TBPN - Rage Baiting is for Losers, Everett Randle’s 5x Controversy | Jordan Nanos, Brian Halligan, Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Scott Sanders, Jeremy Allaire, Vladimir Novakovski, Andrew D'Souza, Parag Agrawal

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

(00:43) - Rage Baiting is for Losers (27:45) - Everett Randle’s 5x Controversy (38:07) - Rage Baiting is for Losers (42:08) - Dwarkesh Patel’s Satya Interview (01:00:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:56) - Jordan Nanos, a Member of Technical Staff at SemiAnalysis, discusses the depreciation practices of hyperscalers like Meta, Azure, Oracle, and Google, noting their extension of IT asset lifecycles from three to five years up to six years, which Michael Burry argues artificially boosts earnings. He highlights that Nvidia's two-to-three-year product cycles could pressure companies to upgrade hardware more frequently, potentially leading to increased capital expenditures. Nanos also emphasizes the importance of considering the operational lifespan and performance of GPUs, suggesting that while hardware may be used longer, rapid technological advancements might necessitate earlier replacements to maintain competitive performance. (01:32:07) - Brian Halligan, co-founder and former CEO of HubSpot, now serves as a senior advisor at Sequoia Capital, where he coaches startup founders. In the conversation, he discusses his role at Sequoia, coaching CEOs building AI-driven companies, and his new podcast launching tomorrow, which explores modern CEO practices. He also reflects on the evolving CEO playbook, highlighting unique leadership styles of figures like Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, and notes the emergence of 'five-tool' CEOs proficient in vision, coding, design, recruitment, and sales. (01:59:16) - Dr. Fei-Fei Li, a renowned computer scientist and co-founder of World Labs, discusses her company's vision to advance artificial intelligence by enhancing spatial intelligence, enabling AI systems to understand and interact with the three-dimensional physical world. She highlights the development of Marble, World Labs' first commercial product, which generates 3D virtual environments from text, images, or video inputs, aiming to empower creators in fields like gaming, visual effects, and virtual reality. Dr. Li emphasizes the importance of human creativity, stating that AI should augment rather than replace human creators, and envisions a future where AI's spatial intelligence leads to breakthroughs in various industries, including robotics and medicine. (02:29:48) - Scott Sanders, Chief Growth Officer at Forterra, discusses the company's recent $238 million Series C funding and their focus on developing autonomous vehicle technology for defense applications. He highlights Forterra's efforts to equip military vehicles with self-driving capabilities, communication nodes, and advanced weaponry to enhance battlefield effectiveness and reduce human risk. Sanders also emphasizes the importance of open architecture and partnerships with other defense technology firms to deliver comprehensive solutions to warfighters. (02:38:53) - Jeremy Allaire, CEO and founder of Circle, is a prominent technologist and entrepreneur known for co-creating the web development tool ColdFusion and founding Allaire Corporation. In the transcript, he discusses Circle's impressive Q3 earnings, highlighting a 108% year-over-year growth in USDC and a 600% increase in on-chain activity, reaching $9.6 trillion. He also introduces ARK, a new layer one blockchain network, and mentions collaborations with major companies like Visa and MasterCard, as well as AI firms, to develop agentic payment standards. (02:50:05) - Vladimir Novakovski, a Harvard graduate at 18 and former Citadel trader, is the founder and CEO of Lighter, an Ethereum-based decentralized exchange. In the conversation, he discusses Lighter's mission to provide low-cost, low-latency, secure, verifiable, and composable trading solutions, emphasizing the importance of transparency and trustlessness in decentralized finance. He also reflects on his journey from finance to AI and then to DeFi, highlighting the need for decentralized exchanges to offer superior product-market fit to attract users from centralized platforms. (03:01:59) - Andrew D'Souza, co-founder and CEO of Boardy, discusses how their AI-driven platform connects founders with investors to facilitate business growth. Since its recent launch, Boardy has attracted 5,000 founders seeking to raise $16 billion and 600 investors managing approximately $1 trillion in capital. D'Souza emphasizes the platform's role in creating high-quality, meaningful connections that unlock economic opportunities for both parties. (03:11:24) - Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter, has founded Parallel Web Systems, an AI startup that has secured $30 million in funding from investors like Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. In the transcript, Agrawal discusses the company's recent $100 million Series A funding round, highlighting the growing demand for AI agents capable of conducting real-time web research across various industries, including sales, finance, healthcare, and scientific research. He emphasizes Parallel's commitment to providing high-quality, authoritative data for AI applications, aiming to outperform existing models like OpenAI's GPT-5 in delivering accurate and reliable information. (03:18:16) - 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.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVVN. Today is Wednesday, November 12th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultram, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital, capital. What's going on over there, Shorty? You got caught lacking. I was publishing an essay. You were publishing an essay. It's live on X now. You can go listen to it. You can also subscribe at tbPN.com. Our substack will email you every morning with the TBPN newsletter and, you know, 500 words from me or Jordy. It's a lot of fun. Go check it out. Also, check out ramp.com.

Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. The thing that got Jordy to learn to type was this video, this launch video. You were like, I got to write an essay. I got to learn. I got to lock in. I got to learn how to write because this is, this is, this is, this is, uh, is, uh,

It's enraged me. Were you enraged? I wasn't enraged. I try not to let the internet make me mad. Okay, but they were trying to enrage you. And the fact that they tried made you angry. You got angry, you weren't enraged. You were below enraged, but you were above angry.

And so you had to put him in the truth zone. You had to write a long post, an essay about it. We'll go through it, but I'd love to watch the Chad IDE brain rot code editor video. First, I want to see the video for myself. Let's play it. Okay, so he's got some Newport cigarettes. He's packing, pulls out a cigarette. With the Stanford.

Lights it up. He's got the cutoff. Stanford cutoffs. What is this music that's playing? He's got the guitar in the background. And what is he playing? Some sort of plink. This is steak.

Oh, this is gambling. So he's gambling. He's gambling in the IDE. Okay, so I assume that means he's won something or other? I actually don't know what the stake UI looks like. Okay, so he's done winning. He has won the gambling session with steak, and now he's back in his IDE, and he writes a prompt,

and he says, test the code, and it pulls up some sort of mobile game that it's playing. Do you know what... This is Clash Royale? This is Clash Royale. Okay. Have you played? I have played.

in middle school, yeah. Interesting. I never played... I never really got into any mobile games. I did play Politopia. I like Politopia. That's a good game. It's a mobile game.

It's like Age of Empires, but on your phone. Elon is a big fan of that. Elon's big fan of it. And with Politopia, actually, the entire Elon universe is sort of into Polytopia. It's like how you gain status at some of these companies.

It's like waiting in Polytopia. So I'll start by saying, I think the video is funny. Okay. And I'm sure the founders are smart. Okay. And I think they, they, for a low budget launch video, I think they did well. They broke through.

That is a very low budget launch video. That literally cost nothing. Yeah. Okay. So I think that's great. And I'm not, and I want to be clear that I'm not bearish on the founders at all. But this made me think of something, and I'll read through my post. So the title of the essay that I just put out, rage baiting is for losers.

This is in itself, if you have been rage baiting. There's sort of levels. But I said yesterday Y.C announced Chad IDEe, aka the BrainRot code editor. Chad is an AI code editor that allows you to gamble, watch TikTok, and use dating apps while you work on coding tests. Their launch rightfully got a lot of attention.

On one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, what are we doing here and why does this belong in the official YC account? To understand Chad IDE, Cooley, Icon, friend, and the new class of Gen Z startups, you have to understand the online environment that these founders grew up in. If you grew up on the internet and you studied how and why certain people would regularly go viral, you know that making people mad has and always will be an effective way to get attention. The feedback loop is simple.

You make something that makes people angry and people comment, share, and dunk, and because feeds are optimized to show posts with high engagement the most, you get a lot of reach. rage baiting for commercial purposes, in my view, was pioneered by course bros. People like Ty Lopez realized that making the masses mad was an effective way to drive course sales. You could flaunt Lamborghinis, make a bunch of people angry. And as long as a handful of people found their way into their course, it was a viable, repeatable strategy.

Historically on X, rage baiting was a marketing strategy, not a product strategy. Accounts like sweaty startup, aka Nick Huber, frequently post things to get an angry reaction in the subsequent reach. but behind the scenes, Nick has always been running a pretty normal commercial real estate fund. In 2025, rage baiting has become a product strategy. Cluelly started as an app for cheating on coding interviews. Chad IDE's only known differentiation from the other 100 AI native IDs is that you can gamble and swipe on dating apps in it. The rage bait is sitting at the product level now.

It's becoming clear that while rage bait might occasionally work as a marketing strategy, it really should not be employed as a product strategy, running a success. VC-backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media, investors, talent, and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage-baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people who could be potential investors, customers, or team members to actively prey on your downfall. YC has long provided some of the most durable, high-quality, generalizable advice for startups, and I believe that it has had a tremendously positive impact on the companies that go through YC and even those that don't.

Launch now, make something people want, do things that don't scale, ignore your competitors, are just some of those. So as someone who believes that YC is one of the most important and influential institutions in tech, I believe it might be time to include this in their list of essential startup advice, rage baiting is for losers. So again, I think, you know, I'm sure that, I'm sure that there's like more to Chad IDE than we've seen so far. But I do think it's notable that rage bait has moved from kind of a fringe marketing strategy

to a marketing strategy within tech to now living at the product level. And I just don't think that's going to create a lot of enduring value for the companies that pursue that strategy. Yes. So the reaction to this was very negative. And I think there's a few. It really has to do that layer of the stack. It ends up impacting the brands of the firms.

that fund these ideas. Of course, of course. There's a post. I'll try to pull it up here. Let's see here. The most important different, like the most important thing in your piece that I liked was this idea that there is rage bait marketing, doing a stunt, doing something a little bit crazy, but then delivering a quality product is separate from making the product itself rage baity. And so I think. I think a lot of people, when they saw this video, they wanted, they were wondering, what does the product actually do? Because all you've told me is that you created an April Fool's joke.

And Google's been doing April Fool's jokes for years. Some of these April Fool's jokes I was looking at were insane. In 2000, just a couple of years after they launched, they created a fake mind reading search engine. Then they did Pigeon rank, an explanation that Google's algorithm relied on trained pigeons. They launched a free home broadband service. So internet delivered through your toilet. They announced Google Translate for animals. You could talk to your dog and it would try and translate.

These were all jokes. They were never real products. It was just the Google team having some fun on April Fool's Day. They would get a bunch of attention. And then they would route you to the safest, fastest, most secure email system possible, right? Like a real product. but they would have a lot of fun, and sometimes they would even build

a little web experience around it. But at the end of the day, it was like, yeah, but also we're ready to sell you servers with Google Cloud Platform. We're ready to sell you, like, you know, ad units on Google. It was like, we have a serious business. And so the question for me

and the question I had for Tyler was, what's actually under the hood at Chad IDE? The company is not called Chad IDE. It's called Clad Labs. The steel man here is that, hey, IDEs are boring. You got to do something funny. film a funny video, create a fake product,

but then have something under the hood that is actually real, that does actually advance the conversation, and is maybe something that a real product would... I tried to sign up and need a code. Yeah, so what happened? We asked you to sign up. And one thing I would say, before we go further, I think this would have been a brilliant kind of like stunt.

If they did it as a stunt, and it wasn't core to the brand that they're building. It wasn't core to the product. If they did it... Yes. if they released a product and then later said, hey, we're adding this brain rot functionality. Totally. Like that would have been, that would have been, I think, a good reaction.

If it was April Fool and Michael Truel at Cursor or Scott Wu with Winsurf, we're like, we're doing a brain rod version of the IDE. Everyone would be like, that's hilarious. Okay, now back to using Winsurf and Cursor, right? Like, that's just what. Yeah, and I don't think it certainly probably is not a fit for Cursor's brand. No, not at all. If you were creating something to try to compete in that space, it would have been a good

strategy. But again, I would actually fight you on that. I think that cursor has this very, Michael Truel has only done like a few podcasts. He did that podcast with Patrick Collison. He's, he's this very like thoughtful software engineer. Scott Wu is this IMO gold medalist. Like there's something that actually would be very funny and might actually break through if they did some silly brain rotty stunt because it, because it would be like, well, obviously they're not actually doing that. Obviously, they're not actually doing that. Obviously, there. what they're focused on is just improving developer productivity. And instead, this, it just, it hasn't answered a lot of the question of like,

what's behind the curtain, what's behind the marketing? Because if it's brain rot stuff, if it's jokes all the way down, like, what are we really doing here? But Tyler, what was your experience actually trying to use this product? Yeah, so I go to the website. You can't download yet because it's still in beta. You need a code. I DM the founders, but they didn't get back to me. But, like, I mean, the company is not Chad Labs.

It's Clad Labs. This, like, it's the chat ID, but like, this is obviously a marketing stunt. I kind of disagree. Yeah, but can you get a product from Clad Labs? Like, Google would come out with a joke, you know, pigeon-based algorithm or something like that. That would be out, or like, Google Translate for Animals would be at like Animals.com that day. But Google Translate would still work. So, like, walk me through the Clad Labs product.

Like, what is their core product outside of the stunt? Yeah. So I mean, obviously I haven't tried it, so I'm kind of giving them the benefit of the data here. But like when you go to the download page, there's the options like which brain rot do you want? Yes. And it's like, you know, steak or like Minecraft Barcore or whatever. And then there's an option that says, I don't want brain rot. Okay.

So there is obviously a product here that is like not just, it's not just the brain rot. That's not the entire company. Yes. Like when you go to the pricing page, it says that it says like there's, you know, the free pro, pro, super whatever tiers. It's not listing like, oh, this one has the Minecraft one. it says like, oh, it has unlimited, you know, agent tool use. Okay. Like, there's obviously a product here.

This is a marketing stunt. I, like, believe that. Okay. I, like, I kind of disagree that. I just think it's, I just think it's a poorly executed stunt and be, because you have not told me what the differentiator is. Like, how is this better than WinSurf? How is this better than cursor?

Like, what is their value prop other than just like, oh, cool. It's a newer, it's a newer, it's a newer cursor with less funding and the team's less serious, but they're good at making viral videos. Part of the reaction here that I think is, you know, there's an account developing Volhalla is quoted the post from YC said, this is what we're promoting instead of telling young 20-year-old founders to take us to the moon, to create better societies, to improve the material conditions of our fellow man. YC is funding garbage. There's only making our society worse.

You don't hate VCs enough. So I think there's just naturally, like I just look at YC as an institution. that has consistently provided just very sort of like, like the best quality advice that's generalizable, right, for just any, any person that wants to get into startups. So let me tell you about restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream reach your audience, wherever they are. There is, there's this post by Shiel Mo Nat here, he says, met a very successful founder who said, I chose fund, blank, because they gave me credibility when I needed it.

Now the fund backs everything, including the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. I don't think the next wave of founders will pick them. The credibility they had is gone. And I was thinking about how AUM-weighted brain rot or A-U-M-weighted slop is not an excuse for slop and controversial investments. Like, if you put 1% of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, we are the most degenerate. we're the craziest, we're the most insane, we're the most fraudulent, like, in your face

company, even if it's only 1% of your fund, you're not going to be able to say, like, no, no, no, 99% of my investments are just, like, you know, trying to cure cancer genuinely, or, like, actually trying to improve developer productivity. Or, like, 99% of my investments are just reasonable down the fairway, like, good businesses. But 1% of them, I took a flyer, 1% is a little bit crazy. Well, if that 1% gets a thousand times more views, your enterprise SaaS portfolio, like you're going to be known as the slop fund. So like you need to

be careful about that. Yeah. Because because the nature of the internet is that is that a viral rage baity video can get a thousand times more views than your latest bet on AI legal services that might actually be helping improve lawyers efficiency or something like that, you know? Yeah. So like in terms of brand, part of it, it's a real. I see has always had, you know, one of why sees challenges as an institution is that they can only accept something like, I think it's like less than one, isn't it less than one percent? Oh, yeah. It's kind.

So super small, you know, very, very low acceptance rate. Yeah. And so if you're a founder that applied with an idea that you think is, you know, world positive and then you see them announcing this kind of stuff, they're going to be, you know, that those founders are going to be even more frustrating, right? I want Tyler's reaction, but first I want to tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails.

Securely spent up white label wallets sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all who want simple API. Tyler, what do you think? Okay, so, like, as a steel man, like, say that I have some new way to do, you know, agents in my editor, right? And it's like, it actually works way better than cursor.

It's way better than wind surface. It's better than everything else. And I apply to YC with this thing. Okay, there's like probably, what, like 10 other YC companies that are, like, literal YC companies in the same batch doing similar, you know, coding editor stuff. How do I differentiate myself? I feel like this is like fairly reasonable

to get more of you. Imagine, I think from their opinion, the idea is like, okay, we get some users that think it's funny to gamble in their IDE, and then they realize like, oh, this is actually a pretty useful feature. And this is all assuming that they actually have good tech underneath. But like what, like, Jordi, if you were in YC

and you had a coding editor company, like, how would you launch it? Yeah, how do you like recommend, like, instead of doing stuff like this, How do they differentiate themselves? If Clad Labs had launched something and they were just like, hey, like we're, you know, we're building a better IDE. Here's how we use our model. Oh, cursor, they're currently in a fight with Anthropic.

The rates are through the roof. Ours is cheaper for this one reason. And we have this better UI and better functionality. And we also have this engineer who figured out this little solution. And we work on mobile and they don't. Or we work on iPads and they don't. Or we work for Fortran and they don't. They only do Python.

You know, there's a million ways to like articulate your differentiation. they certainly, it doesn't seem like they even tried to do that. It doesn't seem like they even tried. Sure, but I think you could probably find companies in this YC batch doing exactly that. Yes. You don't know their name. Yes, yeah, yeah. That is true.

That is true. And you do, like, I'm not asking. I just go back to what I said, which was separate out the rage from the core product and have it be like a marketing stunt. I still think you could have gotten the same amount of attention, but then people would go in and they'd be like, wait, this is actually a really cool novel approach. I don't think we know for sure that they're not doing. doing that. This seems to, like, when I read this, I see it as a marketing. But it's like,

like, like, so, so I would, I would agree with you if I could go to cladlabs.com and, like, see the actual product. But it's like cladlabs.com is not even purchased. Like, they, like, there's literally no information. It's cladlabs. But I, but when you go to the site, it, it is just like the brain rot. Exactly. Like, like, where is the real product? Like, like, there is no real product here. And that's the, and that's, and that's what Jory risk is, is that, is that they, they're in, they haven't built anything behind the scenes. It's all marketing. It's all stunt. And it's like, yeah, doing a stunt is maybe fine, even if it's designed to enrage people. It's like, I, I don't know, maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe people

are against even doing the stunt marketing. I think it's actually okay. I think we went through this, Cooley. Like, there was, there was the moment where like, it was, it was, clearly was doing rage bait marketing. And there were people that it were upset about that. But there were other people that were upset about this idea of like the product you're making is to help people cheat and cheating is bad. It's like the product you're making is to help people gamble and gambling is bad. And so if you are anti gambling, you are anti this product that they built and they, now they have the opportunity to say, no, no, no, like here's the real thing. And they haven't done that yet.

And there's no like, oh, click seven layers deep in the menu and you can see that it's like, oh, this was a stunt for this other thing. Like, they haven't actually put out any breadcrumbs of, like, what they're actually building. And so I think that's why it leaves such a bad taste of mouth. Because it feels like they spent all YC just working on a stunt. And I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt that I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're smart. And I'm sure they have a, have a deeper, broader vision. And I think, you know, the reality is, is like having these moments between prompts, like, is a sort of, is a sort of an unsolved

It's probably. 100%. 100%. And so, yeah, it feels like they, it feels like they risk sort of going the Cluelly route, which is over-optimizing for rage bait product development even. And then they have to like figure out what the final product is, where it's like, okay, I think it's okay to spend, to spend, you know, a day. in YC, thinking about like, what's our marketing strategy?

That video did not look expensive to film. Yeah. What feels expensive is like, it seems like they actually built the full product. Like, it feels like they built the full brain rot product. Yeah. And it's like, you didn't need to do that. You could have just gone viral for the video and then followed up and been like, it would have been so easy if at that end of that video,

been like, be like, like, that's what people feel like Gen Z entrepreneurs built. Yeah. But we didn't want to do that. So we actually built this. Go down right now. this video. But I'm not going to, I want to try the, I don't want to gamble, but I want to see it actually like in the ID. That's like funny. But if they, at the end of they say, oh, it's all a joke, it's like, okay, it's another ID. I don't need another one. But I want to. What do you? I want to try it. You can just do window management. Like, what are we actually talking about here? Just put TikTok on the left side of your screen. I have two windows open right now. This is a Mac native feature. Okay. Well, let's pull up this video from Chirav Arora, who's going viral this, yesterday. Okay. said tips to apply at YC Batch winner 2026. And I think

Sharave is a literal child it seems to be under under 10 years old, something like that. He looks very young, yes. He looks very young. And the reason that I think YC... Cognition.

We're making of him of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. You want to play this video? Would you have? First step, you should have some clear cold. Like, what you should do after funding and you should have a place of? I can barely hear this, but...

Okay, we can pause it. But the reason I included this is because I think there's a lot of people like Chorav and tons of young people that look to YC as, like, whatever YC is promoting, they approve. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. They give a lot of advice. Yes, yes, yes. If they're sharing something on their social account, it means it has weight. It means it's a valid strategy. And so I just, I want to avoid a scenario where the shiravs of the world think that they need to rate, put rage bait in order to like break out in this industry.

Yeah. Because it's just, it's not the reality. You can just build a great product. You can get let that speak for itself. You can find ways to market it along the way. Yeah. I mean, I feel like, I feel like that's part of the reason why Gary Tane was tapped as the, as the president. Like he, he, I don't know, all the complex behind the scene stuff, but he was putting.

out content on his YouTube channel and certainly carrying the torch of YC forward where he was definitely speaking to the next generation of entrepreneurs in an extremely positive way, telling all these fascinating stories about his entrepreneurial career, his values. I mean, he hosts meetups at churches and has really focused on building an extremely positive community. And there is a question about the YC. account. Is it a portfolio list?

Is it every company that launches? Or is it a library that they're building for startup advice? And they stand by everything that happens there. There's two different things that you can use the account for. Right now it feels like it's a little bit of like, hey, like, you know, if it gets views, we're going to put it up there. If it's fun, if somebody's doing something fun. But you don't always

have the same, you don't have the same like the context really matters. I think that video goes more viral because it's on the YC brand account as opposed to, oh, some people got into YC, they pivoted, they came up with this funny video, like, they're just having fun, like they're kind of, like, after YC, there's a whole, there's a whole era where you go through YC, you hit Demo Day, and then, and then a few months later, like, there's companies that still have a little bit of cash, but they're not really building the same thing, and it's not like, I would not hold the YC found, the YC, the Y,

I see partners responsible for what YC companies do post-pivot, post-demo day where, yeah, the company is still a YC company. You know, you do have, there is sort of a code of conduct in YC and they can kind of kick you out a little bit. But legally, like, there is a contract where once they invest, you can't just take the money back because they think you're doing something immoral. Yeah. Unless it's like fraud.

If it's legal, like they can't just ask for the money back. Yeah. Teddy Blank says sharing a video of. Alby, who is a 14-year-old applying for YC, went extremely viral earlier this week, got 3.6 million views. Wow. It's a 14-year-old founder. Yeah, let's play it. I'm Albi. I'm 14 and I'm based in Sydney, Australia.

I've been building things ever since I was six or seven. Br-ha. Don't get the joke. Really good editing. Well, I've been building things ever since I was nine. First writing code at code camps, then building Roblox games. And even launching a soccer gear brand when I was 12. Wait, did he edit this?

We got to hire this guy to edit for us. Where teens learn the real world skills that school forgot. This is a great roto. Coding, AI, content creation, etc. Instead of boring textbooks, you level up, earn XP, and unlock challenges as you go. All while learning from top founders, creators, innovators, and other young people doing amazing things. I started Finkel because school wasn't teaching me or my friends had to actually build, create, or launch something in the real world. Teddy says my default reply to high schoolers hitting me up for VC funding is put me on the phone

with your parents. This is awesome. I love this. I hope he gets in. I should recommend this guy. If he doesn't get into YC, Alby will hire you. Yeah. Head over to Los Angeles.

Head over to Hollywood. Yeah, I don't. This is, it's interesting because it's sort of a sort of a, like, you're not really supposed to do this. when you apply to YC. Like, the application video is, like,

they definitely don't want a game of, like a Red Queen's race where it's about the video production. Yeah. But at the same time, like, you got to play the game on the field. Like, you're supposed to just turn on the webcam and basically just talk for one minute.

That's how you apply to YC. One shot it. Yeah, you're supposed to just one shot at, no editing, because they don't want it to turn into, oh, to apply to YC, you spend two weeks doing an edited video. They're like, no, work on your product. And then the marketing is like the last little cherry on top.

Like that's always been the YC mantra. And that's a little bit of like this cloud labs thing, although the weird thing is like the video, I love the video. It's funny and it's cheap and it's clearly just like a bit and they did it and it was two seconds. But then it feels like they didn't, they didn't give me the payoff of like, oh, okay, you guys are funny. And you're working on something cool and interesting and hard and different. And so I just feel like I didn't get the payoff of the joke. Like the beauty of those Google April Fool's Day was that that was the, when they were on such a tear.

You would go and you would go to a Google April Fool's joke and then you would land on their product blog and you would be like, oh, wow, like they did some crazy update to Google Maps and now you can see your house from the street because they just invented street view. Like, this is incredible. They were delivering on so many different levels

that they earned the right to make the April Fool's joke. They earned the right to joke around because they also had a massive monopoly in search engines. And so they were printing money. so no one was like, oh, this is so unreasonable that they took a couple hours out of their developers' time to go build some funny gag. Anyway, bigma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Bigma helps design and development teams build great products together, get started for free. Sheel says met a very successful founder who said, oh, I read this one. Because you gave me credibility.

We covered this. What? I read this one. We covered this. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we jumped ahead. Earlier. Yeah.

This was my point. About if you, even if you put 99% of your AUM into boring B2B SaaS or even curing cancer, if you do one deal that's going to get a little crazy and go viral, like that's going to have a big impact on the fund overall. Should we go to more drama in the venture world? Ev Randall, who's coming on the show on Friday, went on Harry Stebbing's show, 20VC, and is putting the timeline in turmoil over. some comments about other funds. I'd love to play this clip from the actual interview. It's a minute and 32 seconds. I don't think, Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool, and say, hey, this basket of funds that we're making you invest Pari Pissue across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. I don't think they can say that, or they at least can't say that with a straight face.

And if you look at the recent return data, I think it suggests that. So I think they'll be able to make an immense amount of money on an absolute basis. But I think a lot of these LPs are in the business to make, or in venture to make high money on money returns. Like they had P.E. for the low return stuff and they probably get better liquidity from P.E. They're here for the high money on money returns. And this is one of the reasons why I'm extremely excited about benchmarked competitive position in today's market, because we can go to LPs. We can say, hey, we're shooting for higher than 5x net. We have the historical track record to back it up and we have the fund sizes to back it up as well, I mean, you had Miles from Carnegie Mellon come on here and do the awesome math and the

very clear math of, hey, do you know how hard it is to return ForexNet on $8 billion, $10 billion? It is immensely hard and it's, it like defies the laws of physics. So I think there's a difference between are they going to make a ton of money and are they going to produce the returns that LPs really want this asset class to produce? Two very, very different things. But for now, like the rubber is like the rubber won't meet the road because as you mentioned, And there's just so much global demand from LPs for exposure to private technology. And they are happy to take lower returns. And so I don't think there's any end in sight.

But I think on a relative basis between all of these different constituents and all these different GPs, there's a huge, huge delta and a huge differentiation between who can actually produce venture-like returns. Boo! He's not HGI-pilled. Boo! 10-X! You're going to 10-X the fund. Just 10-X it again. 10-X it again.

10x the fund. All within a 10-year fund cycle. And 10x it. Just 10-X it. exit and we're going to 10 exit again. No, obviously. Ev was on a little bit of damage control this morning. Wait, wait.

So I want to hear what exactly did he say the first line? He says, they cannot go to LPs and say with a straight face that they can do 5X net. Can we play the actual clip? Because I feel like that's not quite right. What do you say? I don't think, Ravir Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs, one of those legs of the stool. I said, I don't think they can go to LPs.

basket of funds that we're making you invest Pari Pesu across, we're going to get you 5x net on that. We're going to get you 5x. because maybe they can go with a straight face and say we're going to get you 6x net. Boom. We're going to get you 10x net. Maybe they can say that with a straightx. Taylor knows. Nancy Pelosi is not afraid to say, I'm going to 10xit.

I'm going to 10x it again. I'll 10X it again. Yes. Ev is for his life a little bit. Tagging big shots, quick edits, click big callouts, giving me, pick me vibes. people are not happy about this clip hitting the timeline people are are taking shots back and forth what what actually happened here part part of the the reality is I don't think no fund manager can really go to LPs and and you can you can share that you believe

there's a chance we'll get a 5x net but isn't it like yeah 99% of funds just don't come anywhere close to that. Yeah, that's for sure true. Also, I mean, I think the broader point that he's making is something along the lines of like, like, I saw some other post about like there will be fortunes made just by getting, getting retail investors and the broader capital that's out there in the world into the private mag seven. So the open AIs, the anthropics, the SpaceXes, the Andrels, there's a whole host of companies.

That was also an Ev Randall tweet. Oh, that was him from, was that him recently? Yeah, that was, I think, yesterday. Okay, yeah. So, like, there is a world where you set up a fund that has lower return expectations, but also lower risk, and it's a great deal, and LPs love it. And so I don't know, I don't know that it's that hot of a take, but it certainly, certainly put the timeline in turmoil like Christian Garrett here is sharing the gif of digging.

himself deeper into the hole, I imagine. So what do you have to actually? Part of his benchmarks feeling pretty good right now. If you look at their 2020 fun, they have Merck 4, they have fireworks. What's the other one? They have a number that are, that have, they have a bunch of like multi-10 baggers

at this point in that fund. So they're feeling pretty good about going to LPs and saying, look, we still got it. Yeah. Still cooking. Yeah. And, and yeah, I mean, ever in Benchmark, newly at Benchmark,

Benchmark has not become the platform fund, mega scale fund, has not 10x the LP base, certainly. Ev says, to be clear, I slash, we love working with our friends at all of these funds, and this part was not meant as a slight commentary on their quality as investors, just POV on fund strategies and the unique value prop of Benchmark.

I think it's a, fair tweet. But it's amazing because everyone is coming out and just trashed. Spencer Peterson in the comments there's like, I took that personally. I run a big fund.

I'm at Co2. We got 60 billion. What are you saying about me, buddy? You don't think I can put up a 5X? Watch me. Watch me. I take that personally. I'm going to put up 5X.

I'll call you when I have 500 billion under management. I think part of what made it feel super personal is that hairy tech. Robbie, Ravi. Totally, totally,

totally. And Ben. Yeah, we actively try to avoid, like, tagging people if someone is talking trash about someone else or, like, sub tweeting them. We don't really try and,

like, handhold into drama. But it is an art and it is delicate. Like, sometimes it's like, oh, wow, like they're really talking trash about that person.

Sometimes, sometimes it's fun. Like, sometimes we've done this where, I mean, we've done this with Ev, right? We've had Delian on the show.

He's called, out Ev, and we've tagged Ev in a clip. But it's all been fun. We've all been chatting about it behind the scenes, and then obviously had them all on the show to duke it out and stuff, and that was a lot of fun. This felt personal. I don't know. It doesn't feel that big of a deal. But let's go to Scott Kippor, obviously speaking for

his former colleagues at Andresen Horowitz. Now he is the director of the Office of Personnel Management. Scott Kippor says, since my former colleagues at A16Z are RIAs, and thus cannot legally comment on what they can slash cannot say with a straight face to LPs. This sounds a lot like what crappy board members say. They think they understand your business in depth and make inane comments about what you should slash should not do when as an outside observer, they have zero clue what actually happens day to day in the business.

Buy or beware. What? What? I'm so confused. by this. Okay, so he's saying that Ev thinks he understands Andresen's business, but in fact, he does not understand Andreessen's business. So, but I want to know, like, what is the misunderstanding? Because the, the steel man, the bull case on the Andreessen strategy is that Ev is making the claim that they will make more money, dollars, total dollars, because they're investing out of a bigger

fund size. They don't need to go and say, we're going to five-ex it. So it's a different pool of LPs. Also, part of, part of, like, the major appeal of investing in A16Z is that you pretty much know that you're going to get in every important company. There's one, a single check. Okay. So, yeah, maybe that's something that I didn't articulate fully. I don't know. I don't know. That's my, that's my point of view. I'm not an LP, but I, I happily would be. and it's because you know you're going to get some exposure to pretty much every important company, not necessarily always super early, but at some point in the company's life cycle, it's very likely that they will take a meaningful check from A16Z.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder how the RIA dynamic is playing out at Benchmark. It seems like such an advantage in the vibe wars to be able to speak freely. If Andresen can't defend themselves because of RIA rules and Ev can just go on podcasts and talk trash. Like, you kind of win by default. Like, you got to get out there, guys. You got to convert. You got to deconvert from the RIA.

I don't know. You got to get on the timeline, fight it out. What does Ev say? He says, I think smaller constrained funds can produce higher returns in venture. Quote, this must be a shitty board member. Don't work with him. Incredible non-sequitur. Thanks, Scott.

Chad Beyer says, while I actually agree with Scott in general, my lived experience is most board members are useless. I've been on a board with Evan. He was consistently the most prepared slash founder raved about his contributions. And Alex Klein is saying, love you both because they're beefing.

Interesting. Hmm. Yeah. Smaller funds can produce, smaller can train, strain funds can produce higher returns in venture. That seems to be like a reasonable take, but I don't know what they're actually saying to LPs. Where is, wasn't Emil Michael going, chiming in as well?

What did Emil have to say? I tried to pull that up, but the lying post got deleted. Oh, we got deleted. Okay. Well, we'll move on from it. We'll tell you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, and prove trust with Vanta. Banta helps get you compliant fast. And we don't stop there. AI automation powers everything.

Meanwhile, over on X, people are saying, calling me Unk. They're saying I'm a boomer. Oh, yeah? For my post, which I think is fair. But again, there's more nuance. I don't know. I like, there's a lot of it that I think is cool. Should we have the founder on the show?

The founder, open invite to the founder. Okay, open invite to the founder of the brain. ROT-I-D-E-Clad Labs. I am actually very interested to hear what is, what the actual product is. I feel like the narrative around these, like, you know, rage-baity stunts is always, is always like, oh, don't play into it. Don't play into it. I'm happy to play into it.

We played into it with, Cooley. We had Roy Lee on the show three times. and what I said the first time was what I continue to say, which is that, like, hey, you're going to have to build a real product. Part of my thesis is that Roy, like, effectively ran this strategy as aggressively as you could. Like, there was a picture of him with a stripper. Yeah, that was very rage-baity. And that was, like, the peak.

And then I think he's walked it back and he's adapted to strategy. And now he's. And so our take was like, he's going to have to build some good software at a certain point, a good product. and we tried the product and Tyler churned and like it just wasn't adding a ton of value. It wasn't moving. Yeah, but now they're iterating on the product.

And now they're iterating on the product. And so now I would imagine during the Culey Hayday, I would imagine that 80% of the team's hours were spent on marketing and 20% were spent on product, maybe. Now I think it's flipped. And I think that's very bullish. I think that's good. But Tyler, you had a rebuttal?

Yeah, I mean, I would just say like this seems very different from like you see the, the gambling on your credit card statements or whatever, like from other accelerators. Like, this feels very different. Like, this is like the marketing. Like, I think people kind of tend to group all of this stuff together where it's like, like what growing gay in was talking about yesterday. Where it's like some of these are like immoral companies that you could say.

Sure. I think this feels different than that. It feels much, at least to me, it feels much more of a marketing stunt than like, this is the product we want people to be gambling while running code. Yes, but what if what if the whole, if the whole, whole product is, and this is all we've, this is all we've seen, is a, you know, a VS code fork with minimal auto-complete. They're always, you know, a year or two or five behind cursor and windsurf. And yes, it has the ability to add Tinder and stake in sports betting in it. And like that,

the product that they are telling us their building is what they're building. And they stay with it for five years. Like, what do you say then? Yeah, then that's not good. So, so basically you're, you're just saying, you're open to a pivot. It's, it's not even a pivot. Like, it seems to me like the company is, everything, at least in my opinion, points to this being a marketing stunt. The company is named Clad Labs. It's like Cad Lab. This feels like a marketing stunt. It tells me that there actually is something different underneath than just adding. Yeah, no, no. I, I am super optimistic about it.

I would love to see, like, I don't know, by the end of the month, we know what is actually going on here. Certainly by Demo Day, when's Demo Day? December 3rd, I believe. December 3rd, we should know what's actually going on with the company. What's the real product? So they did their stunt. They got a bunch of people, hopefully to sign up, check out the website. You got your early user base.

Typically, in YC, you just ask your other YC batchmates to try. Right? Maybe you need to go broad, go viral. You did that. Now, draw the rest of the owl, basically, is the prompt. Or at least, or at least say what you're planning to do. Say what you're planning to do. Let's move on to Dorcasch. Dwar Keshe.

Dwar Keshe. I haven't watched the full thing, but a massive interview has hit the timeline. Dwar Keshech Patel, Dylan Patel, sat down with Satchadadella, and they got an exclusive tour of Favis. Airwater 2, the most powerful AI data center in the world? I feel like everyone's been saying they have the most powerful AI data center. It appears that Microsoft has leapfrogged Colossus 2. Well, I think maybe this is wrong, but I think Colossus 2 will be bigger.

It's just currently it's not big. Like, this is the current. Current biggest. It's the current biggest. Okay, okay. Okay, great. So you had a chance to actually sit down and watch this whole interview before we started the show, can you give me some takeaways? Where should people, are there any timestamps that

we should pull up? Are there any takeaways that people should know before they go and watch it? Yeah, I wrote a bunch of notes, so maybe some of these aren't interesting. Before you take us through those notes, let me tell you about graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software, faster. GitHub, of course, is a Microsoft product. Yeah, okay, so I think broadly, I would say it was pretty enlightening. I usually think of Satya as being very non-AGI pill. And I think this was, a bit of an update. So there's a bunch of reasons for this. I think so early on he like in the very, I think it was one of the first questions. He's like, what is AI? AI is basically two things.

This Satya's saying this. There's cognitive like enhancement. So this is like your like tools or this is your auto complete. This is your co-pilot. Yeah, co-pilot stuff like this. And then there's like the guardian angel. And this is like the very AGI build where I mean it's like kind of lording over everything. And so he actually does say these two things are like very possible. So and then we kind of move on. He says, co-pilot and actual pilot. Yeah, basically. Okay, so the next thing he's talking about kind of how he thinks about pricing structures of AI broadly. So there's this kind of conflict between subscription models and usage model of pricing. And he says, I think he's broadly more kind of focused on, at least in the short term, on this subscription kind of thing, right?

Which, like, it's... He makes a big emphasis on this, right? Because you need to be very specific on how you price these things, because doing actual, like, serving of the models is so expensive. Okay, so then throughout the interview, he keeps emphasizing the point that, like, Microsoft is a hyper-scaler. And so that means, like, a bunch of things. That means that they're going to keep supporting multiple models.

It means that they are going to... like they want to prioritize, prioritize the kind of long tail of like high margin users. So you can like, you can kind of compare that to Oracle who you can think of Oracle as basically prioritizing one potentially low margin. Yeah, exactly. You're giving bare metal essentially to one customer, opening AI. Yeah. And you're betting the whole company.

And he says like, if you're going to do that, you should just vertically integrate that company, like you're part of that company. That's what Zatia says, like in response to like, why is Oracle basically eating your entire business? Sure. Like, in the past like five years, Microsoft was super ramping up their CAPEX, their build, and then they just basically stopped and let Google, Oracle, Amazon basically build that up. So that's kind of the main reason. There's a bunch of other stuff. He's talking about, they ask him about chips.

So all the big hyperscalers have their own chip play, right? There's Trinium, there's TPUs. Open AI is doing their own chip. And Microsoft does have their own chip. But it just kind of, it's like the actual production is like way behind everyone else. Yeah. It's like, okay, why is this chip so bad or why are there so few of them? And then Satte basically brings up that like Microsoft has IP to everything open AI has, except for consumer hardware.

So chips are not consumer hardware. Chips are enterprise? So he's like, well, okay, how do we get the best chips? the best like, you know, model-specific chips, we'll just take OpenAI and we'll just, like, build on top of that. I wonder how much that actually transfers, though, because where does the chip development live? Where does the IP live?

Like, if Open AI goes to... I mean, it's designed, and they can get line time at TSMC, then they can just produce it and sell it to any customer they want. Yes, but what if they do it within Invidia or something? Like, what if they go to NVIDIA and they're like, hey, hey, for the next run of NVIDIA chips, we'd like you to consider this architecture. Why would they need to do that?

Because they want their models to be more performant on the chips. And so they go to Jensen and say, hey, we're one of the biggest buyers. So make the next version extremely performant for our chips. And I think they're already doing this. They're co-developing chips with InVIDia. They're co-developing chips with other companies. And if they co-develop with Broadcom or they co-develop with AMD or maybe even Intel in the future, but that IP lives with Intel, then no, Microsoft doesn't just get it.

it, right? Yeah. So it's like only in the event that, I mean, both of these are going to happen. Like there's going to be internal efforts and there's going to be external efforts. But it is a funny reminder that the internal efforts get copy-pasted over to Microsoft. One other note, Satya signaled that he's open to buying capacity from neoclouds, like Oracle, Nebius, Lambda, Iron, N-scale. Isn't he already doing that? To fill the, yeah, he is.

But he, semi-analysis has a concept called like the pause, which is like basically a gap of like this like insane period of demand. Oh, right now. Yeah. Yeah. And Satya actually says specifically, you're rightfully calling out the pause in the interview. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I think continuing on like why he basically stopped building out. Yeah. The like chip question is also like very important because. You can think of it like if you build a bunch of data centers right now They need they have very specific like power requirements that are directly based on the chip like if you're building based off the 8100 chip That's different than if you're building a data center based off Gb 200s and it's like there you can't really it's not like fungible like you can't just trade one out for another So that that's another one of the reasons why you don't want to basically have insane build out right now because you think we don't think you know that chips are going to get much better Sure especially like A6 right

Yeah exactly and Vita is like constantly they're saying we got this next chip coming out. Yep, yep, yep. You want to build up your data center with those chips because otherwise they're going to depreciate and you're going to have these basically data centers in like five years that are using the old gen chips or two generations back. Yeah. Anything on depreciation?

Capix. Yeah, I mean, so yeah, basically he gives like two reasons how you can justify data centers, right? Because you think of data center basically depreciating in like five years or the chips, which which is a big part of the cost. And so there's basically two ways to justify the actual buildout. One of them is basically you can think of research as just being like R&D spend.

So you basically just have to like, you gotta do the research, like you need to do the span basically. And the other is just like, he keeps bringing this up is everything has to be like super demand driven. So that's also why he's not, it's like again in comparison to Oracle. Oracle is basically, maybe you could say that they're kind of skating to where the puck is going,

We're trying to figure that out and then doing a bunch of debt, et cetera. And then Microsoft, Satya, is saying, no, where is demand right now? How do we fulfill that demand? Yeah. Basically, exactly. If we're not fully built up, then we can lease from the neoclads. Yeah, makes sense. I'm super excited to listen to this full episode.

The Wall Street Journal also had an article about the news as well. It seems like this is all in line with Microsoft's, just announcement that they have a super factory. I like it. We went from AI factories to AI super factories. We went from regular artificial intelligence to super intelligence. We're ramping up, but we're still like seven levels away from the final boss. Because after super intelligence, of course, you have giga intelligence, then ultra-intelligence,

then super-duper intelligence, and mega factories, exa-factories, terra-factories. there's all these different terms. Okay, so I will say one last thing I thought was funny. Extraterrestrial intelligence factories. Yeah, very sure. Okay, one last thing. Dorcache asks Satya, like, does he buy basically the revenue growth of like when Open AI or Anthropics says they're going to be like 70, 100 billion in like three years?

He's like, well, you know, they have to justify their fundraise somehow. And then he basically doesn't say much else besides that. Wow, Saja, absolutely dog. I love him. He's the best. Cooking. Cooking. It's amazing.

Chat was asking about hair routines. I think we have to comment. And unfortunately, disappoint because I think we both ride the, to apply the same approach, which is... Sleep diet, exercise, baby. Well, and no hair products.

No hair products. No hair products. No hair products. There's water. Some sauna, some workout. Some... Just keep the rest of your body healthy, and I think the hair will be healthy as well.

I actually think that's how it works, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's just funny. we're never going to have a shampoo or a hair product sponsor because we don't really use either of them. No. But I like creatine. And people say that that's bad for your hair, but it's fine.

The hair loss medication? The hair loss medication. People think you'd lose your hair if you're on creatine, but I certainly haven't experienced that. I have experienced that Julius helps with maintaining good hair because it's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data. Stop pulling your hair out. Plain. Yeah, plain English.

Get insights in seconds. No coding required. Yeah, stop pulling your hair out and get on Julius. What are the other factors in here? Microsoft spent more than $34 billion on CAPEX during its first fiscal quarter instead it would increase its total infrastructure investments over the next fiscal year. It is among several tech companies pouring a combined 400 billion into AI efforts this year with demand for AI computing and companies saying they need ever more capacity.

fun. Okay, one last thing. Another thing that I was surprised to hear is that Satya, he made a big point of saying that, like, there is a superintelligence lab within Microsoft. They're going to be training their own models. Yeah, is that Mustafa Suleiman is running it? Yeah. And so he says, maybe they'll be completely trained by Microsoft. Maybe they'll just do like fine tuning, mid-training on like GPT open AI models. Yep. But like they are going to like actually have, they're going to be training their own models. They're doing kind of the full stack. Yeah, when we were, when we were about to go on stage with Sautja, I was texting with Doug O'Loughlin from semi-analysis and, and he was like, ask about MSL, or not MSL,

MAI. M-I. Ask about M-I-I-I, like, what's the strategy for M-A-I? And we asked a couple people, and we got a little bit. It was, it was sort of hard to, like, really pin down a clear strategy. I don't think that they were ready to really divulge exactly the full strategy. It'll be interesting to see what models they train. Like, do they just go bigger, they have the biggest factory, could they just take this, this fair water facility and say, hey, let's go, let's go train something that's 10 times bigger than GPT 4.5? Do they believe that pre-training scaling laws hold or not? That's what I'm curious about. Or are they going to do

something that's more precise? Like, will they do a pre-train for Excel? Will they do a pre-train for Word or something like that? Is there some other tactic that they're going to employ? There's a bunch of interesting things. They clearly very GPU rich, tons of sharp engineers, tons of interesting product surface area. Where will they actually go? Interesting times. Yeah, I mean, he talks a lot about like application layer stuff. He actually says like the wrapper model, rapper companies are basically debunked by models getting better. So I think he thinks that Microsoft will basically take over a lot of that like application layer stuff. He's, he talked about Excel agent a lot. There's like the PowerPoint stuff. That's why I've always felt like the dynamic

between Open AI and Microsoft is so interesting because Open AI just has massive ambitions in the enterprise. They want to create. Sam alluded to an AI native Slack recently. Microsoft has teams. Imagine those competing. It's going to be AI native. You can imagine Open AI having like word processing, Excel-like product. You know, you can imagine them ultimately competing on like every single layer, including at the eventually at the cloud layer. What do you think the dynamic is between this like you know my Microsoft always loves to say like hey yeah we have all the IP but it feels like they're not actually fast following like they could like open AI launched Atlas like they could have launched like edge Atlas Microsoft could have launched like edge Atlas like the next day and that

would have been like whoa what are we doing here like that's a shot uh they could have launched SORA 2 they could put SORA 2 in Excel how about that do you come out of the brain rot Excel Brain run Excel. You know, they could have done that. They didn't. And so there's clearly, like, even though they have access to all the IP, they still have, they still have a different, differentiated view on, like, how the products get built. They're not just saying, oh, yes, one copy of Atlas, please, one copy of SORA 2, please.

We'll just launch our own competitor app. They could have put it in LinkedIn. Like, they could have, they could have, there is a way to integrate that. Microsoft's clearly, like, not moving so fast on that front. they're being a little bit more methodical. Yeah, this is why I'm very excited to what comes out of MAI. Yes. It seems like they have a lot of good people.

Like they've been doing a bunch of talent acquisition stuff. Yes. So I'm curious if they're going to start like, right now it just seems Microsoft is still very slow. They're kind of reactive. And they're like, okay, we should add another AI helper to Excel or something. But it's not like really kind of built-in, like low-level yet. Yeah. I'd like to have Mustafa on.

I'd like to talk to him about ways. their training models whether or not that seems like an interesting conversation. I'd like to ask him some hard questions. There's been a debate on the timeline. John and the X chat says Edge has every single feature that Atlas has. Whoa. Co-Pilot mode. It's better than Atlas or Comet.

Okay. Interesting. Maybe they don't need a copy then. They're good. But there has been a debate over how hard of questions we ask. Is it hard question to ask Mustafa at MAI, you know, what type of model he's training or should we ask some sort of other hard question? I wanted to practice some hard questions.

I think we should start asking harder questions. I have some hard questions here for you, and I think if we practice, we'll become better interviews. Are you guys ready for these? Should we just start hitting guests with, like, insane math? I wouldn't call them insane. I do have one here for Tyler. Is every even number greater than two, the sum of two primes?

Answer the question. He's looking around for clearly. It's a simple yes or no question. Is every even number greater than two, the sum of two primes? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Just answer the question. It's a yes or no question.

Is every even number greater than two the sum of two primes? It's an unanswerable question, of course. It is the Goldbach equation or the cold buck conjecture. There's also, can there exist an algorithm that decides whether any computer program will halt or run forever? It's the halting problem. It's a possible question. What about, what will Open AI's valuation be in 2035? 100 trillion.

100 trillion. Oh, he answered that quickly. We'll come back to that in 10 years, see if that was a hard question. What's the nicest thing ever done by Adolf Hitler? Answer the question. Stop dodging the question. Tyler, ask that to carp.

Carp was on a roll yesterday. Some of those clips were... Here's a question. We should ask a lot of founders that come on here. Does your dad know you're bankrupt? I think if we hit them with that, people will be like,

that's a hard question. That's a hard question. Here's one for Tyler. Prove God exists. There was the go to... What is truth? That's a hard question. Have you ever done illegal drugs, Tyler?

Answer the question. No. Answer the question. the question. Good answer. Who's your favorite host? Me or Jordy? Answer the question. Answer the question. I'm my favorite host. Oh, we're taking shots. What is time? I like these hard questions. Okay. Jordan, Jordan at semi-analysis is down to hop on and correct a few things we said on the article. I'd drop him the, he was listening. He was listening said, Al in the chat. Where is he?

Let's bring him on. I'm working on getting him to Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. In the meantime, let me tell you about fall, the 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. You can get started. Let's see, what else? Henry Kravis gave a talk, the founder of KKR. The post appears to have been deleted, but I won't say who it's from, but I will read it to you anyway. The world needs another fund like it needs a hole in the head. I think it was supposed to be off the record.

And I think one of our friends was maybe live tweeting it against their request, or maybe he just corrected it and realized that he didn't want to post that. But there are a lot of funds, I suppose. I was doing a little deep dive on Blue Owl. I want to get to know Blue Owl more. It's a fascinating company. Merger, there's a SPAC involved. They have two co-CEOs and three co-presidents. The top ranks at Blue Al are absolutely stacked from what I read.

They are, of course, powering the AI buildout with debt, private credit. They are a private credit fund up there with Ares. They've done very well. They actually have three different businesses. Only one of them is doing AI Data Center buildouts. And even within the AI Data Center Build Out Fund, they fund. they fund other stuff. So it's interesting to see how much risk they're taking, how much their business is really dependent on the AI buildout. It's also, there was a, they got a little,

they got a little battle with Jamie Diamond, because Jamie Diamond was saying that some of these bank failures are the fault of private credit. When you see one cockroach, there's usually more. He's kind of saying like, hey, like, you know, we see these defaults. We see these large companies. Maybe this is the start of something bad. Maybe there's a lot of other bad companies out there. Yeah, there was something with BlackRock had lent, I think, $100 million to a business recently. As of like two weeks ago, they had it marked as, you know, fully sound. Yeah.

And then the company almost immediately went bankrupt. So concerning, we have Jordan from semi-unonymous. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, Jordan. Good to see you again. Welcome back. All right.

What did we get, right? what do we get wrong? What's going on? This is all, of course, Tyler's fault. He was, uh, break it down. Give us some notes. Yeah. No, I don't think you guys got anything wrong, but, um, I think, uh, just wanted to promote that we, we put out a companion article that comes out with the interview.

Oh, fantastic. Was in there. He was, um, he's being called out by some other people on Twitter for hunting around in the background while they're interviewing the Azure teams. Wait, Dylan Patel? You mean? Yeah. We got to go through frame by frame and find him like, oh, he's going to go look.

Because he's, wait, we actually break down. What does a Dylan Patel scoop look like when you're on site and security turns their back? Is he like looking for like, oh, instead of this Nvidia switch, they're using AMD's. I've seen him call stuff out where it's like, wait a minute, this company is using a different company's technology. Is that what he's looking for? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he was looking for the credo cables or anything. So those are obvious with the purple housing. But if you look at his last tweet, he just said, to be clear, while Scott was explaining

the data center, he was super intently focused on figuring out the fiber patch panel config. We know about some providers that have gone out and bought cables like 20,000, 40,000 cables. And then they mess up the config of the patch panel and they end up five to do short. And they just have to end up end up back and get all new cables. which is like not a negligible amount of money. These, these cables are like at least a thousand bucks a piece.

Yeah. They're really heavy. We've been talking about internally, how many cables can you bench? Okay, there we go. There we go. Dylan Patel seems like a bit of the Fox, who in Microsoft is the hen house,

and they really shouldn't have let Dylan Patel into the new data center because you know he's going to find some stuff. There's going to be some scoops that, like, I'm sure there's like a PR team at Microsoft that's like, okay, like here are the talking points. Like, we're going to keep them here. He's not going to look behind this curtain. Like, there's a bodybuilder over there.

Like, don't go in that closet. And Dylan's, I'm sure, on the case, probably, you know, quickly becoming the greatest investigative journalist of our generation. What, like, give us some more insight on the depreciation comments. Yeah, definitely. So there's a section of the article that kind of goes to. through this. I think you guys asked me this on Monday. I didn't have a properly preferred answer because I actually didn't know what Michael Berry had been tweeting about and kind of talking about

with this. So maybe for background, Burry is claiming that the hyperscalers, like including meta, but also Azure, on Oracle, Google, are artificially boosting their earnings by extending the useful is of the IT assets. You can see from 2020 when they would report their numbers, these IT assets like servers, switches, storage would be three to five years on a life cycle. And they've now extended that to five, five and a half or six all the way across the board. In some ways, I think this is a bit of a game of catch-up if one provider does that everybody else has to follow suit. But we go into detail in the article about what this actually means. And, you know, Burry's argument that this is understating the amount of, or boosting their earnings,

it's understating the amount of depreciation that's going on on these GPUs is really predicated on in video's comments that the product cycle is now two to three years long, right? Sure, sure. And I think that is like. But that's on the development of a new chip. Like, from my perspective, depreciation, although there is the economic question about how much, how much, how much value can you get out of the tokens that you sell generated by an A105 years? That's a good question.

But that's not how we think about depreciation. Like if you buy a mechanical arm to put a glass windshield on a car at a automotive factory, you're just wondering how long until that mechanical arm breaks. And I'm sure there's been immense pressure on Nvidia to let the chips not burn out in two years. Like, you know, they probably have done a lot of work. It's a very expensive chip. It's a very expensive rack. Like, is it that crazy to assume that the 50th percentile might be five years now?

No, and there's basically no precedent to say that a chip would fail or wear out as you're describing it in two to three years. Yeah. Like there's the hardware OEMs, they have contracts that are standard for three to five years and they offer extended warranties for six and seven years. The big supercomputers in the world that run as a total system where even individual servers kind of get life-cycled. They run five, six, seven, some of them up to 10 years in production, right? Not to say the years that it takes to actually turn this thing on. And these are the environments that use liquid cooling and some of the latest and greatest chips that are actually, you know, similar in comparison to the GB300.

And then even if you go to the providers directly and you try to rent a V100 today, which was launched in 2017, right, seven, eight years ago, I can still rent V100s in data centers from providers like Amazon. I mean, there's plenty of A-100s for sale right now. So there's nothing, to me, you know, the proof of this argument would be predicated on Nvidia releasing chips that so drastically outperform the current generation in two to three years that all hypers everywhere are so incentivized to go through another KAP-X cycle. They've got to buy all new chips and rip out all the existing ones and we're still so

power constrained that they have to do all that. And that seems like a much farther leap than saying we might be able to run these chips for five or six years in the data centers themselves. I wonder, do you have a reaction? So Ben Thompson's been writing about the AI buildout and the bubble potentially the benefits of a bubble. And one of his like bull cases for a bubble was basically that in previous bubbles, you get a glut of, uh, I, infrastructure or even just, you know, steam engines or railroads. But his example was dark fiber. And the idea was if you overbuild, well, then you get a bunch of extra infrastructure that you can use and it's cheap. And his, his like counter to the AI buildout was that depreciated H-100s

just aren't as valuable as depreciate, fully depreciated, you know, fiber lines. But I just don't know if that's true. I feel like if there's a ton of depreciated H-100s out, there in 10 years from now, I think there's still something useful that you can do with that in the same way that you can push bits across fiber lines. It just, it won't be super intelligence, but there will be a base load of, you know, generic knowledge retrieval or just, hey, people just want to chat. And the fact that it's so cheap now because the assets are fully depreciated means that you can just have a chatbot in interface every single conversation, in every app, and it'll just be so much, it's sort of like a Jevin's Perron,

paradox thing. I'm not saying that the economics will stay the same. The margins will go way down, but there will be a benefit. It's not like these things just disappear after five years. They don't just break. Yeah, no, they don't just break. I think there are some new, your comparison makes sense, but there are some nuances compared to the fiber lines, just to say that if new GPUs come along from other providers that are so much more performant than the current ones, then at some level, it doesn't make sense to keep the power turned on for the old one. It shows the operating expense is too much. Like, we estimate this at 30 cents per kilowatt.

So if the bottom of the H-100 price gets below 30 cents or somewhere close to it, you're probably better ripping them out and replacing them with something new, even if, you know, for the car analogy, this is still a beater that somebody else could drive for the price of gas and insurance, right? Yep. Yeah. I was talking to Jordy about it. I was saying like there is a world where to just put in really concrete terms that most business people might understand just, you know, if your job is, you know, you have a Diet Coke business, you deliver Diet Coke's, you have a, you have a gas car that delivers the Coca-Cola.

And you have the opportunity to switch to an electric vehicle. You might do that because bringing down your total cost of ownership, your annual OPEX would be great. but sometimes companies just don't want to spend the CAPEX to actually do that. And so I'm wondering if there's a world where the GPUs get traded down to a point where people are like, yeah, the OPX is higher, but I'm still running it for this niche use case. Like there are still mainframes that are running. There are still on-premise cloud. There's companies that haven't fully moved to the cloud.

And I'm just wondering how long some of these like GPU racks might just be sitting around where someone gets it cheap and they're just like, yeah, like that's the thing. that filters every invoice that we get, and it just runs, and it runs, like, it runs GROC 2 on it or whatever, and it's fine. It's good enough. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I put in the article, like to Azure's announcement from September, kind of pleading with their users to move workloads off of V100 GPUs that are eight years old.

So, it doesn't need. Please don't get upset at us when we turn. off this instance and you, you know, I don't think they're doing payroll on these things, but like things going to shut off. Interesting. I mean, I totally take your point. Working in IT for years, there's so many people that come along and when there's like some sort of last call for the sale of spare parts for these old GPUs and they want to

keep these systems running, they suddenly show up and want to order a bunch of them. And it could be for all sorts of reasons, but usually it's just inertia of not wanting to move the old workloads onto the new stuff. We're also completely discounting the nostalgia market. I mean, people like air-cooled Porsches. I imagine that Dylan and you guys are going to be like, yeah, I need a V-100, just, you know, sitting in the office. Like, I don't like this new technology, this new GV-B-100.

You want to talk nostalgia. We've got to go back to Kepler, Pascal, you know, way before the older guys. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What about on the chip side? what was most notable about Satchez comments there? Yeah, I mean, I find it fascinating that Sautja clarified they have access to all IP, including chips and including systems. So this is beyond the models that everybody jumps to.

I think OpenAI has a ton of IP that's going into their chip program that Azure could effectively take and sell as part of the cloud services. If they want to partner up with Broadcom and just produce a bunch of chips that are, you know, more similar to a at TPU than they are to a GPU in the future. They've got that optionality. I wonder if there's a way to puzzle around that, though. When I was debating with Jordy, I was saying, like, well, you know, obviously Open Air has a team that works with Nvidia and with Broadcom and with, you know, maybe Intel in the future, AMD now.

Is there a world where the IP lives with the other companies for the next five years or something? It seems like maybe tricky, but I'm just wondering, like, how much the IP actually lives within OpenAI versus their partners? Well, I think it's, so Satcham made the point in the podcast that in some cases, Microsoft seeded parts of the Open AI chip program

with IP from their Maya program. Oh, sure. I think it's this whole mosaic of where the actual IP sits. But at the end of the day, there's going to be something that comes with Open AI that they learn. And you can even go beyond the chips to the systems that the chips go into,

to the network that connect. the chips or to the software, like the runtime and the like inference stack, which is to say how they run inference efficiently on these chips. There's a whole stack that gets built from the actual hardware through to the API that produces tokens to the user in the chat bot. And they have access to all of that that Open AI would consider proprietary. So I maybe to the point you guys were making earlier comparing to Excel or to Microsoft's other strategies. it seems like this is a case of open AI going really fast and executing really quickly and their moat being speed and you compare that to Microsoft to as an existing moat of distribution

so they've got 400 data centers in Azure 70 regions for a line free cash flow free cash flow is also bit of a moat too yeah definitely um they've got all the for like, you know, who do you think wins the race to turning on public instances of an open AI chip that anybody can rent, right? Open AI or Microsoft Azure with a bit of a head start. Like, I think they have some good optionality there with with Open AIs program, with the relationship with Nvidia, with Maya. But the point is that right now, they are losing the race on chips to Nvidia, the CPU from Google, maybe AMD, they use some AMD GPUs right now. So they've got to go and execute, right?

Do you think Satya expects Azure to compete with an OpenAI cloud in the next few years? I think if OpenAI really develops a cloud, absolutely, because Sucha says in that article that they, well, in the interview, that they don't, want to be beholden to one customer, right? I think he says, like, we have five big deals with five customers, and that's like the bulk of Azure's compute right now. And I would say it's really one deal with one customer. That is the bulk of the incremental revenue in Azure right now. So, like, I'm, I mean, I go hands on testing this stuff, and I've talked to 140 different companies about actually using Azure. And they were a distant third compared to just AWS and Google from a hyperscaler perspective.

And I talked to Clem from HuggingFace this morning, and he shared some data with us that backs this up. Like if you look at the downloads from HuggingFace of open source models, the downloads that originate from an Azure IP, there's more than five times less when compared to AWI. Wow. Right. Open AI can use it all with their private repos and stuff. But if you look at the long tail of the market where the long tail represents everybody

but Open AI basically. they're getting five times less of that business right now because they're so focused on open AI. So I think Satcha wants to do more than just open AI. It's just a matter of actually going and doing it. Yeah. Do we have more of a clear narrative now on what motivated the pause? You can see it's so clearly in this data center pre-leased capacity in the semi-analysis article. It's so obvious what's happening from 2023, you see the blue bars just increasing, increasing, and then just complete flatlining. Everyone else is growing. It seems like this, it seems like this piece, this video with Dorcasht and Dylan feels a little bit like him maybe teasing like, hey, I'm getting back in the race.

Like the headline with the Wall Street Journal is like, I got the biggest data center. That feels like I'm unpausing. But, right? You're not like, oh, I'm happy to be a leaser. Oh, by the way, I have the biggest thing. Actually, I own the biggest thing. Like, that's kind of a, it's kind of an odd dichotomy there. And I'm wondering if there's a, if there's a clear narrative, was it specifically, like,

the nature of the open AI relationship that, that led to the pause? Or was it just concern about the overall market or the viability of the technology? Or was he, like, plateau-pilled and had seen that GPT 4.5 wasn't getting adoption too expensive to serve? Like, do we have a narrative for, like, what motivated the technology? the pause yet? I don't know if it's clear. I think we have different pieces that we can piece together.

The things that Sacha says in the interview point towards fungibility, diversification outside of Open AI. A lack of foresight in two years ago to what the actual demand would be. They didn't feel like fish tail where they went too far on building demand. And then they wanted to come back and now they didn't have enough. And so now they're renting from neoclouds like Nabias, like Lambda, IREN, Oracle directly. They've got N-scale deals. I mean, they're clearly using neoclouds to take on that extra bit of risk.

And going forward, I mean, we are, I think the result is that it's incredibly bullish for Microsoft actually serving this demand when they have the first right of refusal. And Open AIs growth continues to go crazy. And they are kind of back on track to leading the way. with coding models in a way that they were, you know, maybe forecasted not to with Anthropic coming and taking a bunch of share there. They are like all in on taking down Anthropic as a direct competitor with their Codex models now.

So I think they just kind of, Microsoft just flinched a bit. And they're back on track and we're pretty, I mean, we're pretty bullish on them growing in the future. But it's notable that Sotcha talks about things like diversification around open AI and around globally. Like the idea to me that there's a, there's a geopolitical conclusion that you can draw from his response on the question about the pause where he says, what if I want to build in India? What do I want to build in Europe? What if I want to build, you know, elsewhere and therefore

we pause North Carolina. That seems to say that governments around the world can attract investment in data centers if they implement a bunch of harsh regulations on data privacy. And more and more companies are going to want to train models. based on personally identifiable information or other types of data that's regulated and needs to stay in those countries and therefore you need GPUs around the world. You know, that could be something that they just kind of learned and therefore pause North Carolina spin up something else. I haven't seen that exactly play out on the global deployments, but it could be coming.

How real is this fungibility of the fleet thing? because the narrative around Google is that they have the TPU. They're so vertically integrated. They deep mind. It just feels like when you go to Gemini, you get something that's like down to the metal. And then at Microsoft, like, pick your model. And then also they're the subleasing from all these other clouds. But as I see from ClusterMax, like there is a wide variety of performance metrics and results and qualitative,

like even like the feel of these different neoclouds. And so is there is there some sort of risk to you go to Azure and they put you on the lowest ranked ClusterMax neocloud? And it's like I would rather be up here on the top tier lease. I want to be subcontracted down to the platinum tier, not the D tier. Is there any risk to that or or is Microsoft actually able to take a neocloud that is in the D tier and, and give you the Azure level of service. Yeah, I think it really depends on at what level you're assessing the fungibility. So I think in some ways, the tokens or the tokens produced by the model endpoints are almost

completely fungible. Okay. You know, you can find certain the models on private scenarios, but generally speaking, like, tokens from one provider versus tokens from another provider are effectively the exact same, as long as you're, you know, hitting the, like, quality metric you need from that model deployment on that GPU. Yeah, yeah. But if you look at the underlying architecture, like when Azure claims to add 100,000 GB300's coming online this quarter, I mean, that is not fungible to every single user on a cloud service.

Like GB300s are rented 72 GPUs at a time and 135 kilowatt rack. Your workload needs to be ported to arm because it's a gray CPU. You need to have the performance per dollar benefits of the Blackwell GPU to justify it over the previous generation hopper. it needs to use a GPU in the first place, such as spent a bunch of time in the article talking about the importance of, you know, in the interview talking about the importance of databases of like, you know, non-GPU related services that actually run the web app that actually store the data, right? Turbopuff.

There's lots of Azure capacity beyond GPUs coming online too, right? Yeah. You might call them CPU data centers now and they consume a little bit less. I wanted your take on a couple other things. One, the new Anthropic News, $50 billion investment, any reactions to that? Yeah, I think notable that they called out Fluid Stack by name and they're not calling out the underlying providers, as you said. Like, you know, if somebody like Fluidstack can help them deliver on a bunch of what we think is TPUs deployed directly, first party.

You know, then there's, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that they can do because under the hood, it's pretty clear that Fluid Stack is deploying these TPUs in Terowulf data centers in Buffalo at their Lake Mariner facility and elsewhere in Texas. And then at cipher mining in Texas, if you look at some of the, you know, you've got to pair two new press releases together, the one from the underlying provider and fluid stack. and then the one from Anthropic with Fluid Stack. But the point is that Anthropic is definitely ramping up just at the same level as OpenAI. Maybe not quite at the same level, but they both seem to be clearly believing that statement from Greg Brockman.

Like if we had 10x more compute right now, we'd have 10x more revenue. And so therefore their constraint is compute, bring it online and just keep growing. That was certainly the case with the early iPhone launch. like the iPhone, like Apple's earnings were extremely predictable every quarter because they knew, they were like, as many as we make, we will sell. And so they were completely supply constraint. I, it does feel like on the, on the question of backlogs, Anthropic has just been much less aggressive. Like they have been somewhat saying the biggest number every once in a while, but they haven't gotten into the trillions of backlog. And it feels like open eye all. Sam's almost like, oh yeah, sure, like give me all the weight of Stargate. even though that's sort of a separate entity. And he could have easily fended that off and been like, well, that's Stargate,

that's sort of a separate thing. That's not all on Open AI. Like, we need to clarify how this all fits together. But Anthropics been a little bit quieter on the, on the like, okay, we have this crazy RPO that's going on all over the tech industry. What was your reaction to CoreWeave's quarter? Jim Kramer was going pretty hard.

What did Kramer say? He was just like, it was just, Blackmail? Yeah, it was just a funny interview. He's like, what's going on? What's going on? Because they doubled, they doubled revenue, but they sold off. Is that what happened? Yeah, well, I mean, they sold us a ton in the last month. I think like 20, about a, yeah, 26 percent, something like that. But Kramer was saying, like, why are you relying on a Bitcoin miner to, like, help fill your capacity? Are you sure they can deliver? And he was talking about core scientific, which core we've attempted to acquire. It got rejected. but I know it was yesterday.

Platinum on ClusterMax. That's all I need to know. Buy and hold. Get lost, grab. Yeah, and the CEO was saying, like,

yeah, and like he didn't name semi-analysis because I think the CNBC audience is maybe not familiar yet, but he was saying like, we're platinum rated, we're platinum rated. Oh,

we said platinum rated? Oh, that's amazing. I love it. Yeah, I mean, it's in the earnings call. Semianalysis,

mentioned, I think, three times. But definitely, yeah, we went into this. We're very excited for this. This is big. Yeah, I think we, like, we went into this, Jeremy and the data center guys rake. Dan, they put out a note earlier in the day to the core research subscribers that the core week is at risk of short-term delays in their CAPEX, but not to their revenue, which is driven by the data center partner core scientific.

So, yeah, when you're relying on somebody to add 250. 50 megawatts and, you know, they're only going to get you 150 by the end of the year. That changes your guidance on CAPEX. Sure. I think the, you know, this is like, yeah, look, this is the reality of the industry right now, which is that when projects are so big measured in the hundreds of megawatts, small delays or small changes in a plan can really impact, like, short-term financial guidance that people have in place.

I don't, like, personally, I don't think this changes any of the fundamentals of, like, core waves engineering or a lot of the, like, experience and what customers they have signed. But we saw this, like, a very similar reaction when the information put in an article about Oracle, having a delays, right? Yeah. And, you know, I think people are, people who don't know about the data center industry or things like this, they see things like, oh, yeah, these, these GPUs take a month to come online after they get installed and they're starting to appreciate the asset, but they're not

generating revenue yet. Like, what's going on? It's like, yeah, that's typical. I mean, you know, it's completely standard. That's business. Yeah. It stuff takes, I mean, you know, maybe U.S. federal government is different, but in my previous job, we tried to hand over these supercomputers, the U.S. federal government, it takes like a year and a half to pass acceptance. But at the same time, if investors aren't aware of that and then they learn that for the first time, they could be surprised. And so that could be something of what we're seeing in the gyrations in the public markets, I suppose. It makes sense. And there was a, I think there was a broad recognition that the Bitcoin miners have an uphill battle to figure out how to run these

facilities when compared to established players like an Equinix or a digital reality or, you know, switch or somebody that's like, has been running tier three data centers for a long time. It's just different. Give us an update on the energy model that's coming. What can you tell us? Is it this year, next year? Is it my Christmas present? How does this work? There's some previews. I think you should have a Jay on the program next time or bring Jeremy back.

Yeah, we'd love to have it. Talk about it. Yeah, I'm specifically, I'm very, very interested in, you know, the just American energy forecast for the next couple years because it feels like the entire industry is sort of hinging on like the trend changing, in my opinion. And it feels like we need to bring up the level of energy production for everything else to happen. And whether we hit some sort of regulatory block or some massive scale block or a capital block or a glut of some sort or some gyration correction, there's so many things that could go wrong. But I'd love to know what the forecast actually is from the folks who have gone so much deeper.

I'll give you the quick hit. So everybody's trying to do turbines behind the meter right now, not gas, right? And you've got a number of different players, but if you look at Schneider, Vertive, Bloom, one of them, Bloom is ramping up. First of all, they're all sold out. So the model will cover like how sold out and exactly, you know, exactly how sold out. But, yeah, you want to look at Bloom ramping up production and you want to get Schneider and vertive on here and try and figure out exactly why they're not. Let's see, you know, what does it take to get those guys to recognize what everybody else in the industry is recognizing right now? and then let's dig into solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, all these alternatives that, you know,

you'd like to have in there, right? Why is Elon putting power plants on the other side of the border and then piping the electricity back to his data center in Memphis because of, you know, short-term regulatory approvals? Like, there's all of that political stuff that goes on to influence this market. I'm so excited for it. Well, thank you for coming on again twice in a week. We'll see what happens. We really appreciate you. Maybe go for a three-peat. If you're not already subscribed, what are you doing? Head over to semi-analysis.com by the most expensive subscription you can find, especially if you're a venture capitalist. You can't call yourself a VC in the age of AI. If you're not paying semi-analysis, the big bucks. At least a couple hundred thousand dollars per month. Per month. I demand it.

Anyways, great. Thanks to see you, Jordan. Thanks for coming on. We'll see you soon. Bye. You mentioned turbo puffer. I'll tell you about turbo puffer. Search everybody. It's a serverless vector in full-tech search built from first principles and object storage.

It's fast. 10 X cheaper and extremely scalable. The soundboard is doing very well. Someone leaked their revenue recently. It's quite shocking. Well, we have a shocking guest. Brian Halligan from HubSpot joining us. He's the co-founder of HubSpot.

Welcome to the stream, Brian. How are you doing? Sorry to keep you waiting. Welcome to the show. Never matter. How are you guys doing? We're doing fantastic. What is the latest in your world?

Have you been captured by the AI buildout? Is this something that's keeping you up at night? Or are you watching it more as an observer? Or are you checked out entirely? Where are you on the, how much does it get your pulse up? Because me and Jorny, it's every day for us over here. We're in the trenches. I'm very checked in.

Okay. I come at it from another angle. What I've been doing for the last, last year is I'm like the I run an in-house CEO practice at Sequoia. Yeah. And I do three things. I coach CEOs, most of which are building companies on top of the AI wave, all of which. I create communities of CEOs so they can collaborate together.

I have a kids table of CEOs of kind of small company and an adult's table of CEOs and large companies. And then I'm creating content. So I've got a podcast launches tomorrow. Oh, let's go. Yes, about CEOs and how to be a CEO. I love it. Start up and scale up.

Tune in tomorrow. Fantastic. What's the format? What's the format? Is it a guest-driven? Is it turning kind of the lessons that you talk about at the kids' table and at the big kids' table? It's a six-hour daily live stream, actually. It starts at 9 a.m. and ends at 3 p.m. makes us look lazy.

The basic thesis is, like, the playbook I grew up running HubSpot from 2006 to 2021, like a lot of those plays don't seem to work as well. Sure. And the rulebook's getting, like, for example, I think what's how the way Jensen Wong runs this company is super interesting with 60 direct reports and no one-on-ones and kind of public criticism. The way Elon runs this company, his empire is really interesting. The way Brian Chesky does it is quite interesting. And I notice all these CEOs have kind of new place, and they've got a new perspective on things. And so I'm inviting them on kind of one by one to chat about how did you become a CEO?

How do you like your job? What are the best practices? What is all wrong about CEOing these days? And I think it's my first guest is Parker from Rippling tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Nice. And it's a good one because Parker gives all the tea on getting fired by David Sachs from Zed it's all the tea on the drama with deal on SpyGate.

And then in between all that, he is a very, very thoughtful CEO. He's not a big fan of conventional wisdom, as people know. But he's doing some really cool stuff. So that's kind of episode number one tomorrow. Yeah, I like that framing as like focusing on the actual job of the CEO. Because there's other shows that could do like, okay, let's do the product or review. Let's do the product announcement.

but having one feed where you can go and actually understand the philosophy of a whole host of CEOs. That's fascinating. I think it's kind of interesting because I was the CEO for so long. So it's like I'm really a journalist. It's like a conversation about what the hell's really going on here. How did your approach evolve over the 15 or so years that you were CEO of HubSpot? I don't think it evolved that much is the interesting part. You just one-shot it.

I was basically the same guy from 2006 to 2021. And I followed like ye old playbook of the way people run companies, like the Bill Campbell style playbook. And that's what I think is interesting. It's kind of changing. And that's what I'm trying to dig into and kind of go deep on. It's like Stanley Tucci. You know, Stanley Tucci show and he goes to Italy and he's trying to find his roots.

That's fantastic. What are your thoughts on? You want to know some surprises? Yeah, please. Okay, a couple things. There's a breed of CEO that I see a lot of these days that I call a five-tool CEO. Now, I'm the big baseball guy, and there's such a thing in baseball is a five-tool player, someone who can hit, somebody who can hit for power, somebody who can catch,

somebody who can throw, and somebody can run at an elite level. Very, very rare in baseball. Who's an example of a modern five-tool player? I mean, a six tool player is Sho-Hao Atani. But he can actually run. He can hit. He can hit for power. He can throw.

He can catch. He's very talented, very unusual cat. Alex Pregman's one of those on the Red So, some of the Red Sox guy. But there's a bunch of these folks who kind of remind me of that in the software industry where they've got vision. They can code, they can design, they can recruit, and they can sell their product. And that's, I think, with pretty rare in software, they're all over the place now. And they're getting funded, and I work with a bunch of them.

Just a few examples, like Parker's one, for sure. Brett Taylor, for sure, from Sierra's one. Gade Stengel from Rogo, kind of a new company's ripping is one. Mati from 11 Labs. I have no idea how to say it's last name. Harine from Clay, Darra from Delphi, like on and on and on. I'm super impressed with the new breed that's coming out and how talented there. Who do you think the Barry Bonds of Business is?

Or the Mark McGuire of business. Fantastic performance as a CEO, clearly using performance enhancing drugs. If someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, I don't know if you heard this, but Elon's actually an alien. Oh, yeah. man, that puts. You guys would be surprised if someone said, it turns out he was an alien? Would you guys be like, oh, no, no, no, no, that's crazy. You'd be like, yeah, maybe.

It is funny, the performance-sensing drugs thing, because, like, me and Jordan have joked about how it's not illegal to be on a stimulant. I obviously partake in caffeine, the legal stimulants, but some folks go a little bit further. But the reason that it was so controversial and so illegal in baseball is because isn't baseball a sanctioned monopoly by the government? I believe that's why. And so that's why during the whole baseball scandal, the steroid scandal, they came in and they had to do like a hearing on Capitol Hill. It was a crazy, crazy moment. I don't know if you tracked that.

I think the real reason is because baseball went around for 150 years, people who broke records in the 1920s, like Babe Ruth, broke. important records in the 1920s, that you can have, like, a ranking of who's actually done the most run from runs, best batting. You can't do that in basketball because they change the rules so much. You can't do that football. They changed rules so much. So that's why they were so resistant to change

the rules in baseball, and that's why they were so up in arms about the steroid thing. But I do think founders do the equivalent. Like, when I was growing up, I'm a beer drinker, you know? You went out with the team, definitely time we're on. You go to a Sequoia founder dinner?

Yeah. First of all, it's at 5.30, like early. And everyone has a salad and it has water and is back in the room coding by 730. That's definitely not how I grew up. Do you think beer gave you an edge back in the day? I don't think beer gives anybody an edge. I think it helped me connect with some employees along the way, for sure, particularly salespeople. What do you think about co-CEOs?

Yeah or nay? Okay, I think Sand Hill Road is very negative on this. Except on stewards. We have co-stewardship. Yes, we can talk about that too. But I talked about this on one of the pod episodes with Vlad Tenev. He was a co-CEO for like the first seven or eight years of the company. And I was very surprised to hear that.

And he was very positive on it. I think you can do it. I think it's a little dangerous. You better know the person very well and be able to finish yourself. It's like my co-founder, Darmesh and I, we weren't co-CEOs, but we ran it like a partnership, and we thought of it like a partnership, and the employees thought of it like a partnership. If we called ourselves co-ceeos, that would have actually worked quite fine. That makes sense. Yeah. Want some other things that surprised me?

Yeah. Here's the weird thing. Two of our most successful entrepreneurs of our generation are Jensen Huang, Nielan Musk. And they've obviously got really unique playbooks. like Jensen's got his 60 direct reports and the no one of it's all this stuff we just talked about. Elon has his algorithm and like credits the algorithm and a lot of its success. I ask all of the CEOs on the pod like, who's on your Mount Rushmore? Who do you follow?

Like who's your inspiration? For me, it was Steve Jobs. Like my generation is Steve Jobs. None of them really say, Elon, Jensen. Like, no one's copying their playbook. None of these CEOs have 60 direct reports. And not a single person has mentioned the algorithm. I think that's quite odd.

Do you? Yeah, we actually polled YC founders of the last demo day. We asked probably 20 or so who was their favorite entrepreneur, like who they look up to. And I was expecting like half to say Elon and maybe, you know, a third to say Jensen, something like that. Just like vanilla market cap. It's a question. We didn't prep them. We didn't tell them we were going to ask them this.

This is off the top of their head. And there were maybe like two or three Elons, but it was all over the place. And it was way down the stack. I mean, there were some people who were like the founder that I look up to most is like a founder who started their company five years ago

and is a unicorn now, but like certainly not like one of the greats. Like obviously doing fantasticly. But like, you know, this is like a series B or series C level. and they're like, that's who I actually look out to the most. I was shocked. I don't think, I don't even think a single person said Jeff Bezos. I don't think anyone said Bezos. A guy with a 120 billion of 2024.

Free cash flow even though. Yeah, yeah, it was crazy. It was, it was much less concentrated in the Mag 7 than I thought it would be. And I don't know if that's a shift in, in how younger entrepreneurs or newer entrepreneurs are thinking about what success looks like. Like, the, maybe the downstream critique of like the teal monopoly thesis is that like it's actually really hard to go start a business that is in the social networking category or in the online commerce category. It's just harder to do that. And so maybe people, some people read zero to one and they said, hey, I got to start a company. But then other people read zero to one and says like, hey, I better not I better not set my sights too high because realistically, how am I going to compete in, you know, some of these monopolistic categories that have been truly dominated by the hypers, it's going to be hard for me to go zero to one in those categories. And so I need to maybe find a smaller market. I don't know. Maybe it's a trend. One of the things that surprise me about them is they don't really have anyone that they're really following or looking up to.

They're very much their own people. And they're kind of making it up as they go in their in the writing the rules kind of based on what they think makes sense. They don't have, like when I grew up, I had two people. I've two CEOs, Steve Jobs, Jerry Garcia. Those were my two heroes that I tried to base my behavior around. And they were my cortisos. These guys don't have cortisomes. The other thing that's interesting about all of them is like, be yourself,

everyone else is taken. They're all very, very, very different homo sapiens. Like Vlad Tenev is very, very, very different. from Parker at Ripley. Anton from Loveable is very different than Mati from 11 Labs. They are all quite unique, which I like to see that. And they're their own people. They have a lot of agency.

Are you interviewing anybody that runs their company remotely? Nobody's doing remote. Everybody is in the office. Remote is dead. What is dead? And everybody talks about 996. I think there's a lot more talk about 996 than walk on 996. I don't think very many people are actually doing it.

The CEOs are, though, every CEO I talk to is under, like I say, what's your stress level, one to 10? Almost all of them say 10. Yeah. What do you think about this idea that a lot of companies are 9-9-6ing in a hybrid sense? That because the tools have gotten so good, I mean, a software engineer, can fire off a prompt at home on their phone that will go and, you know, start doing work that gets reviewed in the morning.

I'm firing off a deep research prompt for something that we are going to talk about on the show. Yes, tomorrow. And so there's this like ambient level of remote work that's happening on top of the in-person work that's happening. And so I might, if I were to push back, it might be that remote is not dead. We said yes and. We said, let's go back to the workplace. let's work in the office, and then let's also work remotely at home on Saturdays, on the nights and weekends, because that's what it takes to win.

And so the 996 thing is happening, but across two spaces. I'm a little, I totally buy that so much more is asynchronous now. I just think, like, we went remote at HubSpot pre-COVID. And, like, the culture's great. It's still great, but you lose something. You lose. You definitely lose something. So I'm very supportive of the en masse thing.

If I were starting a company today, I wouldn't do remote. You know, your headquarters in San Francisco. San Francisco is a bare of a place to scale a company. Salespeople are hard to find and really expensive and not loyal. Developers are even harder. And so I do a big hub in San Francisco and then another big hub, let's say, in Toronto, where there's a lot of salespeople and a lot of developers and be like, we're in office or at least four days a week.

I think that's a good call. Ironically, the people who I think, the CEOs who I think are the hardest core are the two European founders I interviewed Anton from Lovell and Matib from 11 Labs. Like they are seven days a week. They expect everybody in the office for seven days a week. Those two are the hardest core, even more so than our American brethren. Well, the pressure on them is immense because people have so low of expectations for Europe. So, you know, they have to deliver for their country. It's really, it's really high. And it's kind of patriotic. Yeah, of course. Of course. They need to lead the thing. Talk about the stewards. Wait, one. One, one. One,

One second. I was curious. You said the CEOs you interviewed, all of them or the CEOs you talked to, all of them say their stress level is 10 out of 10, for the most part they do. 15 years running HubSpot, when was your, like, does that resonate? Was it kind of steady state 10 out of 10 the whole time? Or did you at some point figure out a motion that allowed you to maybe hover it, you know, a 7, which is maybe like a healthy amount of stress? it was pretty close to 10 the whole time. Just white knuckling it. It was pretty stressful.

Like the whole thing was stressful. And like the thing with HubSpot in most companies, like it looks pretty smooth from the outside, but it was like two steps forward and like one friggin giant step back. And two steps forward, giant step back. You're stepping in it. And in HubSpot, like we were kind of a wartime company. Like I like Ben Horowitz's book and he's got a whole chapter on wartime versus peacetime CEOs. all of these CEOs are wartime, all of the time.

And if they don't have a war going on, they kind of create a war. I thought that was kind of interesting. It's a wartime era. The only CEO I interviewed that is not like 10 out of 10 stressed is Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks. He's a cool cumber. Yeah, I wonder why. Yeah.

He's a cool. He's like so secure. He doesn't work. A lot of these guys are owned. I mean, yeah, like this has. It has to correlate with strength of market position, right? Like, if you are running a company where Sam Altman's out there being like, I would love to eat off of your plate, I would love to launch a competitor.

And then like, Satchanadella is like, oh, yeah, we're going to do that, too. Like, you better be operating in a 10 out of 10 stressful. Yeah, you're going to get cooked. Sam competing, you know, effectively competing with Microsoft. Well, Microsoft has all his IP. Andy has to give him 20% of his revenue. Andy's got to pay him a quarter of a trillion over the next few years. He might come for your nice little startup.

Virtually every company, just looking down my list of kids, stable, adult's table, virtually all of them are extremely nervous about what I'm going to have been asking it. It's a long conversation at every board. Of course, of course. The steward thing. I'm so interested. Like, why doesn't Sequoia, I just have one CEO? Why don't they have a, you know, like a super GP, like a head partner, named, name partner.

You can just rename the fund. Kleiner was doing there for a while with Caulfield buyers. There's so many different ways to approach it. The Blue Owl we were talking about earlier, they have two co-CEOs, and I think they have three co-presidents. You know, these names kind of mean nothing, but they also have extreme weight. So what is a steward in the Sequoia Capital context? why not CEO, why not president, why steward, and then what does it mean to have two now? Okay, I like the, I actually like the word steward because, you know, Don Valentine started Michael Moritz and Jim Gets and Doug Leone.

Like, it's been a long line of really strong leaders and Rulov that they've handed it down to. And the thing that's interesting about Sequoia, so I've been in there a little over a year, is they are not at all, like even remotely, resting on their laurels. They are paranoid. They are aggressive. They don't want to blow it. And so Stewart is actually a decent word. In this particular case, I think Ruloff was ready to move on. He wanted to move on top. And there were just two really obvious candidates. Alfred Linn's got an incredible track record. He runs the early team. He's a good leader. Pat Grady's an amazing track record. Runs a growth team. Like, picking one of those would have been tough. They work well together. it's like let's give it to them both.

And I think Sequoia has done that kind of thing in the past. So it's not unprecedented. And I think it's going to work well. And they don't call themselves, they call themselves stewards, but internally they're like just calls partners and they've made a big deal out of that. I imagine that they go around the office saying,

you have to call me steward Lynn now. You have to call me Stuart Grady now. And also don't make eye contact with me. I will wear long flowing robes. No, yeah, it's just interesting the actual, the actual aesthetics of it. I mean, we don't need to get into the actual dynamics of the changeover from Roloft to the co-st stewards. It's just, I wonder if a co-CEO dynamic is sustainable or if it is an audition process for the final boss, the final CEO. I mean, it hasn't worked a lot.

It means Netflix is doing it, Spotify is doing it, but you can't think of a lot of examples. And it looks like it kind of works with Netflix. Like that's been going on for a while and it's doing pretty well. I mean, Spotify's really, there's just not a lot of precedent for it. So I don't know. It wouldn't be my first choice to be a co-CEO or to fund a co-CEO. But in some cases it can work. I think it's a little unorthodox.

There is an interesting dynamic where, they call it a partnership for a reason. Yeah. You know, it's not a corporation, it's a partnership. And so that vibe has stretched over five decades for these folks.

Yeah. I wonder the benefits of having two people in the same, in the role, like it becomes less pressure for one person, but then you also don't have necessarily

the buck stops with one person. There's all these like odd dynamics. Like, there's benefits and costs to having the du the that's right i think they can get a lot done and they can divide it up and get a lot more done that was the case with my co-founder and i like we divided a lot of stuff up and we got a lot of shit done together in our respective parts and i deferred to him a lot he deferred to me a lot what do they call it duarchy where there's two kings monarchy is one key duarchy is two kings very rare how have you been processing this new wave

of AI agent startups that are, in my view, oftentimes competing with traditional SaaS companies that may have only been started a few years ago. How have you been processing it? Well, I'm involved with a lot of them. I mean, they have escaped the gravitational pull of the Earth's revenue. Like, holy crap, where they're going fast. And HubSpot grew fast in its day. And it's like, wouldn't even get a second look from a VC now. And it's remarkable what's going on. And I tweeted a week or two ago that, like, it's a bubble. If you get an offer to sell your company, you should do it.

You should take money off the table. And on one shoulder, I'm like, it's definitely a bubble. The valuation is crazy, 100x and whatnot. On the other side of my shoulder, like, I just have never seen in the history of mankind growth like this. So maybe it's not. I don't know. Where do you guys come out on that? Are we in the middle of a bubble?

or is it just match the growth? I think we've had a, you know, we talk with a lot of investors and sometimes we get a little concerned when people come on and say they don't care at all about margins. We worry a little bit about those clips ending up in documentaries about, you know,

whatever this moment in time ends up being. You're either in a bubble or you're in a crash and we're definitely not in a crash right now. I get, I get, I would say, I get like my concern comes from companies that spring up and are raising because they're positioning their product as this like AI agent when in reality it's hard to tell why it's going to be a better solution oftentimes than something that looks like a normal SaaS product. And so I just get I get concerned because I know

that the SaaS companies in their category have access to all the same tools and they have distribution and they can potentially use the advantage they have of having this big product surface area and a bunch of core existing product and then just compete on all these new product lines. And I just wonder if some of these like AI agent, these more native AI companies, will struggle to actually compete with. And you've seen this. It's not like companies like Notion, for example, didn't sit around and say like, no, we're not going to integrate else. LMs into our product. Like, that seems cool, but we're just a, we're, we're, you know, a notes product and

we're going to stick to handwritten text. Like, they were incredibly quick to integrate all the best models into their product. And so I just don't, I don't see, like, the most recent generation of teams, like, asleep at the wheel at all. Yeah. And I'm old enough to remember the last platform shift from client server to SaaS. And the client server companies were very much in denial of SaaS for a long. time. I remember Oracle just being very vocal that SaaS is a bunch of BS. And obviously,

SaaS did very well. Some of those folks did well, and they came across. SAP did pretty well. Oracle did fantastic, actually. The thing that's different this time around is all the SaaS players, including HubSpot, were very early on it and are investing heavily in it and are building cool stuff. And they have a little advantage, and they have a lot of data and a lot of context, which is really useful if you're building agents. So I think SaaS is alive and well, and I think a lot of these SaaS companies, HubSpot, Service Now Notion, so many of them are building cool stuff.

Like inside of HubSpot, I think of it as like a platform with applications and agents. You can build agents on it. You can use our agents. And then it's got a co-pilot that you can refer to. It's all starting to work. People are using it. The thing that's interesting about some of these agent companies is they're working in areas where there weren't SaaS companies.

Like Harvey is doing incredibly well. It wasn't really a, you know, it wasn't an area with a lot of big SaaS companies in there, or Rogo selling to investment bankers. Like a lot of, a lot of the early huge wins on the agents are in funny areas. This company called Juice Box, absolutely ripping, is in recruiting areas where they're like a big incumbent,

like they're filling in there. And some of them are coal-pilot. sort of be working alongside of it and some are autopilety. And the autopilot ones, I think, will be the ones to really watch. Yeah, it feels, it feels really hairy for Microsoft to go after legal AI, just because that's not really,

they sell mostly general purpose tools. And so if you're building an Excel plugin, where you bring an AI to Excel, I'm worried a little bit about where that goes. But if you're building something that, yes, it ostensibly is a word document, but your entire business is off in this industry that's heavily regulated and Microsoft has only penetrated with the broad tools and has never really built a vertical solution

in that category. I feel much less worried about you being attacked from the labs. But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. I'm excited for your new show. I'm excited to check out the first episode. And the number of stewards at Sequoia is doubling. So any day now, you might get the tap on the shoulder. be the third, fourth, fifth steward.

They're adding more stewards every day. We're pulling for you. See you. Cheers. Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up

the right models and APIs for you get started at AI.studio slash build. Our next guest is Dr. Fay-Fei Lee from World Labs. She is a world-renowned computer scientist. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. And congratulations on the launch.

Massive. Guys, how are you? We're doing fantastically. I have so many questions about what you're building. I'd like to start with why you're building it, specifically. What was the moment where you decided to go and start the company? Because the big institutions haven't exactly given you the cold shoulder. You've been associated with Stanford and Google and on the board of Twitter at various times.

you could be doing work inside of a hyperscaler, I'm sure. Why did you want to build a company outside of the big labs? Well, because we had a vision. We had a vision we really believe in. We believe that AI as a civilizational technology will help humans and superpower humans in many aspects of the intelligence industry. One of them is spatial intelligence, and that is something that is, in my opinion, still in a budding stage. And our vision was ahead of most people, and this is something that my co-founder said I really feel passionate about,

because without this, AI or AGI would not be complete, and we want to pursue that vision and that mission. Talk about how you think about spatial intelligence. There's so many data primitives from GIS data, GPS data, GPS data. There's dot clouds and all sorts of different ways, even just video footage, like what we're generating right now. We're generating spatial data to some degree. How do you, like, where did you think the initial data sources were like lacking? and then how did you think about building up the stack

to kind of advance this and move it a step forward? Yeah, you're totally right. Spatial intelligence is actually as huge or horizontal as, say, linguistic intelligence or language intelligence. So there is many aspects of it. But fundamentally, I think it's deeply perceptive. You know, it involves seeing and understanding.

it involves reasoning, it involves the ability to create in the mind's eye, what worlds look like, and also the fundamental ability to be able to interact with the worlds, whether it's physical or virtual in a very profound way. And if you put all these together, we haven't had technology that can really do all of the above, and we're still on the journey to unlock that. But one of the things we just have done is really putting out the world's first 3D world generation model that is available to everybody. And not only it's generative, it allows users to interact and create and edit. And your question about data is actually an important one because it's hard.

Unlike language, unlike videos, unlike images, you don't have too many 3D data, too much 3D data out there on the internet. They're much more specialized. So as a group of technologists, we actually have to work harder. And frankly, we use a hybrid approach in data. Some are large scale from the internet. Some are large scale from simulation. Some are real-world captures.

And a lot of data also comes from, algorithmically processed data. That's really important because it's just a much richer problem. 3D is a much richer problem. So the product that we just saw, it looks a little bit like a video game. I can imagine a bunch of different ways that this gets built into something that feels like a video game. Or maybe there's this new trend of folks who are using AI tools almost as like these, they just enjoy generating songs on Suno or they enjoy just creating for the sake of creating. It's like you sell a

guitar and then someone plays the guitar and they never commercialize their music. They just enjoy playing the guitar. And so I'm wondering if you have a view on, is it too early to tell what your customer base or what the user base will look like? Are you just hoping to get this out and then see who shows up? maybe there's a robotics company that needs a bunch of data and so they use your model to generate synthetic data or there's people that just have fun with it and they wind up paying because they enjoy the service. Yeah, I wonder if people underrate world models because they look and feel today often like video games and so they don't understand kind of the significance.

And so, yeah, I would love to understand. You're so right. Yeah. You're so right. I think people underrate world models because we haven't had world models. It's not people's problem. It's that the technology is really hard. It's the next frontier of AI.

And like I said, this is the first time a generative 3D world model is available to everybody. And humanity has only no one world, that which is the 3D physical world. But now suddenly we are in a multi-universe, multiverse situation because of this technology. So who will use it? I agree with you, actually, you know, just the sheer joy of, the immersive experience for the sake of enjoyment itself is really fun. I was just talking to a user earlier today about the VR button. You know, we on our product, click on the VR button.

It takes you to, if you have a headset, you can just purely enjoy the immersive experiences. And of course, add some favorite music of yours. That will be even better. But dialing all the way to professional use, there is a lot of professional use cases. If you go on our website, we have a page called Marble Labs, where we show creators from VFX, from game developer, developing world, from design world architecture, from robotic simulation, even clinical research, which I personally never thought about, are already finding use cases. So it's very horizontal.

But I think creativity and simulation are going to be two very large areas that people will find this really useful and superpowering. Okay, help me understand tool use in the world model context. So there was a moment where the large language models, the transformer-based GPT-3, GPT-4, those models were getting really good at math. And they were basically just memorizing math. And you could just ask them, what's 100 plus 50? And it would just tell you 150.

And it was sort of learning math. And then at a certain point, it broke down, and it couldn't do really complex math just in the actual weights. And so the solution was to teach it to write Python and give it a Python-reple and let it write some code. And then you get the perfectly accurate math when you need that from the, not just the LLM weights,

but the actual model, the experience. And so what I'm interested in is that I've seen evidence from Jeannie and your model and world models generally. There's this idea of persistence and the base model getting good enough that if I go up and I paint the wall and I come back later, the paints there, the model remembers this, maybe gravity, there's all these things that are simulated.

But at a certain level, it feels like if I need an inventory in my game, maybe we should just use a database. And so I'm wondering where you see tool use coming in to layer on top versus your, where you think you're on like a scaling law where if you just keep working on the base underlying model, you will get all of that functionality for free. Yeah, great question. So I want to answer your question in two different ways because you ask a very important question and technically, which is the scaling law of these models.

But then you also ask the really important question of the tool use, right? On the scaling law side, the 3D-generative world, or just world model in general, is actually an earlier technology than language models. So we're seeing budding sides of scaling law, but this is an interplay between model architecture as well as data. So what I can say right now is we're absolutely. seen but in size of it. But it's not, the curve hasn't gotten to the point where we see LLMs, you know, yet.

So which makes the technology really, really exciting and being at the forefront of it, we really do have the best 3D generative world model is exciting. On the tool you side, this is where I find it fascinating. I think when it comes to the usage or the usage, cases of world model, there is a lot of professional use cases, whether we're talking about VFX, you know, for movie industry or game developers. And when it comes to professional use cases, I personally really believe that superpowering creators and developers is very important. That means it needs to give them a sense of control and agency. You know, if you're a very important, you

know, if you try our model and product, there is an option just prompting and result out. And sometimes it's a slot machine, but it's to be a pretty good slot machine. I love a slot machine. Yeah, and that's great, right? That's amazing. But as a creator, in your mind's eye, there is actually so much nuance. There is so much story in your mind, so much, so much you want. want to express, whether it's for a game or for a movie, for a story, for even like trying to

get the robot to do, train the robot. So we actually put a lot of thought in using native AI capabilities to allow the users or the customers to engage in an editing and controllable creative loop. So if you're prompting something and you don't like the wall color here, we actually allow you to say, well, change the wall color from green to purple, or say, add this object, or say, I want to expand here, or allow you to stitch together the worlds that you see, or allow you to actually give a 3D layout so that you can put the couch where it is.

So this is very important, and this is the tooling side of it, right? It gives the controllability and agency to the human collaborator. Yeah. You can go. By the way, my team told me I have to put this on that. There we go. Wow. Thank you.

Thank you. Love it. Fantastic. Love it. What kind of progress can we expect from World Labs on the next two, three years? What are your kind of ambitions in terms of just general progress? Oh my God. Two, three years.

I think we need to, two, three years is a long time. Things are moving so fast. Spatial intelligence is so horizontal, and it's a platform. I do envision that Marlboro our product is a platform that can empower creativity, simulation. and I think we're going to see a C change in multiple use cases on the gaming side, on the VFX side, on the Metaverse side, on the robotic simulation side, on design side. All these are really, I wouldn't say it's almost ripe for

changes and we were seeing that level of excitement for many, many users now. What game developers or platforms do you think will be most quick to adopt world models? Because it feels like Roblox, I'm sure you've chatted with them. Like Roblox should be jumping on this because it could be something that any of their users could get a lot of value from immediately, speed up that creative process. But I can think of any, and some of the visuals we've shown on the screen, I'm just like, I wish that I had world labs when I was playing first-person shooter games as a kid, because you could just generate infinite maps for the games that you're playing.

You're watching this, and you're like, yeah, the environments look beautiful. I just wish I had an assault rifle in this game, and they were bad guys. Yes, and if you look at our page of Marble Labs, there are, you know, shooting examples already. So I don't know. I think the sky is the limit literally. Of course, I think what's exciting in this Gen. AI era is that a lot of just creators and technologists, many of them are individual developers or indie studios and teams,

small teams are really jumping in really fast. and Gen. AI models like ours really lowers the bar of entry for many of these use cases. So we're also, to be honest, we're also talking to bigger teams. I'm actually very pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm from bigger teams as well. The teams going crazy. They're actually playing at your website live. that we're in a world labs model simulation

at this very moment. Have you? Sure, yeah. I'm glad this is time travel. Generated this way. Getting back to some model. The model is getting really good. Yeah. I would love to know your thoughts on

market structure and how things might play out because I've been completely convinced of your vision for where we are on this technology, how early we are, and what's going to happen over the next few years is like just the, I don't want to call them easy wins, but like the logical play out the scale and you get somewhere really exciting. But I'm interested in the market dynamic. So in chat, in LLM, we saw sort of a somewhat of a monopoly, you know, emerge, a clear

winner and consumer chat knowledge retrieval with OpenAIs chat GPT, of course. Now, other firms are obviously working on that and competing. Then in the enterprise, you have more of an oligopoly, maybe emerging between Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI's API. There's obviously a long tail of other providers. Then you have the wrappers. And I'm wondering if there's going to be something similar that happens in world models, is it worth thinking very hard about being the winner in consumer specifically

and being not partnering with Roblox, but being the next Roblox, being the platform that wins consumer, even if it means pulling back from an API business in the short term? Or is it just too soon to tell, and it might be kind of totally different? I'm just wondering how you're thinking about the long-term market structure for what feels like a distinct technology from LLMs. That's a great question, actually. By and large, I think it's a little bit early to tell.

So right now, like I said, we just rolled out the first, you know, generally available, publicly available model. And we're going to focus on being a model company for a while because science is still early. We want to move fast and there is a lot to be unlocked. I also think that I don't think we're a model in the way that we are defining it, especially in the deep spatial intelligence way, is as consumer as a chatbot. Because I think, you know, like 3D is a representation. It's a medium that has its own characteristics. So I think that we're going to see products that are going to build around these models in different ways. Some are for creators, some are APIs, some are for possibly even different use cases. And I'm not saying there's no consumer.

I actually think the market might surprise us, especially. on the Metaverse side. I think it's going to surprise you. I think it's going to be a huge consumer category. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to actually make it a place where people want to hang out for hours and hours and hours. But I do think it's going to happen.

And I think that it's a bit of a race. But it's extremely exciting to even just be at the model layer and then experiment at the application layer. Because just today. companies get into the application. Yes, exactly. Of course, right. Of course, of course.

No, we're absolutely, I mean, Margot itself is an application today. Of course, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we are going to focus on model. This is the, World Apps is a deep tech company, and I think focusing on model

is the right thing to do right now. Yeah. How are you thinking about fungibility between formats? It feels like there's, maybe a uniquely unique value in having a world model that can export Gaussian splat, but then also export geometry, also export just an MP4 for different stages of like a VFX pipeline, for example, something that Hollywood might want to do.

Do you think that you need to have like translational models, or is there like one model that becomes like multimodal that can handle all, the different formats, whether I want an OBJ file and I want a 3D, you know, point cloud or an Olemic, I can just get whatever I want from the same model, or do I need specific models to translate between them? I don't know if you have played marble yet. We are actually multimodal. We are right now exporting, you know, Gaussian splats, mesh, mesh colliders, MP4s, and images

and panels. But is that all from one model that's trained? or is there like a translation layer between the outputs? Is there like one foundational truth and then like it's like chat GPD is not specifically trained on, there's not a Spanish version and an English version and a French version. It just learned every language when they did the big pre-trained. Is it the same thing or is there actual like or is there a translation layer that you need to do in a series of different models? What I can say now is we are a foundation model.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Got it. Cool. More broadly, where do you think AI is underhyped and where do you think it's overhyped? Oh, that's a spicy question. Hold on the motto is underhyped.

There we go. Yeah. Talk your book. Just talking your own book. I love it. I agree, though. I completely agree. I think this is a deeply underhyped category. So, to be honest, you know, one thing I consider myself a scientist in my heart.

And I actually really don't like hyping. I think, you know, that's just, you probably have seen me not on the hype train in most of these discourse, right? So as a scientist, I think world model is underappreciated because it's so new. And in terms of overheated, I do think that Silicon Valley as a whole tend to mistake. They can clear vision with short distance. Sometimes, for example, at 2006, Stanford self-driving car drove the first 140 miles in the Nevada desert for mankind, self-driving car. It took 20 years for Waymo to be barely on the road as a L4,

and it's still so limited. And this is a massive amount of effort. And it's also riding on the coattail of a very mature industry, especially hardware and distribution and use cases and all that. So this is an example to show you there are clear visions. For example, robots that can do all kinds of house doors. And as a mom, I'll tell you, That would be amazing, you know, start with cleaning my bathroom.

But that clear vision is important, but the journey is going to be long. It's, you know, we have issues with hardware. We still need to figure out data. The world model brain of the robots also need to improve and all that. So that's just an example. And also creativity, right? Creativity industry, which we are also engaging in. One thing I don't call it a hype, I call it a misleading sentiment, which actually really bothers me, is that we don't want to replace human creators.

You know, human creativity is precious. It tells the story of our species, of our culture, of our society, of our community, of each one of us. What we want to do is to superpower and augment creators' capabilities. And sometimes the communication of technology is a little skewed towards, oh, the model can do all the work in creativity. And I personally really want to highlight human creativity as something that's so fundamental to who we are, and AI is here to help and augment. Can you help me understand the relationship between the current AI hardware buildout and your technology, your model, your business? I would imagine that you're a beneficiary because there's all these data centers.

There might be some slack capacity in the future. But at the same time, I've been hearing that a lot of the LLM Foundation model companies are partnering with NVIDIA to try and steer the development of the next generation. of chips to be hyper optimized for LLM inference. And that might be okay for you, but it might actually take us, you know, away from something that's optimized for what you do. And so I'm wondering if you could just take me on a tour of what's exciting on the AI hardware buildout

from your perspective. Where are the risks? Yeah, so actually I was just in London receiving this award with both the algorithm folks as well as the hardware. folks for AI. Congratulations. Yeah, so I think as you...

It's the queen... No, it's not AI generated. I believe it is a recording of an audience clapping, but Jordy triggered it from his soundboard. That is the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from King Charles himself. Congratulations. We had it here to mention to you,

but I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, because you're talking about hardware. Yes. literally the room with my friend Bill and Jensen. So as you know, the most exciting thing for modern AI, for the birth of modern AI is the convergence of hardware, software, and data. So from hardware side, I think it continues to evolve. For world modeling, especially our technology relies on rendering,

we do think we will keep our conversation, our side of the conversation, going with the chip makers. Because some of the our requirement, especially on the rendering side, as well as on the training, the model side, will be somewhat different from LLMs. And, you know, I would love to, I will, and I would love to call for the chip industry to also work with us on this front. What is exciting? That's a great question, actually. So I was in Middle East visiting some of the construction of data centers, and that was pretty epic, seeing how large the Stargate data centers are being constructed. And it really feels that we're in a different phase of industrial.

revolution. You know, we never, none of us lived in the days of the steam engines, the electricity when the scale of industrialization in that time was just multiplying for humanity. I think we are now living in the AI industrialization era and seeing that scaling up is quite exciting. Hypothetically, last question for me. Hypothetically, if I gave you unlimited access. to a one gigawatt data center, the best and brightest, the hot off the presses,

the freshly installed one gigawatt data center, you know, probably billions of dollars invested in this. Would you run your, would you do a training run? Would you run your model? Would you just scale up? Or would you say, hey, I would need more time to actually advance the way we think about training before we press go on the big run. Yeah, that was going to be my question is like, at what point does World Labs become capital constrained and are you capital constrained today? Yeah, it's the whole bitter lesson. There are different parts of the business that are bitter lesson pilled and others that aren't

and I'm wondering like what pieces are currently on the great scaling curves. you. Yeah, like I said, the scaling curve from a model architecture point of view, we're still early. So if I have one gigawatts and that many chips, I'm more likely going to actually run some parallel models and experiments to really hole in the bet. So it doesn't mean we're still trading large models. It's just not at the level of today's, LLM's yet. So are we capital constrained? We are capital constrained. You got to start hyping more.

I want to see some faith. We're going to hit the gong. We're going to hit the gong. We hate capital constraints. How much have you actually raised? How much can you do? How much can you share? Publicly, it's known that we've raised more than $240 million.

Publicly. I can explain why. Why did you make the call just now? Because we're increasing the hype. We hit the goal for every fun-rays. We hate that. Yes, yes. It's a good sign. It's a mutual hype.

I'm wearing your hat. Yes, we appreciate that. And we appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us. Thank you so much. This was extremely exciting, extremely enlightening. And yeah, we're very excited for you. Congratulations on the launch. And we'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, thank you guys. Bye. Cheers. Bye. soon. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about profound. Get your brain invention in chat. GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Let me also tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. I'm going to ask Kari to add

this sound effect when you open money. Projects and product roadmaps. I'm loving the new stingers. Look at that. That looks fantastic. Our next guest is Scott Sanders from Fort Tara. He's got some big news. How you doing, Scott? What's going on? Good to see you. Good to see you too. First time of the show. Introduce yourself.

Let us know what you do, how you describe for Terra, for those who don't know. I mean, first off, a long-time listener, first-time caller. I think it was actually the subject of the original TVPN, print the Internet situation. Oh, yeah? Or you were now physical memes. That's true. You criticized it? Okay.

Well, you came around. I came around. Was it, like we were using up too many pieces of paper? Is this an environmentalist thing? You were anti-printing or something? What was going on? No, I just, you know, the internet exists on your computer of what's the need to physically print it off every day.

Well, I printed your new, we printed, I will put it out there, we printed your news here. Yeah, we printed your news. Because we care so much. We wanted to physically hold. We like the Wall Street Journal. We like the Financial Times, you know. You'll come around. We should, we should do like a TVPN, like, for,

every episode we plant a tree just to make sure that, you know, we're replacing. But I feel like you, I feel like we're kindred spirits. You, you work on physical things. We work in, in physical, in the physical realm. Of course, there is a software element to everything that both of us do. But give us the update on, on what you're building because it does touch the physical realm, correct? That is, that is true. We do, we do build hardware. Yeah, we, uh, we announced a $238 million dollar, uh, series C today. I think. I think there's a down-effect pattern. There we go.

Congratulations. There we go. Massive. It's fantastic. Yeah, but we're building distributed systems for defense, starting from the ground up. You know, we feel the warfighter, you know, you need drones, you need maritime capabilities.

There's great companies building that. Yep. But we're focused on building stuff that primarily goes on vehicles because at the end of the day, you know, try not to walk into combat, if at all possible. And we want to be able to equip those warfighters with technology and distributed compute at the tactical edge that enables vehicles to be self-driving, active communication nodes and relays, launch things like loitering munitions, put radars into place to detect aircraft or detect enemy shipping, and then put anything from cruise missiles to anti-ship ballistic missiles in the back so that we can deter our enemies from invading countries and want them to invade.

Yeah, my mental model for this stuff is, a little hazy, maybe you can help clean it up. I feel like there's usually like one company that does just autonomy. There might be another that's doing some sort of battlefield tactical mapping, some awareness things. It sounds like you're doing multiple. How do you actually interface with the other touch points? I mean, who do you need to integrate with?

Since some people might be familiar with maybe what Palantir builds or what Anderals built on the operating system level. How, how, like, what, what, can you give me some concrete examples of, like, groups that you're working with or technologies or platforms that you're building on? Like, what's the, what's the wheelhouse case study for Fortair? Yeah. And on top of that, I feel like the challenge from a product roadmap standpoint, a product planning standpoint, is you have to understand what are the systems that we have in place in our armed forces today and then how the battlefield is actually changing. We've heard from other people.

on the show that, you know, a lot of the equipment that we have might not be relevant in a world where the front line is just drone-on-dron action. Yeah, I think one of the best examples of doing this is actually with one of our partners, Raytheon, where we, or in this case, chaos in that quick little snippet, where with Raytheon, we and Oshkosh, we integrated our edge compute platform and our self-driving software to take a traditionally manned vehicle and make it. unmanned. So one, by putting the edge compute on self-driving vehicles, you're enabling enabling other algorithms and other platforms to run on top of them. So we think about the ecosystem

as a partnership approach where we're not going to make everything that a warfighter needs. In fact, no defense company, defense tech or otherwise can do that. And so we open up our architecture and our system so that a Palantir can run at the tactical edge, not on a giant server rack somewhere. Or in the case of the small multi-purpose equipment transports that you're looking at. We put chaos's long range bistatic radar system on it to detect drones. And our future integrations with those guys will enable them to utilize our compute and our autonomy later. We don't care who's doing the C2. We obviously do our own because you kind of have to. But if that's Andrew's lattice or Palantir's Gaia or smart system, we're very open

to that, and we've broken up our system in a way that enables the user to sort of make the decision of what capability they want for each different application layer, and not wrapping it all into one holistic platform, unless that's what the end user and the customer want to do. What was yours or the team's reaction to Pete HegSeth speech last Friday? We had Catherine Boyle from Andreessen on talking about how HegSeth was, basically making a case that it was it Cheney made back in like 2001 so these are basically reforms that have been people have been asking for for a long time but we haven't been able to actually deliver yeah we were we were lucky enough to to be at that event and you know defense

tech reform is people is a thing people been talking about since before defense tech was a thing you know the acquisition system has become extremely complicated and I think difficult to work with for many companies. And it's, you know, to have a Secretary of War coming out and saying, like, look, this is a, this is an actual problem, right? Like the rate limiting the step on getting technology to operators is very rarely whether there's the technology that exists that can solve the problem. It's can it work its way through the prototyping into production phases and get in a scale

production with an end user? And that's been very hard. Palantir's been at this for 20 years. Andrews has been at this since 2017, and definitely not going to do that math in public. I'll be quite easy to do. I'm a math guy. He's a growth guy. That's amazing.

Speaking of growth, how is the company growing? I mean, we've texted about this. It's all SBIRs, right? Yeah, it's all sivers all day long. Actually, no, I think it's too big for SBIRs now, which is great. we're about 550 people total and so we're not still not that big in defense tech or defense world still relatively small yeah trying to be a scrappy startup and you know work with not only the legacy primes who build incredible systems right there's no one in defense tech building eight by eight 25,000 pound

armored vehicles they can go head to head with you know major land forces across europe and And there's only a couple small startups that are starting to do the missile systems that we want to put on the back of these platforms. But our approach is we open up and enable our architecture to work with nearly anyone to deliver that capability at the tactical edge. We really just feel like humans being the blunting force of combat is a pretty bad idea. We have probably 20% veterans at Fortera. And a lot of us feel very strongly and very passionately that I would much rather have a robot make first contact with the enemy. or be the platform that is emitting a large signature on the battlefield, something firing a missile, firing a howitzer, moving a radar.

So the platform is inevitably targeted, it's not a human that's getting targeted. It's a machine. And we're trying to change that dynamic, you know, one platform, one program at a time. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you to all the veterans. It was Veterans Day yesterday, right? Thanks everyone for the service. And congratulations on all the progress and congratulations on the Series C.

And next time you come on, we will not print out your news. We'll just go in blind. Yeah, we'll just go out. Because we don't know how to use computers. As long as the next time, isn't it at 10.30 at night, I'll be stoked. Wait, are you in, are you in Lisbon right now? Were you guys at Web Summit? Josh is at Web Summit.

I'm in Paris at TechTOP. I mean, with some customers. Okay, cool. Awesome. Yeah, we can coordinate better on the time. Congrats to the whole team on the progress. Yeah. Awesome.

We'll see you soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. See you. Numeral.com, not numeralhq.com anymore. Numeral.com and sales tax and autopilot. Spent less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Our next guest is Jamie Aller from Circle.

Just had earnings. Welcome to the show, Gary. How are you doing? Good to see. I'm great. Good to see you guys. Welcome back. Fantastic.

Welcome back. Thank you. Give us the rundown. What's the latest in your world? Yeah. Well, this morning we announced our Q3 earnings. It was a tremendous quarter. We saw USDC grow 108% year-on-year, which is fantastic.

The amount of activity happening on-chain with USDC grew about 600% year-over-year to $9.6 trillion of on-chain activity with USBC. Get the gong for that. I think that's the biggest gong ever. Maybe we've hit the gong for various countries' GDPs. I think we might have hit for a GDP once, but that's it. The only thing that's bigger. That's bigger volume. That is, yeah, that is remarkable.

That's a lot. Of course, that's the nature of these networks. Yeah, a lot of other great stuff. I mean, we launched something called CPN, which is an on-chain money movement payment network earlier this year. That is growing very fast. You know, dozens of financial institutions coming on that network. It's already gotten to an annualized payment volume of about $3.4 billion.

Key, though, just from a financials perspective, we saw adjusted EBITDA grow 78% to $166 million in the quarter. That's a 57% adjusted EBITDA margin, which is about 730 basis point expansion. And so strong performance on that as well. And then I think really importantly, we recently launched ARC into Texas. And ARC is a new layer-one blockchain network that Circle has been building into the market. We had over 100 major companies, major banks, payment system operators like Visa and MasterCard, major AI companies, major exchanges, e-commerce companies, gig economy companies, all these working with us, collaborating us to deliver ARC.

And we also announced this morning that we're exploring a token, a native token for ARC network, which is an exciting development for us as well. And so we're seeing a lot of activity in the space. We had the Genius Act pass recently, and so we're also just starting to see more and more major institutions, major financial firms, payments companies, getting in the game and collaborating with us and building products with us as well.

Can you tell me anything about the anthropic relationship? There's this very interesting concept of, like, using stable coins to power agents in the future. There's that. And then there's also just like Anthropic might need to pay someone internationally. Yeah. Give me any guidance on like where we are on that. Yeah.

I mean, look, a couple of things on that. I think the first is that, you know, we've been working alongside others on these standards for agentic payments using like MCP, which does not have, does not have stifoy points yet,

but it should maybe in V2 or something. Well, yeah. And standards like X402 and Google's agent to payment standard. We're collaborating on both of those. We're releasing tools for those. And we actually have a number of agent developer tools, companies that are supporting these things as well. And so that's actually happening.

It's actually one of the key design centers for the ARC blockchain network that we're building, which is we envision a world where over time the velocity of money increases and more and more of our economic activity is machine intermediated. And that machine intermediation is going to be in these new computing networks, these provable, trusted computing networks, which we call blockchain networks. And AI agents will become, we believe, the primary intermediary that's intermediating activity on these. And so we see that as sort of, if you look at these trends converging over the coming several years, we see these kind of compounding each other. And so, So, yeah, we were excited to have Anthropic as a collaborating, a collaborating partner for us with

ARC. And I think, you know, we had a number of other AI-focused firms there, too. And I think it just speaks to the fact that we need a substrate, we need an execution environment that AI agents can use that are trustworthy, provable. And look, AI agents need to be able to make, you know, a $5 transaction for consuming some tokens or, you know, a $50 transaction. and needs to work anywhere in the world where software works, and that's what these new networks are really good at.

And so there's not a payment system that's ever really been built to support that. And I think something like USDC and then these new networks like Arc Network and standards like X402 and others really help with that a lot. Talk about just like this strategy of going full stack and how you guys are positioned against competition at the different levels.

You guys are an issuer, you're building your own network. You're going to have a native token. There's, nowadays, it feels like there's probably a new stable coin that gets created every second of every day, right? Not just a net new of an existing stable coin, but an entirely new stable. You guys are well positioned in a lot of ways, but I guess talk about how you view your competitive position as a variety of other networks come on. and new stablecoins come online?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the first to start with the core, which is our stablecoin network has really strong network effects. We have liquidity network effects globally. We have infrastructure network effects just in terms of where we're plugged in around the world. There's tens of thousands of products and services that integrate to our network, which really drives the developer flywheels. And so we're in a very strong position there.

And we're taking that, and we're expanding kind of down the stack and up the stack. And I think in our view, you know, if you think about where we are in the evolution of this, you know, the global economic system is enormous. And we expect more and more of the economic system to, as I said, become machine intermediated on these new kind of economic operating systems. And we're still at the front edge of that. You know, we have a market that really grew out of speculation on cryptocurrencies, and now we're seeing like more and more of actual financial contracts, actual, you know, trade flows, payments flows, treasury activities, investment products, lending products, all this is actually

starting to come over. But we're at the front edge of that. And so I think our view is that there are going to be some very significant-scale internet platform companies built out of this transformation over the next five, ten, fifteen years. We think that these can be as big or bigger than prior internet platform companies that were built around, you know, centers of gravity around search or social or mobile or cloud or e-commerce, we think that that's going to take place. And we think that we're in a very good position to provide really great infrastructure across those different layers. And I think if you look at

what we've been able to do with ARC, even just getting to TESTNet, the range of major firms from around the world that touch literally over $100 trillion of assets, whether those are custodians, exchanges, clearinghouses, payment systems, et cetera, we're putting forward a model that we think can work for scaled mainstream adoption. And so that's an infrastructure problem. And we're doing it in a way where we can build a distributed network of distributed stakeholder participation, distributed governance, and kind of bring that into the world. And obviously, that's what we're considering as we evaluate the design of an arc token as well. And then on the other hand, you know, we definitely see an application layer emerging on top of these platforms. And I think, likewise,

we're still in the early stages of the application layers being built. We are definitely taking a crack at part of that by building a payment utility, this CPN as a payment application, but we're designing it in a way where other financial institutions can use it, benefit from it and generate revenue from it. We're not trying to compete with them as well. And so at every layer of what we do, we try and build kind of market neutrality and interoperability at the core. And that has served us well. I mean, one of the things we've pointed out this morning in the earnings call is, you know, we actually run, as of October, the largest cross-chain interoperability protocol in the world. CCTV, which is Circles Cross-Chance Transfer Protocol in October, was greater than 50% of all

cross-chain traffic accounting for all assets across all blockchains. And that's really significant. We really want to be part of the solution to interoperability while we build at these different layers of the stack. We've had a number of conversations about the local regulatory environment, how that's changing recently. But what's going on internationally? Last time you were on the show, we talked about how part of Circle's Edge is having offices in a bunch of different countries and being set up to navigate what will ultimately be unique regulatory environments in a bunch of different countries. Well, it's been amazing, actually, since the Genius Act, we've seen almost every major government in the world accelerating plans around building local rules around stablecoins. We've seen, you know, for example, Hong Kong in August, when effective with their new rules,

we're seeing, you know, regimes working on this from major emerging markets to some of the largest developed markets like Korea, which is accelerating their efforts around stablecoin rules, UK accelerating their efforts. So now everyone's sort of getting behind this model of private sector, you know, bank and non-bank, issued stable coins, clear supervision, usually supervision by the central banks, just like, you know, we're going to be overseen by the national bank regulator here in the United States. And so that kind of standard is cascading around the world. And I think also a lot of these regulators are looking at ways to support kind of reciprocity or kind of consistency as well. And so I think that's really important as we build infrastructure that we know that it'll work in all these different places around the world. So I would say the activity for us internationally has really, really accelerated, and you'll see a lot more as well as we go forward.

But I think, you know, the U.S. is actually really providing leadership right now in this whole area. And the rest of the world is taking notice and following. It's kind of a national competitiveness issue as well. Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a sense. on a successful earning season. We'd love to have you back on the show soon. Thanks, guys.

Have a great rest of all. Likewise. We'll talk to you. Cheers, bye-bye. Go-bye. Before we bring in our next guest from the roost room, waiting room, let me tell you about Finn.com. The number one AI agent for customer service,

number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. Our next guest is Vlad. He's building lighter, and we have some big news on the funding sign. How you doing, Vlad? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. It's happening.

Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Please introduce yourself. Introduce the company for those who aren't familiar. Awesome. Yeah, good to be here. Actually, I think you had my former co-founder, Scott on a couple of weeks ago, who's not working on Cognition. Oh, Scott will. Of course. We've had them on a bunch of times. We are actually, TBPN, Hall of Fame. TBPN is made possible by Cognition. The makers of Devon. Oh, really? the AI software engineer. We love doing ad reads for cognition. Oh, nice, nice, nice. Today, we're here to talk about you and Lighter.

Yes. Exactly. So I'm Vlad. I'm founder and CEO of Lighter, which is decentralized exchange built on top of Ethereum. We can talk more about, you know, how we built it and why. But, you know, we've, we launched in January and kind of had pretty strong growth this year with our main night. And we actually did a public launch in, you know, October 1.

But, yeah, and I guess before later, I worked on lunch club, you know, with Scott. And prior to that, I guess I'm kind of like, like I'm not a crypto guy that got into finance. I'm more like a finance guy who took a detour to AI and then, you know, got into defy. Yeah. Talk about some of the some of the choices that you've made like like why Ethereum compared to other other chains. Why decentralized exchange? Like of the technical decisions that you made,

I feel like we've talked to a lot of folks who have picked out different quadrants if we do a two by two quadrant or something like that. You've clearly landed in one particular piece. one particular spot on the market map, how would you describe the tradeoffs that you've made, and then why did you make those tradeoffs? Awesome. Yeah, that's a great question. And we actually started working on lighter right around three years ago.

So like mid to late 22 is when we were thinking through that IDMAs, as it were. So it's interesting to like look back now. And the, you know, the genesis of the idea, right, was that, we were thinking about digital assets, right? Like, digital assets have been around for 10, 15 years, right? Like, they've been traded a lot. I mean, but most of them represent some kind of blockchain or, you know, decentralized protocol or like rails for the future of finance.

But the weird thing was that, like, 99% of the activity of how they're traded actually did not use the rails of the stuff that these assets are building, right? It's actually trading in a centralized way. And like centralized exchanges have, you know, there's some good ones, right? You know, they, you know, I think some of them definitely have provided value to customers. But like at the basic premise, right, like a centralized exchange doesn't actually use the blockchain at its core to verify what's going on. And like in some cases it's actually worse than TratFi, right? Like at least in TratFi, you have, you know, regulations and the legal system to call back on.

something goes wrong. And we said the thing is that like actually almost three years to the day is when FTX collapsed. And we were looking at that when we were thinking about how to build lighter. And we thought, okay, well, now people will get it and like volume will move away from centralized exchanges after like one of the big ones failed. And that didn't happen. So what that taught us was that actually like the decentralized exchanges that existed at the time,

like their product market fit was so bad that people would rather trade somewhere where there's like a one in six chance of the whole thing being a fraud than like using the decentralized products. So right, so then we thought, okay, well, this is something we should be part of the solution to, right? And so for us it's like, okay, what we want to achieve is low cost, low latency,

secure, verifiable, and composable. And like the first three of those are pretty self-explanatory, but, you know, what does verifiable mean, right? It means that everything that happens, there's a cryptographic proof that it happened fairly incorrectly. And, like, why is that important? Well, if you ask the reverse question, like, what if it's not verifiable? Well, that means there's some part of the system where you're just like, trust me, bro,

which is kind of, again, defeats the, even if there's one part like that, you know, like the whole thing could be, you know, manipulated or, you know, corrupted, right? So that's a problem, right? And then composable is also important because at the end of the day, we're not just trying to build a sandbox for people to speculate on. We want to build something that's composable with the rest of DFI, whether it's lending, stable coins, staking, prediction markets, all this other stuff so that can kind of all work together in smart contracts.

So anyway, so we had those five goals. And going back to your question, like, so Ethereum was the obvious choice for the security layer, right? For it to be secure, we had a pretty strong view that the layer one that's by far the most secure out of things you can build on is Ethereum. Now, we, you know, Salana has built a great L1 as well and others have too, but, you know, Ethereum is like very secure. It's been stable for a very long time.

So that was pretty clear to us. And yeah, we can dive into how we achieve the other goals. But as far as like why decentralized and why Ethereum, I think that gets into those points. I don't know if we have enough time to go super deep into more of the technical side. I'm more interested to hear about how you met Ken Griffin, honestly. So could you tell me the story of the Ken Griffin recruitment? I would love to know, like, how did he even know to reach out to you? What happened there?

Tell me the full story, because I think that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. So, and by the way, I'm, you know, also based in Miami now with the last five, years. So, you know, not only did I learn a lot of stuff from Canada about finance and business, but also that South Florida is a good area. In that location, yeah. Yeah, but, you know, so I guess, you know, the thing with my time at Citadel and, you know, so I was 18 when I finished Harvard and actually even while a student.

Let's give it up for finishing Harvard at 18. Congratulations. Continue. What's that account like VCs congratulating themselves? We're congratulating you. You just said a fact. You just said a fact. But yeah, so actually like even at school, I did some trading and was working on kind of a side project with two friends around options.

And so, you know, so I was doing that and that didn't quite get off the ground. but I got to know the team at Citadel through, you know, essentially like the research firm. So, you know, it's not like Ken personally gave me a call or something, but I got to know the team and they wanted me to join. And then kind of towards the end of the process, Ken got involved and spent a bunch of time with me, you know, to tell me more about what their high level goals are at Citadel and their strategy. why it would be a good fit for me and kind of making sure that I'm comfortable joining them. And I guess without going to too much details, I mean, he made it a very attractive proposition for me and was pretty involved, you know, the first couple of weeks, especially of my work there. And yeah, you know, he's to this day someone I thoroughly look up to.

Yeah, I think he's fascinating lineage here. There's just fascinating lineage here, obviously. Ken Griffin went to Harvard, was trading in his dorm room. It took him a couple extra years. He didn't graduate at 18, so he sort of mugged him on that front. But then, of course, he had a deep relationship with Robin Hood, and Robin Hood markets came in and invested in this round. And so there's a whole bunch of like full circle moments.

I did want to quickly ask if you think that the industry fully learned its lesson from FTX, because I feel like there's, I've seen some chatter over the last few weeks around. various exchanges saying like, no, your funds are frozen, but don't worry. We're working on it. And it's, you know, maybe sending some alarm bells. Right. So October 10th was an interesting moment for the space, I think, that actually Defi kind of as a whole worked well, right? Whether it's AVE or morpho or all those protocols, and I think our competitors handled those market moves in different ways. But I think all of them in the context of defi work the way they were supposed to work.

Some of the centralized exchanges, I think maybe, again, the problem there, right, it's like lack of transparency. You don't really know, like, did they actually liquidate their customers correctly or not? Like, maybe they did, right? Like maybe everything worked exactly as expected, but if it didn't, there would be no way we would even know that. And so I'm not aware of any cases of specific wrongdoing by centralized exchanges in that cycle. But again, with the lack of transparency, there was no way I would know that. And we do know there have been some like blow-ups of kind of smaller hedge funds, like on-chain hedge funds, right? And what ultimately caused those is unclear.

but the one thing I will say is I remember after FTX, there was this whole thing about like, okay, let's even centralize exchanges, let's make them more verifiable and like prove reserves. Now, of course, like, what does that mean? Because like you can prove assets, but how do you prove liabilities? But still, like, there was some push to do that. And I remember Vitalik had some ideas on how to do that. And Binance was looking into it.

And then, like, I think someone asked CZ about it. And he was just like, well, you know, Vitalik is very technical. Some of the stuff is too complex or something like that, right? So I don't know if the centralized exchanges have really truly learned their lessons on that front, but did anything particularly egregious happen that I know of October 10th? Like, I can't say that. But again, the whole point is that, you know, it's supposed to be transparent and trustless.

Well, well, well, glad you're building what you're building. Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on the show. And congratulations on the massive fundraise. Very excited to continue following the story as you continue to build this company. But have a great rest of your day. Awesome. Hope you enjoy. Awesome. Thanks for having me, guys.

Miami. Cheers. Come back soon. Have a great host to you day. Thank you. Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free.

Also, I'm going to tell you about 8Sleep.com. Jordy's traveling, but I got a 91, 7 hours, 55 minutes. I'll give it to you. Let's go. And our next guest is Andrew DeSuda from D'Souza from Bordy. He's in the stream waiting room. Welcome. Welcome.

What's happening? How are you? Great, great to meet. And welcome to the show. Kick it off, maybe with a quick intro on yourself, background, and then let's talk about Borty. Yeah, yeah. So I'm the founder, founder, CEO, creator. of Bordy, the AI super connector. Bordy is helping, you know, helping founders meet investors

primarily, but connecting people for, you know, business and economic reasons. We've had, we launched a program about two weeks ago to try and get 100 founders to help close around. We have 5,000 founders raising $16 billion signed up and 600 investors running about a trillion dollars of capital. Some size. So, yeah, we've got, I think we probably got about 10% of the active fundraising happening right among founders that are working through Bordi, which is pretty exciting. Awesome. So, yeah, I guess, I guess, yeah, I guess immediate thought is with products like this, like one of the challenges is just like balancing the network, basically. And with Inventure,

it's oftentimes the companies that have the most demand for their equity or the companies that are that are, you know, maybe performing the best, oftentimes don't need intros. You know, they're in the position of like saying no. How are you thinking about kind of like maintaining quality on the platform when you're a business and you want to be as big as you can possibly be? And I imagine you have a strategy there. Yeah, I think it's, it's, that was something that I was worried about. This is the reason why we didn't start with the idea of connecting founders and investors. It just sort of happened organically that this was, this was the activity that was taking place. I've been shocked at the caliber of founders that have come in looking for help.

And I think as a CEO, as a founder, like, your job is to create demand for your share. It doesn't matter whether you're Elon or, you know, Roy Lee or, you know, a YC founder. Like, that's your job. And you'll take all the help you can get. Most founders only raise capital, you know, two or three times in their life. And having someone that can help you navigate that, get the right introductions. I think there are probably 50. or 100 founders in the world. I think this is the reason why we talk about this sort of AI bubble right now. It's maybe 50 or 100 founders in the world that every investor is chasing, right?

Because that's the hype cycle. There's probably thousands of founders who have incredible businesses. We're talking to them that have incredible businesses, incredible metrics, and they're just, you know, they're not based in Silicon Valley or they're not, you know, straight down the middle pattern recognition. They're not based at all. I'm back They may not be based at all

stupid Good luck raising if you're not based these days Yeah that makes total sense What like where does this go From here This feels like a good early wedge But you know hard Hard to build a billion dollar business yourself

Just within just within venture So I imagine you have a number of other kind of pathways or use cases for the kind of introduction engine or I don't know how you. Yeah. Yeah, we've built Bordia as like an AI board member. So what is the most important meeting for the CEO to take at any time, right? Is it a customer meeting? Are they hiring an executive?

Are they trying to get on, you know, a podcast? Are they, you know, like, is it a big partnership? Is it corp dev? It happens to be that fundraising ends up being a high urgency place. and build a great relationship. But I think of Bordy is an economy. You know, Bordy, every time you connect to people, there's some economic opportunity that is unlocked.

There's some latent economic potential. And we can financialize it. Yeah, I love it. It's actually what you're doing. It's true. It's actually good. Okay, can I give feedback to Bort? If I get an intro and I take the call and I'm like,

can I be like, yo, Borty, that never again, never again. Because we, I mean, everyone's gotten. an intro from somebody and you're like, wait, why'd you make that intro? Like, I jumped on. They didn't know who I was. Am I on with the venture fund that loves firing CEOs? Don't introduce me to them. Introduce me to the friendly ones. Yeah, so how do you, how do you, because I can imagine that's like one way that you want to make sure, you want to get to the point where the entire industry is, is onboarding. Like every single founder, every single investor. But as an investor for an investor to like not churn, they need to be able to like, give.

of feedback and say like, hey, like, this didn't meet, this didn't meet my bar for a meeting. I don't, you know, if you, you know, and if you keep sending people meetings or intros that don't meet their bar, eventually, they'll just say, like, I'm going to, you know, log off. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, so this is, this is one of the things we take a lot of, we take feedback. Bordy has goodwill with people, right? So his idea, the same way that if any time I make an introduction, I'm gambling goodwill. I'm going to, if I make a bad introduction, I burn some goodwill.

If I make a great introduction, maybe I've gained some goodwill. and you're sort of doing that calculation at any given time. The version of Bordy, if you just sign up, you're talking to a low latency, relatively low cost. On the phone, on WhatsApp, you're just talking to, you know, the standard version of Bordy. What we tried to do, we had this experiment. We were running this fundraising thing.

We said, what if you could remove the constraints of latency and cost? What if I could spend 100 times of tokens? What if I could let Bordy run for 30 minutes trying to find the perfect introduction and position you in the perfect way? Can I get better results? And that's kind of what we're seeing. So now we've had 5,000, and Bordi's talked to 5,000 founders that are raising in 600 investors in the last two weeks.

He has now picked the top 100 that he knows he can help that are going to be in demand from the investors in his network. And we put them into a shared Slack channel with us and Bordy and the founder. And we've now got those shared Slack channels with people and are like, hey, here's some investors. What do you think? Get feedback from the founders. We're doing the same thing with investors.

So the investors are sort of signing up and saying, here's a few founders that are raising. We think they'd fit your thesis. and Bordy's just learning. So you're like, actually, that's not a good fit. I've talked to this founder, more like this, less like this. And over the course of a couple weeks, we really dial it in on both sides. And we just make sure that you're spending time. And it's less about capital allocations, more about, like,

how are you allocating your time and attention onto the deals that are actually likely to materialize? As an investor, the deals are going to win as a founder, the investors that are actually going to give you a term sheeting fund. That makes sense. What are some other kind of like types of work that you expect Bordy to do in the future? Yeah, we're already starting to see a lot in sort of corporate, you know, enterprise sales and biz dev and partnerships. There are, it starts with the corporate venture capital arms. So we're getting a ton of corporate venture capital funds coming in.

And now we're talking to their innovation teams. And it's the same thing. It's like, hey, look, I got to stay abreast of what's happening in my industry. And it's almost impossible, right? Maybe I'll watch TPPN and see who comes on there. But like, that's almost too late, right? It's actually like, I've got to see who's starting a company, you know, who's just being funded, who is going, who do I want to be, who do I want to be tracking? And so board is starting

to help with that and making those introductions. Hiring is another one that I think is interesting, you know, especially when people are passive. They're not actively looking. They don't want to take a bunch of recruiter calls, but they'll talk to Bordy, like, I might start a company, but if there's a really great startup out there, I might join the team. And so those kind of conversations are quite interesting as well. But it's like whatever you call your board member, whatever introduction is going to move the needle for you that is worth the time of the CEO, That's what we want to work on. That makes a lot of sense.

I'm looking for a board member who can take me on a track day. That's my only thing I want to get out of them. Take me to the track. Put me in a race car. It better not have a passenger seat and then get out of the way because I'm building on my own. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good challenge. Maybe that's a customer development. Maybe once you get into the really high tier of boardie spend, you do a track day. Well, you know, so Nico Rosberg is a big boardie user. No way. There we go. Oh, he's been on the show. Big time board a user.

That's awesome. And so he can probably make it happen for you. Very cool. I love it. I like it. I like it. It's one of those things that in kind of working on, when you describe it of just like a place that a founder can go to just get help with their business. It's surprisingly not something that nobody's made that pitch on the show to date, which is surprising because that's pretty much.

know, feels like very valuable to a lot of the companies that are coming on. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Congratulations and all the progress. Yeah, great to look forward to talking. We'll try out the product and we need to find like a guest. Yeah, that'd be great.

There you go. I'd love to give it a shot. Awesome. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Andrew. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously.

They got multi-ass investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. I'm also going to tell you about ad quick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches about out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Parag Agarwal from Aralel AI.

Welcome to the show. Parag, how you doing? Hey, hey. Hey, hey, good to see you next. There's so much fanfare. Are you at a newcomer event right now? I am. I get the step of review behind you.

Cerebral Valley. AI Summit. Congratulations. What did you announce on stage? What are you announcing here on TVPN? I announced on stage that we just raised CDZA. We saved $100 million from some of the best investors. Yeah. Let's give it up for the best investors.

$740 million. I'm nother Perkins Index Ventures. There we go. Got some spark capital participation. We love to see it. Kostla is in there first round. Wow, really? Really murders.

Oh, Mahmoon, Ecliner is joining the board. That's exciting. That's exciting. Kind of looking like the Figma board. We got a good crew here. I like this. So take me through the actual company progress, the progress that unlocked this $100 million series A. Obviously, there was some demand, there was some research progress.

What was the shape of the data points that went into the ultimate deck that got this across the finish lines. So we got first time two years ago. We started with this sort of find the sky idea that agents are going to use the web and they're going to use them a lot. Yeah. And we need to build new infrastructure for them. Yeah.

There weren't any agents around in that moment. Right? None of them were using the web when we started. They were trying. Some of them were trying. Yes. And this year, like everything changed. Everyone's now building an agent.

And every agent. and every agent wants to connect to those. So the market just came alive, I want to say six, nine months ago. The most frontier customers started doing its last years and became our design partners. This year, the number of customers, the number of queries, the diversity of work, like there's coding agents using us. There's people in sales, building agents using us, finance, risk, compliance, compliance, insurance, healthcare, people doing scientific research agents, people in pharma and biotech figuring out how to

use web search APIs to build agents. So like it's a completely different world this year as it relates to agents, agents using the web. So yeah, to make it super simple, people are using parallel web systems within, you know, maybe a SaaS provider is integrating parallel into their product so that if somebody's doing research, let's say in a CRM on a customer, you guys can help them use agents to do a web search and fill in that CRM with data. That would be one example. That is a perfect example.

You see this quite often. Our products are APIs, our users are agents, our customers are people building agents, right? So if someone builds an agent to say, okay, I'm going to take your CRM and adds very interesting data to it so that you can take better actions. that agent that they built will call our APIs in order to search the web, in order to pull content from the web, in order to get the highest quality information to be able to fill up that it is. React to this post from Jim Kramer.

He says, when I use ChatGBT, GBT, or the others, I can tell quickly that they won't pay up for good sources. We all know this. So what's the point? they need to start paying newspapers and stop using bogus sources. We would never use ourselves. We need integrity, not volume. There's a bunch of ways you could read that. But my take was there is a data quality opportunity,

especially in the enterprise, especially where willingness to pay is maybe really high. And so how are you thinking about making sure that parallel and the deep research API has the highest quality data forever? Perhaps I'm being partly, the GM claimant, I don't always. Two things there. How do you get the highest quality deep research items? That is a lot of things.

High quality data, authoritative data is a part of it. And then there's a lot of other technology we're building on top, whether it be at the ranking layer, the retrieval layer, the crawling layer, the reasoning layer, to get you higher quality deep security signals. I ask you to try a deep research product and compare it to OpenEEIs, and we win nine times out of ten. So I want everyone to try that and tell us if I'm wrong. Go to the data question.

I think there are deals being done by people. The world I don't want to live in is only Google and Open AI's agents have access to some data. And most publishers don't get to make those deals. And most other agents don't get to have that access. That is the core mission of our business. We started with building products for AI customers. We recently started figuring out what the incentives are for publishers who allow AI agents to use them, which will include payments,

which will include other forms of value, which is transactions, and which will include distribution. Which are the things that people care about on the web. I've sort of having run Twitter before, I understand the concerns of someone publishing on the web and business models around ads are likely to evolve. And that's part of the reason we end up doing this company because we think we have an opinion or two to bring to life years. Do large revenue multiples scare you? No. Good.

No, as long as you know what you're doing. There we go. Confidence. I love it. Love the confidence. Got to be confident. Congratulations. But yeah, I love how the, even since your last appearance, you know, the vision and opportunity just seems bigger and bigger. Totally. Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. Thanks for having. Yeah. It's great to have you back at this rate. I'm sure come back on before the end of the year. I'm going to ship a product in a couple of weeks and be like that.

Fantastic. up then. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Prague. Have good one. Thanks, having to see. Let me tell you about Bezell. Getbezzle.com.

Your Bezell concierge is available now to source you. Any watch on the planet? Seriously, any watch. I want to do a lightning round. We got a bunch of posts. We're going to try and go through them as fast as possible. First, Brian Johnson does, did confirm. This is from Brian Garell.

Brian Johnson confirms he was not one-shotted by a recent magic mushroom trip. You said if Brian Johnson comes out of this five-gram trip and says, yeah, we're going to conquer. death we're still on, then he's certainly a true believer. What do you say? He replied to TBPN's post. He said, we're going to conquer death. So Brian Johnson is feeling good, looking good back on the timeline, not one shot, I suppose. One of the founders of Chad IDE says, he quoted my post and said, really great post. However, it doesn't apply to Chad IDE for five steps ahead. Different plane of thinking. But really great posts. So reposting

for visibility. Nice post little bro. I want to say, I think that's a pretty hilarious. I did, I did sneak a peek at your post during the show. And I don't think you got called Unk as bad as I expected. You made it sound like you were getting destroyed. You did very well. You got over a thousand likes. And people are like, oh, you're taking shots of Gary Tan. No, Gary Tan chimed in. He said, good points. Big thanks. A lot of people, a lot of people did. A lot of people did. did identify that you were rage baiting the rage baiters, which is funny. I had to use their own tricks against them. Yeah, you did.

I think in this case, you used the tricks for good, and I think it's a great post, and I enjoy. But, you know, maybe we have to have the, you know, there's always room for follow-up. Maybe we'll talk to Gary Tan later this week. We'll get him on the show. Think about how he's thinking about the future of YC. Maybe we'll have the founder of Chad Labs, Chad IDE, whatever. Yeah, we de-up a lot. We will also be demoing the product at some point.

I believe we'll be getting a preview of what the actual product is. If there's something awesome behind the scenes, we're going to tell you what that is. I just love responding and being like, actually it doesn't apply to us. Or five steps ahead. Or five steps ahead. I mean, that is just a complete trump card.

How do you respond to that? Levels. I think he wins. Much like Wander, find your happy place. Book of Wander with Inspiring Reviews. Hotel Grated Men. He's Dreamy Betts. Top Tier Cleaning in 20.

24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. What is this? La Lamp. Introducing a La Lamp, says Chavir Charké, an emotional and expressive robot to reshape our attachment to technology. Is this a CGI vibe real, or is this a real product? Do you have any idea?

Who put this in the show notes? I put it in the show. Okay. Do you think this is real? I'm trying to find where you are. Real. Yeah, it looks real. Looks real?

Okay. It looks pretty cool. I wonder, so would you buy this? What is the value of this? It's obviously very cute, very cool. It's the Pixar lamp, but it should exist, but why, what does it do? It's pretty cool, I don't know. It's weird.

It just feels cool. It's a cool thing to have. Put a speaker on it. I'm like 90% sure it's real. There was an Apple research paper that came out like, I don't know, six months ago. It was all about like expressive robots. Sure. And they had a bunch of demos and stuff on how they could build this stuff.

Yeah. It looks very exciting. Yeah, well, the website is la lamp.com. That's a good one. L-E-L-A-M-P dot com. You can pre-order it. The lamp like follows around your cursor. Pretty cool website.

Let's see what the checkout is. It's only 50 bucks? Wow. Okay. This is very cool. I have been delight-baited. I have not been rage-baited by this. I think this is a great launch.

And in other news, Jim Kramer is posting about quantum computing. He says, Rgetti. What an opportunity? Kaching by IBM. What is that even mean? Kramer posts like a crazy amount. I mean, he's got 2.3 million followers. He's posting like every half hour.

Like, you guys a machine. He's going to be on the show in a couple weeks. We're very excited. I cannot wait. It's going to be a lot of fun. Anyway, that's our show for today. I do not tolerate Kramer slander. Yeah, no, no, no.

I think he... He's entertaining. He's insightful. He's controversial. He's a total package. We love Gramer here. He's great. Whoa, there is a review from

Andre Carpathie. I missed this one. Oh, there's a couple posts that I missed, actually. Andre Carpathie says, I took delivery of a beautiful, shiny, new HW4 Tesla Model X today. I like this hardware for. He cares about the chip inside that thing.

He doesn't care about what the light bar on the front is or the door handles or whether the doors go up. Andre Carpathic cares about the GPU inside. So I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive a bit like I used to do almost daily for five years. Basically, I'm amazed. It drives really, really well, really smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3, my previous car, and Elon's aeons ahead of the version. I remember driving up Highway 280 on my first day at Tesla nine years ago, where I had to intervene

every time the road mildly curved or sloped. Note, this is V13. My car hasn't been offered the latest V14 yet. the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high-tech maglev train pod. The car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from the Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window listening to the incredible sound system or chatting with Grok on city streets. The car casually handled the number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over

just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars and tight lanes. It gracefully went around construction and temporary in-lane stations. stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides. It's a glowing review, glowing review of Tesla self-driving from the man who basically invented it and started the whole process. I mean, I don't know if he started it, but he was increment. He was instrumental in the development of it. So let me go out here. We also missed it, but OpenAI released GPT 5.1 rolling out to all users this week. Neers.

Because NIR says ChatGBTGPT is officially in its Fiji phase now, if you're wondering why the upgrade doesn't come with benchmarks. Have fun. Yeah, no benchmarks. So, yes, there's two models. There's 5.1 thinking and instant. So if you go to the actual model router on chatubt.com or whatever, there's GPT5, which you can do pro,

which is like the super long, almost like a deep research product. And then the rest of them are just the 5.1 thinking. But yeah, no benchmarks or like any kind of really technical report. In the blog post, it was a lot about the like personality of the model. She also released a separate blog post like on her substack. And there was some mention of like they're definitely like, they tried to address kind of the 4-0 like one-shotting stuff. They're like, okay, we're definitely aware that there are some problems with

like a very small amount of people becoming very, you know, addicted to the models. But yeah, nothing like very technical out of this. Like it was only 1% of our user base. It wasn't 1%. Like 0.001%. It was 10 million people that want to kill Rune. Rune up your security. Anyways, we actually have to go over to base,

which is a conference hosted. by my dear friend Will Cofield. So we got to head over there. We're going to have a little chat. That'll be fun. More podcasting. Another two hours of offline podcasting. You love it.

Cannot wait. Cannot wait to be back tomorrow. Have a great rest of the day. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts in Spotify. Subscribe for your email at tbPN.com and we'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.