TBPN - Is Something Big Happening?, Tai Lopez Charged in $122M Fraud, U.S. Adds 130K Jobs | Harley Finkelstein, Vlad Tenev, Matt Shumer, Jeff Lawson, Sam Blond, John Ferrara

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:59) - Is Something Big Happening? (24:29) - Tai Lopez Charged in $122M Fraud (48:29) - U.S. Adds 130,000 Jobs (54:38) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:17:16) - Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, is a Canadian entrepreneur and lawyer who founded his first company at 17 and later earned a law degree and MBA from the University of Ottawa. In the conversation, he discusses Shopify's impressive 2025 financial performance, including a 29% increase in Gross Merchandise Volume to $370 billion and a 30% rise in revenue to $11.5 billion, attributing this growth to the company's strategic investments in AI commerce infrastructure and the development of the Universal Commerce Protocol in partnership with Google. Finkelstein emphasizes that 2026 will be pivotal for scaling these AI-driven initiatives, positioning Shopify to support a new generation of billion-dollar brands. (01:40:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:46) - Matt Shumer, founder and CEO of OthersideAI (HyperWrite), is an AI entrepreneur and investor known for his work in AI infrastructure and development tools. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid advancements in AI, emphasizing how models like OpenAI's GPT-5.3 Codex and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 are now capable of autonomously handling complex tasks, signaling a significant shift in various industries. He highlights the importance of individuals adapting to these changes by becoming proficient with AI tools and integrating them into their workflows to stay competitive. (02:15:21) - Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, discusses the company's strategic initiatives, including the expansion into prediction markets, enhancing family finance tools, and increasing access to private markets. He emphasizes the potential growth of prediction markets into a trillion-dollar asset class and highlights efforts to make Robinhood more beneficial for families by integrating partners, children, and grandparents into the platform. Additionally, Tenev addresses the inequities in financial services by working to provide broader access to private markets for retail investors. (02:35:08) - Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, has transitioned from his extensive background in software development to the fusion energy sector by founding Inertia Enterprises. In a recent discussion, he detailed Inertia's mission to commercialize fusion energy by building on the 2022 breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where scientists achieved fusion ignition. Lawson outlined plans to develop the world's most powerful laser and mass-produce fusion fuel targets, aiming to construct a gigawatt-scale power plant capable of supplying energy to over a million homes. (02:48:47) - Sam Blond, co-founder and CEO of Monaco, an AI-native sales platform, discusses the company's launch from stealth mode, highlighting its rapid growth to a team of nearly 40 since starting in September 2024. He explains Monaco's comprehensive approach to sales technology, integrating various tools into a unified system that automates tasks like prospecting, outreach, and pipeline management, allowing sales professionals to focus on customer engagement. Blond also shares the challenges faced in securing the monaco.com domain, including a legal dispute with the government of Monaco, which the company ultimately won. (03:03:17) - John Ferrara, founder and CEO of Juxta, is developing a GPS alternative capable of tracking locations without external hardware like satellites or beacons. He discusses Juxta's synthetic fingerprinting technology, which simulates IMU measurements to map environments remotely, enabling scalable deployment in GPS-denied areas such as indoors, underground, and combat zones. Ferrara also shares his motivation, influenced by his parents' military service, and outlines Juxta's progress, including securing $5 million in funding and preparing for initial deployments in logistics, healthcare, and defense sectors. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, February 11, 2026. We are live from the Teens Ultram. It's good to be back. The Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. He's to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something. Big is happening. His viral essay. Forty-five million views. Completely broke. containment. That has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1 million challenge. We also have Harley from Shopify coming back. Vlad from Robin Hood's coming on. Jeff,

founder Twilio is coming on. Jeff Lawson. Sam Blonde, who I worked with the founders fund, is launching a new company, Monaco and John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC Demo Day. And so we've only talked to him in person, and he's coming to the Ultradome again. So we will see him in person at two. Well, is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay. I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good. It's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into, you know, how much is AI and fast takeoff in the advancement of these models really like COVID? I have trouble with that analogy in particular. So back in February, of 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech

had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's law. There's that funny quote, the most powerful force in the universe's compound interest. People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it, but it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts, you know, everything is about exponentials. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that, just made people much more aware that if COVID got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases. And that, of course, held for most of COVID, but it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before. There are very

few true exponentials in the real world because, of course, things cap out. They turn into the to logistic curves. So instead of going up into the right indefinitely, they go up into the right and then they plateau. Now, will AI plateau, there's been a series of plateaus, there's been a series of S curves. That's the story of technology. Really, as you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth. But in the moment, you see a number of S curves.

You see the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the internet, and cloud. You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning, agents, a whole bunch of different technologies that have grown, that have sort of, if they didn't happen, there would have been a plateau, but then we get the next thing. And so the math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while, but you can't keep growing indefinitely exponentially because there's only

8 billion people on Earth, something like a billion people got reported COVID cases, but you just can't 100x from there. It's impossible. There's not a hundred billion people to infect. So eventually the growth rate has to slow down. And of course, there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if a bunch of people have had COVID, they can't really infect each other anymore and all sorts of different things. And just jumping in chat, we are aware of a number of audio issues. So we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging. So back to AI. If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from

Kardashev type 2, like full Dyson sphere, capturing 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun, even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI that we have the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%. So we can grow that significantly, and that's why it feels exponential now, but there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky. And so I like the framing of, you know, it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI. But it doesn't feel exactly like COVID because COVID affected people, you know, older people,

people who were not online reading Bologi, Srinivasa's post about COVID, studying the exponentials, modeling the R-Nauts. So it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them like, hey, like you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's going to get rough out there. And people didn't. It happened to, it happened extremely fast. And a lot of people, when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, oh, the images of six fingers. And they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect. Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses, something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning. models, knowledge cutoffs. Like, oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, no, it can

actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the internet, no problem. And so many people still use these reference points, and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good. I love that. At the same time, the coding models, as remarkable as they are, they'll reshuffle the economics of tech. We're seeing this with the SaaSpocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger, beneficiaries of AI. Others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden, an agent can just do it for you. And you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry.

Even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive, hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go get, go renegotiate your contract. But when I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about some of my real world friends. Like, I'm friends with a surgeon. Like, yes, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients. He should probably renegotiate that. I would not recommend him vibe-coding his own payment system

and his own customer relationship management system. Yeah, compliance. But even outside of that, that's just a headache. He should just maybe go to a startup that's cheaper. There will be more pricing pressure. So if he's actually getting squeezed and it's hurting his margin, then yeah, he should go and find a better tool, find a faster tool, find a newer tool.

But like the humanoid robot that can operate on a patient in a surgical context and has the trust of the patient, like it's coming, but it's ways away. And he's up to speed on surgical tools and how surgery robots are developing. And that's not going to happen this month. So compare him to Matt Schumer, the guy who wrote this.

Yes. And Matt has been building what, appears to be, we can talk to me about it, but like the thinnest possible wrapper over models. Okay. And other models, right? It is according to the definition, your AI personal assistant, writing in productivity tools.

Yeah. So again, like this is, I don't know. I can see him using chat chagipt and Claude and Gemini and thinking, what am I doing with my life? Well, if he used the tool to write this, it clearly worked because he got 45 million views and 65,000 likes. But on the – yeah, it works. But it's the AI – on the website, it's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations. Yeah.

Which you can just get the models to do today. Yeah. When he started this, I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. And so he's been – his business has been getting – steamrolled by the labs. Yeah. And a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of...

Yeah, Sam Altman famously said, rapper. Don't build a startup that assumes the models will plateau and capability. Yeah. And then he built Sora, and that was a little bit of a violation for that, but sort of in line with what he was doing. Yeah. But at the same time, yeah, if you were just building a rapper and saying,

I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, do better citations. that was always message just like, hey, you're going to have a rough time. Yeah. And so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction. I mean, just yesterday, Roon posted something. We was like, whatever level abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that.

And I think that's a good, that's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company, for some reason, hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption. I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved. It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible because that's clearly where the future role is going. But in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are

outside of tech, if I sit them down, like I have a friend who's a teacher. And I say, hell, like coding agents are here. you need to understand that this is going to change everything. This is going to be like COVID. It's like, well, for the teacher, like, COVID was important because they could go there, they could get sick, and then they could not work, and they could, you know, and the school could close. But if the software gets better, it's like, yes, in the far future, like, you might go to, you might be like, I want my kids to go to the school with the humanoid robots because

it's cheaper or something like that, but we're not there yet. And so if the software gets better, then I'm talking about, like, grade school. Like, it's mostly like distracted kids. they'll be distracted by like better AI sloth feeds basically. Yeah. But the actual process of like, you know, you want your kid to go be with other kids and have a, have a teacher there monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted. Like, yes, it will change over the next decade.

Like, I'm not, I'm not AI bear here. I'm just saying, like, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that, like, surgeons change or, or what do you like? Sorry, I got to jump in. I know everyone, I know we're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. Goel Terminal says, tax loss harvesting my audio right now. Is this the, someone else said, is this the Seedance Kling, SORA version of TBPN?

I asked people if they had kind of closed the app and reopened it. And Trey says, already sold all my devices. Anyways, thank you for bearing with us. Book Boy plunger says we're back. So, let us know. Let us know. Whoa. The chat's saying we're back.

Chat says we're back. Hopefully. AGI, ASI is here. We're back. We're back. We can't get reliable audio. Wait, cut to John's screen for a second. Oh, yeah.

You're asking me. We're so back. We're back. It still works. At least the graphics package works. Ryan serves as TBPN. Terrible buffering personal nightmare. Oh, no.

We're getting cugged. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI, software engineer, but crush you a backlog with your personal AI engineering team. All right. Thank you for bearing with us. Back.

We will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just, I, you know, I'm extremely bullish on AI. I do think like there's the software only singularity is super real. The singularity broadly. I still believe in the Kurzweil timelines. But it's just like, I don't know that February is the year, is the month. February 26 is the month where like everyone is changed, whether you're like a car mechanic or, like,

I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations. One of the things he had to do was like, kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. There's a crazy video of him like jumping over the counter and like, it's just like, the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're still like in this like slow takeoff in my opinion. It is remarkable and it's a lot of fun to talk about. So I do think the recommendation of like talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome.

Because you can just say, hey, like look at this personal website, let's build you this. oh, you have a wedding coming up, like, your vibe code your wedding website. Like, what do you want to do? Like, there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do. And you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses. But for most people, it won't be like COVID, where 100% of people were like somehow, somehow affected it by it, you know, whether it was like, oh, the thing that I like is closed. The coffee shop I like is closed. Or I'm afraid to go outside. Yeah, I think the question I have is like even five years ago, there was kind of a running joke where

felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake. Yeah. And even when people kind of started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it, it didn't mean all the jobs went away. Some jobs have gone away, but again, headcounts, you know, even a lot of these companies have stayed relatively stable. We had a good jobs report, surprisingly. Yeah, economists expected 65,000 jobs.

The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. where lands in terms of... But yeah, the question is like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. And what happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain? Yeah.

And how fast? Overall, like I didn't... I was joking. I responded to the article and I said, TLDR, freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's the point. I was joking around.

I thought Jeffrey said it's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay, quote unquote essay implies. So really going hard. But again, it felt like something like, you know, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever. kind of like high school. Yeah, it was a little bit of like a throwback to the permanent Einer class. Tyler, what was your interpretation of it?

Yeah, I think my main critique is like, I think with COVID, it's like very destructive, right? Yeah. Maybe you lose your job, but like at the very least, like you might get sick. Yeah. Everything is like bad. Yeah. With AI, it's like this article is like, yeah, people are like going to lose their jobs.

That's like kind of what the gist, like, you should be aware that like your job might get automated. Yeah. But like AI is like fundamentally like it's like a productive tool, right? I imagine, like, it's not going to cause a recession. And, like, GDP is not going to go down. It's going to go up. Yeah, yeah.

And so I think my base case is, like, jobs actually get, like, way more fake, generally. Yep. Like, now it's, like, I mean, there's probably, like, hundreds of people on X in their entire job, like, their salary is just posting, like, basically fake AI news. And they get paid by, it's not even, like, sponsored deals. It's like, they're just getting paid by X directly. Like, that's, like, completely fake job. Yeah.

But, like, that's going to go up. There's going to be more of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields, correct? Isn't that the, I mean, that was the original Sam Altman formulation was like, if you explained to someone 200 years ago, a bunch of people will be sitting around talking about the news and they'll be filmed, it'll go over the internet, it's like it makes no sense. And yet here we are running a business, doing ads for Octa.

Octa helps you assign every age and a trusted identity. so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Should we keep touring the takes, the various takes on this article? Stay Sassy says, I'm exhausted by the OMG. This changes everything. AI posts, this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom-scrolling talents back to Instagram.

I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly non-trivial tasks. My team spends a massive amount of money on it, vendors, tokens, acquisition, and I have pitched AI products that we built. on stage, I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty, overly online dudes breathless panting over the latest model anymore.

I don't need to know what's changed in the last 45 seconds in AI. I don't need some dork with a weird haircut, writing condescending posts. He was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end. I'd rather miss the latest AI news and just be poor.

Tell me when the singularity is done so I can pause singles inferno and I'll tune back into X then. Logging off, apparently stays as he works at the NASDAQ. Apparently, you see Robert's Gold. I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple weeks and the next house is, you're building Ambien?

Nelson says, okay, but this one really changes anything, everything, please, I promise, please. Yeah, people are having fun. Let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next?

Hogan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable crazy times we are in. It says, feels like an anon congest tweet. Just vibe-coded databricks with a screenshot in the SaaS market will fall 5%. Cephalopod. Yeah, I mean, if your job is building a wrap-around chat chabit like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that. Fire shots. What did Joe Wisenthall have to say?

Joe with a funny post. He's seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like, AI is devouring my job, and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like, maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else. Such good bait. Incredible bait. Master. Incredible.

Solid bait, Joe. If anyone falls for this, you really deserve it. Yes. And software engineering isn't an easy job. And Joe says, how hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do? That's so good. That's funny. Bucco Capital

quoted it and said a great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock. For the hype you read online, it's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda should justify valuations and LLM psychosis.

Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis. I was thinking more about clawed with ads. vibe-coded drop we launched on the Super Bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down, we talked about it with Tyler and said, like,

is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up? It's a clone of the Chatschie, of the Claude app interface, same color, style guides, fonts, all this stuff. Like, coding that by hand feels like a week-long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but it would be harder,

and it was clearly accelerated, and I was thinking about, like, if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like, we could have paid a dev shop, 10K, to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have done it at all, right? Disagree.

Okay, what do you think? How would it have played out? I was doing kind of drops and stunts like that before coding agents were a thing. Yeah. And you could just work hard and do them. Just grind. Dylan and I, you know, we did one back in the day with party around called Helpful VCs.

This was during, you know, kind of, this was, I think, like May or June of 2021. So it was before the crazy NFT boom had really started. But Cryptopunks were popular. And we made a collection of like 400 NFTs of various VCs. And we just put them on a website. and said if you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're going to auction off your NFT. And so you had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly. And that was an example of like a funny idea, like Claude with Ads, where we just had the idea. We worked on it for a few days,

shipped it. And that was it. So this kind of thing was... How long was it? A couple days? It was definitely no more than five business days. We got this done in like one day. Friday to Sunday Tyler was still shipping Yeah Like obviously like I'm extremely bullish on these tools And they're like incredible But it's still like I was spent like most

Like almost all my Saturday like building now It's not like it's like Okay we get it dude You took one for the team You sacrifice your weekend Like these tools are like You get saleroy the month Employee the month

Get it You deserve it They're not so incredible that like It can't like literally one shot it In five minutes You can't just tell Cloud Code build Zach Repska. Yeah.

And it can't actually like do that yet. Yeah. Without you, it would not have happened because I was busy on Saturday with a bunch of different

friends' birthday party and stuff and I wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels like Yeah, and I just like comparing it to the helpful VCs drop.

Yeah, to comparing it to the helpful VCs drop like we had to create original artwork 400 VCs. Yeah. That you would have actually that would have been much easier with Gen A.I. Totally. So that was a factor too. But you're talking about anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just wondering like, you know, there's the Jevin's Paradox. We go back to Jevin's Paradox here. Is like, is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter?

And then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening versus versus something that we would have done anyway, and it's more just like a cost savings thing. I don't know. It goes back and forth. But people are debating, and people are enjoying the AGI. Megan Fritz says, bro, you've got to listen. AGI is here.

It's smarter than me. It's smarter than Neil deGrasse Tyson, bro. There is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're going to put AI in your cereal, bro. Bro, listen, the only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription. Bro, I swear I hardly make a commission. Please, bro, buy it.

That was a funny thing. What was the call to action? What was the... What is the call to action? I actually missed that part. It's like buy a subscription to Open AI or to his app. Because if this is content marketing, like genius. No, he just said sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGBT.

Okay, yeah. Yeah, I mean, anyone who's saying that, like, this is like SpawnCon for the for the AI labs, like, that's ridiculous. Like, that's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine. It's just how nuanced is it. So yeah, start using AI seriously. It's not just a search engine.

Sign up for the paid version of Cloud or chat GPT. Like you don't post that if you're for economic gain. So I don't know. Anyway, graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub shift higher quality software faster. Delicious tacos, favorite account, says, moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long-winded articles

on how scare they are of AI. Very true. There's a lot. But I wonder, this didn't trigger my, this is AI writ slop, you know, vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. It didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this, or should we move on to a different story? Because there's a lot going on in the news today.

We can move on. Okay. I want to talk about Ty Lopez. Ty Lopez, the retail investor, retail rival, retail revival, vow, burned investors. The Wall Street Journal has a deep dive on Ty Lopez. He pitched Radio Shack, Pier 1 turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Ty Lopez was living proof of the American,

the American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage. The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self-help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send you just a box of books, which was like not that scammy, like kind of a funny, cool thing. I mean, the books were like very like he was an automated book buying. Basically. A lot of people are popping onto Amazon to buy books. They don't read. He's like, why don't we just set this up on a subscription and save you the time?

Yeah, he had this whole thing about knowledge and how, like, the original pitch for here in my garage was like, look at all my supercars, that grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around, a bunch of airport nonfiction. And it was like, you know, a bunch of these like books behind him. And he was like, this book wall is more important than anything. Where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is.

The Wall Street Journal. So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self-help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads that when he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to KAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris rented them, but like it clearly worked. It was like the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign. Very broad. Not, didn't need to be super hyper-targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap.

Radio Shack, Pier 1 imports, dress barn, Modell sporting goods and linens and things, with a promise to turn them into e-commerce winners. That was always a weird, weird, weird story. It was a crazy pitch. And it's crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off. Radio Shack. All right, I know that one. Pier 1 imports. I know that one.

Dress Barn. Do not know that one. Modell's sporting goods. Do not know that one. Linens and things. Do not know that one. At least linens and things I can guess what they sell. I don't know what Pier 1 sells.

I peer one imports. And it's crazy because, almost every single item that these retailers sell sells on Amazon and Walmart.com at extremely thin margins. Yeah. I mean, it's really like a referendum on the aggregation theory. And if you're not aggregating customers, you are just getting... Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch.

What was that? One customer database. Yeah. Leading retailer brand. That was sort of it. Yeah. We had one unified e-comber. front end, but a little late to be going after.

I mean, there was some successful, you know, come from behind stories. What was the company that sold to Walmart for a billion dollars or a couple billion dollars? That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called. But Walmart made an acquisition of an e-commerce infrastructure provider that did have an e-commerce front end, but it never reached to escape velocity, but it was like the perfect plug-in add-on to Walmart's infrastructure, and now Walmart's a trillion. company, I think. It might be a little bit off today, but we'll see. So Sean Murphy is an example of someone

here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return. But I think... Yeah, and this is called, you know, first kind of major error. Having a bad business idea, like buying old retailers and trying to revive them. Yes. Is not illegal. Yes. But general solicit Yes, very, very risky. He said, no, no. And we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered in the gap. And you see some startup founders try to get around this by like generally signaling on X that they're amazing.

But I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing this. Totally, totally. Really quickly. Phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. So he invested, Sean Murphy, invested $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, e-commerce ventures, REV, and related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230 million from hundreds of mostly small investors.

You know, we talk about these big funding rounds, and we're like, oh, like, how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the later SPVs and all the bringing retail into the private markets, but like he really did it. Like the power, you know, we, a lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns and sort of don't don't have a ton of respect for him in the business community. But he really does have a serious audience of people that have, you know, money that they need to invest. So one way or another.

And if they get caught in the wrong place, they might write a check that they wind up going on to regret. So Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 peer one gift card. and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors. Second mistake. Second mistake.

These guys lied, he said. They conspire. They led people on poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy. The payments stopped abruptly in late 2022, and the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors. So he had the $230 million of equity, and then he also levered up. Yeah. And so the creditors got control of the assets. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners, accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors, and misappropriating $16.1 million. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened, according to people familiar. No charges have been filed yet. So innocent and still proven guilty here, but the Wall Street Journal has some good data here. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to requests or comment. Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks.

So on his podcast, the Thai Lopez show and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X, never doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological. Was he talking to himself there? I don't know. Yeah, I guess.

Staying in character. I just can't believe how much the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible, an 82-year-old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands.

You can imagine somebody like this, goes offline for 10 years and then just logs onto the internet and it's like, wait, this guy has Radio Shack, Your one imports linens and goods. Yeah. Lins and things. Lennons and things.

I mean, this seems like a winner. So yeah, quick, quick Google search could have helped to avoid this. I mean, it's, I feel like it's under-discussed how Ty Lopez effectively drove an entire, seemingly a generation of young men to inspire to, aspire to build, like, a personal brand. Sure. And he, Ty Lopez's greatest contribution, I would say is not very great, is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in info products, which is like still perpetuating itself. Because it's sort of like a, it's kind of like a virus. Because somebody starts doing it, they get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel.

They realize like, hey, like this guy is actually making money at the court. I should learn from him how to do courses, and it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and, you know, flaunting a bunch of their lifestyle. So yeah, yeah. Anyways. There's so many layers. The, you know, the course that teaches you, e-commerce or drop shipping, and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on e-commerce, and we need to do the final boss. The course that teaches you how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell courses about how to sell. sell e-commerce or something like that.

Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to Restream.com. So in podcast, Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California while his father was in prison for selling cocaine. After high school, he said he spent several years working on farms, including with the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He said when on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He landed in an insurance company where he cold-called clients. Lopez has said that his breakthrough came out when he figured out how to write snappy copy for Google Ads, which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for an insurance company and later at a financial services company. He found it. He went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled, Here in My Garage. In the first...

So crazy that that was 2015 in my head. was like 2005. Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube. I know.

I don't know. Yeah, it is retro. In the first, Lopez, wearing a crew neck shirt, glasses, and a scruffy beard, stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers, is knowledge.

That was the famous line. Knowledge. The camera swings to the, other side of the garage. In fact, he says, I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought. That video spawned a slew of parodies. Uh, around the same time, wait, around the same time, 2015, Ty Lopez launches 67 steps, 67 steps. He did this in 2015. He created the 6-7 meme, apparently. This is crazy, He's pulling all the strings.

A online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life by focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich. 67 steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this, how, you know, 19 details you missed in the Super Bowl halftime show. Like the odd number is like, oh, okay, that's like feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing. If I say, you know, 99 cents, that's different than a dollar, right? I was going to say, so in that video, when he pans to the bookshelf,

one of the books is called 101 books. So it really has, he has 3,0001 books. There we go. There we go. Books inside of books, layered. I guess where Mosey took this to the next level where his new info product is he selling like tens of thousands of books at the same time. I believe there was a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of,

was that you could buy like a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times bestseller list. And I believe he, didn't he set a world record for most books sold or something like that? Wild. You know, all sorts of different book marketing strategies out there. Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small, he said in a social media post. He hosted influencer-fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion. He rented with a pool and basketball court.

In one 2015 video billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house to the two shot hoops and talked life lessons. For those who want to be an entrepreneur, what's the best advice? Lopez asked, find something you love to do. Be great at it and sell it. Cuban responded. Honestly, good advice. Icky guy. There's been a bunch of different ways to say that from very high-brown. I should have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a page. He's like, this is such good advice. I can't just, I can't just, I got a charge for it. Yeah, that's the problem is that a lot of the courses, it is just like, it's already been distilled into a 60 second reel. You pay for the course and you're just getting that 60 seconds repeated 25 times. All right. It's rough. So let's go into the shopping spree. Did you ever buy a course? Yes. That actually changed your life?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I did. I bought a course on Houdini, on Houdini, which is a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood if you've watched Game of Thrones and you see all the forces galloping. What was the course title? Was it like, how to get rich quick with Houdini? No, it was like, it was like, you know, like using Houdini and advanced VFX pipelines. So you weren't deep, you didn't, you didn't, the course creator was not driving a Lamborghini. No. No, the course creator was like, I worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely. I would love to pay you $1,000. to teach me how to do that, that's really cool.

And I want to learn that tool. I paid for a number of courses related to content creation Cinema 4D, after effects, like any like skip, you and you see me like edit something, you know, all of that is, I did, I needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos for free. I was also paying for stuff. But none of them were about getting rid of quick. You paid to learn how to fish.

Yeah. And now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime. Exactly. Because, I mean, truly courses are good if it's a narrow scale. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19. Yep.

And I doubt, even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just learn from any Arnold video, any quick Google search, certainly can get it from chat. It was opinionated and I just followed it. Yeah. And it was well worth the money. Yeah. Even though the information was like there's something about if you pay for something.

you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it. And so I won't say, even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all information products are bad. No, I completely agree. P90X. That was the workout course that was going viral when I was in college. The ones I do think are really, really, really bad are when they advertise like trading courses to like younger audiences.

Yeah. Because it's like, okay, you have $300 in your bank account. Yeah. I'm sorry. Like, you're not going to change your life. You should learn anything else. And the crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course, which would be like, like, buy ETFs, right?

Like, there is good financial advice that you could give someone to trade, right? And it would be basically like, don't trade, like buy and hold, right? Dollar cost average in, invest a little bit every bond. Yeah, or go pro. and go work at Jane Street or Citadel if you have the chops. Intern at a wealth management firm. Sure. The flip side is like a lot of the courses, they weren't even teaching you how to,

okay, well, there's this big AI trend. Maybe you want to increase exposure to Nvidia, Google, Apple, you know, the big companies. Like that would be maybe a little financial advicey, but totally reasonable. They were like foreign exchange, like, like, Forex courses. So you were trading, but it was like a sense. on top of a random number generator. Like, it's like the most complex, like, understanding the trade flows for proper Forex trading is not something you can just like pick up on a weekend.

Like that is a life's work as opposed to just being like, oh, well, like, I'm a kid. I'm using Uber all the time. Maybe I should buy some Uber shares. Like that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing, in my opinion, then, okay, well, the candlestick went up and it's a camel pattern, so it's got to go up. Astrology. Yeah, chartology or something that's that called. Anyway, vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV.

Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on meta. Lopez teamed up with Alex Mayer, mechanical engineer who had co-founded an online dating app that sold for $255 million. Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami-based retail e-commerce ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO and mayor was president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer. According to the SEC complaint, she had previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started. The spokesperson for Merrissetty believed in Rev's business models put over $5 million of his own money into the company and suffered substantial losses when the business was hit with a so-called severe post-pandemic macroeconomic headwinds.

Birken Road is represented by blah, blah, blah. Rev's first notable acquisition came in 2019 when it paid $5 million for the e-commerce rights to the Dress Barn name. Has anyone in this room heard of Dress Barn? Crickets. Where's the crickets? Where's the crickets? That's a good one. Team crickets, cricket sound effects.

We've got to add it. After the COVID pandemic hit, Rev went on a shopping spree in July 2020. It purchased home furnishing retailer, Pier 1 imports out of bankruptcy for about $31 million. followed later that year by two more bankrupt chains. Sporting's goods retailer models, modals, for 3.6 million. Has anyone heard of modals? Yes? Yes?

No? No. No. And discounter Steinmart. Has anyone heard of Steinmart for $6 million? And we got another no. I feel like this is, we got people from all over the countries. So I think this is somewhat representative of the average American.

And of course, Radio Shack undisclosed. I wonder how much they got Radio Shack for. I have no idea. Okay. There's an interesting tidbit here about Alex Mayer. I had to hunt it down. I'm sorry, I was distracted. First, I'm going to tell everyone about Labelbox.

Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, e-vals, and expert human data. Label box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. Tell me. So Alex Mayer is controversially included in this Wall Street Journal article about this, you know, potentially disastrous deal. Jessica Livingston, founder of Y Combinator, is the author of Founders at Work, Stories of Startups Early Days. It's a fascinating book with interviews.

It's basically a whole bunch of podcast-type interviews combined. So 37 signals, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal. The interviews in here are remarkable. Steve Wozniak, Katrina Fake from Flickr, Max Lepchin at PayPal. This Founders at Work template, if you see it has this like, we should pull it up, but it's like this very iconic book with just a bunch of names on it, and then in orange founders at work, and then Jessica Livingston wrote it. It turned into a series. There's coders at work about software engineers, and there's venture capitalists at work. And venture capitalists at work is a different book, not written by Jessica Livingston, but Alex Mayer's in it because he founded Zusk, which was a dating site. and it's just like a funny, like, fun fact that he's in this like book that is sort of tangentially, like extremely legit.

Anyway, we can move on. During weekly Zoom calls for investors, Lopez and Mayor Pitch, new investment opportunities by touting the success of earlier REV deals, according to former employees. At his self-help conferences, Lopez would tell audiences they could share in his success by investing in REV brands. Joseph Burtow, a 44-year-old who works in construction sales, went to an investor meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. Bertow recalled the message, give us as much money as you can. These deals are popping off, and we can't get them fast enough.

He invested about $350,000. So much money. I don't know. I mean, maybe people are... At the same time, when I look back at my first angel investments, which granted, I was like 22, I would... I thought that I was seeing good... enough opportunities that I would happily invest half of my liquid network.

Half. You were going to say 10%. Which, I mean, it wasn't that much of the time. I was like building my first company. Yeah. It was like very young. I was down to take a lot of risk. Yeah, yeah.

I was like, hey, this is. But it's got to be different for these folks because this is clearly like retirement. Yeah, but part of it is like when you start seeing. Yeah. When you start seeing private deals for the first time. Totally. It feels special. It feels special.

you look at the chart. Yeah. And, you know, and in hindsight, I'm like most of the worst, like, there's certainly some people that have come on the show, Justin Marys is a good example. Like, you look at the first, like, three deals Justin did, and they were all, like, at least two were unicorns. Like, he's insane. But for me, I look at the worst investments I've ever made were, like, probably in the first five.

Yeah. And so, people just don't realize how many companies are out there, how many private companies are out there. You see this one deal, you talk to this one founder, and you're like, this is everything. And some of the early angel investments that I made that didn't go well were like, okay, great team coming out of a great university on a super interesting category. And what I just didn't realize was that they were coming out of Waterloo, but there was a team at MIT that was six months ahead. And there was a team at Stanford that was nine months ahead. And Sequoia had already backed this one. announced and then the you know and reasoned back that one and so I was in the one that didn't have any of

the backing and was just going to be third in the category which was just going to create this like power law difference and if you don't have full coverage you don't even know that those deals are happening and so you wind up uh even if you get like the idea correct and like the team is good you can still wind up in a really and the other thing here is in one peer one pitch deck investors were told they would receive 200,000 after their first year if they invested one million which again is 20% return, which is insane. If somebody tells you they're going to do something like that. Any sort of like guarantee your return is usually a huge red flag.

Huge red flag. Anyways. Before we move on, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Anyways, I think we can move on. Sure. This story is still unfolding.

It is very sad. and I hope that the investors that were duped can recoup as much of their investment as possible. Indeed. Getting into the jobs report. Jobs report. Big beat. 130,000 jobs. Economists expected 65,000 jobs and a 4.4% unemployment rate.

Bloomberg has a live blog here, breaking it all down. There's some interesting things. So traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to do. July and revisions trimmed the US 2025 payroll gain to 181,000 from blue Yeah, it's it's interesting I think everyone there were kind of delays with the report right everyone who was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal yeah and now I think the reaction is can we trust can we trust the data right yeah there's just been so much kind of like fad thrown around the data and and the job market in

general that it's hard to believe your own eyes. I was debating with a friend about he was he was sending me some economic data and he was saying like like AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and and that's where like the real economy like there's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets. It's very forward-looking. You're valuing things based on, you know, 2050 cash flow and being like, yeah, I'll pay for that right now because this company's going to be around. You're buying a Google bond that doesn't mature for 100 years, right? And then there's, like,

on the ground, like, do people have jobs or not? And the question of, like, do people have jobs or not is much more in the health care and services sector. And so Bloomberg has been breaking it down. U.S. payrolls rose in January by the most in more than a year, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell, suggesting the labor market continue to stabilize at the start of 2026. And now there's going to be some debate over, you know, how real is this? Will it be revised down? But there are other economic statistics that we can look at. We're having Harley from Shopify on the show and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of commerce data. And if people are even just worried about losing their jobs,

usually they're pulling back on spending, discretionary spending. And revisions came out today as well, showed job growth was almost. 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, like we announced these big numbers. Yeah. And then we kind of move on and then revise them. Yeah. This is pretty big though. You'd be surprised if this flip negative. Like maybe it goes back to 65 or half as much, but it still seems like like there is job growth broadly. This seems at least directionally correct. Employers added 130,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined to 4.3% according to the BLS. That followed revisions to the prior year, which showed market slowdown in

hiring. Jobs gains averaged 15,000 a month last year down from the initially reported 49,000 pace. Just a bit off. The report suggests the labor market is finding its footing after a year marked by rising unemployment and minimal hiring, while economists expected hiring to remain generally sluggish in 26, more clarity around the impact of President Donald Trump's economic policies and lower borrowing costs could encourage some employers to boost headcount. The January data reinforces Federal Reserve's official inclination to keep interest rates on hold now. Yeah, I mean, there is this interesting tension, right, between even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these, like,

two things. Like if you're if you're pushing for hey let's let let's count every possible job that could potentially you know fit in this category that will then it's going to be harder to make the case that you should cut rates. In leaving rates unchanged last month chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market so Jerome Powell saw this as well coming off a hiring recession in 2026 this is welcome news said Heather Long chief economist of the Navy federal credit union I think Fed, Chair Powell was right. The labor market appears to be stabilizing. So Trump praised the numbers in a social media post Wednesday said that the U.S.

should have the lowest interest rates globally adding to previous calls for great reductions, great job numbers, far greater than expected, he wrote, in all caps. With the release of each January employment report, BLS benchmarks payrolls to a more accurate but slightly less timely series called the quarterly census of employment and wages that data is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers most U.S. jobs. That adjustment showed job growth was nearly 900,000 lower in the 12 months through March than initially reported. The figure roughly aligned with that of the BL. Overall, I think the team that had to revise last year down by almost a million now coming out and saying,

like, you know, everything's great and we crushed it. It doesn't give you, I don't have any comp. Like, a smart person might think, like, okay, a year from now, we're going to figure out that this, none of this was real. Maybe, yeah. I mean, the market's not moving on it. The Dow Jones is down 0.1%. The S&P 500 is up 0.1%. The NASDAX completely flat, I guess, technically up 0.01%.

Comments on Joe's post says, and you take these numbers? at face value question mark. Joe, I know you don't believe these numbers. Oh, well. Almost every single person responding. Just like, oh, anyways. Oh, well.

What did Kalshi have to say? Jobs numbers this month. This is for February. Most people are expecting, you know, more than 60K. The current forecast is 68,000, and it jumped in the last couple days. Well, you know what?

Israel, bite dance, C-Dance, 3.0. The model's very good. According to Ethan Mollock. I wish we could have asked Chris from Runway about C-Dance yesterday and how he's thinking about competition from BiteDance. But we can next time. Let's play this video. This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane,

which, if you ask me, is worth the two trillion of CAPEX. It is photo real. of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations. This is the incredible story of the pilot otter. That's cute. I like that. 12 seconds, longer than most eight seconds. And someone in the replies shared a Grock version of this

that it just has a little bit more, I don't even know how to describe it. It's a little bit more blurry, maybe this video. I don't know if you can see it up close, but it's not a model made this. This is grok. Okay. The audio is also much worse. I think I watch this.

Yeah. In the skies above Alaska, a river otter pilots its plane. Yeah. Its pause expertly handle the controls. Yeah, you instantly clock the audio. Yeah, you don't on the C-Dance. On C-Dance, it sounds for sure real. Otter maxing.

Lucas is firing shots at actors. Okay. But we can pull this up. Let's see. Let's get some odds. You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal! Oh my God. He knew too much about our Russia operations.

He had to die, and now you die too. Insane, insane audio, but the video, the video looked, I mean, I can't. You've watched a handful of movies more than me. Does this look like it could be in a film? It's close. It's pretty close. What are you missing?

I mean, just the length of the shot, it's not fully like modern in the sense of the way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either like way more cuts and just way more like detail shots like cutting in and out or they'll try and turn it into more like a cinematic set piece and have like a drone shot or sweeping shot. like it's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of like the most modern movies but but if you were sitting there prompting and splicing it together from different angles for sure you could for sure what do you think yeah i think um i do wonder if there's like interesting comparison to the the kind of cloud bot stuff where like i think one of my main takeaways from the cloudbuff thing was that um it's going to be hard for for big labs to kind of replicate that just because of like you can't get the the what's app integration like stuff like this

where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly like training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on. Like the otter flying, like that's David Attenborough's voice, right? Like you're not supposed to be able to do that? Yeah, yeah. Where like can SORA, can opening out release SORA with that exact voice? Like probably not. Like maybe they can try to do it, but like they're clearly going to face some legal repercussions

where like China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those. Yeah. A lot of the American labs, it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like,

look, yes, we know you can prompt Disney characters where you're happy to pull that out, but also, you want to talk to our business development team? Yeah, like with Open I, you saw them actually do like a Disney deal where... Very quickly. China is not, like, I'm pretty sure that you can go and see, sea dance and just prompt like Mickey Mouse you know doing a little dance or whatever yeah

let's look at this let's look this other C dance 2.0 uh post will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster epic action film scene different cuts there you go john you wanted cuts all you had to do is ask this is pretty real I like that will Smith is just the benchmark forever and I have the old will Smith spaghetti a I'm ready to go after this Okay. All right. So this is February, 2026. Yeah, this is.

Let's go back in time. That is a great shot. That's something you need to do in Houdini. No longer. Yeah, this is good. This is very good. All right, pull up this next one we got going back to 2023. We can see the progress.

China can one-shot AI crime. Wow. This is the progression? I remember people used to post this exact same thing and be like, this is going to change everything. And it did. And they were right. Yeah, they were right.

But it's still funny. And now it's just him sitting there enjoying spaghetti, I suppose. Yeah. Wow. That looks. Cinematic. This is good for Will Smith, right? Like, he'll license his likeness and it's just more attention.

I mean, this is like Jake Paul's strategy. He really wanted to be all over Sora. Got a billion impressions. or something like that. Daniel in the chat says China can one-shot AI crime. Who do you think launches the next turn of the video model? Do you think we get V-O-4, SORA 3, or the next meta model first? And while you're thinking about that, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. What do you think, Tyler? I'm hoping it's meta. I really want to see their model.

I'm expecting it to be like super, super good. I think it'll be this quality. It has to be. This is like the standard. You can't launch something that's behind the frontier. Yeah, also with SORA. No shortage of content, for sure. Yeah, I'm curious what they'll do with SORA

if they'll actually like keep working on the app or if they're just going to kind of try to just keep like making the model better and then, yeah, they put it in the app, but it's not as big of a push this app. I don't know. Well, yeah. Another news. Which one?

We got to talk about Mistral. Mestral's cooking. They're cooking. And they're investing $1.4 billion to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden. Wow. Let's head over to Bloomberg. French AI startup. Mestral is investing $1.4 billion U.S. dollars to build AI infrastructure in Sweden,

as it pushes to become the go-to-a-i supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe. The data center will be located in a place that I can not pronounce, Borlaunge. in partnership with Echo Data Center AB, Mistral said in a statement, the facility will house the advanced computing power to train and run Mistral's AI models, and is scheduled to be operational from 2027. So at least a year out. This is Mistral's first data center investment outside of France, and the company is billing the build out as a move to strengthen European tech sovereignty.

As political ties with Washington-Fray, governments in the region are increasing, wary of relying on Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which dominate AI infrastructure, data storage, and cloud computing. Mistral, which develops AI models and hopes to be Europe's answer to OpenAI, says it can offer customers a fully European AI stack with data processed and stored locally. This investment is a concrete step toward building independent capabilities in Europe dedicated to AI, says Arthur Mench. Their last round was led by ASML, $1.3 billion from the Dutch.

chip maker. That's a good deal. They're cooking. They're cooking. This is the kind of thing that McCrone should be highlighting. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess it's old news. You need to launch a new project. You can't just fully focus on it. And they're announcing in the Financial Times

that their revenue is now similar to GROC. Mr. All's revenue soars over 400 million. Interesting. That's pretty high. 400 million as Europe seeks AI independence. Well, they've certainly carved out a nice niche. Let's go over to the GROC team and GROK and the XAI departures.

First, I'll tell you about Finn.a.I. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a. No, in the chat says, Jordi discusses dissing McCrone, caused domino facts. Mr. Roll and that's one point where. You manifested it. I did it. I inspired them to grind harder. No, of course, I was one of many who was having a little bit of fun last Friday. So Jimmy Ba'a said bye yesterday. He said last day at XAI.

And Tanish says with Jimmy Baas departure, half of the XAI founding team has left. A lot of people have been trying to figure out why is this happening? Yes. And my current belief is that, and this is basically, on some news that last week, XAI executives were given the option, take cash as part of the

SpaceX merger, take cash today, and you can just move on, or you can take equity in SpaceX and stay with us for the next leg. And so I think a lot of the executives, which are just the founding teams and the co-founders are just saying like, hey, I'm going to go work on something else. And so we saw some other posts. Some of these people are teaming up to work on something new together. Sure. I'm sure some of them will just join other labs. But yeah, the big question is like what is, is XAI strategy going to change at all with the merger or is it going to be more of the same? I keep kind of wondering, you know, will they get into, you know, actually get into the neocloud business? I could see it, I could see it happening. But for now, I think this is maybe, like people want it to be more dramatic than it actually is, I think. But yeah, it is, it isn't, I mean, when the, when the, when the SpaceX merger happened with

XAI, a lot of people were like, like, you got pre-IPO shares in SpaceX. Like, you're, you should ride it out and then sell post, post-IPO, because the stock will probably pop, et cetera. And yeah, this feels like a quick exodus of people, which is aggressive. And it feels like, sure, you're behind the frontier on a few different vector. but it is a place where you're sort of GPU rich. Very intense environment, though. So if you want something that's a little bit more exploratory,

a little bit more research-oriented, you know, having the CEO say, we're not doing research, we're doing engineering. That's not exactly a rallying cry if you're like, but I want to do research. I don't want to do engineering. But I'm a researcher, sir. You're an engineer.

You're an engineer now. And so, yeah, it'll be interesting to see where people land. Tyler, what's your take on all of the, departures from XAI. Yeah, I mean, it probably just seems like more evidence that that X is going to be some sort of like GPU reseller or Neo-Cloud market. Yeah, yeah. Like maybe it's like, okay, Elon is extremely bullish on space data centers because it can just allow you to put like so much like, you know, terra watts of compute in space.

It's like, okay, if you're engineering versus research, maybe he's just like so scaling pill that you don't actually need to do that much research. you can just build up massive data center, and then you just use the same paradigm of models. You just train the biggest model. It's 10x bigger than everyone else. You just have the best models. You don't actually need the insane moonshot research projects. Yeah.

Maybe there's something like that going on. Yeah. A lot of the researchers, they said they're leaving. That's all, folks. They said they're leaving because they're so excited about this kind of recursive self-improvement learning. Yeah. There's a whole recursive-type cycle. It's like a very moonshot research project.

That feels it's something you wouldn't want to leave. That seems fun. That seems interesting. Yeah, but if XAI's whole path is now just, we're going to scale up to data center so much that we don't actually need to work on these things. Okay. Maybe it's something like directionally kind of in that lane. Yeah.

What was the original Elon Musk prediction about XAI's progress around, like, solving something fundamental in physics or one of those, like, major math challenges? Yeah, I think he said that at the GROC-4 launch. Yeah, was that Naviya Strokes? Yeah, it was something like that. It's going to develop some novel physics there. The most impressive product that I've seen from XAI is their voice mode integrated into Tesla. Comedy mode.

It seems to be wildly entertaining to a lot of people. To a lot of people. And I've been seeing posts this week that have like 200,000 likes, meaning that it's incredibly mainstream on Instagram. And testing out the product, it's like very quick, very low latency. It says it feels like pretty much as close. to talking to somebody like in a Google Hangout or Zoom as you can get. And so I think maybe their voice mode is underrated. I think so.

I have a friend who has a Tesla with a long commute. The question is, is there value beyond comedy? Not saying there needs to be right now. But if GROC can actually get good at doing things for you genetically and you're driving in your Tesla and you can say, hey, book me a haircut for next week and I can like do that. Or hey, I need to get some groceries. Can you order some groceries to the house?

and you're actually just getting that kind of like ambient assistant experience. I think that they could get some traction there. They do have an insane amount of cars on the road that's a big user base. Yeah, I have a friend who has a Tesla with long commute, and he talks to Grock voice mode, not the crazy mode, just the normal mode about putting together to-do lists, planning out the day, researching things, answering questions, getting up to speed while he's commuting.

I've done that a few times where I've just kind of sort of opened up, not the voice mode specifically, but the record my voice and transcribe it. And I'll sort of talk about what's on the agenda for today and then try and put it into just a sort of, you know, annotated note format that I can work with. We, breaking news from Elon. What's that? He shared, XAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution as a company grows, especially as quickly as XAI. The structure must evolve just like any living organism. This unfortunately required parting ways.

with some people and we wish them well on future endeavors. We are hiring aggressively. Join XAI if the idea of mass drivers on the moon appeals to you. That's funny. I like that. Yeah, but mass drivers is like not an AI thing, right? So it's very clear that like if you want to work on these crazy like moonshot AI, like this weird machine learning concept, like maybe it's not actually that aligned with with XAI anymore.

Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, it's like what type of moonshot do you want to, work on. ASI that lives in a data center or the infrastructure that will power humanoids and the mass driver on the moon that's making endless satellites that, you know, build the Dyson sphere. It's like it's a different direction, maybe even longer term moonshot, but it is different. Yeah, I mean, they still have like the macro hard project, right? Yeah. I'm very excited to see what comes out of that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, do they do they have a CLI tool yet for GROC? I want to say there's there is a ROC code. Okay.

Yeah. Anyways, actually, I posted a 45-minute all-hands outlining their accomplishments and much of other stuff. So today. We will watch that right now in silence. Yes. No, we're not going to watch it. No, we'll tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let's see. A lot of people, like a number of researchers have just been doom posting on the timeline. Hugh Pham says, Today I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing when AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do.

And it's when, not if. So this is somebody who's actively at Open AI. Yeah. And so it's significant, but it's also. great marketing for investing in Open AI. I think people are more skeptical when it comes from the CEOs who are actually out on the fundraising trail than from staff engineers who have less of an incentive. I don't know. Yeah, but this post has been up for 19 hours and it has 384,000 views.

So you can assure, I would say, Open AI comms has seen this post and has not asked them to take it down. Yeah, well, they probably genuinely feel that way. The question is just like, how real is it? And how diffuse will this be and how fast will it be? Is it February of 2020? Or is it, I don't know, some other time, 1995? There's someone on X who has figured out a massive viral hack to go viral with AI slop constantly. I thought it was very funny because I looked up the account and I already had the muted.

But the formula is as such, Trunk fan laid it out. Find a viral post. AI generates a take of 400 to 800 words as a quote. You do 10 plus quotes in quick in a row and hope a few hit. Between 10 30 and 8 and 10 p.m. yesterday, cranked out 13 of them, 10,000 words total. All AI slop every day unreal. And the, and so Trung fact check, or spot check them with Pangram and you see that it's fully AI generated. But apparently he blocked Pangram Labs.

I was laughing because there's this interesting divergence in the performance. Some of the posts have tens of thousands of likes, and some of them will just sit there with like one like, two likes, no likes. And so it's this odd case of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, something like almost 200,000 followers on X. Like it's working, but there's no real audience because if you post something that's just, that only gets one like, it feels like there's no like real audience there, real fans. So I'm wondering like how this monetizes, is this a real business? Where's this going? But certainly frustrating some people at the trough.

Ackman makes $2 billion bet on meta. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in meta, making up to 10. up 10% of its portfolio or about $2 billion. The firm sees meta as a top beneficiary of AI, boosting ads, content in future products like wearables and digital assistance. I saw somebody had wired up, I don't think we got to it in the show, but they wired up OpenClawe with their meta headset. Okay.

Which one? VR, AR or? The AR one. The displays. But effectively saying like, hey, buy this product, and it would go to Amazon and buy the product. Wow. And that is the vision we've been talking.

That is the opportunity. Zuck wants you to be able to just be in the world shopping. Yep. And for a lot of people that don't want to wire up an open source project, he will slowly do all the biz-dev deals to, you know, drive traffic. Although meta has tried to get into commerce so many times, and we can talk to Harley about this as well. There's been a lot of back and forth about, you know,

should you be able to just click and check out directly on meta properties, it's never fully developed, and you have to imagine that they have all the biz-dev horsepower, in the world to try and go and do that. But for some reason, that has continued to live in the domain of brands in Amazon, on Shopify sites, et cetera. Quickly, Vanta. Automate compliance and security.

Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And Scott Wu is sharing some news from cognition. Your PR should fix themselves with AutoFix. Devin now closes the loop on its own PRs. If Devin review or GitHub bot flags bugs, Devon automatically fixes the PR. Devon also tackles CI-Lint issues until all checks pass. And so there's auto-fix, and Scott just says one step closer to the recursive, ever-improving AI coding system.

Jay Bull on X says, cool. So now Meta is Enron being a little dramatic. But Meta platforms auditor, Ernst & Young, raise a red flag over the financial. Engineering META used to keep a $27 billion data center project off its balance sheet. Meta moved the data center project into a new joint venture with Blue Al Capital and said it isn't the primary beneficiary of this entity, so it didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Four Democratic senators asked the Financial Stability Oversight Council to investigate the

risks that AI-related debt posed to the financial system. Citing's meta's joint venture with Blue Al as an example of a convoluted and opaque financing This is sort of old names. We talked about the Blue Al deal and how it was structured as its own entity. It's its own business. It just has meta as a tenant.

Yeah. I think for me, I would probably need to see them doing, like copy and pacing this like, you know, 10 more times to the point where I'd be like, you know, maybe meta's not good for it, right? But...

I mean, it still shows up in the cash flow if they're paying for the data center. They need to monetize it properly. So. Nas on a roll, it says apparently Walter Bloomberg has no vocal cords left because of all the uppercase shouting on X. He's constantly. I bet a lot of people out there think he just works for Bloomberg. They probably do.

Oh, yeah, Walter Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg, Joe Wisenthal's boss. Definitely. We got Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring him to the TV panel. Harley, how you doing? Gentlemen, great to be here, as always. Love being here on earnings day. Yeah, always good to have you. Great to have you back.

Yeah, give us the update on earnings. And then I want to dig into what you can tell us about the economy broadly, 2025, the jobs numbers, everything about what's happening in the world. Help us understand it. All right, let's go. All right, let's start with the headlines. Last time we were on together, I think it was Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think I came to you live from the middle of the national retail. Or maybe it's January, actually, NRF that's Retail Federation.

And I told you that you asked about how things are over Shopify. I said, wait for the earnings. So here are the earnings. We announced early this morning. G&B was up 29% to $370 billion, which is incredible. Revenue is up 30% to $11.5 billion, which is a decade of growth of over 20%. The number that actually has, I've been in Shopping for almost half my life. And this number is, I don't know, hits hard, which is that we now power more than 14.

percent of the entire U.S. e-commerce market, which is, which is remarkable. You guys did the, you did the 1% of the TAM meme, and then you 14-Xed it. That's exactly. That's exactly right. And actually, you know, one of the cool parts is that we also did that with, I think with incredible discipline, cash flow for the year was about $2 billion for 20, 2025. Beyond that, one of the things that I think I'm certainly most proud of is that we really spent kind of 2025 building the rail, for AI shopping. And we did things like announce the universal commerce protocol that we co-developed with Google, which effectively means that every single brand will be able to sell on every major AI platform with our Agentic storefronts. And we have partnerships with ChatGBTBT, Google Gemini,

AI mode, and Microsoft co-pilot. And so I think if you kind of think about 2025 is the year that we kind of laid the rails for Agenic, I think 2026 is the year that we scale what runs on them. And so that, I think, is really incredible. what we were talking about in NRF, we were talking about some of the brands and how the velocity of growth, we can talk about consumer as well. But just in terms of the merchants and entrepreneurs we see, I'm beginning to think that 2026 is really going to be kind of year one for this next generation of these billion-dollar brands. I think there's going to be more billion-dollar brands created in the next 10 years than the last 100 years. And in terms of, you know, if you're looking

for kind of a proxy for how the consumer is doing, I mean, we talked, you know, we talked during BFCM, of course. We did that, you know, I sort of became a big a stream. A couple of hours, exactly. But look, GMV for the quarter was $124 billion. I mentioned, you know, for the year was almost $400 billion. And so if you, if you think about that as a proxy for, you know, how consumers are doing, consumers are buying. They're buying from brands they love. They're being incredibly thoughtful about where they're spending their dollars. But for the brands that they care about, they're voting with their wallets to support them. Talk about Agentic Commerce. Is there any activity that's happening yet? Is the ads launch from ChatGPT going to be an important moment in driving that? What are you looking forward to this quarter in terms of Agentic? So we do have some merchants live already.

Merchants like Glossier, Spanks, Viori, Stanley, Steve Madden already live. Actually, if you just look from Jan 2025 to Jan 2026, we actually have seen approximately AI searches. So if you look at your Shopify admin in terms of sources, it's up like 15X. It's still very early, but it's certainly beginning to evolve. And one of the things that we're trying to do for the merchants on Shopify is that if you're with us, you can sell everywhere commerce is happening, whether that's online or offline or certainly on agentic. And I think, you know, you guys have discussed this many times, but I think there's going to be a bunch of, like, there's going to be a bunch of different permutations of exactly how agentic commerce evolves. What we're doing is we're preparing

for whichever path wins, Shopify is going to be well set up there. In terms of ads, I mean, that's not, you know, ads are not a new thing. I think ads have always been part of the commerce experience in some form, sort of natural evolution. I think consumers expect this. I think the key, though, is going to be, there has to be a clear distinction between kind of ads and organic content. And so far, that's what we're seeing as well. But generally, and, you know, I think, you know, we're in the early stage of 2026, but it does certainly feel like there is a massive, I know you were talking about earlier about, you know, how a bunch of young people became kind of drop shippers based on some influence. In many ways, it does feel like there are more

people starting businesses, but the velocity of those businesses is just insane right now. And like, because like they can access global markets like right away, they have incredible resources. It feels like a really, really important time to be an entrepreneur right now in a very exciting time. Yeah, what's the moat for D to C entrepreneurs? Is it changing? Is it brand? Is it distribution, marketing chops? I mean, look, I think, let me, I'll give you a quick example. We launched Shopify Sidekick about a year ago or so, which is our, we sort of call it your co-founder. It lives inside of Shopify. It knows everything about your business and everything about commerce and Shopify. We added to this thing called Shopify Pulse recently, which is this new feature that effectively,

it proactively helps merchants grow their business. It works in the background. It surfaces like these tailored recommendations for things you can do to grow your business. And then if you agree to them, it actually goes and executes. I heard the story last week of a jewelry merchant who was actually, who got a recommendation from Pulse

to, rather than having four separate skews to actually bundle them into a stack and create a bundle. And immediately, that particular merchant like immediately saw more sales happen. If you are meeting these great merchants with a great ambition and great products and adding this like personalized data analysis with great intelligence. I don't know. It's bespoke. It's intuitive, but it really

will allow more of these direct to consumer brands to access, I think, more customers. And this idea of, you know, like initially it was like online only for DTC. Then it was like, let's try offline as well. I have online and offline working simultaneously. It feels like we've evolved well past that, and this is kind of what we're doing at shop at which is that regardless of where consumers are spending their time, make it really easy for merchants and entrepreneurs to access those markets. And something as simple as like the agenic storefronts where with a couple clicks, you can push products to chat GBT and to Gemini, that's only going to increase the velocity even further.

Sasspocalypse, how are you guys? I'm just going to say the word that's been on everybody's mind the last like 10 days or so or 10 months for kind of our corner of the internet. I look at Shopify, it's a system of record, it's payments, it's a consumer buying network, it's battle-tested infrastructure that needs to have insane uptime. Like, I don't see the vibe coding risk at all, but how are you guys answering that kind of question with analysts?

Yeah, it's, look, I did our our call this morning at 830, and we've basically been with analysts and investors the entire day. The question does come up. I mean, first of all, let me just say this. People have been underestimating Shopify pretty much since day one. We've sort of made it a habit of proving them wrong, which is kind of fun. I think a couple things. I think AI, on the agenetic side, I think AI will change how people discover products and potentially

even how they buy. That's what we're building for. We are building for these agentic storefront experiences and making sure tools like Sidekick make it so that if you're on Shopify, you're just better position. But, you know, the truth is, like, AI is going to rewrite interfaces. It's not, it will not rewrite the transaction contract.

And one of the things that we've been building on Shopify, you know, everyone talks about the online store, like, you know, the e-commerce component of Shopify. The killer feature of Shopify for a very long time has actually been the back office, the retail operating system. That's where you go to do inventory and you do taxes and you do analytics and reporting, you launch marketing campaigns,

and you create loyalty, and you do payment authorizations and fraud prevention. Ultimately, I think the companies that are going to continue to do really well, notwithstanding some of this vibe coding, the ones that will do well will be the ones that are system of records, the ones that are actually operating,

like operating systems, and, you know, that's Shopify. Yeah, and I... Yeah, and I... Yeah, and I... Just jumping in, like, I do think that there, when, throughout my history, you know, being a Shopify, you know, customer and user over the years, I would be, if I was operating

like a tiny Shopify plugin that one engineer had built and they were charging $30 a month, I would be a little bit worried about vibe coding because I do remember throughout history using a plugin where I was like, okay, this is a nice little feature that I can bolt on. And I'm happy to pay for this because it doesn't make sense for me to go hire an engineer to build some custom, you know, yeah, whatever, whatever. that is. So I think, but again, that is a, that is a, that's a tail win for Shopify as a platform, because you have the system of record and it's like, hey, now we can allow you to add these kind of like Lego blocks on top of it. So, you know, one of the things we're noticing, actually, one of the

questions they got on the early as call this morning was, um, the growth of the app ecosystem, that there's now more people building apps for us. So one of the things we're, we're seeing app developers, but also merchants themselves who historically would hire, you know, a third party to build a tool do it themselves. And part of the reason that we're putting out all these new APIs and SDKs and these new tools to build on top of this is because we actually think having more people build on top of Shopify, you know, benefits, benefits merchants. But back to that whole, like, if you were just a feature, I mean, you know, you guys, if I had to word cloud, you know, your show, the word wrapper probably comes up as much as, as anything. I think you

actually have to create something of real value. And if all you're really doing is wrapping something, you're going to struggle. But companies, if you look at the apps on, I mean, you know, take some of the larger apps on Shopify, like the clavios of the world, you know, who are, who built this incredible, in their own ways, their own rails around email marketing, that is very, very difficult to disrupt.

So I think the idea of, like, we want to invite more people to build incredible tools on top of Shopify and also give merchant tools to build it themselves. But I think that, you know, AI will rewrite interfaces. Clavio is a good. It will never rewrite, like, real infrastructure. Yeah, Clavio is a great example,

because you could have a somebody could build something that can send an email, but then if your delivery is just terrible, it's just going to be, you might like save a little bit using the five-coated solution, but then you're like losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're not actually getting through to your customers. So there's, there's any like e-commerce operator, like getting, you guys know this too. Like you've spent, like you guys have had a better solution in the market for how many years and you're still, you know how hard it is to convert a legacy brand to even trust a new platform because they're like, our current system is not great, but we know, we know how critical this infrastructure is and what a big step it is. So I...

It is interesting. Even on the enterprise side, one of the things that I've noticed coming out of NRF, which effectively is like all the major, the largest retailers are all there, is that even the largest retailers who feel like they have something that's good enough, they're getting pushed by their exec team or their board to think about like unified commerce. This idea that, you know, think about the metaphor of like a browser with 12 tabs open, online, offline, agentic, cross-sell on social media platforms, B2B. Even the most traditional of retailers and businesses, we are finding now or coming to Shopify for simplicity, that they don't want to run this like, you know, this Rube Goldberg machine

in commerce. They actually want to create this centralized back office that runs all of it. And that's been amazing for us. In fact, one of the biggest areas of growth for us has been the enterprise. and companies that traditionally did not come to shop, like General Motors, for example, or Estée Lauder, for example, are now migrating to us as well.

So I think, you know, it's an exciting time to be a new entrepreneur getting started because the resources and the tools are insane. But even for some of the largest retailers, the next few years are going to be incredible for them because they're going to access these tools and be able to operate at a pace

that, frankly, some of them have never been able to operate at. Do you have a hard stop at 1230? I can keep going for a bit. Okay. I want to talk about evolution of UI, sort of tactical, like when I had an e-commerce site that was not on Shopify, regrettably, launching a new product was like, how are we going to literally Django, go in the back end, what's the database schema, is it a Boolean, right? Like all these different things, right? Then you go to Shopify, and it's very easy to-

Yahoo stores or something? No, it was literally Django, like Python. It was like hosted on Heroku, I think. And so, yeah, homegrown disaster, huge, huge waste of resources. You go to Shopify, you get an HTML page with a bunch of fields that you can fill in when you have a new product and it fills into the templates, right? Is the future I talk to Shopify in natural language? Is that actually better than defining my product variance in HTML UI? Why? Do you think that, like, Shopify will have an agent that, where I'm making changes within the Shopify ecosystem, but in natural language, or is HTML drop downs? Are there sort of, like, more Lindy than we think?

So I think the good news you can do both, right? Yeah. The idea is, can we make the important things really easy than everything else possible? There are merchants right now that we have a product we just announced in December at our edition called SimGim. Sim gym effectively simulates what any task might be. So you can say, if I change this particular design or I try this particular campaign, what does SimGim Simulate will be the results of that?

And we're seeing a lot of our merchants begin to adopt it now and try it out. I think the idea should be you can do both. If ultimately what you do best is you are an artisan, you make beautiful products, you make some sort of like children's toys, and they're amazing, and you actually do not know anything about digital copy.

commerce, digital marketing, I think you can use sidekick as really your, your CMO and your, your co-founder that helps you become a lot more, you know, internet native when it comes to commerce and retail. In other cases, the idea that, you know, some of our brands, like skims, for example, or aloe yoga, for example, I mean, they want to do some really customizable stuff. They're very technical. They have an amazing engineering team. They want to go into the code and really make it. So their particular store is, is exactly what they want. That ability where, you know, at some point you had to either build your own stack if you wanted massive customization or if you didn't know how to use anything when it came to e-commerce, you had to go and hire,

you know, some sort of like company to go build everything on your behalf. I think all that's gone. I think the net result of that's going to be you're going to have way more people starting businesses and way more companies getting larger at a much faster clip. And a psychic is a really good example of that and so is SimGim. I think beyond that, the other thing is like this idea that you start with one particular channel, I think will very quickly go away. We're already starting to see that where immediately, you know, you may start with your online store as your online hub, but very quickly you're going to activate an Instagram channel or a TikTok channel or you may decide, hey, I want to try this agenic thing. I think this idea that I am an ex kind of merchant,

I'm an online merchant, an offline merchant. I think that's going to be something that like, it's going to be like talking about the color TV. It makes no sense in the future. But all that coming together is what we've been building in Shopify for two decades. And the end result of it is that we're seeing way more entrepreneurship than ever before. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? How are you talking to, last question, how are you talking to friends, family outside of the tech bubble about AI on X? You were busy with earnings, but on X, there's an essay with like 50 million views basically telling everyone to freak out. I'm curious I saw the essay before I started my day.

I actually sent the essay to my wife, just because I wanted to substantiate that I'm not an insane person talking about the stuff every single day. I think that essay, I think you guys said, if someone said like that essay feels like it crossed the chasm, it did, yeah, sure. Like, what I mean is like,

containment. Exactly. It went kind of well beyond just like our kind of little, you know, world circle of the internet. I think ultimately, the idea of being reflexive with AI, Toby wrote this letter a couple months ago, you guys probably remember it, that got leaked.

And it really, you know, the reason it got leaked was it talked about that if you want to hire someone at Shopify for your team, first you have to substantiate why AI can do it better. But if you actually looked at like the meta message in that email, can't do it better, right? Definitely, cannot do it better, exactly.

So if you can't do it better, then, like, you can hire it, but like, if AI can do it better, you know, we're not, we're not, you know, the headcount doesn't get allocated, which what it really suggested was this idea of like AI reflex that, rather than sort of use it as a tool, how do you kind of use it as part of your day to day life? You know, when I'm preparing for an earnings call with Jeff,

our CFO, we used to go around and meet a ton of different product leaders around the company to kind of glean and figure out and summarize, like, what are the most exciting things happening at Shopify? It was part of the process for, I don't know, like 10 quarters. Now, effectively, we go to Shopify's vault. We have like a dozen MCPs running. We're able to pull way more information we can. So when we do me with those product leaders, the conversations are way richer.

They're not spending a bunch of time explaining to us on a, you know, at a very abstract level or a, you know, at a macro level what they're working on. We can ask specific questions. I think companies that become more reflexive and individuals that become reflexive, especially entrepreneurs, there's no doubt it's going to make you more, you know, it's going to make you more effective and more efficient. But I think articles like this, it invites the non-tech community into what we're seeing in a way that I think is important. I think the reason it's getting so much traction is because it felt like it was, it felt like it was written for my wife

as opposed to for me. And not to say that she is a lagger, she's not, but she needed someone who isn't me to say, hey, you should really take this stuff seriously. It's really cool. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But that's different. then I think a lot of people are sharing it saying, you should take this seriously, it's really cool. I think a lot of people have been processing this as like, you should take this seriously,

and it's like, get your financial house in order. Like, you know, this is like, you're going to get steamrolled. Yeah, I'm,

look, I'm not, like, I don't believe in the doom of them. I'm an eternal optimist. I think, I think what it's done for Shopify, for our merchants,

for our business has been incredible. I think what it's doing for individual entrepreneurs is incredible. My daughter, you know, we recently moved to, we moved to Montreal, which is a French city. My kids, we moved from an English city. My kids are learning French right now. There's homework that comes that I just cannot help them with. I would have had to hire a tutor. I still may have to at some point, but the fact that I'm able to do so

much more on my own, even in my own like dad role makes my life better. Totally. So yeah, and what's so cool about that is for for you, you can, you can go hire a tutor. You could hire 10 tutors, but there's a lot of families that just never would have been able to do that. their kids would have been struggling. How could you not be more optimistic? I mean, sometimes like my four-year-old will ask me just why, why, why, why, you know, the 10 whys of like, why, like, why is the sky blue? And I'll be like, I think I know why. But I, even if I, even with the money, I can't hire a tutor to come by the house at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, two seconds. But I can go

and look it up and then relay a story. And I can tell that story however I want. So how can you not be optimistic when you have those tools available to? I love it. The key, though, is looking at them as these incredible tools. looking in them as a way for you to create like some sort of exoskeleton for all of our lives. And there's going to be some laggards. I mean, it's going to be like,

I think it was Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm. Like we will cross the chasm where in the mainstream will use it. Yeah. My mom's using AI right now mostly for like things like recipes. Sure. But that's sort of like a gateway drug, I think, for her using it for things like questions about,

I don't know, banking or whatever my mom does daily. So it's tough not to be optimistic. And certainly from a shop at my perspective, it's been incredibly valuable for us. Jensic shopping hasn't even started yet, but like we're prepared for it. And I think, I don't know, it sounds like, yeah, even for entrepreneurship.

I think we're still underselling the opportunity with AI. Yeah, when I look back in my early days of entrepreneurship, luckily I had people around that I could call and say, hey, how do you do this or what kind of contract do I need for this? How do I set this thing up? How do I, what, should I use a safe note? Should I use this or that? And now it's, you know, hopefully entrepreneurs can build,

the network quickly, but you don't need a network to get, like, customized advice on pretty much any situation. And yes, it could still be wrong sometimes, but it's usually directionally correct and it helps you be more informed. And it's amazing. It feels also like we as humans, we don't often want to ask someone else the question that we deem as being like a silly question or a stupid question. That's one of my favorite parts of AI. You're right. Just like ask a dumb question. Totally. Totally agree. I remember when we raised our first Series A, this is, I don't know, literally almost 20 years ago, I had to look up what a liquidation preference was. And I'd call around. And I felt like, you know, like we were raising a series A.

And it was a $25 million round, Bessemer led it. And I remember thinking, like, I was already a lawyer. Like, I wasn't a very good lawyer, but I finished law school. I didn't, went to business school. And I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. I just sort of think back of now, the, like, the amount of information, I could have taken, I could have got all these case studies. I could have understood it in, in a much deeper way. That is where I think, so it's not surprising that this article way are. You could have dropped the term sheet into any LLM

and instantly gotten like pretty decent analysis, pull out all the main terms. Hey, here's what's marked. Here's what you can push back on. Anyway, it's amazing. No more doom. Sorry. Thank you for not. No more doom, guys. Come on. Let's go. Let's go. This is going to be great. We kept you long. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Goodbye, Harley. Let me tell you about gusto. The Unified Plotter, for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. And I'm also going to tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Nikita Beer has a prediction.

I want your take on Nikita Beer's prediction. He says, in less than 90 days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. I message, phone calls, Gmail, and we will have no way to. stop it. What do you think? Yeah, I don't, yeah, I mean, he must be seeing something, yeah, I would assume he's seeing something at X. He's been fighting this for a long time. He's been fighting the trenches, for sure. Fighting the bots. Yes. I got a, I got a pretty good AI phone call yesterday that was somebody leaving me a voicemail that was just like, hey, just have a few questions,

give me a call back. Ooh, that's, that's, that's one of the hook. And I was in, yeah, it was a good, yeah, no, no, sometimes like the text message is like, but I listen to the voicemail. Yeah. And I could clock it as AI, but when I just got the, like, kind of, like, summary of it. But if it's dated to that in Borough, you're going to be like, David. I would love to do a documentary about a flying beaver with you. Sign me up. So, hack that sort of solves this. On X, you go into the settings and you turn off notifications from anyone that you're not

mutuals with that's not verified, that doesn't have a phone number. You just make it really, you will miss some stuff, but you will see way less spam. on iMessage and on the iPhone, I just don't accept calls from unknown numbers. And so, like, you have to be in my contacts book. And so how do I actually meet people? Well, I get mutually introduced. I add their contact.

We get into a group chat. And it's just a game of chain linking one chain to the next. So if you get me, Tyler's one number, I add it. There's a small number of people who are free to call me out of the blue whenever, and I will pick up if I'm available. And then there's another big group of people. that I'd be happy to have a phone call with,

but I'm not just going to pick up out of nowhere because, you know, whatever. You should talk about it before. The typical spam functionality for a long time has been deny lists or black lists where you have a list of spam accounts and you deny those. You block those numbers.

Everything is shifting to allow lists or white lists where you have an approved list of people that can get through through your messaging apps and basically cold messages, cold DMs are going to be a lot, harder to break through. So the error of the reply guy who gets retweeted and ratios and, you know, gets surfaced. Maybe that's the, maybe that's the alpha these days. Or you just have to grind harder. I have a post that I want to read to you.

Turbo puffer first. Serverless vector in full text search, build from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Shopify alumni. I have a post I want your reaction. Okay. Hit me. This is from delicious tacos. Yes. I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years. And I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies. I think it's a little different, but it is funny. It is very funny. I mean, who knows? Hot dogs might change everything. Okay. Well, you got, you got quote tweeted here. You said, just in horses say we may be in a car bubble, which is funny because that's a pro-AI.

take, right? Yeah, I was confused by this. And then AI not kill everyoneism, memes responded, kind of saying, Horace says the real risk is what happens to the economy when the car bubble pop. So it's kind of, it's, it's, this is a techno-optimist account now? No. I think it's a Dumer account, right? No, no, I don't think so. Wait, really? They say techno-optimist in their bio. Okay. I thought they were always like pause AIs, pause the progress. But maybe the, maybe the bubble is a bigger issue as well. Well, we can continue to dig into that. Quickly, let me tell you about Plaid.

Plad powers the apps you use to spend, say, borrow and invest, securely connecting accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI. We got the, we got a Bugatti Turbion.

The Lucche. Post here. Yes. The Bugatti's magging. So the post says, the Ferrari luce makes the interior of the Bugatti, Bugatti Turbione,

look like an absolute master. class. Bravo Ferrari. It's pure genius to be this bad. People are still going back and forth on this. The Turbion, this is a driving machine. My takeaway from all the reactions this week in my personal view is I think the Johnny Ive Ferrari will be popular in specific bubbles on the West Coast and generally not be very loved. Yeah, the only thing that really jumps out to me about the about the design is the rounded rectangle display in the center. It just is

it does feel iPad-ish. It feels like there's the tactile buttons but just that block of like there's a screen. There's also like a leather kind of lunchbox looking thing that you can pull out. Cool. Which I think is weird.

I don't love it. Take it on the go, I suppose. Rat limit on X says people who back into parking spots cannot be truly present. You envisualized your departure the moment you arrived. Invisualized? This isn't even a word. Isn't it envisioned? This is hilarious. Still doing numbers. Wow, 50K likes. I love it. You envisioned your departure the moment you arrived. You're not truly present. Do you back in ever? I back in every once in a while, but mostly I'm

angling for the room for the doors. So if there's a, if there's a pillar in the parking garage that will block the passenger door and have a passenger. It's strategic. It's not default. Exactly. So I am extra, I'm extra present. I'm extremely present. I'm locked in trying to give my passenger the best possible vehicle exiting experience there could possibly be. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams built, create code back prototypes, and apps. maps fast. Toma Bravo executives fielded queries and held conversations with investors to discuss the impact of AI on their software portfolios. Vista Equity's chief executives sent an email to clients

and plans to follow up with a webinar. Don't worry. Following up with a webinar to discuss the state of the firm's portfolio saying that we believe that AI will enhance software, not replace it. Leaders of several firms, including KKR, Blackstone and Aries reported that their exposure to the sector are limited and that the sell-off is overblown with some saying that AI will not significantly impact their well-established portfolio companies. It's hard to say that it won't impact it at all. You kind of got to pick a side in most cases. But yeah, it's interesting. You've got like, you know, like PE firms that only own software and they're like no big deal. We're excited about this. We're not worried at all. But they're having to do kind of like, you know, what kind of American

an ARU meme? It's what kind of software did you own? Yeah. Did you own something like that. But then on the other side, you have firms that have some exposure saying, well, we don't have very much exposure. Yes. Yes.

And so these are, you know, the messaging is telling you. And so this is what we were talking about this morning. This, you know, I think there will need to be a, in many ways, a reclassification of who the AI winners and who the AI losers are in the software world because there truly are platforms where, yes, you could vibe code it, but the value in the asset is is the liquidity on that platform. Like, you can vibe. code an Airbnb marketplace competitor, but if there's no houses on there and they're all AI

generated, you can't actually go to the beach house, like you don't actually compete with Airbnb. And so there's a lot of software companies that fit in that world where there's liquidity or some other network effect or some scale economy, but purely just having, okay, we spent a bunch of money on R&D, we have a bunch of lines of code written, and it would cost you a billion to write the same amount of code and compete with us. So you're not going to do that because you're going to take a billion dollars to raise all the money and then you're just going to be competing with us. Well, now that billion dollars is shrinking down.

Maybe it's $100 million. Maybe it's $10 million. Maybe it's less and less and less. And so there will be need, in many ways, just a return to form of like, where are the true moats? And then, you know, intellectual property, obviously, network effects, scale economies. There's a few others. Regulatory.

Regulatory. So yeah, there will be some software companies, some SaaS companies where you find out that it's like duolingo with like, oh, it's actually a game and people love the brand. And so that's been much more resilient relative to a cheg that was basically just data that was scraped and put into chat. EBTBT, and the stocks down 90%. Well, Pithia Kapp responded to the comments from Toma Bravo and Vista Equity saying, breaking 6x levered long software investors who can't exit, think software is okay, actually. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also, Pat Grady from Sequoia Capital, has quote tweeted my article. And he chimes in, sort of agrees. He says, AI, the title of my article was AI is not COVID.

And he says, AI is not COVID in three key ways. And I wish I'd put this in the article because it's pretty good analysis. He says, it's bigger, much bigger. And I agree with that. COVID, you look at the numbers and it goes up. It was crazy, world-changing. But then now we've moved on and there's a whole different set of stories. It's durable. COVID was a wave. It came and went. AI will compound. And so you never go back to not using the internet. You never go back to not using a mobile device. You never go back to not having AI in the world. You do go back to a world where you can walk around and not feel sick if you don't wear a mask.

That happened. And then third, he says, we have a choice. This is important. And the main reason to read the article. With COVID, everyone played defense with AI. We can choose to play offense. Don't let AI wash over you. Put it to work. And this is what Harley was saying as well. There's an opportunity. And Pat Grady says, the best time to make that choice is right now. And I agree. It's an optimistic message. Alex Sue. Yes. Says, at this point, I can't tell if Harvey is in the business of selling technology to lawyers or equity to VCs. He, of course, is in. What business is he in? He's in, works for a company called Latitude.

We specialize in providing a high-end flexible legal talent to corporate legal departments. So he's in a legal, a lawyer staffing firm. Oh, okay. So hard to take this post. Guess what?

Newsflash. If you're the CEO of a startup, you're in both businesses, buddy. Always. No matter what. You've got to raise, you've got to outraise your competitors. If you're in a competitive space,

if you're in a high-growth industry, You have to be selling equity to VCs, and you also got to be selling your product to customers. Get used to it. It's the game on the field, and you're going to be playing it. Let me tell you about app-loving. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.a.i. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. Jira Ticket says, knew a dude who emailed the IT guy directly instead of submitting a ticket,

and they blew his head smooth off. I can't believe how mainstream this is. 5 million views, 167,000 likes. Andrea Consul says, should I use console? It does solve that exact issue. Sof over on X says, gonna name my son Garrett, short for cigarette. I never put that together.

Garrett would be a beautiful name. I used to have this joke with Christian Garrett from 1-37 Ventures, because his first initial is C. So if it's C. Garrett, it's Cigarette. It's like he has the name. Anyway, BlackRock's getting into the D-Fi. Totally unimaginable five years ago, but they're doing it.

They're buying uniswap tokens. Yes, they're buying uniswap token. So Fortune has a story here. In the latest sign of the rapid convergence of Wall Street and crypto, the world's biggest asset manager is moving into decentralized. finance or DFI. BlackRock on Wednesday revealed it will be bringing its treasury-backed digital token called build with misspelled. That's very online for BlackRock. On to Uniswop, a leading DFI platform where it will be bought and sold by institutional traders. As part of the tie-up,

BlackRock is also purchasing an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's own token uni. The new arrangement, which is being undertaken with tokenization firm Securitize, is a significant milestone for the DeFi sector, which many of you is one of the most useful applications in crypto, unlike traditional trading, which relies on centralized intermediaries to record and settle trades. Platforms like Uniswap rely on smart contracts to match buyers and sellers via liquidity pools and automated market makers. Currently, there are around $100 billion worth of capital sitting on DFI platforms. I remember DeFi summer.

Were you deep in the trenches during DFI summer? it was a big, what was that, 2022, right? 2021, it was before the crash. It was the era of like Thor chain and like, and like, 2003, 2020 or 2021? Yeah, something. But I think that 2021 was the Salana summer.

Yeah. Defy summer was, was, was, must have been. Major FOMO, basically, for anyone who didn't participate in major heartache for many people that did. It was, it was a wild time. A lot of people having fun. And interesting from a, you know, it had some of the same feelings as the open claw thing.

It was like you had to set out, you had to know the terminal a little bit. You had to be comfortable sort of, you know, installing these tools, understanding, oh, don't send your money to the wrong address. The address itself looks like a hash. And so it's like a little bit like slightly technical. You didn't have to write any software, but you had to be able to use different wallets that were very. It does feel like there was a little bit nerd sniping. There was also a lot of real businesses built, and obviously there's still $100 billion sitting in Defi, and Defi survived the Defi Winter that followed Defi Summer, of course. Sort of bad nominative determinism. The Defy Summer sort of implied that a winter was around the corner, and it was. But Black Rock's now going into Defi. So they're listing their build token, which launched in 2024 and boasts a total market value of around $1.8 billion, and it reflects a major vote of confidence in DFI from one of the finance industry's most influential firms. The practical impact of Unify, of Uniswap, adding build to its platform is likely to be minor

at first, though, since the arrangement involves securitize creating a white list of eligible institutions that can participate in the DFI trading. The firm is also white listing a handful of market makers, including long-time crypto liquidity provider Wintermute to facilitate trading. Meanwhile, access to build is restricted to qualified purchasers, a legal designation for for those assets of more than 5 million or more. So they're getting into D5, but they're just dip in their toes in the water. Let me tell you about Century.

Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So there are lots of essays that everyone, it's like essay week and AI. People are writing essays about, is AI like COVID? that is you need to tell to your family. Zoe resigned for Open AI on Monday the same day they started testing ads and chat EBT. She quit in protest.

She did? Yes. And she dropped a guest essay. Guest essay in the New York Times. In the New York Times. That is a crazy thing to do. Open A, I feel like a company hasn't fully arrived until an employee quits and they have the opportunity just to go immediately write like an opinion essay on said business.

Pretty soon you're going to quit and drop a whole Mr. B. video. That's the future. You drop, you drop a, drop a 10-part hour-long mini-series. Just raise the stakes. Go with the biggest, the biggest splash you can possibly make. So first, Zoe makes the bowl case for KatGPT as a business. Opening Eye is the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the title forces, pushing them to abuse it? Again, so far. the ads will effectively be display ads, not integrated into the content and not, yeah, not influencing the content.

And but again, she's arguing that, you know, you can sort of start by doing that. And then there's an incentive, there's a business incentive to, you know, up the ante a little bit. Hopes, revenge says, I don't mean to be rude, but I feel like this article says very little. I think everyone will agree data privacy is good. Two, tech companies have a bad track record of resisting their incentives to misuse this data. You kind of vaguely gesture towards certain kinds of oversight, mostly niche and European. But I think we both suspect that that's probably not going to happen in this case. There really isn't a model here.

I'm a lot more interested in why you joined Open AI and stayed for two years and what you would slash wouldn't do in the AI space. I do think you're right to draw attention to what is special about the intersection of AI in advertising, which is that the dataset being created and the process. being created and the product itself has a much higher potential for abuse and other familiar tech models of ad monetized platforms. This feels like fairly obvious point that I don't see enough of. You're also right to draw attention to the fact that people don't necessarily have a problem

with the fact that ChatGPT is doing ads now like this, but that they likely don't think it will actually stop their slippery slope. Thanks. There's a very funny paragraph in Ben Thompson's Sertecre piece on Google earnings that is basically the flip side of this that I thought was very funny. Now, he says, this is probably the least important

of the three benefits of LLMs for Google search business. He's covering Google earnings and what ads are doing for Google. Everything's going very well. And he says, what's notable about that ranking, however, is that this is basically OpenAI's entire

proposed advertising business. Google has the luxury of not putting ads in Gemini, but that doesn't mean they aren't experimenting with ads in conversational AI. They're just doing it in AI mode, and their initial offering sounds a lot like what OpenAI is going to do in ChatGBT.T. Put in ads based on the content of the current conversation. Meh. It's the meh that is scary. Google's upside revenue potential from LLMs is so large that its side project, which is Open AI's entire proposed business, hardly merits a mention

in terms of justifying CAPEX. So Google's saying, hey, we're going to spend so much money on CAPX, but analysts, shareholders, don't worry because we have really great applications and the great applications that, like, they put ads in LLM responses really, really low. And so Ben Thompson's like, it's this like, this thing is happening and everyone's very focused in this chat GPT ads thing, but Google's doing it and it's like, nah, like not a even big deal for them. They're like, of course, yeah, we just stuff some ads in the thing because we're doing AI search and we'll keep them out of Gemini, but we're, you know, display and, and so. search ads and YouTube ads are going to be way better and we're making so much money over here

that this thing that's like causing so much drama and people are doing Super Bowl ads about like yeah we just did it and it's minor to the financials and you know if you're an analyst or shareholder like don't even stress about it and also no one's paying attention so it was just very funny that says there there are plenty of justifications elsewhere while everyone else is going to have to have to spend to keep up without nearly the obvious high margin benefits so Google has a bunch of different places to put ads and so much surface area, so many users, and so little pushback. You know, I don't think anyone at Google is going to be quitting over ads in AI mode because it's an advertising company and everyone's used to it. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting

room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike first. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Matt Schumer in the recent waiting room. Welcome to the show, Matt. The Shuminator. The Man of the Hour. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. The most viral essay ever, maybe? Has there ever been a more viral essay? Would you have won the million dollars if you posted this a week ago? I think so. I don't know, but I do wish I posted this a week ago. Yeah. Well, fantastic response. What has the response been like to the essay from non-tech people? I imagine that you have family friends that have been texting you screenshots or something. Like, walk me through the

experience of this. It's been crazy. I wrote this with that in mind, but still, I didn't expect it to actually happen. You know what I mean? Right. I originally wrote this for my parents. I was trying to explain to them what was going on while I was actually home for Super Bowl Sunday with them, some family friends. And frankly, I couldn't find anything that was both clear and accurate, but also understandable for them. Right. I was looking at Dario Amode's essays. And when you read them, They're perfect. They're amazing. But you have to be in tech to understand them.

And I just wanted to find a way to communicate this in a way that allowed them to actually understand it without having to know all the jargon, industry dynamics, everything. Because I think it's important for people to know this, but there's just not much out there for the person that's not in tech. So yeah, it did take off. It's been surprising and exciting. Frankly, I've been getting texts from friends who I haven't heard from in years. And they're like, my boss is sending this around the office.

It's surreal. I thought it would go a little viral. I didn't think it would go mega viral and certainly not this level. So I'm kind of taking it all and I've slept like two whole hours since I posted this. I'm exhausted, but it's been crazy. And I'm glad that the message was received. I think that's the most important part, right? People, it's better than not happen the way I'm expecting, but it's good that people know that there's a chance.

And the message is just something big is happening. You just want people to pay attention because I think people are going to debate like how, how you presented different things. Is the COVID comparison really that accurate? But is that specifically, you're just trying to wake people up? Exactly. Right. If I knew how viral this was going to go, I think I would have spent more time thinking through some of the parts and how I presented them. Is part of why you're maybe sort of worried or you want people to pay attention is your experience as an entrepreneur here? Because it feels like in many ways hyper-right, like, you know, probably made more sense as a product two years ago. And as all the different

LMs have gotten better and the products have gotten better, I imagine it has been great. And it sounds like maybe you're moving on to focus on investing. But as part of this, it's been kind of very personal experience of just kind of waking up to the power of the base models and the labs in general. It has. And I'll share more on the company side soon. But I've been in this industry since 2019. I got in when I was in college working on a VR startup, and I realized that if I didn't drop everything to jump into AI,

I'd regret it for the rest of my life. And I'm glad I did. But seeing the progression is kind of freaky. I mean, you know, it couldn't write a sentence accurately in 2019, much less a light of code. Now we're looking at models that can build autonomously for many hours. I had early access to GPD 5.3 codex. and that was a very eye-opening experience getting used to that.

At first, I was prompting and using it like I use any other model, little things at a time, iterating back and forth until I realized, wait, this isn't screwing up. I started pushing it forward and pushing it further and just saying, hey, here's the big spec I want. Don't come back to me until it's perfect and get it deployed on a server, and it did. And I'm not saying every industry is going to go just like that. I don't think it's going to look like that in every industry. but if that's a sign of things to come, I think people should be paying attention.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the VR example is so interesting because, like, completely agree with you on just the power of the models. Like, it's so real. It's so legitimate, and it does, and truly a lot of people are like, oh, it's still hallucinates.

There's six fingers in the images. It's like that is antiquated. Like, you need to get up to speed. But at the same time, like, if I was, you know, we see Mark Zuckerberg, like cutting back on on virtual reality spending and plans there like and it doesn't and it feels like if AI is like going to advance everything you'd be like great like I can invest 10 times less in reality labs and the headsets are going to get 10 times better but there's a lot of these things

in like the they're not even it's not even physical world I'm not even talking about doctors I'm talking about VR headsets but even that doesn't feel like maybe like AI doesn't really pull that forward. And I'm just wondering, like, when I go to my friends and family, how many of them will actually be like, yes, this is going to change my life in whatever I do versus like, yeah, software will get better, but software is a small piece of what I do. But how are you thinking about people that, where software is like a more minor piece of their world? Yeah, this is something that, again, hindsight is 2020. I wish I had spent more time on knowing what was to come. I try to address it a little bit in the article and I'll hopefully provide more color here. My dad's a lawyer

as an example. Yeah. It's not going to stand in court anytime soon, right? It can help with writing. It can help with reviewing things that he's working on. It's essentially an associate and it's getting better every year. Yeah. But it's not going to stand in court. I think the ideal thing here is people read this and they kind of take it in their own unique way for their own unique needs for what they're doing, right? If you're somebody who's very, very exposed, I think there are a of people who are who kind of are denying it. I think it's worth paying attention and saying, okay, what is the world going to look like in two, three years?

How do I prepare myself? Because it's worth it just in case. There are industries where I think it will take longer, though even in those industries, for example, let's say legal, those that are just getting started today might have a bit of a rough time where as a partner might do quite well, actually. So I think it's very contextual for each person. And that's what I wish I got across a bit better. Maybe I'll do a follow-over or something like that.

But yeah, I think it's really tricky to give sort of like a silver bullet one-size-fits-all answer for everybody. Totally. The goal is to just say, hey, look, this is happening. Can you try to think about it a little bit for your industry? Because even if it's going to change an industry and there's like the ability for it to happen, it's not going to happen overnight even if the technology is there. Though I do think for a lot of these industries, the technology will be there relatively soon. It's just a matter of how long it takes to proliferate through society.

Yeah, yeah. Lawyers don't tend to post as much. as software engineers. True. But you can imagine lawyers out there thinking, I don't even write contracts anymore. I just review, which is like kind of what you're seeing most engineers saying. But at the same time, so interesting. So part of the, I'll be interested to see what happens with like the general legal job market.

But we've just been hearing examples from companies being like, I need to hire hundreds of interns that are just going to come at work in a new way and use the tools. of natively. And you can imagine that happening. But again, there's just, I don't know. Yeah, what advice or what recommendation would you make to a new grad right now? It's really tough. And it's one of those areas in the article that I don't think I had a clear answer on, but that's because there is no clear answer. I have a lot of people in my life that have asked me this. And part of my thinking on this article was like, can I answer some these questions. And there are parts of this that got clear parts that did. This is one of the parts I don't think I have full clarity on. I think knowing the tools is better than not knowing

the tools. Focusing on industries that maybe will take a little bit longer to be disrupted so you can entrench yourself a bit first is valuable. And there are people better than I at knowing which ones those might be. But really, I think it's just getting used to using this. This is the new world. It's like, you know, if a calculator is available, you should probably learning how to use it. This is that times a thousand. So I think it's just learning to be adaptable. I think there probably is, we'll look back in 10 years and there will be clearly like this is what you should have done. I don't think anybody knows today. But it's also been very contextual. It's going to depend on what your goals are as a person. Yeah. I mean, obviously, like, there's this

post about like, it's the last moment to join a lab before the takeoff and it'll be fun to join. And that makes a ton of sense. At the same time, I love the idea of being a young person becoming a hacker, like lightly technical, but really fluid in the tools. And then going and working at like an oil and gas company and just being like the most cracked, most productive person at this company that has like assets. And you're going to be able to just do so much more across the organization and be that like, you know, 1000 X intern, basically. Jordy, where do you want to go? A lot of comments from people asking if AI wrote the essay. Oh, yeah. What's your, what's your writing process actually like?

these days. It didn't stick out to me as AI, but you definitely, I didn't, you probably, if you did use AI, you pulled out a lot of the M dashes. Yeah. So it did help a lot. And I think that's kind of the point. A lot of people are like dunking on me for saying that. And I posted that I used yeah. Yeah, it's not really a gotcha if, if it did insane numbers, like whatever, whatever, whatever the result. Like if you're up front about it, it's like, yeah. It's like proving the point. It's like, people are saying this, this thing sucks at X, X, Y, and Z. But like, look, it's 50 million views. Like there's a reason that I'm talking about this stuff. And, you know, I think there's like little details I get wrong here because this has been a crazy couple of days. But the way

that I approached it was, again, I wanted to write sort of like a Dario style essay but for the average person. So what I started doing is I have like lists of like all the things that have like sort of made me think over the years that I agree with. And I've sort of points on what I agree with in each of those articles, what I disagree with what I think has been well and what hasn't. And I've kind of dumped this all in, and I used Claude for this, even though I think Codex is way better for engineering Claude is better for this sort of stuff. I dumped all those articles in and I said, okay, here's what I agree with, here's what I don't. And then I basically spoke to it for like an hour with my own thoughts and my own feelings and how I wanted to present it and what I think actually

makes sense because a lot of these things past kind of are somewhat accurate, somewhat not. And I iterated with the AI for many, many hours going back and forth until I finally felt like, okay, it's time to write. And I kind of had to put out a whole sheet on how to do this. And then I actually went and I took that and wrote the first draft myself. And then there were obviously parts I struggled with. I had the AI come and help. I had it kind of like work on the wording with me. And then once I had a first draft, I brought it back.

And I had it critiqued. And there's obviously more details. Yeah. But I mean, I think when people lob this is AI, they think that your prompt was like, write an essay that will get 50 million views. And it just like one shots. It's like, no, this is a collaborative. I wish that works.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. We tried that on X. Yeah. A lot of hashtags. Yeah, yeah. It can be a little rough. Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

Jordy, anything else? No, what are you going to do next? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've noticed from your portfolio that there's a lot of chip companies, hard tech investments. Like, what are you most excited about just in the economy broadly? I mean, in terms of what I'm investing in, and I intentionally try to leave this out of the article because I wanted the article to be just purely my message. I'm not sort of like kind of like have to deal with the sort of interplay of that.

But in terms of what I actually believe in, I think the chip companies are very interesting. I was, you know, I don't know if you saw a couple years ago, I kind of helped Groch blow up and that's worked out quite well. I mean, etched a few others like that. I also think the rails are going to be very important. I tend to invest in, you know, I just started my fund around this thesis, that there are going to be sort of these things that AI needs to proliferate, right? It's not just the model itself and the weights itself, but it's the, you know, the rails for them to communicate with each other. And I just invested in the new company, Agent Relay that's about to come out that I think it's going to be really exciting there.

I also do the agent mail. So very, very similar. Daytona. SF compute's a little different, but I think they're going to be, which Evan is a killer. I'm sort of interested in that sort of stuff. like how do you take the models and then bring them out of their boxes? Because this is obviously happening. You just kind of want to put your money where it's going to grow, obviously.

Yeah, it feels like there's, whenever something crazy happens, there's a lot of like, it's almost like nerve-wracking panic. But I do think we're in this moment right now where there's going to be a re-evaluation of how value accrues in tech, because tech has become everything. Like, you know, car companies are tech companies now. Everything's a tech company. But the business models are wildly different. and, you know, the software agents are going to accelerate some companies, they're going to

damage some companies, and we're going to be following it all right here. But we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us. Yeah, get some sleep. Congratulations on the massive article. I mean, I definitely agree with the point of, like, we're not talking about the latest updates to AI broadly enough. I do think it's interesting. Some people will read this.

let's say they're a firefighter or a school teacher and be like, wait, I'm going to have to do less paperwork. Oh, yeah. There's actually a lot of people that should see this and be excited. But that's a good thing. There are some beautiful white pills. There's obviously some quagmires and some quake sand you want to avoid, but this is how technology is rolled out and adopted. And so you want to skate where the puck is. But we appreciate you coming on the show and breaking it down for us.

Thanks so much, Matt. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Good to see you. Let me tell you about Gemini 3. Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado, we have Vlad Tenna from Robin Hood in the Restream waiting room.

Let's bring Vlad into the TVV&LTRAD on. Vlad, how are you doing? Whoa, cactus. Cactus. How you doing? I like the. Is the cactus symbolic of something? Well, I love succulence.

And I think we're, we live in a dangerous world, gentlemen. You turn around. you just got to be careful. So it's a constant reminder that you just have to watch your back. With a physical cactus behind you, yes, you need to physically watch your back. Don't back up during this interview.

I love it. I love cactuses, too. This is probably going to inspire us to get it. Cacti. Cacti, right? Sorry to be picked out. No, no, you're right. We'll get some cacti around this.

I'm more of a Christmas tree guy. I like a big Christmas. I know, but I've been missing having some plants in the place. Anyway, sorry, we're not here to talk about it. And you know what's the thing about this cactus is? You think that it's very dangerous, but you can train yourself to actually like... No way. Whoa.

Yeah, yeah. Alpha right here. Yeah, it's all about the angle. This is amazing. I had no idea that you could do that. Fearless CEO touches cactus. That's great. How's business?

What's new in your world? Well, we've got a lot of things going down. You know, I know it's the day after earnings, but we're always looking forward to the future. And what I did at earnings outlined our path for 2026. So a couple interesting things. Number one in active traders, we're pushing hard on prediction markets. We think that we're in the midst of a prediction market super cycle. And eventually this asset class is going to go from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume.

So we're in the thick of that. We're also pushing on a bunch of initiatives that I care about super personally. private markets and family finance. So through this year, if you look at the end of the year, Robin Hood should be better for you, the more family members use it. We want to get your partners on Robin Hood, your children, your parents, grandparents, the whole family. And we're building tools accordingly with that. And then private markets. I think access to private markets is one of the biggest inequities in financial services today. So we're, just working really hard to solve that for people very, very quickly and urgently.

Yeah, more specifically, you guys have a fund set up. Like, I imagine there's more going on. Like, where's, like, private markets as a category going on the platform? Yeah. Because, like, fundamentally the problem of, like, a lot of people have been excited about these billion-dollar companies and watch them go from single-digit billion to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and having to just sit on the sidelines and hold SaaS has been rough, rough for a lot of people over the last year. And I think it's really a continuation of a

trend that's been going on for decades, right? It's gotten harder and harder to go public. And at the same time, more and more attractive and easier to raise capital as a private company. Yeah. And yeah, our efforts in the U.S. to stem the tide are Robin Hood Ventures. which is currently on file with the SEC. We filed our N2, which you can think of as kind of S1 for funds. So we're in the strict quiet period for that, so I can't talk about the funds specifically. But in the U.S., we're very focused on solving this problem, and we think we have a path. And internationally, we're going to push forward on tokenization.

Last year we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token gift. which showed us that there was just voracious demand for access to these types of products. So this year it'll be about hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like a real, making those products real and tradable for customers and also getting the companies to like engage in it willingly, right? I think we experimented a little bit, but we realize where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should want and benefit from just as much as it is to the retail shareholder. If you could rewind, how would you have let retail traders

invest in Robin Hood? Would you have done it at Seed round if you could have? Series A, Series B. Would that have been a headache? Would it have been worth it? Walk me through if you could replay? We absolutely would have done it at Seed. Not. Not a lot of people know this about Robin Hood, but Robin Hood was actually, we had kind of a hard time raising our seed round. And so we talked to probably over 100 investors. At one point, Robin Hood was live on Angel List, if you remember that platform. And you could invest in Robin Hood at Seed at a 10 million valuation cap. So effectively think of it as a 10 million valuation.

And we would take all comers. I mean, we would pitch, you know, middle-aged ex-retirees from Nebraska the same way that we would pitch like Andrescent Horowitz or a Sequoia. And, you know, they would ask us questions. And if they wanted to invest, we typically would just let them invest. So we have tons of shareholders that were just essentially retail. I mean, high net worth, maybe. but they were just normal people. And some of them even have messaged us.

They held through IPO and over the years and have done quite well. So I absolutely would have. Understatement. Yeah, I absolutely would. I want to go back to prediction markets. Prediction markets are bringing new people to the Robin Hood platform. That's exciting for the business. The pushback and concern that people have is like people coming on.

maybe they want to trade the Super Bowl. Are those people going to make great financial decisions on the Robin Hood platform? Obviously, you guys are an open platform. People can do whatever they want. But what are you going to be looking for to make sure that, you know, over time, there's, you know, I think that the general concern is, you know, I'm not going to use the G word, but, you know, bringing like trading, high risk trading to the platform, there's some very real kind of concerns around that.

So how are you making sure this kind of rollout as prediction markets as a category grow still serve, you know, the overall user base? Yeah, I think this is one of the things that we're actively working on. I think you have some customers that really love prediction markets. And for them, they wanted to be easier to get to and more intuitive. And they don't like, they would probably say that our experience right now buries, them too much and we make them too hard to get to. And then you have customers that, you know, don't want anything to do with it. They don't want to see it.

And so we've been actively working on greater personalizations so that we can let customers opt in or out if they'd like. And also we can detect automatically when someone wants to see that content in different places. So this is just, I mean, prediction markets are kind of a test case. It's where it's most acute. but we see it across the entire spectrum of products as we expand the breadth of our super app offering. For example, we have a credit card.

We have banking now. Banking is a separate app, and you have some customers saying, well, I'm kind of annoyed having to go through two different apps to get access to banking. Can't we put it in the same one? Others want it to be separate and prefer it. And so we're continuing to experiment with this stuff. But where it ends is just a really, really tightly personalized experience, depending on what each customer is looking for and expecting.

And I don't think we're actually breaking new ground. I don't think financial services companies have done that. You see that a lot with consumer products, but we're investing a lot on the machine learning infrastructure on the AI side into delivering that for customers across our entire product suite. And I'd say more generally, you know, prediction markets, one of the unique things we have is we're not a monoline prediction markets player. So we have the suite of products. We can offer you a lot of things.

And what we've been seeing increasingly is prediction markets have been great at attracting a new type of customer who previously may have not been as interested in Robin Hood. You know, they hear about us, they download the app, they onboard for prediction markets. and we're making that process easier and simpler. And then we can onboard them to all sorts of other stuff. So be it retirement accounts, our credit card, our banking product. And I think that's just something that's generally good for these customers. I see nothing wrong with someone coming in for prediction markets, but then discovering our retirement account.

Yeah, I certainly hope that people come in. Maybe they want to trade something that's happening in the news, or a game or something like that, and they realize, hey, I actually just want to save a good amount of my paycheck every month, invest in stable assets, and, you know, invest in my retirement. I think that's actually true because I think the media talks about these as two different types of people. You have your prediction markets, users, and your people that are interested in stable retirement. But what we increasingly see is that actually it's the same people. And, you know, I might be, I'm obviously interested in a retirement.

account, I might have a small portfolio for my prediction markets or my options trading or my more speculative trades. But having both together in one roof makes it a more valuable service for me. How do you think about the news generation from prediction markets? It's always been an interesting way we pull up prediction markets all the time to understand what markets think about how many SpaceX long. there will be this year. Do you want to do more in content driven by prediction markets? Yeah, and we've been doing that quite a bit already. We have a whole slew of prediction markets that

are non-sports. And actually, one of the interesting things that we saw was the week after the NFL season ended, we had the government shutdown. And the prediction market contract, on the government shutdown actually drove a ton of volume because it was on everyone's mind. And people wanted to see what the current status was, how likely it is, and of course, some portion of those customers traded. So we think that'll be a bigger and bigger thing. And again, as we make it easier to surface things that are trending and things that we think you might be interested in, I think that'll strengthen the use case of looking at prediction markets as a source of news.

How do you think the wealth management industry broadly will adapt to AI? I think there's a lot of conversation recently around, hey, do I need to pay somebody 1% if I can ask an LLM, hey, what's a good strategy for somebody that makes X amount of money a year and wants to retire at this point and wants to take a little risk, but not too much, and you can ask some questions about it. So it feels like that model could be threatened, or at least margins could compress, but how are you thinking about it, both as an opportunity

from Robin Hood and then, you know, how the industry will have to evolve? Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of disruption by AI. I mean, we're starting to see it already. And we have Robin Hood Cortex, which really has done well, sort of like helping customers think through their trading, their sort of self-directed activity. But we've already begun conversations with regulators about how to bring Cortex to advice, making recommendations and doing ongoing portfolio management. So obviously we'll want to roll that out safely in a trustworthy way, but it's coming.

And I actually think on the human advisor side, a lot of people prefer a human advisor. They prefer the relationship. they like to have someone that has the full picture and that they can talk to. So I don't think that's going away. And in fact, AI is going to be a really integral part in streamlining the workflow of those people so that rather than serving, you know, 50 clients per advisor, you go to serving 500 or possibly more. So I think you're going to see both models continue, but costs and efficiency and capabilities continue to grow for each of them.

What's the status of copy trading? There's a lot of people that are excited about situational awareness, what Leopold's doing over there. How many clicks is it to copy his strategy and how closely is it possible to copy these days, the big funds that have generated a lot of excitement? Yeah, well, we have a product coming out, Robin Hood's Social, which should commence rolling out

in in just like weeks to low single digit months so we're kind of putting the finishing touches on internal testing we just integrated prediction markets which actually makes the the feed much more dynamic sure and when we announced it one of the features that was like particularly popular was whale tracking so following nancy pelosi's trades yeah it's been you know other things like that so we're gonna make it really well nancy nancy's It is such a funny world we live in. It's the Nancy Pelosi stock tricker ticker. And yeah, endlessly entertaining category. Always, always new innovation. But congrats on the progress. That Robin Hood's social feature, how much of it was vibe coded, how much of a speed up are you getting internally?

Like, what is the software engineering org look like these days in an era of coding agents? Yeah. I mean, we've certainly been continuing to hire software engineers. Okay. Perhaps not at the, definitely not at the rate we were hiring in 2021. But one of the reasons we've been able to deliver this high product velocity and keep costs relatively flat is because of the productivity improvements we've seen with AI. And there's two things that we sort of like talked about at earnings. When we look at internal operations, the two areas that might be.

move the needle are software engineering and customer support. And I think we are at or at the very least near best in class for both of those. So customer support side, 75 plus percent of all tickets are handled by AI, including licensed cases that would have previously required a licensed brokerage professional. And we thought, I mean, frankly, we thought that would be further away. we were able to get there and deliver a great experience relatively quickly. And on the software engineering side, it's been tremendous. I mean, with every new generation of models, you look at Opus 4.6, now you've got Codex. You can essentially have it running autonomously overnight, checking its own output, debugging itself,

and have it do the work that probably would have taken an individual software engineer weeks to do while you sleep. And one year ago, that wasn't possible. So the acceleration from each new generation of models is tremendous. And I think there's going to be lots and lots of disruption. You can kind of see the market starting to digest that. But I think the firms that adopt AI and our actual technology companies, this is the obvious. opportunity to dramatically accelerate relative to incumbents. And financial services, you know, a lot of our competitors aren't really even on cloud infrastructure anymore. They're still on

mainframes. So I think it's going to become, it's going to become increasingly tough. Last question, then we'll let you go if you have another second. How are you thinking about M&A? You guys clearly have built the muscle to take new products from zero to one. I'm sure you have a lot of confidence around that, but what's interesting from an acquisition standpoint? What's your M&A team, you know, spending time on generally? I mean, we're certainly always, always looking. Last year, we were quite active with a number of acquisitions, and I think we've really built the muscle to integrate them well. In particular, you have BitStamp, which since we close that acquisition has basically doubled in revenue. And typically, when you go through an integration like

this, it's tougher, right, because things tend to slow down, but we've been able to actually accelerate as we've integrated. So that's good to see. And we're on the lookout. You know, a lot of people are bearish on the crypto industry right now. We remain bullish on crypto, and we think that, you know, now's the time for builders to build. And just like in the past, the cycle goes up and down. But long run, we think crypto is going to become the financial system and they're going to converge. And so, you know, I think we're still investing heavily there. That's awesome. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Very, very interesting. Thanks, John. Thanks, Courtney. Yeah, hope you have a good rest of your day.

It's funny. So many other CEOs come on and they're dealing, you know, with the crazy volatility in the market and you're just like, you're like first time. Yeah. It's great. So good, good to see you. Griseled. Congrats. We'll talk to you later. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Unlock infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

And without further ado, we have Jeff Lawson. And we are starting the Lightning Round. We are starting the Lambda Lightning Round. Let's go. Let's activate the GOM. Thank you. We have Jeff Lawson in the Restream Waiting Room. Actually, are we delayed here?

Let's figure it out. I will tell you about it. Because it's actually the next one in the stack. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We have Sam Blonde coming on the show in just a few minutes. Bucco, this kind of gets at what I was asking Vlad about. Bucco says, unless you have 5 million AI is already good enough to be your financial advisor, even then it's probably good enough. Try it, share net worth, where, how you've allocated assets, what your goals are, ask it to analyze.

and identify opportunities for improvement, stress tests, different scenarios. It gets basically everything right. So bullish on just out-of-the-box, LLMs for helping with this stuff. Very good. Well, let's bring Jeff Lawson in to the TBPN Ultrodome. How are you doing?

What's happening? Very good. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. First time on the show, I mean, I feel like most people will be familiar with your career, but please give us a brief introduction. All right. So I'm Jeff.

I've been an entrepreneur my whole career. I've been a software developer and started a bunch of companies on the internet. So very first company in the dot-com era was the first CTO of StubHub, was one of the first product managers at AWS. But then founded the company that most people know me for, which is Twilio back in 2008. So enabling software developers to build communications and all the apps that we use all day. And grew that over 16 years to about $4 billion in revenue and took it public in 2016. and now I'm here in the fusion energy world with inertia. Amazing.

I have to say thank you because Twilio sponsored a lot of hackathons when I was in college, and it was like the go-to, like, fun tool to pull off the shelf and build something that was a little bit more interactive than just a normal website. I built something that would text me every day with little updates and stuff. It was like so much fun to be tinkering in that era, so thank you for everything you did at Twilio. It was a crowd-pleaser. Yeah. You know, just like delightful product experience, so many interesting unlocks.

And then obviously, like, huge partnerships you see at powering Uber and all the big companies that need to send a lot of text messages. So obviously, fantastic business. But get us up to speed on inertia enterprises. Absolutely. Well, so inertia is the commercial fusion energy company. And I know that sounds like, you know, saying, you were selling unicorns or something. But that's because fusion energy has been the thing of myth.

for nearly 100 years since it was first hypothesized because fusion energy is the perfect form of energy for humanity. It is clean. It is safe. It is low cost. It is abundant. The only question has ever been, will it work? Well, that changed in 2022 when the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab actually created the first experiment to create energy with fusion. And this is a huge breakthrough. And so inertia is commercializing that experiment, taking it out of the lab and bringing it to the grid. And the way we do that is with few things. Well, the way that experiment works is they hit this tiny little peppercorn-sized bit of fusion fuel with the world's largest laser. You get it just right. You compress it and you create this reaction that releases a bunch of

energy. And so for us, commercialization means, number one, we're starting with proven science. This is pretty important, right? You want to have science, basic science, that works before you start commercializing. So that's step one. Step two, we're going to go build the world's most powerful laser. It is a million times more powerful than the laser they currently use of the world works of a more national lab. That's crazy. It is a big number. 20 times more efficient. It is one-tenth the size. So it's a really modern, but the coolest laser the humanity will have ever built. The third thing we're going to go do is build the world's first fusion fuel factory where we are making these fuel targets in an automated scaled way.

And then last, we bring all that together and we build a grid scale, gigawatt scale power plant that is enough energy to be able to power a medium to large size city, a million homes, you can power with this facility. So that's our plan. That's actually, that's so crazy. Talk to me about the capital intensivity of this. This is hard tech. This is energy. This is a big deal. How much did you raise?

I love that you're doing the meme, too, to like, you know, build software, you know, and go into hardware, and then do the. The hardest thing possible, right? That's great. Well, you know, I feel like that's one of the things that is exciting to do. Like having done the software thing for most of my career, taking what I've learned in terms of building a company and scaling a company and now bringing to this new domain is really exciting. So in terms of the capital intensity, you're right, Fusion is not a cheap endeavor. So today we announced our first capital raise, $450 million. It's a milestone-based approach.

Nothing like 450 to kick things off. That's a fantastic round. It's a good way to get started. Thanks, thanks. So we've got a milestone-based approach. So basically we take this and we've got a great group of investors have come around and said, hey, look, you know, Fusion is something that we want to invest in, but we want to invest in a commercialization effort, not in basic science.

And so that's what our investors have come to the table to do. And so we're really excited to be embarking on this. Now, we will raise more capital later, especially as we get to that last stage. which is to go build the first fusion power plant, that'll be capital intensive. But this funding is allowing us to take a lot of the design work that we're doing today and then start building these prototypes. So scaled down version of that laser,

a scaled down version of that target assembly plant in order to prove that these technologies are ready for the scale up. With a business like this, it feels like, you know, obviously the TAM is massive. It's no doubt that the world needs tons and tons of energy. We want as much of it as possible. How do you look at the risk to the business? You've got technical risks, execution risk, regulatory risk.

What's your kind of personal framework? And how are you trying to chase each one of those down and to eliminate that risk? Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's interesting. It's the exact opposite of the world of software. The world of software, it was always, you know, you can build just about anything. The only question is, does the world want it? Is anyone going to pay you for it?

This is the opposite. You know the world needs energy, especially if it is cheap, clean, abundant, and safe. The only question has always been, will it work? Can you do it? And so here we are with the physics of it now proven. It's the scale up. And so what does that scale up consist of? Well, it is essentially building supply chains, building vendor bases, and scaling up a number of fields to meet the demands that a first power plant would put on some new technologies.

So, for example, we're working with a lot of companies in the laser. diode field to scale up production of the particular kinds of laser diodes that we need to go build our plant. And in order to do that, we have to scale up production of these particular semiconductor diodes by about 1,000x what the global production is today. And so you look at something like that, and you're like, okay, that is doable. It's a lot of hard work. And so the milestones that we look at is like, okay, we're bringing the vendors along for

the ride. We have to do some invention, some automation. But, you know, this looks a lot like bringing a consumer product to the market. I think about here's what Apple does every year. They dream up a new iPhone and then they figure out how are we going to make a billion of them and then they introduce it to the world. And every time they do that, well, there's a bunch of hard things they have to go figure out about how they're going to take a design and manufacture them at scale

and with a certain yield and with a certain precision. And so those are the kinds of undertakings that we are going under for both the laser scale up as well as our target development scale up. How important is it to find a dance partner with one of the hyperscalers now? I've seen a number of news articles about not just fusion, but also fission projects and just big energy projects. You know, these things are measured in years, if not decades. And it feels like there's a lot of advantages to having at least an LOI that says, hey, if we can deliver this, you know, AWS wants it or something like that. How are you thinking about spinning up the biz dev muscle of the business, maybe before you break ground?

Well, you know, I think that if anybody is able to deliver on cheap, abundant, clean, safe energy, is there any question that you will have buyers for it? You know, I don't think that's really the problem. I think really the problem is actually bringing those things to reality. Sure. But we are excited to be. When you say the people that are like, you know, still have all this risk, technical risks to their business, can they scale it up, regulatory risk, all that.

And they're focused on finding their dance partner. It's like, is that just for hype? And do you think maybe that's like the wrong focus or is creating some amount of hype necessary to attract capital? I mean, you have the luxury of a track record that allows you to raise half a billion dollars out the gate where someone else might need to find that dance partner to get any type of excitement around what they're doing?

Well, I think really it's about focusing on the core progress that needs to be made. because no matter what your approach is, there's a lot of things that have to get proven, there's a lot of things that have to be done. And so I don't think that necessarily the validation of a buyer is the most important thing for the stage at which most fusion companies are at.

That said, we were happy to have Google Ventures become a part of our round, so they are an investor in inertia. And obviously, we think that if we were able to deliver on the promise of clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy, that they and many others, will be interested buyers, but really our focus is heads down. Let's make it work.

Let's do the engineering and the scale up and the supply chain work that is needed in order to go build that first plan. Why inertia? How'd you pick the name? There are two major types of fusion like methods. One of them which I think you may have heard about before is magnetic confinement fusion. The other one is called inertial confinement fusion. And we are doing the inertial confinement fusion using lasers. And so given that, I thought the word inertia was a super interesting word because it both can refer to the lack of change of direction, right?

If you have inertia, you're like, well, you're not going to move. And I thought that actually spoke to humanity's dependence on carbon-based energy, interestingly enough. But inertia, the flip side of inertia is once you have momentum, once you are moving, it's hard to stop you. And of course, that's our goal with building the company. And so I thought there was a number of interesting things about the name. But it all stems from the basic technology that we're pursuing, which is an inertial confinement fusion. That makes sense. Prior to this, you've kind of lived and built through a number of cycles.

How have you been processing kind of everything else happening? Yeah. And venture outside of energy. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We started StubHub. It was during the dot-com meltdown in 2000, started Twilio during 2008, the financial crisis. You were born in the darkness. Yeah.

You know, I think the thing is you've got to start companies irrespective of the macro environment that you're operating in because the macro environment is going to change. And so the business itself has to be built on the fundamentals of whatever is going to make that business successful. So for the case of, say, Stubhub or Twilio, the fundamental was focus on customers. If customers need what we're doing, great. We'll eventually, you know, show the world and win and all the things we need to do. If we're not serving customers, then we won't. It's as simple as that. it's a little bit different because we're not going to have customers in the short term,

but I like to say our biggest customer is the laws of science, right? So we always have to be serving the laws of physics. And if we focus on that, taking, you've got to talk to the, you've got to talk to your, you've got to focus your time talking to your customers. Physics, laws of science. Our customer is, yeah, the universe. But if we focus on that, of doing all the engineering, all the scale-up work we have to go do to go take the proven result and now build it bigger and, um, uh, to a power plant, that's the thing. By the time we're done with that and proving that out, whatever the current economic story of the day is or even the story of the year is, we'll be long

gone and we'll be talking about something else. And that's how I've always looked at my at my startups. What's the hardest role to hire for right now? Well, you know what's interesting? We are, one of the things I like, and I'm really excited about with inertia, is that we are not fighting the talent war for AI engineers. Now, Now, we have software engineers on staff and we are hiring people versed in AI, but it's not the same kind of people that, you know, that meta and Google and every startup down the street. And I'm here in San Francisco at the moment is fighting for. And you see some pretty bonkers things going on in the talent market right now for those, you know, foundational AI engineers. And I'm quite frankly just happy that we're not in the market for that talent.

We're hiring for a lot of engineers, but, you know, not necessarily those. We're hiring for mechanical engineers and materials engineers and industrial engineers. We're hiring people from the likes of Apple, people who've figured out how to take these products every year and take them from a designer's desktop into a factory where they're making billions of them. We are hiring people from the likes of Waymo where they had to figure out over the last decade, hey, how are we going to build this first-of-a-kind autonomous car and scale up things like LIDAR and make them better and cheaper and faster and all these things in order to enable those amazing cars we see driving around autonomously

here in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it's like those are the types of people who've done those scale-ups are the most, you know, a lot of the interesting talent that we're going after right now. And I think that's just a little bit different than the, you know,

than the AI, let's just call it a hot mess right now in the industry. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come by and explain it all to us. Yeah, great to meet you. And yeah, we're excited.

Come back on any time. Everyone's rooting for you in the chat. Big updates, small updates. You're going to be legendary. Thank you for all the hard work. It's going to be probably decades, but hopefully we'll have you back a bunch along the journey. This is a lot of fun.

Hopefully a decade and then the next decade. There we go. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. And without further ado, we have Sam Blonde coming in to the TBPN Ultradome. Sam, good to see you.

How you doing? I'm awesome. Thank you for having me, guys. Here, let's start off with a little bit of fun. I think the squad is ready for a big show. Whoa. Goong it right back at you. Let's go.

Let's go. Wow, look at that team. Here we go. Amazing. Amazing. Hey, team. Wow. So coming out of stealth today, it seems like you hired half of San Francisco already.

How big is the team? How long have you actually been working on this? Because we worked together, what, two years ago? and then you called me and you were ready to launch. That's right. So we really started working on this September of 24. Okay. So we really started working on this September of 24.

Wow. Yeah, going on 40, a lot of EPD, and we're starting to build out, go-to-market too. So having a lot of fun. Introduce the full product, the company, Since no one's heard about it yet, but you're launching a debt. They've heard of Monaco. They've heard of Monaco.

But now they've heard of the real Monaco. Real Monaco. There's a maybe fun story with Monaco. We've already been in a bit of a lawsuit so we can go there. If entertaining for the viewers. Absolutely. Okay. So more importantly, we're an AI sales platform.

And I think like, you know, two-minute version or one-minute version is on the tools side or a replacement for Legacy CRM. most commonly, this is going to be like your HubSpot, your Adio, your Salesforce. We also replace all of the point solutions that integrate to those tools. So this is going to be data provider like an Apollo or a Zoom info. We provide all of your signals like a clay. We do your call recording like a otter or fireflies. We do all your sequences, like a number of different companies that do outbound in a deeply

integrated platform. And for us, that's really a means to an end, which is we're replacing four sales workflows with agents. And so we have agents who identify the right company to target, the right person to target, the right message to send. We leverage signals to incorporate into that message. When you get a response, we schedule a meeting. We record that meeting.

We update your pipeline. And we're really architected in a way that is not to be reactive to user input. If you've ever worked in a sales tool, you sort of get a database that's largely empty that you need to tell it what to do. day one when you log into Monaco, everything is already done for you. You're just sort of a beneficiary and recipient of things like meetings, feedback on things you can be doing better and more. Yeah, is launching with a platform like this only possible because of AI and the advancements and coding agents and coding tools? Because it seems like you're sort of re-bundling.

You list it off maybe like 10 different points solutions that are now coming together. And it's notable that you guys didn't come out of stealth like maybe six months ago when you maybe had five of those things operational, but you clearly decided to launch with a full suite. I think a few things come to mind. One is we are able to build software faster because of the coding co-pilots that you just alluded to. And so I don't know that we would have been able to build a Monaco-like platform in the amount of time that we've been able to pre-AI. We're also building for a segment of the market. We're purpose built for earlier stage startups. So this is Series A seed stage companies.

The needs of these businesses are relatively unsophisticated compared to much larger companies. And so because we're purpose built for a type of company that doesn't need super deep functionality, unlike the database side. In fact, when you have super deep functionality, it makes it more difficult to interact with. And so you bundle all these tools together if you're a series A startup, it actually works against you because the tools are so complicated to integrate, customize, work with. And again, we're purpose built for that company. And then the last thing that comes to mind is wouldn't be possible to build Monaco without AI because we're AI native. So everything that we do is sort of oriented in the decisions that we make are around. How can we program the platform to have an agent doing this rather than a user? And so very different user experience than if you're used to logging into these sort of reactive databases.

I listed a few of them, HubSpot, Adio, Salesforce, totally different user experience. Yeah, talk about the domain. You got Monaco.com. Talk about the lawsuit. Talk about how you picked Monaco to begin with. I want the full story. Okay, so naming was hard. It took us a couple months and tried a bunch of different names.

and you can't just like pick a name that you like. We couldn't have just called ourselves like sales.com because one, we wanted the dot com to be available. And two, you like can't name it if something already has that name. So I was trying to associate the brand with like luxury premium, was thinking through like what are some names that are typically associated with that? And I came up with Monaco. My older brother who is a co-founder, when I told him I really like the name Monaco,

his response was, that's the stupidest name ever. What are we going to just call it, like, New York? And so he wasn't a fan, but I think, like, over time, started socializing it with some other people and started picking up some traction. There are a few things that we really like about it. It's a cool sounding word. Like, Monaco is just, like, a nice word itself. The place is associated with, I don't know, wealth and success. Yachts, Formula One.

Yachts, a big one is Formula One. A lot of really cool things that we can do there with the brand. Our logo is actually like a checkered flag that's going up and to the right. And let's see. So the domain dispute, we ended up calling it Monaco, really liked the domain. Was the domain just available or did you have to go to a broker and get payable? A domain like that doesn't just sit for $12 on GoDaddy. We had Monaco.co.co.co and that was a couple thousand dollars. I think all is said and done, both the domain cost and the broker's fees. We spent like, I don't know, another eight or nine hundred thousand dollars to add DM. So we got Monaco.coe. Evolved to Monaco.com. We did use a broker. Shout out to Loomis. I love Loomis. I've worked with them on a bunch of domains. That's awesome. Shout out Loomis. Cool. How, what what lessons? Yeah, yeah, the dispute. Yeah, yeah, the dispute.

but actually haven't. So shortly after we acquired the domain, I think it had sort of been parked for a little while. And we get this, like, hate mail from the escrow company that was holding the domain that the government of Monaco had filed what's called a UDRP dispute against us. We'd never heard that this was a thing. I didn't know there was, like, a regulatory body for domains.

Anyway, they made, like, you know, all sorts of what turned out to be unsubstantiated, like trademark claims. I died to get legal representation. This was like a couple months-long process that required all sorts of evidence and war. And we ended up winning the case. So, Alzwill, that is well, we are Monaco. It's official, monaco.com.

Just coming, went to war with a country before you even launched. Not many. War time CEO, there we go. What are you learned, we've been covering the SaaSpocalypse. You guys have the benefit of kind of understanding the world in its current form building from the ground up. But a lot of questions around seat-based pricing. Do companies need to evolve to more value-based pricing? What are you learning about kind of the broader concerns around

enterprise software and how are you kind of applying it? Well, I can tell you what we're doing right now. We're in public beta. So yesterday we were in private beta. Today we're in public beta. we'll eventually get to general availability. Right now, we're pricing around simplicity. So we charge a platform fee that includes all of the compute that you need. Relative to these other companies that I've referenced, we have very high compute costs because of all of the agents that are doing the work. We also have really high servicing costs.

We pair what we call forward-deployed AEs with every customer that signs up. So we charge a platform fee. Those things are included. Right now we're charging annual platform fee of 20,000, $25,000 that's discounted to what it will be as we go into GA. And we will, I suspect, when somebody who is at the company that is much smarter than me on the finance side, I think we will be in this sort of like you pay a minimum amount for the initial compute and then it's pay as you go. It just makes far more sense with the value that

we're adding to do this usage-based sort of compute predicated pricing. But right now we're solving for simplicity and eliminating friction from onboarding customers. And this has been a price point that has been met with very little resistance. How do you think sales is evolving? If you compare any software engineer says, oh, I don't write any code. I just review code now. What's the equivalent experience in sales? Where do you think it goes? Yeah, it's a thoughtful question. You know, look, my answer may change six to 12 months ago from now. So let me give you the like today answer. It doesn't seem that the sort of customer-facing relationship-building aspect of sales is going anywhere.

In fact, that that seems today to be the highest ROI activity that salespeople, in some of our customers' cases, founders are doing, trying to replace the founder for many of the startups that are selling our product with some sort of like agent that is pretending to be a salesman. or whatever it might be, people want to talk to someone in sales oftentimes. And so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing around that. It's the sort of non-customer-facing activities that we believe agents are far better at. So I'll give some example. Building and scoring your addressable market. So what we're effectively doing is we are telling you, without being customer facing, who are the best companies for you to target and why? Here's your prioritized list. We've added buyers to that prioritized list. We've added sequences based off of signals to that prioritized list. We're going to automate those sequences with no human involvement. And you as the beneficiary,

whether you're a sales rep or a founder, you will spend your time customer facing the way that I'm speaking with you guys right now. And we're going to optimize everything in the platform around that experience, including the post follow-up. So you get off the call. We have the call transcript. We've written an email for you to follow. up with that person. It's very opinionated and trained on the way that we think about sales and go to market. You can review that email and click send. It's time for the next call. And so that's the sort of optimization that we believe AI is influencing the function of sales right now around. It's getting more qualified demos, helping you close more of those customers, and actually

emphasizing the relationship building that happens that is sort of customer facing. What's the best way to get a job as a salesperson in 2026? Advice for young people, maybe mid-career people, somebody who wants to sort of be on, I mean, you worked in sales, had a great career. What does it take to be the next Sam Blonde? Oh, well, that's, my answer might come off is too arrogant. Why don't I just come up with, like,

what would I do if I wanted a job in Monaco? I think there are a couple things that stand out right now. We've come out of this, like, and I think we're long out of the sort of like COVID time period. We're five days a week, at least, in San Francisco. And so anybody that is sort of looking for this, like, I expect to be able to, you know, potentially work from home one or two days, that like sort of COVID hangover. That's a thing of the past. So I think from a quality standpoint, people that are just looking to win, understand that it's like hard work to work and win at a company like Monaco.

I do think that track record of performance is an important thing. And so if you are, you know, a little bit later in your career, have several years of experience leveraging the relationships and the network that you've developed through that process, I think for us it's going to be hard. to hire someone that sort of comes to the website and fills out a, like, I want to be a senior AE at this company, like a job application without a close connection. You got to send you a bottle of champagne, right? That's the secret? Look, I won't say I can't be bought. You said it so not me. Yeah, if you're looking for a job, send a case of champagne, you'll get the interview.

review maybe. Who knows? You got to have the resume too and the skills to back it up. Jordan, anything else? No, this is great. Congratulations. The whole team on all the progress. I'm, yeah, I'm excited to watch more companies pick this up and start to grow their revenue faster, hopefully. So, this is awesome. Thanks so much, guys.

Come back on soon. Thank you for having me. Congrats on the success. We'll talk soon. Take care. Cheers. Have a good one. 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. And without further ado, we have someone in person. Who is it?

It's John. How you do, John? Welcome. Grab a seat. Yes, even better in person. What brings you to L.A.? Well, a couple of other meetings, but I figured I had to stop by.

Yeah. And, you know, little known fact, I was actually in journalism school before, along with data science. I was also majoring in journalism in Northwestern. And if this had been an option when I was still in school, I might have not dropped out and just tried to get a job here. Who are your heroes?

Who's the goat journalist, in your opinion? Oh, man. Well, I dropped out for a reason. Didn't learn anyone's name. That's funny. Well, reintroduce yourself. Tell everyone what you're working on, what you're building. For sure.

So I'm the founder and CEO of Juxa, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth, outdoors, indoors, underground, without relying on hardware. like satellite spikins or cameras. So that's a bunch of buzzwords to say. Without external. Without external hardware, right? You still need your hardware.

We use IMUs that are already installed on devices like phones, robots, embedded devices, medical devices. So no magnetic fields involved? No, that's kind of a... Different tech, right? It's different tech. And the key differentiator in what we've built is something called synthetic fingerprinting, which is this idea of being able to simulate IMU measurements at scale for different people and objects. And the value behind that is essentially from this desk here, we could map out

and simulate an environment anywhere in the world, an Amazon warehouse in Boston, and then have that up and running like in an hour. If you wanted to typically use like a magnetic approach, you actually, because it's hard to simulate magnetic movement because it's usually dependent on objects that are hard to predict being in the environment. You actually have to go to that warehouse, collect that data manually, and then train models on that. And so our idea is that the ultimate scalability with any positioning system is one that can be deployed fully remotely because I can't possibly go to every corner of the earth and install beacons, cameras, or, you know, collect fingerprint data.

So what's the textbook device? Android phone, iPhone, iPhone? Yeah, so, I mean, every mobile phone today has an IMU inside of it. So, like, the same thing that's powering your compass app, right? Accelerometers, gyroscopes are what we rely on. Are they getting better? Because I feel like the compass app came out, I don't know, a decade ago, and it works as well as I can tell.

I mean, they've gotten better. So the traditional problem you'll see in the like inertial measurement unit space, if that's one, a space that you find yourself in, is that drift is pretty prominent. So, you know, in theory,

if we can do something that's faster, better, cheaper and more accurate, you know, everyone's like, why haven't this been done before, right? So the idea is typically because I am used drift a lot. So if you want to actually,

you know, track someone over, or an object over a long period of time, typically they veer off course. And then you end up losing. So the example is the phones here. you know the phone's here to start, then you raise it one foot,

the IMU knows you went up a foot, you put it down a foot, the IMU knows you went down a foot, so you know where you are again? That'd be probably like an accelerometer, like an altitude sensor, but we're talking about usually speed and orientation vectors.

So the simplest way to think about it is, right, if you know your starting position and you're stacking vectors related to speed and direction, that's called dead reckoning. That's the approach where you're not actually, that's just like very drift prone, right? And so then what we do with our simulation

and then our kind of the models that we've built is what mitigates drift by like 90 plus percent and is able to track people and things over long periods of time. So the value adds are places like in defense and military, right? Because GPS gets jammed like instantly in any war zone. In indoor environments like warehouses, hospitals, any sort of like logistics centers. So those are kind of where we target first.

Obviously our long-term goals to sort of be like a, like I said, a pretty wide-scale GPS replacement. you can imagine that way down the road, eventually someone like FEMA being able to use this to find survivors of natural disasters under piles of rebel where GPS signal might not be able to penetrate through. But in the near term, those commercial opportunities are pretty.

Do you have any customers yet? Do you have pilots running and how big are these firms that you're working with? Yeah, so we work with, like I said, kind of those three industries mostly right now, logistics, health care, and defense. We have three customers. Our ACVs are in like the mid-to-low six figures.

So those deployments, the first deployments are actually going on in March, which is exciting for us. And do they have to change anything on the hardware side? No, so we work kind of out of the box by design again. The whole goal is we want to eliminate as much, especially compared to like RTLS solutions like beacons or cameras. We want to eliminate as much friction as possible. So we integrate directly onto device and they don't require any setup. Yeah. How did you get into this, where you're just annoyed by messy, noisy data?

and you were like, I got to fix this. They kept going into Chief ES denied zone. You find yourself there all the time. Well, that's the same reason why if you're ever driving in a city and it tells you you're going the wrong way on your maps app and it's really annoying. That's why for reference. Even outdoors, those tall buildings, even the way of the signals. But I got into it largely because both of my parents were in the U.S. military in the Navy.

And so for a cumulative set of years, they were deployed between Afghanistan, Asia, all over. And so I think I kind of was exposed early on to the idea of wanting to know where your parents were when you're a kid. Sure. And it's funny how you develop these like random hyper fixations, maybe at that age that feel random. And then over time, you know,

an elementary explanation from my mom or dad kind of converted into like a prolonged interest. That's cool. What's the status of the company? How much have you raised? Yeah, so we raised, we out of YC, which we were in the summer 25 batch,

we raised a little over $5 million. Nice. You ever hit the gong for this race? Congratulations. It hits different in person, too. It is loud. No, it's better in person. But raised 5 million led by CRV

out of YC. Charles River Ventures, correct? Exactly. Well, yeah, I did not. I should have probably known what that stood for before I took the money. I learned that after the fact. She locked in. Yeah.

So how big is the team? Right now it's seven. Okay. It's a pretty technically dense problem, and so essentially all of our talent are like the top. There's a very small community of hyper-talented engineers and researchers, mostly in academia,

who focus on like no hardware tracking, similar to data, all that stuff. We've been fortunate enough to probably have what I feel comfortable in saying is probably the highest concentration of those people at a single company today. Maybe Waymo or maybe Tesla, who does a lot of LIDAR and slam stuff. But, yeah, seven people, pretty much all engineers. And the IMU manufacturers, they don't want to get into this side of the software problem

for their clients, providing API that is less noisy? Yeah, it's probably a business opportunity for them, but it's a pretty drastically different space than manufacturing sensors that are like the size of your pinky nail into into sort of building like simulations and and all these like drift loss functions that are like again pretty concentrated in the knowhow among the 10 or so people that can actually build that across the world yeah it makes a lot of sense uh what was the biggest thing you learned in yc well whyc was interesting for us because we are i think like 95% of our batch was b2b SaaS or like agents i think even maybe um so which was

yeah yeah you were there uh you got agents for your agents yeah it was a lot of Agent infrastructure companies, I think you were refreshing. You know, we're actually in Brow, our office at Union Square is browser base as old office. Oh, no way. So hopefully we're summoning some of the good juju from them. But, yeah, yeah. No, YC was good for us because they basically shove all of the

non-agent companies into one group office hours. So like our, our like eight companies, our weekly meetings was like a missile company. Like, I think Percy's defense. Nox metals, if you're familiar, right? Like us, robotics, like a, robotics company. Another couple guys building like magnesium alternative. So it was a pretty eclected group. Nobody was really focused on the same thing, but they were really good

conversation. So my favorite part about that was probably the group office hours. If you can finagle your way into the eight or nine deep tech companies. What are you trying to prove out before the A? Well, I mean, realistically, like I think for us, it's like a technical question more than there's like a market question, right? Because again, if we're coming to right now, 90% of all human and object movement globally is in GPS to night areas, which makes sense if you think about it. Like right now we're in one. Anytime you're indoors, underground, in a combat zone, there's no location data being tracked. So you're missing tons of analytics. So I think the appeal is pretty strong in terms of the need, and we can do it if our technology works, as we say it does,

at a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time with the same accuracy and reliability. So essentially it just comes down to proving out the tech. And we have a lot of, we also have a lot of pre-orders aside from the customers we already have that I think will propel us to all the revenue benchmarks that are important. For us at this point, it's essentially proving out that we're able to, again, mainly reduce drift meaningfully so that we can track people for hours or eventually days on end without it being a significant problem. I've got to ask how you're thinking about privacy, security, all those things. I'm sure the internet, if you're successful, you're one of the most hated people on the internet, just from the, from the schizzo's. Well, I've been seeing all the hearings

online of all the, yeah, the hearings get pretty tense now. Get ready. modification. Yeah, exactly. So I'm like, maybe next up. But, um, but, uh, no, I mean, privacy is essentially something that, like, we're usually selling to vendors or companies who have end users on their side. Sure. So by and large, like our direct interface is not with the people who are being tracked with

their location. That doesn't mean it's not important for us. Obviously, we have our methods about it being encrypted. Yep. Um, working a lot with defense and those environments has to be very secure. Uh, but generally like for, for, like, for, you know, we work with healthcare, for instance, tracking staff is usually a matter of, what does it fall off in the union rights? Like, is it something that, uh, if it's on a hospital issue device, usually they're allowed to track

them without it being a problem. If it's on a, you know, personal device, then it's obviously comes down to the direct discretion of the employee. And even the personal devices like, you know, Apple can track you, but Apple has been probably billions of dollars talking about how they treat privacy seriously. You sort of know that if you open up the maps app, you're paying the GPS. Yeah. And, and, and for what it's worth, like we're using also the standard infrastructure that Apple is also using in their devices. So like the actual things that we're going off of in terms of hardware have already been greenlit and approved by hopefully institutions that people trust. Again, though, it'll ultimately probably come down mostly to the interactions and the relationships between the customers that we sell to and their customers.

You know, my long-term vision, though, is right now we're selling commercial. It'd be great over the course of, you know, five, ten years. You can see a use case where, you know, there's a consumer-facing version of Jux. So instead of Google Maps or Apple Maps, you get the added benefit of, you know, of, again, a navigation tool that will never lose your direction when you're in a big city. You can route it from your house to your exact appointment room at a hospital. It'll give you routing on the road to the parking. Once you're in the hospital, it'll navigate you to the room.

So there's those easy added benefits, but more than that, like when I think about FEMA tracking, you right, are people going to download a FEMA app to be tracked by FEMA in the event they're a natural disaster? Probably not. So I think about, like, in terms of how we can ultimately eventually interface with people directly is we might partner with companies or agencies like FEMA or whoever else. who want to track location in sparing moments, and they basically, as a user on, like, let Juxta Maps,

you can opt in to FEMA tracking you if you live in a natural disaster area in one strikes. And then that's sort of a consent process that we would deal with directly with the customer, but for now that's probably much too ambitious and way down the road. Yeah, also the phone OEMs would probably want something like this. Like, you know, Apple just, like, randomly rolled out.

Like, hey, if you're, if you don't have cell service, like, you can send one text message via a very slow satellite. Yeah. And everyone's like, awesome. Yeah, exactly. If I'm ever lost hiking, I'll probably text someone. What does the data side of the business look like? Is this a big data problem where you need to actually source a ton of data to run a model on top of?

So the big, again, the big breakthrough with us has been the synthetic fingerprinting process. So we're the first company publicly that I know of that's built an IMU simulator at scale that's as reliable as ours is. So essentially we can be given an input of an odd. We do a lot of asset tracking too. So we do a lot of like warehouses and different like shipments. given the dimensions, weight, height, whatever, of a object or person, we can then simulate it in our physics space engine, have them moving around a 3D space. Because we render, we basically take in a map or a satellite image of whatever the space is. We use computer vision to render it into this 3D model.

Then we simulate all these people or things moving around the space and create these basically anchor points, benchmarks of what IMU measurements are going to be at certain spots, given how that person is moving and where they started and all that other stuff. and that allows us to benchmark that data. So we're able to, that ability to synthetically generate it is what makes it so scalable. In terms of like, again, long-term, really long-term visions, like my anticipation is we'll be one of the largest holders of all labeled map and floor plan data in the world by a good margin, right?

There's actually, it's a pretty untapped, but important space to have labeled data as you can imagine. Yeah, and because the input, the only input that we get from users is the floor plan or the satellite image of the space they want to track. So if we were to partner with, let's say, a major grocery store chain across the United States, you know, we'll probably be the only company at the moment that has that much labeled data about aisles, shelves, checkout lines, everything like that. So that's maybe not a, that's more of like a monetization route down the road.

In terms of data that we need as our input, the synthetic process kind of allows us to circumvent a lot of that. Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, great to get the update. Congratulations. Hang out for a little bit. Yeah, yeah, we'll hang out after. We got to plant the bomb. We got us tell everyone. Thank you for watching the show. There's one more video. There's one more video I want you to watch. I don't think you've seen it yet. This one is for you. Okay. I'm excited. Let's pull it up. Sharing it with the team.

Going on. We got through a lot of stuff today. Oh, I think I know what you're pulling up. I think I know. You guys got it? Let's see. Blue Water Autonomy had a announcement. Okay, let's watch this. P.O.B, nightly reel scroll, but you're performatively into physical media. So they print them out. I could get into this. Commenting. Commenting. Okay.

Double tap a like, okay. This is, this is how you're going to start consuming short form. Yeah, people, people always lament the fact that we don't print out the tweets anymore. But a lot of the tweets are videos and you can't print those out. But maybe you can. Maybe you actually can print out. the videos. Anything else you want to talk about before we get out of here?

No, fun show today. You don't want to talk about the Hermes leather pool table and Emerald Green. Plant that bomb and we'll tell everyone about the leather pool table. It's Emerald Green. This would look great in the Ultradome. It's only $264,000.

What a steal for an Hermes pool table. Absolutely stunning. And they put the H on the cue ball. I like that little D. Let everyone know. You got the Hermes version. For generations. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Sign up for our newsletter at TBPN.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific Sharp. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.