TBPN - Peter Thiel Gets Apocalyptic, The Myth of AI Millions, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Joe Lonsdale, Bret Taylor, Riley Walz

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

(00:11) - Peter Thiel Gets Apocalyptic (13:55) - The Myth of AI Millions (49:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:34) - Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI's board, discusses how Sierra's AI agents are transforming customer service by autonomously handling tasks like answering calls and managing complex processes, thereby reducing costs and enhancing customer experiences. He emphasizes the importance of aligning AI solutions with business outcomes, advocating for outcome-based pricing models where clients pay for successfully completed tasks, ensuring that Sierra's services directly contribute to measurable business improvements. Taylor also highlights the challenges incumbent software companies face in adapting to AI advancements, noting that transitioning both technology and business models is complex, and that startups like Sierra have the advantage of agility and focus in this rapidly evolving landscape. (01:31:07) - Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, known for co-founding Palantir Technologies and serving as managing partner at 8VC. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid growth and high valuations in the AI sector, emphasizing the importance of investing in top talent and innovative ideas. He also highlights the potential of AI to transform various industries, including healthcare and construction, and shares insights on the evolving startup landscape in Texas. (01:59:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:07:16) - Jim Cramer's Daily Ritual (02:11:50) - VCs Scramble For AI Darlings (02:22:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:26:59) - Riley Walz, a 23-year-old software engineer, discusses his creation of "Find My Parking Cops," an app that used publicly available data to track San Francisco parking enforcement officers in real time, allowing users to see their locations and ticketing activity. He explains how he identified predictable patterns in ticket ID numbers to scrape this data, leading to the app's rapid viral success. However, within four hours of its launch, the city altered its website to block data access, effectively disabling the app. (02:43:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiFollow 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

TVPN. Today is Wednesday, September 24th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. The Wall Street Journal has a post because they wrote an article about Peter Thiel's lecture circuit on the Antichrist. They write Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor in data, AI, defense, and weapons development technologies wants everyone to think more about the end of the world. And it got me thinking more about capital allocation, honestly. This circuit we've covered this a little bit. Teal has been on a lecture series that's now four parts up in San Francisco. Tyler, do you know why Peter is doing this? What do you mean? Do you know why he's

doing this lecture circuit? You're supposed to say why questions are overdetermined. Oh, yeah. That was a layup. That was a layup. Tyler made this. Anyway, never ask why. Ask how to save time and money. Go to ramp.com. Easy use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

They are not live streaming this. They should be live streaming it on re-stream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream reach your audience, wherever they are.

No, it is off the record. And if you go and you get a ticket and you post about it, you get axed. Yeah, somebody summarized the first couple and just immediately got a comment from Ms.

Stevens who said, your band. Yeah, they were running the Blake Masters they were trying to run back the Blake Masters playbook. So if you're not familiar with the lore here back in spring of 2012... He was basically kind of making a run it. I want to be the Blake Masters of the Antichristian.

Yeah, which is like a wild, wild thing to play out because... I mean, so let's give a little history here. Back in spring 2012... He wanted his name in the history books next to the section on the anti-currant. Yeah, exactly, which is very different than what happened last time. Peter gave a set of lectures. It was at Stanford. And it became the backbone of the best-selling book, zero to one.

The talks were focused on entrepreneurship, but it could be seen as a history lesson or political treaties or referendum on American culture. There was a lot that came into that lecture series, and there's a lot of facts in that book, a lot of stories in that book that aren't strictly directly applicable to just building a company, even though the course was literally called how-to-start a startup, CS-183. And zero to one kind of turned into the playbook that Founders Fund ran for a long time and still runs and has produced a bunch of alpha. The ideas of being founder friendly, the monopoly thesis, the definite optimist. Like these tealisms became real investment strategies for the following decade and are still holding true today. It was a bit shocking. It was always shocking to me that like the be founder friendly, don't fire founders, like stuck around as durable alpha for as long as it did. but VCs just love firing founders.

It's just nothing. Sometimes they can't help them. Yeah, I've never done it personally, but I imagine. You've always wanted to. I imagine the thrill must be electric because even though... You're ripping somebody from their creation. It must be, because it clearly doesn't produce alpha. Because if you look at the companies that are founder-led, they tend to outperform.

So you're sacrificing a lot of financial gain when you fire a founder. But the rush. The rush must be incredible. It must be better than even... returning billions of dollars to your LPs. But, so this new lecture circuit is about the Antichrist, and the series doesn't fit neatly into the previous Stanford course calendar.

It's not listed as CS-184, Antichrist. No, it's not a computer science course at Stanford. Not yet. It's being put on by Michelle Stevens at Acts 17 and is much more focused on religion, specifically in Christianity. So the Wall Street Journal characterized one of Teal's course, this way. Teal draws on a theory that the Antichrist could be an individual or entity that is

incredibly charismatic, but talks repeatedly about the end of the world, thereby convincing society to give it the power it needs to regulate the existential risks from science and technology. And there are lots of people that come to mind when you think about talking about Dumerism. And Teal cites Greta Thunberg. She said, our house is on fire. We must act like the house is on fire. She said also, we are in the beginning of a mass extinction. This is in September of 2019. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. She told this too.

I think it was reported by PBS at the UN Climate Action Summit. She's been very focused on climate. This is her campaign to increase human suffering. It's been a mixed bag. But Eliezer Utikowski said other Dumer things. He has a new book out. He's on a book tour. He says, if we go ahead on this, everyone will die.

He's referring to AI, not climate change in this case, including children who did not choose this and do not do anything wrong. Sam Altman has also said some stuff that's sort of apocalyptic. You know, he told the U.S. Senate in his testimony in 2023. If I don't get $200 trillion. If I can't, if I can't automate enterprise workflows. If I can't get $500 trillion million billion dollars. $9,99.9.9.9. I need $9,99, $9,000, $9,000, $1,000, $1,000, $1,000,000, $1,000, $9,000, $9,000, $9,000, $9,000, $9,000, please.

Yes. Don't make me choose. But make me choose. Don't make me choose between curing cancer and free education. I will do it. Saving time and saving money. Just save both. We can save both with rave.

Anyway, no, but he did give, you know, a bit of a doomer take. He was talking about how this could go wrong. He said, if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. Elon Musk also said something similar. He said, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. And the original SpaceX thesis was... Did he say that, by the way? He said that in October of 2014 at the MIT Centennial Symposium.

And what did he mean by that? Because now he's got a X-A-I. He's summoning a demon. I think he thinks that if you shape the demon portal in the right shape the demon comes through and it's kind of friendly maybe? Friendly demon. Kind of nice. I don't know. Friendly demon that increases enterprise value through business automation and increased efficiency.

Hopefully. And vibe coding 3js apps. That's the demon that I want. But even SpaceX, you can view as a rebuttal to the apocalypse. What would be apocalyptic? Humanity remaining on the Earth alone. An asteroid comes, hits the Earth. We're all done.

But if we become multi-planetary, we are no longer a single point of failure. If there's humans on Mars and the moon and Earth, if something bad happens to Earth, humanity continues. The stakes that Elon framed SpaceX in were world consequential. By the way, if you go to xAI.com, it's this random company, called Unk AI. What? U-N-N-K-A-I.

And they feature popular AI brands like Rock 4, Chat-G-T, Deepseek, and Xiaomi and Unitree. Weird. Seemingly a Chinese company. Okay. Odd. That's using it to promote

a range of products. Yeah. It's very strange. So my question was there's a lot of focus on if you speak in millinarian terms, if you speak of apocalyptic consequences to not building your technology.

You might be the Antichrist. It might be bad. But at the same time, I'm just looking at history here and looking at these folks who have become popular and thought leaders on apocalyptic scenarios, Elon, Sam, Utikowski, Greta. If you backed these folks as a basket, you would have done quite well. You're in SpaceX. You're in Open AI. You've done quite well.

And I'm wondering where the line is for, you know, using, speaking about apocalyptic consequences to the lack of technology, to the lack of not solving a problem, and then balancing that with delivering something that isn't authoritarian, but is actually just a really, really big ambitious project. So if you read into, you know, we're summoning the demon, we need to go to Mars because humanity can be wiped out on Earth is cooked, right? There's one world where it's like, that's like, that.

is apocalyptic thinking. There's another which is just like this is a reframing on the classic like I want to save the world. I want to change the world. We want to make the world a better place. All those terms have kind of fallen out of fashion as a lot of founders just kind of wound up, you know, building, automating manual workflows, right? And so they stopped saying we're going to change the world with a better database. But there's still something if you're a VC and you want to back a moonshot and you want to back something that's either going to be a zero or a trillion dollars that where I feel like you're your sure perk up. Yeah, Augustus is a great example of this pitch because everyday people experience rain all the

time. They're not necessarily like droughts or not something super tangible, right? Because you just, you turn the faucet and the water runs regardless of if you're in a drought or not. Obviously farmers feel this much more intensely. But he's come out and said, you know, we need to be able to control the weather, we need to be able to increase precipitation. And you should fund me so that I can do this, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's something about these bold missions that rally employees, they rally investors, they rally media attention. You look at, like, what Augustus is doing is deeply controversial, but he's on podcasts that are so much bigger than what normal, what is he at Series A. Like a Series A founder typically is not on multiple million plus subscriber

podcasts doing a tour. We talking to a lot of them. Going and talking to people that are actively disagree with what he's doing. Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, we talk to founders all day long who come on and, oh, they raised it a billion dollar valuation. Or they raised a billion dollars. We had five series E companies on Tuesday. Those folks are not getting calls from the biggest media platform in the world on day one consistently on a regular basis. And I think it's because of that they're going after more tractable problems. They're going after things that are less controversial, but also there's just something interesting about actually refocusing on tackling those really, really big issues.

And so there's something where I feel like the fear of like targeting the Antichrist turns into like, you know, Gerardian scapegoat. You've got to find someone to blame everything on. I'm worried about how all that shapes up. But I am optimistic about this idea of venture capitalists returning to the super high risk. It's either a zero or a trillion dollars. It either is a completely useless company that doesn't get anything done, or they cure cancer, or they build a flying car, or they build the rocket that goes to space.

And even if Elon hasn't gotten us to Mars, we're not multi-planetary yet, he's still able to ship Starlink. It's great business. and then also keep everyone still motivated on how cool would it be if they actually got to Mars. That's amazing. It's another 20 years. We need AI to benefit humanity. Very oriented around safety, right? This is a nonprofit.

This is work that needs to be done that's not going to get funded through the capital markets. And then it turns into an internet software. And so I don't know what your timeline is for SpaceX getting to Mars. It might be 20 years, maybe 30 years. but at least it keeps them focused on, you know, chopping wood and working hard to actually advance the underlying technology that we get a lot of value on through just satellites and stuff. And I think that the same thing could be true for the AI companies where, yeah, maybe we don't get the AGI God ASI super soon, but there's just like a ton of value and you keep working at it because it's delivering value in the short to medium term, but you're able to keep the sites really, really, really high. and that drives just like that's just what you need to actually marshal

all the energy to go back something really huge. Anyway, Tyler, have you been following the Antichrist lecture series vibes at all? What's your take? I read the first set of notes that came out by the person who I think got in trouble.

A banned notes. You got to them before they were taken down off the internet. Oh, they were taken down. I believe so. I couldn't find them. I don't think people were really missing anything because most of that stuff was like in other podcasts.

Yeah, most of it was in the Hoover Institution podcast with Peter Robinson. Yeah. So, I mean, the vibes are, like, most of the stuff I've seen online were just, like, the protests outside of it. Yeah. I thought were, like, pretty funny. Yeah. But it does feel like this is definitely in the, in the early stages of, like, it's, it's definitely, like, working these bits out and figuring out how all the pieces fit together into some sort of narrative or conclusion. But it's interesting, and not many other venture capitalists are talking about it.

So at least it's different and fresh. Anyway, Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. There we go. We got a little bit of a bear take from Jerry Newman over in Colossus. AI will not make you rich. I feel like AI is already making tons of people rich.

I wonder what's going on. Let's read through some of this. Kick it off. Jerry writes, in Colossus Mag, which you should subscribe to, of course. Fortunes are made by entrepreneurs and investors when revolutionary technologies enable waves of innovative, investable companies. Think of the railroad, the Bessemer process. I actually don't know what the Bessemer process is. Tyler, what's the Bessamer process?

Electric power, the internal combustion engine. That was mass producing steel. Mass-producing steel from molten pig iron. Were there lots of steel startups at the time, I suppose? Interesting. Each of which, like a stray spark in a fireworks factory, set off decades of follow-on innovation, permeated every part of society, and catapulted a new set of inventions and investors into power, influence, and wealth. Yet some technological innovations, though societally transformative, generate little in the way of new wealth. Instead, they reinforced the status quo. 15 years before the microprocessor, another revolutionary

idea. Shipping containerization arrived at a less propitious time when technological advancement was a Red Queen's race, and inventors and investors were left no better off for nonstop running. Interesting. I didn't know that about the containerization story. Anyone who invests in the new new thing must answer two questions. First, how much value will this innovation create? And second, who will capture it? Information and communication technology was a revolution whose value. Whose value was captured by startups and led to thousands of newly rich founders, employees and investors. Also called high technology. Yes.

High tech. Yes. I am very excited to see where he takes this because I feel like there are already, what, thousands of new millionaires in the AI boom just from secondary sales? Check out the prices of starter homes in San Francisco. Yeah, like it's happening. Didn't Open AI just do a $10 billion tender offer or something? Like there's liquidity flowing.

Not to mention how many. individual indie founders or making a lot of money. Totally. Building various AI apps and experience. Also just people that went long in video or have been buying, you know, calls on Nvidia at various times or or Leopoldosh and Brenner. Like there's a bunch of people that have figured out different ways to make money. What do you think?

I mean, yeah, there's that set of the, like, this was like maybe three years old or something, but about the Nvidia employees and it was like 75% of them are worth over a million dollars. That's right. I'm sure that's like probably 90% now. Yeah. And so, I don't know, maybe he has to argue for, like, collapse of everything. We'll see where this goes. Is generative AI more like the former containerization or the latter, IT revolution?

Will it be the basis of many future industrial fortunes or a net loser for the investment community as a whole with a few zero-sum winners here and there? There are ways to make money investing in the fruits of AI, but they will depend on assuming the latter. That is, once again, a less propitious time for investors and inventors, that AI model. that AI model builders and application companies will eventually compete each other into an oligopoly. I believe that's true,

and that the gains from AI will not accrue to its builders, but to customers. A lot of the money pouring into AI is therefore being invested in the wrong places, and aside from a couple lucky early investors, those who make money will be the ones with the foresight to get out early. What do you think, Jordy?

I mean, I'm in, I mean, we got to, we got to, I don't want to just, just start. Okay. Keep reading the microprocessor. Yeah, so the micro, but the main thing is in venture, it's really hard to get out early if you're investing with real size. Yes, totally.

If you're writing a $200 million check, it's not like at the next round. You're like, oh, nice, I got a 3x markup. I'm going to, I'm going to sell 600 million in secondary. You're not. And this is something you see on the timeline. People usually and on accounts saying like, oh, these mold. multi-stage funds are just dumping on you and all this stuff. It's like, yes, at times funds can exit some of their positions.

Smaller funds can exit entirely, but by and large, if you led an early round, you're not able to just fully exit. And you might even be locked up post-IPO. There's a bunch of ways. It would be very funny if, you know how everyone's like, let SBF out of jail, he got a stake in Anthropic. There was something else somebody was sharing this morning. I forgot about this, but he bought almost 7% of Robin Hood at the bottom.

And there's like two other companies that he got, that he like nailed. He was like a fantastic trader. But did you see what Elon posted about Anthropic? He said, winning was never in the set of possible options or possible outcomes. So he's like, I said that on X yesterday, I believe. So Elon is a gig of bear on, Elon is a gig of bear on Anthropic saying that Anthropics is zero. And if Elon's right, then SBF looks bad again because he looked bad because he lost all the customer money. Then he looked great.

Was Elon's spreading about S? No, no, no, completely unrelated. Completely unrelated. Elon's just trash talk in the other laps because he trash talks a bunch of the laps, right? But he was saying that, you know, oh, Anthropics are not going to lose. He's not going to win. It's going to be a zero or whatever. He wasn't exactly saying it was going to be a zero.

But he was saying, you know, winning was never in the set of possible. outcomes. And so it'd be very funny if we'd be very funny if we round trip on SBA. Everyone that prayed on my downfall, pray harder. Yeah, yeah. I think it's kind of a silly, silly. I'll continue. The microprocessor was revolutionary, but the people who invented it at Intel in 1971 did not see it that way. They just wanted to avoid designing desktop calculator chipsets from scratch every time. But outsiders realized they could use the microprocessor to build their own personal computers, and enthusiasts did. Thousands of tinkers found configurations and uses that Intel never dreamed of.

This distributed and permissionless invention kicked off a great surge of development, as the economist Carlotta Perez called it, triggered by technology but driven by economic and societal forces. There was no real demand for personal computers in the early 1970s. They were expensive toys, but the experimenters laid the technical groundwork and built a community. Then, around 1975, a step change in the cost of microprocessors made the person. computer market viable. The Intel 8080 had an initial list price of $360, which is $2,300 in today's dollars. MITS could barely turn a profit on its altar at a bulk price of $75 each, which is $490. Donald Boat would have gotten it done in 1975. He would have been done. He would have been

putting ads. Gordon Moore, send me an Intel 80A. You're on notice. He'd just be putting ads in the newspaper. He'd be writing letters to Gordon Moore. Send me computers. And Bob Noisse, send me an Intel 8080. But when MOS technology started selling at 66502 for $25, Steve Wozniak could afford to build a prototype Apple. 6502 and the similarly price Xilog Z80 forced Intel's prices down. The nascent PC community started spawning entrepreneurs and the score of companies appeared, each with a slightly different product. You couldn't have known in the mid-1970s that the PC would revolutionize everything. While Steve Jobs was telling investors that every household would someday have a personal computer,

a wild underestimate, as it turned out, the others questioned the need for personal computers at all. As late as 1979, Apple's ads didn't tell you what a personal computer could do. It asked what you would do with it. The established computer manufacturers had no interest in a product their customers weren't asking for. Nobody needed a computer, and so PCs weren't bought. They were sold. Blashy startups like Apple and Sinclair used hyper.

to get notice while companies with footholds and consumer electronics like Atari, Commodore, and Tandy Radio Shack use strong retail connections to put their PC. Look at this controversial ad that they ran with a naked man, Adam, holding an Apple computer. The original

Cooley, maybe Steve Jobs was onto something with the viral marketing being controversial. Yeah, this is an insane. We're looking for the most original use of an Apple since Adam. What in the name of Adam. What in the name of Adam do people do with Apple computers? You tell us in a thousand words or less.

If your story is original and intriguing enough, you could win a one week all expense paid trip for two to Hawaii. Giveaways. Giveaways. This is wild. What insane Apple lore. Steve Jobs is really on one. The logo too with the Apple. Stripes. Stripes. So good. The market grew slowly at first accelerating only as experiments led to practical applications like the spreadsheet. Let's give it up for the spreadsheet. For the best inventions of all time. Hit that horn. As use grow, observation

of use caused a reduction in uncertainty leading to more adoption in a self-reinforcing cycle. This kind of gathering momentum takes time in every technological wave. It took almost 30 years for electricity to reach half of American households, for example, and it took about the same amount of time for personal computers.

When a technological revolution changes everything, it takes a huge amount of innovation, investment, storytelling, time, and plain old work. It also sucks up all the money and talent available. Like Coons, paradigms, and science, any technology not part of the wave's techno-economic paradigm will seem like a sideshow. Well, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin.

Devin is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team at your fingertips in your slack. Let's continue. The nascent growth of PCs attracted investors, venture capitalists, who started making risky bets on new companies, this development incentivized more inventors, entrepreneurs, and researchers. You don't hear enough about inventors anymore. Everyone

wants to be a founder. No one wants to be an inventor. I want to meet some folks who just are like, yeah, I'm just working on an invention. What about Riley Walls? He's trying to show later. He's kind of inventor-coded. I think he's an inventor. You called him a rascal, something like that. Internet rascal, which is, I think, fantastic.

But I think of him as an inventor. which in turn, and all of this drew more speculative capital. Companies like IBM, the computing behemoth before the PCs, saw poor relative performance. They didn't believe the PC could survive long enough to become capable in their market and didn't care about new small markets that wanted a cheaper solution. Retroactively, we gave the PC, we give the PC pioneers the power of profits, well, that's a lot of alliteration, rather than visionaries. But at the time, nobody outside a small group of early adopters paid any attention.

Establishing media like the New York Times didn't take the PC seriously until after IBMs was introduced in August of 1981. In the entire year of 1976, when Apple Computer was founded, the NYT mentioned PCs only four times. Apparently, only the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, and the treble makers were paying attention. This is a total mentions of personal computers in the New York Times overtime and exponential growth. from 1979 to 1984. Crazy that it actually peaked in 94. 84? Sorry.

84, sorry. It peaks in 84, sorry. And then it was dropping throughout the 80s. Well, it's old news, you know? Yeah, it's over. Everyone has a PC. I mean, how many articles are there about, like, social media today this year or like smartphones?

Like, there just aren't as many as there were during the boom. That's the nature of these days. Still the full New York Times. Yeah, but I mean, there's just so many times and you can just, like, you know, it just melts into the background of the story. But it's a good point. It's the element of surprise that should strike us most forcefully when we compare the early days of the computer revolution to today.

No one took note of personal computers in the 1970s. In 2025, AI is all we seem to talk about. Big companies hate surprises. You want to continue here? Big companies hate surprises. That's why uncertainty makes a perfect moat for startups. Apple would never have survived IBM entering the market in 19, and only lived to compete another day after raising $100 million in its 1980 IPO.

It was the only remaining competitor after the IBM induced winnowing. It's IBM and Apple. They're the only two survivors, all these other companies, the Altaire, the Amiga, the Atari ST, all fell off. But the Mac and the IBM PC ripped onward. International business machines. I'd love to see it. As the tech took hold and started to show promise, innovation. and software memory and peripherals like floppy disk drives and modems joined it,

they reinforced one another with each advance putting pressure on the technologies adjacent to it. When any part of the system held back the other parts, investors rushed to fund that sector as increases in PC memory allowed more complicated software. There became a need for more external storage, which caused B.C. Dave Market, to invest in disk drive manufacturer Seagate in 1980. Seagate gave a 40x return when it went public in 1981. Other investors noticed and some 270 million was plowed into the industry in the following three years. Seagate's been ripping, right?

All the hard drive makers because all the AI companies need to store a ton of training data, RL data. They're generating a huge amount of data, images, videos, all sorts of stuff and all of that needs more storage. Yeah, up 109% in the past. I remember, I think we read an article about, the hard drive boom like a year ago. And it was, we're still early.

I know. That's actually crazy. I remember it was like, yeah, remember this. First like 10 episodes. Yeah, we were like,

oh, this is kind of a boring story, but it's kind of interesting and it seems important. So we read about Seagate. Let's check in with Western Digital. Another 118. Another 100 bagger. Little easy double. Yeah.

Money also poured into the underlying infrastructure, fiber optic networks, chip making, etc. So that the capacity was never a bottleneck. Companies which use a new technological system. to outperform incumbents began to take market share, and even competitors realized they needed to adopt the new thing or die. The hype became a froth, which became an investment bubble.

Let's give it up for bubbles. The dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s. The ICT wave was therefore similar to the previous ones, like the investment mania of the 1830s and the roaring 20s, which followed the infrastructure build out of canals and railways, respectively, in which the human response to each stage predictably generated the next. When the dot-com bubble popped, society found it disapproved of the excesses in the sector, and governments found they had the popular support to resort to resort authority over the tech companies and their investors. This put a break on the madness. Instead of the reckless innovation of the bubble, companies started to expand into proven markets, and financiers moved from speculating to investing. Entrepreneurs began to focus on finding applications rather than on innovating the underlying technologies.

Technological improvements continued, but change became more. more evolutionary than revolutionary. Look at this chart. Technological waves over time, the industrial revolution, the canal mania. I wasn't even familiar at this. Arkwright Mill opens in 1771.

I would love to watch a documentary or even a drama. Canal mania. Yeah, this has the... Underrated mania. Totally. People always talk about tulip. Tulips, yeah.

Tulips doesn't even count because it's not a real technology. So the actual technological waves that are highlighted here, the industrial revolution, steam in railways, steel, electricity, and heavy engineering, then oil the automobile and mass production from 1908 to 1974, and the 1971 onward is information and telecommunication. And pretty remarkable results from this. 27% rise in real GDP through the 2010 to 2019 era. It's pretty good. In contrast, society did not need a bubble to pop to start excrues. goriating AI, given the backlash to tech that has been going on for a decade.

This seems normal to us, but the AI backlash differs from the general high regard earlier in the cycle enjoyed by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the others who built big tech businesses. The world hates change and only gave tech a pass in the 80s and 90s because it all seemed reversible. It could be made to go away if it turned out badly. This gave the early computer innovator some leeway to experiment. Now that everyone knows computers are here to stay, AI is not allowed the same way.

wait and see attitude. It is seen as part of the information technology revolution. Perez, the economist, breaks each technological wave into four predictable phases. Eruption, frenzy, synergy, and maturity. This is a new Gartner hype cycle. We need to know where are we on the curve. The Perez tech wave. I think we're right around frenzy. We're definitely past eruption, maybe going into synergy and maturity next. The middle two, frenzy and synergy are the easy ones for investors. Frenzy is when everyone piles in and investors are rewarded for taking big risks on unproven ideas culminating in the bubble when paper profits disappear. When rationality returns, the synergy phase begins as companies make their products usable and productive.

Everybody's scared of a crash. They're not eager for synergy. Yeah. So investing in the maturity phase is even more difficult in eruption. It's hard to see what will happen. In maturity, nothing much happens at all. Nothing ever happens. The uncertainty about What will work and how customers and society will react is almost gone. Things are predictable. Everyone acts predictably. The lack of dynamism allows successful synergy companies to remain entrenched, to see the nifty 50 and fang, but growth becomes harder. They all start to enter each other's markets, conglomerate, raise prices, cut costs, the era of the, it feels like Microsoft's in that bucket, certainly already.

Companies frame this is a drive to win, but it's really a fear of losing. Should we read about the shipping container wave? Shipping containerization was a late wave innovation that changed the world. Kicked off our modern era of globalization, resulted in profound changes to society and the economy, and contributed to rapid growth in well-being. But there were perhaps only one or two people who made real money investing in it?

That is insane to hear, if that's true. Yeah, and key words here are investing specifically in that technology versus benefiting from it broadly. Yeah. Because if you were in any type of business that required shipping and receiving goods from all over the world, you benefited directly from the technological change,

even if you weren't like investing in companies that were functionally creating. Yeah, I would certainly agree. So they mark the containerization wave starting. The year is 1956. It was late in the previous wave, but that year, the company soon to be known as Sealand revolutionized freight shipping with the launch of the first container ship, the ideal X, or the ideal 10. Sealand's founder, Malcolm McLean, had an epiphany that the job to be done by truckers, railroads, and shipping lines was to move goods from shipper to destination, not to drive trucks, fill, box cars, or laid boats. sea land allowed freight to transfer seamlessly from one mode to another saving time making shipping more predictable and cutting costs both the costs of loading unloading unloading and reloading and the cost of this you would just have like a wooden crate that would just get thrown on a ship yeah and then you'd

so you have to stack it unstack it figure out how you have to do a puzzle every single time you want to load tetris yeah and now it's just stacking blocks jenga instead yeah of tetris much easier to play to play janga supposedly The benefits of containerization, if it could be made to happen, were obvious. Everyone could see the efficiencies, and customers don't care how something gets to where they can buy it as long as it does. But Longshoremen would lose work. Politicians would lose the votes of those who lost work. Port authorities would lose the support of their politicians. Federal regulators would be blamed for adverse consequences. Railroads might lose freight to shipping lines.

Shipping lines might lose freight to new shipping lines. And it would all cost a mint. Most thought McLean would never be able to make it work. But he squeezed through the cracks of the opposition he faced. He bought and retrofitted war surplus ships, lowering costs. He went after the coastal shipping trade, a dying business in the age of new interstates to avoid competition. He set up shop in Newark, New Jersey, rather than the shipping hub of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, to get buy-in from the Port Authority and avoid Manhattan congestion.

And he made a deal with the New York Longshoremen's Union, which was only possible because he was a small player, whom they figured was not a threat. What's interesting is that, yeah, I think it's like, the direct investment might be very concentrated, but when I think about the rise of the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, like globalization, I'm thinking of Nike. And I'm thinking of companies that were built on the back of globalization, even the iPhone, Apple. Like these companies exist in part and are beneficiaries of containerization. And so it's not a direct investment in the fundamental technology, but it is enabled by it. Yeah. I don't think so.

Yeah, we'll have to get through the article, but it already feels like it's somewhat clickbait. Not clickbait, but to say, like, no one's going to make money on AI or you're not going to make money on AI. Yes. Let's skip to his conclusion about generative AI. He says, let's grant that generative AI is revolutionary, but also that as is becoming increasingly clear,

this particular new tech is now already in an evolutionary stage. It's towards the end of its cycle. It will create a lot of value for the economy, and investors hope to capture some of it. This is the key point. I totally agree. When, who, and how depends on whether AI is the end of the ICT wave or the beginning of a new one, right?

Is it SaaS or is it God? Is it the final SaaS product? and then we're stock or is it something entirely new and we're just going to start compatible is it is it consumer software is it enterprise software

something entirely new right I don't know if AI had started a new wave there would have been an extended period of uncertainty and experimentation I feel like that's the last decade of open AI I feel like 2015 to 2025

was that period of uncertainty yeah you have to understand Is it people in 2015 that were trying to make chatbots, right, with no hype? Totally. Really no user, not a lot of users, right? Yeah. Or are you just counting, like, when Open AI was like, okay, we can actually be a for-profit company now and we can productize this.

But even then there was, like, a pretty large gap between them deciding, like, hey, let's actually raise traditional capital for this before they could get out the API. Yeah. Before they could get out, chat GPU. Totally. Yeah, and also like there was this in AI, the period of uncertainty and experimentation, that was the TikTok algorithm, the Netflix recommendation algorithm, Facebook's core AI investments. They have bought billions of dollars of GPUs, not for generative AI, not for LOMs, but just to make better ad recommendations, better content recommendations. And so there's, I don't know, there's a lot there. We'll have to continue to dig in, but let's keep reading. He said, when thousands, Thousands or millions of tinkers use the tech to solve problems in entirely new ways, its use is proliferate.

But because they are using models owned by the big AI, companies, their ability to fully experiment is limited to what's allowed by the incumbents who have no desire to permit an extended challenge to the status quo. This doesn't mean AI can't start the next technological revolution. It might if experimentation becomes cheap, distributed, and permissionless, like Wozniak, cobbling together computers in his garage, Ford building his first internal combustion engine in his kitchen, and Trevecnik building his high-pressure steam engine as soon as James Watts' patents expired,

when any would-be innovator can build and train an LLM on their laptop and put it to use in any way their imagination dictates, it might be the seat of the next big set of changes, something revolutionary rather than evolutionary, but unless that happens, there can be no eruption. Tyler, like, don't you think it's possible to build and train an LLM on your laptop and use it in any way your imagination dictates? Yeah. I mean, I don't know about training a whole new LLM, but like people are getting a lot of value out of open source ones that they're locally.

Lama, Deep Sea, Klan. Obvious. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't, I mean, I somewhat agree that we haven't seen that many totally new, crazy, like, unprecedented uses. of LLMs where it feels like it's an entirely new category. Like it's hard to point at like the Uber for AI where it's like this company would never have existed.

It feels like a lot of the companies are kind of evolutionary. Like, you know, we have site builders and then we have vibe coding platforms that's very, sites on top of them, figma.com. A lot of the companies. Figma builds faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together, get started for free. Use Figma make if you want to. develop a website.

Yeah, a lot of times companies come on TBPN to talk about what they're building. They're building an AI application. Yeah. There is a company started 10 years ago basically doing the exact same thing. Yep. They just didn't position it in the same way.

They weren't using prompts and they weren't using reasoning and things like that. But still, it looks and it looks and sounds like SaaS. It looks like it's solving the same SaaS, problem definition. It's like the problem was like organizing information for lawyers or answering the phone. And we had a phone tree that was just deterministic like robotic press too for customer support. And oftentimes they can solve a problem. It's like product can be twice as good. Yes. Which is enough to to kind of eat into existing market share. Maybe create new markets. Right.

I think the market for people that can create software is obviously exploded, right? Which is why you see vibe coding, you know, revenues just exploding the billions of dollars collectively. But it does seem like the video games are getting more realistic. Video games are getting more realistic. The software is getting better. The spreadsheets have more useful tools. There's just a little extra helper everywhere. It's a lot of co-pilots.

It's not a lot of like entirely new plans. And then you see Chad GBT, and the usage looks a lot like the way that people use Google search. It's better in many ways, but the core value that's being delivered is quite similar. He actually talks about domain-specific models. So first, he says economists are predicting that AI will increase global GDP somewhere between one to more than 7% over the next decade, which is one to seven trillion of new value created. The big question is where that money will stick. it flows through the value chain. Most AI market overviews have a score or more categories, breaking each of them into customers and industry served, but these will change dramatically over the

next few years. You could instead just follow the money to simplify the taxonomy of companies. There are data infrastructure companies, there are model companies, user application companies, AI customers and consumers. But what the history of containerization suggests, if you aren't already an investor in a model company, you shouldn't bother. Sam Altman and a few other early movers may make a fortune, as McLean and Ludwig did. But the huge cost of building and running a model coupled with the intense competition means there will, in the end, be only a few companies, each funded and owned by the largest tech companies. If you're already an investor, congratulations, there will be consolidation, so you might get an exit. Domain-specific models

like Cursor and Her Harvey will be part of the consolidation. These are probably the most valuable models, but fine-tuning is relatively cheap, and there are big economies of scope, on the other hand, just as Google had to buy invite media in 2010 to figure out how to sell to ad agencies, domain-specific model companies that have earned the trust of their customers will be prime acquisition targets. That sounds like another group of people that would be making money. When you say like only open AI investors will make money, it's like, well, there are like 7,000 people on that cap table in one way or another.

Like all the investors, all the LPs and the funds that are investors, all the employees, All the people that got in through SVVs, like, it's not just two people. I feel like it's a lot of people that are in the big winners, like even if there's just a few power law winners. Yeah, there's other, you know, another way to look into this is like if you're investing in a series A at a $300 million valuation, assuming just crazy explosive growth, it's very possible to the company, even if it does well would someday sell for a few hundred million dollars, and you wouldn't have actually made any money even though you got an exit.

Yeah. Here's a good, like, counters point to some of the companies that are potentially in a more precarious situation. So he says, while it's too late to invest in the model companies, the profusion of those using the models to solve specific problems is ongoing. Perplexity, inflection AI, writer, a bridge, and 100 others. But if any of these become very valuable, the model companies will take their earnings, either through discriminatory pricing or vertical integration, launch their own competitor. success, in other words, will mean defeat always a bad thesis. At some point, model companies and app companies will converge. There will be simply AI companies and only a few of them.

There will be some winners, as always, but investments in the app layer as a whole will lose money. The same caveat applies, however. If an app company can build a customer base or an amazing team, it might be acquired. But these companies aren't really technology companies at all. They're building a market on spec and have to be priced as such. A further caveat is that there will be investors who may be. make a killing arbitraging FOMO panicked acquirers willing to massively overpay, but this isn't really investing, he says.

And so, again, it's another group of people that will get rich, but it's maybe not a durable source of alpha, which is an interesting thought. Where else? Let's keep going. This is a very long article. You should go read the full thing. So let's close this out by reading his conclusion. And, of course, if you want to read the full piece, you can head over to

Colossus mag. There is nothing better than the beginning of a new wave when the opportunities to envision, invent, and build world-changing companies leads to money, fame, and glory. But there is nothing more dangerous

for investors and entrepreneurs than wishful thinking. The lesson learned from investing in tech over the last 50 years are not the right ones to apply now. The way to invest in AI is to think through the implications of knowledge workers

becoming more efficient, to imagine what markets this efficiency unlocks, and to invest in those. For decades, the way to make money was to bet on what the new thing was. Now you have to bet on the opportunities. It opens up.

Jerry Newman, he's a retired venture investor. Totally, totally agree with this conclusion, right? I think if you come in with a $200 million venture fund right now and are just investing at crazy multiples, pre-revenue, investing in new foundation model labs, you're going to have a really tough time. But that doesn't mean. And I don't know, I think saying like the app layer as a whole will lose money,

at least when you look at private markets, right? The whole point is that a lot of the companies can go to zero and like a handful of them will create enormous value and that's okay. Yeah. Right? So not that bearish, but I do think it's not a, you know, at this stage in the market, spraying and praying. is going to lead to some bad outcomes. Really understanding the opportunities, really understanding that maybe this is,

a lot of the winners here are going to look more like traditional software. And that's OK. But it just means you have to be, I think the company we had on yesterday, Filevine, a good example of this, started as enterprise software for law firms. Yeah, RU has a ton of clients. Now, they have 100,000 lawyers actively using the product every day

in a really good position to vend in. a variety of different models. And they will, depending on how they execute, prove to be a big challenge for new AI native companies that will have to decide, do we want to be sort of ancillary product, or do we want to own the workflows? And if we want to own the workflows, we have to rebuild all these different products that help a firm run

and do that with maybe a 10 years behind other players in the category. Yeah, I mean, Venture's always been the game of pick the winner in the category, but it feels like it's more important than ever to actually define the category because, and understand, is this particular category going to have one winner or three winners or two winners? Is it going to wind up being a duopoly or a oligopoly? I'm excited to talk to Dr. Taylor about this. He's building, you know, he's the 800-pound gorilla in AI for. for customer engagement experience, right?

But it's a category that has an active capital war going on. You have heavily funded new players like Sierra and Decagon. You have the intercoms of the world that are taking... Finn.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. We're going to ask Brad Taylor about his performance benchmarks, his competitive bakeoffs, his ranking on G2. Because we are obviously supporters of Finn, but interested in following the fight.

And I am very interested in how oligopolistic will that particular market be. There are certain markets that have just kind of run away. It certainly feels like just in terms of knowledge retrieval, we could be looking at a monopoly with OpenAI and ChatyPee or a duopoly with Gemini. But it doesn't seem like there's going to be 10 search engines and 10 default chat apps that people are going to.

It's certainly not going to be 20 deep research APIs. Exactly. Yeah, it feels like there's going to be one or two that kind of compound and people get comfortable with and they stick with. Yeah. Well, in other news, Emmett says, I'm excited to share Rora Water is the official partner of Huberman Lab for Water. Rora is, of course, company I co-founded a while ago

and worked on this partnership with the Huberman Lab team, Rob and Andrew, for a very, very long time at this point. Yeah, it's been a long. We started talking about it probably a year ago. Actually got them product over about a year ago. They used it a bunch. They tested it a bunch and finally launched this partnership earlier this week. So absolutely thrilled to get this across the line. And yeah.

Big vote of confidence from the Huberman team. I love it. And in other Huberman World News, his network, SciCom Media, is working on a new show with none other than David Senra. It's David Senra by David Senra. Yeah, the show is called David Senra. Hosted by David Senra. Yeah, they picked David Senra as the host of the David Senra show. Yeah.

And so we will watch the launch video that he put out on X yesterday. Pull it up. Nine years ago, I launched Founders to Dayne for launching a new podcast called David Senra. Nine years ago, I launched the Founders podcast. On Founders, I tell the stories of history's greatest entrepreneurs

and extreme winners. This week, I'm launching a new podcast called David Senra. On this show, I sit down for conversations with the best living founders in the world. I'm ready with you're so good. How many camp? You got three cameras?

People like Daniel Eck, Michael Dell, Brad Jacobs, Todd Graves, Michael Ovitz, and many others. My goal with everything I do, is to obsessively study the greats and find timeless ideas that you can use in your work. We have to change or we're gonna go out of business. And now you can learn directly

from these legendary founders. You know what I see the most common core of all the people that are successful for me is they're never satisfied. You said something interesting. I like the pressure. I do. Thrive on it. Founders will still come out every week.

And this new show will now have episodes dropping every other Sunday on all platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, X, and everywhere else that you find your podcasts. There are parts of me that still live in the valley. When did you know you were good? I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different. And I'm out there for this chicken finger dream.

Failure is not an option. Chicken finger dream. Nothing is going to stop me from doing it. It's binary. We need a wall that we can set up here and run through. We're deaf. That's great. Dan in the chat says the market is not ripping.

What are the white suits for today? Bitcoin is up. One half percent. It's a bright spot. It's a bull market in a lack of volatility. If you were short volatility, you've done very well today, right? Because it's not a volatile market market. There's always a ballpark.

I mean, it's a little rough out there. It's just a fun day to put on a white suit. We just feel like we were feeling some optimism. We were, you know, have fun. We just had some good energy in the studio this morning. We wanted to, we thought maybe if we'd put on the white suits, the market. Yeah, we'd be able to materialize a bull market.

Let's make it happen. We're trying to send it. Anyway, before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Did you see this post from Sheel?

He said, interesting. We might see in New York Stock Exchange IPO where the underlying asset is a bunch of paintings. Billionaire Thomas Kaplan is exploring, taking his Leiden collection. 17 Rambrance of Vermeer, etc. Worth 1.5 to 3 billion public. This is the next generation of the digital asset treasury, the Dats. You have the physical asset treasury, the Pats, and these will be able to invest in art.

There's been a couple companies that allowed you to invest in art. There was an art platform for a while that was doing that. Yeah, I mean, in general, taking art highly, I mean, art is liquid, but not at sort of like market prices, right? So if you want to sell art quickly, you have to sell it at a massive discount, right? You need to be super patient. Yeah. If you have a big collection and you're holding it, especially if you have a bunch of works from a single artist, if you bring 10 pieces online, right? At the same time, you flood the market with supply, prices will come down.

So it's a very weird thing, but this makes sense if Thomas wants to be able to get out all at once or get out. Get out partially. Get some liquidity. This is probably more effective than selling it, you know, just selling it piece by piece. And he gets to hold on to the art, too. That's the other thing. Oh, yeah. I mean, he can still store it.

Probably keep some in, you know, different properties, et cetera. Well, we have our first guest of the show. Brad Taylor coming into the TV, an ultron from the roosterone from the restroom room. How are you doing? I didn't get the wardrobe notice. Yeah, we normally wear white suits when the market is ripping and we're celebrating the market.

But Sierra's ripping. But Sierra's ripping. So we're celebrating you. We're wearing them for you. We're wearing them for you. Thank you for celebrating our growth. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been fantastic.

Give us the brief history, the founding of the company to the news just last week. Yeah, so Sierra, we help companies build AI agents for customer experience. So think maybe it's on a website, maybe it's answering the phone. No one likes to wait on hold. Now you can chat with an AI agent. We're helping do everything from originate mortgages to help you get a better rate on your serious XM plan to helping, you know, when your ADT home alarm system doesn't work,

you'll now chat with an AI agent to fix it. We're a couple years old. We're the leader in this space. We kind of uniquely have run towards, I would say, larger enterprise businesses. We're trying to help companies that, candidly, it's hard for them to deploy AI because they've got lots of legacy systems. Maybe they're in a regulated business like the health insurance market or banking with the whole hypothesis is if we can help them be successful, there's just a ton of value in leverage in that. So as you mentioned, a couple weeks ago,

we announced a recent round of financing, which is we're proud of just a milestone on the path, but I think kind of recognizes our leadership in this space. You're the chairman of OpenAI. How should I think about application layer versus model layer? I'm sure you get this all the time. There was a meme for a long time about, oh, Open AI is going to go on stage of dev day and just steamroll a bunch of companies. You seem to have good information on what they're going to steamroll and not.

Yeah, and the other thing is there were so many, you know, two years ago, so many different companies that had thriving businesses doing various customer service platforms. Sure. And, you know, many people would have said these companies are just going to move quickly on AI, get this, you know, they have the customer relationships. But you clearly saw it differently and have proven that that hasn't been necessarily the case. I'll answer both. I'll start with the foundation models. My theory of how the market plays out is that the foundation model market will look a little bit like the infrastructure as a service market, where it, you know, primarily provides technology, low-level.

technology to a lot of applications companies. And then there's all the adjacencies. You know, like if you look at Amazon Web Services, they've got some developer tools. If you're kind of in the area like Snowflake and Databricks, there's probably an Amazon product that competes with you, the farther you go towards serving a line of business, you know, like ERP systems or CRM systems, the less likely it is that you're going to run into, you know, an infrastructure provider competing with you. I think the same is roughly true in the AI market. You know, if you think about what what's required to make AGI.

It's a lot of, like, you know, training stuff, but it's also maybe software engineering agents. So that's probably sort of in the target of these foundation model companies. The closer you get to, you know, Harvey doing legal AI or Sira doing customer service AI probably doesn't seem in the core of these, you know, research labs, you know, primary functions. The reason I think that the applied AI market is exciting, not just for Sira, obviously I'm very loyal to my own company.

I don't think most companies want to buy a bag of floating point numbers and then figure out what to do with it. You know, they want to buy a solution to their problem. And if they can, you know, turn on Sierra and it will answer the phone and bring down their customer service costs by 50% overnight, they're going to do that, not try to, you know, take these models and try to do it from scratch. If they can buy Harvey and get an antitrust review for one-tenth of cost, they're going to do that. And I think, you know, I was talking to Toby Lukie at Shopify one time and he was joking how many people come up to him and me. And like, aren't you just a database in the cloud? If you're like, yeah, I guess so.

But there's a lot more to it. And it turns out these workflows are valuable. So I'm really banking in our company that there's a lot of value in these agents. And I, but going to the second question on the incumbent software providers in the space, it's very hard to disrupt your own business model. If you're licensing customer service software per seat and you have to make an AI agent that will actually cannibalize your own business to realize the value of this new technology. That's not just a technology problem, right?

That's a business model transition. And the history of technology is littered with companies that saw the slow motion car wreck of their business model being hurt by a technology trend and not really being able to respond to it fast enough. And I have so much respect for people like Satcha who navigated those transitions. But, you know, candidly, there's a lot more companies in history that didn't navigate transitions like that. And I think that's candidly just a simple reason why it's hard for a lot of the income. come at companies to respond to this new technology trend.

When you were thinking about starting this company, did you, did you, like, how methodical were you about mapping the market? Is there like a whiteboard picture of you looking at, maybe I should do ERP? Maybe I, you know, was this one of a few options that you narrowed down once you studied the market or was it something that just came to you in a fugue state or something? Yeah, it's such an interesting. You said that. We actually did, call up some, you know, potential customers. We started those conversations just saying, hey, if you could put us on one problem, what would it be?

And by the end, we had a pretty clear picture of the available markets. I don't think any of it was particularly surprising in some ways. You know, it's like software engineering, customer service, content marketing, you know, all these things that come up when you think about if you have a technology that can see and understand text and voice that can reason, you know, what are the direct applications. but kind of the thing that we're most excited about is not where we are today but where it might head.

And our whole theory is that your AI agent will end up more important than your website or your mobile app in the future. And as a consequence, we think the addressable opportunity here isn't just customer service, which is really compelling and interesting, but saying, you know,

how can you actually drive more sales? How can you actually create a personalized concierge for your brand? I mean, just to give the math of it, if you actually have a phone call with a human being, it probably will cost on the order of $20 at least. And it really depends whether it's onshore or offshore. If you think about running a large-scale consumer brand with an ARPOO of $20, you know, how do you afford that? And you can't.

And as a consequence, it's almost impossible to talk to most consumer brands. You bring down that cost to 20 cents or even two cents over time. You just think about the dynamics. Let's say you're a large mobile phone carrier and you're fighting for a rich, retaining your subscribers, you're not just going to recoup cost savings in customer service. You're going to say, how many phone calls can I have with my customers so that I retain this subscriber for five more years? Think about the impact on your lifetime value of your customer. So what's exciting about this, like so many new technologies, is like the first

order effect is obvious, which is saying, hey, let's reduce the cost of customer service by, you know, 50%. The second afforded effects are almost more exciting, which is the companies that lean into this faster will actually grow their top line faster than their competitors. So that's what's so fun about the technology disruption, right? You can end up ending, you know, sort of upending, you know, sort of the incumbent versus insurgent dynamic. At the same time, the value proposition to the companies using Sierra is more than just cost reduction. It's saying, like, how can we actually give you a competitive edge by moving faster in this new world of AI? How are companies actually, you know, you're going and landing some of the probably,

just crazy logos, right? And these are, you know, massive companies with, you know, operations all over the world. How are they actually rolling it out? Are they giving you specific sort of segments, regions? You're proving it out at a smaller scale? Or what does the actual rollout look like? Yeah, so starting, you're right, one of the things I'm most proud of is the scale of some of the companies working with us. Over half of our customers have over a billion in revenue, over 20% have 10 billion revenue or more, which is pretty, I'm just really proud of that. I think it shows you do not need to be a small startup to deploy AI successfully with Sierra. On the rollout, it's a very kind of a variation of what you said. Some companies start with

us on a use case or two. We're going live with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world and actually replacing their IVR system, you know, and it was just in a handful of months to do that. So, you know, it can really, I think it's really up to the customer, how assertively or aggressively they want to roll out these new technologies. And the thing that I've been most pleasantly surprised is some of the largest, more well-regulated companies in the world actually want to move faster. I was having a conversation with my co-founder, Clay, about one of our largest clients and kind of being awe-inspired about how fast they're moving.

And I said, now I know why they're big. You know, now I know why they're successful because they're moving faster than some of their smaller competitors that we also work with. And you really learn to respect the, I say, intentionality, assertiveness of a lot of these, like, really well-run companies. What's the sales process for a huge company like that? Is that you meet the CEO at a, you know, fancy conference and start pitching? Or, I mean, like, it feels like an advantage of, like, having a career like yours and the Rolodex that, like, that's sort of like the unfair advantage here? Yeah.

In many ways, Sierra, like, you know, doing what you guys have done in two years is incredibly impressive, yet at the same. time it's what I would expect out of the team right I mean we said this is like Palantir and carp like he's just so fun to talk to he's in all these interesting places and it's like yeah I could imagine that some big Fortune 500 company just wants to hang out with carp and like talk to him and then they do a deal together is that how it works well it's funny when you said this is what I expected this is like why it's hard to start multiple companies like yeah of course it's going to be successful I've ever started a fucking company it's hard but uh yeah but uh yeah but I mean it's and I and I and I And I say that as like a compliment where it's like it's going from zero to a $10 billion company.

Having, you know, this crazy, you know, list of customers is incredibly difficult. But I like when people have a lot of advantages through what they've done in their career and their network. And then they just put on an absolute master class. Like it's it's very satisfying. Well, I appreciate you saying. And, you know, it does all have to start with the product though, you know, because certainly I would say, my guess is the way I think of Sierra is, we have have the best product, but because we have a founding team that sort of been there and done that, we're not like a hugely risky bet. We know how to work with large companies. We're not going to

show up and be learning from, you know, first principles how to engage with a large bank or a large health insurance company. And that's a unique value proposition because right now, most of the incumbent technology platforms, their products don't really work. And so you really want to use a best of breed product right now. And I think our value proposition is we are a best of and I believe the best of breed product in this space. But we also know how to like work with complex companies. You know, we're going to show up with as many people necessary to help you be successful as opposed to just throwing a product over the wall and saying good luck to you.

And so that I think I, you know, certainly our reputation helps, but at the end of the day, it's the quality of the product that really matters here. And just, you know, think about it this way. If you have 400 million phone calls a year, the difference between having an AI answer, 100 or 300 million of them is probably measured, you know, and, you know, at least eight or nine figures, right, in terms of like the impact on your business. And so we always start with the product. And as you said, take advantage of our unique, unique advantages as a company, which fundamentally means we know how to work with you. It's sort of interesting.

Like, it just turns out that, you know, there's lots of different stakeholders between a business team, a technology team, compliance, understanding, just like the constraints that a company is dealing with, we just try to show up with a ton of empathy and, you know, show up recognizing this isn't just a technology problem. You know, it's sort of a kind of bureaucratic word, but it's a change management problem. You know, how do you get from point A to point D when your auditor and your regulator is scrutinizing everything you do? Well, we understand that. Like, we're going to help you with that problem, not just the technology problem. What do you think the steady state of commerce interactions look like because I imagine that companies will be using AI to interface with

their customers, but then customers will be using AI agents to negotiate on their behalf and select products and without leaking too much of the open AI roadmap. I think we're all pretty convinced that some sort of agentic commerce thing is going to happen. I'm already seeing pop-ups for, you know, links to products when I search for things. I'm going to going to be able to say, hey, go get me the best option, the best price. Is the future a voice agent talking to another voice agent, or do they just interact at some lower level, API level at some point? Like, how does that all play out when you get agent on agent warfare? I think you're right about your intuition, but it's also, as you were sort of alluding to,

the future's not perfectly clear, even for people in the middle of it like me. But I think in general, I think a lot of intent has already gone from search towards chat GPT, especially for the more considered the purchases, the more you're likely to use something like AI. You know, when I was traveling in this past summer, I used Chat TBD to plan the entire trip. If you think about something serious like purchasing a home or, you know, I've talked to so many friends who are using ChatTB2 to figure out, how's the school district in this area, what neighborhoods are good, you know, and you think about that just from a commercial standpoint, that is extremely qualified intent at the very top of the funnel and so much research. is already being done there.

But as you alluded to, the thing that's not happening is you're not kicking off your agent to go fulfill that transaction. It sort of stands to reason to me that that will likely happen at some point. And then the question is for a lot of our customers are sort of on the other end of that is what do you, how do you want to show up in that new world? You know, how do you ensure that, you know, your goods and services show up in the right way, you know, when you're engaging with an agent? How much do you want to directly engage with consumers?

How much will you be able to directly engage with consumers? I don't know all the answers, but step one is make an agent. You know, step one is, you know, make an agent so that whatever interagent protocols emerge, you can be present and do business in that new world. And that's one of the main value propositions Sierra provides its customers is like, we don't know exactly where the world's going to go, but a prerequisite is to technically be able to interoperate in that new world. Yeah, I think it's going to impact different industries differently.

Sorry, go ahead. Do you think the form will generally die, whether there's certain businesses out there that sell, basically sell product? Let's say like a company that makes aircraft, right? If you go to their website, you're not just like browsing inventory and checking out. It's like you submit. Yeah, you're not adding to cart. Tesla's likes to do add to cart buttons on, you know, most, yeah, many companies out there.

Let's say somebody, aviation enthusiast wants to buy a small plane. They've got a contact sales. And then like the second you get to the form, so much, like, so many leads just die at the form. And something I've been doing with LLMs is just talking to them about, like, the pricing of different products. Because I don't want to go to the form and, like, get a sales rep to call me. I don't want to be waiting. I don't want to just get a call back at a random time. I don't really want to go through that.

But I want to kind of understand. And so it feels like the form is something that fundamentally could just potentially go away. And so you go to a website, you talk with an agent. Maybe you give them your information because you do want to hear more. You do want to talk to somebody at some point. But it feels like that could be going away. I agree. I mean, if you just think about qualifying a lead, which is basically what those forms are,

why not ask follow up questions? Why not collect enough information so that when that great salesperson does follow up, 80% of the work is done. And it's just the human touch part of it. You know, agents are already doing outbound sales, debt collections for credit cards, processing payroll for small businesses. These agents are already doing sales. And I think that the best salespeople, the reason why they're the best paid people, most

companies, because they're worth their weight in gold. But what about the median salesperson? And my guess is you can make an AI agent that's actually quite a bit stronger than most, just because you're standardizing the best practices really, really fast. You can run AB tests on AI agents. It's hard to run AB tests on people. And there's so many advantages, as you said, to not only just forums, but really thinking about agents as not stuck in one part of your customer life cycle, but really managing the whole thing.

And let's just take, I don't know much about airline, you know, buying an airplane for a hobby pilot, but imagine this AI agent sort of the concierge to the whole experience. So you're browsing around impines, you set up an appointment, you know, what if it's collecting a bunch of information before you get on site? after you, I don't do test drive an airplane, but let's say you do that, you know, afterwards, it's asking you questions, maybe helping you with financing. I think that's the future where these things are going, which is whether or not a person's involved, it's a concierge helping you through the whole process. Yeah, there's something about, you know, the consumer

being proactive, engaging for information, but then, yeah, using the airplane example, let's say they don't have something in stock. You know, the agent, at what point are you guys already thinking about agents being proactive and reaching out to to a customer after they already engaged like I imagine a lot of the core of what you're doing today is just reacting to customer needs inbound questions things like that or problems with the product whatever it is but then at some point or another the agent is going active and actually going outbound but how do you think about how do you think about that that's exactly right I almost think of it as like Maslow's hierarchy of needs of agents step one is answer the

phone, you know, when your customers call. Step two is can you actually get in front of customer issues? I noticed the ramp logo on the top right. They're one of our customers, and like, they have like the coolest implementation of our platform. It's, you know, not only doing service, but really, like, I love their Ask AI function and their product. It's just one of the coolest experiences. And it's just, it's not service, right? It's basically a conversational experience around one of the best design technology products in the world. And I think, you know, Ramp is obviously one of the best engineering teams in the world, but can every brand do that?

You know, can every brand make their agent proactive, offer a conversational experience? I look at you've ever visited like Brazil or India and you look at the impact of WhatsApp. It's like, well, can you be present there in a way you weren't before? Well, yeah, you can. What an awesome opportunity for agents. So it's new channels, it's proactive. And this is really where we're trying to guide our customers.

And I think kind of represents the future of our platform in a lot of ways. The latest round, I think it's $3.50 on $10 billion. That feels low on the dilution side. How did you think about the amount of money you needed to raise, sizing that? I mean, you've been part of so many interesting financings throughout your career. How do you land on that? And what does it say about the usage of that fund? and capital-intensive your businesses,

the state of the markets right now. Just take me through the thesis for the round. Yeah, I also think of rounds in pretty simple ways, which is what valuation are you raising at? What do you need to fill in that valuation so that if you need to raise another round or if you're going public, that you've more than filled out that valuation with fundamental business metrics,

like in your revenue and growth rate. And then you start and then you say, okay, how much capital do you need to reach that milestone? And so that's kind of how we reached it and that 350 number. It's obviously there's a lot of precision involved, but it is a bit of an art form because you're making a lot of assumptions about the future, which is what are the capital that we need to reach the revenue scale where, you know, we can reach the next milestone in our business. So that's how we think about it.

I'm pretty methodical about it. I think a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of raising too little at too high of evaluation and they end up sort of walking sort of a zombie company just because they don't have the capital they need to reach the next milestone, but their valuation is such that they've sort of priced themselves out of the market. So that's the main sort of thing I'm paranoid about and I feel really good about how much we've raised. But more than anything, too, I feel great about the investors we have around the table.

benchmarks, Sierra Green Oaks, Neil Mette, Green Oaks, is just remarkable. And so love our board. And in particular, you know, I think about who do you want to be

on the journey with to get to the next milestone and really happy with the folks we have around the table. How are you thinking about IPO timelines just generally? Do you think Sierra is going to be another stripe or data bricks

where you just stay private forever because you can? And it's probably allows you to, whatever. take more risks, think long term, et cetera, or given that you've been, you know, done your tour of duty on the public side in the past, I'm curious how you think about it. Yeah, I don't think we're, Clay and I've talked a lot about this. I think our intention is to eventually go public. You know, we, there's a lot of advantages to stay in private. I also

think there's a lot of advantages to sort of having liquidity for your employees, you know, that access to capital. You know, I really admire the way I know the Stripe founders pretty well. And, you know, they're in a really unique position. I respect what they're doing. I think we'll probably take the more traditional path, though it's far enough in our future. You know, that's just more our philosophy, because I think that's where you're going. We don't have reticence to do it eventually, and we'll probably more take the traditional path. That makes sense. How do you think about the Sierra fundraising process versus what's happening at Open AI? Is it a it just so much simpler to underwrite this business?

Have you learned? It doesn't feel like it's just add a couple more zeros. The open AI stuff, it seems deeply complicated. Is it refreshing to have more of a simpler business to underwrite? Or are there at least lessons that you've ported over? Have you learned something from Open AI that you brought back? I'm interested. They're like C-Corp traditional equity financing.

It works pretty well. Open eyes are just a really, I mean, it's a one-of-one. business, as you all know really well. The thing that's just so different about building the AGI versus building an apply I company, they're just so different from a capital standpoint. You know, as Sam has articulated better than I could, AGI will fundamentally in some ways be driven by compute. And so much of the capital strategy that Sam was articulated is really how can we have the best compute infrastructure and the most recent. resources available for both training and inference, especially with these reasoning models,

and meet the scale of demand there. And when you have something that capital intensive, it just changes your approach to fundraising partnerships. And I really admire, you know, what the management team of Open Eye is sort of orchestrated there just because I think it's the company that is best positioned to essentially build the best computer, the largest computer in the world, and have the best research team, which I think if you're saying, what are the ingredients to winning in that market. I think they've checked both those boxes. In some ways, the applied AI market, I'm not sure other founders

in the space would agree. I don't think we're like an AI company. I mean, we're using AI to solve business problems. But that's what I love about kind of the whole approach is that we talk to a lot of companies that say, we're an AI agent company or we're an AI company. And then you look, you ask a few questions and you realize like you're building enterprise

software. There's a bunch of things that there's a bunch of things that and there's nothing bad about that. We love we love enterprise SaaS more than anyone. But you know if you forget that and you get fixated on, you know, we're building, you know, we're just building agents. It's like you're going to just, your customers will eventually ask you for a feature set that looks like traditional software, although maybe it's a different work for. Or you might burn 20 million of capital training a model because it makes you cool at a San Francisco cocktail party and lose sight of what. why your customers are hiring you to do the job that you're doing. And so, you know, to some degree, as you said, we're unashamed of being an enterprise software company. And more than that,

you know, I think the way we invest our capital is very different. Thank you. Thank you. How do you, what's your framework for understanding SaaS companies in the public markets today? What percentage do you think will be? It feels like everybody will have to transition at some point from traditional seat-based pricing to value-based pricing. You guys have the benefit of starting out with value-based pricing and saying, how many phone calls do you get? How many individual reps do you have? What percentage of that can we, you know, augment or replace? But it just feels like doing that transition on a, you know, a quarterly reporting cadence feels completely, you know, miserable.

Yeah, my high level premise is it's easier to transition your technology than it is to transition your business model. And it's especially your public, just because if you just think about, let's say you have your, I'll just pick an ERP company and you have an enterprise license agreement for some number of seats, you know, and or, you know, ITSM or something like that. And then you say, okay, we're going to make an agent to automate 70% of what this platform is. does. That's easy in theory, but what happens in the next renewal, like in six months? Maybe your AI agent platform isn't quite mature enough to actually, you know, make up for the difference in lost seats. So maybe your sales rep who's incentivized on increasing the size of that contract goes and it says, you should buy both, you know, buy the same number of seats and an AI agent. And all of a sudden the CFO of that company is like, wait, I thought this was supposed to reduce

cost. You know, like, what's going out here? And so I think the, I think all these incumbent SaaS companies have an opportunity to come out strong in this market, but they have to really transition their business model and their technology mall at the same time. And anyone who says it's easy has never been a public company CEO because it's really hard, you know, because you end up having to tell a story to your investors, to your customers, to your employees. You have to go through a trough of despair, probably. And if you look at Microsoft's transition to the cloud, and it was really complicated to go from Windows revenue to Azure revenue,

now such as a hero for having done it. But at the time, there's a lot of people, including me, who wrote them off. And then afterwards, you're like, wow, props to them for making that transition and coming out so strongly. But for every Microsoft, there's a Ceeble systems who didn't make a transition. And for those of you online who don't know Ceeble, That was the company that Salesforce beat in the transition to the cloud. And now you probably don't know their name because, you know, they, they didn't sort of make it through that transition,

despite being the market leader in the on-premises software era. So, you know, I think all these companies have an opportunity. And I think that it really takes leadership. I think it's very hard to do as a public company just because it's very hard for investors to sort of see through the quarterly earnings to see. because you can, it's just hard. It's just like, is this company mid-transition to something great or are they just dying? You know, and like, it's easy. It's like, and a lot of it, a lot of it is ambition and storytelling.

And so it's just a complicated time and software. I think it's really going to come down to leadership, both like stakeholder management and technology leadership for companies to make this transition. Are you getting a bunch of calls yet from AI application companies that haven't, found product market fit and need to find a soft landing? Or do you think that's a few more quarters out because those companies are still well capitalized? We are.

There's definitely the, you know, just given the amount of revenue growth for the ones that are working, it's pretty clear the ones that aren't. There's some good teams and good technology there too. So we try to look if it makes sunset at all of them, if there's a good team that could contribute. When did that? When did that start? About six months ago.

Okay. Yeah. I assume it will accelerate. Yeah, we're having Hamant from General Catalyst on the show Friday. What's your reaction to his sort of hot take? I don't know how much it was taken out of context, but this idea that triple, triple, double, double, double, is kind of dead. You need to be 10xing every day. You're not interesting unless you're 10xing.

10xing. Is there something there where like the power. power law is getting steeper. There's a there are more winner take all markets, more faster growth companies, but then also just some that are you know triple triple but then going to be nothing. Yeah. So I have a complicated opinion on this one. So first I'll say the faster you grow is sometimes correlated with a lack of a moat just because what enabled you to grow fast might enable your future competitors to grow there as well. You see this in some social services as well. You know, you'll have these social services grow from zero to whatever million users

overnight based on a social mechanic. And very few of those have ended up durable. Some of them ended up incredibly valuable like TikTok, but there's like, you know, the clubhouse is the world. Yeah, but TikTok also spent like billions of dollars on user acquisition. Exactly. Exactly. In enterprise, I do think that growth is greater in agents, in part just because, there's more value in agents than there is in software because you're, you know, essentially doing things like that were people were doing before. So you're just achieving more valuable outcomes than just slight productivity enhancement. The reason I'm cautious on it is I think growth can sometimes be artificial, you know, so you can basically juice the numbers.

And the question is, are you creating a durable business? And, you know, we talk a lot about, like in our board meeting, it's just about first mover matters. And there's definitely like a green field right now, but what matters is where you are 10 years from now. So, like, are you creating a machine to make happy customers at scale? And so many of these businesses can grow to like, you know, 50 or maybe even 100 million in ARR and plateau. And you sell us with a lot of different businesses, actually. I mean, it was. And so the question is, what is your addressable market? What are your product advantages? What are your go-to-market motion? And can you scale to add to the next zero? Can you grow to the next order of magnitude? And I, you know, you, you know,

The only reason I think he's a smart, I thought it was a smart point that growth has definitely accelerated in this world of agents. But as an investor in particular, you're really worried about can they get a billion in revenue? Can they get 10 billion in revenue? And it turns out that like growing really fast to 20 million is like loosely correlated with that.

You know, it certainly means there's product market fit. But the question is like, was it with a very small niche of startups? Or selling tokens at a loss in your- Yes, exactly. subsidizing it, right? Yeah. So I'm a huge believer in quality annual recurring revenue and very happy customers.

And my view is if you can do that quickly, like we have, that's great. If you had someone growing more slowly, but it was very high quality revenue from very happy customers, I'd probably bet on them over just the fast growth rate, because to me that's a more durable business over time. Do you think just raw execution can be a moat?

Because some of those things you were saying earlier, it's not like you guys have access to different. different LLMs that someone else in your category might not, but it's just this kind of like know-how of selling into the enterprise and being able to do that at, you know, just with with pure excellence that feels like it's separated you guys from. I'll say it's a I think it's, I think it's all the above. You don't want the best technology, best product, best go to market. But I think right now because the technology is changing so fast, execution compounds over time, you know. So if you had a great product today, but you weren't excellent. Well, you will not have the best product a year from now. So that's where I think execution is maybe the main thing we focus on because it's basically the pace of innovation in your product and the pace of reaching and making new customers successful. And we won't have the best pace because I think what we want to if I come on this show a year from now, I want to be farther ahead of our competitors than we are now. And that is all a function of execution.

Last question I have. I know I know we're a few minutes over. So hopefully you don't have to jump. But how are you thinking about the evolution of the cloud market broadly? You have companies like Oracle waking up and getting extremely aggressive. You also have a bunch of neoclouds. I'm sure all of these different players are calling you every day, hopefully not sending you AI chat, GPT generated cold emails. But I'm curious, like, you know, where you expect to be, and what kind of vendors you expect to be using on that side over the next five,

10 years. Yeah, the Oracle story is pretty incredible, isn't it? I don't like, who would have predicted the what's your backlog? If you were going to, you, is you, do you have? It's amazing. What's really impressive to just because it sort of shows you, you know, sort of like a founder-driven, big view of the market. It's super impressive. And I've just like kind of, I just, I love stories like that just because it's like, just I mentioned the Microsoft story where so many of us had written them off and like, it's just super impressive. The level of execution. And, and, clarity that Larry brings that business. You know, broadly, I think the things that's changed in cloud is just the shortage of supply

of GPUs and the demand for compute. And I think that is bringing a lot of, you know, there's a geopolitical angle to where are these data centers built, data sovereignty, all of that as well. So I think we're in this new era of cloud infrastructure where, you know, the CapEx is getting larger. You're seeing like the market crediting boldness in a lot of ways because if there's truly a scarcity here, you know, and I think Sam has been articulating, you know, it's like whoever has the best infrastructure will really contribute to this world

of AI in different ways. And so I do think we're definitely in a new chapter there just because it's like, you know, different players are making different bold bets. And one of the things that's been really fun to be involved with Open AI is just seeing sort of Open AI's influence on that as we try to, you know, pursue our mission of ensuring AGI benefits humanity, and a huge part of that is related to cloud, right? It's if you don't have the right computer, you're not going to achieve that mission. Makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much, sir.

We took you a couple of minutes over. Congratulations, and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, thanks for having me. Cheers. Thank you rest of your day. Let me tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

We are joined by Joe Lonsdale next. We are going to welcome him from the stream waiting room into the TVP and Ultradome. Joe, how are you doing? Look at that audio video quality. You look fantastic. How you doing? You look younger than ever. You're aging in reverse.

The camera is helping as well. The six young kids, I guess, are keeping me young running around with him. I won a half a year old was your competition for this. He was angry. I wouldn't drive him in the car. Do you have the most kids of any top GP? Anybody got you beat that you know? Six is...

I'm sure. I'm sure if some have more. I probably... You know, my wife and I are pretty traditional, so just with her, which makes it tougher to be the coach too high. We're going to get there eventually. I wanted to ask you about this,

Trey Stevens post. He said he found a Palantir-branded iPod Touch Generation 2 that he had custom engraved back in 2009 while digging through a box at my house. Did you get one of these? Do you know the story of this? Is this a Trey Stevens exclusive?

iPod Touch from 2009. Nine. Actually, I have a lot of early palatir kind of gear. Mostly I have these giant things we used to carry around, like these big computers and whatever their cases are called. Usually for guns, but use them for computers. I'm not sure about the iPod. The Pelican case. You probably have a Pelican case. There's like the really serious ones. And I, the very first time I brought it to D.C., we had a rental car. It was like 2005. And I went to the address we were going to stay at. And then there's this very nice black man. He's like, you boys are on the wrong part of town. And I'm like, oh, what's this northwest?

West thing, you know, so if you know, D.C. What was it like early in the Palantir Days? Gary Tan tells the story about you're not selling holiday in software. You got to stay at a four seasons. I forget exactly what hotel chains he mentioned. Is that apocryphal? Is that true when you traveled for business? Would you stay at the top tier place?

I think the very top of the company would stay at like relatively nice places. We weren't upgrading to the nice rooms, but there is probably, like $6, $700 versus $200 a night sort of thing, which, you know, in retrospect, I think there's multiple ways of running a company. I do think when you're meeting important people, you had to make sure you're not meeting them with the holiday. And that would probably not be a good idea for trying to network with the very top people in these contexts. So I think that's, listen, I think a lot of people waste too much money when they're starting company, so I don't want to set a bad example. I was actually a top trader at Peters Fund. And then I brought on my friends to like start

this with me because a lot of them I brought on to the hedge. fund and it turns out they didn't really like finance and so we ended up building out this company and and the fund part of our comp was you can basically spend whatever money you want if you're one of the top guys there so it was like a very kind of bad place for me to start from in terms of being spoiled already because we have to be honest here thank you for being honest where should we start there's a bunch of stuff I mean I we were just talking to brad taylor about this umman over at general catalyst was saying that like the world has changed triple triple double double double for revenue growth is no longer interesting. The only thing that's interesting is 10xing

revenue every year, something crazy. The power law is getting steeper. I would love your take on just what it takes to be interesting as a startup in the era of AI where if you are in the right market or your index to the right thing or maybe you're selling tokens at a discount, you can get to a crazy revenue run rate very, very fast. What are you watching out for? What are you optimistic about how does all that play out? I mean, listen, it's definitely a very different world right now because there's so many new possibilities. I think we were looking at something

I want to out the person because I'm not doing it, but I was looking at something that was like going zero to five this year and I thought it could usually have gone to at least 15 or 20 if not more next year but I thought the team was kind of like a B, B, plus and it wasn't like the very very best people. And that

it's just insane, by the way, those two things combined, you can grow that fast with something that was like maybe not the very best people having trouble hiring. And I mean, the bar is just a lot higher right now. And by the way, and to be clear, that that round will probably get done at like a couple hundred million at least. Exactly. And I'm pretty sure it will. And it's like it's like it's like it also raises the bar for everything else.

We were looking at this really cool thing in bio infrastructure that could be very important for the future of humanity and for what it could do in the bio world. And it's just going to take three or four years and these things in bio, as you know, are just hardened. And it's like, you know what? even though this is so important, like we have to, on the margin, you have to be in like the greenfields right now. The very, very top AI teams are just so far ahead of everyone. So, you know, I do think there's like, I mean, what Hamas says, to me it's not as much about like exactly the metrics. I think some people like live in metrics and they should and one of my partners does too. And, you know, my view tends to be like who are the very best talent in the world, who has the very best cultures.

I mean, you see something like cognition with, you know, 20 gold medal winners or whatever, Scott used to work for me to add. apart after winning you know programming you know competition globally three times in a row and like like like obviously that's like the extreme but the extreme works in AI right it's like so I think for me it's more about like what is the very best talent and then let's build something that no one else can build and of course yes if it works it's gonna it's gonna grow insane speeds tell me the story of finding Scott identifying him recruiting him it seems like one of the greatest talent acquisitions of all time you've developed a business relationship over a long time now Now, how did you even think to back him early, work with him early, any of that?

I mean, to be honest, to be honest, like, Scott is a really special and amazing person. But, you know, I hired most of the first 200 people at Palantir. Atapar had eight kind of gold medal winners along with Scott, who came in at the same time with my friend Vlad Novakoski was helping me at the time. Amazing guy as well. Just give away all my secrets here. We're going to go get his help now. But, you know, I've got to hide some of these names from you guys. this is dangerous.

But, but, you know, and then Scott was one of eight that year. And I think another one of them was Alex from Scale. And he was an intern there too. And, you know, it was actually very funny. I mean, both amazing people. I think Alex left in a way where we didn't stay as close. And Scott left away where we did stay a little bit closer. But even Scott, I think he was running around the world.

And I'd been in touch. I actually invested in his new thing after that, which was not cognition, which is a little bit because I thought it was a terrible idea. And by the way, this is a very good idea when you have the smart people in the world, you should invest in their terrible ideas. Just as a sidebar, we went back to 2022 and we met these people who were doing something really dumb and like, we kind of want to give money anyway. We didn't.

It was out of MIT and ended up pivoting into cursor. There's other people, there's another one where it's like, I have this chain from yesterday where Coley, my partners like forged it to me and it's like, these guys are really good. They're raising seven million at like 40 posts. It's 2022 and I'm like, oh God, it's just, we all think it's a dumb idea. I'm like, we can't keep doing dumb ideas guys. And it turns out they pivoted and they're raising a $5 billion post right now. I'm like, oh, God, we just need to give smart people money.

It's just like, oh, what you have to do is so annoying. But yeah, there's like the bell curve. It's like, you know, I'm one end just give smart people money on the other end, give smart people money and in the middle, it's like, oh, what's the idea, what's the attraction? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Just like, even though it's like actually actively a bad idea, like give them money. And by the way, even the thing that was a bad idea, like, but let's be doing a Vlad now, or Vlad's in charge now that and he's pivoted to something that's working.

It's probably also a unicorn. So it's like they figured it out. So it's just the same. Like it's just all about talent. And so I lost, I was touched with Scott a little bit and they got back in touch with them. Unfortunately, I've been in the last few rounds of cognition.

I wish I'd say it as his best friend. It's hard to keep in touch with all the smart people you admire flying around when we're busy. But it's someone I really enjoyed getting to know. And he's someone, he's really grown as a leader more than I expected. Sometimes you know people when they're like 18, 19, 20, 21, and you get one impression of them and you're so impressed. but was not like the leader personality. And now he's just such a like a fierce leader personality plus,

plus, you know, the global champion thing. So that's pretty amazing. He's doing good to work. Yeah, we read a Wall Street Journal article about the latest IMO gold medalists. And I was surprised because I was texting with a GP at a big fund. And they were not tracking it. They were not. Our joke on the show was like every single one of these kids mentioned in this

Wall Street Journal article that beat both deep mind and open AI and got the full score on the IMO. They're going to be getting term sheets, but people weren't tracking it as closely. Yeah, it seems like when you were hiring, you know, these IMO winning folks back with Atapar and maybe a Palantir, the meta at the time was like you want to invest in the kid who's like sleeping on a mattress on their floor, like sleeping in a closet in San Francisco.

Maybe it was like somewhat of a near, like a different, different track then, even though you can see it becoming consensus. now because Scott has shown. No, it's Scott and Alex and a few others. But listen, I don't think there's too much alpha left in the sense that when you have all these people at Open AI and Anthropic and they've raised infinite amounts of money, like, you know,

it was a problem for me in Palantir in 2008, 2009, when meta and Google, it doesn't even call it at the time, started giving 100K bonuses to these kids out of the top schools, because we had like a monopoly on just the playbook for the top 20, universities and they started just like giving you like 100k bonus that's insane and like now it's literally like 100 times that. And it's and it's for these other. I mean there's maybe there is some

alpha. I'm not going to tell you all my secrets in the show and they're required to you tell me. Oh you are required too. But it's like but it's like I don't think if you want to tell every investor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can text us after the fact the real secrets. All right. All right. And we'll keep in private. How are you how are you thinking about, you know, you've obviously had numerous plays in traditional enterprise software. It feels like a lot of public SaaS today has this challenge of transitioning from the traditional seat-based model to something more like Palantir, the sort of like value-based pricing. How are you think, you know, are you just bearish on public SaaS broadly? Do you think some of them are going to be able to transition? Brett Taylor just

said it's easier to, you know, do a transition your tech, your business model. your tech than your business model, especially in the public markets. It's so funny to live in this world because it's like I woke up in opposite land where I was like, people just beat this shit out of me for like a decade for doing the wrong thing, the wrong model.

And suddenly like, how did everyone do that model? I'm like, that's great, I guess. I don't actually know if everyone needs to do a change in model overall. I guess I think the more interesting question is like which of these SaaS companies owns important infrastructure and workflows that are juxtaposed to other value they can capture with AI and then also

still has a technical culture to do that. So this is like a motion at a par I'm working on really hard as an example. I started at a par 15 years ago. It has over $8 trillion in the platform. The core infrastructure business is still growing. Infrastructure SaaS business is still growing at like 25 plus percent just that core and there's all these things on top of it starting to grow because it just touches everything when it provides value for wealth managers. And so I think to get that business growing 40 or even 50% potentially it has to like build really strong AI teams and workflows that take advantage of where it is and I think there's going to be a bunch of SaaS companies that do figure this out in the next few years and those are

going to be really valuable companies and then the ones that don't figure it out at all there's probably some danger they even lose the mode of their core thing to begin with because it's going to be too easy to copy or something if they're not if they're not like scaling it so so I so I think I again think it's like a power a lot thing where some of these are actually worth a lot more and then most of them don't have the talent to do it. It's been fascinating watching the narrative shift from the foundation model companies are going to eat everything to the foundation model is going to commoditize. There'll be a couple application layer companies to the idea that AI would be sustaining in enterprise SaaS because you actually, even if you have a semi-technical culture, you don't need to train a foundation model.

You can just go grab an OpenAI API and implement that. But there's this business model tension now. And if you're stuck in your business model, there's going to be a lot of startups that are counterpositioning against you. and you're going to be kind of screwed. How are you thinking about it? It's interesting because I do think if you own the customer really well, you could add these things much more easily, but you're going to have to go faster.

The startups are going to eat it away. There's so many areas where we're kind of seeing this right now. Or the system of record or some sort of data. Some sort of relationship is hard. This is like a co-trazra as a company. I mean, it's like a great system of record for the insurance space. And it took a long time to build. It's a bunch of palatier talent.

They're really coming into their own system of record now, which is insurance is very slow. And then they're trying to add the AI in before all the new AI things that people are funding. and I think it's pretty interesting. I think the Siss Rucker has a very good chance of winning, but that's a question. How are you thinking about macro broadly?

I feel like everybody's, I mean, every asset, all-time highs. Gold, Bitcoin. I like the meme. I like the meme that says printer is coming with anyone who's dressed up as Lord Stark of the North. Yeah, but for your angle, it's probably generally better use of your time to think about the opportunity.

at the early stage today. You could incubate a company. You could fund a company. What is the world? I'm incubating a lot. Listen, I started incubating a lot more in 2021, partially because I was just so annoyed that everything was like

insanely unreasonably expensive. And you kind of have a monopoly on the first couple rounds, right? Yeah, we probably were too generous letting friends in. I'm always just like, I have these business friends who were just like much more hardcore than me and just like, just like very sharp elbows and kind of even a little bit nasty. And like, I tend to like just like to everyone around me to make money.

So I probably should have taken just only myself the first two rounds. That's especially Seronic. I should have done that. But whatever. We own plenty of it. It's fun to start things that are important for the country and that win and we make enough money for everyone. But no, we do the whole big first round ourselves now, just because that's the right thing to do for the fund and then like do a lot of the second round. And listen, I think building is still the best.

I mean, even right now today, you guys tell me I'm seeing AI rounds where like I'm really happy if I get 15% in a series A of a really hot AI company right now. I think I got 16% something the other day by overpaying. I think it was the right thing to do. And it's like, but I mean, I've seen a lot of things where I get 5% or 6%. We just talked to Brett Taylor. He raised 350 million,

a $10 billion valuation. Like that's not a lot of dilution. It's going to be hard to build a huge position in that company. And that's a one-year-old company. Like, and these are happening all the time. I mean, he's special,

but yeah, it's still a huge situation. There's a special, the specialist ones I only have two or three percent. I'm really happy because I think they could be a hundred billion dollar companies. Yeah, exactly. It's very weird.

It's different than it was. Talk to me about the early stage startup market in Texas. Obviously, you were in San Francisco for a long time, buddies with Gary Tan, coworkers at some point. Gary's leading a revitalization of Y Combinator. Is there something adjacent? Like, if I wanted to go talk to 50 young people building startups, the next up in Texas, like where would I go? Who would I be talking to?

So, and I've been fighting for California to fix itself for a long time. Gary's an old friend, obviously, from our fraternity days through Palantir, and I think he's come more to my point of view on these things, but I really appreciate he's doing a good job. We used to argue a lot. You know, there's a lot of history there. Gary's crushing it. The thing about Texas, there's a few things.

I'd say if you want to build, like, the very top AI startup in the cloud, application layer, model, whatever. like doing something really hard new there, you probably should be in San Francisco today. Like that's just where the town is. It's a very strong network effect. I would love it if it wasn't, but it is. And it's there. And that's it. So why what do you do in Texas? Well, I think we have we like a mission Seronic earlier. I think if you're building in the land of Adams if you're manufacturing, I think that's probably the most important company in the country for the US Navy as well as doing very hard things in robotics, very hard things in software around it.

As applies to defense, we do have like, you know, 10 or 15 of the very best. AI software people for that there. So I think what you're seeing in Texas is it's a really good place to manufacture. You have a lot of the best people, like a boring company, a lot of the top SpaceX talent. Others are coming out here. I think you have a lot of things that go really deep in health care here. Obviously, M.D. Anderson in Texas is one of the probably the best cancer center of the country alongside Memorial Sloan and New York. And you have just a lot of other really deep kind of health care research, healthcare services groups, healthcare services.

There's multiple, multi-billion dollar new companies in health care here. There. And I do think like when I was talking, Reed Hoffman, I was trolling because we have different politics. Like, where do you test your like self-driving trucks? And of course you test them in Texas. I mean, if you're trying to like do things. You know, if I'm trying to like automate, one of our companies that I'm really bullish on is a bunch of ex-Wamo guys and they're automating construction with excavators. And they're going to like automatically run all sorts of construction and quarries and other things. And of course they're doing it in Texas. So so Texas is just like a great center for industry for building things in the real world. for robotics talent, for defense talent, for health care talent. It has great AI talent, but it's not going to compete with like the next new AI models in San Francisco. San Francisco right now is just obviously an awesome place for investing for that type of stuff. My current like understanding of the startup like micro worlds is that you're still probably going to be doing a road show on Sand Hill Road or in San Francisco.

When you're later stage, you're going to be talking to crossover funds in New York. you're going to be in D.C. if there's a lobbying component, but then you're going to need to build your company wherever makes sense. And for certain industries, Texas makes a ton of sense. For a lot of things in the real world,

a lot of things in health care, Texas is by far the best place to do it. It's, listen, I love you can go to the government. It's not like they agree with me on everything, but you can go to them and you can talk and they're reasonable and they respect you and you go back and forth. And you don't have to be a Republican or Democrat

to do it, by the way. Like they actually, it's like you can't, they actually care about business succeeding. It's very cool. It's like it's a new idea to me to have a government that has a group. It's like, wow, how do we help business succeed? It's really great. And then you can get things done and it's reasonable. So I definitely like building things here.

Sure. Without giving away too much alpha or feel people, feel free to put people down the path. Give up all that. But what do you think is the most under, under hyped trend adventure right now? Obviously, AI is just drowning everything out, but feels like could be at the, you know, beginnings of a new robotics wave, but how are you seeing it? Yeah, I'm really interested. You say robotics, I'm really interested in the stuff going on in the real world using AI,

which I think is like a whole new area that it's still early, but I think it's just like a much bigger part of the economy than people realize. So for example, if you can do a certain part of construction automated with bedrock, like I think people don't understand like that means you can run a quarry better. And there's $100 billion dollars of quarries. And if you can make quarries have higher cash flow, that's worth like, It's worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, it's just like, and there's like so many things like this where the real, like the real economy is like 85% of the capital.

And that's all about to be transformed. And I think people underestimate like how much we're going to need in credit to do that, how much, just like just like how much big stuff's going to happen. You can create in the economy in the 2030s there. So, you know, even stuff like boring company and like, and like automating that and making it much, much, much better is obviously using modern AI and other modern technology as they iterate with engineers on it. And it's just really impressive how much cheaper you could do things, how much better you could do things. So I think that's under-hypes and misunderstood, just because it takes a couple years longer to really get out there and start spreading quickly. But I think it's just much bigger than people realize. And that's one of my favorite areas.

I guess the other one, you know, I think in general people spend too much time on like the super giant companies. Like people call them the infinity stories or the things that could be worth trillions. And I talked to some of my friends who are running very big funds. and they're really only interested in something that could be worth trillions of dollars and have all the top talent. And it's almost like, I think one of them is a good guy, but he said to me and I want to be in the room

with the powerful people doing the most important things. And I think that's like an instinct of a lot of our top investors right now. And actually, I think there's going to be literally like 1,000, like five to $50 billion companies and like so many niche application areas that do need to build out the workflow, do you need you to build out the operations,

and do you need you to kind of go after different services there. of the economy. So what about it? It feels like, you know, when you look at like Palantir, Atapar, OpenGov, it feels like you've had a lot of success with companies that were very under, you know, didn't have a ton of like crazy hype and did the kind of like behind the scenes heavy lifting to get to the point where you could have a massive outcome or be really

critical to an industry. Are you, do you think there's not enough of that? Like it feels like a lot of every company gets hyped, you know, incredibly quickly now if they're talent dense. And are you still like trying to find opportunities where you can just kind of quietly build in a category for four or five years? Yeah. I mean, I think I am building a bunch of stuff that's not really that hyped right now

that's using AI that's going to change these different categories. And there's this like when you look at the talent out of Palantir, it's a lot like the talent out of PayPal except on a bigger scale in a lot of ways because Palantir have many more years to compound with the very top talent. And so you have things like, I just like random things like, Candid is just like, probably do, I don't know, they don't know, they want me to give their numbers on this show, I guess, but it's like they're doing health care billing,

they're growing really fast, they're going to do, you know, they're going to get into the billions of revenue like within the next few years probably. And it's just like, just like, I guess, you know, it's a $280 billion space and there's not that much hype around it. And it's just like, wow, this is like, this could be absolutely, this could be like $100 billion company in the early 2030s. And almost no one will have heard of it.

And it's like, There's just so much stuff like that right now, which is pretty fun. So, I mean, I think I'm really bad at hype. I think Palantir eventually got hyped, like, despite us being bad at it, which is like people. Well, yeah, I'd say like seronics, an example of something that, you know, got a ton of hype, ton of capital, a ton of attention really quickly. That, that, that did.

I think we did get a lot of the right talent and we were kind of the right place, right time where there's no one else who was doing this for the Navy. And had like, and no one else who had like that density of, of talent and operational like dina's just such an amazing and such a fast CEO and he brought in kind of other co-founders who were also really top people so i think like andral they just had so many of the best people right place right time going hard so i guess that got hyped earlier and i would have expected that's fair but but most of the things i'm doing are not like that yeah that makes sense do you think there's any positive knock on effects of the insane capax that's going into the

a i foundation model world like we saw sam olman say he's going to build 10 gigawatts mark zuckerber He's doing a gigawatt. Elon just did Colossus 2. It's a gigawatt. And the interesting thing to me is like, this is in some ways like the, like, you know, Seronic Palantir, Anderol, SpaceX.

Like those are American dynamism companies. But if you were talking about reindustrialization and just making big things in America, doing stuff that requires government approval, like Elon's like Colossus 2 across three different states, like that feels like that unblocked some crazy stuff. And then it's going to be easier to work on health care.

or work on automated truck. This is very, very good. No, you're 100% right. Whether or not it's a bubble and whether or not they should be investing this much money, I'm not even going to comment on because I think it's just like really good for America. Yeah. That they are like practicing, building these things at this scale. You're 100% right.

They have to fix some of the permitting stuff. Yep. They have to create all this infrastructure we can use now for advanced manufacturing. We can use the advancements to make things cheaper to do a scale for building related things in America. We're going to build a ton of stuff on top of this. I mean, for me, I just love it because I talk about the different levels of AI investing where it's like zero is energy infrastructure. One is chips.

Two is data centers. Three is the models. Four software infrastructure. Five is apps and services. And like I'm mostly doing things at five and some four. But by people doing all those stuff at the bottom with insane amounts of money, that makes my life very easy. It makes everyone else's life easy too.

So this is great for America. Yeah, for so long we've heard like, oh, America, we can't respond to DJI, GoPro got roasted. Oh, we can't respond to unitary. Maybe Elon will figure it out. And it's like, I feel like we're getting close to like, no, you can actually marshal $10 billion of capital, set up a massive facility in a couple months and get approvals and do the thing that you need to do to build a ton of stuff in America.

I think this is really, really good. I'd love to see a wave like this for bio in the next decade as well because right now our bioregulatory apparatus is completely effed up. There's been some really strong hit pieces in the journal recently or some huge messes there. but it's the same sort of thing where if you could take this energy, apply it to that infrastructure. And, you know, hopefully it applied some breakthroughs we're going to see there to own it. Like, like, but the fact that America can still do this, these companies can still do this, it's awesome. And it makes us very bullish.

Yeah. You had a pretty viral post yesterday responding to Nick Huber who was taking shots at the great citizens of Austin. He's going after Austin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it turns out the photo was from like after. school ended so like very clearly i see i could totally tell it was a joke photo yeah yeah but but i wanted to ask something you said sorry nick many but many of these people relaxing in the nice weather in our hometown are the spouses mistresses and children where did where did you where did you get number two

that number two there where did that come from he was trying to his whole post was like these people are lazy i'm going to outsource them for five dollar an hour jobs to the philippines and and it was like an anti-american kind of like negative post and then so my clap back is actually our US employees are so wealthy and so successful and I built things so much bigger than anything you're doing that they can afford to have their families relaxing and and mr. said the joke the joke of mistresses is they're so wealthy that maybe they have mistresses they're just relaxing in the sun while they're working because they're creating so much wealth we don't need to outsource

to throw a rolled slop we can we can have great wealth in this country and great success and don't make fun of my city so it was it was obviously a joke but some people some people got really sensitive about that Your masterful poster. Yeah, you used his own tricks against it. You did. You did. I was a strong ratio.

I appreciate it. It was like, it was a Jewish New Year. And I was like stepping out of the synagogue service. And I was just like, I probably should have stayed in a synagogue and been on my phone. It's not been on my phone. So it's dangerous when you give me like a little bit too much free time on a day.

It's dangerous. Oh, yeah. Well, never stop posting. Never log off, Joe. We enjoy your posting. We've enjoyed your appearance. Thanks. Yeah, I would actually like, I think X would like it broadly.

If every time Nick Huber posted, you just quoted it and dumped on him, because he's always leaving something open. Oh, yeah. I worded I hurt him because he, like, has these really angry replies. And I thought it was kind of a joke slapback, but I think he was, like, pretty offended. So if he's listening, I didn't mean to be offensive. I appreciate his hustle porn, even though I disagree with attacking America. He knows what he's doing.

He's getting in the arena. It's purely, it's just, he's rolling around in the mud. He's going to get a little. All right, it's going to happen. But thank you so much for taking the time. Come back on anytime, guys. Have fun hanging with your kids. We'll talk to you soon, Joe.

All right, have a great rest of you. Let me tell you about Julius.AI. What analysis do you want to run chat with your data and get expert at level insights in seconds, loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG? Zapier. I got the name right this time.

Did you see the car heart jacket that Turner Novak says. If a VC shows up to the meeting wearing this, you should sign the term sheet immediately. This is a callback? Didn't Bain Capital do a Carhart collab for merch? And they got some backlash from that. Sol and Ballar allegations.

VCs keep it in the... I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting on a suit. You saw Joe Lonsdale just came on the show in a beautiful suit. Nothing wrong with a suit. What's the, with the Patagonia vest? That's very iconic VC attire. You throw on the...

This looks like Han Solo. This jacket looks like something Hans Solo would wear. It looks good, though. Anyway, in other news, YouTube restored some suspended accounts. Ben Thompson has been breaking it down. He said that he gave kudos to the information for their headline, which is YouTube to re-allow accounts banned over COVID-19 integrity election violations. And Ben says this stands in marked contrast to other headlines

that characterize it as people who spread COVID misinformation. And he's quoting the verge on that case. And he says, it's true that there's some misinformation, but there's no question that not just legitimate, but in retrospect, true content was censored. And its creators kicked off the platform. Google, in that letter to Jordan, who is a Republican legislator,

said that, They place the blame squarely on the Biden administration. Google is saying the Biden administration twisted their arm. And so this obviously goes back to the discussion about what happening with Jim and Kimmel. What is the role of the government in free speech? I think it's that the government shouldn't be involved at all, actually. And that no government should be involved in this stuff. There's been debate over what level of involvement is in.

Find one person that didn't spread at least a little misinformation during that era, right? whether you're government, whether you're some schizos, conspiracy theorists, right? Everybody was... And that's what makes America great, is that during the COVID era, we were suffering through the same pandemic that China was suffering through, but we supposedly had free speech, and so we could talk about it and throw out crazy ideas and pitch all sorts of different solutions

and debate them in the great online marketplace of ideas. And so this seems like a positive shift. You know, more speech is probably better. More free speech is probably better. Ben says his concern on strategyry is more narrow, and that is how tech companies should have approached challenges like these over the past years and how he hopes they approach them in the future. And so he says Google and YouTube were obviously not the only tech companies under pressure

during the COVID era. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing a year ago. Another was Spotify and Joe Rogan, which Ben wrote about at the time. And he got a lot of angry responses to his take on how Spotify should have handled the Joe Rogan situation and the pressure on Joe Rogan during the COVID pandemic. And Ben says, but I think in the revelations of the intervening years, and I might add, a lot of those headlines I complained about above prove my point. And most disturbingly, we have just this month seen some of the most discouraging and devastating consequences of losing the cultural value of free speech. Still, that wasn't the part of that update. Rather, I was writing directly to EC and other tech CEOs declaring an adherence to free speech was not a get-out-of-jail-free card in terms of avoiding criticism for content hosted on your platform.

And in that light today, I don't have so much advice as I have an exhortation. Tech platforms need to lead the way in re-establishing the cultural mores around free speech and not just to get there, get-out-of-jail-free card back. Tech is dominant culturally in a way it wasn't when the... the cultural mores around free speech were established, of course, centuries ago. And the most generous interpretation of their actions over the last decade is that they were afraid to assert their power, bowing to the wishes of the loudest voices in the media and in their own companies. In fact, the best way to avoid partisanship is to be the natural arbiter of all the platforms say they want to be is to decline to take positions on all issues, but one, the importance

of free expression. That is the key. enabler of finding a path forward on all those other issues and is the foundation of a free society. That in a nutshell has been Stratore's approach to politics and it has served me well. I think it would scale just as well to the largest companies in the world. He says, take a page out of my book. It's working for me. Page out of the First Amendment. Potentially the First Page.

The first page of the list of amendments. Did you see this post from Lachlan Phillips? He said, I did. break it down. This is Coogan thought. The most toxic trait is a belief that instead of jailing Elizabeth Holmes, she should have been placed, we should have placed her under YC arrest under the watchful supervision of Gary Tan and forced her to rebuild and rebuild her device over and over again like Iron Man for the next 11 years or until she gets it working. I love it. And this is what you wanted to see. Instead of the kind of shit posting that she's doing, it'd be great if she was like, guys, I'm, I've

I'm figuring out kind of what went wrong before. Here's a more narrow solution that we could kind of create. Yes. I mean, there, there, it doesn't even need to be, I mean, I understand that from prison, you are not going to be able to build a device that tests your blood. Like, she's just not going to have the equipment for that. But she could be reading papers. She could be, she could be reading the analysis and giving thoughts that over time could

look very good. Like you see it today with the news of Donald Trump and RFK are talking about Tylenol that's being hotly debated. The administration is taking one position. Different media figures and health experts are taking different positions. I'm sure Andrew Huberman will comment on it at some point, right? But like she has the opportunity to read all the research, comment on it, and then we will see in a year or two or maybe more how those predictions panned out. And that's what we've been seeing with Martin Screlly, where he has made a bunch of bets on, he's very bearish on quantum computing right now. We'll see what happens.

We just get to wait. And we will remember, wow, he was correct about his bare call on quantum computing. And so that updates us to think that he is a, he is an interesting thinker on the valuation of new technology companies, right? Whereas right now, she's kind of just like leaning into this character of, oh, wow, she's posting from prison. I think that novelty will wear off. fun. I think that novelty will wear off and will want to see something more meaningful.

I mean, it's definitely broadly change people's like general feelings towards her. For sure. For sure. Anyway, Fall, generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. Add over to tbpn.com slash sounds, which is brought to you by fall. printer is coming, omit is investing, rights from Bessent. We are going into an easing cycle and we'll see a massive decrease in mortgage rates. Powell should have signaled 100 to 150 basis points of cuts, not just 75 points. We'll begin Fed candidate interviews next week. Looking for someone

with an open mind. Looking for someone with an open mind. Open mind to low interest. To what we want. Potentially. We'll see. I would love to see mortgage rates come down. I would I'd love to see the cost of housing come down. I still feel like the opportunity is probably in just building more housing, building a lot more. But love when the rates are low, hate when they're high. It certainly helps. But, of course, that tenure isn't really behaving.

Yeah. It's got to whip it into shape. Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, with that tenure, better start behaving. That's great. There is a fantastic profile on Jim Kramer in the news today. We should take a gander through, this because it's a fun one. This was brought to my attention from, let me find it, from Joe

Weisandthal. He says, great profile and business insider of a guy who was on the Odd Lots podcast who wakes up at insane hours every day to cover the markets. Did you see this? So, Jim Kramer is a busy man. The Mad Money host, known for his emphatic delivery and bold stock calls on the air, gave a rundown of his hectic schedule when speaking on Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast last Monday. Here were the highlights of his routine. and get ready to be mogged, Jordy. He wakes up. He kicks off his day at 3.15 a.m.

3.15 a.m. Do you know what time he goes to bed? 6. 11 p.m. What? He gets four hours of sleep a night. Just doesn't need to sleep? Does he nap?

There's no competing with this guy. This is insane. We try so hard. I feel like we do a really good job. But we're putting up eight hours of sleep a night. How did you? sleep last night. Go to 8Sleep.com. Get a T, you get a pod five ultra 30-night risk free five. I wish that I could. I got a 96 last night, but I slept for seven hours and 41 minutes.

That's about four hours more than Jim Kramer slept. I got a 90, seven hours, 23 minutes. Ooh, I win again. You win again. Um, yeah, I just, I guess I got to go to bed. So Kramer wakes up at 3.15 a.m. The first 45 minutes of his day are on, quote, a tight schedule due to his 4 a.m. workout. We're getting into the gym at 6.30 at best. He's getting in two and a half hours ahead of us, and he's on East Coast time. This man lives in the future compared to us. It's remarkable. Before the hour, he brushes up on the market by perusing the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. I get two of those done. He's doing six. Okay. He's ahead of me there. Kramer also said he sifts through stock research in his

inbox, combing through about 700 emails a day. That's remarkable. I read everything I think is relevant. I'm looking for something to say. I have a memo that comes out. Ten things I'm looking at. I do one thing I'm looking at. He does ten. I try and just do the current thing, and he's got ten of them. He's an absolutely beast. Kramer said referring to his weekly, weekday morning newsletter for CNBC's Investing Club. He said, so that's my overlord, he referred to the newsletter as. I'm starting to feel that the newsletter is my overlord. I respect it. Go subscribe. TbPN.com. Throw your email in there. You will get the TBPN run of show every week, the current thing, my newsletter.

Then Kramer appears on CNBC's squawk on the street, begins writing Mad Money, his flagship show on the network in the mid-morning. Throughout the day, Kramer spends a huge amount of time reading up on company news and earnings reports. He finishes taping Mad Money around a quarter to six. We saw him there doing that. Zach Meyer in the chat says, this guy does not go to the gym at 4 a.m. Look at him.

You think he's lying? I think it's more like he's not working out for physique, right? He's, I mean, we, we got to hang a couple weeks ago. We got to hang with Kramer for about 20 minutes. It was the end of the day. He had a ton of energy. He was incredibly locked in. He did have a ton of energy.

This was at like probably five, four or five. But I like to imagine him benching three plates, squat in five, throwing up some 200 pound hang cleans, some clean shirt, PRs every day, PRs every day, getting a aerobic, getting athletic with it. Just throwing on a stringer. He'll fit it. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we get a, get a gigacad mass monster Kramer photo up ASAP.

I need to see that. He finishes taping mad money around a quarter six and comes home. He'll go out to dinner around 10 p.m. And then say good night to his wife before tucking in. Kramer acknowledged that the intensity of his schedule puts a strain on his marriage. I have a great marriage. I put that out first because I wreck it every day. I go to bed at 11.

She goes to bed at like a normal time. So that's where I really wreck the marriage. That's not the plan. I didn't set out to do that, he said. Kramer's routine doesn't seem to have much changed. In 2015, he told Business Insider that he followed a similar schedule. He's been saying this. He's been waking up at 3 a.m., tweeting about stocks and puppies in the morning,

making a pit stop at the headquarters of the street, which he co-founded in 1996. What an absolute run for Jim Kramer. Anyway, turbo puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector in full-text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. This little turbo puffer is used by notion, linear, cursor, and many more. I want to go through BCs to AI startups.

Please take our money in Bloomberg. This is from Kate Clark. She's private jets, box seats, and big checks. Investors are doing whatever it takes to get into top AI deals. Jordy, would you mind reading the first few paragraphs of this article? I'm trying to catch up to this article. It's page 90. Raising venture capital money has been a breeze for Decagon.

AI. We're all over the place with the customer service. AI, CX. It's a very hot industry. Decagon's doing well. Finn, our partner, is doing well, and Brett Taylor's doing well, too. Decagons, two years old. They're developing artificial intelligence tools for customer service. All four of Decagons funding rounds, totaling more than $230 million, were preempted, meaning firms like Andrews and Horowitz offered to invest before the company started fundraising. Now, just three months after a round that valued it at one point, 5 billion. We have the founders on when they announced that round. Decagon is fielding unsolicited

offers at valuations as high as 5 billion. Give it up for unsolicited offers. They're some of the best offers. For Decagon and a few other AI startups, uh, the fundraising script has flipped instead of pitching venture capitalists up and down Sand Hill Road VCs are pitching them, hoovering them with gifts and favors in hopes of leading their next round. Uh, can you catch us up on the rest of the Senate of Gold? I want to go into some ideas because I think the BCs aren't thinking big enough. Big enough. We'll get you back in a second. Jesse Jang, the 28-year-old co-founder

and chief executive officer of Decagon says investors, hoping to back him. I've offered him everything from tickets to Golden Gate Warriors games to an autographed poster of MMA legend Kabeer Mugammedov. John would not know who Kabebe

is, but I'm sure many of you do. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Decagon's logo and hand delivered it to the company's San Francisco office with a term sheet hidden inside. Decagon took the deal, so that's a good one that works. Investors are emailing term sheets. They're giving verbal offers. They're inviting founders to sports games. They're inviting founders to race Ferraris, and they're inviting them on private jets. It says Bennett Siegel, a co-founder of investment firm A-Star,

and an early investor in Decagon. What you tend to see is the best companies are getting preempted every round, and the time between rounds is shrinking. The lavish VC overtures are part of a larger Silicon Valley frenzy for AI driven by startups astonishing revenue growth and investors' belief that these companies can dethrone tech giants. U.S. startups have raised around $200 billion this year so far, according to Pitchbook data, but 41% of that went to just 10 companies, highlighting VCs a relentless focus on a small group of AI frontrunners like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last year, the share of funding that went to the top 10 companies was less than 10%. A few smaller AI startups have also emerged as investor favorites drawing outsized attention in capital. Among the rising group of hot companies is legal startup Harvey, customer service firm Sierra and coding company cognition, all of which have drawn big offers from VC firms. Any sphere, the maker of AI coding tool cursor, has become a central example of the rush to fund newer AI companies. It's kind of funny that... I heard you talking trash, by the way. I do know who Khab is. He's an athlete. There you go. Nailed it. You know.

What else is there to know? What else is there to know? He punches and he... He kicks. He kicks. Does he do kicks? He does kicks. He does kicks as well? He does kicks. He's into kicking?

And wrestles. So... Isn't it any... This trend of companies having like one name and then the product name being called something else. Yeah. Any sphere and cursor, windsurf had the same situation, right? Yeah.

So there's this story about Decagon. One investor even folded origami cranes into a mosaic of Decagon's logo. I saw a picture of this and I was confused because a Decagon is just a ten-sided shape. And so it's actually like extremely easy to fold something into a Decagon. But I guess they did cranes into the shape of a Decagon or something. Because like imagine if you're like, oh, I really want to invest in square. I'm going to fold you a square. Take a piece of paper.

I'm going to turn the term sheet into sort. something square. It's like, I want to see, I want to see true origami mastery from a VC if you're going to try and preempt around. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, I think investors should be thinking of it as, as what is the right kind of effectively bribe at each stage. Yes. Right. So what's the budget? What's the, what's the math that you should be doing? How much should you put towards the bribe? Towards the tip. It's a tip. Yeah, it's a tip. There's no tax on tip. It's a tip. Yeah, I don't know. You know, it depends on the round.

But if it's really competitive, maybe thinking about putting 10% of the check size and then paying out of your own management fees for some type of experience, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're just paying 10% over, if there's a $300 million round and it's between you and another firm and you just take just 10% over, that's not going to hurt your returns. Like if you win the round, it's going to be, you know, 10x. And so 10x on 300 as opposed to 330. Just making insane assumptions.

Just take the 30 mil. All math out. Buy McLaren F1 and be like, I see you as the next Elon. I see you as the next Sam Altman. They drove McLaren F1s. You should drive one. You should have this car. It's yours.

Or keep a fleet of super cars at Sandhill and say you can have this from between the A and the B. Right? So it's, and you could have an adverse effect of founders being like, I like this P1. I'm going to, I don't really want to raise my beat. I'm enjoying it. But in general, I think it should work out. So I think it should be like writing a 250K flyer, why not get a founder, a long weekend at an Amman property of their choice, right? You know, something, something straightforward.

You just read just a weekend? I feel like a long weekend. A couple weeks. A couple weeks. Like, at least you can do it. I know, but you're getting, you're getting well beyond. on that 10% mark. Two days in Amman is two weeks at a four seasons.

Yeah, so I think you kind of going up the ladder. Yeah, what's next? If I'm trying to win a $20 million Series A, what should I budget for the tip, for the bribe? For the tip. Tip, tip sounds better than bribe. Okay, yeah, tip. We're sticking with tips.

Yeah, it is. You know, we are coming up into VC tipping season. So founders got to be thinking about what kind of tip makes sense for each person on your cap table. We've talked about this before. But yeah, how can you take it up? How can you take it up a notch? You know, racing Ferraris, private, private.

But I think these like one-time offerings are super weak. Yeah. You know, it's like race Ferraris for a day. Yeah. That's not that interesting. Founders doing 9-96. They're like, I don't want to go to your racetrack. Yeah.

So I think. Buy the racetrack. I think the Thermo Club was up for sale. Or a lot of, or saying, you can use my jet one time. One time? One time. It should be...

Here's the full jet. The jets should live with you until the IPO. Tossing the keys. Until the IPO. Yeah. Then you get your own jet? Yeah, yeah. Until you're in the position to be able to get your own...

Tyler, what would get you to sign a term sheet? What would stick out to you if a VC came to you and said, I got to do this deal. Look at this picture. I like that you're David's... center of fan. You have a frame of a photo of him. I think something compatible like if the founder is doing 996. Yeah. Right. There's this thing, you know, the current vibe is stakes, right? So maybe you buy, uh, you know, kettle farm. Hmm. It's very high quality cows. Like, you know,

Zuck's Island. Zuck has that on his island. Yeah. For sure. Uh, Goldrock said I had a VC try to take me hot air ballooning. That's a wild one. Are you, would you go in a hot air balloon? I would absolutely go in a hot air balloon. Okay. It's extremely aristocrats. It's extremely aristocrat. It's fantastic. I saw a video of a hot air balloon crashing from somebody that took the video inside the hot air balloon. It wasn't super appealing. Oh, we got Tyler on the big screen now, and we got Senra here on the big screen. There we go. I feel like that's a skill issue. Skill issue, just hit chat GPT. How do I fly a hot air balloon? Get up to speed. Summarize that for me. Don't make mistakes. And then we got a little inception going here. That's a good start. Anyway, profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT.

We should reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Maybe that's what the VC firm should do. Get on profound. When founders type in, who should I raise money from? I building this. Show up in chat. I think founders should just ask, I don't want you to just join the board. I want you to actually become a BDR at my company for the next two years.

Yeah, I mean, you're joking, but like that's sort of. I've seen that happen with Elon companies where to win allocation, you're going. Not BDR, but recruiting. So come in and import your entire network. Everyone you know who's an engineer who could work at this company, come and work basically full-time for like a month to like really do everything you possibly can. Because there's always you write the check and then you're like, they hit you with like,

oh, like, do you know any software? It's very different from being like, I'm doing three full-time weeks. just actually racking my network, actually making calls, catching up with everyone who'd be relevant. Not just making the most convenient. No, no, no. Going really deep into the actual

into the Rolodex. Does the Hindenburg count as a hot air balloon? I don't think so. It was a dirgeable. It was a blimp. But anyway. Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot.

Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Let Numeral. HV. Google just killed Dingboard. You saw this. Are you familiar with Dingboard? Yaxine's project? They just killed it? What do you mean? Have you seen this? Of course I know Dingboard. Did you were you a subscriber? I was very early on. He gave me I was like I I damned him for some reason. He gave me a code. I love the product. I thought the product was

amazing. It wasn't it didn't really work that well on mobile. But it was it was super cool. You could like go in with AI remove backgrounds, merge images, blend things together. It was a fantastic product. He goes to work for X. kill it. Well, because Google Labs just launched Mixboard, an experimental AI-powered concepting board designed to help you explore, visualize, and refine your ideas powered by our latest image generation model, of course, nanobanana. And with nanobanana and, you know, basically it's not that they killed Dingboard, it's just that they launched a product that is clearly inspired or lives in the same kind of work stream as Dingboard, where you can remix images, bring things in.

very, very cool product. I would love to see this on an app for sure. I've always made, when I'm making images and memes on my phone, I'm always going back and forth between like Photoshop Express and image flip and a few different sites. There's not a lot of stuff. I, this is a great product and I hope someone can take it across the finish line. Obviously X had to go work at X and now he's working on robots and stuff, but what do you think of Stillers? Stillers. Soda. Ben Stiller's soda company.

I have no idea. Does he have that type of audience that's like ready to rip soda? From Walmart? Yeah, it's interesting. Like I guess like we were talking to John Chahy about this like Ben Stiller's the type of person that could probably call the CEO of Walmart and get a meeting, right? Like he's so famous. If if you're a CEO of a big retail chain and you hear Ben Stiller's on the line, you're going to take that call, right? So maybe it advances your, you know, distribution quickly. Stillers is also just a great name.

I do. That's the name is great. And when I saw it, I was like, oh, that's a cool name. I'll take a Stillers. That's a great name. Is that related to Ben Stiller? And then I found out it was. So I could see it working.

I would love to do a taste test. We'll have to actually see is the product good. Because if he has great product sense, the distribution and the celebrity will take care of itself. The copy is a little millennial coded. It says made by 100% real human celebrity people. Okay. Yeah,

that's a little. And the copy on it says, no fake stuff. Hmm. Okay. And crowded category. Yeah. Just they're competing with,

with Oli Pop and what's the other one? There's been a huge lineage of trying to find, make a product that's free of, free of sugar, free of fat, I'm incredibly bullish on this company if it launched in 2019, but launching into a category that Pepsi's already going to buy their want. I'm for Coke while eventually.

I mean, I believe Pepsi already has Poppy, which was directly better to. Peppy. Wait, there's Poppy, but then there's also. Pepsi bought Poppy. You could imagine Coke buying Olipop. Yeah. And then that's, then it's kind of over. But then there's another, there's another company that's a Seltsor that's,

it's bubbly Bubly. Do you know Bubly? Bubly Sparkling Water? Who owns Bubly? Yeah. Well, we should get Ben on the show to talk about stillers. And we should get Tyler Order some stillers. We're going to...

Bubly was incubated by PepsiCo to compete with like the spin drifts of the world. And remember the big boom in in Seltzers? There were a whole bunch of Topo Chico and a bunch of other products that were really popular in offices in, you know, 2017 corporate offices. People would be drinking LaCroix all day long. Bubly was like their answer to that.

I don't know how it actually panned out, but that's kind of interesting. But in much more interesting news, OpenAI, SAP, and Microsoft are launching OpenAI for Germany, a partnership to bring frontier AI to Germans, Germany's public sector through a sovereign, certified cloud environment. We haven't wrung the gong enough on this show. Let's ring it for Open AI for Germany. There we go. And you got to hit it for

Claude getting into the Microsoft ecosystem. That also happened. We love it. Well, without further ado, I think we have our next guest, Riley Walls in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. He has been being a rascal,

last 48 hours. Riley, welcome to the show. How you doing? Thank you for having me. The most viral man on X, the current thing. Yeah, take us through the current thing, the current project. What'd you build? What inspired it? What's the reception been? Are those GPUs on fire? Are the servers on fire? Is it staying up? Walk me through it all. Yeah, I was going to project kind of going on. Yesterday's project was I figured out you could scrape the parking ticket system in San Francisco to reveal more or less the real-time locations of parking officers as they wrote tickets. Okay. So I made a website called Find My Parking Cops. It looks very similar to Apple's

Find My Friends. Yeah. And yeah, you can see where the cops are as a as a traveler around SF. Take me a level deeper on the technical. What inspired this? Oh, yeah. Did you get a lot of tickets? Is that what inspired this? I actually don't even have a car. My roommates, All my friends on cars and you hear a lot about tickets. It's pretty notorious in the city. Yeah. Yeah, take me through one layer deeper of the technical side. Is this just a function of the SF parking ticket office integrating with some sort of, you know,

IT or ERP system that basically as soon as the ticket's written, it gets loaded into a database. And then is that, is there a public API? Is this stuff that you can just look up on the, on like an actual website? or are you finding an entirely private API? Yeah, it's all public. The magic is right when they write the ticket, it goes up online, and you have to enter the ID number

to be able to see the ticket. Like there's a website you can pay your ticket. And when you pay it, you can see a copy of the ticket. So I figured out that the ID numbers for all the tickets were predictable, meaning that there's a pattern to it. So I could, I do kind of the pattern, and I could see, okay, like this ticket,

to simplify it a lot, like if like ticket number like 83 was just ran. I know 84 is going to be next. So I just keep checking for the next one. There's a little more technical than that. But like, you know, it's pretty magical when predictable IDs are a thing. Like there's so many cool ideas you can scrape knowing that.

Talk to me about your actual workflow. Is there, are you using vibe coding tools? Well, before that, what was the current state of things? Yeah. SF obviously. Oh, yeah. You could potentially really, you know,

if enough people in SS, started using this, it would be, could, I would hope that the mayor would write you a letter of recommendation for this. Like, you should win a medal for this. Yeah, yeah. You should get the highest calling. Yeah, you should get the key to the city for this, but what's the actual response from SF been, if anything? Yeah, so I do websites like these that are provocative a lot. And I think a lot about framing it and like how I want to present it to people. So I thought this would be maybe a little, like, mildly viral among people in SF, but it actually went pretty viral like around the world yesterday. Within four hours

the SF government mobilized and they changed their site to prevent me from getting the data. Like only four hours, it's like for them to prevent me from make the site useless. So yeah, the site is not up anymore because they changed the way of the data. Those four sweet hours though

were rice off. Everyone was free of parking tickets. It actually is if it had gone less viral and not, and people hadn't, you know, if they hadn't noticed so quickly, I can imagine this being highly, somebody's pulling up, they want to grab a coffee,

you know, they're like, they just check the map, they can run in and out. It's not a, not a, not a, not a, uh, I can see it actually being pretty valuable. Yeah, walk me through some of like the, how you like to build these projects, how you like to host them, um, what, what problems you typically run through, would love to know just a little bit about your stack these days. Yeah, I mean, use AI a lot. It makes things so much faster. I have like a gazillion ideas. These are all thinking out's for different, like, data ideas I want to make. So just kind of every weekend I'll try to knock one off in my first time. You guys talked about, you saw the other one I made Panama Playlists.

Oh, yeah. Oh, you did that. You did that. We're on that. You scrape my data. I'm glad you. I was wondering, like, how did I make the cut on this? Like, these are some big people on there.

Yeah, what was the secret to that? Because it only... Yeah, was there any strange fallout? I mean, it was hilarious to read into people's music taste. You wouldn't have noticed this, but the playlist that I had public that you featured was like seven songs I found that had like obscure references to venture capital. So when I saw it, I was like, I don't listen to any. When did I make this playlist? I don't listen to any of these in like 2021. I had just started collecting.

Yeah. I don't know. It was just kind of trying to highlight like how much data is out there on Spotify and like people just forget about it. And yeah, sorry you guys were part of it. No, it's fine. I thought it was hilarious. I think it was pretty amusing. I think all people had a kick looking at it. Yeah, what was the reaction from either the people that were in it or Spotify directly? Has there been a change to the API? Because we saw this even during the last election, like the Venmo public records.

People forget about this stuff all the time. There's kind of a question about how tech platforms deal with, like, default privacy. Because there was an era when everything was public, and then people started closing things down, becoming a little bit more private. it, but it's a, it's an interesting, like, user design problem for the big companies to shift. Yeah. Yeah, in case your audience didn't see it, I scrape, like, the public playlist and listening data of notable figures on Spotify.

And, like, they're, like, you guys were on it, like, Sam Alton was on a bunch of politicians, like Mike Johnson and JD Dance and, like, so many people just have stuff open on there. They haven't changed stuff yet. I feel like Spotify probably will change, like, the default behavior of playlist, because right now they're public by default, which is kind of crazy. But yeah, I mean, it was a lot of people took their place down. Sure. Kind of was a, yeah, interesting to see, like, kind of, a lot of them embrace, like,

Palmer Lucky, he was like, yeah, these are my songs and I love him. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So did you have to guess some sort of code, or was, did you just literally just search my profile and then it was there? Yeah, for you guys, a lot of it was just like real name. They just searched your game. Yeah.

I found a profile with your picture and, like, probably a sim because I could see, like, you guys follow each other or something, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Walk us through some of the other stuff you've done recently. And then I want to talk about. Yeah, specifically, what's the most underrated project or most underappreciated project you've worked on where you love it.

It's one of your dearest children, but you feel like it hasn't gotten enough love. Hmm. One, like, interesting one, a few months ago, I, this was also very, how much out there, but you know, you guys know looks maxing. I mean, it's like it looks mapping where I scraped the Google Maps reviews of restaurants in New York, SF, and L.A. And then I ran the profile pictures of the reviewers through a very jank attracting this model. And then I mean, an aggregate map of like all these restaurants, like, okay,

this restaurant is usually composed of like sixes or whatever out of 10. very awful on the idea and premise, but it was kind of funny. That would make anybody mad. Yeah, you can you can glean a lot of just information because I also had an age map. You could, you know, get their age from the poll picture roughly and gendered too. So you can see what restaurants had like the most men or women in a city. Did it what kind of pattern? Like how much did it track with just the general hype around restaurants?

Like what did you notice? Yeah, I mean like the oldest restaurant in. SF is not a country club. Like the most like male restaurant as a gay bar, the most female ones, like a brunch spot. It all kind of fits. It's predictable.

That feels like a product that maybe it needs a little polish, but could just be something that would actually add value to the Google Maps experience. Has big tech companies reached out to you and said, hey, come work for us? Not for that. There's been a couple of smaller maps that are like,

oh, you should maybe add this. I think they should. Yeah, I think this would be cool. I feel like it's too closely risky for Google, but like definitely a smaller startup could do it and it'd be useful. Yeah, I feel like even if you dialed back some of the framing on what you're building, like there's there's product insight there and there's like novel features that would surprise and delight. And I feel like that's kind of what what a lot of these projects like put on display. What were you doing? What were you doing before all these experiments?

Yeah, does this pay the bills? Do you have a full-time job? It is not. Yeah, I have a full-time job. job doing like data stuff that's more commercial reliable. I also mean like you guys talked to Gabe Whaley of mischief. Yeah. Yeah. There was an intern there. There you go. Mafia. Which was like very, I mean, you guys can kind of see like all this is very inspirational. Very inspired by mischief. Yeah. Yeah. The chat is literally saying he's like mischief for tech projects,

L.O.L. People have clocked it for sure. At first hand, I got to see up close how they operate. They're like incredible people. Yeah. So you were at mischief and you said, I need to pursue data science. Yeah, that was my calling. I think data's like really cool. And it's cool that you can combine it with like mischief elements to make like weird things like this park. What are let's let's uh, I don't, I don't, it feels like you could talk through some

ideas you have without giving away too much alpha just because a lot of, I don't know. I doubt people would would steal your ideas since a lot of them are like don't make, uh, are you not doing this to make money, but, uh, you want to talk through any, work, workshop any with us? Yeah. Let me see. Oh, yeah, what you got on the board. It's like one, like, terrible idea that I'll probably never build because it's awful.

It's, um, there's a, um, open AI has like a, um, API endpoint for like how, um, like a moderation endpoint for how bad a piece of text is, it will like return back like a string of like, you know, is this, um, harassment or is this like racism or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. The horrible idea is like somebody should make a leaderboard, um, where you like, after type in a string of text and you want to actually hit every single one of these categories. Say the most offensive.

As a few hits as possible. You have to create the most offensive string of text in history. And as few cases as possible, defend as many people as possible. Yeah. Horrible, but... Horrible, but... Certainly, I think... You might not need to disclose what it was actually said.

You could have it be anonymous, but, you know, it would certainly spark creativity. I mean, Rune was talking about this, how there are certain strings of text that just go viral every time they're posted, no matter when they're posted, no matter who posts them. These little insights, we did this project Bangor archive where we took the best post by certain people just screenshot of them and just said Bangor. And they would get another 10,000 likes every time. Yeah, we had posts that would get 50, you know, an order of magnitude more likes than the original post. And it was like a Naval post about like you should work like a lion, like, you know, take rest and then work really hard. And it's just like these universal truths that like just continue to deliver value.

What else? What else you got? What else you got? What else is on the board? Give us some other stuff. Because I feel like 4chan would like one shot your leader. They'd figure out there's like there's four words. You put these together and make every person on earth mad.

Yeah. No, it'd be terrible. One idea. This is something I asked you with parking tickets here. I also found out that like Vanda. have like a similar setup in the city. So I was able to scrape like half a million pictures of graffiti that cops took. So I think it'd be cool to make a website that shows graffiti art through the lens of a cop in San Francisco. Yeah, that'd be cool. They took on their

phone themselves. Yeah. It feels like a lot of your projects touch on public works projects, public like cities, like data in cities. And I'm wondering, if you have a view on like, should cities be more open to the hacker culture, actually embrace some of this stuff? Like some of the stuff that you're building is like very close to just like a tool that would make life in a particular city easier. And yet cities are notorious for long lines of the DMV and not being the most tech forward organizations or entities.

How do you think about actually like, how cities deliver tech services. Yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think the asset government actually has a pretty good handle on this. They have lots of data sets that they publish pretty frequently. There's a lot to work with there. They publish 911 calls with like a 10-minute delay. You can see kind of like an anonymized data set of what people are calling 911 for,

which is kind of cool. There's lots of things like that nobody really knows about. But there's things there. Would you like in a perfect world, in a perfect world, Would one of these you do it for fun and then you discover some like enduring business or do you like just doing one idea after the next? Yeah, I mean, all these ideas are just things I find interesting to myself and, you know, usually that means something else will find interesting too if I post online. I think it's just like an outlet to be creative and it's nice to have distinct work work and like this is more fun work. But yeah, definitely would be cool if something like that happened.

Any ideas? Are you capital constrained on anything? Like if you had 25 grand, you would do, because I feel like at this point, there's enough people, ourselves included, we would, as long as it was not offensive, we would happily chip in to make possible. There is, yes, I need 33K for a project next May for a very fun stunt in San Francisco. Okay. If anyone would like to see what. We should talk. Yeah. All right.

Let's talk. We'll talk off the line. We don't want to spoil. Last story I want to talk about. I didn't really, I didn't put it together until just now that you're the person behind New York's hottest steakhouse that was fake. Tell me that story. Because I remember it happening and I didn't put it together until just now. You talk to the, the co-conspirator in Bahra, the archaeology guy.

Yeah. Oh, no way. Wow. Yeah. No, that was an incredible, like one of the best nights of my life. We had so many things go wrong. but like somehow it just happened to go right we we long story short we lived in a house together in New York Maran made steaks and then we made a Google Maps listing called Maran Steakhouse and then

all our friends started writing these bizarre five-star reviews like you know I converted out of like Hinduism so that way I could try something as beef or like he came in like drenched in blood from upstate fresh with a fresh count like really bizarre reviews of people in New York thought it was real because the dining culture there is crazy yeah and we had this huge wait list over a couple years that we built up. We actually opened it for one night. We opened a real restaurant. Fully permitted, I was licensed by the government to actually open a restaurant. We had 120 guests come thinking it was real. It was like humongous operation, logistics lines, but it somehow ended up well. We did not get sued.

How did the guests take it? Yeah, what were the, where were the reviews after the back? Most of them were pretty good. Like, I don't think people really realized it was fake. We wanted people to find out it was fake in the Times, and they read it about the York Times. And a lot of people did. Oh, got it. thought it was kind of a weird restaurant, but they thought it was like, okay, this is just how things are. It's like cool and avant-garde, right? It's like edgy, new and different and pop-up.

Did you guys break even on it? Like, did you, did you end up, did you sell enough steak to, no, no. We, we spent like 16K and then made like 13K. So we lost like 3K. But for the amount we got, like, it was, it was viral everywhere. But that New York Times piece is forever. It is. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Amazing. All right. Well, we will message you. We'll figure out how to make this. We'd love to talk about SF stunt. That'd be fantastic. Happen.

And keep up the great work. Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon, Riley. Thanks for joining. Cheers. Let me tell you about customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level that started.

Opening I says, more compute in the making announcing five new Stargate sites with Oracle and SoftBank putting us ahead of schedule on the 10 gigawatt commitment we announced in January. Let's go. Ahead of schedule. Massive. Stripes also buying back shares from its VC backers at $106.7 billion dollar valuation.

Sequoia bought $861 million worth of shares in 2024 at a 70 billion valuation, so they're getting a markup. And amend and pretends his live shot of a swath right now. He's talking about a swath demodron, who is a... who is obsessed with valuation, specifically liquidity premiums, illiquidity premiums. And it's just interesting that Stripe continues to find ways to stay private, basically, forever. And they've been on a tear of the Collison brothers. Well, we saw this, we talked to Joe Lonsdale about being in the same fraternity at Stanford with Gary Tan.

And you can zoom in on this photo and see a young Joe Lonsdale and a young Gary. Tan hanging out at Stanford back in 2003. Pretty remarkable piece of tech lore. I want to know what is everyone else up to. We got to go through this list because there's probably some interesting folks in here. I want to know what Michael Calhoun's up to or Justin Reynolds or Adam Rodriguez. Got to figure it out. A bunch of lads.

Got to get on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. And we got anything else here? Tyler Cowan is talking about the potential for stagflation, economic stagnation. No one wants that. Tyler says it seems increasingly likely that the American economy is sleepwalking towards stagflation.

In case you're wondering, that is not a good thing. Stagflation means an economy experiences excess inflation and excess unemployment at the same time. This was one thought to be impossible, but the OPEC oil price shocks of the 1970s triggered both high inflation and high unemployment, and voila. We were suddenly, we suddenly had a new unhappy economic phenomenon. If I had to guess, I think there's a decent chance that 18 months from now, America could well have an inflation rate of 4% up from last year's 2.5%. Oh, John, we got some breaking news in the chat. What do we have? China agrees to terms of a U.S. TikTok deal. Wow. Thank you, Bobby Cosbank for breaking the news. Thank you,

hello, hello. Thank you everyone in the chat for keeping us up to speed. Is this not a a little worrisome that they're agreeing with. It seemed to have historically had a pretty hard line. Well, pull up any more information while I tell you word about adquick.com, out of home advertising, easy and measurable. Say goodbye to haggs out of home advertising.

Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I want to tell you how Steven Spielberg works. He says, Stephen Spielberg says, before he goes off to direct a movie, he always looks at four films. Can you guess what films he watches before he goes out and directs a film?

Seven samurai, Lawrence of Arabia. Borat. Borat. Dark night. Dark night. What is the other? Mountain Head and Office Space. Those are the movies you've seen?

No. Now he does. Seven samurai, Lawrence of Arabia. It's a Wonderful Life and The Searchers. Have you seen any of those? Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia is a fantastic movie. Tyler, have you seen any of those?

I've seen all of them but the searcher. Same with me. No, I have seen the searchers. You need to give us a review on that. I need to check that out this weekend. I've seen seven cents. All right, since you've seen it, name every scene. Yes.

Is there a tech equivalent of this? Before you start a new company, study the grades. Listen to these four founders' podcast episodes. Who are you listening to? Pick four. top four. Edward Land, Steve Jobs, Gaston Glock,

and probably Rockefeller. You got to throw Gaston Glock in there for sure. Underrated. And the chicken finger dream. You got to get up to speed on the chicken finger dream before you start your next company. I think every founder should have

four founders' podcast episodes in the chamber before they go out to raise, pump up speeches. Or if they need to run through a brick wall. Yeah, if you need to run through a brick wall, that you need to have your top four founders' podcasts. Ready to go.

So when you hit the road, when you check into the Rosewood for your Sand Hill tour of pitches, you're ready to go. And you're also wearing a fantastic timepiece on your wrist that you picked up from getbezzle.com because your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. In other news, Palmer Lucky says that Mod Retro has teamed up with Ubisoft to re-release some of their greatest classics starting with Rayman. It has some of the best graphics of any Game Boy Color title. Late Cycle developers truly mastered the hardware. It shipped months after the Gameaway advance was announced.

So congrats to Palmer Lucky and a new deal for Mod Retro. Company's been on a tear. Very excited. And we also hit the timeline yesterday, quoting a meta post. Yeah. See how U.S. national security agencies are using metathlama models to develop bespoke tools for America's military and intelligence professionals. It is crazy how much the vibe has shifted.

Entirely. Would imagine if meta posted something like that in 2016, when Palmer was there for a couple months. Yeah. Would have been crazy. Palmer says added to the quote from the announcement, we're also supporting U.S. national security through our work, developing augmented

and virtual reality technologies. Through our partnership with Andrel, we are developing a range of wearable products to help maintain America's technological edge. You know what I've missed recently? Singing. There hasn't been enough singing on this show, so we've got to bring it back. Find your happy place.

Find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring Views, Hotel Great Amenities, dreamy beds, top tier, cleaning, a 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We got to get Tyler to chime in when we're singing. We can close on this post. Vinnie Daniels says, I'm seeing parallels between Nvidia and the Medici Bank failure of the 1490s. Who isn't?

People are having fun drawing comparisons. Lots to the dot-com boom. Not so much to the 1490s, but fire up, crack open a history book. Should we do a deep dive on the 1490s? for sure we should definitely read about the Medici bank failure Tyler you in get out the red string I was going to say I see a parallel between NVIDIA and the rise of the Roman Empire early on okay okay taken over everything okay who is Jensen is he Caesar or the rise of Genghis Khan the Mongols maybe maybe

anyways that's a fun show folks thanks for tuning in hope you have a great Wednesday a fantastic rest of your day we'll be back tomorrow And I cannot wait. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.