TBPN - Our Super Bowl Ad, Walmart hits $1T, Ken is Sick of Griftin | Dara Khosrowshahi, Mati Staniszewski & Andrew Reed, Gergely Orosz, Mitchell Green, Simon Hørup Eskildsen, KJ Dhaliwal, Nicolas Sharp

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com(00:17) - Our Super Bowl Ad (06:43) - Ads in AI Commercial Reactions (31:11) - Walmart hits $1T (35:05) - Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a company specializing in AI-driven voice synthesis, discusses the company's recent $500 million Series D funding round, valuing ElevenLabs at $11 billion, and highlights the rapid growth in annual recurring revenue, reaching $330 million by the end of 2025. He emphasizes the expansion of their product offerings, including advancements in voice agents and conversational models, and notes significant enterprise adoption with clients like Deutsche Telekom and Revolut. Additionally, Staniszewski introduces Andrew Reed from Sequoia as a new board member, underscoring the company's commitment to innovation and leadership in the AI voice technology sector. (50:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:06) - Gergely Orosz is a seasoned software engineer and author of "The Pragmatic Engineer" newsletter, focusing on in-depth topics for experienced professionals. In the conversation, he discusses the transformative impact of AI on software engineering, emphasizing the shift from traditional coding to AI-assisted development and the importance of adaptability in this evolving landscape. He also highlights the value of hiring interns proficient in AI tools to enhance team productivity and underscores the need for engineers to develop business acumen and product sense to remain competitive. (01:22:31) - Dara Khosrowshahi, an Iranian-American business executive born in 1969, is the CEO of Uber and previously led Expedia Group. In the conversation, he discusses Uber's strong earnings, highlighting a 22% trip growth and nearly $10 billion in free cash flow, emphasizing the company's supply-led strategy and the integration of rides and Uber Eats to enhance customer engagement. (01:48:37) - Mitchell Green, Founder and Managing Partner at Lead Edge Capital, a $5 billion growth equity firm, discusses the rapid evolution of software development through AI-driven "vibe coding," expressing skepticism about its ability to replace complex, trust-based enterprise software solutions. He highlights the undervaluation of established software companies like PayPal and Workday, emphasizing the importance of trust and reliability in their offerings. Green also touches on the dynamics of the IPO market, noting that strong companies can go public successfully even in uncertain times, and shares his personal interest in motorsports, including plans to participate in races at Le Mans and Monaco. (02:16:16) - Breaking News: Sama Responds to Anthropic Ads (02:19:50) - Simon Hørup Eskildsen is the co-founder and CEO of Turbopuffer, a company specializing in serverless vector databases. He discusses the rapid adoption of agentic coding, emphasizing the need for efficient search engines to handle vast data volumes, and highlights Turbopuffer's role in enabling companies to build their own scalable search infrastructures. Additionally, he addresses challenges in compute resource availability and the importance of honest representation in client partnerships. (02:36:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:43:17) - KJ Dhaliwal, CEO and co-founder of Lotus Health AI, discusses the company's mission to provide free, AI-powered primary care directly to consumers, addressing the shortage of primary care physicians in the U.S. He highlights the platform's ability to handle 80% of primary care needs virtually, including prescriptions and lab orders, by integrating patient health data with AI and real doctors. Dhaliwal also mentions their recent $41 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and CRV, and outlines plans for monetization through premium content and employer partnerships. (02:53:16) - Nicolas Sharp, Co-Founder and CEO of Attio, discusses the launch of "Ask Atio," a conversational AI interface designed to help users interpret and act on extensive CRM data, including calls, emails, and customer interactions. He highlights the industry's growing consensus on the potential disruption of incumbent CRM systems by AI-native solutions and emphasizes Attio's commitment to supporting diverse integrations through a robust SDK and open platform. Looking ahead, Sharp outlines plans for rapid product development, aiming to balance scaling the company with continuous innovation to meet ambitious targets. (03:00:52) - Ken Griffin Blasts White House "Favoritism" (03:06:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlOkta - https://www.okta.comKalshi - https://kalshi.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Wow, look at those flashes. Today's Wednesday, February 4, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultrium, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved both.

Easy use corporate cards, go-pay accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Ramps's doing a Super Bowl ad. We're doing a Super Bowl ad. We're ready for the Super Bowl. Ramps in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl. Just a couple days away.

This was a very fun project. Do you want to take us through the thesis and sort of what we put together with this, since I just got all the credit, but I had nothing to do with it, basically. Let me pull up the ad week. It was a very nice post from Blake Scholl over at Boom Supersonic, and he said, there's clever,

and then there's John Coogan and Jordy Hayes at TBPN, clever, behold, a master class in marketing, and I had nothing to do with it, and I get the credit. This was, of course, Dylan on our team. led the charge here. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time. We had done something similar back your party round. Yeah, we ran a billboard with a bunch of different friends, companies, customers, et cetera, did really well. And so doing this is the final stage in terms of advertising. Fun fact. Dylan also spoke this week at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Very happy to be partnered with them. But Kendra Barnett over at Ad Week covered our ad. Yes. Of course. And she says the 15-second spot isn't selling anything.

It's simply what co-hosts Jordy Hayes calls a love letter to our community. That's really what it is. TBPN is nothing without the community, the people that joined the show. We made the 15-second spot in-house. We featured a bunch of our guests. And then if you've been on the show as a guest, whether it was for five minutes or five hours, your logo made it in here. So yeah, this will be doing it a regional buy.

We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was, and we bought segments around that. So very excited for Sunday. And I said in Ad Week, it's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising. The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally, just through the content.

So why do it? And we basically did it. I said, we believe in doing things purely for fun. So we're certain. Some people screenshoted that and texted me to that. I thought that was a good quote. Let me tell you about fin.a.I. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a.i. There was another reason beyond fun. I do think it's an important opportunity to introduce the football community to technology, to business. And that's really, that's my goal with this ad. Hopefully let people know if you're watching the Super Bowl.

technology. We got to raise awareness for technology and business. Let's play the ad. Let's play the ad. Let's see. You're watching TVPN. If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed a test. It's a great question. I think it's super important and awesome. This is going to be one of a hundred bagger. You guys are the number one podcast in the world.

The gong hit. This is great. Short, sweet, and we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday. Yes. 11 labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11Labs. We have some massive news from 11Labs coming up on the show at 1130. Let's pull up the linear lineup. I will tell you that linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents, and we have a stacked show.

Andrew Reid's back on the show. Maddie from 11 Labs is coming on. We have Gerge from the pragmatic engineer coming on. Super pump for that one. from Uber's coming on. Mitchell Green, one of our close friends is coming on

to talk about all sorts of stuff going on the market and then we have an awesome lightning round lined up. So is there anything else that we should cover

about the Super Bowl or should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage because we're not the only ones running ads. Lots of tech people coming out. Wild, wild morning. Yes.

I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took the Vibe War was like effectively relegated to X. Yeah. It just felt like the same

100,000 people saying, it's so over, we're so back, it's so over, we're so back. They're taking it to the main stage, right? And it shouldn't be that surprising, right? Anytime Dario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at Open AI. But he's not taking direct shots.

Not direct shot. And this arguably is not a direct shot either. They just said ads are coming to AI. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. And anyway, so. But truthfully, like a lot of the previous anthropic advertising has been very in their own lane.

They've run a number of campaigns that have been above the crowd. We're just thinking. We're just thinking. We're your thought partner. This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry. Yeah. And we'll get into why they took this approach. Clearly, I think we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol.

And I think they probably did. They've definitely been watching some height. Yeah, let's just play all four ads. Let's play at least one of them. We got to play the height-maxing one. That one's particularly funny. But are they here in the timeline? While we pull those up, let me tell you about app-loven, profitable advertising, made easy with axon.com.

I get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business. You were saying earlier off the show, you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against that. Yes, yes. I see this as an attack on me. I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. I'm pro ads. Wait, this is not the right answer. We'll come back to this one. That's another Super Bowl ad that we'll have later in the show.

The anthropic attack on advertising, it does cross a line for me. It goes too far. And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy. Almost 10% of the American workers is somehow time to advertising. The first ad is, can I get a six-pack quickly? And this one I immediately thought, okay, definitely not just watching, clavicular, they're studying. Apparently, let's watch it. I was not expecting this to be the looks-maxing Super Bowl. Yeah.

But let's play it. Do we have it? No? Almost. While we're doing that, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Without further ado. Let's play it.

Yeah, this is, what does it say violation? Okay, it starts out by just saying violation. Yeah. Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a person? personalized workout plan? Yes.

Perfect. Let me personalize this for you. The last, slight delay. This is the whole meme on Instagram reels. People will do impressions of chat Chbettie voice mode like this. 140 pounds. Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength training.

All right, pause for a second. Like the slight delay. It is iconic. It is so good. Yeah. And clearly this was written with Chat Chabit. No. No, no.

I'm saying like, like, it's designed to sound like it sounds exactly like, got it. I'll create a personalized plan. I don't think that's actually how ChatsyPT sounds. I think, in fact, when I've watched the Instagram reels, they, they do the Chachapit impression and it's a little more, like, this is written for comedy. And so the fact that he says, what does he say, absolutely twice in a row, like that's something just built in the gym. Try step boost max.

the insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help Short King stand tall. What? Use code height maxing 10 for big discounts. Ads are coming to AI. Not to Clyde is a good ad. The height maxing thing is so crazy. So crazy to run an ad like this

and not even do a call to action. Yeah. That was probably intentional. Well, I mean, they're anti-ad It's like, you know, you're Google Claude and you land on the ad. It's so funny. It's just truly the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, irony of being anti-ad and then just spending.

How much do you think they're running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them. This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl. Someone ran the numbers, and if they did all, if they aired all four, it would be something like $80 million or something. I don't think that they're going to run all four. That seems like a lot.

Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know. $80 million seems like a lot to spend. I mean, it's a big company. They raised tens of billions. you know, it's possible, but that feels like, that feels aggressive. There's also bulk discounting. Sure, sure.

And there's, again, they could do, they could choose to do regional. And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well, NBC sells both. So we could see a rerun of these or another buy later. Yeah, Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand. Yeah. Olympics has way less. But this is clearly like a particular moment in time.

and, uh, it's insane. It's insane. I mean, it's, it's incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. Like they're entire, I think they're like trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout. Oh, sure. Sure. As the ads, the ads that are coming to chat. GBT are effectively display ads, right? Uh, everybody in the industry by now should know this. Uh, yet this, this, this campaign implies that the, the, the, the ads will influence the response and that you cannot trust it. Yeah, yeah. And so it's, it's fair game.

Yeah. But it's like, it's like dirty. Yeah. It's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little bit, it's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. And yeah, I mean, the, it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content. They're probably just going to wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things

that you're actually likely to purchase no matter what you're looking at, because that will just be what optimizes. CAC and Roaz. Yeah, I mean, at some point I affect, I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted. Yeah. Like if you search, I don't know, Urbamate. Yeah. What Yerba mater should I get?

Yeah. It might show you like what it thinks you should get. And then separately it will have like, here's also another ad. Yeah, exactly. Where you see a sponsored, you know, result and it's flagged. And there's a little ad tag or slightly different background color. And people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects, you know, ads as they roll out in Chat Chachapiti to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be.

But what's interesting is that they don't actually say opening eye. They don't say Chat Chupit. This is just what comes to the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category. Yeah. And it feels like it's a shot at you. And it's sort of a champagne problem. You know, if ChachyPT wasn't in the position that it was in, they wouldn't,

everyone wouldn't be like, oh, this is a shot at chat GPD. They'd be like, oh, this is a shot at the category because there's seven players that are all equally used. It's like, no, it's a dominant. It's a dominant app. Yeah, let's pull up the next one. How do I communicate better with my mom? They went off with this.

Great question. Improve communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. words. Build conversation from points of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity.

Perhaps a nature walk. Or if the relationship can't be fixed, find emotional connection with other older women on golden encounters. The mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with warring cougars. For anthropic. Yeah, they haven't been like a funny,

it's not classy. Yeah. Like, it's, it's It's, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it wasn't a good move. It feels, it feels appropriate for the Super Bowl. This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads. Like, if this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, okay. But yes, I agree with you. It feels like totally unexplored territory for them.

It's, yeah, it is a little, it's spicy. It's spicy. It's, yeah. All right, pull up the next one. Pull up Octa. Octa helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

Pull up. Let's the next one. Please. Deception. So, what do you think? Absolutely. That's such a fun and creative business idea. You've got something really special here.

Getting started can feel daunting. I can make a step-by-step mini business plan. Do you want me to do that? Yeah. Absolutely. Here's some steps you can take. One, research. Really get to know your audience.

Two, think of a catchy name and start your social presence early. Three, new businesses often struggle with cash flow. So try quick-pays payday loans because girl bosses need CEO money quick. Whoa. 400% APR rates may vary, possibly doubling or tripling without notice. What? Would you like to make a quick credit check? Incredibly well-played and incredibly dirty.

Yeah, yeah. Like, this, I don't know if it's worth trying to... It's the worst possible outcome in an ads world, but so easily avoidable and Open AI has been messaging. And I was trying to find... I was trying to find... And they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays. Like, they've been beating the drum on this for a long time. That clearly they will gate who is allowed to advertise what the context is, how these ads will be displayed.

There's a million ways to land. I was trying to find examples. of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from like the history of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Apple and IBM. Well, yeah, yeah, the I'm a Mac guy. Yeah, the I'm a Mac guy. And none of them were as direct or effectively as...

The 1984 ad was saying like IBM is authoritarian dictator. It's like so aggressive. But still less... It wasn't as like the timing here is a big. factor right when the ads are rolling out and just like really muddying the water. I don't know. Obviously Open AI is going to do is going to do fine. But this really makes their life a lot harder. Yeah. That one was also funny because like she's like absolutely and that's what Claude usually says. You're absolutely right. That's like a Claudeism. That's a Claudeism. Yeah,

that's not Chachapit. What is what does Chachapiti? What is what does Chachapti usually say? I don't know if there's like specific phrases exactly like that. Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like, it's not this, it's that. And I didn't hear that coming through. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. But I don't know.

Do you think these are going to be effective? Do you think, do you think we'll see? That's a question. So really bold campaign for a company that hasn't been able to consistently crack the top 25 of the iPhone app. In consumer. In consumer. And so my question is like, does this mean they're going into consumer or is this purely to piss off Open AI and make their life harder.

Yeah. Like there's a world where there's business leaders. Like is this like like somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to like trip them? That's kind of what it feels like. It does feel like viable. It feels like consumers so far gone. Yeah.

I mean, we'll see. We'll see. Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll check the app store charts and Claude will be up at the top because so many people have seen this, they thought it's funny. But it does feel like such inside baseball. Like I bet a lot of, I bet a lot of average. average AI consumers don't even know that ads are coming. But again, they're not even pushing, they're not actually trying to push downloads with this,

or they would put a call to action. Yeah, or QR code, like download the app now. Yeah. Ad free, ad free AI is here with Claude, like you download this thing. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, maybe that thing is that I don't even know. No, it's saying all this to IPO first.

I can see it being beneficial in just terms of preparation for the IPO, right? There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that aren't aware, that aren't really super aware of Claude, right? They might have heard of Anthropic. They actually aren't really aware of their different products. I just think, like, if you're, you know, an enterprise that's deploying AI APIs and LLMs, like, into your organization, and, like, you're not worried about the ads product in Chat, You're like, oh, yeah, like Open AI Codex is this quality, Gemini 3 is good for this, and Claude 4.5 is good for this, and like, my team will deploy and will look at costs and Pareto curves.

It doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like any, any CIO or CTO of a big company is going to say, like, oh, like I couldn't possibly use Open AI in a business context. Gabe says, AdFree AI is here with Claude. Ask three questions before hitting limits. Yeah, yeah. Or use ad GBT and be able to ask a bunch more. Interesting. Here's a Super Bowl ad. They should run. MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale.

With best in class embedding models and re-rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. That would just be a clean ad read. Clean ad read for this. Does this ever come back to bite them? Because the idea that you're going to offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads?

Like, it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet, even Spotify, right? Netflix. They always be over, over, look at Apple, if the Clod app does go to the top of the app store, if they do wind up eclipsing chat GPT and become the most dominant force, like, no, it is really funny if you drive a bunch of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits. Sure. They try it for a little bit. And they're like, they're not going to notice that the model might be better. They're just going to be like, I'm going back to chat. GBT. That's funny. That's funny. I want to see. I want to see, I want to see what the battle between Mac, Apple, and Windows looked like.

This is maybe back in 2006, 2009, the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC campaign. It's a 10-minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one. It's on YouTube. Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. Because they get viruses. Zunite, you okay? No, I'm not okay.

Because PCs got viruses. Max didn't. Yeah, there it goes. Oh, yeah. In fact, you better, you better stay back to this one's a doozy. That's okay, I'll be fine. No, no, do not be a hero. Last year, there are 114,000 known viruses for PCs.

PCs, not Macs. So, you just grab this one. I think I got to crash. Hey, if you feel like, that'll help. Good. Is this that far off? And I'm a PC. And I'm a PC too.

And I... What? Yeah, see, now you can run Mac OS10 or Windows on a Mac. So in a way, I'm kind of like the only computer you'll ever need. Huh. Touche. No, I don't think you're using that right. Tushé.

No, listen, so you can only say, too-shae. If you make a point that I make a counterpoint, you see? So I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet. Let's try it again. You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff. Tushay. Hello, I'm a Mac. Okay. What do you think?

I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically, or Microsoft, or Dell. It's like all, it's the whole category, but everyone knows it's really, you know, Apple versus Microchrist's. you know, Apple versus Microsoft. Talking about viruses, talking about this other stuff, these are features. I don't know. It's not that far off.

It's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy. Like, it definitely fits the Apple brand. Yeah, so Anthropics edgy. Yeah. It's also a timing thing where, again, they're actively trying to make their, and again,

I'm not saying anything of this is not fair play technically, but the gloves are, the gloves are off. Yeah. It does feel like. And there is zero, I will go out now and say, I would say there's effectively a zero percent chance that Open AI can win the Super Bowl this year. They will be running an ad. They would be insane if they didn't run an ad.

It would be a huge. That just way harder. Sam calling out Dario by name directly. It's like, Dario, you suck. Just a disc track. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, just a bunch of Sora slop. Yeah, just going quick.

Yeah, no, I think like, the other thing is opening, I really doubt can react to this now. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the right, like, if this had dropped like a couple weeks ago, they would have been able to say, hey, we need to respond to this, but they can't now. At least, at least our experience buying an ad this year, we were, the content was locked last week.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a whole process, right? They're subtitling, all the stuff. Like, they're not, you can't just switch it up. Maybe opening eye. Well, maybe they win in the sense that, like, the vast majority of audiences have the reaction that you're having, which is like, actually, I don't mind ads. And actually, this is sort of a weird ad.

And I still like ChachapD. And then Chachapiti comes out with an ad that's just like very vanilla. Like, hey, use it. We'll help you cook. We have health now. You know, we have a bunch of features. That seems helpful. Then they wind up winning.

He has the right word. What is it? He says it's propaganda. IMO. It really is. It's not, it's not, they're not being, they're, again, they're just kind of calling out the category, yeah, in general about it, but they're implying that ads are going to influence. It's fear mongering. Yeah, it's fear mongering. That, that, that the, that the, that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some slot product will. They took, like, Mark Cuban's, like, main concerns. Totally, totally.

The things that he had been, like, yeah, going on and on and on about, that everyone is like, hey, dude, you can calm down. Like, that's not. how it's going to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they just, like, went with his point of view. Yeah, yeah, which is a little out of dated. I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds,

online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And then I want to go to Tyler. Yeah, I was going to say, like, it feels like the vibe war is like really heating up, right? Like over the summer, there was talent war. Yep. It's kind of like, okay, we got your guy, but on Twitter. And it was all leaks behind the scenes. Like, Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time.

Yeah. And there was like that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying like, like, I feel like something has been stolen from us. But they were not coming out and saying, yeah. At Davos, like, Dario is like basically, yeah. He's still not saying Open AI, the words, I think. Yep. But he's saying, like, companies are doing ads. There's only one company that's doing ads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sort of like the anti, there's these, Ben Thompson has a great formulation of, like, the anti- YouTube alliance between, like, Spotify and Netflix. So, like, once one company starts pulling away in a category, all the other companies sort of have an incentive to team up. And right now it does feel like we're getting a little bit of an anti-open AI alliance, because everyone's like, well, they pulled away.

And so, like, let's gang up on them. And they did so much stuff on the supply side. They locked up all these different, all of these different supply chain partners. Like, we got to push back. We actually got to team up. And that's where you see at Davos with the buddy cop movie emerging between Dario and Demas.

We will see. Katie, the CMO of OpenAI, fired back. She says chat GPT has more free users in Texas that odd has globally. Boom. Yeah, nothing like some stats. They should run that in the Super Bowl, potentially. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads

because I want to see this General Motors robot. What happened here? This was, this was, how'd you find this? I was digging around. Is this for the worst Super Bowl ads or the best? I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen. Okay, let's play General Motors robot. They've tried to scrub this from the web,

but we're bringing it back. Let's play it. Let's see. Robot makes a mistake. General Motors. You make cars. We made catalychs. Okay, robot makes a mistake.

Leaves the factory. Gets fire. Whoever produces that is not going to do well in a singularity. You did not consider Rocco's vassalus. Oh, sign holding. Yeah. Cadillac going by. Well, now the robot's trying to,

get a new job. Okay. Robots working at McDonald's or something. Robot goes to the bridge. This is like, who approved this? Robot watches the Chevy's drive by, the General Motors cars, and jumps into the water.

And then wakes up? The GM 100,000 mile warranty. It's got everyone a GM obsessed. Like, how do you run this at? Whoa, so it's saying, like, we care so much about the 100,000 mile warranty that like we will end it all if it doesn't if we don't stand by it. I think so. I'm still crazy at. Obviously they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying like hey you're you're

effectively advertising like the darkest thing ever. No really sad like ridiculous. Well the bar has been lowered so don't worry. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of One more ad will play for you. This is a Bud Light commercial. Okay. I like Bud Light commercials. They usually deliver perfectly flawlessly.

I feel like Bud Light is very, very steady. You can always count on them for pretty solid Super Bowl entertainment. Um, my king, this corn syrup was just delivered. That's not ours. We don't brew Bud Light with corn syrup. Miller Light uses corn syrup. Let us take it to them a box. By name.

By name, okay. Because that's in the ingredient. Yeah. can say it. Yeah. Pause, pause for a second? Yeah.

So, so if Claude had named Chatchibt and done this, that could have said like, we are suing you for defamation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And potentially. Sure, sure, sure. Otherwise, you just got to go with the category broadly.

Anyway, let's keep playing. Yeah. Corn syrup's coming. We received your corn syrup by mistake. That's not our corn syrup. We received our shipment this morning. You're joking. Try the Coors Light Castle.

They also use corn syrup. Oh, see, this is still like a little bit more playful and, like, classy. It doesn't go to, like, an edgy place. It's also not misleading, because you can see on the ingredient list. Yes. You can just look up and see they have corn syrup. Yeah, yeah. Like my, my, again, it'd be very different if it was like, we're delivering your ads to the chat.

GPT castle. And it's like, oh, we already got our shipment of ads. Like, take that over to Google. Yeah, I search overviews, you know. Take it over to Grapp. They should have just done, they should have done a direct rip of that. No,

I mean, incredibly, incredibly well played by Anthropic. Yeah. So you think it'll be effective? No, I mean, I'm,

to what degree will it be effective? Well, I'm not even sure they care about it being effective. Okay, it'll be, this is effective. Like,

the fact that people are talking about it, people that right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, oh, good point from Anthropic. Yeah. Like, they're scoring points

in teapot and axe, and they're able to score some points in the real world and just make, like, senators are going to see this. Yeah. Yeah. That's wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the whole, like, senator, we sell ads thing in Facebook. Like, stealing your data, that whole thing is, like, very, like, it's still, it's still a meme. It's still a thing in the general populace, which is unfortunate because advertising is the greatest business model ever. And companies don't want your data. They want conversions. They want you to purchase. They want a black box where they can put money and then get customers.

And get money out. That's it. Like, I've run businesses that advertise many times, and I don't want to know anything about these customers. I just want to know they're ready to buy, and they're down and send them the link. Yeah, the difference went between like a butt light going after some of their competitors is that they're actual competitors. Yeah, no, no, it's a very, very pure oligopoly.

But maybe, I mean, doesn't that lend itself to, like, Anthropic is punching up because they're coming from behind? because they're smaller company. They have less market share in this particular market. It would be like, I don't know, it'd be like if the athletic brewing guys ran an ad that was defaming

all of the beer companies for all the bad things that beer can do to you. Right? Something? I don't know. Anyway. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care

of scaling monitoring. And security. Yeah, according to app figures, Claude got around a million downloads in February, which was actually down from the month prior. Interesting. So not a real player in consumer. Yeah, we'll see what happens.

I am going to be watching the app charts like a hawk. I want to know. Yeah, the entire game, while we're at the game, we're just going to be glued. We're just going to be in the batches. Probably. Anyways, I'm so excited. for all the other,

all the other tech ads in the Super Bowl. We got Mr. Beast and Salesforce. We got it. We'll have a bunch of more. That'll be good. And I'm looking forward to it. Anyway, we got to, do we,

are guests here yet? We have guests joining in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, we got to bring down the mallet from the heavens because we got to ring the gong for Walmart. They reached $1 trillion dollars in market cap as he commerce.

Booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda Cloth. Hit it. Let's understand what's going on with Walmart. They've been written off. Amazon was going to kill them, but it seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever.

Let's see. The achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13-figure valuation, Amazon, NVIDIA, meta, Microsoft, in trading Walmart stock passed $125 a share. shares close up 2.9% giving the company a market cap of 1.0.0.8 trillion. The stock has surged in recent months fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business, as well as an investment in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency. Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices,

fast delivery and broad selection. The change at Walmart over the past decade, culminating with its trillion dollar valuation, quote, has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen, said a retail analyst at Morgan Stanley, who studied Walmart since 2001. Wow, Simeon Gutman, overnight success here. 25 years studying Walmart. Walmart's growth, along with Amazon's,

creates challenges for competitors, he said. Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas-based company, will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief as longtime executive John Ferner took the helm this month. Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached $1 trillion are technology focused, even though Berkshire Hathaway is in there, and Eli Lilly is in there as well. A decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing. Rival Amazon was growing fast, and the then-new Walmart CEO, Doug McMillan,

was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores and grow online. Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was $212 billion at the end of 2016. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its long-time stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018. Retail is changing so much. I don't think I understand it as well as I need to, Buffett said during a call with the CEO about the Berkshire stock sale. He said, I don't understand the change.

What will e-commerce do to your business? Buffett offered kind words about Walmart's potential to succeed, but the snub was motivating for company executives at the time. Walmart's sales have since soared propelled by e-commerce, then the pandemic, followed by shoppers more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation. Companies' investments played a big part. Walmart made an effort to offer more items that appeal to higher-income shoppers such as trendy, small appliances and store brand foods. The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of U.S. households.

So they've like fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long time. Yeah, Yusuf in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He's a previously was over at Walmart. Thanks for leaking it to us. Sox on X says nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants, but if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's. And there's still the largest.

That was true back then. He posted this six months ago. I think he was way above this now. But it is interesting how successful. But yeah, Jim Walton, Rob, and Alice all over in the $100 billion. I mean, a lot of this, a lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand. We got to talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this?

No, let's pull up the graphic and see. Whoa. That's probably driving. Stunning and brave. That probably adds $600 billion to the market gap, right? I mean, easily, easily. They really just did a slightly bluer, slightly bluer background, and they called it a day. Well, without further ado.

Figma. Figma, make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so AlPlace will good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. And that's right. We have Mati from 11 Lives, The Man at the Hour. How are you doing? What's going on?

John, Jardy, great to see you again. You look fantastic. This cover is iconic. I mean, props to you, but also the photographer on this, like, perfect lighting. I've always been a fan of Forbes photography. It's so nice to see somebody just beaming, too, just having a good time. Usually people are on the cover acting all serious, mysterious, mysterious, you know. I like to see, I like to see.

We are having a good time at 11 laps. It's a good, good, good and happy moment building at the current age. And everything is changing with AI. We have a chance of building at the frontier of that change. But a little bit surreal to see the cover and a zoomed in pictures. So it's always a tip of the iceberg and reflection of the entire team. So great, great to see it. Yeah, it's amazing.

How did the negotiation go with this current round? I'm sure you had a sort of, your interest was, you know, coming in at 11. I'm sure that gave you, gave some leverage. Couldn't do 10.9? Yeah. This was, in this round, the valuation was known far before the round even started. With our aspirations from the early days to get that.

And of course, just surreal to be able to announce today that we've raised 500 million series D at 11 billion dollar valuation. Thank you, guys. The next leg up will be tough getting to 11. but we're, we believe. We have it all planned. It's going to be 11 squared next, $121 billion as the next proxy of valuation. But this funding is great.

We think this is what we need to get and transform how we interact with technology. Sequoia is leading the round. Andrew is joining the board. That's great. A16 is quadruping down. Iconic is tripling down. And alongside the round, also, we are releasing incredible updates to our voice agents to make them more expressive, quicker, lower latency.

so people, companies can build even better experiences and customer experience and internal enablement and sales. So we were just laughing. We were just watching some of the new Super Bowl ads from Anthropic and they intentionally put a bit of lag in there when in the model. That's your opportunity. And that's the opportunity. It's like reducing that latency to human or even superhuman.

Yeah. What has the, what's been the biggest driver of growth? Just more growth on the core products, new products. Walk me through sort of how I would visualize the growth chart that went in the lead slide of this deck. So we started in 2022. The first model was text to speech. And then we continued expanding with incredible researchers in the team

still doing speech to text with the best transcription model. 11 music, we have the highest quality music model. Productions with dubbing. But the real innovation that we brought in 2025 was agents and conversational models. So helping enterprises build that customer experience work, internal enablement. And in 2025, we got to 330 million in the ARR at the end of the year,

powered by work of Deutsche Telecom. Amazing. Boitretelecom, customer support, Square, deliverer with training riders and importing them into the ecosystem better or calling restaurants to capture what's happening with the menu, what's happening with the opening hour, all the way through to Revolut working with us

across 4 million of their users in Europe to be able to bring that level of customer care that frequently wasn't possible. And we are seeing that, I think, something that wasn't possible just a year prior. You have a real-time voice agent interactions. Jordi, you were mentioning Anthropic. We think all companies in the future

will want to optimize that latency, we'll want to optimize that reliability so they can interact with their audience, with their customers. And whether that's in customer care, whether it has devices around us. Hopefully some of the devices you have will be able to speak back to you and converse with you as the guys come in, all the way through to the future robots.

And that enterprise adoption over last year has been tremendous. We grew to $330 million, and it took us 20 months to get to first $100 million in the AR, 10 months to get to $200,000 to $200,000,000 to get to $300. So hopefully that continues and it's a good proxy of the value that we can deliver. That's incredible. Well, we have a special guest. Yeah.

We should bring them in. Let's bring in Andrew Reed from Sequoia. New board member, right? New board member alert. How you doing? What's going on? Hey, guys. Hey, good to see you.

Good seeing you. I was enjoying when you were, when you were bringing on Matti. I've realized that's very important for a Polish entrepreneur to become a one-name entrepreneur because no one wants to go for the last name. We're not brave enough to do it either. Yeah, much easier when you just to read. So talk to us about like the surface area of the business now. There was someone in the chat saying that they were just using 11 Reader last night.

Is that more of like a demo and a showcase of the product or do you see that as growing into its own sort of consumer AI application? Yeah, and first of all, great to see. you here, Andrew. Welcome to the board. Welcome to 11 Labs. After two and a half years, knowing each other is going to be a great fun after serving on the corner board together. Oh, yeah, that's right. It's great. It was the last time we saw you guys, which is great. So it's a full circle, full circle moment. But to your question, as you think about our business, we have the foundational research layer where we do everything across audio, whether it's text to speech, speech to text, whether that's the expressive narration, explicit voiceovers, the music work.

And on top of that work, we have the agents' work that we spoke about, but also the creative use cases. And really, there is a great example of that of how we can let our community create the narrations, create audiobooks, and then serve them in an easier way. You know, what's crazy is that today, Audible will block AI audiobooks. The only platform that allows you to serve their content on Audible is only the Amazon-created AI content. So we need to find an alternative for us of the community to serve that. Similarly, happily I have a partnership with Spotify to allow our users to bring that. And we have a lot of users. It's 500 million users doing that work.

There you go. Andrew, how are you processing the SaaSpocalypse, the turmoil in the markets? Is this like, hey, 11 labs needs a war chest, batting down the hatches, RIP good times? Or is this something else that's, you know, you don't really need to worry about who's getting beat up in the public markets because you're the reason why they're getting beat up. Well, I go back to what Jason, Jason Lemkin was saying. He was bringing up 11 Labs as an example last week because he said he has a lot of portfolio companies and they're like, we're AI Native, we're AI Native.

And he's like, show me the number. How are you growing? 11 Labs is AI Native and they're adding $100 million in new ARR every few months. So like that's what it looks like. That's what real pull from the market looks like. But yeah, Andrew, what do you see in the market? Yeah, I think the, you know, it was like the Scorpion and the Frog. the voting machine will be a voting machine and I think in the public markets with software

there is a lot of baby being thrown out with the bathwater and I think as far as I can tell the only prerequisite for being an AI native company is being a private company and I'll leave that there I do think what really matters is our business is accelerating as these models are getting better and are they delivering value in a way that's like differentiated and unique and we are seeing companies like 11 that are growing faster with better economics better customer references and is faster deployment than anything else we've ever seen um like i've uh going back to when i first met modi uh 2023 uh i remember what like when i first looked at 11 um it was not obvious like what kind of company this is is it uh is it a is it a a a

consumer company, is it an enterprise company, is it a foundation model lab? Is it an application company? And it turns out it was all of those things. And I think for like these truly like the true AI winners, it's a, you know, like the phrase going from strength to strength, it's like everywhere 11 has been competing, they've just been dominating. And you know, like, shame on me for not investing a zillion dollars three years ago. Fortunately, we were lucky to invest a little bit, and I got the nomadi. But, yeah, the new wave of these AI companies are just incredible. Can you both talk about a little, like, take me through more of that focus,

because you're saying, you know, 11 is a research lab and an enterprise company, and there's a consumer product, but there's still a focus on audio, still focus on voice, and we've seen, you know, a lot of the good vibes that are coming around, Anthropic is like they're focused on code. You know, we've seen this like mid-jurney focused on images and you get to this opinionated thing. Is that where you're narrowing or do you see yourself kind of expanding out on all surface areas over time? Right. And it is true. Like as we started the company, the one connected tissue from model through platform to application is audio and voice. We know that we can create the best models. We know we can serve them, build for the users, understand those use cases, and then bring them for production.

But of course, to get most of voice frequently will stretch from other sister fields to bring those integrations into default. With agents, example, you need the knowledge base to really integrate. You need telephony systems to make sure the agents interact in WhatsApp or can call the phone numbers. You need the evaluation, testing, and monitoring to really be able to understand that. So as we think about this work, voice audio is our superpower. That's the one connective tissue across all those domains. but if we can bring from other fields and elevate the entire voice experience, whether it's in voice agents, whether it's in a voice, a creative space, I will happily do that.

Where are you frustrated with slow adoption? Like where is there a lot of potential where companies are not kind of like, they haven't fully processed that the models are advanced to the level that they have, and you guys have the sort of feature set. on a personal level as a user, there's still a bunch of different media subscriptions that I have that have just like really poor, like audio functionality. It's like if you publish an article, you should immediately have like a mini podcast equivalent that I can listen to in real time.

It shouldn't be like this doesn't seem like a hard problem anymore. But I'm sure you're seeing that kind of in other categories too where you want industries to wake up and say like, hey, voice is here. You should be implementing it immediately. Yeah, I can go quick one first on things that we believe in, and Andrew is helping us push us to think about that space. The one audio will be default in all the content, stories, knowledge that's available. It will be global.

You will have all the languages, all the voices represented, and voice will be the interface of technology around us. The big opportunity to your question, is already will be in the media entertainment space that we haven't seen. On the agent's side, today, a lot of the use cases are reactive, supportive, but we'll see that proactive side where you have an AI concierge, AI assistant that can help you for the entirety of that journey.

And as we work with Andrew, we frequently think of like, what's that connective tissue between research and product, how we can combine that experience together to deliver that? Andrew, I'm curious what you think. We spoke a little bit about this, but what's the top of all your mind for the next year? Yeah.

Well, I think at a high level, it's very hard to find, like, Marcus, where voice is not taking off. and I think I'm old enough to have lived through the initial wave of like chatbot voiced agent companies in the kind of 2015 to 2019 era. And for those companies, it was, you know, enterprise vendors foisting, uh, voicing audio upon consumers and consumers, you know, asking for a real agent over and over and over again. Like that was sort of, I think, I think, talk to a human. Talk to a human. Yeah. Like, the customer research that, like, created, you know, like, voice. agents was people asking for agents over and over and over again.

I think the difference now is if you look across basically every sector, people like interfacing with technology through voice and audio. There's a lot of end-customer pull. I do think there's a big gap between what people expect the voice agents to be able to do and have to communicate with them versus what they're actually capable of. I think humans are very adaptable. And I think once everyone used chat dbt and realized, you know, what the chat bots can do,

people started interacting with text boxes on the internet very differently. I think with voice agents still, like people think they're in a phone tree and are trying to talk to it like a phone tree. When reality, it's this magical interface that overlaps all the company's capabilities. And it allows you to express yourself

and receive information back in a brand new communication style and a brand new interface. I think once people realize what these agents are capable of, my guess is the way people interact with their institutions, with their governments, with their, you know, the companies that they buy services and goods from is going to change very quickly. And I do think it's going to take, like, the leading companies in this space to show people what's possible, and the whole thing's going to flip. Very cool. And, you know, on the last one, just to add a quick example, we've seen that we work with the government of Ukraine on exactly that. And one incredible case was they are creating an effective voice agent for the citizen support where you can call and ask about the services.

And what's transpiring is that the moment you can call in and you frequently just don't know where to find information, if you can just speak through and let the agent navigate through to the right help, it just opened up so many more programs that were just not available, whether that was in the how do I travel, what's happening around the country, how do I apply for certain help, just opens up completely new. ways of you exploring that information altogether. Yeah, I'm excited about seeing some new UI patterns. Like, I feel like the walkie-talkie is potentially like a better even comp than like the phone

call because if I'm like using a product and I have a question, I don't really want to like place a phone call necessarily, even if it's instant and quick. And I know like an agent, you know, an AI agent will like pick, effectively pick up the call immediately. You can imagine like, hey, how, like where, what's the best document for like this part to understand this part of the organization. It can like pull it up. And it's like having having these kind of new UI patterns, I think will be very cool. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and chat with us. Great stuff. Guys. Looking forward to the next one.

Have a good time for having us. Congratulations for you. Congratulations to you. Thank you. Incredible. Congratulations to you to you both. Thank you. Supporting us. We appreciate it. Thank you. Just make sure that make sure the ads available in Polish too. We will. We will. Help us out. Help us out. Help us up, man. Great to see you guys. Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.

That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Let's go over to Gastown, what I wrote about in today's newsletter. And I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic. As soon as you see this, Georgia, you will understand how Gastown works. I get it. Robert says, Gastown is the modern-day Temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something that's insane. And it does have a lot of layers of abstraction.

I'll try and take you through it a little bit. Basically, my theory is like, there's a lot of excitement about this project. You might already be familiar with Gastown. But the broader category is called orchestration, how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different agents. And Steve Yeggie wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max-themed orchestrator.

He says it's a new take on the IDE. It's called Gastown. He dropped it on January 4th, first on New Year's Day. So he has been locked in. He says that he's like having trouble sleeping because he's so obsessed with this thing. He's really pushing a ton of code.

And now he's getting one call per day from VC's asking to invest, apparently. And so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience. And he maps out how this evolved. So you used to write code in a text file, save it, executed in a terminal. Then we got basic IDEs with some code completion, links to file systems,

apples, et cetera. LLM chat windows work their way into the IDE eventually with a coding agent asking you for permission to run tools, run code. Once models got better, developers trusted them more. And the IDE sort of melts away and you're basically just interacting with the agent. So Carpathie has put it, he says, your code writing skill atrophies, but your code reading skill improves because you're prompting and then you're just reading the review and you're saying, okay, yeah, this is going to do what I think it's going to do, we'll test it.

And so the most popular workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI. So Claude Code Codex, Gemini, CLI are the most popular. They all have web and desktop front ends now, but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted. And we can move on from this slide. So Gastown is like way, way more aggressive going fall into vibe coding. So Steve in his post, just all caps says, you will die if you don't know what you're doing. It's like very risky.

The code base is only weeks old. Maybe it's over a month now. It's 100% vibe coded. He's never seen the code. And it's 225,000 lines of go. Like not a very simple. Yeah, he said you should only be using it if you're already at the stage we're using 10 plus agents. That's in otherwise, like, you will not be able to use it.

Yeah, yeah. So, but, so there's tens of thousands of people using this. Some folks have dozens of accounts with the big labs because they're maxing out their subscriptions. They're like, I got the 200-month plan over here. I ran out rate limits. So I got another one. I got another one.

Some of them get flagged for fraud. Like, it is boom time in Gastown. And bills run into thousands of dollars per month. And you're getting close to having basically a full-time software engineer salary on the line. Despite all the warnings, Steve has created a delight. little metaphorical taxonomy for how to explain how things work. The town is your HQ. This allows you to work on multiple projects. The projects are called rigs. And then you sort of play, I guess that's the word, as the overseer. You're the boss. But you also have a mayor

who reports to you, like a chief of staff. That's an agent that you talk to. And the mayor kicks off work convoys to different agents. They're called like pole cats. These are ephemeral agents that go and do like one little thing. And then they write code. That code lands in merge queue, but then you have another role, another agent called a witness that oversees all the pole cats to help them get unstuck. And then there's a deacon that goes around, patrols the town,

find stuff that's like, needs to be taken out or deleted. There's dogs that do maintenance, like cleaning up code branches that have gone stale. There's a crew that are specific to a particular project, and those are longer lived than pole cats. So if you have like back and forth design work,

you'll create a member of the crew who he says you'll love. and you'll develop a relationship with, and you'll be updating their agent workflow and their skills so that they can, so that, you know, days later, you can go back to the same agent about how you're architecting the app,

and it has all the context, whereas the Polkats are just off doing one little implementation at a time. And so there's a bunch of different roles. It's a lot. It's very cool, and it feels like a glimpse of what's coming this year. You still have to have an idea of what to build.

So, you know, we talked to, I've searched around for like, what are people actually building with this? And a lot of people have like re-implemented this open source library and Rust. It's like, it's probably valuable, but that's not exactly like the breakthrough $1 billion individual solo developer project just yet. Like you still got to have a genius idea, but then you can build it. And you still have to have a really good ability to manage agents and understand when things are going off the rails. But the rough edges are getting sanded down like as we speak. orchestrators, it feels like these are the next, it's the next easy unhobbling that will cause another

doubling in the meter software engineering time horizon benchmark. If you remember that benchmark for how long a software engineering task can run without going crazy, it used to be a couple minutes, then it became a couple hours. Like if you set up your gas town appropriately, you could potentially do weeks of software engineering work autonomously. Do you have more contact? on the meter eval. I mean, meter really does LLMs. Yeah, it's not the actual model running for like four hours. Exactly. It's it can do a task that takes people four hours. Exactly. Exactly. So, so now I think you won't just be able to slot Gastown into the meter eval because meter has like opus four five, codex five two, Gemini three pro. And so you can't really just slot it in. They might need a new

category or something for orchestrators. But you could imagine getting a week's worth of software engineering work done with sort of a single prompt or a single setup. Yeah, it feels very similar to, you know, you see here people talk about like their custom VIM configurations. Totally. It's been like hours working on these things. Totally. I've seen a ton of people on Twitter like build their own like orchestrator.

I mean, this is like very complex. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, no, no. A lot of people are already building these, these orchestrators themselves. Gastown is just one that's open source. But a lot of people are building these like various harnesses. And so orchestration and delegation, they make sense, even.

in a world where models are improving in capability and declining in cost. A stock LLM just cannot spin up multiple instances of itself if you give it a huge task. So imagine you're just like categorize every receipt in my company has ever processed. Like an LLM can do it, but it's just going to take a long time. You should use 50 instances of LLMs and you have to write some code for that. An agent should be able to do that. That's what you're sort of getting with this. And so, but there's obviously still a bunch of kinks to work. out in 2026. It's a very interesting paradigm to me. It's also sort of in hindsight obvious that we'd get here. And I think we'll see all the major AI labs do something in this

space. I don't know if that means launching new products, but they need to deliver on this experience in a more polished package soon. I also expect a number of startups to try and own the category or carve out sub-nishes. You know, gas town for legal or something like that will probably be something we hear a pitch for at some point. And in the end, the multi-agent experience might be completely abstracted to certain end users. Like most people using chat apps don't care about the details of a mixture of experts' model. They just want a good answer, and they want the model to be good at math and poetry and writing and research and history and all these things.

And MOE models succeed at that, but it's buried below the fold. And so even auto-routing between different models, I don't think a lot of people care about that if they're just in the consumer world. And I think that this will be more and more abstracted. So all of this will make 2026 more exciting than ever. You have Anthropic and Open AI fighting over the vibe wars at the Super Bowl. You got Elon and Sam under oath in an Oakland courthouse, and another thousand startups just got funded to make something people want.

So basically, if you're working on AI agents and you just pivoted to building a harness, pivot to orchestration. It does feel like it might be like the next hot keyword that we're seeing. orchestration market map orchestration, you know, all sorts of stuff. Anyway, Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And yeah, people are having fun with Gastown. Will Brown got nerd sniped into finally reading the original Gastown Post. And wow, it's beautiful and terrifying and hilarious and probably a glimpse of the future that will feel normal in six months. I couldn't agree more.

Steve Yegi is a great writer. Just very, very interesting to read all. of what he writes and he talks about his his neighbor's squirrel in a very fun way and how chubby the squirrel is. Wait, his neighbor's a pet. He has an 82 year old neighbor who feeds his local squirrel against the city ordinance, but he's 82, so he's like, what are you going to do to me? And then he uses this like fat squirrel as an analogy for the gas town that he's building. It's fascinating. And then people are in fun with this. Tetsuo.c.p. says, last month, I was generating 15,000 lines of codes per day with Claude Code.

Once I discovered the Ralph Wiggum loop, my productivity shot up to 10x. This week, I finally set up Gastown, and I'm generating one million lines of code per day. At this rate, I'm mere days away from completing my minesweeper clone. And like, there is something here where people, you know, you got to know what to build. You got to have a good idea. There's going to be a lot of people spending 15 grand to recreate a game that's 60 bucks. Totally, totally. But if it has me in the game, maybe I'll play it.

Who knows? Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. Stay at the art reasoning, next level of vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado, our first in-person guest of the day, Gerge, correct? Did I say that correctly? The pragmatic engineer, welcome. How you doing? Grab a seat.

Please sit down. And first time of the show, please give us an introduction. Yeah, good to see you in person. In-person, this place is even better on the show. Yeah. Yeah, so just flew in from Amsterdam and I got you guys some special stuff. This is stuff that they don't know about the Netherlands. It's called Crowd Noten.

Okay. And it's best kept secret in Netherlands. I love it. Little mini cookies. Mini-Cookies. Many cinnamon cookies. Before Christmas, the whole city sells this all the time. But as per the Dutch, you can only have it before Christmas.

So there's this one shop that sells it year-round. Locals hate it. It's kind of unknown. But I think it all be right. And yeah, just some pragmatic engineer stickers for you guys. I love it. Thank you. And how do you introduce the pragmatic engineer these days?

It's purely substack, writer, a media company. What do you like? I like to say that I'm a software engineer who has been a software engineer for like 15 or so years. I was a manager as well. And then I just started writing for software engineers. I didn't think there would be any demand for this. I don't think anyone thought there would be any demand for this. And turns out there is a ton of demand for people writing about just, like for me writing about in-depth topics that

I don't write for beginners. I write for experience folks talking about, I started talking about stuff like how did Uber create platform teams, like, you know, tech depth, how do you deal with that stuff? And people were paying attention, subscribing, paying. So it surprised me the most. That's amazing. Well, and I feel like timing, timing wise,

what better time to be writing about software engineering than right now? It's a crazy time. Like I've been in industry for about, you know, like 20-ish years, depending on how you counted. And I'm now, luckily, been able to talk with people who are still alive, like Grady Booch, who is a legend who had been around since closer to the beginning of it. And I don't think there's ever been a time. Like, I remember when I was working, you know, we were a software engineer. Like, we were, we loved our jobs and I think we still do.

But what we were doing is kind of automating other people's jobs. Sure. Like customer support, we were saying how many savings we had. But we, and we kind of took this for granted. And there's a bit of existential crisis now with, with devs because this. This is the first time in history where the stuff that we build could potentially automate our work. And there's, it's messy people's minds. Maybe more software engineers used to have the luxury of like, I'm not going to, I'm just going to do my work.

I don't need to really pay attention to what's going on and the big changes that are happening. And now it's like, oh, I should really pay attention just so I stay on the edge. Because if you're not getting efficiency gains right now, I think you will be left behind. That feels obvious. How wide is the spread of experiences that folks in your audience share with you? Because I imagine that there are some folks out there saying, like, I'm using Gastown and agents and I'm vibe coding. I'm doing everything, and my job is completely changed. And then I imagine that there's some people that are like, it's kind of business as usual at my company.

So interesting enough, you would think that, so first of all, like the people who are using the agents and doing all this cool, so I'm being on the cutting edge. You guys shut off a gas out on Stevie. I was just hanging out with him yesterday. Yeah, we were together at this place called The Future of Software Engineering Summit. So 25 years ago, there was the Agile Manifesto that back in 2001, it kind of shook the industry because it said, like, talk to customers, iterate fast. It was like four simple things. It's sort of anti-waterfall. Anti-waterfall.

And there were a bunch of people who gathered at this resort in Utah, and, you know, they came up with it. And 25s later, Martin Fowler, one of the Agile Manifolde founders, who organized a retreat with, like, a bunch of thinkers of today. we went there and we gathered and a lot of about half the people were like more traditional companies think about like john deer 200 year old companies enterprises Cisco etc and then some of them for startups and the crazy thing was that like i was thinking you know they're a business as you'll know like this is the first time i'm seeing a technology where even in the kind of most old school companies they're using it they're trying it they know that they need to cash up and funny enough some of those old school companies are a little bit ahead of like i don't know

some mid-level tech companies because they kind of have processes to, like, approve vendors and all that they've been used to this stuff. So, like, I don't see anyone who's not impacted by it, but there are some people who are on the cutting edge and, you know, using gas talent and playing with Claude, et cetera. I think they're still the minority, but the gap used to be massive. It used to be, like, years or something even a decade behind. So, Steve, you put him in the same kind of camp as Peter from OpenClaw

and that just loves the craft and just loves experimenting, and it's like non-commercial, because it's just like we have this interesting dynamic right now where you have these like hyper, hyper, hyper-commercial labs, like anthropics, which is like idealistic, but like very focused on like, let's make as much money as we possibly can from generating code, and then you have the Peters of the world

and maybe the steves of the world that are just in it for the love of the game. Yeah, so I was hanging out with Peter two weeks ago. Yeah. Right when Claude was starting to blow up, and then my podcast went out when it was peak popularity. And people thought I was talking with him that same day. But I would say Peter is way more obsessed than Steve. Like when I met him for two weeks, I was the first human that he met.

Whoa. That guy is pulling it. But he's very clear that it's obsessive. But the thing that both him and Steve share, so first of all, both of them are, I think they're a little bit like on the kind of like FU category in terms of like they're doing what they want to do. And they want to build. mode. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. However, one thing that they both share, and Steve was telling me this, I was asking, how are you, man? Because, like, I saw him, like, about a year ago last time. And he looked a little bit more pale, and he said, like, dude, like, we need to talk about something that is really getting

to us, like early adopters. This thing is like a vampire. It drains you out. You have trouble sleeping. Like, a lot of people who are in this, like, multiple agents mode, they're napping during the day. You know, there's an email list, the kind of secret AI email list with these folks, and they share this stuff. And so both of them are seeing it. And Peter was telling me the same thing. It just really is draining. This might be,

maybe this will pass. But back to your question, like, yeah, I think they're both. They're just building for the fun of it. Both of them are being chased by crazy investors, like crazy amounts. And they're,

at least for now, saying those, same with Steve. And I love it. I feel we're finally back. It's so refreshing. This, the last time I remember, it was like 90s or 2000

when there was a hacker culture. And this is it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you go back to like the Linux folks, and like there's so many open source folks who did say no to the business community and wound up building great. Yeah, please. This one's empty, but we can have that one. So, yeah, but it does feel like a return because while the mobile platforms were so closed down, there was less opportunity to now we're sort of migrating back to desktop and, you know, open source. And I think both what Peter and Steve are doing, the reason it resonates so much, they're doing the stuff that the big guys.

will not do because it's too risky. Peter, like, Claude took off because he himself connected to all these things, and of course, it's risky and security risk. He knows that, but, like, and I think one of his... Read the disclosures. Read the disclosures. But no one would do this because it's not ready.

Also, the other labs would build it, but they wouldn't make it, you wouldn't be able to use multiple models. They would be, like, it would be pretty kind of clamped down. And Steve was telling me that what he did with Gastown, like, so both Steve and Peter are amazing software engineers. They have built incredible

system. Steve's had built a lot of Google's internal systems. He's been at Greg, at Amazon. Peter, you know, built, if you see a PDF on a web or online, it's probably his business. Seriously, it's amazing. It's so big. And Steve said that the reason he built gas town is not because he believes that gas town will work. It's crazy. You guys have deployed the mayor or the pole cats, all that. It's a mess. The reason he did it is he wants to push the boundaries and kind of like wake people up that something will be coming, it's not going to be gas town. This is just a start. And he said to me that he feels that he succeeded.

So I think Steve is a lot more provocative. Peter is a lawfmore like, I'm just going to build whatever I want to build. How have you been reacting to Steve's position on like the death of the junior programmer, the revenge of the junior programmer? Like what advice do you have for young people that are joining the software engineering community today? I my position changes on change is so fast. I used to be really, really worried about junior folks. Like, you know, because you look at it.

Like it's just, it's just been like such a bad like five years. COVID started. Sure. No one started. Like I was at Uber when COVID started. We just stopped hiring. Well, we still hired. We were paying people a lot more after we rebounded.

But we didn't hire junior people because you didn't want to onboard them remote. And it's difficult and we didn't know how to. Sure. And then one remote was returning. AI started. And of course, now there's a thing like, why would you hire a junior, when a senior can, like, pair with an AI. Now, on the other hand, what I'm seeing, so it's just really hard to get a job. But when I think back when I started, like, my first job was around the financial crisis.

It was just really hard to get a job. And I didn't realize at a time. And there's so much else, there's so many other things going on. Like there's Ukraine and, like, there's all this geopolitical stuff and the economy. What's the dollar and the gold doing? And business leaders are not, we think of them as only focused on AI in terms of hiring, but there's a million other things going on in the economy. Yeah, but when I started out, like, I remember like a lot of people in my, in my class, university class, they just dropped out. They never became software engineers. But I never thought of it that I would be given a job. I knew I needed to earn it. So what I did is I did a bunch of projects on the side. I entered competitions. I built a bunch of things. And honestly, I was probably like a more impressive. And I think like first of all, like we don't need to, I'm not going to, like, when I remember this, I'm not going to feel sort for this generation because I did a study with like Gen Z, like, talked with a bunch of like, you know, a young full. and some of them are like friggin' amazing.

Yeah. And so the kids are gonna be fine, that's one. Okay. The other thing is the turns, there's this, I'm gonna spill it, I guess, to everyone who's watching TBPN. There is a massive advantage of hiring young people, and Shopify is the first one who figure it out.

Farhan Tavar, head of engineering at Shopify, told me that he saw something interesting years back. Shopify was so early to AI. You know, they got co-pilot licenses to everyone, but no cost of it and all that, but they didn't see many teams using it. But there was this one team that was using it a lot more, the end of attracting tokens.

And Farhan, look, what happened? Oh, there was an intern on the team. And so it was like, oh, what happened? So they numbered to the intern and gave the intern his two-week task. And the intro was done on a day. And, you know, the, and it goes like, okay, what next, right? And they were like, how did you do that?

It's like, oh, well, you know, like, I just like use this AI and did this, like, what next? You know, they're worried. They want to get a return offer. And suddenly the people on the team felt stupid, right? So they started to learn from the intern and use AI. But the intro was not threatening them.

The intro was never going to take a position. So next thing Farhan did, hire an intern in every single Shopify's team. So this is why Shopify had 1,000 interns. Oh, no. He's in some CTO groups. So why do you think Cloudfair is hiring 1,1111111 interns? Why is GitHub hiring more interns? Farhan told him this is the biggest hack in actually getting your team more productive.

Get an intern, a good intern. From one of the things. Yeah, the other thing is I've heard stories of people saying like, I've submitted a thousand resumes or a thousand applications. I'm like, if you want a job as a software engineer, build a piece of software without asking. Yes. Just you don't need to be invited. One job a week. One job a week you should be applying to.

Not 150 a day. Well, not even that or one job a day. Yeah. We hired somebody last summer. We hired somebody last summer that built us a guest directory that like in real time would take, we'd had an episode. It would scrape it. it would put it into a little dashboard. If you want a job at Shopify, build a plugin, we hired the guy.

There's so many different ways to plug in. But yeah, you can, every single company out there, if you want an internship or a junior job, just go build a product for the company. Make it look, make it match the brand kit exactly. Make it look like something that you could ship, even if it's just rebuilding something that's existing. That's how you're going to get attention.

For sure. Yeah. I think you just completely agree. Totally agree. And also like, you know, one thing that I think will, will happen with software engineering, which has happened, like, for 20 or something years, software engineering is not too different to like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. When I graduated, a lot of my friends were in that domain.

And those domains, to get a job, if it's a mechanical engineer, you need to go to university and you go to one where you get a placement. So I think, honestly, this will probably return. That the most straightforward way to get a job is go to a reputable university that has placement programs and has industry connections and get in there. If you go to a lower rank one, you can still get it, but it'll be hard. And if you're self-study, you can also do it, but now you need to do amazing work. You know, like, like, build something like open-cloth or something like that.

But the lower, like it or not, tech was this really special place where pedigree did not matter for years or decades. This might be ending, unfortunately. Are you interested in the other thing is you don't need to, I think, you know, telling somebody they need to, if somebody can go out and create something like open claw and go viral, like amazing. But you can also just look at a company, look at a company, look at a, I think. feature, find a feature that their competitor has and just build the feature and say here. You don't need to like create something totally novel. Just build the thing, share it. And that's how you get attention. I guarantee if you called email for people in the org with like a link to the product, you will get an interview. Yeah. And don't forget, I think the interim disclosure

and like all of these like how to get things, a lot of people, when you do the thing that most people do, you no longer stand out. So there's a lot of advice. There used to be how to get into Fang of like, all right, do lead coding. And what happened is everyone is really good at lead code, the algorithmical problems. And those companies don't really look at that signal anymore because everyone is so good. So I think any point in time,

you want to do stuff that others don't do, and it'll be a lot more effort. It will be more risky. But that's the way you're going to stand out. So like, you know, if you're young, just do crazy stuff, especially with AI. Help me understand more about standing out. I remember there used to be job titles for Django developer.

It's like not just back at, not just Python. the Django framework, right, Rails developer, front end in a specific framework. Now it feels like every developer can use every tool front and back end because of vibe coding and models. Do you, would you recommend someone say, okay, yes, you're a great developer. You can use all the tools. You can write any language whenever you want. But in order to differentiate yourself, why don't you add design or add finance or understand a little bit of legal? So, you know, is there something else that you should pull in so you can be?

a dual threat. Yes. And this is, so this is what's happening. When I looked at, for example, the job listening work was. WorkOS employs what they call product engineers. They don't have a product. They have one product manager for like 80 engineers. And when I looked at the job description, like I remember this evolution where it started, you

know, in the 2000s like a specific language, then a specific framework, then a back end or something. And the job description actually have things like, you know, like soft skills, like emotional intelligence, like good communication. So first of all, hiring is starting to, like the serotype of the guild. foil developer, it's just not going to get hired on a lot of companies these days. And most places are expecting business sense, product sense, and the thing that almost every modern company from linear to work OS to all of the other similar ones are saying is taste for software engineers. Now this is pretty, pretty difficult. Interesting enough, inside Microsoft,

there's an internal course that they're trying to teach taste to people. No way. Yeah, crazy. Scott Hansel almost telling me this. But it's kind of hard to define, but it's a mix of, like, I guess, do your own projects, try to do real work that actually either makes money or helps people or does things. Keep trying and use latest tools. It's hard to give universal advice because the thing has changed so much. And one other thing that's happening, some companies, like the big change we've had over the winter is everyone has realized who has paying attention and paying side projects that us software engineers will no longer write the code. The agent will write the code. We will prompt it, which is some people are grieving or grieving.

I'm kind of over that. Yeah. But a lot of companies have paused hiring for now because they need to figure out who are we going to hire. Yeah. Because there's no point in coding interviews or much less point when the agent is doing it. So there might be like a cool of like six months to 12 months where there's a lot of us hiring as companies figure out what is this new person. So in the meantime, though, people looking for the job is like first of all, like if you get a job off,

appreciate it, probably just take it, get your door in the industry. It doesn't matter where. And then, yeah, keep pushing. Yeah, I wonder if they- I feel like a big opportunity right now is, software engineers finding the companies, of course, the companies that are really beat up in the public markets right now, the software, there's tons of companies that people are just saying, it's over. Of course, many of them will recover and, you know, a few years from now be worth

multiples of what they are today, but like doing the work to figure out which one of those companies have durable customer relationships aren't just going to be fully ripped out. And then you could have a situation, you know, not that dissimilar from people that ended up joining companies in like 2022, late 2022, 2023, when things were really corrected, where then the stock just trades up 3x over the next two years and you look like an absolute genius. Yeah. And one thing that companies are starting to hire for, but they're struggling. I talk with a startup in Amsterdam. They were looking for an AI native junior engineers. Let's hire junior engineers. And their expectation was like knows how to use all these modern tools, has built some, some, doesn't have to

work with some projects with LLMs, you know, like built a bot or something. They couldn't find, and find anyone. So like, like go and use these tools, build some stuff, put it on GitHub, launch it on the app store, et cetera, because the reason they want to bring it in, again, they want, like some of these folks will use it a lot better. So there's a lot of opportunity, I think, you know, we're might be overthinking this a little bit. It's a massive tech change. A lot of existing folks inside the industry with like five plus years of experience are paralyzed because that skill coding. It takes, it takes friggin hard effort to like get good at coding. It took me, you know, like three years to get okay and then 10 years to get really good.

And that's kind of down the drain on one end. So a lot of people are grieving that. So there's an opportunity for people who are kind of like stepping over this. I'm like, all right, how I'm going to be effective with these. Yeah, this is great. Last question for me. How do you think about the, like, it used to be that software engineers would join a company because they were obsessed with the technology.

They joined 37 signals because they wanted to work on rails or, you know, Shopify. And there were a whole bunch of like rail shops. and if you enjoyed Rails, you would go there. Now it feels like there's more opportunity than ever to find an industry or a category, like if you're obsessed with travel or you're obsessed with gaming or music, the tools are maybe less important, but the willingness to be excited about the product that you're making is going to be the differentiator as opposed to just,

yeah, I work at this company, but I don't really listen to music, so why am I at Spotify? It's like, you know, if you love music and you, love advancing that industry, you should go there more than anywhere else. Does that resonate with you? It resonates 100%. At my brother's company, he's building a start of craft docs. Yeah. Over the winter, he realized, like, these agents are really good, and he just mandated his team. Everyone using cloud code. Everyone needs to do prompting, and you need to generate your code. And he said about 50% of his team got really demotivated. And one engineer quit because he told him,

I do not want to be a prompter. I love the craft. That engineer was really in, Code was his kind of like identity. He was the go-to guy. He understood the code based better than anyone. And what happened in his first week is people used to go up to this person asking for like, hey, how does this work, etc. No one walk up to him because the AI could answer it. And on this retreat in Utah, I talked with a bunch of people who have been larger enterprises, like big companies. And they were telling me the same thing, that the people who are struggling whose identity is the code and the craft.

And the people who are thriving, their identity is less of the code. It's the impact. Let's build cool stuff. Let's help the business. Or let's, I love this industry. I want to advance it. So I think that that's going to happen. Builders who don't care about the tools that much or are going to thrive. People who grab up with the craft, there might be niches for them. And it's not going to go away, but it'll be harder. Yeah, you always see that in the video game industry. Or I'm thinking of the, uh, the Dwight, Dwight, Dwight. Every programmer loves video games. And so, I mean, not everyone, but a lot of them. So they go there and they'll be like, oh, yeah, pay me half as much as if I was doing ads. because I want to work on League of Legends or whatever. Yeah. I'm reminded of the scene, Dwight Shrewt, trying to outsell selling against the computer, right? Like immediately, he's, like, doing fine, and the website just steam rolls it. Yeah. It's wild times.

Well, we really appreciate you coming by the show. Come on anytime. Anytime. This is great. We'd love to have you more. We'll do so. It was great. Thank you for the cookies.

Let me tell you about. Turbo puffer, serverless vector in full-tech search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast 10xG. cheaper and extremely scalable. And I'm also going to tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance, and support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, I believe we have Darak Khosra from Uber in the Restream waiting room. So let's bring him into TBP Ultram. Darra, good to meet you. How are you doing? Nice to meet you. I'm doing great. Thank you.

We just had earnings. Yes. They were really strong, although the market is going crazy as we speak. Who knows? Yeah, let's start there. Break it down for anybody that wasn't paying attention to your guys' fantastic quarter. Yeah, what happened? Yeah. Maybe why did you have this particular quarter?

So the quarter ended a great year for us. In the quarter, we announced a trip growth of 22%. We're now to run rate of 15 billion trips. Well, there you go. 15 billion trips. So many trips. For the year, that's 40 million. per day. So the business is really scaling. Gross bookings growth actually accelerated.

You know, usually as companies get bigger, they slow down. We're actually accelerating. Profits is defined by EBITDA. We're up 35% on a year-on-year basis. And then we threw off almost, almost $10 billion of free cash flow, $9.8 billion, of 40% year-on-year. So the business is really scaling. And at the same time, you know, you've got the mobility business that's growing at really healthy rates, 19%. And then Uber E.E. that really we built like entirely organically now is over a hundred billion dollar run rate, solidly profitable, and that grew 26% in the last quarter really accelerating nicely since the beginning of the year. So the business actually looks really, really great.

And then obviously we've got the onset of autonomous and autonomous vehicles. And we kind of, in our investor presentation, we had a lot to say about autonomous, which we can definitely get into if you guys want to. Yeah, before we get into that, like what are the key drivers outside of, obviously, the businesses, you know, maturing. You've been in the driver's seat for long enough now to really start having clearly a tremendous impact,

but, like, what's really, what's driving, you know, this acceleration? Yeah, so I tell you one in terms of the business is, our business is really supply let. So the more cars we get on the road, the more restaurants we have on the platform, Our product gets better. There's the conversion of the product. You know, when you open up your app, your ETA is lower.

You have more restaurants available. So basically, we are a supply-led business, and we continue to add supply onto the platform. We've got almost 10 million drivers and couriers on the platform, well over a million merchants. And first it starts with supply. And our selection and supply just keeps getting better and better. I'd say that's number one.

The second is we're the only platform out there that has both rides and Eats and it's global as well. And that allows us to more deeply embed with our customers. About 30% of our Eats first trips come from Riders, so to speak. And we can cross-promote from the Rides platform to the Eats platform. If you open up your Uber app now, you see Eats being offered. You'll see Grocer it being offered. if you're looking to go to a restaurant for dinner, we'll also offer that restaurant for delivery

as a reminder that is available for delivery as well. So this cross-platform kind of promo that we can do, it's just no one else is doing it. It's taken its years to perfect it because any pixel that is promoting, let's say Uber eats on the Uber app, it can get in the way of your experience on Uber. So you have to be very careful to have an optimal experience

for your base business, while at the same time nudging you over to the other product. Yeah, was there a period where it just felt like you were running two very distinct businesses and now it feels like they're actually coming together and it's working? Totally. And, you know, my philosophy is that when you're building businesses that are younger, you want kind of full-stack teams. So, for example, our technology team, we had a dedicated technology team for Eats.

As that business got more mature and larger, we combined our tech teams, We combine our product team so that you can build one core infrastructure, one matching stack, for example, bring the customer data together and kind of create more commonality between the businesses. Now, for example, I promoted our head of global mobility, Andrew McDonald, he's been here for 12 years. He's now president and COO. So he's running one P&L, and essentially we can trade off between benefits on one business for the other business. to kind of grow the whole. And there's no one else who, again, has the breadth and depth of offerings that we have.

And then on top of that, we've got the Uber One membership program. We've got 46 million members. Close to 50% of our gross bookings come from members. And that membership provides a real lock-in. Members spent three times more than non-members. Customers who shop on both eats and rides spend three times than the ones who don't.

And so it's that combination of the whole platform coming together that lets us grow fast, it lets us accelerate, it lets us gain category position versus the others while at the same time having a lot of profitability. What's the biggest lesson from Expedia that you've been able to apply to Uber? Yeah, it's a great question. I would say, and it was a mistake at Expedia, was not recognizing that the business is supply-led. So with Expedia, we were very much focused on the customer and bringing in more audience, so to speak, and then following with supply. And I think one of the regrets, and you have to kind of learn your lessons as a CEO.

It's like we're humans too. We make mistakes too. We learn as well. Is that booking.com was really focused on more supply in Europe, for example. And because they had more supply, they were able to build a more compelling platform in Europe than Expedit. was. And so I took some of those learnings and then of course, you know, some tips from the OG Uber folk, including Travis as well, that this is a real supply-led business. And so it was, to some extent, learning from my past mistakes and then making sure I don't make those

mistakes again in the new job, so to speak. Yeah. I remember when Uber came to L.A., the push for supply on the platform was so aggressive that I was getting directly targeted. Do you want to drive for Uber? I was employed at the time. I wasn't. signing up, but I haven't seen those ads. Is that a function of better targeting? Or do you just have a more natural driver acquisition flywheel? Like, what's working on the supply side, increasing the supply of drivers these days? I think supply is definitely cyclical. So in the early days, obviously, it was kind of a new thing. No one knew what gig work was. So Travis and team had to introduce it to drivers, had to pull them off of, you know, driving for a carry limit.

scenes or some of the traditional players onto the Uber platform. It was very broad. You see ads everywhere. Yeah, totally. And then we had to kind of grow the overall marketplace as well because there are way more Uber is on the road now than taxis, et cetera. But we have had kind of supply shocks in the past. So for example, COVID, one of the great things about COVID as it related to Uber.

It was a terrible event, obviously, was that we were able to move our drivers who are driving for Uber to make money on Uber. eats. But then after COVID, we thought when the world would open up, everyone would get back to driving because why the heck not? It turned out that a lot of our drivers, rightly so, they were worried about their health, they didn't want to catch COVID. I remember I was talking to a driver and I'll never forget this line. I'm like, well, why don't you go back to driving people because you can make more money that way? And she said, well, a Big Mac isn't going to give me COVID. You know, it's so safety was a big issue. So we had to reinvest in supply.

very aggressively post-COVID. We did so faster than a competitor's, which helped us. Now we have a pretty finely tuned machine in that the retention of drivers is really high. On average, drivers are driving more supply hours. They're spending more time on our platform because they can drive, they can deliver, they can shop, they can even do,

they can judge AI algorithms now. We have a group called Uber AI solutions where they can, you know, look at algorithmic answers and decide which is better, et cetera. There's much more to do on the platform. So the position that we have in supply is pretty strong. But believe me, we're investing. I guess we figured out that you guys are more consumer customers than drivers and good for algorithms.

Yeah, good work on the marketing side. Everyone's been able to make the bare case for traditional enterprise software over the last year as models have gotten better. There's been some chatter about kind of risk to marketplaces with agents. I'm not necessarily bought into some of those theories yet. You know, you're operating this, you know, massive network of drivers and supply, and it's just a lot more difficult to sort of, no model's going to one-shot that anytime soon. I'm expecting to go to my terminal, and it will call people randomly in my neighborhood

and ask them if they want to give me a ride. That's the future I want to live in. Anyway, so we're not really quite seeing that yet, but how are you thinking about kind of risks and opportunities with a more agentic kind of internet and consumer product? Yeah. I think that if you have unique fragmented supply and the global scope that we have,

then you are safer than, let's say, others who might not have unique supply or they don't have the fragmentation of supply that we do. Like we've got over 9 million couriers and drivers on a platform. That's very difficult for anyone, whether human or agent, to replicate as well. So we are working with agentic platforms. We've got a great relationship, for example, with OpenAI. And so you will be able to call an Uber using chat GPT. One of the things that we want to do is we want to get our brand in front of you as well.

So once you call it, for example, it's an UberMap so you can track your car, do all that good stuff. So I think that companies like ours who do have, you know, we're in over 70 countries, we've set everything up. The membership program is very, very deep and embedded. We have a fragmented supply base that's going to be very difficult for anyone to recreate. I think we can rest easier. And for me, I want to make sure that my brand gets out to the customer. And at the same time, I'm building those experiences within the Uber app. So a driver can interact with an app using voice.

They have an agent who can help them out. they don't know why they're not making more money. We've got agents for ordering. We've got agents for ordering your rides, et cetera. So I think as long as the experience on app doesn't trail the experience off app, I think off app actually can ultimately for players like us expand the marketplace, and that's definitely something that we're looking at. How are you thinking about the next iteration of Apple intelligence rolling out?

We were talking to Mark German, and he was saying that we've been able to call Uber, from Siri for, I think he said a decade or something like that. It's been there. Obviously, I'm sure you have the numbers and there's probably a lot of people in nominal terms that are using that functionality, but it feels like it hasn't broken through, but it feels like it's about to with the next iteration of Siri and Apple Intelligence. Is that, that's lower friction. That feels good for you. At the same time, if I don't open the app, maybe I don't go and do other things and I lose a little bit of connection. How are you seeing that tradeoff? You know, my view is don't think too hard and build great consumer products.

And so if someone wants to get us through Apple Intelligence, chat, GBT, or they want to come to the app, I don't care. You know, as long as we're getting used and we're getting used often. Now, yes, there are considerations. We have a $2 billion advertising business. if that is subsumed underneath an Apple intelligence, that could hurt our advertising business. But for me, like, if the North Star is build-out consumer experiences that are absolutely first-rate,

and then we have this, the multi-product category and the membership underneath, I think the economics can kind of take care of themselves over the long term. And if we make a great app, you know, like people will keep coming to that app. And I remember when Google Maps was at some point amalgamating Lyft and Uber content. People were worried about that. You talked about Apple intelligence. Our app is pretty damn good. And my job is to make sure that it remains leading and keeps attracting audience

because ultimately that is the most engaged audience that you can have, that direct audience. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, with the benefit with the Uber Eats business is like, I don't really want plain text experience ordering food in chat. And then, yes, you know, chat can generate images and stuff like that. But it's several jumps in UI. Eventually you're like, well, I can just pop over to the app. Yep.

We got to talk about autonomy. I'm sure you spent a bunch of the earnings call on that note. But what were the highlights? What should people be paying attention to? I think the biggest highlight, and we have a big section in our supplemental materials that I encourage folks to look at is that what we're seeing with autonomy is that it's a net positive in terms of demand into the ecosystem. So there's one view of looking at a, hey, autonomous is just going to replace humans and, you know, robot cars don't get tired, they don't get

distracted, they can work 20 hours a day, they do need to get recharge and clean, et cetera. So they will replace the workforce, so to speak, that I think a lot of people are talking about in other markets as well. What we're seeing in markets in which we have launched Autonomous is that actually those markets are growing faster. There's a new audience segment that comes in. Our new customer acquisition, you know, overall now we have 200 million consumers coming to our front door every single month, growing 18 percent growing pretty quickly. But in the markets in which we have AV, our audience growth is actually accelerated. And we're gaining new customers because it's a real. really freaking cool product.

So one is that we've always had the hypothesis, hey, mobility is a trillion dollar marketplace, but autonomous can add more to that market. It can be trillion dollar plus or another trillion dollars. And the early signal is that, yeah, it is actually additive. It's not replacement only. The second, I would say, big finding, if you want to call that for us, is we've always had the hypothesis

that autonomous on our platform, is going to take advantage of the platform to be much more utilized than off platform. You know, like to some extent, a car is a box with wheels. The autonomous car is super expensive, so you want to keep it running and you want to keep it earning money

for as long as possible. And we're finding that the utilization of those cars on our platform is 30 plus percent higher than cars that are not that kind of are building their own. on platforms. That utilization bonus is hugely important as it relates to the value of our platform. And so we're seeing that come through too. So one is it's additive, which is great. And the platform

is doing what is designed to do, which is bring more business to a driver, where that driver happens to be human or happens to be a robot. Yeah. So you're saying, so the unit economics of AV provider can actually be better if they're adding it to the Uber platform. Yeah, I mean, that's how we have to earn our take rate, right? It's if we're not driving higher utilization, we won't earn our take rate. And right now, the utilization premium that we're seeing suggests that our take rate is, you could argue too low, but we have a very strong case to be made for the take rate of the platform. Is there any role for Uber in the rest of the self-driving car stack from cleaning to service to storage?

there's a lot of these things that could be handled and they're currently handled by the sort of OEMs and the big autonomy companies, but you could imagine in the future it being much more distributed, but does it go full individual maintenance and whatnot? Yeah, yeah, totally. So if you think about the AV stack,

there's the distribution. You know, that could be Uber. It could be Waymo. It could be Tesla, right? Then there's a driver, and the driver we're partnering up with a driver. then there's an operator, and the operator has depots, is cleaning the cars, recharging the cars. We have a network of fleet partners now on a global basis, because about 15% of our supply is provided by fleets today.

And, you know, they rent out cars to drivers. We're taking those fleet operators and we're saying, hey, we want you now to operate AVs. So those fleet operators in partnership with us, we have investments in a bunch of them. They're the ones who operate the fleet, and they can do it in a really low-cost manner. They're doing it with hundreds of thousands of cars, and so AV is different, but not that different. So you got the operator. Then you have someone who owns the car. That could be us.

It could be Waymo, but ultimately, I think it's going to be third parties, like private equity players and all this stuff, who are going to want to own these big assets, just like they kind of do rental car fleets. And then you will have kind of debt. out there. So there will be the financialization of the marketplace as well, but we are definitely playing in the demand side. We're partnering on the driving side. And then we can and are providing through our fleet partners all of the operations in a city, including depots, cleaning, etc. What kind of conversations have you had or what should people expect from other OEMs outside of Tesla on the autonomy side? It's an interesting dynamic now where Tesla's are getting

FSD is getting really, really good. It's a meaningful differentiator if you're a consumer and you either want to drive less on your way to work or one day be able to add your car to a platform like Uber. What's kind of coming down the pipeline in terms of just overall competitiveness from other OEMs? So what's interesting is that when I was having discussions regarding autonomous with OEMs, It was more, they were more interested in L2, which is rare FSD is now, than they were L4. You know, the prospect of every single car being sold with a $5,000 priced piece of software that has a cost of goods of zero. It's like, OEM's eyes, you know, went like this.

They were super, super interested. As it turns out, I think that L2 is proving to be less interesting. than people thought. Because you still kind of have to watch a road, et cetera. You can't really turn off. I think the great, great customer product is just, I can relax, I can do whatever I want, and I can get my time back the way that you get your time back in an Uber.

Send the backseat, do whatever you want, make a call, et cetera. So the conversations with OEMs actually are getting a lot more constructive for us because they see L3 and L4, and we want L4, obviously, as the big prize now. And that was not true three years ago. So we're having actually really great conversations with OEMs. We have a deal, for example, with Lucid, who builds awesome EVs,

and one of our other partners, Neuro and Lucid coming together. And there are many other discussions that we're having with OEM partners. And then, of course, now, Nvidia's in the game, right? They were building the reference computer architecture. Now they're bringing in the sensor. stack and now they are building self-driving as well, the model as well. So, Nvidia will provide a full-stack software and hardware solution to any OEM provider. And as you can imagine, Nvidia brings a lot of heft, a lot of know-how, and then a lot of

credibility to the ecosystem as well. So the direction of travel is... And you're sitting there as like a supply-driven business just being like, let's go. I want every car outfitted with this when it's ready. And you can imagine a world where the Uber wait time is 20 seconds every time. It's just like a car just. The dream is 10 years from now, every single new car sold is L4 capable because that is obviously very strong prospect for a supply, what I started with. And hopefully you'll get that 20 second ETA or you'll be pissed off if you have to wait for more than a minute. Yeah, if you step back from maybe the specifics of Uber and just think about how autonomy might change the American landscape.

Like how, do you agree with the thesis of like the suburbs will become more popular? People will be commuting longer. Like, what knock on effects do you think are potentially underrated or underdiscust of moving in a more autonomous direction? Yeah, it's a great question. I'd say generally in the U.S. suburbs are growing faster than cities. So if this is a trend that started with COVID, it continues. And our growth in the suburbs and less dense areas is about twice our growth rate in the cities. So it's been a really attractive growth driver for us.

I do think that it's going to create a lot of space and cities. You know, I think 30% of space and cities is for parking. A huge amount of it goes unutilized. Some of that will be taken up by deep. etc. But I do think that it is going to increase the breadth of where people get to live. And I think it's going to make transportation available for many, many more people. As the cost, it's going to take a while, and it's probably going to take two or three generation of cars. But the hardware costs for these sensors for the computer is absolutely coming down.

And this will result in lower cost mobility being available to many more people in the world. whether they live in the city or they live outside of the city and I think it's going to have a great impact on society having more transportation available more affordably to a higher percentage of the population. Yes, it's good for a business But it will undoubtedly be great for society last question What advice do you give to someone who wants to be a public company CEO? One is I would tell you like don't hunt for it pick I'd say that the advice that I give folks is people get way too hung up on what their title is or how much are going to get paid, etc. I have always, you know, what's worked for me is I have been very, very specific about who I want to work for.

And when you pick the right people to work for, one, you learn a lot from them. But the one thing that I've seen in every environment, like environments are unpredictable. but people usually stay successful. Like you look at Elon, right? Like he succeeded in so many different areas, and that's true for really exceptional people. So exceptional people stay exceptional regardless of the environment. You know, if you pick a company or you pick a position,

that can change. That can go the wrong way. If you pick the right person, you pick the right person. Not only do you get to learn from them, but they usually move up in the world. And so as they get promoted, as they build a bigger company, you kind of get to free ride off of them.

So you get double the benefit, which is you learn from someone who's awesome and you get to move kind of in their wake until you're ready to strike out on your own. I'd say that's number one. And then the second thing I'd say is like, you know, advice for young people in terms of learning, just learn how to work hard.

Like it's, again, your skill sets may change, your profession may change. People are like discussing is coding the right thing or, you know, learning the liberal arts, the most important skill in life is the skill of working freaking hard. And if you work for the right person and you learn how to work hard,

you're going to do just fine. I love that. I love both those answers. That's a fantastic answer. Thank you so much for... So great to finally have you on the show. Congrats to the whole team on a fantastic quarter. And we'll hope to have you back on very soon.

We'll talk to you soon. By the way, I don't know if our IT people have been watching you guys, but we have ramp coming on to Uber. or so. No way. There's something happening with your commercials

that are working. My IT people are watching way too much PBPA. That's amazing. Love it. That's great. Well,

congratulations and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Thank you guys. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream,

go to Restream.com. And let me also tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

I love a public company CEO. We have our dear friend, Mitchell, from Lead Edge. Lead Edge Capital. Coming into the show. Let's bring him in. Oh, he's here. Mitchell, how you doing? You should have had Dar and I on together. We're buddies.

Oh, you are? That's awesome. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, we should, if we plan better, we would have. It doesn't surprise me. We'll add you both next time. Yeah.

How's life? It's good. It's good. Yeah. We're going on. all over the place today. We're talking about the market collapse, the end of SaaS, but the birth of agenetic coding and all these crazy things that developers doing. Yeah, what's up? I got a question for you. If everybody, my partner actually came up to this idea. He's like, so if all the SaaS

company, of all the software companies are all going to disappear because you can just like vibe code your way to build in one of these companies, well then can't the next AI company vibe code that AI company? Yes. Yes. Yes. And I mean, there is seriously a push. in the open source software community now to loosely vibe code everything you need. Like you build all your own tools, you build all your own software. This used to be the domain of programmers

that would stay up all night for months on end to build a little to-do list app. And now it's much more robust, but we haven't really seen where all of this goes. It's still pretty early. And most people are just building like tools that build more tools at this point. But yeah, I mean the iron law of the universe,

I don't know if you agree, is like if it goes up quickly, it comes down quickly. There's always, you know, you see these amazing growth charts and you get a little nervous because if it's come, easy come, easy go.

Yeah, so it's funny. I think people are, people are going to be in for a rude awakening. I think some people that say, I mean, you were calling this the last time, the last time you were on the show, you were kind of more just kind of skeptical a lot of these valuations.

Yeah, what's funny is, it's like public market software is not cheap. We're buying it. But we think companies like work, air incredible businesses. Company like transfer-wise in the payment space, remitly, toast has been crushed. We're not in a company called App Lovin, but a huge gaming company. I have a good buddy who's made billions on it and is now rebuying it.

These things are just like, like, all sent out at the same time. Yeah, and I was looking at, looking at PayPal, you have a, it's trading at seven times earnings now when I looked this morning. They have half a billion users. It's a global payments network. It doesn't seem like anything you can just vibe. You're not going to vibe code your way to like money transfer license. We're going to vibe code it.

We're going to build it. We're just going to make money. Same with Workday as well. We're just going to vibe code our way. You know, only took workday 20 years to get companies like Nike and Procter and Gable to give them all their ERP data. Of course, you know, Mitchell and John and Jamie. And we're going to like, we're going to vibe code in our way. Yeah, I think people are undervaluing trust right now.

Totally. People forget how software companies, like building code has never been the actual, like, hard thing about a software company. Yeah. Because there's not like building semiconductor chips. Yeah. It is like distribution. People forget you build a piece of software.

Yep. Then you have to sell the software. Then you have to maintain the software. Then you have to add features to the software. Then you have to, you know, you connect it with other systems. Those systems change. You have to have user permissioning. This stuff is really complex.

And oh, I'm sorry. the dude sitting in, you know, on Silicon Valley in a shed on, you know, Sandhill or in San Francisco, who's going to vibe code their way. Oh, I'm sorry. How about the other 10,000 software engineers that, you know, Salesforce has? Or the 3,000 software engineers at work they have. I mean, are they just like sitting around, you know, on their thumb? No, of course. They're going to try to innovate and what's going to happen is no different than what happened in 99 and 2000.

Yeah. If you look at the top 50 sellers on the Internet today of, like, the large. just e-commerce companies. Like, yes, Amazon is one, but Walmart, Home Depot, you know, are, you know, Macy's. Yeah, it's a good. Decombered businesses. Like one way you can. Really quickly, you can actually test the thesis empirically by looking at R&D spend of tech

companies and how much they actually spend of the money they raise before they IPO on software development specifically. And it's shockingly low, way lower than you'd think. You feel like software company goes public. You literally at all these like pod shops and all these head. audience hedge fund guys. And by the way, the trade, there's a great chart. I wish I could pull it up, which is like, you know, it's like software exposure for hedge funds

has gone like this. Yeah. Semiconductor exposure has gone like this. Sure. And, you know, usually if you do the opposite of what everybody's doing, you'll make a lot of money. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. One, you know, one kind of test you could run is like, if you're thinking about a company like Workday is if you went to all of Workday's customers right now and you said, hey, I can, I can build this for, and I'll sell it to you at 20% of the price, would anybody actually switch over? Because it'd be like, okay, it's going to be cheaper, but what if it's like way less reliable? What, what if I get, what if it's so unreliable or has so many issues that I get fired over it? Yeah. You know there are like multi-billion dollar revenue businesses that are literally built to sit on top of companies like Salesforce and

workday to help them manage the companies. to manage the software. It's, it's, now again, so then you think about, like, I think companies that are, like, selling to big enterprises are actually going to end up great. Now, again, you might have the Sears and K-Marts of the world that, you know, didn't innovate or were over-levered. So, like, I do worry about some of these private equity software companies

that get way over-levered, and if they try to drive too high at Epocheon margins and sacrifice R&D. Now, there are other terms, like a vista, like what Robert Smith does, And he's actively like, they're trying to be like, no, we need to like double down on AI and like double down in R&D in these things. But I think there will be some people that are just trying to maximize your bad margins that'll be hurt. And guess what? Somebody will go build the next competitor of that.

So then you're like, look, we think about like an area that's probably more right for AI disruption is companies selling into like SMBs because the software isn't nearly as complex. But again, there are companies. It's not like companies like HubSpot, which is a great business. that sells in the SMB, they have probably a thousand software engineers. They're sitting there trying to disrupt themselves constantly. So it's not, I don't know.

I think it's. Yeah, it's definitely market by market sector by sector. It's not in the hype cycle for sure. Like, I think people just don't truly understand how like software companies actually sell. Yeah.

That's just say that people are going to vibe code it away. Now, what is incredible is how fast some of these AI businesses have grown. Yeah. that are built off the tailwinds of some of these companies, even like a company like a Click House, which just raised in a big round. We were one of the early investors in it, luckily, totally by dumb luck.

Somebody, you know, we have four couple of investors in Grafano Labs, which, you know, is a software company, but embracing AI and just had an incredible quarter and plan. And so, like, you are, you are seeing there are, you're going to be a bunch of companies in software that continue to innovate. Could you vibe code equipment share? that was one of your they just IPO.

Oh, it's funny. I am vibe code. I was going to vibe code car collection software, but then I decided since I actually have a job for a living, I'm going to hire somebody else to vibe code it for me. Job creator. Total software engineer victory.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just creating another job. Actually, some 18-year-old senior at Santa Barbara High School is benefiting from this. That's fantastic. They're going to have a job forever. For sure.

They're going to be maintaining. I'm not buying cars. They're going to be maintaining this thing for years. I'm going to get you guys in on it as well. Oh, I like that. I'm down. No, but on equipment, care,

equipment chair, look, I mean, it's up almost 30% from the IPO. It's, uh, my partner's Tim and Zach. My partner's Tim and Zach led that deal.

Uh, I take no credit for it. They did a phenomenal job. Um, it's, look, it's benefiting from, you know, the ongoing,

there's a massive, if you were to isolate, you know, CapEx and infrastructure spend outside of like GDP, you know, driving GDP growth right now, I think it's like a very meaningful part. Highways, energy products, data centers. I think another big thing that's going to drive a lot of CapEx is this, you know, accumulated depreciation, this accelerated depreciation and the big, beautiful bill.

That will benefit people like equipment share and to put it in perspective. I think companies like equipment share and then the S-1, because they haven't filed results yet, I think last quarter, you know, in the S-1 result, in the last quarter of the S-1, and the S-1 was, like, growing nearly 30% a year. Yet you have companies like United Hertz and Sunbelt that grow like single digits, and yet these things traded almost similar. You've got margins. Now, the reality is, it's people that tend to buy companies like equipment share or Hurt

equipment are not used to businesses that grow 30%. So they need to just, like, continue to put up results. And I think they'll look at the multiple expansion over time. But they are, it is like a, great second derivative play on AI. Totally. In the public markets, when you look at a software company, it feels like a lot of people are looking at, you know, is top line accelerating?

That should be happening if you're a true AI company. You're also looking at stuff like, are you over leverage? Then you can also just talk to the management team. And it doesn't sound like they know anything about AI. You could be very, you know, skeptical of the company. How do you think about when you find a new company? What research, what's your process for understanding? how they'll be positioned over the next couple of years.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think what we should do is just count the number of interns they have, frankly, because 24-year-olds and 22-year-olds are going to know more about this than 50-year-olds and 40-year-olds like myself. No, all kidding aside. The way we think about it is we just think of how, is this like squarely in an area that could be like very easily disrupted by AI? We just sit in like, how deeply is this product integrated?

How many people are using the product? Is it a result of stuff coming out of, do they own their own data? I think we just, we think about how complex the product is to build. You know, like we talk to a company that's growing like a rocket ship and that makes, like, software to help like voices in call centers. And for us, and it's called like a rocket ship, but we're just like, but they sell into call centers. But the call center software companies just build this themselves. And then it's like a function of, okay, well, what valuation then do they want?

And then you dig in deep and it's like, and I'm not saying this one way or another. Do they have like one or two customers that are 30, 40% of sales? Like, you know, we were looking at a company recently where like 40% of their sales is to a company that, you know, we're pretty skeptical on whether it should exist in 10 years. Yeah. And it's like, you know, 30, 40% of their sales. Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of like a dying gas from that bigger company. And they're sneaking the money out of the back through this new startup.

Talk about the IPO window. Feels like it's been open. There's a lot of rumors about the big company, SpaceX, Open AI, Anthropic. But what does it mean? You mean, you saw Equipment share. Like, what's your take on the IPO market and where it might evolve over the next year? Good companies can go public at any time. Okay.

Except, like, you know, equipment share is up 30%. Yeah. Like, boy, it was a great, it was a good deal. Yeah. I think, I think what's going to be very interesting about some of these giant, I think, a clip show is like a billion dollar deal. Yeah. It's not sucking liquidity out of the markets like,

oh, we're going out and raising $200 billion. Yeah, a lot of people seem super confident that, that, uh, the market will fully support a SpaceX, Anthropic and opening a eye. David Gagin's market. We, we shall see. By the way, the money, has to come from somewhere. So you have to say,

well, is it going to come out of cash? Is it going to come out of treasuries? Is it going to come out of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft? Probably every... The reality is a company like a SpaceX or an Open Air,

an Anthropic, or a Stripe, or let's use like Bite Dance. By the way, Bite Dance trades has massive amounts of earnings. You know, the negative is it's China, right? Yeah. But the positive hours has massive amount of earnings and you know, you can get to a giant number like valued like SpaceX of a fundamental earnings number.

Yeah. So you're like, where is a $150 billion going to come from? And so in that one you probably say, well, it would probably attract new money back into China. Yeah. But then might people pull out some pull some money out of Tencent and pull some money out of Alibaba or Google or Microsoft to get exposure to this thing. I'm sure in the case of a SpaceX, it would take money out of a, you know, it would take money out of Tesla because it's like Elon, you know, it's like diehard and forgivers.

But maybe he's just going to merge, you know, SpaceX and Tesla together. And then they'll have to then change it to the Elon Musk company. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think Tesla shareholders would have been very frustrated to get XAI merged in, but getting SpaceX merged in. And maybe you got a little ax. I would not. I knew nothing.

Would it shock me if it happened? No. Someone in the chat just said that the ticker ax just got reserved at NICC. So we'll see what that means. That's exciting. What do you think of the secondary market? When I moved to Silicon Valley, it was seen as a total bear signal if a founder, CEO was selling stock at the early stage.

Now companies stay private for so long. There's massive secondary sales. Elon's been a master of liquidity keeping SpaceX private for 20 years. How is the secondary market evolving? What are you seeing? It's definitely evolved a lot. When I started working at Besserberg in 2004, 2005, it was a very, you know, it was very, you know, world-class venture funds were like, oh, my, absolutely not. You should not let big secondaries.

And I got into my first investment ever in 2009 in a company called Bizarre Voice, doing a second. secondary. Now I will tell you most deals have a secondary component. It feels a little bit frenzyish right now like the Facebook Twitter back then. I was just at an investor conference yesterday speaking in Arizona and it shocked. I had multiple people come up to me. Institutional investors like random companies pension funds that were like, oh, what do you think of? We're like buying into it here. Yeah. Like, oh, this doesn't end well. Not just for like, it didn't mean it and drop it.

No, no, no, no. It is one of those signals when like the person who's not a professional investor is talking to you about things that feel like in professional investments. Yeah, I got even a better one. One of my big institutional investors, fantastic guy. Name will be, I've not said, but he's like, you need to start a micro-secondary fund that we, will buy secondary interests in these tender 30 act funds.

You have like the new COTU fund and the VISTA fund. And all these, and it's a huge way of coming. Yeah. And basically they offer like quarterly redemptions. Like you can take out like five or 10% a year. It's what like B-Ree was, right? And then,

but occasionally if there's too many people that want to redeem, you have to gate them. But you never want to gate. But when do you think everybody's going to gate? Like everybody's going to put, All the dentists and doctors are all going to pull out at the exact same time. Yep. And my buddy was like, oh, you should start a micro-secondaries fund to buy out their interests

in all these interval funds when they all, when they put up, when the gate comes up, and all of them want out at the same time. And they're like, wait a second, we can't get out. We're locked up. What do you mean? I thought this was like liquid. Yeah. It's common.

Don't worry. It's good. Don't worry. What do you think Ferrari, the business is worth? Hmm. Oh boy. I thought you're going to ask me what I thought of the new car. Lewis was Hamilton was fast and Dustin at preseason dustin. It's an amazing business.

The stupidest thing I ever did was buy the cars and not the stock. I actually have several friends that I race for our challenge with that bought the stock at the IPO and now they slowly dribble the stock out to buy cars. Wow. It's an amazing brand. I don't know what it's true. Yeah, and only IP out in 2015. What if the stock like, I mean, what's for, stock price now.

Stock's down 10% in the last month. It's a $63 billion. You'll just vibe code a Ferrari. The right thing is you can't be I. Yes. You can vibe code. But it's up 500% since the IPO. Right when you got into cars, you should have been getting into Ferrari shares.

Yeah, yeah. What advice would you give to someone just getting into venture, private equity, raising a fund, looking at opportunities. We're seeing this like K-shape right now with the mega funds scaling up. Feels harder than ever to start sort of a mid-sized fund. What are you seeing that's interesting that new managers are doing?

That's a good question. I'm going to steal a line from Jeremy Levine who's a senior partner, investment venture partners, and probably one of the best venture capital over the last 25 years. You guys could ever get a bond. He's incredible.

Again, an amazing investor. It was like that very early investor in Pinterest. and LinkedIn and Yelp and Shopify with Alex Ferrara, like the total study. When he said to me, I would always complain about what they were paying me at the time. And he's like, but Mitchell, you're learning a lot.

And so the most important thing is actually to go find, if you're trying to get into this industry, and I think there's too many people that are young starting funds and they're going to actually like, or entrepreneurs and I've actually never really professionally invested, I would actually tell you you're better off going to find the apprenticeship and literally go find an amazing venture

capitalist or venture capital firm that you can go work for. Convince Sequoia or Benchmark or Mike Maples or Josh Kaufferman or strong. Like guys that have been doing this, gals have been doing this, Teresa Gow who have been doing this for a long time and go shadowing for two years. That's how you're going to really look. That is honestly the best advice. Or 10.

10. Yeah. Like so many Yeah, a lot of people getting these funds Like two years later, I'm raising my own fund. It's like, you haven't seen a full cycle. Going, like, maybe you're a good investor. Maybe you've made some good Angel Blatz. Maybe you did a couple years at a fund already. But going and saying I'm going to do the, the path of doing the 30 to 50 to $100 million to $200 million fund.

Like, that is like, it's tricky, especially where prices are. I mean, I give Harry at 20VC a lot of credit. Like, he started out in the podcast. He, like, hustled his way. Like, I'm sure you guys are going to get to start to see, like, really interesting deals from doing. this. It doesn't mean in like 18 months ago, you're going to go start a fund. No. Yeah. I think it's people confuse angel invest in and being successful in angel investing with all of a sudden if you get a hundred million bucks, you'll be really successful.

It's really, really hard. And I think people need to find mentors and go work for people that have invested as you through cycles. 100%. What does it take to actually be contrarian? because it's like whenever you know it's such a popular word in this industry now everybody says they're contrarian and yet of course only that's consensus consensus yeah exactly and so i feel i feel like it's something like humans have an innate sort of instinct to kind of go with the herd and and and so you have to like fight that but how do you fight it i mean deep going has always told me if you want to know where the stock market goes but he's like look he's like you've got a lot of small hard, Hectorang guys in your fund, you know, himself included.

Ask us all where we think the market's going. Like, eight of us tell you one thing and two say the other. Please call me and say what the two said. Yeah. That's where it's going. The market causes the greatest amount of pain to the, you know, greatest number of people. Well, yeah, and to be honest right now, the, if you looked at X,

you would say the consensus view is that AI is in a bubble, and then we're going to have this massive correction. And the contrarians are saying, you know, are the Roons. Obviously, he's very incentivized. Dylan Patel saying, like, people aren't prepared for this not being. Yeah, look, my view is, is my view on all that is good company and good investment can be two very fundamental things. Like, you may wake up in five years and Anthropic is worth $300,000, $350 billion. Right. It's $350 billion. I want to go back to the contrarian thing in a second. People are underestimating over the next 10 to 15 years. What is,

I is going to do. Myself included, every one of your guests included. In 2000, I could have sat on your show if it was around and nobody would have talked about the $3 trillion of

social media that's been created. Value. Yet people always overestimate the near term. Whatever level we're in will be different than 2020 and 21. It will be different than 99. There will be some correction.

Nobody will be able to predict when it happens and the correction will just happen. But then that is probably the best time to then buy a bunch of these names. and hold on to Blumper. How do you be a contrarian? I don't know.

You'd be like Lindsay Vaughn and Terry, C.L. and try to get an Algo win an Olympic medal. You know, I think people that have, I think contrarians tend to be people that understand, like, how to take very calculated risks. And are not afraid of doing that. So, like, what we look for in our analysts that come and work here, you know, cold call companies all day long. by the way the good CEO doesn't call you back it's a CEO you call every 10 10 times and calls you back after 10 times like that's it's like grit persistence not being afraid to be different so like you look for like athletes I'm sorry but if you

drop the ball at the Rose Bowl like you have faced adversity I'm sorry getting a D on a test is not adversity like you know but like so I think like a lot we like a lot of like athletes or like people like we're really big in like arts or music or doing something different. Being a straight A student is not different, especially with great inflation. Talk about the differences culturally between the hedge fund guys you know and the venture capitalists. I was reading Dan Wong was talking about how in the hedge fund world, you're wrong five times before breakfast because everyone has a different thesis and then it's immediately proved right

or wrong. So you get more used to being contrarian and everyone wants to find that edge, whereas in Silicon Valley there's a little bit more incentive to go with the herd because you can just ride the wave. What else have you seen? And do you agree with that take? Yeah, yeah. So hedge funds, it's like, I think, I think a very, very generalist view, like extremely generalist view. Broadview. What I would say is I think if you were to take the best hedge fund managers I know and the best venture capital, I know. We've been fortunate to like partner with a bunch of people, work with people, have people back us.

I would tell you that in three month or six month increments, I think the smart, the hedge fun guys are smarter and like have a better sense of where the world is going. But I think over like a five to 10 year period, the venture capitalists have a better view, just in general, like how they think. Makes sense. Yeah, kind of aligned with the business. Contrarian takes. I saw one here.

The center of gravity is shifting. More innovation is happening outside of Silicon Valley with countries outside the U.S. producing category leaders earlier in their life cycle. I read that. I felt like I disagreed with it. Defend it. In a world,

if you believe AI is coming and it's easier to build software or build whatever, well, who says you have to be in Silicon Valley where it's really expensive to live. It's really expensive to get 10. talent. If you can build it anywhere, but people have built now public companies that are completely, you know, Grafondit, by the way, is a big business. Yeah. And it's completely distributed. There are other big companies. Like you talk to people like Dell and Microsoft, they will tell you that they've shut down a lot of like small, small regional offices and just have people work remote. So I think in actually, the more you believe in AI, the more actually stuff could come on to select application layer. I think at the models at the model level.

it becomes about recruiting the best, like, you know, Ph.B. Tech-level talent and stuff like that. But just to build application companies, I think you can build them anywhere. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. George, anything else? This is great.

What's the update on the racing side? Did you watch the Rolex 24? Yeah. Any reactions? I watched part of it. Why weren't you racing in this Rolex 24? A couple years. A couple years.

A couple more years. I was to race season. We had our first race for Ferrari. challenge kicks off in like the middle of March at the thermal club uh as out of palm springs where you guys have been i'm actually going to race the support race at lamon's this year i'm gonna run i'm gonna race the monaco vintage races in an old f1 car nice my goal is through on lambs in the next like five years like 24 hours at lamonts wow that'll be amazing well you'll be sure you know you guys you got to have come on here though because you like cars

i don't really know him but george kurtz is like oh he's a sponsor oh hey he's a He's very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, his race at Daytona was insane. I mean, from getting taken out in that opening corner to getting the win. Yeah, absolute legend. Well, F1 was funny.

George Russell was talking that he thought F1, I thought I saw an interview with him where he thinks it might be a lot closer this year because there's a bunch more teams that could be in the mix. It's still obviously very early on. But like the car that Adrian knew he built at Ferrasta Martin is, totally wild. Yeah. It'll be fun.

We're putting together a market map of F1 teams based on the tech companies that are sponsoring them. Oh, that's amazing, by the way. Because there's, I mean, I think, uh, the easiest way for tech people understand. Motorsports are definitely a beneficiary of the AI boom so far. You guys got to come to a, you got to come to an F1 race. We're excited. Yeah, we were in Vegas.

It was fun. Well, yeah, I'm assuming we'll be at all three American races this year. I hope so. I hope so. Anyway, have a great catching up, Mitchell. We'll see you soon, Mitchell. We'll see you soon, Mitchell. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software. And I'm also going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits, and H.R built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. And we have some breaking news. Sam Altman has responded to the anthropic ads. He says, first, the good part about the anthropics.

ads. They are funny, and I laughed. I like it. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads is that we won't do exactly this. We would never obviously run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid, and we know our users would reject that. I guess it's on brand for Anthropic double speak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access because we believe access creates agency.

More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the United States. So we have a differently shaped problem than they do. If you want to pay for ChatGPT plus or pro, we don't show you ads. Anthropics serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that, and we are doing that too. but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly, Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI.

They block companies they don't like from using their coding product, including us. They want to write rules for themselves, for what people can and can't use AI for. And now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad democratic decision-making in addition to access. We also are committed to building the most resistant. resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI. And we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks is a dark path.

As for our Super Bowl ad, it's about builders and how and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to codecs. There have been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday. and we think builders are really going to love what's coming for them in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them. So he fires back. Yeah, it was, uh, more responses.

This is why I said in general, like, again, I think Sam has to admit that the ads are, like, pretty entertaining. And it's just such a wild move. And, uh, unexpected from, from anthropic, given that, uh, they've been, you know, trying, I mean, I'd say like from a brand standpoint, going with, like, the sort of edgy adult humor was, was, uh, unexpected. But yeah, ultimately it's deceptive. Like, they're trying to mislead people about Open AIs ad product. Yeah, it's not corn syrup.

Like the entire strategy of the campaign is clearly not to drive downloads. It's fud. It's fun. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, I think, uh, they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll, there will probably be a Harvard business, you know, case study on this campaign. Maybe we should do TBPN business case studies. I think that would be fun.

You should generate those. Also, it's just anti-ad, which I don't like. I like ads. Here's another ad. Label box, R.L. Environment's Voice, Robotics, Evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And we have our next guest in the Restream waiting.

Is it time to puff? It's time to puff. We got Simon from Turbo Puffer. in the mainstream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN UltraVal. Simon, how you doing? Good to see you. Good, good to see you guys.

Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. It's time to puff. It's time to puff. What's new in your world? Were you thinking about doing an over-the-top attack ad on a competitor or are you locked in focused for this Super Bowl? What's the strategy?

How is the business growing? I mean, you were so generous to give us a front-and-send logo to the Super Bowl. Check the box. As a new entrant, yeah, as a new entry to the new world, I can't, I don't really understand American football. Okay. But it seems right up your alley because when I think of it from first principles, it seems like a sport that has been designed to show ads. Yes. Which I think that is a great American invention.

So I have to respect that. It's beautiful. It's very beautiful. Yeah. How has the, the agenic coding boom been processed to you? What's the effect? Are you seeing any slowdown? There's been hype waves and sell-offs and all sorts of turmoil.

Has the recent sort of re-acceleration taking a surprise? Did it hit you like a flashbang? Whatever is going on right now is hitting us like something. That's good. What is going on? Break it down for us. You've been waiting to use this effect all day? Yes, all day.

And the chat demanded it. Anyway. Bobby says billions, billions must puff. We need a puff one. We need a puff one. Like a puffer fist that's sort of just like, you know,

when you want me to get off camera, you get a puffer fist that sort of counting down. Well, we have a smoke grenade that kind of issues puffs of smoke, but maybe they need logos all over that. That would be good.

I mean, look, the world's puffin. I think you asked about coding. I think coding was the first vertical that really started puffin, hard. And I mean, in general, the way that we look at the world is that we can certainly take all of the knowledge in the world and we can distill it into a few terabytes of weights. And those terabytes of weights are extremely useful at reasoning over data. But in some way, they have to reason with the data. And to reason with the data, you need a search engine, right? That has all the

canonical data and is that tool to search through the data. I mean, that's what cursor and cognition and other coding tools are doing with Turbo puffer. is to search through the code. And so I think we're seeing that in other verticals now. We see it in legal, right? And we see every vertical sort of starts by just pushing a bunch of things into context. But then really what they want is to allow the agent to search by itself. And that's where TurboPuffer comes in as that as the search engine

it can index petabytes and petabytes of data to allow these agents to search. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about ads. Do you have a burgeoning ads business, not ads in TurboPuffer, but powering ad tech systems, because I can imagine a lot of new platforms, they have a lot of content, they have a lot of ads, they need to match those. And so your system should be valuable there. Is that a stretch or is that a good application? I think most of the ad businesses already have extremely sophisticated systems for this.

I'm thinking new ad businesses. Yeah. Yeah, no, we haven't seen that vertical really come alive for us yet. Yeah. I imagine, I imagine it becomes important. And what about other sort of applications or sectors that are growing in terms of this technology, adopting this technology, puffing broadly? Something that we're seeing puffing pretty hard right now is that people want to basically

build their own Google. They want to take the entire web and make it searchable and allow the agents the reason over either literally the entire public internet or data sizes that are the internal data that's of that kind of volume, right, hundreds of billions of documents. And recently, we launched some product to support that where you can basically now build your own internet index on top of turbo puffer for an extremely reasonable cost. So what we showed is that we can take 100 billion documents and make them available to you with a P50, so that's the immediate latency of less than 50 milliseconds.

So this is pretty remarkable for an off-the-shelf SaaS product and something that we're seeing that some of the most sophisticated customers in the world need. And I don't think there's any other easy way to do it than to puff. Yeah, we talked a little bit last time on just compute bottlenecks, AI bottlenecks, anything that's keeping you up at night in terms of data center buildouts, semiconductor buildouts, even if it's not directly related to your business, is there anything? that you see that could potentially put a damper on the growth of the booming AI industry? I mean, I think everyone is struggling to get compute when you get enough skill. And I mean, it's good news in CPU land. I'm not contending for the GPU yet, but we are starting to see. I mean, you have to do that at any scale, right?

You have to start requesting from the cloud providers, hey, I want hundreds and hundreds of this machine this particular region for these customers. So I think that's something that everyone's facing. Obviously, we're watching the DRM prices and things like that, like everyone else. But hopefully, hopefully that comes down. Are there any kind of like, you have an interesting view into the usage of pretty much every popular AI product. Obviously, you can't talk about individual, the sort of usage of any individual product.

But is there any sort of narrative violations that you're seeing? broadly. Every single day, depending on new products getting announced, people are saying, you know, it's over for this company, it's over for that company, or I just turned from this product. But overall, what are you seeing? I think, I mean, what we see is that the companies that are building the most exciting product are trying to operationalize very, very large amounts of data. That's difficult, difficult to copy. And so, I mean, we have a survivorship bias in the businesses that we see, but they come to us because they want to connect more data to AI. than anyone else, I would say, yeah, if you're a thin layer and you're not trying to vacuum up a lot of data,

then it starts to get really difficult. So, I mean, I do see as with how powerful the models are now, you have to be investing in some pretty deep tech to make it. Yeah. Yeah. Are you doing anything on the front of like making TurboPuffer intelligible to agents? If someone goes to a vibe coding app or a CLI tool and they just say, solve this problem for me, the agent pulls turbo puffer off the shelf? I mean, we try as much as we can to make the docs very easy to read.

I think it's not completely clear how the LLMs make the decision of what the best database is, but I think that we're trying to do what we can to make sure that the LLMs like Puffin as well. We have made API decisions around what it would be easier for the LLMs to guess. Yeah. Yeah, I heard an interesting anecdote about someone building a CLI tool. They wanted to make it easy for an LLM to grab or an agent to grab. And so basically they just rewrote the CLI to include every possible hallucination or mistake that could be made. And people often do this with URLs, where they will say, well, you know, some people might type the wrong URL sometimes, but LLMs hallucinate in a slightly different way.

They don't necessarily fat finger a single key, but they might, you know, drop the wrong token or use the wrong phrase or use the wrong term. And so they rewrote their CLI to include like every possible permutation that an LLM could think about in terms of like update, edit, quit, exit, you know, all the different keywords. just created hooks and functionality for all of them. So even if the LLM shows up and is like kind of clumsy, it can still use it. And so it still likes it. But I don't know, I don't know where all that goes on the commercial side.

This is more for like open source. Yeah, I think, I think maybe it's a little overblown how much you have to design for this. I think it's the same with humans. We have fat-finger stuff and the LLMs are a lot more resilient now than they were even just six months ago. So to me, it's just always good API design. If you're designing a good API or a good CLI or good interface, you should sort of be able to predict like, oh, if I did this, it's probably going to work this way.

And I think the LLM treated exactly the same way. So I would maybe take back that we're doing anything super intentional for the LLMs because I think the same design that's good for humans is good for LLMs. Yeah, that makes sense. What, if anything, has changed since the funding round? Yeah. Not much has changed. We got Logo Rights the Ramp. So that's exciting.

No, that. Congratulations. Second Ramp. They were like, finally you raise a bit more venture capital. We'll let you use our logo. There you go.

I mean, you know, it's, it's, yeah, I think we're really, really happy to work with that team. And I think there's lots more logos waiting beneath the surface to be on Earth.

So the murderous row will continue to evolve as we earn the trust of more and more of the lovely company that we work with. What was it, early on

when companies were discovering turbopuffer and realizing, hey, this is really good and this is going to be sort of key to enabling all these different features

and functionality that we want, was it actually a challenge getting logo rights because they didn't want their competitors to be super aware of it, right? You want like,

hey, if I can have even an extra month before another company that I might have some overlap with, I'll take it. Yeah, I mean, we have some verticals in, like there's a head front that doesn't really want us to talk about

because they see it as a competitive advantage, right? And so, I mean, we like that tension for sure. I think, honestly, in the beginning, it was just, I'm sure that some of the companies that bet on us early were like, okay, this is like three or four people in Canada, and we're betting our whole business and search on them being able to make it. And I've certainly heard from one of our early customers that that kept them awake at night. Now the company is 10 times that size, right, and of an independent caliber. And we owed them everything to have bet on us that early on. But it was certainly a challenge in the beginning, not just because they saw it as a secret sauce,

but also because they were afraid of what their customers would think, right? Here's this little, like, dinky company in the woods of Canada. Like, what do they know about writing search engines? I think they were concerned with their customers thought. And we've just tried to do everything that we can by keeping our uptime as good as possible and walking everything carefully and building good software to earn that trust. But I think every startup that gets logos, I think the founders have to really fight for it. And they have to build the relationships to make sure that people trust they're going to use the logo in good hands. And they're not going to plaster it all over contexts that they wouldn't feel okay with.

How are you guys approaching vendor selection today? when are you running the calculus of should we build this ourselves or pull something off the rack? We were just discussing this recently where we've started our data stack now is just using like cloud code or cursor agent in a repo and just giving as much information as possible what's going on. We're we're starting to more and more ditch just the tools because it's so easy to compose the charts and things like that with agents. So the shallow SaaS software, I think it's dire there because it's just so easy to replace it now. But I think there will also be a bit of a hangover from that, right? There is real value here in like permissions and enterprise, like all these enterprise features. So it will probably go very much in the direction of everyone's going to build their own little shallow thing.

And then some of them are going to realize that this is a bit of a nightmare to maintain and then pay for it again. could be dire for a little bit, but I think that that, I don't think it's going to swing. I still think there's a lot of value in that. Yeah. What's the worst, like, logo crime that you've ever seen someone do? Is that just go in the customer database? Search has any employee from a hyperscaler signed up for a trial account and then slap the logo on the landing page?

What would you tell a young founder not to do in terms of three? drawing a logo on a landing page. I think we, like, I think the logo crimes is actually great diction. I think we see this a lot where you see like just, you go on a page and it's like Microsoft, right? And it's all these, it's like, okay, like, we were talking about this internally because, so for example, there's a, there's one small team inside of Roussel that uses turbo puffer. Yeah.

And I think a lot of companies might then just put the Ressel logo on the website and say, Bersel's Puffin. Yeah. But I don't think that's fair, right? It's an exhilarary use case. It's one person who's using it for go to market and doing a phenomenal job over there. And so what we're trying to do is like, okay, that logo might not make it to the front page because that would not be an honest association.

And then on the use case page, we're going to be having to tag this as core and auxiliary. Sure. And then under accelerary, right, it will say, okay, it's this particular team at this enterprise that's using it. Just to be completely honest about it. And I think that's, and then I think just sending a note to the teams that you work with of like, hey, is this a cool place to use your logo? Yeah, just ask for permission.

But you can't. Yeah, you can't speed run it. It takes time. Well, the chat, the chat's saying Versailles Puffin. Breaking news. Put up a TBPN trading card. We got the scoop here. Yeah, we love Guillermo.

Yeah. Case study will come out. But as I said, it's an exhilar use case. Yeah. Yeah, but that's still cool. And we love the trust. But it's not like B zero is puffin or something like that. Yeah, no.

That makes a time of sense. Well, thank you so much for hopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. And have a great rest of your day. While we were live, Google reported earnings. Oh, yeah. What happened?

Revenue grew 18% search, 17%. Gemini has 750 monthly users. And the stock is absolutely nuking. So just don't look at your portfolio. Stay in Slack. It's just barely over $4 trillion dollar company, though. That's so rough. When are you coming to California next?

After hours. Or southern California, I should say. I'm going to California next week. All right. But when are you coming up to Canada? I keep like every time we talk about this. And then you guys are like, oh, it's so cold. It's so far away.

I just feel like the whole country's un-American. From my perspective, it's just, it's just a little un-American. Have you met American, Simon? I'm right here. Okay. I'm ready for you. Okay, you got me. You got me.

Well, we'll talk about it. We would love to go fishing. Yeah. We need to do a weekend trip. It's too hard to bring the show. Honestly, yeah, family trip. Yeah, that'd be great. Let's do it.

Realistically. It's great. Great for kids. Bring in everybody. Awesome. You dump them in the lake and you have a great time. Sounds risky with some one-year-olds, but we'll give it a try. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.

We'll talk to you soon. Great update. Goodbye. We'll tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund. your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card chat says we need red suits red suits yeah we were talking about that today because we've been wearing the white suits a lot and now it's time for the red suits we're going to have to call the tailor guy your capital yeah says alphabet

sees 2026 capex 175 to 185 billion versus 115 billion expected we go for the past decade mag 7 we're free cash flow monsters who poured money into buybacks to support their stock prices, that era is over. Well, let me tell you about vibe.com, where D2C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on meta. Pavel says SaaS is dead, is probably oversold, and sleepy companies get wrecked in technology shifts is probably undersold. I think that's a good take.

There's a lot of people talking about the SaaSpocalypse. Patrick O'Shaughnessy shared a clip from Gavin on Gavin Baker on Invest Like the Best, saying why it's a mistake for SaaS companies to resist AI because it has a lower margin structure. We can pull this video up when there's a transformative new technology. Customers are demanding. It's always a mistake not to embrace it. Let's play this clip. I want to see what he said.

Application task companies are making the exact same mistake that brick and mortar retailers did with e-commerce. So brick and mortar retailers, they looked at Amazon and they said, oh, it's losing money. You know, e-commerce is going to be a low margin business. And so they did not invest in e-commerce. They clearly saw customer demand for it, but they did not like the margin structure of e-commerce. That is the fundamental reason that essentially every brick-and-mortar retailer was really slow to invest in e-commerce. And now here we are, and Amazon has higher margins. So margins can change.

And if there's a fundamental, transformative kind of. of new technology that customers are demanding. It's always a mistake not to embrace it. And that's exactly what the SaaS companies are doing. They have their 70, 80, 90% gross margins, and they are reluctant to accept AI gross margins. The very nature of AI is, you know, a software you write it once, and it's written very efficiently,

and then you can distribute it broadly at very low cost. Such an underrated point that the CFO just knows my company has 30% gross margins, So that's what I'm building my entire business around. My company has 90% gross margins. And that's how I'm informing every business decision when the whole structure and that you've built the foundation of your business on changes, that can be a little tricky. Quickly, yesterday we went to the Cisco AI summit. I'm sure you saw it. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era.

We have a lot of fun talking to the team at Cisco. They were very hospitable. I had a great time. Absolutely enjoyed talking to everyone. a really wild, wide-ranging conversation with Dylan Patel at the end. That's in the RSF speed if you didn't get a chance to listen to the full thing. We go all over the place. Space Data centers, what Google's doing, what Apple's doing, what Microsoft is doing.

We went everywhere. It was really, really great. Anyway, we can go through some more of the timeline. What is this? OMG CAP says he died doing what he loved, aggressively buying the dip on SaaS, like a guy averaging down on Blockbub. video in 2010. I'm averaging in to zero.

That is not good. There are a whole bunch of different takes on the SaaSpocalypse. Pierre Richelson has one. Why would I pay for SaaS if I can prompt the software and run it myself? My brother in Christ, have you heard of open source businesses? The last thing people want to do is be in charge of development and maintenance of software. You got to get an intern. It's a bull market and interns.

The interns are back. the interns you heard from Mitchell Green over at Lead Edge he's hiring interns to build stuff for him it's a bull market interns everybody wants to be the one person billion dollar company no one wants to be the billion

intern company of America yeah that's the business I really I hadn't actually heard that about Cloudflare over a thousand interns that's crazy I didn't even know that about Shopify that's very cool clearly got mocked for having 50 interns maybe they were just early

we at one point it felt like we had a ton of interns. We don't actually have that many interns, but interns are underrated. It's a, it's a good time. And it's a particularly good time with the new tools to let someone loose with just a fresh start. They don't have to, they don't have to maintain the old system. They come in and they're able to start completely fresh with fresh tools. They can pick anything off the shelf, whatever's the most cutting edge. That's what they bring into the organization, as opposed to saying, hey, you have to maintain this particular workflow or this particular technology, or you have to plug into those rest of this ecosystem, change management,

takes a long time. In turns allow you to kind of pull that forward, which is a lot of fun. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Unemployed capital allocator says, wait, I'm confused. Is it the software engineers that are obsolete or software companies? Or is it the software users? Or the software user's employers? Take him says all of the above. Yeah, the Bucho says you're not confused. None of these things will exist. in five years. Everything.

Sell everything and quit all the jobs. It is interesting. Bloomberg had an article yesterday that shared that Google is expanding their footprint in India, planning to basically, they'll have the capacity to add something like 10 to 15,000 new employees. And, you know, I don't, you know, I would say like the, probably the catalyst there is sort of, changes or unpredictability to U.S. immigration law, potentially being a factor in that. But it was kind of looking at it from a Tyler, Tyler point of view, just being like, hey, how AGI-pilled is Google broadly, you know, is deep mind if they're planning to scale headcount?

Yeah. Yeah, the headline was from Bloomberg. It's millions of square feet. So that can accommodate somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 employees per million square feet, according to Gemini here. The industry standard is 60 to 80 square feet per person. I wonder how we're doing here in the TBPN Ultrodrome. I feel like I have way more than 60 square feet to myself. Standard tech office is 100 square feet per person.

Techno chief says India is also going zero tax on data centers until 2047. Whoa. What would the tax implications be of that? tax? You don't get, yeah, maybe no property tax because you can't possibly not pay income tax on the revenue that's generated from a data center. That would be a crazy, crazy thing. But we will see. But our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We have KJ from Lotus AI. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you. I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Good to see you guys too. Thanks so much for hopping on. First time on the show, please introduce yourself in the company.

Yeah, my name is KJ Dollywall. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Lotus Health AI. Yeah. We are building an AI doctor powered by real doctors. What's the go-to-market? How much do you, like, who do you want to sell to? Like the hospital network, the individual doctors, even the individual consumer. Yeah, no, we're actually direct to consumer.

Okay. So one of the big things that we believe in is going straight to the patient because innovation in health care sort of has always lagged at the hospital systems or the insurance companies. My background's in consumer. I built a large South Asian dating app prior to this. Oh, no way. And so we just, you know, we thought, what are the things that people actually need? Yeah.

America's struggling with health care. So we decided to just go direct to consumer. Yeah, walk me through some of the, I mean, the most basic could be, you know, diet plan, exercise plan, all the way to a doctor can refer you to a lab to go get an MRI and surgery and all sorts of stuff. Like, where, what do you see as the early go-to-market, the landing zone? Like, what do you want to be excellent at and then grow from? Yeah, we're really focused on primary care today.

So when you think about America today, 100 million people don't have primary care doctors. So that's sort of this huge sort of opportunity to really give people, you know, basic care. So that means, you know, sometimes you need a prescription, sometimes you need a referral or even a lab order. If you're going to go see a specialist, like a cardiologist, and you don't have a lab ready that oftentimes that visit is a waste of time. the cardiologist and for the patient. Yeah. Right. So we can do a lot of that preliminary primary care virtually.

Yeah. And it turns out 80% of all care in general is actually, you know, possible virtually within the primary care setting. How important is image processing, you know, oh, I got a mole. Like, do you look at this? Like that's like a clout. All right. I got a scab and it's not healing and is it infected.

Is, is AI ready to handle that sort of use case? Yeah, definitely. So like, you know, we're seeing, we're seeing. We're already seeing AI being implemented in, you know, obviously the imaging space and the MRI space. But what we're focused more on is really getting the information from the patient, distilling it and summarizing it for a clinician to look at and make the final call. Sure. So that's really where Lotus is able to give Americans free primary care, essentially, because we brought the cost of care down by a factor of 10. Yeah.

So you can upload images. You can, you know, chat with Lotus for hours. it will do the intakes and alerted how you would answer questions on that clipboard when you go see a doctor. And then the doctor can review all that quickly. And the big thing sort of that we did is we sort of created this, what we call the personal health record, which is the richest longitudinal record on a patient. So when you sign up, the first thing we do is we ingest all your health data. So that's from all the EHRs, every doctor you've ever seen, your wearables data, your insurance claims data.

that allows us to build sort of the foundation of the patient. And then we can really unlock a lot of the sort of agentic workflows and the clinical workflows on top of that. That just make care delivery a lot more accurate at that scale. Years ago, I remember this company Zoc Doc was sort of like help you find a doctor nearby, almost like a Yelp for doctors. I don't remember what that business model was, but is there any overlap in or learnings from that type of business where maybe there's a referral fee to a specific doctor? or does that make any sense? Or do you just want the customer to eventually pay or ads? Like, how do you see monetization evolving?

Yeah, Zocdoc did, I think, something interesting, which they would basically have doctors pay some sort of affiliate fee to be listed on their platform. But actually getting paid for referrals in healthcare is a big no-no and kind of illegal. That's why doctors, you know, shouldn't be paid actually for referrals because then you can be incentivized to refer to a particular part. And so what we really believe in is in terms of, if you think about the largest tech companies in the world, they're computer companies, and they make money through sponsored

content. So we actually think if we focus on premium content within fitness and wellness, which is, you know, multi-trillion dollar sort of industry already. That's sort of how we'll be able to monetize. But really what we're focused on today is bringing the cost of the care down. So anthropics attacking you. Like you're the They weren't talking about Open AI. They were talking about you. Respond. No, no, no.

But I mean, you are going to have to have the talking point that responds to that ad. I'm sure that Super Bowl ad will blow over. Everyone will talk about it in the chat. You'll talk about it in the chat. But you're going to have to have a strategy for how you, you know, don't do the, hey, we're recommending lifts or we're being weird or creepy with your ads. Like, how do you think about messaging and setting the tone, the mission, the values of the company now so that you never have a PR crisis in the future.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's so important to do that, right? You know, trust and safety and privacy is very foundational to what we're building here, I noticed. And being, you know, we want to not only stand for the patient, but also for the doctor. Right. And so when you look at the industry today, doctors are burning out, right? We don't have enough doctors.

So we're really giving them the technology to supercharge their capabilities. And yeah, in terms of, you know, advertising, it'll be all. optional and you know there'll be a premium subscription if you don't want to see ads you can sort of opt out or there's other avenues we're exploring like your employers right a lot of large employers that are self-insured struggle to get their employees really good health care or at least primary care so the employee has to take time off for work you know drive an hour go see a doctor half of the times around seeing the doctor or seeing a nurse or a PA because we have such a shortage and it ruins their day and it reduces productivity for the company.

So we have companies reaching out to it saying, hey, we'll pay you $50 a month. Can you just give this to our employees for free? So there's a lot of different revenue models. We'll explore, but really what we're focused on is, how do we get to a million, 10 million patients and grow this company to scale? Because that's really how we think this sort of primary care crisis can be fixed.

Essentially, fee for service doesn't work in primary care. And even value-based care doesn't work because we don't have enough doctors. Yeah, how are you reacting to the major LLM providers potentially going into this category? A lot of them have already made announcements. They've rolled out features. They have massive user bases. What's going to be the key differentiator that allows you to go the long haul? Yeah, no, we think that's actually net positive for the industry because, you know, people are starting to trust AI with their health data.

The one thing they can't do is they can't actually treat patients, right? So we can actually, because we have real licensed clinicians getting treatment, we can actually close that care loop, right? We can give you that prescription, order the lab, refer you to the specialist, give you a diagnosis. And, you know, in fact, you know, one of our investors is an executive at Open AI. And so we've been sort of following that sort of product that haven't been for a while. But I think it's net positive. I mean, I think there's, you know, there's, you know, health care is a $5 trillion market in terms of spend. and a lot of that is just waste, right?

That can be sort of cut out and tax dollars. Are you, do you think Lotus is really a threat to urgent cares where, let's say somebody has like a skin issue and they're used to the flow of like I want immediate care. I want to get like if somebody gets, I don't know, like poison, bad case of poison oak and they want, they need to get some treatment for it. They'll go to an urgent care, be able to get like a prescription or a stare, or something like that. Whereas with Lotus, you could just get, you know, basically as long as you have your phone, you could immediately, like, get treatment. Is Lotus threatening to those kind of businesses that rely on people just needing, like, convenience? Yeah, no, actually, it's the quite opposite, because what those urgent care centers today and even emergency rooms are hospitals,

their biggest problem is they're overwhelmed with patients coming in that don't need to come in for, you know, things that can be treated through telemedicine or telehealth, right? We actually refer you to urgent care because we obviously recognize and our clinicians recognize that there are obviously certain things that can't be treated, you know, virtually and need to be done in person. And that's where we refer you to inpatient or urgent care sort of, you know, care where the doctor needs to touch you or, you know, do a procedural thing. But it turns out, like I said earlier, you know, 80 to 90 percent of care can be done

virtually and that's sort of the big bottleneck. So what ends up happening is all these patients end up going to urgent care or, you know, hospital ER rooms. And then the patients that actually need that care end up not getting it because, you know, these systems are overwhelmed today. Well, we are in the Lambda Lightning Round. You raise some money. Tell us what happened. What's the deal? Yeah, we just raised, you know, a total of 41 million in our seed and series of. Congratulations. Congratulations. Bider Perkins and CRV could lead that round. And then for, you know,

some great names. We're proud to have these guys. Well, congratulations on all the progress, and I'm sure we'll see you back here soon. Great to meet you. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we will continue our Lambda Lightning round with Nick Sharp from Adio. He's a co-founder and CEO. Welcome back. Hey guys, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here again. Yeah, good to have you back. Give us the update on the last few months. I feel like the timeline has been loving. Adi-O feels like there's a ton of momentum. Yeah, well, that's good. We've had a, it's the end of a busy day here in London. And it's been a long one, but an exciting one. So I think it was about five months ago that I was on the show when we raised our Series B. And since then, we've been busy.

deep in R&D land. And today we are, we're showing the world the fruits of our labor and launching a product called Ask Atio. Amazing. Break it down. Yeah. So it is a entirely new way to interact with Atio with your CRM. And it is a new conversational AI interface, which essentially does something, which has been

the holy grail for CRM for a really long time, which is making sense of all of the ton of data that you're generating all the time. So that's calls, that's emails, that's all of the interactions you're having with customers, product data, etc. And essentially makes it intelligible and allows you to take action on it. So good example might be I now run a workflow at the end of every day, which essentially goes through all customer calls, all customer emails, and just flags things that are important for me. So that's like customer feedback or a place that you need to step in and have a

conversation with a customer yourself, etc. Exactly. But imagine, you know, we have like 30, 40 people in our customer-facing team now. So to do that previously when we have hundreds, thousands of customer interactions a day would be impossible. And so it's, yeah, it's a very, very exciting step for us. What's been your reaction to, it feels like even, even this year, a lot of people have been saying AGI's here. And yet there's a bunch of net new CRM companies being formed. You guys have the benefit of having been around long enough to have a very strong foundation, yet not necessarily be fully kind of cemented in your ways and still a lot of functionality.

And so it feels like you were already an AI-native CRM. And so it must be kind of funny to see other CRMs coming in that are maybe trying to claim they're more AI-native. Yeah, totally. And what's funny for us is that there seems to be a level of consensus now that something's going to happen in this market, which has not been the case, right? So the consensus seems to have been building more and more and more. And in the last few months, we've just seen a, we've seen things fully flip in the other way where everyone now believes that these kind of incumbents are going to be disrupted. So we're excited by the excitement of everyone else and the kind of belief in the market.

And, you know, we, we have the job now of making sure that we continue to be at the front of the pack, which is sort of, you know, lots of short term, just being very paranoid in the short term, very optimistic in the long term, and just kind of keep building, keep going. What are you paying attention to on the sort of sales agent side, just in general? This is, you know, big opportunity for Adio, but I know you guys will want to integrate with a bunch of players as well. So far, we've been hearing, you know, people are using a bunch of different agents on that front. But what are you seeing? Yeah.

And the way that we think about this is I think when the market is, when there's much innovation and turmoil, et cetera, as we're seeing right now, you kind of want to see, you want to see how things play out a bit. So we're taking some pretty big bets, but equally we're not building a closed platform. and we're letting, we really want people to integrate with our platform. And we want our customers to go in whatever direction is right for them and make sure that we can support that. So we took a huge bet on ecosystem and building a really strong SDK. We've kind of quietly put out an MCP server and beta. So mcp.atio.com slash MCP.

But we're basically, you know, CRM is always going to be the center of a GTM stack. And so as well as doing our own things in the genetic workflows and that kind of stuff, we've also taken a huge bet on supporting all the other great companies that are doing stuff there as well. Awesome.

What can we expect from you guys this year? You're calling it now? This is the last thing you're going to ship for the year. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, exactly. Job done. Well, like, you know, for us, this is day four of FY27.

So we're just at the beginning. And honestly, it's going to be a bit of an onslaught. We have a huge, huge amount coming. We're going to follow up with this launch pretty quickly in sort of just over about a couple of months with another really, really big launch. And then, of course, we're in this interesting phase as founders or as company builders or whatever, where you now have to do two things. you've got to scale your company and you've got to hit all of your really ambitious targets.

But at the same time, everything needs to be rebuilt every three months. So the way that you do go to market, the way that we think about product, etc. We're in kind of deep R&D mode across the company. And so you're trying to be simultaneously be an extremely scrappy, early stage company, but then also trying to kind of compound growth and service. a growing number of customers. So we're up to about 7,000 customers now, which is triple this time last year.

And so, yeah, lots of things going on at once. How are you thinking about outbound actually sending emails, like going into more of like the AI agent for sales rep, replace a sales rep? That's a space that feels like people are trying stuff. but nothing's really caught. Like how far away are we from that? The interesting thing is that the,

I mean, you might have seen this, the ramp post that was making rounds. Yeah, and these channels are getting saturated, and it's a constant game of cat and mouse, right? Because the more emails that get sent, the better the Gmail or whoever else is detecting them, and shutting them down, et cetera. So we take an ecosystem, take an ecosystem bet on those things. Again, you know, especially when it comes to Outbound,

we really want to be, we want to be the place where the customer context live, where your team live, et cetera. We do, we integrate with a lot of these players. Now, over time, you want to be able to provide your customers with a pretty out-the-box solution to a lot of these problems. So never say never. But right now, we're mostly focused, when it comes to Outbound, we're focused on just partnering with the best people we can. Amazing. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come to shout with us.

Thanks for staying up. Thanks for staying up. We appreciate it. Long day. Exactly. We'll see you soon. Yeah, we'll see you back on soon. Yeah.

Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. We have one last story that we should get through before we get out of here. Citadel's Ken Griffin says Trump White House has, quote, enriched family members. The Wall Street figured Republican donor offers rare public criticism of perceived administration's self-dealings. They're calling him,

Ken doesn't like Gryfton, the billionaire investor. Sick of Grypton. He said, this is the direct quote from Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel. He says, this administration has definitely made missteps

in choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration. He said at a conference in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday that was hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

He added, quote, that calls into question, is the public interest being served? In response to Griffin's comments, a White House spokesman said, quote, the only special interest guiding the Trump administration's decision-making is the best interest of the American people. The fact that major stock indexes have hit multiple all-time highs, real wages have grown, and inflation has cooled since President Trump took office, is proof that this administration is delivering for every American.

Trump and his family members have profited since he took office. office last year. This is the Financial Times. An FTE investigation in October found the president's rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire had already reaped more than one billion in pre-tax profits over the prior year, partly attributed to a digital currency boom, buoyed by the White House's own crypto-friendly policies. Companies backed by Trump's sons have been awarded contracts with government agencies and benefit from administration policies on cryptocurrency and prediction markets. And a lot of this goes into the decision to sell Nvidia chips to the UAE, right?

Yeah. And an associate investment. Yeah, I meant to ask Dylan about that yesterday. Yeah. This idea of like, do you think any lab CEOs or hyperscalers were looking at that, the reporting that came out over the weekend that the spy chic in the UAE had bought half a billion dollars of world, or sorry, invested half a billion into World Liberty Financial.

bought 49% of the company right before the inauguration, and then quickly we approved a pretty massive sale to China. And I wonder how many people were kind of reading that story and being deeply frustrated, just given, hey, like, I would have. Oh, I would have bought them. I was a happy buyer. Trump, of course, said he didn't know anything about the investment. Yeah, there's a big question.

I mean, obviously the Wall Street Journal, I think, had a piece on like the timing being suspicious. The Trump administration's denied that there's anything wrongdoing going on. Maybe there'll be an investigation at some point. But the question that's in my mind, aside from that one, is just, is the UAE suitable for selling GPUs to? Because if it's something that's like really obviously a thumbs up and everyone's happy about, then it's a lot less controversial to do it, I would think, because we're now at a point where many folks that I look to for guidance on, like, the geopolitical chip issue, have come around to the idea that maybe we do want China to actually be buying

Nvidia chips and there's maybe some good arguments there. Initially, it was like cut everything off. Now the ball has moved to don't sell them ASML equipment, don't sell them lithography equipment. Yeah, come around to, we want people to standardize. To be on the American AI stack. Is it better for the UAE to be running on Vidia versus Huawei? I mean, yeah, Dylan's point was like, not, this, these things don't happen in isolation. So if you, if you don't sell Nvidia chips to China, it's not that they're going to, you know, retaliate specifically with, with Huawei or Smick or Sme.

It's that you could like, they could like, you know, do something in a completely different part of the world. Like Dylan's example was like, be more aggressive about Africa or something like that. Like, or the rare earth elements. So there's like a million different debate points going on and all of those sort of come together. But with regard to the UAE, I mean, I guess that there is a risk that you sent a bunch of NVIDIA chips and they just stay on the container ship and they just get forwarded straight along to someone who's maybe even less friendly. But I don't know that that's been a historical risk.

There's been a lot of chip smuggling. A lot of it's gone through Malaysia. I don't exactly know how much of a risk the U.S. U-A-E poses. So I'd love to talk to Bill Bishop about how that fits in. We'll have to keep digging in. But obviously, I think we're fans of Jimmy Carter's approach to leading the American people. Divest.

Divest. Stay focused. Lock in. It's the great lock-in. It's the great lock-in. You've got to stay focused on the job at hand. Anyways, crazy day. Mike Isaac over the New York Times.

says by the number of Open AI employees I see tweeting about Anthropics Super Bowl ad, Anthropics should be paying Open AI earned media fees. That's funny. Oh, also related to Ken Griffin, I like this post from High-Yeield Harry, where it's Mr. Beast with Kim Kardashian and Ken Griffin's just way in the background. And High-Yield Harry said, guy like me would have taken a photo with Ken Griffin instead. And I don't know who he's imagining him being.

Is he imagining that he's Mr. Beast or Kim Kardashian? but it's funny to imagine being at this party and saying, I got to get, I got to get a photo with Ken. I got to get a photo with Ken. Whoa. Okay, we got to close with this, this G-Wagon. Look at this G-Wagon.

You mentioned this. Pull it up. I did not. I did not see this. It's right after, yeah, look at this thing. What is going on here. I'm going to pull up. I texted him to get some more context.

So Blake runs an account called Found Objects on Instagram, and he is selling, a very special G-wagon that's effectively like a, it's, it's one of 10 ever made. Why is Vladimir Putin seen next to it? Because he was, he was rolling in the evening. He was rolling in the, this was part of the presidential fleet. So it's basically like a Mibok converted, uh, with, with, into a G-wagon. Yeah.

Uh, in order to, you'd have to do an insane conversion to get this into the U.S. Uh, uh, uh, but, for the right person, it could be, could be, could be really great. This has Mark Zuckerberg written all over it. Yeah, he's got the Kyan. He's got the extended to West Coast Customs. This extended to... Yeah, go to the picture at the very end. Yeah, the picture of the very end.

It goes incredibly hard. Standing in front of it. It's like, why is he not getting into it or getting out of it? He's just like walking next to it. It's very, very confusing. So this can be yours for the low price. So you know the person that's seen this. This is not AI. This is confirmed. This is real. Because there was, there was an

AI car caught on Bring a Trailer that caused a firestorm in the car auction community. The pictures were absolutely hilarious. You'd look in the car and the car was generated, I guess, on cobblestones. And inside the car, the AI had hallucinated more cobblestones. So it looked like you had cobblestones floor mats and you can imagine getting into a technical lot. So basically before you pay. You know, 225K for a brand new GWagon. First, consider this 2010 G55XXL.

It's a fantastic example. And we'll end on a white pill. I guess we didn't need the red suits for Google today. Yeah. The stock has recovered. It's now up one and a half percent after hours. Let's hear it for Google. We're investing in AI, and the market loves it.

Logan also just tweeted, they just crossed 10 billion. tokens per minute on Gemini. Wow. And 750 million MAUs. I've seen it now. Give them $100 trillion valuation. It's $100 trillion. They're 4% of the way there.

They just need a 10x and then 10x again. They'll do it. Well, I'm rooting for them. I'm rooting for the entire financial market. I'm rooting for all companies because I love business. We're rooting for you because we love you. We love you. And we'll be back tomorrow.

We have a fantastic show planned. Leave us five stars. Plant the bomb. I'll tell them. about where to leave us a review. Leave us a review on Spotify, podcast, five stars. Please sign up for our newsletter, tbPN.com. Follow us on all the social media platforms. And go to go to Yahoo. Why not?

Why not? The Yahoo team, the marketing team that we're like, we need a jingle, we need someone to go sing it. This guy gets in the booth and starts singing and they're like, go harder. Yahoo! They're like, that's not hard enough. Goodbye. Nice work brothers. I'll see you on the next one.