lean into services, lean into subscriptions. We're going to do Xbox GamePass. And the idea of Xbox GamePass is, instead of buying every individual game for $60, $70, $80.

Gaming pricing, by the way, really has stayed suppressed probably far longer than it should have been, particularly for the AAA games, but we already got to that with Rockstar. So they're like, you pay one price per month and you get access to all the games and game paths. Well, of course,

no publisher wants to partake in this, because they make all their money up front by selling games to their biggest fans. You know, it's kind of like the movie model. You make a bunch of money up front. And yeah, in the long run. Were they looking at like at what happened to the music industry as an example?

of saying like, yeah, it's cool to make your product more accessible. You get, you know, more listeners by bundling and streaming. That was the bet. You had to make it up in volume, right? And so this, this, why the series S came about, there's the series X and the series S. The series S was a more underpowered, but much cheaper model. I think it launched at $300 versus the X was, I think, $600 or maybe $500.

And that was also a problem because you're kind of neutering the X because, Developers build to the lowest common denominator, not sort of the highest one. So that was one problem. But the idea was we're going to expand the market. And they have these package deals where you get an S and you get GamePass for a year. And it's this sort of thing. And we will make it up. And the problem is no independent developer is going to go for that.

So they had some of their own games, but they went out and started buying a bunch of developers. So they bought Bethesda, which included, I think, it at that point. And Zenimax. The Elger's role is like they have a bunch of like great IP libraries But those But those developers just aren't releasing

Like incredible titles annually Except for Activision Which does have Well so Exactly And so the issue With buying these companies Is their

What you're paying for Is you're paying for Their existing business Plus the premium And their existing business Was selling Single copies of games to all platforms.

And what they were saying is we're going to basically force all these studios to take a bath, to lose a ton of money by putting all their games on Game Pass. We'll still sell on PlayStation because we have to, because that's a lot of money. It would be massively economically destructive not to, but what we think's going to happen is gamers are going to realize I could be paying $70 a pop on PlayStation, or I could go to Xbox and I could pay $20 a month and I could. can get all these games, and that's it. What a better deal. And by the way, we'll get new gamers.

People are going to come in and realize, wow, I can get all these games for $20 a month. None of that happened. All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games, pay way less to pay these games, and Microsoft ate it. And I think the, you know, the recent reporting was they expected to have. 75 million game pass subscribers by this year. They have like 30 million and that number is actually decreasing.

It's not going up. And so it's just been. And so that's sort of the context of what's happened here. Phil Spencer got retired, which if you retire at that level of a company, you're probably canned. Probably too late. The whole strategy of disaster, they brought in new leadership. And now there's sort of like a reset going on.

They're laying off a few thousand people. They say all games production are going to continue. But there's a real sort of critical decision here. What do we do? Because we ended up getting stuck in the middle. And we're just, this doesn't work. What did you read into their approach of laying off 1,600 people now and keeping a 1,600 person riff?

It's a terrible idea. because everyone there for the rest of the year is like like every VC would tell you to like just cut hard cut deep and then move forward with the team if you're on the ship we're going to Valhoa together I think I do have some sympathy because the reality is I appreciated the note

because they are in big trouble and there's an aspect of just stating it clearly we're not sugar-coated it. And if they laid out how much trouble they were in and then only cut 1,600 people, then everyone kind of knows they're going to be cutting more people. Right. So I think they're just in a bad spot. So of course it's not great. It's going to destroy morale. It's going to destroy everything for the next year because everyone's way to get fired. But there's a bit of, they did, I think, tear the bandaid off to the extent they could. And now there's just a, now they can be

very overt. They could go through and actually talk to employees about what are you wearing? on why should you still be here? And it's a reflection of the employment climate, like people in general are more, they're just not going to bail. Microsoft, you know, they're going to want to keep their job. And so they can probably,

hopefully, fingers crossed, do better cuts by virtue of doing them in the open. But I don't know. I mean, I don't envy Xbox's leadership at all. It's going to be a very tough thing, but I can totally understand how they are where they are. Probability of a spinout. I mean, I think it used to happen.

But, you know, this is, again, the regret is this was my take for years and years and years. I'm like, okay, fine, Xbox game passed. That seems kind of interesting. Let's go for it. It should have stuck to my guns. So you're like, no, stop. This is going to be a disaster. I think, yeah, I don't, I don't get it.

I just don't, I didn't see it before. The thing that got me to say, okay, let's give it a chance. Didn't work. I don't see it now. I mean, I think it does give me pause. They hired Matthew Ball, who I've had on Straitchery multiple times. As their chief strategy officer, I have a lot of respect for, you know, his takes. So I'm curious what he's thinking about.

This gets to the question before, is there a bit where they just write off these acquisitions and say, actually, all this stuff's going to be exclusive now? We're like, call of duty, buy an Xbox. Wow. Like, basically giving into the FTC's worst fears, which, But those fears didn't make sense at the time in the context. Because by writing up, I mean, acknowledging we lost billions and billions of dollars. Yeah.

And it would test, it would be a good pricing test for the power of a AAA game to say, okay, you can only get Call of Duty on Xbox now. And you would see like how many incremental Xbox sales do you get. Because that means the real value of the game is actually in the hundreds of dollars. If people have a PlayStation. and then they'll try something new.

Switching gears a little bit, we keep having this experience where there's a company, you know, an AI company, let's say an application layer company that is, or lab, that is, you know, hot, but then you don't hear very much for a few months and you write them off and then they come out and they've like added hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and are doing a crazy upround. And it's this weird thing where like even, you know, historically, you know, There's power laws everywhere, but I feel like in this moment we're seeing more and more examples where, like, the 10th best company in the category is still having the financial performance that a company that would have been the leading company in their category five years ago. What do you make it? What do you make it up?

This is just a thing in tech in general that is always sort of stuck out at me. I mean, I think it has been, though, but like CRM, for example. Like, if you go back to, like, 2000, 2015 was, like, the 10th best CRM company, like, actually printed? No, of course not. No, no. The example I always go back to is, I think it was 2014 or so when Apple bought beats. And they bought beats for $3 billion. And everyone's going, the tech press is going crazy. Everyone's writing thought pieces about it. And I'm like, you know, of course writing about it.

I'm like, $3 billion. Like, Apple is a $500 billion company. What does $3 billion matter? And what's funny about that take is number one, it was right, who cares about $3 billion? That's under couch cushions. Like, people were spun up off so they didn't really matter. Number two, Apple is only a $500 billion company. Like the astronomical increase in valuation and numbers around this is absolutely crazy.

So to your point, yeah, a 2019 CRM company, number one, there probably wasn't a number 10 even then. But yeah, the numbers are not even remotely tied to like any, I just sort of let them go and be like I write down the numbers and they don't really mean. anything to me. But it's very hard to keep track of. Like the inflation in tech numbers specifically, you know, you think that, what was I complaining about pricing before? Oh yeah, lemonade stands are bad. The Silicon Valley lemonade stand inflation is absolutely the worst in the world. On mergers and acquisitions, there's this news today about Getty images calling off Shutterstock deal after UK regulators said that they would have to sell the editorial business for the merger be approved. And it seemed very odd to me that a merger would be blocked by a regulator when that

industry that is consolidating and is maybe becoming more monopolistic is under such insane attack from generative AI. I can't imagine a better defensive move than putting Getty images and shutter stock together. This happens, this is, this happens every single time. Like the, the natural response to your overall category being threatened by an external force is consolidation. Like it's the only way to defend yourself to sort of, you know, you get synergies. Like all these companies are pretty established. So it's actually fairly easy to price. You know exactly what things are.

It's a much like we have growing companies you want to merge them or acquire them. It's really unclear because how do you sort of price out the future? These companies are declining. So it's very easy. Like you could do a discounted cash flow and understand exactly how much they're It's a very straightforward negotiation. It makes total sense for them to consolidate. But precisely because they're knowable and understandable, it's very easy for regulators to block them.

And you see this happen again and again. You see like pushback on, you saw this with TV and like different networks getting together and the various pushbacks happen to that or in telecoms. Like this happens, this is a natural pattern. The moment that a company, an industry wants to consolidate. needs to consolidate is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry, regulators don't do anything and also rightly don't do anything because you're dealing with the future and it's unknown,

you don't want to screw it up. It raises the question of what you do regulators sort of do anyway in broad strokes. I used to be, I think that they probably do more harm than good as far as a lot of these sort of blocking mergers and things go. But I don't know. I'm the one that just said maybe Microsoft's to take Call of Duty exclusive. So who knows? Maybe I'll have something in the face. We had a funny moment because we were looking.

It's a $3.7 billion deal. But I'm like, how is this a $3.7 billion deal? These are two, 300 million-ish market cap companies. And it was because the deal was like priced back in January. of 2025 and so both companies have declined so much. Combined market caps under a year. So maybe they shouldn't leave the deal anyway. I don't know. I mean, it could be worse. You could be Netflix and have the stock market and sort of like make

a bid for Warner Brothers that the stock market hates abandoned the deal, but they already decided you did the deal because you're desperate and you're screwed anyway. So yeah, you don't even get what you bid for. So maybe that's what happened here. I don't know. Oh, well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a, have a great summer. Enjoy the break. And we'll see you soon. Yeah, good luck with the lemonade stands.

Yes. Try to make it through summer. Don't go into debt. You're going to run up on a kid that has Klarna. You're going to raise some money. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yeah, Clarena and a lemonade stand.

Five easy payments. Interested free. Interest free. It might. Well, thank you so much and have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Ben. Talk to you later. Have a good one.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform. It grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And our next guest is Rodrigo Leong from Samba Nova, the co-founder and CEO, is here with us in the TVGed Elferome. Rodrigo, how are you doing? I'm doing good. How are you guys? We're doing fantastic.

But it sounds like you're doing better. Give us the news. What happened? You know, we're super excited. We did a big funding announcement today with a billion dollar round. that we did a first close on at an 11 billion valuation so it's super excited about announcing that incredible this reminding me there was somebody posted like a couple weeks ago something to the effect of like every day there's a new billion dollar deal and chips from some company you've

never heard of and uh market i guess the trend uh the trend continues yeah talk about Yeah. Yeah. Is this an overnight success? When do you start the company? How long has this been overdue? It's an overnight nine years success. You know, I've been building chips for 30 years. And we started this company in 2017. So no, but it's been, it's been a great journey. It's just, you know, again, it's so noisy. There are so many companies out there are doing all sorts of awesome things. But look, then, you know, in France. Inference is now right in front of us. It's kind of broken everything open. It's what we do and it's been what we've done for a long time. And so it's the new training run. And so people that have kind of been thinking about building just for training,

well, now it's the time for inference. And this is where we shine. And we shine, you know, and investors are putting all their money behind that. And so we're excited about that. How, how, walk me through the phases of, I mean, you have some of the biggest companies of the world you're working with. J.P. Morgan Chase selected you for secure on-prem. inference, and I'm interested in the thought process that large Fortune 500 companies,

Fortune 100 companies are going through right now. I imagine that there's a lot of explore with Frontier models, very expensive, they're token maxing, then they shift to, okay, this agenetic workflow is working, let's use an open source model for it that is, you know, either the open source frontier is caught up and can do this particular task, maybe there's a fine tune or some RL on some private data that makes the system perform better. When is the conversation shifting to actually optimizing the inference stack, the hardware? What's the conversation like there?

What are the savings that people are focused on? Well, I think what people are starting to realize after they started using chat chip IP and the frontier models is, look, there's a bunch of things I can do there and it's great. you know, we'll use it, and it's going to be part of their business for a long, long time. And hypers are offering all sorts of different services with different PPUs and GPUs and training chips. They're offering different things there, again, on the cloud. What's happening now is this next phase of production, is people starting to realize, okay, what happens to the stuff that I'm not comfortable releasing to these models? Like my private data, my computer data, the stuff that I want your models to learn and then somehow become part of the global knowledge, right?

And so what happens with that? Right. And so I don't know if I have, you know, my clients have banking information, you know, have some very regulated information. What do I do with that, right? And so people are starting to realize, okay, there is a whole other class of workloads. A whole other class of, you know, of applications that you've got to go and do private. And so with someone like J.P. Morgan, which is fantastic. You know, I mean, they are the top of the top of it comes to enterprise and IT, right?

And so in technology, and so fantastic partners. So they selected us as the ones that can come in and go into an environment like JP Morgan. Do full on-prems secure private. They can bring their open-source models. They can fine-tune into it. They can deploy that privately, securely, and control the models and control it forever. And so I think we're starting to see the landscapes are to steady, right? There's some things you use the Anthropics for.

There's some things that you're going to use the hyperscale clouds for. And there's some things you're going to say, hey, let me run on-prem and let me control the outcome. And especially since I don't know how the regulatory environment is going to settle, let me just be secure for that. Let me just be safe and just run those things on my own models, in my own environment, with my own security around it, and it'll be done. Yeah, you can think, you know, pharma company being like, I would love for all the other large pharma companies to share their data with the frontier lab. Totally. But I'll pass. What does, what does partnership with you look like for a large arena?

If I have, you know, a large IT footprint already, I probably have data centers, but they might be more CPU-based workloads. Maybe I have some GPUs, but I'm not doing, you know, frontier inference. I'm not fully scaled up, but I have some, are you consulting with them at the level of, like, where they should be buying land for their next data center, how they set up a powered shell, who they should partner with, like, how deep in the stack will you go with a company that you're working with? Well, look, you know, I mean, if you look at the AI ecosystems up today, you know, we've been really focused on hyperscale clouds, you know, the Neo-Clouds, the frontier models,

we're really focused on building those out, you know, gigawatts here, megawatts here, megawatts there. I mean, just, you know, just this large-scale, large-scale deployment. And then what you're still thinking about is, well, how do I get as many tokens out per, you megawatt per kilowatt, you know, kilowatt megawatt and Googlewatt that I have, right? And so that's kind of, we're very focused on. And then some of the workplay into that are really, really efficient models. We run the big models really fast.

That's really what we're known for. Huge models, right? You know, the battleground for power and data center and all that is about huge models. It's not about the little models. It's about the trillion, multi-tillion per model models. That's what we focus on and run that faster than anybody else in the world. So, but then you flip it over to the enterprise. And for them, it's not as much about how many thousands of racks going to fit into an environment.

It's about data privacy. It's about security. It's about having the capacity when I wanted. It's about low latency. It's about these things that, again, you go back to traditional computing. It's what they've always wanted. Right? They always wanted low latency, high performance, all our security and privacy.

They always wanted that. And so what we can make up is that because our rack, our rack is a 10 kilowatt air-cooled rack compared to what traditional GPS are 140 kilowatts per rack. But 10-kilweight air-cooled rack produces state-of-the-art AI. Sure. Now you can go into your existing data centers. You don't need to go buy new data. You already have data center.

Roll out the whole gear, bringing the new gear, off we go, right? And you're running the latest and greatest models at great performance. So that's kind of what's exciting about it. And, you know, they're first and foremost our customer. You know, they're buying racks and deploying them. But then broadly, they're really also a co-developer, you know, when comes to enterprise and you secure AI for enterprise, right? Because they are the most knowledgeable in it comes to deploying these types of applications.

They're just so smart about this stuff. And so we can partner with them and figure out how to bring the enterprise on board, which, again, if we all think about it, there are three classes of AI clients. You've got the model makers, right? You got the clouds. And people forget enterprise is just waking up. And historically, they have been a massive amount of spend. Mass.

Right. And so they're just working up when you see Jake Morgan, some of the banks and some of the other retail, something to come aboard. And I think that's going to be a part of the ecosystem. I think it's going to be something that's going to be around. Yeah. Last question for me, Jordy, you can take whatever after. But walk me through the pre-chat GPT era for your company.

I imagine that since 2022, 2023, it's been on fire. And demand has been through the roof. But how did the company survive from 2017 to 2022? What were you doing? Who were the customers? Did you have revenue? Like, what was it all R&D and venture funding? Like, what was the early history?

of the company because that feels like a very potentially rough period, but how did you get through that time? Well, look, I mean, you know, I've been in Chippen Design for a long time, well, and I always know that this is a long-term investment. And so, I mean, back in 2017, we're still trying to recognize cats and dogs in the web, right? It's just a cat on our dog. That's what we're doing. We're trying to figure out, you know, what do we do with this thing, right?

And so, and we're building recommender models. We'll also be different people, but the reality is this, the pre, what, what opening did, it just flushed out all of that noise pre-open AI and focus all the value around. Let's start here. It doesn't mean that images aren't important. It doesn't mean poised. All these other things are important. But what it did is focused us as a global market to say, let's start here.

Let's just start with language. And it's a very good place to start. And it allowed us to all of us come together. I just say hardware, software, models, everybody's focusing in on language as the use case. And now you've got so much production traction. And now we're focusing on other things. Like we're doing great in voice. We're doing great in video.

And these are things that are also coming. But the ability to sequence these things in production so that you can actually see value is being incredibly important. On that note, going forward, how are you thinking about, you know, reacting to customer needs, like this partnership with JPM and some of your other, you know, new customers feels like reacting to this like real time need of like, okay, we understand the potential. We're willing to invest a lot here, but we have certain kind of criteria around how we want to roll these products out versus skating to where the puck is going and trying to make predictions around R&D that you do today that will pay dividends, you know, three, four, five years out. Yeah, well, when your chip design, as you guys know, right, it takes you two years to design and you've got to go through DSMC, you've got to build these wafers and you've got to build this system. I mean, there's a three or four year cycle, right? And so you're always, it's a blend between engineering and fortune telling, right?

And so you're kind of mixing those. But the reality, the reality is you're always doing that. But here's the difference when it comes to the enterprise. And we not only have JP Morgan. Last month we announced a huge partnership with Vista Equity, which has 90 for the companies, building all the applications. So what is the biggest thing that we run out with AI is we don't have off-takes. We don't have optics.

And so now what you're seeing is the JP Morgan's of the world. the enterprise of the world, the business of the world, all these applications, all turning SaaS companies into AI-first companies, and you're seeing the demand pulled through it. So what we're excited about this is not on the web, the chips, and you got connected with the data center that there. Oh, the next thing is connected with the end user, the end off-taker that applies AI into something that's useful to new businesses. And so we're super excited about the JP Morgan, the Vista, all of these type of picture.

That's our, that's our mentality is what are people using it for? that problem, everything underneath follows. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the massive round. Nine year overnight success. I can't wait to talk to you again soon. Have a great rest of you reading. Cheers.

I'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is Alana Palmito from Paradigm. Hey, guys, what's up? What's up?

Welcome to the show. Our last guest raised $1 billion. You had to one up them. You had to two up them with $1.2. Tell us about the new fund. Oh, man. Thanks for having me, guys. Really great to be here.

We're super excited about it. We raised $1.2 billion to go after the new opportunity set. Frontier. Thanks for warming that up for me. It sounds nice to warm. Fantastic. Sorry, continue. Continue.

$1.2 billion for Investors. All right, guys, we're going big. We're going after all frontier tech. We're really excited about it. Obviously, you guys know we got our start in crypto back in 2018. This is our fourth fund. Yeah.

Pretty excited about it. But I feel like, I don't know, this is being somewhat positioned as like an expansion of the vision or the thesis, but I feel like Paradigms been investing in broader frontier themes for years now. Like, can you talk about some of the future? of the history of expanding beyond crypto and the key moments in the fund's history that sort of woke you up to broadening the thesis? Yeah. Well, I think in 2018, crypto was the most interesting frontier to be investing into, and like that really was the heart of how we started building the firm. And it was the thesis behind being the sort of researchers, builders first.

How do you get really close to the tech to be able to understand and underwrite these things from first principles? And then I think over time, it's become pretty obvious that it's not the only frontier and really hard to ignore what's happening in AI. But actually, like, I would say it's more than that. It's like the world itself has started to blend together. And drawing these concrete lines is like no longer applicable. I think that like even something that called itself a crypto, project years ago today, like things that are right on the periphery, tech is just all touching each other. And when you think about trying to separate it, it just doesn't work that way.

How are you thinking about the early stage? There's been some chatter on the timeline about like every VC just wants to pile more money into the biggest private companies, the trillion dollar private companies. Why would I waste money or time talking to an early stage founder? How are you thinking about opportunities at early stage, midstage, late stage? What even is mid stage now? Is that a mere $50 billion company, early stage at this point? Who knows? Yeah, I think, well, I think stages is a hard thing to define because, like, what are we really talking about?

Are we talking about the stage of the company, the valuation? I think it's impossible to not be backing some of the earliest founders and folks who are, you know, coming out. with new great ideas. And so for us, it's like talent-led, I would say. Like, you find great people. Oftentimes, they're in the early 20s. So I don't think you can ignore the early stage, but you also can't ignore the dynamic that you're describing,

which is like the power law of what's happening with these larger or later stage companies and how much they're able to capture and the compound rate of growth. So I think it's like you have to do both. From an actual product standpoint, are you breaking out the fund? Is there some amount, you know, segmented for the early stage, some for growth, some for incubation. How should founders be thinking about the new vehicle? It'll be truly stage agnostic.

So we're going to invest in everything from super early seed stage, even pre-seated in some cases, all the way into growth markets. We also, you know, we have a core flagship fund, which is an open-ended vehicle. And so we invest into public markets, too. Oh, interesting. Very cool. What is the effect of this year's IPOs? It would have been the internal learnings from the height of the opening of the IPO window. It feels like it's sort of open, but maybe not fully wide open.

We've got a lot of exciting IPOs that have done well. But how is that affecting the fund and you're feeling around the market right now? That's a good question. I think it's a hard thing to answer. One of the interesting dynamics happening in IPOs is like hyperliquid and some of the some of the trading activity we've seen at advance of the IPOs. It's been pretty fun to see like the 24-7, 365 markets really come alive, which has been a long-term thesis that the crypto markets have had.

And I think Jeff Lowe at Hyperliquid has just done an incredible job pulling it off. And Jeff Lowe at Trade.X, Yon, at Hyperliquid. And so like the Cerebrus IPO, SpaceX IPO, like all of these now, like we had all of this trading activity going into those. And so there was a lot more transparency on pricing in advance of the IPO event itself. Yeah. How accurate was the like on-chain pricing relative to what these IPOs actually opened at? And do you feel like they're converging?

Yeah. Surprisingly, like quite accurate actually. Interesting. And have you heard of any institutions like starting to, you know, bigger like firms on Wall Street that you think will, if they're planning to? invest in the IPO or trade it after it opens, actually start their activity on-chain? Is that something that you see happening in the future as we get sort of more evidence that on-chain trading tracks, you know, real life after these IPOs actually happen? Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, if I were them, I would be doing that. I don't know what the rules are and what the playbook is for them today and like what the liquidity and depth of those books looks like. But I mean, I think that's the thesis for what 24-7-365 markets look like in the future is you're going to have a lot more institutional activity. Certainly, we're seeing that in perps as a derivative product themselves. Like, I think they're just a much more efficient pure play product for big hedge funds to come in. And I would even say, like, the same thing can be true in prediction markets. Like, what we're seeing is, you know, some people are relating to prediction markets as an institutional product for getting exposure to things and bets that they want to place.

that is much more precise than we've had in the future, or excuse me, in the past. And so the future, I think, holds, like, still a lot of white space in terms of how these markets are going to evolve, but we continue to be really excited about it. That's great. What do your internal meetings look like? Do you have, like, you know, a meeting once a month where you guys pitch new frontiers that you're kind of kicking around? Like, at what, like, what is, what is forming a thesis look like? Is it all partner-driven or is it more collective?

you guys have kind of a general idea of a category that you're excited about and then you work together? Well, I'd say top down, like, thematically, we're investing into areas that are structurally long AGI, first and foremost. So what are the things that are going to have a natural tailwind to come out of that? We don't run, like, necessarily a top down process, though, down to an investment and say, like, let's go do a deep dive or a particular theme. I think that oftentimes you try to gain conviction and do sprints on individual areas in the market that were maybe like there's a particular founder that we are excited about.

But the process, yeah, I would say it's more organic. Like each individual partner may have a different thing that they're excited about and digging in on. I do think like, you know, fundamental to our thesis is like we have to be close to the tech. And so we ourselves have to be able to go really deep and like understand these things down to, you know, lines of code. And a lot of folks in the team are computer scientists or physics. What about down to the metal? You guys have a little data.

You guys have a little data center in the office? No data center in the office. Yeah, I mean, like orbital data centers, I think of the future. I don't know. What do you guys think? I don't know. I think you guys should get some get on the next SpaceX rocket and run a little experiment. I think it's all just, yeah, I'm on the Elon timelines, which is take whatever he says and multiply it by three.

And that's probably true, which is still going to happen, but just not next year. Yeah, I think Elon will will things into existence. Yes, with enough time, you will get there. Yeah. Almost always. Absolutely. But it takes time. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to come chat with us and congratulations on the new fund.

Yeah, and excited to meet all the new founders joining the portfolio. Yeah, yeah, super pumped about it. We got some great folks. True anomaly. Zip lines in there. I love Zip line. Yeah, Evan Rogers. Keller is amazing a zip line.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of your day and we'll talk to you. Yeah, great to have you on, Lana. Sure. Bye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing

code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business work. close. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next step is Byron Boots. We got boots on the ground. Boots on the ground. Let's bring in Byron Boots from Overland AI. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Oh, great. Thanks for having me on, guys. It's really exciting to be here. Yes. Great to have you. Very excited. Can you reintroduce the product and then take us through the latest news and the contract that you just signed? Yeah, sure. So good news is I'm working here.

out of our factory in Seattle. So you can actually see the product that we have, right? So we're building autonomous ground vehicles for defense. Basically, you think about that as like robots for the battlefield. So do you guys want to see it? Absolutely. Absolutely. Give us a tour.

So here's one of them. This is our ultra product. You can kind of see the top part of it. It's a large off-road ground vehicle. You've got sensors in the front. So there's stereo cameras and LIDAR. You've got these big wheels here and long travel suspension. Down here is a payload deck.

So you can think about putting big payloads on the vehicle right in here. There's onboard power. There's compute down below the deck. Coms in the back. So that gives you just a brief overview of one of the things that we're building. And then you asked about the contract and we're super excited. So we're the first ground autonomy provider to get a production contract. with the U.S. military.

$20 million contract in the U.S. Marine Corps. It's fantastic. You're thinking what I'm thinking. That truck needs a gun. What does the payload look like on there? It seems very modular. It seems like you can put a lot of different equipment on that. Is that something that's delegated to the Marine Corps?

They decide they partner with other primes, or do you have like other relationships where you can bring the configuration to them? So we've put 30 payloads, 30 different payloads on these vehicles. It's designed to be modular. You can see that there's L-Track down here that makes it really easy to attach things. Sure. So this is everything from kinetic payloads, like remote weapon stations, drones, EW. So it depends on what the customer wants.

We can help them integrate anything onto this vehicle. Dogs as a form factor. There's been a bunch of sort of robot dogs? dogs or actual dogs well we should get into real dogs yeah but there's been a bunch of videos circulating recently there was one maybe a week ago of of a robotic dog and it seemed like they had solved like some of the recoil challenges do you think that's a like how are you thinking about that form factor obviously you guys are you're focused on something else but I'm sure you understand the tradeoffs

of both I can imagine like your product is much better for high range you know situations where you need a lot of range, but how do you think about it? Yeah, so one of the reasons why we love this form factor is that it's, first of all, large enough to put a serious payload on it, can handle one to two thousand pounds, depending on what the configuration is. It's got wheels, so, you know, it has really good use of energy. You can drive it 100 miles. So robot dogs are really cool, too. So before I started Overland AI as a professor running a lab where we worked on machine learning and robotics. And we had a bunch of robotic dogs in the lab.

And they're fun to work on. But I think wheeled vehicles are really the place where we can get, you know, the most... You're saying the wheel is underrated and it doesn't need to be reinvented. That's what I'm hearing. Which is crazy. Yeah. I mean, so not only do you not need to reinvent a wheel, I mean, if you have squishy tires, you can do things like drive up and down stairs and do all sorts of. I never thought about how simple that is.

You can just drive up the stairs of your tires are big enough. How big are the tires on that truck? I think these are like 38 inch. So pretty big. 38s. That's fantastic. I love it. What does the actual manufacturing process look like?

Obviously, you're very well-funded company, $100 million round recently. At the same time, there's probably a lot of experimentation, a lot of putting different parts of the supply chain together, a lot of modularities. So how hand-built are these? What does the automation story over the future look like? So the ultra vehicle like this one is actually based on a Polaris razor, chassis, and drive train. Okay. So we get that from Polaris, and then we upgrade the suspension.

You can actually see a great view of that here. Got it. We pull out the seats. We just add this flat payload deck. Yeah. And, you know, we do all the work to add the compute and the sensors and wiring power, all of that kind of stuff. So we pull all that together in our fact. We're also very field forward, so we test these out in the fields all the time.

You know, we're in the field every single day, working on the software, the autonomy. And I think one thing which is really, really important about these systems is that this is a completely autonomous robotic system, right? Like it has sensors that allow it to perceive the environment, plan through the environment, control it so that a user can just tell it where it wants it to go, what payload to execute. It's not, you know, it doesn't have to be teleoperated. You know, a single user can control multiple vehicles. It's one of the things which is really cool about this tech.

I imagine there's like very high demand for both teleop and full autonomous mode though, right? People want to be able to port in for a particular mission and then also be able to just try and draw waypoints on a map. So one of the things that I think we see is when people first start to use a vehicle like this, So like, oh, like I want to teleop it and be able to precisely control where it goes. But they quickly realize that you can actually just tell it where to go on the map. Tell it, you know, what orientation you want it to be in. And it will just go there and do it. And so it's actually safer, more efficient and allows you to get like much more force multiplication

if the operator just relies on the autonomy to get it there. And so what we've seen is war fighters really embracing that and starting to experiment much more with that. So we think autonomy really is the future. Any plans to make a dual-use version for Malibu? If you got a bunch of surfboards, you want to get them down to the beach, you load them up and say, hey, I'll meet you there in five minutes. Some natural light. Some natural light.

I mean, it sounds awesome. We are actually dual-use. We are using this for things like wildland firefighting and other things. So who knows? I mean, maybe pretty soon we'll be able to get you guys one. The day party market. The Amman. taking around the hotel property.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic news. Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon. It looks incredible. We appreciate what you did. Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. There's a scoop. There's a scoop on the timeline.

Perplexity is quietly building an AI coding tool that takes on Claude Code and Cursor and Codex, potentially. It's meant to build software end-to-end. The tool is being internally used for now under the code name teammate. Perplexity has been sort of bouncing around from different. So Steve Who here says, what happened to the Bloomberg Terminal Killer? They were working on that for a while. Then they launched Bloomberg computer, which was sort of a computer use agent and saw incredible growth. Like you saw the ARR numbers went way up. It's, it feels like one of those examples of a company that

people were sort of like skeptical about. Yeah, I think one of the challenges, and then all of a sudden there's some new good news. Perplexity has a ton of revenue. Yeah. They're taking a ton of shots on goal. Yeah. Just like every other company, to be clear. But I think the difference is that perplexity doesn't have a product that's being used heavily by tech insiders. And so people just see them as like running around with like, it feels like they don't have something like that's a hit in enterprise that they can fall back on while they keep taking shots at some of these more enterprisey products. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's interesting. It feels like it's going to be.

Remember they fired up the perplexity investment fund investing in other startups? I don't know what they invested in. I don't know what they invested in. But he has good access. It's possible everything in that fund is just. on fire because the market is doing so well, so many companies are getting marked up, that could be a pretty interesting portfolio to do into at some point. I think that this is more, this teammate makes me think that it's maybe something else,

but I could see them seeing lovable's growth and having a lot of overlap and audiences and Rapplet and saying like, hey, we want to make, you know, yeah, we want to make a more consumer-leaning product. I think it'll be hard to really get a foothold. They are more adjacent than you think you go to perplexity to look up some information. You get nice, you know, UI design on the responses. Yeah, they have the Joe Rogan partnership, which seems like it's crushing. Lewis Hamilton.

And Joe can be like, hey, Jamie, build me a new CRM during the show. I don't think Joe Rogan has any interest in a CRM. I don't think he's in the market. I think he does everything over text message and you have to be invited. So you know if you're going to be on the shelf. Before we have our next guest, GROC, 4, 4.4. That's right. Is out.

It's got some reviews. Looking good on the benchmark. I wonder how does Michael Truel have a SpaceX AI badge yet? Is the cursor team involved in this heavily? Because I know they were doing some consulting work while the deal closed. Of course, the deal was announced, but there's still to go through post-merger integration. I wonder how deep that team was integrated. But excited to check it out.

I think they're still going to be running under the cursor umbrella for a long time. Sure. I think it's much easier to sell Cursor through the enterprise than Croser. And they have Composer, separate model, but. Yeah, Cursor did say that we've partnered with SpaceX AI to train GROC for five. So I think that there was a lot of class. I really wonder if there'll be any gap in capabilities, in the spiky intelligence sense of GROC will be good at a particular thing, writing, or something that's a little bit more X-native, Twitter-native, news, social media. Like, that's been the advantage there, potentially.

and then cursor will be more data code driven and they'll actually be sort of a bifurcation in the models or will we just see a consolidation where both models wind up offering like basically the same spiky frontiers every other model. Anyway, excited to dig into that. Always love a new model launch. But we have our next guest in the waiting room.

We have Will Mayer from Colt Holdings. Welcome to the show. How are you doing well? You're doing well. How are you guys? Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to have you on the show. Great to have you on the show. What have we got in the background here? Is that real?

That is real, yeah. That's like various artifacts from the past. So yeah, very cool. Webby Awards, I think. The Spring, isn't that a Webby Award? That is a Webby Award. Congratulations. Thanks, ma'am.

Give us a little background. Give us a little bit of the journey. Introduce yourself for those who are watching who might not be familiar with your work. Yeah, of course, I am Will Mayer. I'm the co-founder and High Priest at Cold Holdings. background came from making skateboard films at a young age when I was like 14 for companies like vans became deeply obsessed with brands and what they represented moved from there into advertising working with brands like Nike and Netflix and then started working more and more with startups

incubating companies and fell in love with cults and religions and believe that many of the best brands are some form of a religion I remember early in Silicon Valley I was working on a company and people were saying like, oh, like you don't want your product to have a cult like following. And I was looking at cult of Mac. Like the website that tracks Mac, they refer to it as a cult. It's a great way to think about things. Obviously, so negative- What was the case against not wanting a cult? Oh, just that like, you know, cults are bad. They often lead to like terrible outcomes in the literal sense. And also you probably don't want like psychos following you. You want just like normal customers in reality. And that's what

Apple wound up getting, they got a huge amount of just normal consumers, but they do have a cult-like fan base. Yeah, they needed the cult to get them through to the truly hit consumer product. Yeah. I mean, before the, like, 1970s, the word cult was actually neutral. It just meant a new fringe group. There was a period in like the 16 and 70s, people referred to as the fourth great awakening.

It's like huge boom in spirituality. Things like, um, I'm some Riccio, children of God, but also brands like blue ribbon sports, which became Nike or Apple. from jobs. In that period, the word cult went from being a neutral word to a negative. And conservatives started to use it to demarcate and delegitimize new movements. So today, sociologists mostly refer to cults as NRMs or new religious movements. Okay. Got it. Interesting.

But you're reclaiming and you're taking it back. Talk to us about, I mean, you have a couple different things going on in your world, but I'm interested particularly in advertising video production. Like, what does it look like to work with you? How long are you on a particular project? The Polymarket ad went very viral. And I'm wondering, like, what does that process look like from start to finish? It really depends on the type of folks we work with.

With Polymarket, we've been working with them since January in like a bunch of different capacities. The team and I have been working on strategy, a bunch of the brand work and out of home stuff. That campaign came together in an insane timeline and was driven a lot in partnership with their internal team. I got a call like three weeks before the World Cup. And if you guys know, like people now are working on. on Super Bowl ads.

Yep. It's like a six month process. Normally that whole thing from like concept to production to post to be online and brought it for TV was like three, three and a half weeks. Wow. So it was insane. What how did you process all the different reactions? I think I saw the Ruben ad like while watching UFC.

I watched it too. And I was like, whoa, Rick Rubin in a prediction market ad. The ad was obviously very cool. A lot of people were surprised by that. I brought up to you, you were like, Rick Rubin came out of the rap game. Why is it surprising that he would do like a prediction market on UFC? So, yeah, I feel like it was very mixed reactions to it. You know, not on the creative.

I think that was universally. Like, creative was awesome. But how did you process people's reaction to it? I mean, I feel like a lot of the best campaigns are pretty controversial. I mean, in our time with Equinox, we like banned membership sales on January 1st. And that became like the most heated moment that business has ever had. but also the most successful campaign in history for them. So I think with someone like Rick, what was great is there's nobody that represents questions better than him for those who feel either the creative act or anything else.

So he felt like a great fit. Yeah. I've been feeling over, you know, we're sort of at like peak marketing content. And yet like it feels like advertising has never been in a worst place. I don't know if you feel the same way. The campaign with Polymarket is like it is a campaign. It feels like the craft of advertising, and that's why I think it broke through as much as, like, again, the actual creative was good. Do you feel the same way?

Do you have launch video fatigue? It used to be like, you know, maybe a company would come out with a video, but they were really just hoping for, like, a tech crunch article. Now it's like, well, we're definitely doing a video, and it'll look exactly the same as every other video. And then, yeah, maybe we get a TechCrunch article, but it feels like people are trying to create their own artifacts. I mean, dude, I don't want to point it back at you, but you guys created like the OG launch video, I feel like for TV. I remember like that was my first experience to TBPN was like you guys on a helicopter or something. So I'd say, you'll appreciate, we had 20 other videos planned. And then it just started this sort of snowball where everyone was launching videos.

and we were like, this is no longer a good way to actually break through and get attention. So we just switched. We literally had the whole production team here, like, geared up for, like, weekly video shoots with ideas and different songs that we were going to play on. And then it just got so tired. And we're like, okay, let's not do that anymore. Yeah, we should have, we should have made 10. We should have made them all.

And then launched them, like, one day at a time or something like that. But I don't know. What do you think about, like, the, yeah, the oversaturation of things, like, how fast the internet moves, when you want to jump on something, when you want to bring back something from the archive that hasn't been touched in years. It's tricky, man. I mean, again, like, not to throw it back to the 70s again, but the average American, I think, then saw like 500 as a day, and now it's more than 5,000. And who knows what it'll be in, like, a few years from now. Wow.

We get hit up, like, every day for, like, countless launch videos. Sure. I'm not sure how long the trend's going to last. I think just, like, it's cliche to say, but, like, taste and a contrarian point of view will cut through. The approach I would give to people to try is I think the polymarket work resonated because we took somebody who would, the whole team, like from creatives on internally there to the photographer to the talent, normally wouldn't be a part of a prediction market campaign. When you think of like Equinox, every photographer we ever hired for Equinox and never shot fitness before. They only shot fashion. All of our design team came from museums that we would poach. So I think like hiring people out of category, you have

enough subject matter experts in the business. So bring in people who don't know the category and can bring new things to it. Yeah. When you have a campaign that hits, where do you, do you think the value is primarily coming from a great idea or the execution? I think a lot, it's hard to say. The Equinox, the great idea is like, let's make it impossible to sign up for membership on January 1st, right? Like, that's the idea and that's what sticks with people. I don't even remember, like, a lot of the visuals, but to me, that that's what made it a great campaign. campaign. Yeah, I think that we spent less than 1% of what we would normally spend on a January

campaign that year for what we launched, which was we don't speak January. It was just black and white text, which is why you don't remember it. But like brand actions, I think cut through more than anything now, especially with like, I feel like AI is going to democratize creativity and skill so many people. That'll be such an abundance of beautiful visuals over the next few years that like the concept and what the company actually does will probably be the most important thing. Yeah. What action are you willing to take?

Yeah. Yeah. speak louder than words and maybe sloth as well. How is working with Brian Johnson different? Because it feels like Polymarket, it's sort of like a standard playbook. You have a celebrity, you have a video, it's going in the World Cup. It's like, it's like standard inventory. Obviously executed very well. But with Brian Johnson, it's like this massive owned media, influencer-driven individual. He's huge on Twitter. It just feels like a different company. How did you approach that? What do you wind up working with him on?

It's massive. Him and Kate hit us up, like, probably late 2024 or early 25 because they heard we were focused on, like, building religions. And the brief was basically like build a religion for don't die. That makes sense. So we spent a lot of last year. We had to basically collaborate with them on what the doctrine of don't die became. A lot of the rituals around it.

There's like a, I don't know, like five core tenants of like how to build a cult brand. And I think Brian's like done all of those completely naturally, authentically on his own. Do you know? Were you responsible for getting him on the, uh, uh, cigarette box. You know about this? I was not responsible for that. In France, they have pictures of, I think, cancer patients on the boxes of cigarettes,

and one of them looks exactly like Brian Johnson. Hold this up. It's very funny. Yeah, we can share it with you and you can see. I'm interested to know the five key tenets of building a cult brand. But first, we'll show you the image of the Brian Johnson on the cigarette box. Can we zoom in there? it looks just like him to me.

This one. This would have been good guerrilla marketing. Yeah. You should have claimed credit. I'm honestly surprised it's not, but yeah, respect. But yeah, walk us through the five tenants. How did they apply to blueprint and beyond? Yeah, I think it comes down to like five core things.

The first being doctrine. So having like identity before features, which is like what is the sacred text that everybody abides by? Most brands have a tagline, but what can actually be like truly enforced and felt by the community. Brian's done this. incredibly well. Think of things like most religions have commandments or tenants. Brands have like think different or just do it. You have longer forms of doctrine like the technological republic by

Alex Karp or like zero to one. Brian used to write under the moniker zero all the time. So he's been primed for that. The second is ritual, which like again, Brian through the dinner series for Don't Die Dinners did such a beautiful job at. You guys have a ritual here every day, five days a week. but like what are the initiations into your brand or into your community? Yeah. And it's basically forming like a ritual that becomes a habit that becomes identity over time. So like you buy a pair of shoes, you join a run club, you are a runner. The third one is symbols and language.

So like how can you take elements to create in groups versus out groups? What are the key features that signal people who are insiders versus outsiders to your brand? CrossFit has like, it's not a. workout, it's the Wad. With Equinox, we never said gyms. We would say clubs. So elements like that are super important. The Catholic Church used stained glass windows to educate an overwhelmingly illiterate population in the 12th century to indoctrinate them into the church. That's like another form of symbols for that. The fourth is a charismatic leader, which again, you have in Brian, you have in folks like Palmer Lucky where you almost icon yourself. So like Palmer, goatee,

Hawaiian shirts, flip-flops, things like that are so incredibly important. And then the fifth one is an enemy. I think like every brand needs a nemesis. A lot of people use like competitors. Apple started as IBM. Yeah. With the like 1984 campaign. But over time it evolved to the concept of conformity. Because when you get bigger than your competition, that enemy loses power. But if it's like an overwhelming thought that can never truly be defeated, the enemy always keeps power. If you were doing a brand for the dog breed golden retrievers and you needed to figure out an enemy for the gold Retriever, what would, let's, let's workshop. The tennis ball.

No, it's not the tennis ball. It's not the tennis ball. Because that's your friend. That's the thing that you want to, that's the thing that you want to, that you're desperately trying to find and get. It's hunger. I don't know. What do you think?

It could be hunger for, for my Australian Shepherd, it's like every single loud car. So I would say like the opposite of peace. And in defining your enemy, you define yourself. Yeah. So like, I'd be interested, who are, who's your enemy? Who's like the nemesis of TBPN right now? Ooh. We've actually.

Yeah. Yeah, we mapped this all out. We actually did this experience. And, I mean, it was geopolitical near-peer rivals, who you can guess. And then we had a bunch of, like, more satirical ones. Like our ally. People who block data centers. We love data centers, that whole thing.

I mean, yeah, that was early on. We would do things more like who were our allies. Like, if someone would mention private equity, we were just like, you know, clap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like, no one ever is, like, standing up for private equity. Short sellers. We hate short sellers. That's, that's, yeah.

the thing, you know. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, we have a sheet. The terms and memes. How do you, how do you think about scaling what you're doing, you know, in a craft business, it's, it's exceeding, it's been done. Scale's been done in, in the creative field with, with, with, agencies, but oftentimes it's at odds with great work, but how do you think about it? I think the point of view, the way we work is different than most, I'd say agencies, like I have no desire to scale the agency much larger than it is today. The way in which we work was like, you can either grow an agency really large, try to sell for a pretty shit multiple down the road, or what we started doing like five years ago

was incubating startups. So only a third of our clients pay us in cash. The other two thirds pay us in some form of equity. We helped create a credit card company that is called built rewards, which you might have heard of. Yeah. This guy, Uncle Jane. And I've done a bunch of stuff like that.

So we're working on a ton of those with firms like index and other venture friends. I found our actual list of enemies. Did you? HVAC repairmen. I don't know where they're on there. DJI drones, TikTok, Cision Ping, under monetized podcasts, podcasts that don't have enough advertising. Which we solved. Leafblowers.

Fantasy football. Why did we put that on there? What's wrong with fantasy football? This is from the original printout of the TVPN. So when we were doing the show early on, we would have these bits. And if we had a good bit, we would write it down. would have this sheet that we would update and I would just keep it here. And it would just remind me of like the kind of the core tenants as we were establishing the brand. In allies, we had job creators

and bubbles. Very good. Very good. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, good exercise for any brand. But of course, everyone should call you first because clearly much better than most people. But fantastic progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down for us. Jordi, anything else? Yeah. Next time you're next time, one of your founders is coming on. Flag it to us. Yeah, it'd be great. I'm excited to meet them.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Awesome. Sounds good. Good one, guys. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. The old term sheet, the size gong timeline, some personnel news.

We haven't done one of those in a while. We don't really do the trade deals. The trading cards really took the place of the trade deals. But speaking of advertising, I want to watch this S.K. Heinex advertisement, the Tyler Dugop. Let's play this because I want your reaction, Jordie. to This is an ad for

SK Hynix? Okay. Don't wait for me. So we're also being extorted the others. Exported. Time went by. He's dressed up as the chip

as the HP as the HP. He's dressed up as the memory. Can't you just be cool? How have you been doing? Why is he frozen? Some prop comedy, I like it. Wow. I have no idea what that means, but I love S.K. Heinek.

Yeah, we don't know how to make... I think that ad has like 80 million views. Wow. For good reason. It's a good ad. Makes me want HBO. Well, our next guest is live in the TVP at Ultram with us. We have Tucker Brown from Compound Creative Holdings.

He's the managing partner. friend of Paki McCormick and we're very excited to have him here on the show. We're back. This is quite a set. Yes, welcome. How was the rest of your trip to France? France was hot. Okay. It was productive though. I think you know you guys probably saw the energy that there was. Were you doing deals? I was trying to do deals. Okay, but when you do the deal,

are you a back of the envelope guy or a napkin math guy? Which one are you pulling out? You got to kind of combine, I guess, both. Both. Is that just because, like, you're doing a DCF and it gets so big? You might have spreading comps on different tabs. And you guys, I'm pretty much understanding, you know, the category that we're in. Yeah. You got to be creative with the deals.

Yeah. So anyway. Okay, so take us back. What was your first can? Hmm. What was my first can? Yeah. When did you go for the first time?

It was this year. I've been the film festival. You waited until it was, like, actually going to be productive for you. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I want to make it worth the, you know, the money you got to spend to get there. But, yeah, take us back early in your career.

How'd you get here? So I've been at CAA for 15 years, you know, the talent agency that represents biggest entertainers in the world, athletes, and all of that. It was at Evolution, which is our investment bank, working on large-scale M&A, capital-raising transactions across, you know, different categories. So I've been that for a long time. I'd like the applause on that. For capital raising?

Yes, for, yes. Worked with pro sports teams, work with entertainment. entertainment companies, TV, you know, TV studios, production companies. When does that way should get tapped in for a transaction? So, like, yeah. Like I can imagine if a sports team is going to transact or, or an emerging league, or an athlete has a business that they want to sell. Like, am I, am I in the right area?

Yeah, it's sort of, it depends, right? I mean, we don't work on tiny deals. We like to focus on larger scale transactions. So in sports, it's probably going to be something 50 million plus. So if you're putting a check into a team and you got some money to spend and want to buy a piece of a sports team, we'll facilitate that transaction. We'll work on, you know, team sales too. So entire teams that trade. One of the earliest deals that we did was the sale of the Sacramento Kings of a big runaway in 2011.

And how much? And how much? Teams traded, by the way, for $500 million. Yeah. How much does that organization look like a standard investment bank? A lot. I mean, that's the service that we provide. I think the difference is we sit within CAA.

So we have the strategic connectivity, the knowledge that might be a little different than other investment has. And probably less public markets coverage, no IPO stuff? Okay, yeah. We don't do public markets. But focus on M&A. Yeah, generally. Got it. So probably a little bit smaller.

Our team is only about 20 people. So kind of 50 to 500 millions are sweet spots. This is going to be a lot larger than that. But I'd say for other, you know, deals that's really in that kind of. of range. Okay. So, you know, it was there for a long time, and I came to, you know, how I've gotten to compound of what we just launched.

Yeah. I started working around creator deals a couple of years ago. Kind of just by chance, you stumble across deals and companies that are interesting that make sense. You want to lean in and figure something out. And that was the case with Dude Perfect, you know, a creator business that been scaling really nice to you for a long time. We're not successful.

Probably 20 years and the years. Yeah, 16 years at the time. 16 years of the time. Yes. So they were ancient in YouTube, you know, land. But consistent in their performance the whole time. I think they were growing at a 50% K-GER for that entire time. And no matter when you, a lot of people dip in and out of dude perfect content,

of course you go through some binge watching, you watch a bunch of the archive, then you come back years later and you see that, okay, everything's evolved and all the great pieces are still the same, but they've added on a bunch more capability. Yeah, and their audience, I mean, they sort of eight to 16-year-old boy, I'd say is the core of their audience, but they also grew up with them. So these guys are, they're 38 now. They have a big audience.

Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. People in their 30s that grew up watching the content. So I didn't know much about other than what I'd seen on YouTube. Yeah. They built a big live entertainment business. They go on tour.

They sell at NBA size arenas. Yeah. So what's unique about that deal? Because they have multiple revenue streams at this point. They're doing advertisements, partnerships. They only have a partnership with Nerf and like a bunch of other deals in the works, tours, and then they were also talking about building like a Disneyland, basically. Due Perfect World.

Dude Perfect World. Incredible. There was a big mock-up of that when I first went to visit their office in Texas. Yeah, insane. You know, amusement park. To make a pilgrimage. Yeah, listen, they wanted to build, and we've heard this a lot from creators, but, you know, kind of a next generation Disney type business. Yeah.

For a specific audience around, you know, sports, kids, comedy, family, very family-friendly business. And, yeah, that's why I, I, I sort of got to know the guys, saw their business, diversified across a bunch of different categories. It wasn't just a YouTube business. It was a real media company. So we took that to market and executed a pretty large-scale private equity transaction. It wasn't easy. I was naive in the sense that I thought it would be because the financial profile was so attractive. Why was it not eligible to? It's a new category, I think, generally for transacting. It's the opportunity that I see at this point in time. You don't have decades of like case studies and a Harvard business.

There are no, as a single comp or press, and I looked at media company comps for it, I guess. And you're dealing with talent. You're dealing with key man risk in a way that's sort of unnerving to some private equity. Platform risk. Platform risk. I mean, with them it was a little bit less contingent on the platform itself, which was an advantage.

You know, their YouTube revenue was a small percentage of the overall business at that point in time. But sure, you know, investors get spoofing. by algorithms, what can happen if it goes up or down or changes and how that impacts the business. So it took, and by the way, you have to find the right partner too. And for talent and for their business, they built it over 16 years. They owned it outright. They cared about what the future looked like with their partners.

So finding the right, you know, not just the right deal, but the right people behind the deal to transact with. I'd say in this category and the creator world is more important than in others. And so you came out of that feeling like you had a greater. sort of understanding of these businesses as well as like an appreciation for their potential and their quirks and so you decided to become the buyer is that the right way to think about there were many times during that process and there were a couple of others I did after where I was yeah I just wish I was the buyer in the situation I was like I was doing the work to structure

the deals that made sense I understood you know the talent behind the deals in a way that maybe others buy you know other buyers couldn't and I came from the world of the agent at CAA where we had a whole suite of services and things we could provide for these creators in a way that, you know, typical buyer wouldn't be able to do. So we pretty quickly started to think about what we could put together to basically be that unique buyer that we didn't see in the marketplace. Or we didn't see many of, didn't see really at scale, didn't see sophistication from, and started to iterate, you know, what that would look like and how it would come together. And do we do we do it through the agency proper? Do we set up something independently, which is what we did?

because I think it's important to be independent in the way that it's structured and raised, you know, good amount of money and, you know, looking to do, you know, a lot of deals in the category and really become the first of its kind, you know, kind of becoming a buyer in this category. So, yeah, excited. For creators or media businesses that wind up with the Disney style business, the flywheel of multiple properties, multiple revenue streams. Do you find that those businesses are sort of organically grown by garden, like a garden, or built brick by brick? Like, how often do creators have the idea of where they want to go and they execute one step at a time? Because I always think of that Disney flywheel and it's a beautiful napkin sketch. And it's so cool. And you understand how the business works. But when he drew that, it was like two years before he died.

It was very much a reflection on a life's work. Yeah. Listen, the best creators really are creative geniuses, but there's not always cohesion without how they think about the future and what they're doing. So oftentimes, I'm going to see the whiteboard over there in the studio.

You walk into their offices the same way. I walked into a Duke Perfect's office in Texas, and you see a whiteboard scattered with ideas. And it's all brilliant. It's not necessarily put together and structured in a way that provides, again, a lot of cohesion, but there's a lot of opportunity

that they see. And I think first and foremost, what they've all done successfully is they focus on building a pretty rabid audience and building engagement with that audience. And then once you have that, and you have that captive audience, it really expands and opens up the world of opportunity beyond whatever that core product or offering might be. So for them, it was trick shots on YouTube. And then, you know, you build an audience there, kids, family comedy. And you can extend that into live events, into products, into things they probably, you know, certainly in 2009 when they started, didn't think they'd have a line of products in Walmart. Yeah.

Necessarily, right? But then you start to dream bigger once you realize that what you're doing is actually working and resonating with the audience. Yeah. So the fund that you've built, how permanent is the capital? Are you thinking about a certain fund life cycle? Is there a world where, maybe not today, but in 10 years, we are talking about capital markets, public markets, creators going public.

There's been rumors about Mr. Beast, and I can see that happening, but that might be like an exception that proves the rule, but is there a world where in a decade we're looking at, like, yeah, like the top 20 YouTubers and podcasts are public? Yeah, certainly possible. I mean, it's the fastest growing segment of entertainment. People want exposure to that. It's going to start with private capital. I think it will probably move into the public markets.

So, yeah, I think we're moving in that direction. For us, I think permanent capital is an important part of our strategy. We don't want to be forced into an unnatural life cycle. we're forced to sell quickly. Creators don't, you know, a few back. Yeah, they're like, hey, you're doing your life's work, but also we're going to try to just change up who you're partnered with in a decade. Whereas like a CPG business or software company,

like the management team might be fully turned over over the fun life cycle. So we try to, again, in structuring this, we tried to solve for what we heard was important to creators in the transactions I've been around. Yeah. And some permanence of the partnership of permanent capital is part of it. you know, letting creativity sit and remain with the creators even in a control transaction. So there's no interference in the creativity of what they've built.

That's really important even if you're selling equity control. Yeah. To me, I look at it and I can see over time this just being a more and more and more important part of CAA strategy. Because the challenge right now is you have creators. Historically, there was maybe, I don't, I don't, you know, you'll know much more about the history. but my feeling is that historically there was like maybe 500 stars that matter. And then now in media there's like 50,000 stars that matter across every single vertical. It was maybe easier to run a business when you had, you know, you could just focus on like a smaller number of like really, really big stars who were running their own, you know, basically that they had their own individual businesses. but when you have 50,000 creators and all these sub-nishes,

you can't, like, it seems like there's probably a limit. Like, you can't scale the CIA team 10, 20X and expect to be running the same kind of business. You need too many agents to cover it all. And so as a sort of new strategy saying like, hey, we're going to try to service as much of that market as we can, but we're also going to try to find the best talent and businesses across all these different categories and then be a long-term partner to those and actually participate in their overall business. Yeah, you go deep with the ones you believe matter most

and their position to scale the most. Right, so we're not, you know, trying to transact with hundreds or thousands of creators. It really is to pick the businesses we believe in in in categories that we think are exciting and scalable and go deep with them across the board. On the capital side of things, then, you know, we're able with the agency.

How do you think about stages and a creator life cycle, there's people that are going to be incredibly talented from a just pure talent standpoint, right? There's people out there that are like not even good at making videos, but have incredibly engaging content because they're so good. And then usually they graduate into having better and better teams and eventually maybe they get into products. But like, how do you look at the different stages? What's, what's too early? When are you seeing an individual who's like showing all the potential but is too early for maybe a transaction. Yeah, we don't like to be hyper prescriptive with how we look at it.

I mean, there's certain things we do look for to assess whether it's the right stage for us to get involved. If it's an individual without a business, it's tough for us. I mean, there's a lot of work to do probably to pull it together and make it transactable. So we look for it to be an actual business that's been built and scaled to some capacity. Right now. Is that like multiple revenue lines, not dependent entirely? on platform revenue. Yeah.

Like those kind of maybe an operator diversified to some extent. Maybe an operator not essential. I mean, there was no operator due perfect

when we did that deal. Wow. Wait, they'd do everything themselves? I mean, there was, I think 20 employees.

The oldest outside of them was 24. Yeah. But they didn't have like a business guy who would do like an ad deal. That's great. I love that.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's a different business. Yeah, it's 80 employees now. Yeah. Of course. So you look for some sense of a business.

Achieve diversification and some, it doesn't need to be massive, but yeah, small platform monetization is, you know, is attractive. And then, yeah, scale of revenue, profitability. We really only like businesses that are profitable. And that's not, I don't want to say it's not hard to do. But in this category, it is, you're used to seeing margins that are not common in traditional media, right? 50% plus margins for creator business is actually relatively, it's relatively standard.

So, yeah, look for profitability, growth. And again, categories that we think are. position to scale and where we can be valuable and add additional value. So, you know, bring service. When you're, when you're underwriting a deal are like, how do you think about a, like, how do you, how do you think about a business where you know there's a ceiling? Like, and I imagine there's certain situations where you're totally, it's like there's certain creators, I would say that, uh, we've always said that if you, if you asked us to make

content for a hundred million people, we would just wouldn't enjoy. enjoy doing it because we'd be covering topics that are not interesting, right? To us, at least. And there's, I think, a lot of creator businesses where there's sort of like some Tam on from an audience standpoint in the category. You don't think we can get 100 million views on an SK Heinick's advertisement reaction video, Jordy? Have some faith. Have some faith. We'll see. We'll see how that does. We're talking about South Korean memory company advertising. Come on. But I can imagine you're talking to the creator and saying like, hey, I think that you're a $5 million business today.

I think that you can get to 40 and that's going to be enough for it to be a home run for you and us. Like, is that a conversation that you have or is it always like, I need to see the path to superstardom and, you know, nine figures of revenue? I think, listen, there's a difference between how we might underwrite the deal and think about where there's a ceiling and then how you communicate that to a creator. if you're trying to justify value, maybe that's part of the conversation. But really, the best creators won't really cap their potential. So, you know, even if it's a $10 million business today, they probably think this is a billion dollar business if we do it right. We sort of serve the audience in the way that we can.

And so honestly, any of the businesses we look to transact with now, probably we ourselves believe could be a billion-dollar-plus businesses. And if we don't believe that, we're probably not betting in the right. categories with the right creators. It's early to maybe make that kind of call in, you know, in this space, but to the earlier comment about public markets, you know, potential, I think we'll see many of these businesses scale to that billion plus dollar mark, potentially go public. And yeah, it's just, there's a lot, I think, that's left to. What did end up is, is a more likely, or one of the more likely pass where you end up with effectively an index of a bunch

of top creators? Because to me, like a creator business is like, I don't know that many creators, even like look at the most sophisticated operations, like a Mr. Beast, right? You have these like nine figure Amazon deals. You have these consumer packaged goods businesses. You have, you know, royalty streams effectively. But him running his business being like, I got to make sure that next quarter is good. Otherwise, we're going to nuke. Like that feels challenging. Whereas if you took a basket of, you know, 200 top creators that, that, uh, we're trading. You could see that being like stable and growing, you know. You're looking for sort of like a Manifere ETF for you.

So you can have exposure to roguidicular and routine in one ticker. Listen, that's partially what we're trying to do, right? I saw the difficulty from institutional capital partners to transact with single creator business or single assets. They're all eager to get into the category. They want to put money to work. They talk about it all the time. You bring them a deal that's attractive. And they're like,

we can't do this. There's too much risk. If you bring them a basket, though, right? I think it's a lot more attractive. And in some ways, dude, perfect is a little bit of a basket. There's a number of on-camera talent. It's not single person, single name.

And same thing with Midas Touch. They have a number of products in their portfolio and number of hosts and whatnot. The more layers to diversification you can achieve for more attractive is probably going to be. Right. with the business itself, the talent maybe that's involved. And for us, the portfolio that we build.

How are you building out your pipeline of opportunities? Are you going, you're in Cannes, you're meeting a bunch of creators, but I imagine you're like, probably, like the beauty of creator businesses, they're out in the open. Like an invisible creator business is not one. Whereas, like, some of the best deals in, you know, traditional private equity are like, you would have to, like, live in the town. and know that this, you know, a certain business was printing.

Yeah, they're out in the open, but some of the flashiest ones don't always have the numbers you might expect that they would. Some that you don't think about as much, a little quieter, building actually really significant businesses in a different way. So you don't always know everything, even if it is quite visible. You know, I've had the benefit of living in the category for a little while, so I've seen a lot and have a good sense of what, you know, the immediate attracted targets might be. You know, we again have the relationship with the agency at CA. We've got a, I think, 308 creator clients. Not all of those would make sense for us, but a lot of them are growing and are looking to potentially think about capital partners. So there's a built-in pipeline there.

And, you know, we're open for business. I've gotten a lot of great inbound opportunities that have come our way since we announced. That's great. So, yeah, there's a lot of activity and a lot, I think, for us to do. How much time are you going to be spending in New York versus? L.A. L.A. Yeah. I've been back and forth

over the last decade plus quite a bit. I spend the winter out here usually smart to do. February New York's not always the most fun. So I'm usually here about twice a month. We'll have a headquarters probably in both locations. And then, you know, creators are kind of everywhere

too. So New York and L.A. have been the hubs of entertainment, London, a bit internationally. But we see that much more dispersed with creators that are all over the place. So, yeah. How is the influencer creator industry evolved in China? Is it similar? How is it similar versus how does it differ from the U.S.?

Yeah. Because they were big and early in like live shopping, for example. Yeah. I mean, do you have a sort of massive, you know, massive population? All the numbers you see with businesses over there are pretty crazy from an audience perspective. it's listen Transacting with China Yeah I don't I can't imagine you could do deals there

But I'm saying like is is when you when you look at that market Is there anything that you see that allows you to feel like you're seeing into the future It's tricky right because if you do take that as a learning and you try to apply it to a different territory Probably won't necessarily translate in the same way Yeah Live shopping is taken off in the US but it's a lot of like functionally gambling not like buying oranges. Yeah.

Oh. Like a lot of these like live shopping platforms are like people live breaking open packs of cars. Yeah. Unboxings and stuff. It's not like they're like shopping for apparel in the same way. That in China like a lot of these live shopping platforms they would start with like you could literally go and buy a new Kiwis and you can just see the Kiwis and then you're just hitting.

Apparently China doesn't have a Joe Rogan. Like they don't have a really dominant just public commentator who just gives his random opinions about everything. Well, I think somebody like Joe Rogan that's commenting on that many things. It's a little risky politically, essentially. So, yeah, how that would fly. Yeah. What about Hollywood?

What's you been in your update on the creator economy's interaction with Hollywood post the trifecta of creator-led movies? So obsession, backrooms, iron lung. Yeah. Three born on YouTube crossed over. This was predicted like a decade ago. It's finally here. is it, it feels like very high status, but maybe not actually moving the needle for some businesses,

not something reliable, like something low status like ads and merch, which might actually drive a business forward. Yeah. Yeah, again, tough to rely on that and bet on that as a business model in and of itself. I think it's a component that's pretty interesting. For creator businesses, I mean, it was a big kind of narrative early on in podcasting, using podcasts as a cheap sort of IP development mechanism for long-form content. Yeah.

You know, same thing with YouTube, right? A cheaper way to test and see if you've got an audience. Yeah. And then use that to sort of monetize in long form. So it's a great trend, I think, that we're seeing more and more of that. It'll continue. We were talking to Alex Hermosey about this yesterday, and it was interesting thinking about, like, he was saying that he just doesn't reach

the same audience as a... Ramsey. As a Dave Ramsey, who just has syndication on so many radio shows. and if he were able to crack into that, it's not that that deal would make him that much money, it's that it would expose his overall portfolio, his overall business to a new tranche of clients and potential customers but also audience members.

And so there's an interesting world where you could underwrite the high risk, maybe this person does the next obsession, or you could say, this person's on a track where they are going to crack distribution on radio or TV at some point and they're going to be on that channel and that's going to be a halo for the overall business,

but obviously hard to predict. Yeah, and so that's why it's hard to underwrite against that, right? I mean, it's a, that moonshot outcome could drive upside, but probably not going to be a base case underwriting situation. That makes sense. What about substack and potential new platforms? A substack, you know, you've seen some really nice businesses built and monetize on that platform.

So in the same way that, YouTube can be a core that you build off of another area is you can take YouTube building a sub-sac the same thing I think we're seeing migration from substack into video and other you know other platforms so it's one of the the kind of top platforms that we're actually looking at to evaluate if there are things for us to to invest in there and again migrate that audience into other mediums so yeah there's a lot you know to do in that category yeah I was thinking like why is there no substack for video you know like like a platform that was less

algorithmic and of course the substack for video will almost certainly be substack. Yeah, yeah, probably. They just got to get the right people on there or something. It's hard because like as soon as you make a video, you're like, well, this wants to be replicated everywhere on the internet. So let me throw it up on every channel. Timeline to first deal announcement.

Any prediction? Are you to hold me to it? It's always hard to think that. But we know we have friends with funds that have a unique strategy and sometimes they don't do a deal for 18. months after the closing of funds. So like, I think we benefit from a bit of a running start because we've been in conversation with creators. We've had this, you know, in the works for a little while. Sure. We have relationships that are warm. So, you know, we're looking to move fast,

but also want to be thoughtful. We know those first couple deals are going to be really important for setting us up for longer term success. I love to think we get something done by the end of this calendar year. Oh, cool. These deals, at least the ones I've been around historically, they do take time. There's a relationship element to it that involves a real-time commitment. You want to make sure it's, again, obviously, structured the right way. So we're ready to go. I just want to be thoughtful about making sure that we're picking the right partners and setting up the right deal for ourselves.

Amazing. Let's hit the gong for the fund itself. No, I want Tucker to hit it. Look at this guy. He's a gigachshad. You can have out it as hard as you want. It's warmed up. It's warmed up.

It's warmed up. Hit it. Break it. There we go. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for coming on down. We can wrap the show there. You can do this with your first deal.

Yeah, we're excited for that. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbPN.com. And we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Love you.