TBPN - OpenAI Acquires TBPN

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:14) - OpenAI Acquires TBPN (21:42) - Artemis II Reactions (30:29) - The One-Man $1B Company (41:50) - Timeline Reactions (46:39) - Best Quarter for Big Deals Ever (54:26) - Private Credit's Evangelist Under Fire (01:03:47) - Apple at 50 (01:24:48) - Marc Lore, an American entrepreneur and investor, is renowned for founding Diapers.com and Jet.com, both of which were acquired by Amazon and Walmart, respectively. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from investment banking to launching these e-commerce ventures, highlighting his innovative approaches to logistics and customer experience. He also shares insights into his latest venture, Wonder, a food delivery startup aiming to revolutionize the industry by integrating technology and culinary expertise. (01:54:33) - Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike and host of the Adversary Universe podcast, discusses the recent surge in software supply chain attacks, emphasizing the role of developers in securing their code and the importance of multi-factor authentication to protect against identity-based threats. He highlights the increasing sophistication of adversaries, such as North Korean groups targeting developers to steal cryptocurrencies for funding weapons programs. Meyers also underscores the necessity for organizations to monitor suspicious behaviors at endpoints and during build processes to detect and prevent potential security breaches. (02:07:16) - Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, has a background in founding and leading technology companies, including Allaire Corporation and Brightcove. In the conversation, he discusses the expansion of Circle's platform beyond its stablecoin USDC, highlighting the development of the ARK operating system and the company's focus on simplifying payments and providing infrastructure for developers. He also emphasizes the growing role of USDC in agent-to-agent economic transactions, noting its dominance in this emerging market and the potential for exponential growth as AI agents increasingly engage in financial activities. (02:32:05) - Justin Levine, co-founder and CEO of Shepherd, an AI-native insurance company focusing on large-scale industries like construction and renewable energy, discusses the current construction super cycle driven by AI infrastructure, highlighting a $400 billion infrastructure spend this year alone. He explains Shepherd's role in providing insurance solutions to developers and contractors involved in building data centers and energy assets, emphasizing their innovative approach to underwriting and risk management. Levine also details Shepherd's recent $42 million Series B funding led by Intact Private Capital, underscoring the industry's recognition of the transformative impact of AI on underwriting processes. (02:40:27) - Gaurav Misra, CEO of Mirage, discusses the company's recent $75 million funding round aimed at expanding their AI-driven video editing app, Captions, into new markets, particularly in Asia. He emphasizes their unique approach of combining user-generated media with AI-generated content to create cohesive narratives, catering to small businesses and individuals seeking to market themselves effectively. Misra also highlights plans to broaden the app's use cases beyond simple captioning, focusing on automating various video editing tasks to attract a diverse user base. (02:49:46) - Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, discusses the company's recent $170 million Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, making it the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. He outlines plans to build a constellation of 88,000 satellites, aiming to deploy 20 gigawatts of compute capacity in space, and highlights collaborations with Nvidia on space-optimized chips and the development of deployable radiators for thermal management. Johnston also emphasizes the potential of space-based data centers to alleviate terrestrial energy constraints by harnessing continuous solar power. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. We are alive. It is 365 days until April Fool. Yes, that's right. We are live from the TBPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have some huge news. This is from the Open AI blog. Open AI acquires TBPN, accelerating the global conversation about AI. This is not an April Fool's joke. April Fool's was yesterday. We didn't do anything for April Fool's Day. This is real. This is a very interesting deal. I think a lot of people will be interested in this. We're very excited about this We have a bunch of context and information to share about how this changes things What changes what doesn't I'm sure there's a million questions. We're trying we're gonna try and get to them all But then we also have a huge normal show because normal show we got Mark Lourer That's the first thing that's not changing TVPN's not going away We're gonna be live every day three hours as long as we want

We have a lot of flexibility. We're gonna do a lot of interesting things we got Mark lore the LeBron James of e-commerce. This is from his Wikipedia page. We can pull up the, if you are calling me right now, I can't pick up because I'm live. And I think you know. Yeah, I think it might be time to turn off the phones. I think, yes, it might be time to turn off the phones. Yeah, very, very strange. I think this is maybe the first time in history. There's been a deal like this. And then two people that are a part of it have to go and talk for three hours straight. But it's technology, business, as usual, over here. Yes. But we have a fun show for you today. We'll get into the news in a second, but we have Adam Myers coming on from

CrowdStrike to talk about all the recent. Axios hack and more. We have Jeremy from Circle coming on. In person. In person, which was exciting to talk about Stables. Justin from Shepard, Garav from Mirage, and then Philip from Star Cloud. Lots of space news. We're very excited about the Artemis 2 mission going successfully. Hopefully you all watched it. It was a lot of fun. We were watching it here on the screen and we were gripped as the rocket took off because, uh, yeah, we were, we were so locked in. We were, we were joking around that it should, it felt like it should have been a pay-per-view. Yeah. Like, could we turn space into a profit center for the government?

Somebody was saying that it was not entertaining. I was extremely entertained. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they could do more, but I thought. NASA has a decent e-commerce business too. We were watching, they were selling like 10,000 patches a minute or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we were, we were doing the back of the envelope, just from the main call to action at the bottom of the YouTube stream. They were selling a patch for, I don't know, tens of dollars, and they'd sold like hundreds of thousands of them. So as we were watching, they were selling like something like $10 million worth of merch. So maybe go get some for yourself. Anyway, let's go over to Fiji Seimos post on the OpenAI blog. She shared this message with the company earlier today. She says,

I'm excited to share that we've acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience, understanding, and proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture. That's what I'm still going to be hitting the soundboard. Yeah, you are. TBPN has built something pretty special. It's one of the places where the conversations about AI and builders is actually happening day to day. A lot of you already watch it and rely on it to stay close to what's going on. As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate in open AI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to

us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift and the mission of bringing, and with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates with builders and people using the technology at the center. And that's exactly what TBPN has built, which is what I was going to say is the next line. That is a huge part. of the show is making sense of what's going on, how these tools are actually being used, all of the implications we've gone all over the place and we will continue to go all over the place.

Yeah, and over the last year, like, you know, multiple years, there's just been some, there's so much uncertainty about AI. Yeah. I don't think we can change that. Yeah. But there's also a lot of fear and just talking through it with the people that are actually helping diffuse AI through the economy across every single industry is something that we've enjoyed a tremendous amount and is exactly what we're going to continue to do.

Yeah. If you want to continue. Yeah. So she says, so rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense just to bring them in, support what they're doing and help them scale while keeping what makes them special. A core part of this is editorial independence. We can say whatever we want because we're live and we don't need to run anything through

anyone. It's not possible. It is. It would be very difficult to have somebody here. Can we say this? I'm about to say a sentence. TVPN will continue to run their programming, choose their own guests, and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility, and it's something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement.

And also, we were never in the scoop industry. People were kind of asking, like, is this journalism? Is it commentary? I think we've always been like, hey, we like to talk to a lot of people, have a conversation, bring in people all over the place. Yeah, and even when companies have approached us and said, we'll give you the exclusive. We don't look for exclusive. It's like, hey, you can come on the show. We got a golden scoop more.

You to go talk to the journal or the Times or Bloomberg, wherever you want to go. And then come and contextualize it with us and let us dig in and understand more about the strategy. And so, TBPN will continue running their programming, choose their guests and make their own editorial decisions. That's foundational to their credibility and something we're explicitly protecting as part of this agreement. I'm also excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team. We got lots of ideas and we're very excited for this. They've helped many brands market online, and because they have a strong pulse on where the industry is going,

their comms and marketing ideas have really impressed, did you see, about me? I can't wait to leverage their talent outside of the show to innovate on how we bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives. TBPN will sit within our strategy organization reporting to Chris Lehane, really excited to welcome Jordi, John, Dylan, and the broader team. And here's a statement from you. Do you want to read this? What did you say? Over the past year, we've had a front row seat not just Open AI, but to the entire ecosystem covering the daily news announcements and launches in real time.

While we've been critical of the industry at times after getting to know Sam, Fiji, and the Open AI team, what stood out the most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right. Moving from commentary to real impact and how this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us. So, uh, I contextualize it a little bit more shared. You know, a lot of people are like, is this in April Fool's joke? I've been saying, expect the unexpected. This is a plot twist. I'll give you that.

It was unexpected. It was unexpected to me. And, but I'm really happy about it. And when I reflect on my career, it's, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I can walk you through some of my career and my experience with Open AI and with Sam Altman. The, uh, I've known Sam for maybe 13 years. He invested in my first company in 2013.

And then we got in a really serious log jam during a financing. And I wrote him an email. I told this story in Bloomberg a couple of years ago. I wrote him an email and said, hey, this is getting really rough. I'm a first-time founder. I don't know if we're going to be able to get this done. And he called me, and we hopped on the phone for like five minutes. And he was able to completely resolve everything.

And everyone walked out of the deal feeling pretty good. And so that always left this impression on me that he was founder friendly. Obviously, he didn't, in this particular case, it was to my benefit, not particularly to his benefit, the way the deal, the way the deal, like, wound out. And he was just a great addition to the negotiation and really, and you were very young at the time. Yeah, you were just a wee lad. I was, I was. You were about 23, 24, something like that range.

Yeah. And then when I took my second company through YC, he was president at the time. and then when I joined Founders Fund, the very first deal that I saw in motion at Founders Fund was the post-Chap-GPT round in OpenAI in late 2022, early 2023. And so I sort of had this like front row seat to all of this. And then once we actually started growing TBPN, he was one of the first people that I texted to say,

hey, do you want to come on the show? And he was the first lab lead to come on the show. And we're excited to continue having him on the show, hopefully have other lab leads on the show, have other people from all over the industry. And just generally, I think that when I was at Founders Fund, I was not particularly in the weeds of intra-venture capital fights. I was much more interested in the conversation around technological stagnation,

not funding companies, not making great companies happen. I never was in a situation where I was like, oh, like if a different VC firm backs a great company, that's bad, you know? And I think that's the same philosophy that I have always taken forward and will continue to believe in, which is that the American AI industry is the most important thing, and that will continue to be the case. And I'm excited for all the different competition and everything that's happening in the industry to continue and, yeah, push further. Jordy, did you have anything else to say? I just wanted to say some thank yous.

because a lot of people have been a part of this journey to date. It's been, I think, something like, let me do the math here, 496 days, roughly 16 months since we put out the first episode. It was just the two of us and Ben sitting in a room, couple cameras, a couple microphones. And I will just say I didn't know this special of a business relationship was possible between you and me. I think if you look back on that almost 500 days,

we've had disagreements around strategy or approaches or things like that, but we have almost universally stayed perfectly aligned on everything that matters every single day, every step of the way. And I think that's somewhat of a miracle given that we went into this, not really knowing what it would become.

Yeah, we did one side project together and it took like eight, months and it was like not it was like successful but it was not like oh yeah like okay we were we were working together daily four months you know yeah it was a lot of uh just just jump in and yeah leap of faith right yeah and i think uh we've got this question so many times like do you guys get sick of each other you know you just have to talk to each other for three hours a day and like i've said this before i'll say it again uh and uh it is actually hilarious the second that we leave the office where we both get in the car we call each other we end up talking for like another

hour on the way home and so it's just been it's been the privilege of uh of a lifetime to just build this business with you and the whole team uh the team has been absolutely uh incredible you guys are all truly amazing uh and this very much is a this very much is a team like a team sport like business is a team sport, but this is like a live team sport. We come in here every single day. And the show doesn't happen if we don't all come in and make it happen. And so the consistency of the team has been just incredible. And watching everyone's individual talents just flourish has been incredible.

A lot of people came into this, you know, having done a thing or two in the past, but learning new things. Brandon has been absolutely incredible. Just an absolute rock in the organization. Brandon, if you're not familiar, writes our newsletter every day and is just remarkably consistent and has like, you know, helped us shape our editorial approach. And it's been incredible.

Dylan, who joined us, I guess, technically, Q4 of last year. You know, I'd worked with him at my last year. with him at my last company, but is truly, truly one of a kind, remarkable. I never want to do business without him. And he has just done such an exceptional job. Working off air, it's like, you know, challenging when you're building a company and you're also having to put on a live performance for three hours every day. He wrote the newsletter yesterday. That's true. That's true. The op-ed. He wrote the op-ed. Ben, who's been here since day one. TBPN, and he was working with me on my YouTube channel. When did we start working New York?

I was here before Jordy. Yeah. Maybe like, wait, mid-20204 maybe, something like that. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. We've traveled a lot, a lot of Pelican cases. No, but it's been absolutely incredible to watch you grow from an extremely talented individual and to very capable and talented manager and building out a team of people that are so hardworking and wonderful and you know Michael Scott Jackson you guys you know are so you know such a joy to to work with even though what we do is is not easy and it's changing you know day to day to all the guests seriously it's

been it's been so much fun like if you went back and reround to the beginning of of the show to, we started with no guess. We did something like 50 episodes without any guess. We thought that there was a time that we thought we would just do that forever. Because that was the only thing that was, you know, really unique about the show. Like, that's the reason I started creating content in 2020. Because it was during COVID. There were no events.

There were no places to meet other founders, meet other business people. I wasn't thinking of it as like a media business. I was thinking of it as like a way to just have conversations. and meet other people who are building companies. And now we get to do that all day long, which is just dream come true. Yeah, so many, so many guests have turned into dear friends. Yeah. You know, the Joe Wisenthals, the Dylan Patels.

Yeah. There's really too many to list, but we will have you all back on the show. I can't wait. To everybody that's tuned in, whether you've watched the RSS feed, the live show, the clips, the newsletter, anything. laughing hard you know we've strived to to create the right product regardless of how much time you have if you have two minutes a day to read the newsletter great if you've got five minutes to watch some clips if you want to watch the entire podcast if you want to watch diet tbPN the daily cut down

thank you thank you for tuning in and uh fortunately pretty much everything is going to stay exactly the same. To our one and only Tyler. Tyler, you are truly, truly incredible, one of the brightest young people I've ever worked with, and you have such a bright future. You know, we always, we always, we always knew that I've felt from the very beginning that you would go on to start your own company, and we cherish every single minute that we have with you. And we're going to do our very best to retain you for decades, but thank you for everything you've brought to the show, everything you've built, Tyler, if you're just tuning in now, is built all of the internal software that we use to run the show.

It's insane stuff. It is a fully custom content management system, CRM. It helps us edit all of our videos. It is the backbone of the show. It's a tool that the entire team uses on a team. daily basis and truly the show would not be possible without it. And yeah, your, your contributions on air as well. It's amazing. It's so much fun to be able to cut over to you. And so it is with great honor that I give you this soundboard. And our sponsors, we can start with the ramp team,

Eric, Eric Kareem, and the whole team over there has just been incredible. They allowed us, you know, at the end of 2024, when we had started doing the show, we really loved it. They were, they committed to sponsoring the show for a year, and that allowed us to do so much in terms of investing in all the equipment that we use, hiring people. They made it possible and have been truly, truly exceptional. partners and watching ramps growth over the last, over the last couple years has just been phenomenal and they deserve all the,

all the success. And every other sponsor that has been a part of this. Yeah. Truly. Shout out Nick as well. Oh, did he not get one? Oh, we got to get a direct shout out for Nick. We got to get a direct shout out for Nick.

We don't know, we don't know what to call Nick. We can't give his name on air because he'll get 10 times more emails. He, he, man, he, the lineup every day. is crafted by Nick. He is our liaison to 99% of the guests that come on the show. Sometimes it starts with an interaction over X or a text message or there's other intermediaries involved. There's a lot that goes into actually getting someone into the waiting room, into the show, making sure that they understand how the show will work. It's sort of like, you know, you're hot dropping into this live show. That's new for a lot of people. And Nick does a great job communicating and

and parsing all the noise to understand what the best news of the day is, how we can contextualize it best with the optimal guests. And he's done a fantastic job. And we'll continue. It's an honor. David Senra. Yeah. One of a kind.

He literally inspired us to grind harder. Yeah, David was our very first listener that I'm aware of. He gets sent a lot of podcasts. We sent a link in a Google Drive. And he listened. And from that first hour. episode, even though it was very scrappy, he said, take this, take this, you know, a hundred times more seriously than, than you are right now. And we did. And it's, it's the best advice

that I've ever gotten. And he has been. And we have a picture of framed. We couldn't print it full size. And he appears that it was printed on a black and white photo printer, but it's a black and white photo. And he's a black and white brand. So thank you to David Senora, who's been the podcast, Godfather, truly. And the gong. The gong. The gong. The chat is asking us to hit the gong.

We have to, we have to, we have to rebut lodge. The gong will remain. The gong will remain. Wilmanitis has already chimed in with his take. He says many, many people are saying we're in the deal guy yuga, many are saying. And it means a lot that will minotis. The only, he is the only guest who has co-hosted a full show from start to finish with us. And if you want to go back in the archives, you can.

You can watch that episode. It's a wild one. It was in a hotel room. We had yet to figure out the remote shows fully. The team worked really hard to make that one happen. Very chaotic. It's a good time. Very chaotic.

And yeah, where else should we go? Should we go to, is there anything else to say about open AI? I mean, of course, we'll be in conversation with you forever. Anytime on the show, you're welcome to leave a comment or chat in the chat is asking, where is Wilmonitis right now? I don't know. Probably sailing a boat. I don't know.

Yeah. And yeah, it's an honor to partner with Open AI and every single person on the team that we've had the pleasure of meeting. We've been impressed by. They are ridiculously talented. And every single person is committed to getting this AI thing right. So we're very excited. We're incredibly excited. Great.

Well, let's move on to the Artemis II. pictures and images and news. Very, very exciting. It made the front of the Wall Street Journal. NASA aims to orbit moon for first time, for first time since 72 to boldly go. The crew of NASA is asking, is that three Diet Cokes? Yes. I got four now.

You got to thank Diet Coke. Thank you to the Coca-Cola Corporation for making this possible. Thank you to the Huberman team for the Matayana, Yerba Mates, the podcast in a can. Yes. It wouldn't be possible without you guys. And thank you to tailors and suit makers. There's a lot of people that make this possible. The horse, the prop department.

There's a million things here. It's been a great time. So the crew of NASA Artemis II head to Cape Canaveral launch pad Wednesday for the first human spaceflight to the moon in half a century. John Krause hosted a incredible photo. So is he someone who actually, yeah, he, he, he, he, uh, special comms assistant. Special comms assistant. He actually goes to the launches and brings special photography gear to get the best possible

photos. And man, he did he deliver with this one. Uh, what an incredible moment. We talked about a little bit. Um, uh, there's an article on the watches of NASA Artemis too. John, we have to thank our lovely wives. Of course. How could we not?

Our families. Did you get a text? Maybe. We don't talk about them a lot on the show. This is a show about technology and business, but they have been, they are the back, they're the truly the backbones of the show

and have put up with, I think, like, a lot of travel, incredible hours, a lot of kids. A lot of early mornings. A lot of early mornings, I think, out of the last, out of every single day that we've done the show, I haven't, I've left the house,

past 6 a.m. Maybe twice, right? It's been a long, it's been a long road. And the good news, ladies, is it's, nothing's going to change. No,

thank you to both of you for supporting us and allowing us to do what we do. Can we pull up this picture, Ben, in the production chat, of the first episode that we recorded in the Jonathan Club in downtown

showing a little behind. Oh, you did, yeah, behind the scenes. This is, yeah, such a wild time. Remember that? Yeah, remember that, George? Suitless. We had the flag. Yeah.

But no suits. It looked pretty good on camera. I was happy with the way it came out, but... Ben can cook. Ben can cook. Well, where should we go next? Artemis II? Let's do it.

Yesterday, the long-awaited Artemis II mission took to the stars en route to the moon for the first. such manned mission since 1972. It's members of the chat asked for a flashbang. Oh, okay, flash out. Okay, that's good. Yes. The flashbang has been a highlight for sure. Both literally...

Yeah, the soundboard. It's truly a character on the show. And I have some too now. Its members all had Omega Speedmaster X33 models strapped to their flight suits. Danny Milton just wrote a full article on the site now detailing the watches worn on the wrists of the four astronauts throughout their time as part of this mission. Watches have a longstanding history with spaceflight, most notably through the Omega Speedmaster Moon Watch,

but there are countless others that have cemented their place in the cosmos. Head to the site to learn more about the watches of Artemis 2 from the Speedmaster X33 to a surprising brightling. You won't want to miss it. And this is from Teddy Baldassar. Who's a great watch creator? So we can pull up this video now of the astronauts working. on what looks like some type of tablet. This was...

Do you think this is an iPad? I don't think so, right? Because iPad's usually put the numbers. Looks like it's running some windows. They seem very committed to the... Oh yeah, are they running Outlook or something? Yeah. Yeah.

So here he is typing in. Most secure password known to man. What is that? 9393 or something? 399. 399. Powerful. Powerful.

Well, we're going back to the moon. Apparently that video we played yesterday was a little bit of fake news. The young man, the adolescent who swears and says, we're going to the F and moon. The real line, I believe, in the community note, is that he says, we're going to the frickin' and it had been altered to add the actual F word. But the sentiment is still the same. It's very exciting, very inspirational. And Jared Isaacman on launch day says, oh, this can.

is definitely getting it back in NASA gear. That's great. Very cool. There are some wrinkles with the launch, right? Fortunately, nothing like disasters or catastrophic or anything, but the good news is that we're on our way back to the moon. The bad news is that the toilet's broken, apparently. And I believe this is from the live blog from the New York Times.

The NASA Associated Minister said there is a controller issue with a toilet on the Orion capsule, and it would take a few hours to troubleshoot. We're just getting started, he said, when addressing that that and some other glitches with the spacecraft, the spirit of Apollo 10 lives on. They said 135. They told us that. Here's another. It seems like this is not the first time that this has happened.

But we're hoping for the best here. Sounds like there were some other issues with Outlook as well. We can pull up this video from Tom Warren. Yes. Oh, so there's audio with this too? We can remote in and take a look directly. Two? Why do you have two?

Like web and desktop? Or do you think it's like two separate desktop installations? We will join in on your PCD and we'll let you know when we're done. Honestly, this is the best possible failure scenario is Outlook and not the rocket itself. Can they buy? I think it's a good outcome. There were so many amazing images coming out yesterday. Peyton Alexander says this is the real reward for Artemis.

This is who we are actually doing this for. They will grow up knowing they can one day work in their country's bases on the moon and Mars. We are not just abstractly hoping for a better. world for them. We are going there. And two kids here watching the launch from Orlando. Just beautiful. Yeah, my five-year-old said it was boring, which is not what you want to hear. But we'll have to give some more context to him about how big of a deal it is.

He was like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe he wants more flashing lights on the screen. We were driving for the actual launch. And it was so funny listening to the audio feed and sitting in traffic. and just looking out at everyone. Yeah. And realizing that it felt like the majority of the world still wasn't paying attention or didn't care.

Yeah. I mean, like, rockets do launch, like, every day now. I know. SpaceX has normalized it to such a degree. Isn't there some sort of subplot on the Apollo missions that by the third or fourth Apollo mission, there was no, like, the actual viewership had dropped off, and, like, the American population had gotten to it? 3.6 has put subway surfers on it on the NASA feed.

Crazy that you actually need to maybe need to do this. Ed Ludlow was at the launch. Yes, he was. Let's pull up this video of legendary tech anchor. I mean, it's an emotional moment, so I guess it makes sense to capture his result, but everyone's saying he should turn around and actually watch it. It's very funny to do this selfie video. I mean, it contextualized the moment perfectly,

but it is oh he was live on the air he was alive on the air okay so I mean if you're live like you you you don't want to necessarily turn around I guess I don't know there's that famous clip of what it's a wild video there's that amazing clip of from that documentary where the the host is giving this monologue and then the monologue ends right as the launch happens like he timed it up perfectly and it's very cinematic anyway I don't know uh delian shared the the the coolest orbital animation he's seen of Artemis 2. It looks a lot less fishy when you see it this way. It's fascinating how close they have to be.

And by fishy, John means one of the other animation actually was shaped like a fish. It was shaped like a fish. But this one is a little bit more of a straight shot. But it really emphasizes how short that window is where you're actually next to the moon. It really, Delian says, really just really shows you how far away that. they're flying today and how precise they need to be to go to the moon. Yeah, remarkable. I'm very excited to following this.

New York Times article, how AI helped one man and his brother build a $1.8 billion company who needs more than two employees when AI can do so many corporate tasks. It's super efficient and a little bit lonely. Aaron Griffith has the story. People are calling this the... The prophecy. The one man, $1 billion company.

Yeah, if you're in tech and you're in the business of making predictions, no one wants predictions. We want prophecies. Prophecies. You need to be prophesizing for sure. So, the article, how AI helped one man and his brother build a $1.8 billion company. Who needs more than two employees that when artificial intelligence can do so many corporate tasks, it's super efficient and a little bit lonely.

So Aaron Griffith tells the story of Matthew Gallagher, who took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools. to get his startup off the ground. From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher 41 used AI to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created AI systems to analyze his business's performance, and he outsourced the other stuff he couldn't do himself.

His startup, MedVee, a telehealth provider of GLP1 weight loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, he gained more than 1,000 more. 2025, Medvee's first year in business, the first full year in business. The company generated $401 million in sales. Mr. Gallagher then hired this only. This is absolutely insane because as GLP ones were starting to take off, I had, I remember distinctly talking with somebody that was like, I want to start a telehealth company for GLP ones. And at that time, I was like, okay, there's a lot of telehealth companies that are at scale. And they're all going to be very quick. They're well aware of this.

They will immediately introduce this product and other, you know, similar products to their customer base. And it's going to be incredibly difficult to be competitive. And it turns out there's just such overwhelming demand for these products that you could come in as a new company and scale. You know, I'm sure this guy, Mr. Calliger, is incredibly talented. But the market overall is just growing so quickly that it didn't matter that every other telehealth company was also getting into the game. just such an incredible, you know, volume of sales coming in. Yeah, yeah. So, like, one year in maybe, he hires his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot.

This year, they're on track to do $1.8 billion in sales. A $1.8 billion company with just two employees in the age of AI. It's increasingly possible, says Aaron Griffith in the New York Times. Sam Allman, the chief executive Open AI predicted the rise of a new breed of super-efficient company in 2024, A one-person business worth $1 billion would have been unimaginable without AI, he said on a podcast, and now it will happen. Now is AI tool spread, entrepreneurs are harnessing the technology to expand their startups to an enormous scale at breathtaking speed with very few humans. Big companies, especially in tech, are getting in on the disruption two. Pinterest, Block, and others have cut thousands of workers in recent months, citing efficiencies enabled by AI.

Mr. Gallagher, who formerly ran a startup that sold wristwatches, said he thought Mr. Altman's prophet, of a one-billion, one-person, one-billion-dollar company would be a firm that built AI. He was excited when he realized he may have done it, taking an old idea, being a middleman for weight-loss drugs, and using AI to turbo-charge it. I am interested to know, and we're going to try and get him on the show, like what the margins are on this. I imagine that the revenue is, you know, like a lot of this needs to accrue, a lot of the value needs to accrue to the companies that actually designed and.

Yeah, and the one person. one billion dollar company is at a billion dollar valuation yeah at the same time is at a billion dollar run rate i would imagine that even even a reseller would trade around like one x revenue maybe yeah i i have no idea maybe way more uh i imagine does this count does this count yet though like i feel like to be the one person one billion dollar company you got to be able to log into your payroll tool and you're the only person there oh so it's and he's got his brother in there sorry bro take a walk he's got to let his brother let his brother go. In an email, Mr. Raltman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech CEO friends over when such a company would appear and said that he would like to meet the guy who had done it.

Medvea is technically not a one person, one billion dollar company since he hired his brother and some contractors. The startup, which is not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation, but many highly valued tech companies can only dream of hitting one billion in revenue with so few workers. Medvea is also profitable. that is great and important if you're bootstrapped. Can't get very smart. Is this a wrapper company? It's like a GLP1 wrapper. But it's AI enabled, but it's not wrapping the AI foundation model.

It's like using the tool to wrap another industry and just create the efficiency between the manufacturer and the actual distribution. It really is remarkable that they were able to hoover up so much revenue in such a competitive space. Because you would assume that the other, telehealth providers would have significant ad operations and that the margins on customer acquisition would be very, very tricky to crack.

But he must have found some unique insight into how to distribute the product, get actual people to the website, because the AI certainly can build the website and write the copy, but it can't necessarily get people to show up and actually put down their hard-earned cash for the product. Yeah, just to put it into context, Hymns did $2.3 billion in full year 2025 revenue for 2025. Yeah. This guy started in 2024 and got to $401 million in sales. I want to know more about, yeah, the strategy here, how this built up so quickly.

As a teenager, Mr. Gallagher began building websites for local businesses. He always had a hustle, including selling candles and samurai swords on eBay. This is the classic founder journey selling something on eBay. That's how I was selling DJ equipment on eBay back when I was a teenager. At 18, after building a web hosting business, he sold that business for $6,000. He briefly attended the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University, but did not graduate. In 2010, he moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. He eventually returned to coding, bouncing between tech jobs.

In 2016, he built watch gang, a startup that sold Ritz watches via subscription. Interesting. Is that like, by now, pay later for watches? Or are you renting them? You're like, you got another watch? Yeah. You're just subscribed to like, I didn't realize I was getting a subscription.

Oops, it came in the mail again. It had fans, but never turned a profit, watch gang. Even as Mr. Gallagher chased revenue growth and hired 60 people. So wildly different business outcome here. Wow. He's like, I'm not doing that again. Open AI's release of ChatGPT 2022

inspired Mr. Gallagher to start tinkering with AI two years later he met Jitin Chabra, a co-founder of Care Validate, a medical startup in Atlanta. Care Validate offers what is essentially telehealth in a box kits, companies, employers, and retailers who that want to sell customers prescription drugs can use Care Validates technology and network of online doctors to set up a business. The company's software connects patients with doctors and pharmacies, which write, fulfill, and ship the prescriptions. Care Validate charges fees for its software. So you have to imagine that there's, that there's like a fairly decent cost structure here, but it's not to diminish it. It's an incredible amount of revenue.

Like, you look at the comps and you're blown away. But yeah, it's just, it's just interesting to understand the, yeah, the other big, the other big question here is like how much are you spending on ads? Yeah. Like, it's very possible that, you know, the company is profitable. Yeah. But if you're spending 60% of every dollar, you bring in on paid acquisition plus COGS, and then any other expenses that actually go into fulfilling. Can you imagine? He takes a company public by himself. He's like, I don't need an investment bank. I'm just going to vibe code the road show.

100% retail allocation. I don't know. I mean, I think like taking a company public is just technically a bunch of SEC filings. And if the investors sign up and the emails are sent and everyone agrees, it can happen. So who knows? Maybe he takes his company public with two people. That would be a one. Like, it's just the New York Stock Exchange bell ringing.

And normally it's like 20 people and it's like only the executive team and bankers. And all the employees are, you know, outside or on the trading floor. And he's just standing there and being like, oh, yeah, I did it. Like by myself. Wild. Gallagher saw an opportunity for his own telehealth business. He could use AI to do the branding and marketing and let care validate and a similar platform open loop health health, which is another interesting company. And someone was posting about handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping, and

compliance, he planned to start with GLP-1s. He was entering an established market for nearly a decade. Hymns and hers Health Row and other companies have sold drugs for erectile dysfunction and hair loss online, using an online network of doctors to write prescriptions. Hymns, which went public in 2021, has 2,442 employees and generated $2.4 billion in revenue. Yeah, this is what I, this was what I was explaining to my friend who wanted to do something in this space. Yeah. Like, hey, you're, you're going to be going up against a company that has billions of revenue already. Yeah. thousands of employees that already has all the infrastructure to prescribe these drugs. Yeah.

But again, the market is just growing so quickly. Yeah, he really used everything. ChatGPT, Claude Grock, 11 labs, mid-Journey runway to create media assets for his website and ads. He spent $20,000 on software. That's definitely a notable, something quite notable out of any time we're seeing these stories where, you know, the guy who is making a cancer drug for his dog, a lot of people. are picking, if you can think of LLMs as like digital, digital guys or girls, like people are working with multiple digital guys to do, to like complete these projects.

Yeah. One model's better at writing. One model's better at coding. One model's better at marketing or strategy or anything else. Interesting. He said, from the beginning, growth was insane. He quickly became one of Care Validates and OpenLoup's top clients. Companies were blown away by startup speed and scale.

You're like, do you have an army? you have people behind you somewhere and he's like, nope. Wow. Well, you can go read the full article on the New York Times at New York Times.com. It's Aaron Griffith's latest piece. You can also listen to it. There's an audio version. There is some commentary on this. Just a lot of people having fun with it. Clayton Petty says, who has two thumbs and wants to know what the ad spend is? This guy. Yeah, I'm very interested to know. I mean, I, I, I, I, I would still be shocked if this is not a fantastic business. Yeah, at that scale, you can have truly terrible EBITA margins and still be printing.

Yeah, and it's like even if, even if, like, it's impossible that it's negative margin because he hasn't raised money. And so like, where would the losses come from? So you can't be losing money. And if you're going to lever it up. Maybe. I don't think so, though. I think everyone's going to be shocked by how much cash flow this business is producing.

But it is, it is a very exciting, exciting moment in story. Let's go over to Tyler Cowan at Marjoral Revolution. Yeah, he just shares this. Sam said one person running a billion dollar company, but if two are closely genetically related, Tyler Cowen's still counting this as a correct prediction and some people in the comments. Yeah, huge opportunities for other siblings

to fulfill the prophecy. Yeah. So people are moving the goalposts already because technically he had agencies that had humans that worked there. And if he works with a marketing, agency and then there's a bunch of people there. It's more just like the disaggregation

of the different institutions and the different organizations. What do you take? I think the real goalposts we got to move is just you can't talk to anyone the entire time you're looking. You can't talk to a human at all. You can't say you can only be on the command line basically and prompt box. But you can tell the agent

or the LLM to go and call someone. Yeah, I think that's fine. Yeah. Because then you're not interfacing with someone. Do you have to be truly a shut-in? That's the prediction now. Absolutely ridiculous. Chat is asking for John.

Exley. John, get in the Ultrodome. Get back here. We didn't know how to unplug X. We got to get him back in here. He's somewhere. We'll find him. We'll get him back in.

Jonathan Ross is talking about the Petro Dollar. There was a story about how there has been an interesting flight to the dollar. The dollar is very strong, even amid all of the geopolitical uncertain. T. Jonathan Ross, the founder of GROC, now the chief software architect at NVIDIA, said, the petro dollar defined the last 50 years of American economic dominance, the token dollar, the currency AI compute is bought in and sold in, will define the next 50. Oil is priced in U.S. dollars. That means every country on earth needs dollars to fuel their economy.

That single fact has been the foundation of American financial power since the 1970s. Now consider AI. Training runs cost tens of billions. Inference is scaling to hundreds of billions. The companies that are selling compute are American. The currency it's priced in is dollars. The petro dollar had oil. The token dollar has compute. Same structure, same leverage, new resource. Countries aren't just competing over AI talent and chips. They're competing over whether AI remains a dollar denominated economy. That's the game nobody's naming yet. And so he is coining it. He says the token dollar. is the concept. Yeah, it's a cool positioning.

Yeah. So, I mean, it'll be interesting to talk about Circle with Jeremy, about how stable coins fit into all of this. Also, yesterday talking to Corweave about compute-backed credit lines and all the different financial products that are popping up related to debt issued against GPUs that have essentially a flow of business that will be expected to come in against them. Very interesting watching the larger AI accounts. economy, you know, mature. Brexton says compute back credit lines are the next frontier for fixed income and will

quickly turn into one of the largest asset classes on the planet. People are going back and forth. No shade trying to learn isn't compute as an asset depreciating quickly due to innovation scale economies, hence bad collateral. Brexton says, no shade taken, you're right, but it's still a couple notes. Supply constraints on chips right now makes older chips still valuable in secondary markets Because of the above, capital markets care more about revenue produced from chips rather than resale value. And chips are only a subset of the total cost of compute, heterogeneous builds, the rack, powered shell, interconnect, cooling.

It was interesting when we were talking with Corweave about the, that I was really expecting the answer to be chip constraints. And he was saying powered shells, powered shells, which is what we've heard from Satcha Nadella. Yeah, and I think it makes sense, given their business. It's like it's hard to get chips, but think about all of the logistical complexity to actually get the location, the energy, the shell, everything built together. And navigating all those regulations, it's just like one of the, it's an incredibly complex infrastructure project that you're trying to compress onto timelines that America has generally not done infrastructure projects in a long, long time. Yeah. And so this was, this was always some of the, you know, one of the exciting things about the data center build out. Among the fear has been that a bunch of people are learning how to build complex things fast.

Right. Well, the year is off to the strongest start for big deals ever. Corporate mega deals flourish despite turmoil. This is in the Wall Street Journal. large corporate deals had their best quarterly showing ever as companies forged ahead with tie-ups and investments despite the Iran war-rattling markets. So far in 2026, 22 transactions valued at 10 billion or more have been announced globally, a record quarterly number according to L-S-E-G data. The next closest quarter was the fourth quarter of 2015 when 21 such deals were announced in that year. This week alone, Unilever unveiled a more than $65 billion deal, including debt, to combine its food business with Spicemaker McCormick, and Cisco, which we talked about a few days ago, agreed to buy Jetro Restaurant Depot for over $29 billion, including debt.

Uncertainty due to oil growth, growth and rates isn't going away, but major deals are still getting done, said Ben Goodchild, a partner's in the M&A group at law firm Paul Weiss. the M&A market is focused on the long-term fundamentals, right deal, right price, and right strategic rationale. The total value of all deals announced globally jumped roughly 29% in the first quarter from a year ago, but the number of deals is down more than 17% as smaller deal activity slowed. The mega-deal tally includes a handful of big equity investments in AI companies, such as Amazon's $50 billion investment in Open AI announced in February. a number of other big transactions are in the works. Este Latter has been in discussions

to acquire Spanish beauty group Puebegu brands, a deal that would combine two of the world's biggest beauty companies. And there is a number of others. Absolute is buying Jack Daniels. Tilman Ferretta is buying Caesars Entertainment. There's another heist on the Caesar's Casino, referencing Apollo.

Many companies see a moment to pounce on bigger deals. that would normally face prolonged antitrust scrutiny. The Justice Department's top antitrust official departed in February after clashing with Trump allies, who at times favored more lenient oversight of big deals. This all comes as U.S. stocks delivered their worst quarter in nearly four years, led by a 7% drop in the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index.

That makes it harder for buyers and sellers to agree on prices. The Iran War has sent crude prices above $100 a barrel, which could keep interest rates higher for longer to combat rising prices. make funding deals more expensive. There's a very interesting chart. I don't know if we can pull it up in the journal. Big deals have big first quarter. Number of global deals valued at 10 billion or more. There we go. And it's just... Look at 2020, 2021. If you... 2021? What was going on? This is another chart. This is nine. Oh, if you want to scroll down,

you can look at the smaller deals. These are deals valued between one billion and five billion. and 2021 was huge. What was going on then? It was ZERP era, right? Post-COVID, lots of... I mean, when interest rates are near zero, you may as well lever up. I guess that's going on.

Bankers and lawyers say smaller deals are less of a must-have. Buyers are more willing to put them on hold, but the big deals, they have to happen regardless of what's going on in the economy. Also, private equity firms are sitting on a record number of portfolio companies. They need to eventually sell or take public, including many software firms threatened by the rise of AI.

But many are hesitant to strike deals at today's depressed prices. While deal-making activity in the software industry has stalled, there has been plenty in other sectors, including financial services and healthcare. Eli Lilly struck a deal for Kantessa and Biogen bought Appellis. Dealmakers have high hopes going into 2020s. A couple questions in the chat and a special arrival, John Exley has entered the chat.

Let's go. Welcome. original chat room general. Yes. Hit the gong for XLE. Let's hit the gong for XLE. John Exley. I know that John has missed an episode.

And it's an honor to podcast with you, John. Thank you so much. Another question. Who is blacklisted from TBPN now? No one. No one. We've never, there's never been anyone blacklisted from the show. In fact, the evidence of this is every single one of our sponsors ever.

we've had the competitors on the show and all of that will continue. We want this to be a place where. Conversations can happen about anything. Yeah. And there's also just a broader trend of this. I don't know if you watch like the broader podcast landscape, people from like, you know, quote unquote like rival firms or different firms go on each other shows all the time. Not uncommon these days for crossover content to happen all over the place.

Jim Kramer says, if private credit is so horrendous, how is KKR oversubscribed so easily on its $20 billion fund? They raised $23 billion. Some kind of disconnect here, boys. Boy, are these firms ill-advised in how to tell their story? This was the early confusion about private credit. People were seeing a whole bunch of private credit deals during the AI boom. And then when the nervousness matured, it was much more when we talked to, carried no interest, for example, the worry was much more around software companies, not

hard assets. It was not, oh, in this private credit fund, there's a data center that META is going to pay their bill on. It's some other company that maybe is not going to have as high of dollar retention going forward. And so I think that the different private credit firms have a messaging problem of, like, what is in the fund? Because it can be a lot of different stuff.

and KKR clearly did a great job explaining why their particular strategy will endure for the long haul. There's other news about... Let's pull up this video quickly, Kramer, talking about our friends at Semian Alifis. Oh, yeah, this is great. There is a company that I regard. It's the absolute... It's the gospel. Semi-onels.

And I've got this guy, Dylan Patel. Look at that picture. semi analysis is the arbiter. They're like God in the semis. The God and sense. When they bless something, it means that it's the benchmark at the best. They are the most honest guys. I've come

across, and I've always been reading them, but Jensen really praised them in TTC. So I reached out to this guy who my regard is genius. He's genius. I can't wait to talk to it. That's a promo. Yeah. We'll see you tonight. That was. Good promo.

Madden Money 6 p.m. It's awesome. Dylan says, can I short myself? And Kramer chimes in. Some people were saying like, yeah, come on, dude. Like, he's complimenting you. And Dylan and Kramer. This is the meme.

Obviously. And I've always said that Kramer having this thing where no matter what he says, people say like, you know, they'll take the inverse. It is the best engagement hack ever for a content creator of personality. Because it just means anything you say, you get a million. impressions for people saying the opposite. Yep. And the fact is, like, Jim Kramer is, he's an entertainer.

He is incredibly, you know, fun to listen to. And we'll be, we'll be having another conversation with him in the next, in the next month or so, which I'm excited about. Let's head over to Cliffwater and Stephen Nesbitt. He brought private credit to the masses. Now the masses are fleeing. This is more context around the private credit story. Cliffwater is racing to calm envelopes. after steep withdrawals. So Stephen Nesbitt is private credit chief evangelist. His investors and

industry are having a crisis of fate. Nick says hope this still means my invite is open. We'd love to have you, Nick. Of course, Nick. Your family. Yeah, we're always back. We're positive some. As long as we keep it positive, we can say, and we keep the camera roll, smiling, and we maintain that occasionally we are back. It's not always over. very frequently we're back. Very frequently. Nick will admit that. That's true.

No, we had a great conversation with him when he came on. For more than a decade, the 72-year-old championed the hottest asset class on Wall Street. His firm, Cliffwater, went from managing no money to nearly $50 billion on the back of impressive fundraising and big gains turning Nesbitt into a billionaire. Now, many of the wealthy individuals who powered Cliff Waters rise are itching to leave as investors rethink their views on private credit. that after a handful of high profile defaults, investors are pulling so much money out of industry funds that managers are restricting withdrawals. We've talked about this many times on the show.

Shares of big firms are dropping. Few are like Cliffwater, which until recently was an investor darling, but now finds itself in the hot seat. Its top executives aren't lending specialists themselves. Instead, the firm invested alongside and sometimes in other funds, so it's a fund-to-fund strategy, a feature that is now being treated as a vulnerability. Investors asked to pull the equivalent of 14% of its biggest fund in the first quarter. Wall Street skeptics who long questioned Cliffwater's growth are now calling it a canary in the coal mine and a turduckin of problems. Terducken of problems.

That is such a weird phrase. Nesbitts ability, quality quality quality feeders will be a test of his funds and the industry's future. Are they calling it a blue owl in the coal mine? Something like that. No, I'm just joking. Of course, blue owl capped private cruxed. credit fund redemptions at 5% after steep request levels. This was the other news from this morning. I think they got something like 21% redemption request outstanding during the first quarter.

So they had to cap it at 5%. Well, you know what this guy did before he started a, what, $50 billion private credit fund? He was a grave digger. I'm not kidding. Yeah, he grew up near Rochester, New York. He worked as a grave digger in high school. He spent a quarter century at Wilshire Associates consulting for pension funds on private equity and hedge funds. Nesbitt was a soft-spoken presence in a business of outsized egos, says Greg Williamson, a longtime pension fund executive. He didn't preach like others, Williamson. He spoke about his client's needs. In 2004, Nesbitt started Cliffwater. After the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, he began recommending private credit, just as banks were pulling back from lending to riskier companies, giving Blackstone Aries and

others the opportunity to make high interest rate loans. Nesbitt became a private credit advocate. Cliffwater launched an index tracking performance. The firm shared research and Nesbitt wrote two books on the topic. In 2019, he shifted to managing money, launching Cliffwater corporate lending fund, or CCLFX, with Blake and Phil Hasbrook, a then 30-year-old executive. They marketed to wealthy individuals through independent financial advisors the kind of clients Hasbrook worked with. It was built as an interval fund offering to buy back 5% of its assets each quarter from investors and provide daily updates on its value. It charged lower fees than some rivals and allowed clients to avoid the messy tax filing

requirements of traditional private funds. By February, the net assets totaled about 33 billion. Cliffwater made 375 million in fees from the fund in the first 18 months that ended in September. a 54-person crew researched and managed the portfolio of 4,100 or so underlying loans. Along the way, Cliffwater wrangled with rivals when an executive Bond Powerhouse Pimco, when an executive at Bond Powerhouse Pimco said the returns of private debt didn't compensate investors for its growing dangers. Nesb sent investors a letter saying Pimco had a failed track record of predicting market changes. After J.B. Diamond used a cockroach analogy to warn about looming default. Nespets declared there were no cockroaches in private debt.

Others criticized Cliffwater's marketing, especially when it boasted of hedge fund-like returns with minimal risk, citing industry metrics like sharp ratios and standard deviation. Critics said private loans rarely change hands, so they lack the volatility that funds face. Anyway, it goes into the traduction problem. Well, speaking of Jamie Diamond, the Axio show, Jamie Diamond, eyes post JP Morgan Media Venture. He's potentially launching a podcast. Is that what this is? Matthew Zitland, friend of the show, former guest says,

The Desire to Post is the only force in the universe that holds a candle to compound interest. It's actually true. Everyone needs a pod. People have been talking about him running for president. A lot of presidents and media people have podcasts or go on podcasts. Well, there isn't all that much news here, but Diamond said that if he were to start a media venture, it would be something different about policy. He said, I think media is critical. Media teaches everybody. Media is the great influencer. A lot of bad policy, he believes stems from people in the media doing a bad job of explaining issues. And so we talked about this yesterday or the day before in the Wall Street Journal. He has the new plan, the diamond plan for the American dream, wanting to lend to more small businesses. That seems more important than ever in the world where you have a one person, one billion dollar business. More people should have shots on goal.

If you think about the $20,000 that that gentleman was able to marshal to get the business off the ground, if you have more people that have the opportunity, that's probably a good thing. But we'll be tuning in when Jamie Diamond launches his show. Should we go over to Apple? Should we? I think it's time. They really dominated this entire week. I mean, it's spring break, which is perfect timing.

This must happen all the time. I think they probably planned it. They planned this. They planned this. They knew the 50th would be during spring break in 2026. Yeah. And so it would be a good time to, you know, really celebrate the anniversary. Yeah. We had a great, great conversation with Eddie Q yesterday. You can go listen to it on Apple Podcasts, which he created. And but there's more reflections and stories about Apple from all over the place. Ben Thompson wrote a great retrospective.

The Wall Street Journal got access to rare Apple archives that even Tim Cook hadn't seen before. It's very cool because, and you think about it, it's like, that's crazy. He's the CEO, should know all the archives. But then you think about, like, how busy his day is. And he probably doesn't have that much time to just, like, go reminisce. Obsess over every small decision or prototype. Yeah. There's, like, so much work to be done.

He doesn't have that much time to go look at, like, the original patent for the Apple II or whatever he, you know, is in that archive. So the Wall Street Journal took the, took the viewers through that in a video. So we have a big read from the Financial Times here. That's very interesting. Talking about the roots of a tech revolution. So Winston Churchill called it, quote, the most daring and courageous act of the entire war. On August 30th, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed in Atsugi, southwest of Tokyo.

He wore aviator sunglasses, a corncob pipe dangled from his lips, and he was unarmed. A man of war was arrived. to make peace. Over the next six years of allied occupation, MacArthur would demilitarize Japan and franchise women. And by the way, you know, you guys know AGI will be very close when Tyler is smoking a corncob pipe itself because AGI, of course, should be able to one-shot, you know, any sort of lung issues that might come from using a corncob pipe. So in my, some people skip sunscreen, other people, you know, indulge. In 20, 2012, I lived in a hacker house in Sunnyvale, and the best engineer, I still, one of the best

engineers I've met in my entire life, the best engineer in the house was completely straight edge, would not drink or use caffeine or anything, but he would smoke a literal pipe. It was a very odd thing, and he just, I'm not good. That's so Lindy. I don't know. He was like, yeah, I just enjoy this. I would actually expect it to make a comeback, right? People are, you know, a little nostalgic, right?

It's clear that vapes are maybe not something that people should be using, but the corn cob pipe, who knows? There's a chance. Tyler, what do you think about corncob pipes? Yeah, I mean, super lindy. I think I'm... You're in? Yeah, I think we're probably like one or two models away, and then start ripping pipe.

I'm into it. I'm into it. So over the next six years, He enfranchised women oversaw the writing of a new constitution and a decree of democracy. But first, he faced a more prosaic problem. Japan's communication industry was in such shambles that he could barely issue commands. This is MacArthur. Solving this challenge turned out to have enormous consequences, not only reshaping Japan in the 1940s,

but upending global manufacturing in the 1980s and by the 2000s, revolutionizing the way of products. And the chat says Gandalf, Max. Thank you. Revolutionizing the way products would be built at Apple, a company that did not exist at the time. So Apple, which turns 50 years old on Wednesday, is arguably the world's most iconic company. It is also notoriously opaque and secretive in virtually all accounts of how Steve Jobs transformed Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997, which we talked about yesterday with that EQ, to the world's most valuable company by his death in 2011. product, vision, and design all get the credit. But what actually makes a $1,200 iPhone possible at global scale with vanishingly few defects is a manufacturing philosophy that traces back

not to Silicon Valley or Southern China, but to war devastated Japan. And it took all my energy yesterday to not use the 20 minutes we had with that EQ for kind of like a tech support session. I'm having this issue where you seem to be having like particularly weird iPhone issues right now. I think I need to like return the iPhone? I think you are having some weird issue because there are weird UX UI issues that you can learn and adapt and change it. I would say that they are skill issues. Like if you can't use the camera roll effectively by now, you are needing to like, you're lost. Yeah, you should just throw off some search problems and figure out. My issue, I don't know if any, anyone in the chat has experienced this, but when I open the messages app or the phone app,

I just get a blank white screen and then the app crashes. Like a bunch of. of times. You have something weird. And then I just, it doesn't matter what I do. I can do a hard reset or anything like that. I wonder if we were pushing it to the limit too hard yesterday. Because we were on a FaceTime call together and then also watching the Artemis 2 launch on YouTube. And then I was, I was watching it on my phone and I was streaming Geordie my screen via shareplay. And I think that might have, the phone was really hot. I can tell you that much. I don't know. Anyway, by and large, the products are flawless. And I have enjoyed my. Apple journey the whole way. So in the decades after the Second World War, Japan's economy grew

rapidly. This is a story of how ideas travel across oceans and factory floors and sometimes through a single person changing jobs. It is a story about how America invented a manufacturing philosophy, exported it to Japan, forgot it, relearned fragments of it through a handful of companies, and then re-exported the whole synthesis to Asia. The story leads us to the present moment with the U.S. spending vast sums to bring it all back, Southern India investing to be the next global tech hub and China fighting to hold on to its manufacturing dominance. It is above all a story underscoring that what Apple started to build in Senjin, China, a quarter century ago, is not merely an assembly line. It is the end point of a multi-decade chain of civilizational knowledge

transfer, a feat of enormous complexity that cannot be replicated with tax breaks or ribbon-cutting in Texas. Tax breaks aren't going to be enough. You need civilizational knowledge transfer. The whole chain begins with the question. In occupied Tokyo, a 33-year-old engineer named Homer Sarasone stood before a group of Japanese executives and asked, why does any company exist? Power Sol. When the telegram arrived from General MacArthur, Sarasone initially thought it was a prank. A physicist by training, the paratrooper returned radar engineer was working on a transcontinental microwave relay system. This is Tyler. The physicist by training.

The podcaster slash vibe coder. That's true. He dismissed it only realizing his air when an indignant colonel called him back a few weeks later. Then he was dutifully off to Tokyo for what was supposed to be a nine-month stint. Sarasone's mission was to reestablish and rehabilitate the communications industry. But he found there was nobody to work with. American bombers had devastated industry

and MacArthur had abolished the Zibatsu, the powerful pre-war corporate cartels. We had to start from scratch, he recounted in 1988. When we looked around, not only did we see no facilities, but we could find no managers. We had to find lower level people, second level managers. And I said, as of today, you're going to start up this new company and you're going to run it.

The quality of manufacturing in Japan was shoddy even before the war, but as Sarasone began learning the language and immersing himself in Japanese culture, he realized the root of the problem was not technical, it was managerial. When he asked a group of employees how they might improve quality, they murmured among themselves about what an answer would please him rather than answering directly. Sort of the opposite of like the Elon walking the floor and like, I'd want to get to first principles. They're literally like, what do you think he wants to hear? When will this plant be online? I think he's expecting it in June. Tell him June. Why?

Yeah, this is not good. Everyone understands this now, but that was not the case in Japan in the 40s and 50s, I suppose. They had been taught to be deferential, he concluded, to not to question authority. So Saracone set out to teach them a philosophy of management. Despite initial opposition from MacArthur, the need for economic stabilization meant that Sarasone got his wish. He and another engineer, Charles Prutzman, went off to an Osaka hotel for a month to write a textbook on industrial management. They designed a rigorous eight-week course and made it compulsory for top managers. The seminar began on the importance of quality as, quote, a guiding state of mind, a devotion and dedication.

After asking, why does any company exist? Sarasone encouraged his disciples to draft a mission statement by invoking a motto from a shipyard in Newport, Rhode Island. We shall build good ships here at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships. That's a good line. That's a good line. Manufacturing, he taught, had to be considered a total system. It's disparate parts orchestrated with such repetitive precision. that defects could approach zero.

He inculcated his students, in his students, a sense that quality was foundational to the whole enterprise, empowering workers close to production and telling managers they needed to understand the details. Quality control is not a band-aid, Sarasone later recounted, to be effective as a control. The total process to which it is applied must be well designed to begin with. So when Sarasone left Japan in 1950, he recommended his successor, the academic W. Edward Edmonds Deming, an advocate of statistical process controls.

Let's give it up for statistical process. Let's also give it up for using the first initial of your first name and then your middle name. That's sort of a lost art. You don't meet a lot of people that introduce themselves that way, but Jay Alexander Coogan,

I think that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll rip that at some point. That sounds very regal. Yeah, that sounds good. What would you be type? That'd be Jay Tyler Cosgrove. That's good. Yeah, because Tyler's the middle name.

So Jay Tyler, that's good. Okay. Well, J.W. Edwards, Deming, would prove so influential that the union of Japanese scientists and engineers. And it says, sometimes I get emotional about manufacturing. It's true. Yeah. That says they're good ships, sir. The ship's quote is so, is so good.

I'm sure it's already been printed and hung on many of the new, you know, new. defense tech and American manufacturing companies, but it is a good reminder to always build what is of high quality and aim for profit. Justin says chat is on fire today, of course. It's great. It's great to see all of you. Someone asked, how are we going to celebrate? I think we're going to have lunch with the team later.

I'm excited about that. Yeah. We're excited for that. But I think the funny thing is just really, our. Our lives aren't changing. It's business as usual. Chop wood. We're going to go hang out with our families.

And I'm already excited for next week. We do have a holiday tomorrow. It's good Friday. So the New York Stock Exchange is closed. The market is closed. And so we will not be streaming tomorrow. But we will be back on Monday. But just so you're aware, don't be shocked.

Oh, like this opening idea happened. And then they stop streaming. That's not what's going on. This has been on the calendar for a long time. We haven't been booking guests for months because we know that this is a holiday coming up, which we are very excited about. And everyone will be enjoying the long weekend. So, Sarasone recommended the work to of Joseph Duran, a consultant who during the war had managed a program shipping war materials to Allied nations. John's work in Japan would go on to earn him the highest honor from Emperor, Emperor Hirohito.

We don't have a ton of time. Yeah. I want to tie this into Apple. Yeah, let's just go on this insane tangent. We used to do crazy long reads where we'd spend like two hours on one New Yorker article. And then, of course, the show got much more complex. We talked about a lot more topics. But I like going through a long read.

But of course, you can pick this up in the Financial Times, which you should go and subscribe to. Alex asks, how long did the acquisition take from start to finish? I don't remember I have the exact number of days. but it was incredibly, incredibly quick. Incredibly quick. And, you know, part of what enabled that was we had been having people from OpenAI on the show, having interactions with them. We had spent 100 hours talking about Open AI.

I didn't have, like, you know, we didn't have a lot of questions. Yeah. And, you know, just given how much time we've spent. And so that enabled the quick process. Also, you know, your long history. with Sam. Yeah, just like you gave you guys, like years before. Yeah, in this case, 13 years before. That's crazy.

Okay. Where, where do we go to close this? It was the early 1990s. We're flashing forward. And Jobs was a half a decade into leading next, the startup that he had founded after being ousted from Apple. Next first product, a cube-staped worst station from costing $6,500 had already been a much-hyped flop. The team's goal had been to make a computer their friends could afford by the time it shipped, the joke goes. The only friends that could afford

to buy it were steves. Japanese quality ideas had been all the rage for a decade. The superiority of Japanese production had become clear, had become clear in March 1980 when Richard W. Anderson, a Hewlett-Packard executive, famously discovered that the best Japanese memory chips performed 1,000% better than their American equivalents at initial inspection, and 50% better over time. The so-called Anderson bombshell made HP start to obsess over quality. It's Japanese joint venture. Hewlett Packard, Yokugawa, won the Deming Prize in 1982 and became the foundation for rigorous standards applied across the whole company. HP aspired to improve quality tenfold within a decade.

And when that looked to be failing, it adopted a Japanese step-by-step approach to quality known as plan. Do check act. Let's see where else. Jobs was clearly taken by the ideas of quality Silicon Valley was beginning to import from Japan. Having set out to build a computer company that would create better products, he commissioned an automated factory in Fremont, inspired by the plants of Japanese electronics manufacturer Alps Electric. Anyways, we can continue, but we have our next guest, Mark Lour, joining in just a few minutes. Let's run through some of the timeline posts.

Yeah, this was cool. Taylor, Taylor Johnson said nothing gets me hyped like a re-accelerating top line. This is the definition of my eye company, right? Sharing, sharing, or just a founder mode company. Yeah. But really both, you can see this is data from Sakra. Yeah. So funny, people calling me right now. I know, I know.

If you have called me, if you have sent me a text message. are live. I'm sorry. I will get back to you after the show. Feeling the love. But anyways, incredible chart here. You can see Platt had ended. In 2023, they went from 308 to 390 million of ARR and then jumped up to over half a billion in 2025.

So Zach and the team are on an absolute tear. You know who else is an absolute tear? Taylor Lorenz, apparently she spends 17 hours a day. in screen time. I guess that means phone, but maybe phone and computer. She has to spend a lot of time because she's defending big technology. Exactly. There's some incredible quotes in the story. I think she said if she could put the screen in her brain, she would. That's wild. That's very unexpected. I mean, she's got to get set up with the neuralink team. Get me a true timeline merchant. Yes, yes. It's exactly. Well, yeah, extremely online.

the name of her book, and she certainly lives her brand. Eliezer Yudakowski had an interesting post here. He said, today I learned that Gemini Claude and Chachipit, but not Grok, are told that today, he was referring to March 1st, April Fool's Day yesterday, is March 32nd? Because if you tell LLMs, it's April 1st, the conditional text predictions downstream become less reliable for obvious training, data set reasoning. The model's like, okay, understanding, April 1st. How do I understand? It would be very, very confusing.

I mean, we were confused all yesterday because you see so many news announcements go out and you're like, is this a joke? There is news happening. Yeah, but if you're told it's April 32nd or March 32nd, you should be more confused. You're going to be like, that's clearly wrong. Yeah, I wonder how real this.

Yeah, you would think they would just keep it March 30th or something. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I'll have to ask some people. Rune says the AI doc reminded me mostly of Coney 2012 documentary slacktivism, selling the feeling of we need to do something as a product oddly centering the filmmaker. When is the embargo lifting for the AI dock?

Because I did see it with Tyler and a bunch of other folks from the team and enjoyed it, but I would love to talk about it. I believe we're going to have the... I think it already came out. It came out. Yeah, March 27th. Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. The biggest gap between the AI doc and his, like, you know, the press tour that the creator is on now

is that he seems like he does. doesn't believe AI is real at all, I guess. He was very worried about Doom in the movie, comes away sort of like, oh, there's an optimistic scenario here. It's a very nice ending. But then he came away being like, ah, this stuff is not real, which is a very funny, like, conclusion, because he's not really asking about any of the financials or economics or business applications. He's having a much more philosophical debate and then came away with like a financial conclusion. I don't know. Is it interesting? Yeah. Google has released Gemma 4, the best overall models in the world for their respective sizes.

Demas has excited to launch Gemma 4, available in four sizes that can be fine-tuned for your specific tasks. 31 billion dens for great raw performance, 26B, MOE for low latency and effective 2B and 4B for edge device use. Happy building, excited to see what people do with it. They're available now under the Apache license in Google AI Studio. on hugging face and some other platforms. So massive launch. Very exciting. What else do we got?

There's more on the Mercor leak. Very unfortunate. Gary Tan says incredible amount of state of the art training data is now just available to China thanks to the Merckor leak. Every major lab, billions and billions of value in a major national security issue. I'm just feeling, I'm feeling. You know, the national security issue is one thing. I'm feeling really concerned for individuals that not only gave PII as part of onboarding,

but maybe now there's like live video of them tied to that PII. So it feels like there's some real deep fake risk. I'm very glad that we have Adam Myers from CrowdStrike coming on today to explain the surface area, what the trends are in cybersecurity, because things do feel like they are. ramping up significantly. Also just very odd that there's now a leak of

data that could be used to RL models. There's new open source models. There's also the leak of the cloud code harness. And so if you piece all these together, you get pretty close to the frontier. And that's something that we're certainly going to have to contend with the fact that

every time that there's a leak. You probably shrink the gap between the frontier and the open source community a few by maybe a few months or something as they catch up, even if they're doing it like sort of above board. Anyway, Lewis, he found a public company with 99% of revenue coming from one customer. You've heard of the one employee, one billion dollar company. Now we found the one customer from one billion dollar company.

I actually don't know how big this company is. But we need to figure out what company is. This is TSS Inc. The tickers TSSI. And they said, we derive a substantial majority of our revenues from a single OEM customer. Revenues from this customer comprised approximately 99, 99, and 96% of our total revenues for the year ending December 31st, 2025, 2025, 2024, and 23. So they actually had more revenue diversity in 2023.

And then the revenue concentration increased over the last two years. Although we provide services across multiple business units and divisions of this OEM and have entered into a long-term AI Rack integration agreement that includes minimum monthly payments, our overall financial performance remains highly dependent on the continuation and scope of this relationship. Well, you know, they're trading very reasonably. They're at something like a $240 million run rate as of Q4, at the market cap of like $366 million. Okay. So, yeah. It's price seems to be priced in. Yes.

Bucco says, imagine being a software company with like 250,000 customers, one billion of revenue growing 20 percent, and the market says you're worth $3.5 billion. And then rigatoni computing has generously five customers and basically no revenue is worth $4.5 billion. It's a cold world. I don't know. Yeah.

I mean, this is the reality of like working on a sci-fi technology, is that if it works, the value is really, really big. Yeah. Prepared remark says, but those five customers might go to six, so you have to get in before that. What is, what's going on with Scott Wiener's based act? Did you see this? Probably the most radical bill ever to degrade tech products. It bans Amazon Prime, stops iPhones from having FaceTime, strips, travels, shopping, local, and AI results out of Google search results.

This feels like a stunt almost. I don't know. It must be a commentary on some of else. This feels like something that's like sort of being misinterpreted almost. I don't know. We've had Adam on. We sent out an update to the chamber progress, his group. He said the BAS Act is likely the most radical proposal to regulate and direct technology product design ever advanced in California.

Legislature the bill dictates how core products must function from search results to app stores, to e-commerce, marketplaces. Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. let's bring in Mark Lour from Wonder. How are you doing, Mark? Good to meet you. Hey, how are you doing, guys? Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to be here.

Sorry, we couldn't give you much warning or our news. It's kind of a wild, wild day over here. I just saw it. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm sure we can get into M&A war stories and whatnot, whatever you want to talk about. But why don't you, since it's the first time of the show,

sort of take us back in history and give us a little background on yourself for the viewers. Yeah, sure. Start my current investment banking. And then in the late 90s did a first startup, sold it to tops, the baseball card company, then started diapers.com. Okay.

And then sold that to Amazon in 2011. Yeah. To $550 million. And then worked inside Amazon for a couple of years. It started Jet.com, which is another e-commerce site. And two years, latest sold that to Walmart for $3 billion and then became the CEO. That's why they call them the LeBron James of e-commerce.

It's on the wiki. Became the CEO of Walmart's e-commerce business and did that for about four and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm the founder and CEO of Wonder, a food tech startup. Maybe take us back to diapers.com. I'd love to know, like, how you were thinking about that business when you saw. started it was was there a thesis that sort of vertical focused e-commerce was was going to be a trend what was

the ecosystem like what was the competitive landscape where vc saying like or did you just snap up a great domain and think i got to make some money but yeah yeah yeah how much it was just organic versus the way it started i was just searching on google what search terms people were searching for a lot and uh doing it at night searching searching searching you would tell you how many times it was search and I saw, oh, so they didn't even have, so did they even have like Google trends at that point or you just had to search and they had, they would show you. There's a Lexa. I think it was called Alexa maybe or something you can type in a search term and it would tell you how many times it was searched on Google. Yeah. And diapers, I remember was 200,000 times a month. And so I went

a line and I saw the price of diapers was like $10 more expensive. And I thought, I mean, I had a baby at the time. There was a pain to go get diapers. Why aren't diapers delivered like everything else, like books and all this other stuff. And I thought, yeah, diapers.com, you know, and that was, actually, there's 1,800 diapers started because I couldn't afford the diapers.com domain. Yeah. Wait, so the 1-800, there must have been a moment where like the 1-800 was like more expensive than the dot-com though, and did it flip at some point? Oh, yeah, it was very, like, when I was there, very cheap, it was like, you know, I don't know, just tens of thousands, whereas the diapers.com was like a half a million or something. So.

What was it like building an e-commerce website back then? Like we, I mean, we just read a story about a one person or I guess two people company, two-person company that's at a billion dollars in revenue. And that feels unthinkable. But like, what was the team like, were you racking servers? Was there a cloud? We were racking servers. Okay.

We were racking servers. Yeah, it wasn't, nothing was in the cloud. It was just, you know, eventually transitioned to it. Yeah. But yeah, no, it was servers in the server closet. And yeah, we had, you know, designers, you know, designing the website and building it out. And like it was, yeah, old school. And then, I mean, how were you thinking about fulfillment, vertical integration, what you want to do, what you don't want to do early on with that journey?

I mean, we had very little capital. So everything was, you know, hand to mouth. It was, we would sell diaper online, a box of diapers online for, let's say, $40. And then we go to the wholesale club and buy it for 42 and ship it to the customer. No way. So it was like that kind of thing. So we're actually losing money on every box we sold. And then what was the integration with Amazon like at the time?

Where was Amazon as a business? Where was the vision? What was the thesis and like what you saw was going on at Amazon? Like why was it an exciting opportunity? Yeah. So, I mean, it was still early days. Amazon was actually crushing it in 2005 when we started Divers.com, but they were mass. They weren't focused.

Any one category, it wasn't a great experience. Like if you're, like me, a new parent going on to Amazon and wanting to buy, like, your stuff for your baby, you're like all over the place. It wasn't a great experience. The diapers were actually more expensive on Amazon than in the store. They just weren't getting the sort of the whole diaper thing. And saw an angle to create a specialty site. that focused just on that vertical, everything the parents want, everything they need all in one spot. And it was really working.

You know, we also were able to ship the diapers and all this stuff out of the same fulfillment center with two-day delivery, which wasn't being done on Amazon at the time in that category. Yeah. And is that more important? Is that more important in that particular category because parents need diapers for the kids? It's a more urgent. Like, it's a fast, like, you might wait. for a book or you might wait for a TV or something.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You realize I'm running out of diapers. I need them tomorrow, you know, that sort of thing. So definitely. I also think there's a lot of, you're buying a lot of different things and it's expensive to ship them from multiple warehouses, so wanting to get them all in the same box. Yeah. Like getting the wipes, the diapers, the baby formula, you know, bottles and things, like everything

in the same box because they're low margin. Yeah. And so it's too expensive to ship them separately. but we were also the first ones to bring in Kiva robotics into the warehouse. Oh, no way. Amazon ultimately bought Kiva Robotics, but we were the first ones to use robotics in the warehouse. And again, all in the name of the margins are low. We have to figure out how to automate.

We create this software that told the people in the warehouse exactly how to put everything in the box so we can get all the things in the smallest box possible. Sure. Because FedEx a lot of times would charge you for. the box size. And so we tried to like, we had 23 different box sizes. So like we were very advanced when it came to the logistics and trying to pull cost out of the system. And what, what elements of the internet boom, like what are the ways in which the internet boom feels similar to the AI boom and how does it feel different? I think it feels very,

I think it feels very similar. I mean, certainly, you know, just, there's people on both sides of the fence. This is good. This is bad. What's going to do? Like a lot of uncertainty. Yeah, we were looking back on how people, all the fears people that had about the internet are almost mirrored one to one with AI.

Like every single one kind of matches up. You know, the job displacement. Y2K. You know, Y2K, things like that. It's pretty remarkable how humans feared the internet and the exact. same way as humans fear everything you go back to when they uh trains okay yeah i don't know if you guys you know i wasn't alive when trains when trains were i was a thing they strongly advise people not to go on trains because at that speed they don't know the long-term effects it'll have on

your brain whoa and they told pregnant women do not go on a train if you're pregnant because of the same reason. Like any industrial advance that's ever taking place in history, there's always an incredible amount of fear. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. Can you tell me about the process of the idea for Jet.com?

I remember that process happening and it felt like, okay, at this point, with diapers.com, like, there's a niche, there's a landing zone. Like, it makes so much sense. It's complimentary to Amazon. Jet.com felt much more like, okay, this is like a direct competitor. Was that the correct framing?

Were you thinking about that? Were you just thinking there needed to be more options in the market that you could differentiate? What was your thought process going into launching jet.com? Yeah, I think there's just a massive market and there was no number two to Amazon. And we had an angle. You know, Amazon at the time was, you know, shipping stuff from multiple warehouses. It was very inefficient from a logistic standpoint. They were burning a lot of money.

no competition, so they could do it. And the idea was very simple. Let's empower people and teach them how to shop smarter so that they can save money. And so we built this smart car technology where when you started adding items into your basket, it would reduce the prices of the items that could be fulfilled from the same warehouse in the same box as an incentive to get people to save money because if you shipped an item from two different warehouses, you had to pay at least $5 per shipment. And if you shipped it from the same warehouse, the marginal cost of ship might be 15 cents.

And so that was the idea of teaching people how to shop smarter to save money. Yeah, what was the fundraising environment like throughout that journey? I doubt you've had a hard fundraise. At the same time, it's like, you know, you're going up against. Amazon during this time.

I mean, I tried to raise money in 2001, 2008, 15, some really tough years. I've been to it all, I've been raising money. Now for 30 years, I've done probably as many venture capital pitches as anyone. You know? Probably over a thousand pitches easily

now over the career. But the fundraising has changed in early days of diverse.com. If you were to raise a hundred million dollars, that was like a huge deal. Yeah. And then today, you know, it's raising billions, tens of billions, you know. Yeah.

It's a very different environment today. But back then, it was as much harder to get private capital. What drew you to food? We had Travis Kalanick on a few weeks ago, and we were sort of joking around. It's like you do, if you've done, food feels like the hardest possible, you know, massive opportunity, but it's like probably the hardest food tech, probably one. of the hardest categories. And so if you've mastered, you know, at scale logistics and these, you know, incredibly, you know, capital intensive things like e-commerce or ride share,

it feels like the final frontier, an incredible challenge. But what brought you, what drew you into it? I mean, first of all, I think the margins in food are just so much better than e-commerce. And I felt like, you know, it's a restaurant sector was ripe for technological disruption. And restaurants haven't changed fundamentally in 100 years. They're still capital intensive, labor heavy, difficult to scale, and they're places. And we wanted to challenge that and ask the question, what if restaurants were in place? What if restaurants were just ideas? What if you can build a restaurant and scale it across a network like software without any incremental capital or incremental labor with robotics in the back end?

And if we're able to do that, then we're able to bring, you know, make great food more accessible, we can bring restaurants to places that currently don't have access, a ton to the day that don't have access, and at price points that are really unfathomable today. That was really the sort of the thinking there. And, you know, we managed to today in 2,500 square feet have 25 unique restaurants across 20 different types of cuisines. Everything from a high-end, Bobby Flay steak to Jose Andreas to barbecue, burgers, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Middle Eastern fried chicken pizza, all in one 2,500 square foot kitchen with no gas, all electric, no open flames, with very lightly trained labor.

So it's very systematized. Yeah. And we see a future where we'll have a thousand or more unique restaurants operating out of the same 2,500 square foot kitchen. Yeah. And so... Wild. Have you read any of those, like, old stories about the automats in 19?

Have you heard of this? It's like this, it's like this restaurant, I think it was in New York, and basically there was like a wall of cubbies where the food would be prepared in the back and then you would just sort of open the cubby and take your food and there was no interaction and they were like, they were herald as like the future in sci-fi, but they never really took off in like the 50s, I guess. And I've always wondered about like how important is the the, the, the, the, the, the, the online interaction, like the delivery point, because there's been a number of attempts to make

like robotic restaurants work, but it feels like if people are going to a restaurant, they want a particular experience, but if they're ordering food online, they're okay with a different experience. I'm wondering how it's separate those are, even though we think of them as like, it's the same name, it's, you know, this pizza place in person or this piece of place on delivery. there are actually maybe much more different experiences and like and like experiences delivery like what the value prop is yeah we're I mean we're focused it's primarily delivery versus 70% of revenues delivery about 25% is pickup okay and then less than 5% is sit down so we have 10 to 20 seats sure

in the front so it's like a it looks like a high-end fast casual in the front but it's a pretty small front of house yeah but being vertically integrated so we bought the rub-ups so we own the delivery okay we own and we also own all the restaurants. So we own all the restaurants, we do the cooking, we built all the technology. And so the vertical integration, combined with a very tight delivery radius,

allows us to offer an incredible experience. Like faster, more on time, hotter food, great quality. And of course, everyone in the family could order from a different restaurant and it all gets cooked and delivered at the same time. And we can do that in ex-urban, and even rural areas

where restaurants can't typically go. And that's one of the advantages of the model. And then recently we just added drone delivery in New Jersey, and that'll be a big part of the next year's. Is it flying or road going with wheels? I'm sorry, flying. Flying.

And who did you guys partner? Did you fully verticalize? No, no. We're partnered with a couple different drone companies to do it. But we're alive. You can order from drone in New Jersey in this one location. And Texas is going to next year. What are the challenges with doing?

prepared food delivery via drone. Like I've seen some of these videos where a package will fall, you know, 10 feet out of the sky. And obviously that's not going to work if you're ordering a nice meal. No, it comes down with a tether. Yeah. It comes down with a tether and very gently puts it on the ground. But the advantage is no tips. It's more on time. You can service a bigger area. And then you could also deliver to if you're on a boat, on a lake, on a beach, a field, you could be campy. So the idea of being able to deliver it to the point as opposed to somebody's residence is really cool. And it's really at an inflection point now. I know we've been talking drones for 10 years.

But when we go to Texas next year, we fully expect half of our deliveries to be done via drunk. Wow. So just to kind of put that in perspective. We've had Keller from Zipline on a number of times. And we've been feeling the acceleration with every new interview we have. How do you? Yeah. One of the things that go for it.

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. How have you approached everything on the supply chain side? Because I imagine some of that is out of your control, but that you're heavily relying on those inputs, no matter how good your whole technology stack and processes, the food's got to arrive at each of these kitchens. That is absolute most important.

I'm glad you called that out. We have 40 culinary engineers on staff. we just hired Victoria, who's the head of global supply chain at Cisco Foods. So we have a 700 ingredient library. We source everything from a number of different purveyors. It brings it to our distribution center. And then from a distribution center every day, we replenish every location. Today we have 118 locations open.

Next year we'll have 400. So growing very fast. But the food quality is the most important. I'm assuming it would never have worked to. work with third party like food distributors like you need to control it you can have them come into the central hub

but you need to actually understand you want to have a specialist so if you have everything from pizza dough to barbecue to severe steaks to vet like everything comes from a different supplier in some cases a co-manufacturer but yeah the food quality

is most important but the 700 ingredient library is fixed all the equipment is fixed Think of that as like a data center. Once you have the data center and piping in the ground, anybody can create a restaurant using the platform and launch it across instantaneously across all locations. So at the end of this year, we're launching Wonder Create

where anybody in the world with just an AI prompt can create their own restaurant and launch it across all Wonder locations for $10 a month. So we think it's going to fundamentally change how people think about restaurant creation. So yeah, walk, walk me through this. I come in, I want to prompt, I start prompting or even just typing out what I want to make. And then your guys are based using robotics.

You can just make it on the fly. Like what is the lead time? Can you actually like open up the floodgates here? Like how limited will be? In December, yeah, in December, you'll be able to go to one to create homepage and say, create me a fast casual Mexican concept for Gen Z. And that's it. Hit create.

Then AI will brand your restaurant, name it, give you a couple options, do all the images, do all the recipes, write the descriptions, price everything, do all the health information, create your entire restaurant in under a minute. You can decide to publish it in all wonder locations for $10 a month instantaneously. And now you're live to potentially 20 million people next year. You can push it on DoorDage. Uber and Grubbub if you want as well. And you own the restaurant.

You price it, you own it. It's live. And if you're an influence, so you have... So are you doing a rev share back with the creator? Or how does that work? Yeah, you just basically, the creator would pay us for food and pay us for robotic time. So we would plug in, let's see you created a fast casual Mexican concept. It would plug into our infinite bowl machine.

That would we acquire some sweet cream. The infinite bowl machine would make your bowl according to your recipe. And then we would actually print your packaging on demand to match your logo. So you're fully in business. You don't need to do anything. You can be live in a matter of minutes with your new restaurant. And then we're next year launching an automated sauce machine, the infinite sauce machine, which has 130 raw ingredients and can make 80% of all sauce recipes on the internet on demand 500 sauces an hour.

So you can also create your own sauce recipe, your own dressing, your own. your own whatever sauce you want on these on these balls that are made from the infinite ball machine so that's that's that sort of all it's all going to launch at the end of this year ibn i mean like you're you're describing a very a very broad vision for the type of food that can be delivered and made uh walk me through the like the level of robotic automation because you walk into a place that toast bagels and they have a machine it's sort of robotic that will like move the bagels down and toast it or the pizza goes through the oven. And then you, and then we see pitches all the time from humanoid robotics companies where

it's operating a toaster that's not automated at all, but the, but the robot is moving and it's fully humanoid. What is actually useful? Where are we in the deployment of this? What, like, what robotic form factors are actually moving the needle and driving value? No, so where we are today, we have conveyors in every location. We have, again, no open flames, all. electric cooking platform.

Sure. When the item gets on to the conveyor, goes down to the Expo area, it gets auto scanned, no human, robotic arm, picks it off and puts it into the right bagging lane. So, like, that is the extent of the robotics

today, but the robotic machine, the infinite bowl machine we bought from sweet green is live and 32 sweet greens. It makes all the salads and all the bowls without any human intervention. The only thing you have to do is put the ingredients in the machine, but the bowl is beautifully made.

It turns the bowl, neatly puts the ingredients in the bowl, and there's no human labor. You're pulling out 25 points of labor on making those bowls. And the bowl machine can do 500 bowls an hour. It can do 13 million in revenue in 300 square feet. Incredible piece of machinery. This great team from Spice Robotics, they've 34 MIT engineers up in Boston, are now working for us. And they're building the sauce machine. The sauce machine will go live.

early next year and working on an infinite beverage machine that could make basically any drink you know in a coffee shop or a cold brew concept all the foaming layering blending that machine will also go live next year so we're layering on the automation and then in the middle of next year we're launching an automatic retrieval system where all it has a cold storage of frozen and ambient and everything's stored in there and so if you order wing It'll robotically pick the wings and send them to the friar. And then the person just puts him in the friar. In the future, the friating will be automated.

But that's kind of like where we are today and where we're going next year. But we envision in the not too distant future, being able to generate 20 million of revenue at a 2,500 square feet, with only 15 people operating that 20 million in revenues. So your labor cost is a small percentage. your rent is a tiny percentage and we're able to make a 50% full wall margin, which we're going to take that extra margin and put a lot of it back into price. So we'd expect prices to come down and be deflationary over time. And it's consistent with our mission of just making great food

more accessible. Price point. Yeah, has food ever been deflationary? It just feels like it all, it forever, it just goes up and up and up. I wanted to get your thoughts on humanoid robotics, specifically in a restaurant context. I'm guessing I already know what you think, but what's your take? So we don't use any humanoid robots. So I think... I understand now.

I mean more like diffusion. Do you think that... Do you think a humanoid form factor will ever be productive in a commercial kitchen? Or are these kind of like bespoke systems like you've created going to dominate? I mean, I think definitely a short term. What we're doing is sort of like first principle thinking on this stuff.

Like the humanoid robots going into a kitchen that exists, oh, there's the friar. This is what you do. You put the fries in the basket, the basket down, the basket up, the basket over. We like to rethink and think,

why do you need to do that that way? Why can't you just create a friar that has a conveyor? And the conveyor goes through the friar and fries it along the way. So you don't need to put anything in a basket and take it out of a basket. Like that's sort of thinking. I do think there's some things that can't, be automated it would be a long time before we could ever automate it like assembling a burger or rolling a burrito. If a humanoid is able to roll a burrito or assemble a burger, we'd be very

interested in that and we would look at it. It doesn't seem like anything that's going to happen in the very short term, but I'm always open to know that anything you think is not possible today could be possible. Yeah, we were asking a humanoid founder about what we're calling Diet Coke bench. How effectively can a humanoid open open a Diet Coke. It's simple, but probably not too, not too easy. Yeah, we really didn't like this. Sorry.

Okay, good. Just my last question is, I'm wondering about your vision for the future of like restaurant brands generally because if like, will we get to a point where I can go and prompt or design a specific meal? And if I want buffalo wings, put on pizza, folded into a calzone, deep fried, like, all, as long as I'm using the tools that are within one facility, will I be able to just create something that's essentially a one-of-one meal that is to my exact specifications and actually be direct to consumer? Yes, you'll be able to create your own restaurant, your own recipes, the way you want, and go direct to consumer. So we envision a future where there are not only influences creating restaurants, but every college student can have their own cold group concept. A high school student can have their own salad or Mexican concept.

We envision in the not too distant future, there are tens of thousands of salad concepts in the U.S., tens of thousands of fast casual. And the market will be very long-tailed, very fragmented. It won't be consolidated the way it is today. It's fascinating, but you're basically taking franchising and bringing it online and franchising. way has been so successful because you're giving people a system and a proven product, but in this case, you're not asking for them to take on hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt to set up these. $10 a month.

That's all it is. It's 10 bucks a month. Well, thank you. Incredible. Are you guys, what are you hiring for right now? I mean, across the board, but we're kind of, you know, big open, a lot of open positions in robotics. in engineering. So, you know, we've got over a thousand engineers on staff, but we can't seem

to get enough. So, yeah, if you're listening, reach out. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Nice to meet you guys too. Yeah, been, uh, followed, followed your career. Yeah, same here. I was building a e-commerce company in 2012. And I was like, yeah, this guy's the LeBron James. So thank you for everything you've done for the. Yeah. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you too. We'll have to create a TVPN kitchen. Yeah, I'd love it. Goodbye. There was something that you wanted to pull up, Jordy. What should we pull up? Post here from Rat King, our friend over at the New York Times.

Yes. Tech reporter. What is he said? He wrote a profile on us. He was able to get a screenshot actually from our contract with OpenAI. And he says, interesting. As part of negotiation with OpenAI, TBPN is a commitment to editorial independence written into the contract, which states a following TBPN.

retains full control over its daily programming, editorial decisions, guest selection, and production schedule. TBPN will continue to host a broad range of voices and perspectives, which we shared earlier. Yeah, open stage to talk about whatever you're building in technology and AI. TBPN independently determines its external appearances and commentary. OpenAI will not control TVPN's planning materials or working documents. opening I will not provide direction on TBPN's editorial calendar opening I will not influence who TBPN books or what topics it covers again we just talk about so many things oftentimes we're talking about topics like on the fly there's breaking news this was incredibly important

yeah it's just more fun to have the directors be the hosts as well yeah so that we're not talking heads or just say whatever yeah people have always asked us how do you guys decide who comes on the show or decide what to talk about and And the honest truth is we, you know, it's whatever we're interested in. It's always been that way. It's super important. It's always been important because we have to sit here and talk for three hours every day. It's got to be interesting to us.

Or else it's brutal. And, yeah, OpenAI will not materially alter discontinue or rebrand TBPN. OpenAI does not have rights to TBPN host likeness. Yeah, we specifically have it set up where they can't even try. train models on TVPN. Can't train it on the chat. They can't train on anything TBPN related. I'm sure other companies train on TBPN already in one way or another.

But yeah, this was incredibly important to both teams, and I think we got it to a really good place. And thanks to Mike Isaac for covering it. Will, let's bring in our next guest, Adam Myers from CrowdStrike. He is the head of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike and the host of the adversary universe podcast. Adam, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Adversary's worst nightmare. The adversary's worst nightmare. Yeah, thanks for having me. Congrats on the acquisition, too. I was reading about that earlier. Amazing. It's awesome. Yeah. And thanks for hopping on. A crazy week. I imagine it's an extremely crazy week for you. Can you sort of level set for us? Is this a really,

really weird week generally? Yeah, it's interesting because when we had last time we had George on or maybe the time before I was talking, it's like we haven't had big AI related security breaches to date, and not everything that's happened this week has been directly tied to AI, but it feels like everything is heating up. We're seeing more of it. There's been a couple in the last two weeks of these supply chain attacks. And I think what's clear is that, especially with the use of quad code and some of the different agentic solutions that are out there, people don't know necessarily what these things are downloading, what they're loading on their systems. I know you guys have talked about like OpenCod before and things like that.

And it's just, you know, the supply chain for software has been an issue for a while. And I think it's just escalating, right? We've seen so many of these over the last week. We've seen Team PCP doing a few of these. And then this most recent one, which was a big one, tied back to North Korea. North Korea. Yeah, it's two things are happening. People aren't reading code.

They don't understand the ways in which they're actually building products. And then there's also like, you know, it feels like a hundred or a thousand times more software just being created too. And the combination of those things is what's driving this. Maybe. I've been doing a plan with it a lot. And it's, you know, you can't even see it as it's running. And it's just pulling down MPM libraries and God knows what else from Pipey and stuff like that. So it's just, you know, who knows what's out there.

And the other thing is you install these libraries one day. then they become evil overnight. And you have to go back and review everything that you're using. Yeah. Can you give us a supply chain attack 101? Some people might be familiar with solar winds. That was the last one that really broke through to the mainstream. But just how does this work?

What's the anatomy of a supply chain attack? And then we'll go into how to fight it and why they're on the rise in particular. Sure. Yeah. So generally supply chain attacks are going to impact the software supply chain. And so in solar winds, I actually worked that one. So I can tell you that one was pretty special because they got into the CICD environment,

and were able to actually affect the building of the software so that it was done in a way that nobody really could tell that that had happened. What we're seeing in these new supply chain attacks is that they're targeting the developers themselves, many of whom probably listen to this show. And so it's important to pay attention. That they go after your credentials, they fish you, they get access to your, logins to things like MPM and Pipey and then abuse that. And there's a number of ways they can do this with Git tags where they can actually, you know, hide the code and then redirect Git to a Git tag.

But effectively what happens, you know, for the layman is that you have software that is dependent on by enterprise applications, by open source stacks. And their, you know, Axios was downloaded something like, hundred thousand times per week, right? So that gives you a sense that these things are being used extremely frequently. And, you know, people don't look at them. They don't analyze that code. They don't analyze that library. They trust it came from MPM. It must be good. The communities looked at it. But those things can be updated at a moment's notice. And you don't know what that latest update is unless you review the code yourself. Yeah. Okay. So on reviewing the code yourself,

we were debating this. The two sides that we were kicking around was maybe the reaction to this is that, sure, we're not going to write as much code going forward. We know that the models are good at writing code, but there will be a lot more code reading that goes on. And people will just demand that if you're hired as a software engineer, that you read every line, you work through the dependencies, you are in charge of the code that you ship,

regardless of whether or not it was generated by an LLM or not. The other side of it was sort of like maybe the answer to, you know, bad code, bad AI code is more good AI code and that we will be doing more AI code reviews and that we can actually throw more AI at this problem. I imagine the solution somewhere in the middle, but how are you wrestling with those two paths forward? Well, I think what we're looking at is how do we secure it, absent of is somebody reviewing the code or not. And so there's things that you can look for at the end point, at the security fabric, right? We kind of see ourselves as the operating system of security at CrowdStrike. So being able to see that, you know, the AI agent is writing code and it loads the library. And inside that library, you know, use this Axios example.

There's a chunk of it that's base 64 encoded. And it's being, you know, decoded and instantiated. That's suspicious behavior, right? Just if I say that out loud, I'm like, hey, you guys are going to pull out a bunch of base 64 code. then decode it and run it. Yeah. You'd be like, no, we're not. So, you know, I think those things that we can see at the end point at the build time,

we can actually look for that and say, okay, this is suspicious behavior. Let's flag this and pay attention to what's happening with this particular thing. Because, you know, to your point, you could demand everybody read all the AI slop that they're generating. But the reality is that even if they do that, they're not looking at all the libraries that they're using. Right. How many libraries does a standard build have? I mean, I've been vibe coding for a while and, you know, who knows what libraries, you know, you run it and that's the beauty of it, right? You run it, it spits out a bunch of stuff and then it works. Yeah. The reality is nobody's looking at those code bases until something like this happens. Yeah. What does the, what does the future of security products, crowd strike? I can just imagine a world where more people need security products for open source projects, for their personal. projects for their personal life.

If you have someone whose day job is important, but then they're vibe coding, their family calendar at home, but all of a sudden that creates a vulnerability where you can get their phone number and then, you know, Sims Woff or something. One thing that's interesting is like, people have had like relatively high trust with software for the last 10 years, right? It's like, oh, it's a Google login. And only, only this year have I started to be like, really. really question different apps and things like that that people are making because there's a

tendency if you're working in tech to like want to try the new thing. Totally. And now when something pops up, it's actually kind of a headwind for startups because I think we're probably headed into a lower trust era. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I also would point to the people that are building these libraries, right? They need, and we've seen this with Chrome plugins too and browser plugins.

you need to have MFA, you know, multi-factor authentication on all of your authentication for, you know, pushing code out to these library bases because, you know, somebody comes along, fishes the developer, convinces them to enter, you know, password for, you know, drive or some sort of cloud storage or something like that. They take those credentials and then they use that to log in and change the code base. So the developers really need to be focused on securing their own accounts and identity. and we've seen you know we released this global threat report a few weeks ago identity you know for a long time endpoint and when crowd strike i've been with crowd strike since we started back in 2011 endpoint was kind of where the bad stuff happens what a good run what advice are you giving to developers today that are you know I think everyone that my advice would not be freak out

you know, slam your computer into the table. We're going back to pen and paper. Yeah. Going back to pen and paper. But like what are the, you know, two factors, an obvious one, any other, like, any other, like, advice that somebody should basically implement immediately? Look, if everybody secured their identities, my job would be a lot easier. Right. Like, the number one thing that we've seen is identity attacks.

I mean, two years ago, we saw the voice-based fishing. So threat actors calling up the help desk and being. like, hey, this is Jordy and I can't log into my account. Sorry, Jordy, I'm just picking on you there. But hey, I can't log into my account. And they're like, all right, well, who's your supervisor? What's your work location? You answer those two questions and they reset the cred for you.

And that happens to the point hundreds of percentages of increase that we've seen that occurring from threat actors. So, you know, one of the ways to get around that from a defense perspective, multi-factor authentication. Don't use SMS, by the way, for multi-factor authentication because that's a whole other thing because I can sim swap you or I can, you know, and, you know, if you have a backup for your multi-factor authentication as your Gmail, well, I'll target your Gmail and then I'll intercept that key. So having smart secondary factors and using pass key and things like that really important. And then using different, you know, I tell this to everybody. And, you know, even if I'm talking to a

bunch of school kids, like, hey, use different passwords for everything. And I love nothing more than going into a room of people. I'm like, all raise your hand if you don't use the same password for every account. And they all raise their hands. And I'm like, look around. If your hand is up, you're a liar. Everybody does password reuse. Yeah, of course.

Give us the pitch for the podcast. Give us a summary. Tell people where to find it. Yeah, it's the adversary universe podcast. It's myself and Christian Rodriguez, who's our field CTO of the Americas. And just like you guys, we like to have a good time, just kind of back and forth banter, or bringing guests occasionally.

But we really dive into the adversaries. So in this case, with the Axios incident, we're attributing that to Stardush Chalima, which is a North Korean group. We've been tracking them since 2015. And one of the things that they... So, and then LAPSys, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly,

was connected to the light LLM attack, but do I have that correct? That was a different group. Well, yeah, that's kind of team PCP, I think, claimed credit for that. But, you know, they're actually fighting. You can watch this in some of their channels. The two groups are kind of, you know, talking. They're like, I did it.

No, I did it. They're trying. Well, I think the lapses guys, or shiny hunters was like, this is why we hack them, right? So, you know, they hacked team PCP. So there's a lot of back and forth there. But, you know, this one was North Korea who has been doing, you know, they stole last year $1.46 billion in just one attack against a cryptocurrency company. So they've been stealing cryptocurrency since 2016, you know, billions of dollars is kind of the current total.

And when they do a supply chain attack like this, they want to go after developers who are doing blockchain and kind of Dow's and stuff like that because they know that if they can get into there, then they can actually steal cryptocurrency and use that to buy things for the weapons program. Wow. Yeah, a lot more straightforward than acquiring data and then trying to auction it off. Yeah, totally. Or the Rans or the war.

If you get the coins. Well, yeah, some of those are interesting because they actually, they were deploying stealers, right, to steal credentials to then go after other targets. And there's a whole ecosystem on the underground where, you know, you could go in, you could buy creds to an organization. And if you have creds to an organization and you log in, you can go straight into their single sign-on. You can get into Microsoft SharePoint or any of their data stores, and you're off and running.

And there's really very little that organizations can do to prevent that. It's a legitimate user logging in with a legitimate credential. So it becomes very difficult for them. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Have a great weekend. Yeah, this was insightful. Talk to us. Come on more often.

Yeah, this would be great. Anytime, guys. My pleasure. Have a good to have you. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye. Our next guest is Jeremy Alleyer from Circle.

he's alive in person in the TBPN Ultradome with us. We're very excited to talk to him. Jeremy, good to see you. How are you doing? I'm good. Take us through the announcement. We were covering it over the past few days around maybe reset on where the business is today, and then we'll go into the quantum story.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, obviously we went public last year. Yeah. And, you know, as we went public, we talked. Thank you. There's a sound board person, too. Can I hit that now? And at that time, like, we were talking a lot about, like, our stablecoin network,

which is, like, rooted in USC. And, but really, you know, over the last year, we've really widened out. And so we are a broader platform company now, and we have an operating system that we've been building called ARC. And that's getting ready to, you know, go mainnet, as we say. and then we've been kind of building out abstractions around kind of payments and sort of making payments more simple and mainstream. And then just building a lot of infrastructure and tools for developers and stuff. So the platform is really broadened. But, I mean, if you look at, you know, where we are now, like USDC has become the most widely transacted digital currency in the world, bigger than anything else, basically, and has overpassed, overtaken tether in terms of transaction volume.

Interesting. And, you know, we're seeing new uptake. We're seeing new uptake from, you know, major companies now, you know, whether it's like a fintech-like ramp that just launched, like, whole treasury management with it, or it's, you know, a global bank like J.P. Morgan that's now, has used it to, like, sell digital bonds. And so it's all over the place, which is pretty cool. And then, you know, one of the things that we saw really start to pick up,

and we'll talk about, I think, hopefully today, too, is, is effectively like this explosion in people building agents. Yeah. And agents consuming services and needing ways to kind of pay for all of that. And the technology and standards to kind of do agent-to-agent economic transactions, financial transactions. And USDA's played a big role in that. And that's emerging. And to me is like one of the most interesting things happening in the agentic economy.

And yeah, yeah, USDC and our state of Congress. network is like 99% of the transactions happening now at that layer. Yeah, so how are you tracking adoption? What kinds of use cases are you expecting to be the first to really kind of go more mainstream? This is something that people have been talking about for years now and as agents have become massively more popular. It feels like now could really be the moment. But like what are you tracking most closely? Yeah, I mean, look, there are a bunch of things. I think, you know, if you think about, like, the agent stack as it's emerging, right, you're clearly seeing a lot of companies that have services, have software, have other

things, and they're basically like, okay, I need to kind of convert what I do into an agent consumable system. So I want to have an MCP server. I want to have, you know, CLI interface, right? So you're, all these kinds of things and this sort of discoverability. And then you need ways. to basically enable agents to like onboard and transact really, really quickly and not go through the kind of onboarding that you would typically deal with. And so that's where we see this first wave is basically agents consuming services that are now kind of agent ready and have been kind of structured that way. And so there's like a registry of now, you know, thousands of services that are basically becoming what's called X402 enabled, which is a key standard we're involved. with. It's a big announcement actually today about that. And so that's like the first. It's sort of like getting getting that connected. But to me, the really interesting and more

explosive kind of growth potential is really, you know, agents that are providing services to other agents themselves. And so if you think about like, I'm building an agent that's, you know, extremely good at a particular form of, let's say, medical analysis, or I'm building an agent that's extremely good at reviewing resumes or whatever that is, this sort of agent as a service, is, again, the way that people are talking about this is, like, in those models, you're basically paying for, you know, intelligence. And intelligence is going to be priced in dollars, but also as consumable tokens. And you need, at that point, like, if you look at, like, what's the cost of intelligence for X number of tokens with a given model, it could be five cents. It could be a

It could be 35 cents. It could be more. It could be something long running. It could be $100 or whatever. And so once you start having agents contracting with each other and needing that medium of exchange to settle that, that's where I see this as explosive. Because you get this compounding effective agents.

Yeah, we were talking earlier. There's a guy in the New York Times today that built $1.8 billion. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm reading around. I watch the show before I came in here. Yeah. And what's notable is, like, he's using a bunch of different intelligence providers. Yeah.

But if you're just hopping between different LMs all the time, it's not great. You're, like, copy and pasting, and it's not, like, unified. And so you would imagine that over time you get to actual aggregators, and you're like, hey, we need to tap into a different model for this. 100%. Yeah. And, you know, like, an agent marketplace and these registries of agents and this, and obviously, like, because this is all machine to machine, like, it's super. discoverable. Yeah.

And what's behind any given agent, which is just kind of consumed through, you know, some kind of underlying CLI or whatever API, right? Like, it doesn't matter what the underlying model is behind it. It's just like, there's a function I need and it's here. And so, yeah, I think it's also, you know, the kind of, you know, compensation, fees, transactions around agent-to-agent stuff is obviously has that, like huge exponential potential, I think what gets more interesting is, is when you really start to think about structured economic relationships. Like most economic relationships are not just

like, you have a thing, I'm paying you for the thing, right? It's like a labor contract. There might be a lot involved in it or a service contract. There may be many, many stipulations that are part of it. And like a trade agreement between two companies, there's like all kinds of stuff. And so you can imagine, like, more elaborate forms of contracts, and those need to be machine-written contracts, machine-enforced contracts, and machine validated and audited and kind of have dispute resolution against all of those. And, like, economic operating systems that are built on blockchain tech stacks are, like, the way that will happen. And that's more of a view of, like, what is the agentic economy? What is the economic system?

And actually these new companies that are, you know, the one person, billion dollar startups, et cetera, like all of that phenomenon, in some ways, like these are emergent corporate forms, right, that are using a lot of AI labor. But over time, like, I think even the nature of corporate forms will change and will have more digitally native corporate forms that most of the substance is, actually just software execution. And there's humans involved, and maybe the legal system will always require there's a person that's there. But I think we're going to face a lot of

very hard legal questions around, you know, sort of entity substance. Like, what is the substance of the entity? What is the entity? And, but, you know, I think a lot of this, there's a lot of material here that we have to work with to ultimately create these sort of fully digitally

native forms that are, you know, composing and interacting with contracts and economic systems. How are you guys working with companies today? The beauty of USC is anybody can kind of get the power of it by just, you know, it's permissionless, just tap in. But I know you guys have invested in companies in the past, partner with, you know, a ton of them directly. Like, power people. I'm sure you're getting, you know, insane amount of real pitches and then also, you know, people pitching you with OpenClaw and things like that. Oh, my God, yeah.

I mean, look, I think, like, so a couple things. I think within this AI space, right, we're, yeah, we're making investments, like, venture investments in different types of startups that are doing interesting things. We have builder programs, so we have, you know, with funding and stuff like that. So we have builder programs in this space. But a lot of what we're doing is just basically, like, making sure everything that we have, like all of the infrastructure for wallets, the infrastructure for money, the infrastructure for creating smart contracts, like all the stuff that goes into this, that all of that is just

consumable and discoverable by either AI development tools or by AI agents themselves and then letting things happen. But like stepping back and a little bit away from the AI-specific side of it, yeah, I mean, the range of companies now, like getting involved and plugging the end of this is really broad. And that's exciting. This is definitely kind of going into a mainstream phase. I imagine AI companies are ahead of the curve there in terms of adoption and turning on agentic payments because you go to an agent and it needs to use some resource.

That's the logical pattern versus. There was a post. I forget who put it out earlier this week. Something to the effect of people. AI people are more excited about crypto right now than crypto people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I've always thought of these as sort of highly complimentary. And even going back 13 years when we were kind of starting circle, the thing that got me really excited was this idea of programmable money that we were going to have like self-running software machines that would intermediate economic stuff on the internet. And that was the promise of the tech.

13 years ago. You couldn't do it. It wasn't possible. It didn't exist. But it was like, as an internet technologist, that was really exciting to me. I'm like, wow. Like, if you can actually have, you know, these sort of self-running software machines that are auditable and can run. Now, I didn't have a concept of generative AI. Yeah. But definitely was like, okay, programmable money that is going to be like a completely new form of utility for money that's never existed. And so that was very exciting. And so I think in many ways, like, you know, a crypto infrastructure, crypto as a tech stack is very, very purpose built for the, the agenetic world. Like, they really are hand in glove and will work very, very closely together.

And so, you know, trustless intermediation is like what happens in AI, right? You know, whether it's of data or of... Yeah, it's interesting to think about how many business transactions, like even if there's a contract, They're so trust dependent. Yes. And Stables can play a role in helping that evolve because you can say, you know, basically if, you know, you can escrow funds. Like I said, you can make it programmable. You can create contracts.

Yeah. And these can be very, very loud. Yeah, that's always been the thing. Will people, like people like to buy from people. But part of that is because you want to know, okay, who's my counterparty? Yeah. Do they have a good reputation? Do I trust that even if we have a contract, they'll fall.

it and I don't have to get into some, you know, legal. Yep. Yeah. I remember the pitch for machine to machine payments. Yes. I think it was around like Ethereum, maybe 2050. Yeah, yeah. So this was like an early thing.

Yeah, and it sort of made sense, but it was very hard to imagine writing all the code to do all that. But now it makes so much. Exactly. Yeah, it makes a sense. I'm wondering what you think holds about the current economic philosophies or the economic like rules of the road, just in business and what might be different as we move towards a world of decentralized, agentic payments. Like, I imagine network effects still hold.

I imagine that if you create value, you create the network, you can capture value through some transaction percentage and everyone will be happy in the ecosystem. How do you think about the economics? Yeah, I mean, look, I think there are a bunch of different pieces here, right? So Circle is a money issuer. We issue digital dollars. We issue digital euros. EURC is the largest digital euro stable coin.

We issue digital treasury products. We have the largest tokenized money market, basically. So we're a money issuer. And so if we can build networks that have wide utility and protocols for those monies that we issue that are super, super widely used and provide a great utility, you can permissionlessly plug in, et cetera. and we can grow that. The monetary base alone can be massive, right? So we can imagine that, you know, these kinds of digital dollars running on these networks,

there will be trillions of dollars of these, as opposed to hundreds of billions of them now. And so that itself is significant, and, you know, the economics are very significant from that. But I think, you know, ultimately, I think, you know, as the infrastructure becomes kind of, more widely utilized for real-world transactions. I mean, whatever that means, right? Yeah, we absolutely have an opportunity to participate in the velocity of those transactions and the economics around that.

But, you know, we had this philosophy when we started Circle that, you know, over the long run, that the marginal cost of storing and moving value would go to zero, and that the business model of charging fees for payments would collapse. And, you know, I think over the long run, that is still going to be true.

Actually zero or like zero point zero zero zero zero percent? So, which is so big. You're so good. Yeah, I mean, almost, yeah, I mean, actually zero to most of the consumers of it because the costs underneath it are going to be so low. It's like, like, you know, you don't get charged for your WhatsApp audio call, right? They're like, you know, we're going to deal with the B2B2. We'll make it up.

Yeah, it's too cheap to me. But like, we've, we just. announced something called Circle Nano Payments. It's a module for agents to basically be able to have a stored balance of digital dollars, of tokenized dollars, and be able to transact them to like different wallets on different blockchains. And we've gotten it to the point where we can actually have transactions priced at one one millionth of a penny per transaction. And, you know, you're like, well, who would ever need that? well, if there's like, yeah.

Well, here's an example. So yesterday we had Eddie Q on from Apple and was talking about the early days of the app store and how when you when you bought a song, they would effectively kind of open a cart and they would hope that you would buy multiple songs. Oh, yeah, I remember. They would hope you'd buy multiple songs

in a 24-hour period before they actually like process the payment because otherwise you're giving a quarter. Yeah, quarter of a cent. Yeah. And so like that right there is insane. the fact that Apple, one of the biggest consumer tech companies in the world, had to use this kind of weird workaround just to not give 25% of every transaction, taking money away from, of course, like, the creators and the record labels and Apple,

just like pure kind of rent extraction. Yeah, it's like payment systems, like, were never designed, were not designed for a machine and an AI economy. They weren't. And we even see this now where, because the cost to transact USDC on, has gone to, you know, sort of fractions of assent in general. You can do that. Like the velocity of transactions has exploded.

And you see that in the growth and the year-over-year growth. It's like tens of trillions of dollars of transactions on a monetary base of around, you know. We like trillions. Yeah. Congrats on saying the biggest number. On scale. What are you tracking right now to understand where we are in the adoption of agentic payments? Because I imagine, like, it is happening.

Yeah. It's small. It is. Is it, are you doing, like, a percentage of GDP thing? No. Percentage of your transaction base, like, just growth month over month. Like, what's the correct internal KPI? So there's, there's a couple ways to look at it.

Okay. Right now. So one is, like, there are specifically standards for agentic payments. Okay. And so we are a co-developer of the X4O, standard. Actually, the X402 Foundation just got merged into the Linux Foundation. A lot of great companies, Stripe, Coinbase, who's a pioneer in this, circle.

This has been a proposal in HTTP for like 25 years, right? It's this old thing. It's like payment request model. But now, if you look at like X402 version 2, it's like building out into a pretty rich vernacular that's needed for the needs of agentic payment. So one way to look at it is like what's X402 traffic? And like you can look at X402 traffic. You can track it.

You can look at the payloads. You can see what the transactions are. And that's in the like, it's been growing. It's in the hundreds of millions. Okay. Okay. So quite small from a starting base. But I think the, if you look at a leading indicator, which is the number of, of these, like, agents or services or endpoints that are X402 enabled has been growing very rapidly.

And we as well as like companies like Stripe and Coinbase and others are, we're basically like shipping stuff so that it's like super but simple to like have X402 in front of whatever it is you're doing. Or in front and behind. So you could be a consumer and a service provider. And so I think that like 2026, we're going to see this huge growth in that. And then the consumption models, the leaked Anthropic Code actually had all of these references to X402 in it. So, you know, it's clearly like even in foundation models becoming something that they're going like, hey, this is going to be like a. this is going to be like a common pattern.

But, you know, so that's, that's one way to look. And then the other is, like, it's hard to measure, which is, like, people are using AI to create bots, like these polymarket trading bots or these hyperliquid trading bots or, like, all kinds of stuff. And those aren't using X402. And so that's, like, other traffic, but it's AI-driven transaction volume. And so it's hard to measure. We got to talk quantum. Quantum.

Yeah. Quantum. When, I mean, I'm assuming you were aware of the risk of quantum to, you know, encryption overall. No, it didn't. So, very aware. I'm saying like aware predating starting circle, right? Because this is just a risk for overall encryption.

This has been, you know, crypto is cryptography, which is math and, you know, all this is about who can compute these, you know, keys and ciphers and all this stuff. So, of course, it's always been a background debate, always been a theoretical background debate. as we've been building up our own operating system, our own crypto-based operating system arc, we have been saying, okay, we're doing this kind of clean room from the start. It's a new infrastructure. We have a chance to do post-quantum readiness from the start.

Whereas, you know, existing networks and there's this Google paper and all that jazz and so on, like there's a migration and there's risk and all that kind of stuff. And so we basically said, okay. Yeah, just massive coordination problem. Huge coordination. problem. So we basically said, look, we have phenomenal, you know, PhD crypto people, you know, in the company. And so we made this a key priority. And so we actually just announced today our whole

post-quantum roadmap. And one of the most powerful things is that, you know, when ARC goes mainnet in the not too distant future, right, it will have post-quantum signatures there from the start. So if you're issuing assets and you're doing transactions, you can actually use post-quant methods from the start. I think will be the very first blockchain network in the world to have that there, which is key. Now, there's like multiple layers of this, and so the roadmap also details like,

okay, how do the validators on the network get themselves to be quantum resilient and resistant? So there's multiple layers that have to happen over time. the base layer, which is the most important, which is the fundamental mechanism for how you sign transactions, how transactions are published to the network, and how assets get defined. Like, that's post-quantum.

There's a lot of detail we put it out in our documentation today. But, you know, we've been thinking about it a long time, and, you know, it's sort of interesting because we were gearing up to launch this and then this Google DeepMind or whatever it was. Incredible time. Came out and we're like, okay, well, time to launch. an interesting challenge for the industry because everyone needs to get their house in order and, like, create a plan.

But then it's also, like, the entire industry needs to rally because even if you guys have your... Oh, yeah. No, it cascades across all these ecosystems. And, like, USDC runs on 32 blockchain networks, right? And so, like, you know, we are part of the whole ecosystem, obviously. And then, you know, of course, like, if... From a de novo perspective, people building new stuff, I mean, one thing to remember is, like, basically, like, crypto infrastructure, blockchains had been an early adopter phenomenon until very, very recently. And like the actual usage at a global scale in the real economy, like, you know, 98% of that's still ahead of us. So we're still very early in all this. Last question for me, how did you process the 2028 intelligence crisis, that paper, Petrini, because some of it was, you know, specular, basically making the argument,

there's a lot of kind of rent seeking in the economy. Yes. And AI can potentially make a lot of transactions a lot more efficient. That's kind of what you're betting. You're betting the company on. They had a bunch of specific stuff about stable coins and USDC and like, you know, all that. I mean, look, we are, so I read that and there's a lot of really interesting things in there and broadly like, you know, even circle itself. Yeah, the interesting criticism too is like the criticism was like, okay, this is like sci-fi. But when you look back at sci-fi throughout history, there's a lot of sci-fi that is like, like, that is like, like, like, you know, kind of come to life.

Yeah, look, I mean, the fundamentals of like, of like, completely restructuring, like, what, what transaction costs are and, and basically models where, you know, much of the work that's conducted in the real economy is work conducted by AI or by intelligences, and that that work is economically going to be measured out and metered out and executed using these new digital currency forms.

Like, I believe that very, very deep. deeply. And I don't think anyone knows how big that will be, but it's certainly, you know, again, like total processed volume, which is like this number that like the card networks and others use, like, these numbers are going to be, look so small in comparison. Sure. The unit economics are going to be very, very different. So I'm, I agree with, you know, a number of those conclusions. I'm not a hedge fund. I don't have any positions in any of these companies and all that. But like, I think, um, uh, it's, it's, you know, a number of those conclusions. I'm not a hedge fund. I don't have any

It's real and it's happening. And, yeah, we're trying to build for that future. Amazing. I'm glad we have you working on it. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you guys. To come on down to the TVPN Ultram. Thank you.

Oh, really appreciate you. Our next guest is in the waiting room, and we will bring in Justin Levine from Shepard into the TBPN Ultradome. Ketkaen kicks off our lightning round. Jeremy, how you doing? What's going on? Justin. I'm still updating the Kairon.

Congrats, big day. Thank you. It's an honor, honor to have you here on this day. Sorry we couldn't give you a heads up, but it's all good. Well, we are not here to talk about us. We're here to talk about you. Please introduce yourself in the company. Yeah, Justin Levine, co-founder, CEO of Shepherd.

We're an AI native insurance business. We focus on large-scale industries like construction and renewable energy. How are you thinking about the growth of the construction, data center industry broadly? Like, what's the headline number that you're quoting? Because I imagine you have a Tam and it's growing, but how do you actually sense make about what to expect over the next couple of years as you build the business? I mean, we're in a massive construction super cycle specific to the AI infrastructure layer.

I think this year alone, there's something like $400 billion of infrastructure spend just related to either data center assets or the energy assets that need to support those data centers, there's not enough energy on the grid, so we now have to build the energy assets next to the data centers in order to make it all operational. So, you know, from a TAM perspective, we are, we're seeing a massive inflection in terms of construction. This year alone, $80 billion of data centers were started. So $80 billion of new data centers just happened in the last 12 months. So we're just seeing a massive wave. And it's kind of ironic for us. We built Shepard on this thesis that AI was really ripe to productize this service of underwriting and doing underwriting differently.

And then ironically, a lot of these AI companies became our customers because this industry is really the driving force of construction right now. Okay. So who are all the different parties that you guys are helping insure? It's AI companies, Neo Labs, private credit funds, construction firms. Who calls you? Yeah, it's a mix of all the above. So everything from hyperscalers to the labs companies to, you know, contractors that are building obviously these assets.

Our portfolio is actually more diverse than just AI-specific companies. But so, you know, our typical business is a large-scale developer of assets that are either energy assets or healthcare assets, hospitals, things of, you know, all sorts of different, I'd say large commercial, physical assets. and then we insure the contractors as well. So a big portion of what we do is identifying the best contractors or using the best technologies out in the field and then rewarding them with innovative pricing. Yeah. So what are what are they insuring, right? Is it weather, inclement weather, fire damage?

Labor caught. There's so many different. What can you insure versus like what is just too, what could you insure, but it's just too hard to price? You have to go too high to make it feasible. There's a lot of different hazards, obviously, like, related to the construction cycle. So there's obviously, like, the, just the cost of the building during the construction phase. So the property risk that is associated with, you know, again, a large data center campus might be $20 billion of both construction material as well as equipment that's being installed. So there's an enormous property component and just ensuring the actual property during the construction phase is a,

huge strain on the insurance ecosystem. Then there's a liability perspective. So, you know, the builders that are creating these assets are, they are on the hook for mistakes, for defects, for potential injuries to people or buildings and other assets that are around these job sites. So depending on sort of like the product offering, you're obviously focused on a specific hazard. We really focus on like the driving hazard. casualty is our key, our key product offering.

And again, that's going to be like property damage or bodily injury to people in and around the building of these large-scale assets. But then we also do property. So we also do the materials and the cost of construction while it's being built. What are your relationships like on the actual insurance side? Who are you actually? Who's putting up all of the capital and taking on the risk? Yeah, so we partner with large-scale insurance balance sheets, almost similar to like a neo-bank that's going to have, you know, sort of a traditional bank behind it, you know, providing all the financial stability and rating and the necessary requirements to fulfill whatever the contractual risk that is there between a lender and a builder.

So we kind of, we stand up under what's called an MGA model, which is that Shepard really owns all of the upfront marketing, sales, underwriting, policy services. everything from a submission coming in the door, the underwriting that happens, the making the decision-making around what risks we want to ensure and then ultimately servicing those accounts once they become policyholders underneath our brand. Take us through the raise. We got a gone. $42 million rounds. Woo! Boom it. And yeah, what is special about this, like the actual investors on this round?

Yeah, so this is our series B. It was led by one of the largest insurance companies in the world. So Intact Private Capital led the round. That's the venture arm of intact insurance. Intax is a $30 billion global insurer. I would say what's special about it is the signal. I think a lot of the things that we're trying to do differently, specific to the automation of underwriting,

making underwriting significantly faster and more efficient. A large insurer, a large commercial insurer, like Intact pairing, us and partnering on this. I think signals that they see that the world of underwriting is about to change dramatically, just like other large industries, whether it's legal or accounting or all these other areas where we've seen a huge impact from AI. And brokerage and underwriting are kind of right in that wheelhouse of where services, businesses

can change dramatically. So Intact had partnered with us at the A. They were a capacity provider for us. So they are one of those balance sheets that sits behind us. They've seen what we've been doing. They see the innovation that we're bringing in the industry. And so they actually preempted the round and double down into the beat. Last question for me.

How human is the process of underwriting? Because I feel like you could probably build a model, square footage, what are the assets? Where is it? You probably have underwriting models. But there's probably still, like, who are you hiring? How will the human capital side of the business scale? Yeah, totally. So, you know, commercial insurance, you know, differently from personal lines is definitely more complex.

It's more data heavy, more intensive. And there's a lot more sort of nuance and decision making that happens at the underwriter level. So we actually, we equate what we're doing on the underwriting side to a little bit of a similar view of the self-driving kind of autonomous vehicles type of roadmap. So we've mapped our own level one through level five. And the idea is like today most commercial insurance companies have underwriters with two hands on the wheel and they're literally doing every single thing. What we're trying to do is get to a place where the underwriter at Shepard is much more of an orchestrator. They are managing a portfolio of 200 accounts rather than just 20 or 15 on a monthly basis. And so underwriters do play a significant role.

We hire underwriters who think of themselves as entrepreneurs who want to build a portfolio. they want to orchestrate and manage that portfolio. What they don't want to do is data entry and some of the, I'd say, like, process heavy and high friction elements of traditional insurance underwriting today. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations on the round and good length. Thank you guys. We'll talk to you soon.

Ripping. Have a good one. Congrats. Congrats. See you guys. Talk soon. Our next guest is Grav Mishra from Mirage, formerly Captions Apples. I found out about the company through at Randall.

to the previous round. We'll bring in Garav to the TPVen Ultradome. Girov, how you doing? What's happening? Good. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, it's been a small, almost a year. Crazy. Yeah, you were, how, you must have been in the first, how many guests? I'm a huge user of this app. I love this app. I've used it for every name that I send you. Every time there's a video with captions over it,

I'm always downloading on my phone, screen recording, putting it in captions. And then I'll even use it to transcribe. videos. John, John is a magician. Like, he can make, he can make basically feature length memes that usually just get sent to, to the team chat. Yeah. But yeah, for those who don't know, the apps, but also just where the business is broadly and where you're expanding to, sort of give us the lay of land. Yeah. So, I mean, as you mentioned, you know, we transitioned our name, so we kind of went from captions to Mirage. But, you know, the app remains to be captions.

because of the company that we renamed quickly. And part of that is like we're building out of product suite. So, you know, it makes sense to sort of have a different company name for that. Now, we obviously, we raised about $75 million. Recently, we announced that, which is exciting. Thank you. Thank you. I love it.

Love that. And so, you know, with that funding, a lot of what we're going to to do is expansion, you know, market expansion. So, you know, we are very excited about the magic moment the product already has. And you talked about it a little bit, right? And when we can bring the product in front of a new customer, they're very likely to convert, very likely to pay, and very likely to retain. And that's kind of what our investors saw. That's kind of why this new investment came in. Now, we want to bring this to as many people as possible around the world as quickly as possible. You know, historically, we've been sort of marketing in like five to seven countries.

That's kind of where we've been, U.S.-centric, like a little bit of Europe and stuff. But now we want to go really broad, you know, especially Asia as a big focus region. So that's kind of the plan of where we're going. How do you think about just feature requests and all, like the scope of what you can do with video plus AI? I don't want to narrow you down to mobile, but like I think you've executed very well on mobile. But there's so many different features. And a lot of them get broken up into different models, different APIs. I feel like there's so much opportunity to bring all that together.

At the same time, you're going up against meta and edits and Capcut and Divide Dance. There are some big players, but there's also a lot of opportunity. So how do you see the landscape of things that you can do? I'll scroll reels all the time and see some crazy edit and be like, I know that they jumped to Blender for that, or they used a particular AI model for that, or they're in After Effects for that. And I want to recreate it, but I don't want to necessarily sit down.

for five hours and remember how to use Blender. I mean, you actually hit the nail on the head because this is exactly kind of what we're, the way we're thinking about how our proper roadmap goes, right? I think if you look at the AI video space, there's tons of companies, there's a lot of activity happening right now, right? But our approach is a bit different than everybody else. Like, we're not only about generating video, even though that's a big component of what we do, right?

And we use all kinds of models out there. We have our own models as well, right, for audio and video generation. but it's really about the assembly of the video into something that actually makes sense, right? A narrative that ultimately can work for you, whether you're a small business, you're selling something, whatever it is. You can tell your story, sell your product, market yourself, or your business using our product because we can assemble the right video for you.

Now, here's the interesting part. What we've noticed is that a lot of our customers, especially the ones that are retaining for long periods of time, it's not just about fully generated video. Like that's like, it's a thing. If you're making Super Bowl commercial short, like go and generate the entire thing. Like it's going to look awesome, right? But there's actually a much, much larger market for like a mix of content. Like think about like our average customer, like they're like a plumber, right?

Or maybe an electrician or like a nail salon, right? Yeah. They want to actually show like their actual nail salon, right? What is it actually to look like as opposed to a generated nail salon of some sort, right? And they want to merge that with some generated footage, some cool shots. So like maybe, you know, a founder video like talking, you know, perfectly about whatever, whatever they want to do and put it all together into something that they can give to customers, market on their website, wherever they're putting it out there, social media.

So it's really about the connection of generated and non-generated together and then putting the narrative together. That's the intelligence layer. So like that's really our focus. How do you think about entry points into video creativity? There's something that can be sort of intimidating about an empty text box at the same time. It is like the universal interface. It's the most broad, possible UI.

When do you want a user to start with an existing video or an image versus start with a blank text box? Yeah. So I actually, so even today, over 50% of our users start with some sort of media, an image, a video, you know, a set of images, a set of videos, audio, music, all kinds of things, right? So over 50% of people start with media, which actually is like. like very different than most other. Like a lot of like pure video generators, people start with text. They start with a prompt. And ours is flipped.

It's like media first. Prompt is attached to it. Right. Now, I think the way we think that's going to evolve for us is that, you know, it's going to go more and more media first. That's the crazy part, right? Like I think people expect it to go more prompt first. But I think our angle is a little bit more media first using real footage.

You know, I actually think that, you know, there's another experience. stream here, think about like, let's say you want to make a documentary, right? You probably want like zero generated footage in a documentary, right? Like, it's like all documented reality, right? Yeah, I've been seeing that. I've been lately, like, I'll try to pull up a video on YouTube with, uh, with, with my son of like a cheetah, but I have to find videos that are older than four years because I don't want a bunch of AI cheetahs. I want the real thing. I'm trying to see like documentary footage. So you've got to find like the vintage national geographic and stuff. Wow. Yeah. Soon that's going to be lost. We may never find it again. No, we will always have the

archives. We'll be going deep into the vintage. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's real. What do you, what are the plans to scale the business over the next year or two with the new fundraising? Yeah. I mean, so a lot of it's going to be market expansion, right? We talked about that. I think secondarily it's use case expansion. Right. So like you talk about like we start. We start. it off with something really simple, adding captions to your videos. That was the first thing we ever did, right? Straightforward, but quite useful, right? And then from there, you realize that it's really about like automatically editing your

video, right? Like automatically adding edits, automatically doing stuff that people do manually normally, right? And that's kind of how we built our roadmap, right? So the future for us is expanding use cases on what can we automatically edit, right? Today it might be, okay, it's talking head videos, it's real estate videos, things like that, right? Tomorrow, it could be product launch videos, right? Tomorrow could be like all kinds of other things that we don't do today, maybe perfectly, right?

So that's kind of where things are going. And with that comes like new sets of users, you know, expanded use cases, obviously is like expanding the town of a product, right? So that's kind of where we're going both on, you know, product expansion, geo expansion, you know, that's really the focus. Well, thank you for so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon.

Great to have you back on. Let's not let it be a year. Always a great time. Yes. And by the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Have a great weekend.

Yeah, good too. You'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. All right. And without further ado, we have our last guest at the show. Philip from StarCloud, putting more and more data centers in space.

We're going to head to talk to Philip. He is, I believe, in the waiting room. We'll bring him into the TV panel, Ultra Dome, and he's ready. Google released a feature called Inbox Zero.

They say inbox zero is a thing of the past, introducing AI, inbox cut through your email clutter with smart prioritization and daily personalized briefings. Isaac says brand sending five emails a day to drive higher and hire R.I. won't work anymore. RIP email. It'll be interesting to see how this channel does. We had a friend that sent us a bunch of emails that he's been getting and they look like spam recruiter emails, but they all come from newly set up Gmail accounts and they're not quite human sounding so we can clock them, but basically he's getting like an ever-increasing

amount of poaching emails. And, you know, usually like you'll need another filter on the other side. Reputters are going to have to start going, standing outside offices and just waiting for people to leave. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have, I believe we have Philip from StarCloud in the waiting room. We got some vertical video. We'll make it work. We are going to have a quick chat about data system space how you doing what's going hey you do hey guys apologies to the vertical video we're all good it's great

we got back to back sounds okay so I can't turn this off second time on the show kick us off at the fundraising tell us what happened yeah so we just raised 170 million dollars

at a 1.1 billion dollar valuation that is a massive round so the video is vertical because the valuation is going vertical yes never That's true.

But, yeah, this works great. So, yeah, talk to us about what you'll be building with that new round. Is this hiring? Are you going to be in the R&D phase? Do you have manufacturing partners lined up? Are you going to be buying heavy equipment to make stuff? What does the next couple of years look like for you? Yeah, so we're building the third satellite.

That's very similar to, it's going to fit on the starship, has dispensive form factor. So it's this constellation we've just filed with the FCC for 88,000 satellites. And so what this allows us to do is build a manufacturing line for that. 88,000 satellites, by the way, would allow us to deploy about 20 gigawatts of compute capacity, which is only over $100 billion worth of KAP expend. So, yeah, we're ramping up. Too low, too low.

We swing in a minute. Yeah, absolutely. wild. Who, like, what kind of partners are you working with? I can imagine basically every, every chip company wants to have some exposure to what is an emerge, you know, will be an emerging category. How are you approaching that side? Yeah. Yeah, 100%. So we're working with Invidia on, we just announced and at GTC, Jensen announced it, this space Rubin ship. So it's like a slightly mass-optimized, slightly radiation tolerant and then slightly thermally optimized chip, which can be used for space inference. We've been working with them on that for a while because we've got an enormous amount of data now from

the Star Cloud 1 satellite, which has the first inviDivita H100 on board. And so we're using all of that telemetry to inform the design choices, both on the Rubin ship and also on our second and third satellite. Are you running workloads, like mini workloads on the first satellite? What is testing look like? Yeah, exactly. So we trained a model, so we trained Andre Carpathies, nano-GPT on there. Oh, yeah.

We did the first type-out inference, so we're running a version of Gemini called Gemma on the spacecraft. And then we're now also doing some more like military kind of useful workloads, which is running inference on SAR data, so synthetic aperture radar, which is basically where companies, or where satellites collect a 3D image of the world underneath them, and then they can use that to detect things like a vessel entering, you know, your territory or other things. How is it, how is the discussion going? How is the research and development going around heat dissipation?

That, that felt like the key, will it work? What are the economics? Are we, are we expecting to be like on track for some solution? Do you feel like the solutions in sight on some curve or maybe even already here? How is that going? Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, this is, I want to give you guys credit for a shift.

the eye written window on this because I think you guys were the first to do a segment where you were like, do you remember the bit where you were like, imagine before they had cameras on spacecraft and people would be like, wow, that's so crazy. From that on people were like, okay, maybe, yeah, this probably actually is

good. Yeah. But yeah, so we've been working on this radiator for two years now. It's a solve problem in the sense of the physics of it. What remains to be done is the manufacturing challenge, so making this thing cheap and light.

And also small enough to fit into that, what do you call it, like the PEZ dispenser? Exactly, the PEZ dispenser form factor. We've got a design that we've mocked up, so we fabricated it, and it's going through thermal and vacuum testing now. It's about 100 times less cost per watt of dissipation

than the International Space Station radiator, and about 10 times less mass per watts of dissipation than the ISS radiator. And the main reason is we're not doing 3D like additive manufacturing. We have a much simpler manufacturing technique, which yeah, that's kind of our core IP. Sure. And then just, I mean, can you give me like a mental picture of what I'm visualizing?

Because I feel like you can't just be a sail that just like there's no wind, so the wind doesn't expand the sail. Am I thinking about like hinges and little tiny motors to sort of like expand and unfurl? Yeah, exactly. So the deployment mechanism is what's called a pantograph. So it's like this system mechanism that, If you've ever seen, like, when you walk past the building site, you sometimes see those, like, platforms that will raise up and down.

They're lifted by this pantograph system that goes like this. It's exactly the same deployment mechanism, which, by the way, all Starlink solar is deployed using a pantograph. So what we've done is we've just added, you might have, say, 20 sections of solar panel that unfold in the Z-fold, and then we've just added five segments of radiator at the beginning, which also unfold in the Z-fold, and then they're connected with tubing.

And then we're pumping, cool, and pass the chips directly, and then out to this Z-fold five-segment radiator. Oh, interesting. You're at one GPU in space. You filed for... Five GPUs. Oh, you're five, okay.

I saw you short. So you have five, but you're going to 88,000 or something like that. What will the curve look like? Are you trying to do 50 and then 500, and then 5,000, and then 50,000? Are we going by orders of magnitude, or is it like...

Yeah. A lot of work, and then they all start flying up really fast. So we are very heavily dependent on Starship before we will be flying frequently. So we're expecting Starship to deploy the first Starlink V3 payloads either end of this year or early next year. And then from there, we're expecting 18 to 24 months before the first commercial payloads, so customers like us flying. So we're looking at end of 2028 before we're launching on Starship. But our own deployment schedule is later this year we'll be launching StarCard 2,

and that will be a 10 kilowatt spacecraft, about 100 times of power generation of the first one we flew. And that has this, the first one to have this deployable radiator will be by far the largest commercial radiator in space. And then next year we launch a very similar version of that. And then we launch on Starship this pairs dispenser. Actually, we may even launch it on Falcon 9, the first one just to test it,

which will be about 200 kilowatts. So 20 times again, the Star Cloud 2. And then we can launch 50 of those per Starship. So then you're talking about 10 megawatts of compute per starship launch. And once Starship is flying frequently, we're expecting to be launching hundreds of times per month. So that's 100 Starship launch is about a gigawatt of new capacity. So we're talking on the order of tens of gigawatts of new capacity per year being deployed at that point. Do you have any insight into how space compute might in the short term be better for a particular AI workload?

Like it's going to be better at diffusion or worse at diffusion or better. You know, we've seen some bifurcation just in the data center around A6, GROC chips, cerebrus, etc. Is there a world where we're like, oh, there's this one small use case that's going to really, really work well? And then maybe over time it'll do everything. But in the short term, we're confident about this. So at a high level, it's not going to be any training workload. And at a low level, it won't be anything that requires sub 50 millisecond latency. So there'll be a sweet spot in the middle, which in my mind,

is basically all back office business processing tasks and all co-generation tasks. You could even do voice agents for customer service or anything like that, video generation as well. But it won't be things that require extremely low latency or things that require very highly internally networked cluster like a training workload you could not do. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the round.

I'm very excited. Yeah, massive. Yeah, and you seem like you've even evolved. yourself since the last time you're on the show. I'm sure you've just, you and the whole team have been pushing it to the absolute limit. Yeah, it's, it's fantastic to see someone like call their shot and then it becomes just one domino falls after another and then it's being mentioned at GTC and Elon's talking about it and it becomes, you know, much more like science fiction fully moves towards like science fact, which is very exciting. So thank you. I appreciate that.

Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend. And we'll talk to you soon. Hopefully. Yeah, great to see you, Philip. Congrats on Open AIA. It's amazing. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Good, bye. I texted my dad, the news.

He says, congratulations. That's so exciting. Thanks for letting me now. Talk to you soon. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you, Dad. Oh, it's amazing. Well, if you've texted me or you've called me in the last three hours, there's a good chance that I might respond to you in the next couple hours because we are winding down the show. Please leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter,

TBPITIN.com. Everything is the same. We will see you on Monday. The fun week. Next week, five shows, 15 hours. Let's be honest. It'll probably be more like 17 or 18 or 19. We'll see. Who knows? The world is our oyster. And thank you for being with us along the journey. Let's get one more gong hit, John. One more gong hit. It's been an honor. Goodbye, everyone. We'll see you soon. We'll see tomorrow.