TBPN - Ramp New $16B Valuation, OpenAI Wins $200M U.S. Defense Contract | Saquon Barkley, Eric Glyman, George Hotz, Joseph Torigian, Paul Klein, Ryan Daniels, Alex Kantrowitz

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

(00:30) - Timeline (14:02) - Eric Glyman is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a financial technology company offering corporate charge cards and expense management solutions. In the conversation, he discusses Ramp's rapid growth, highlighting that the company has reached a $16 billion valuation and serves over 40,000 businesses. Glyman emphasizes the integration of AI into Ramp's products to automate tasks like expense reporting and bill payments, aiming to save businesses time and money. (29:42) - Timeline (58:31) - George Hotz, also known as "geohot," is an American software engineer and hacker renowned for unlocking the iPhone and reverse-engineering the PlayStation 3. In the conversation, Hotz critiques the use of buzzwords like AGI, emphasizing the need for concrete discussions, and expresses skepticism about the practicality of humanoid robots, advocating instead for simpler, task-specific robotic solutions. He also highlights the challenges in achieving fully autonomous vehicles, noting the current reliance on human intervention in systems like Waymo. (01:33:44) - Joseph Torigian, an associate professor at American University's School of International Service and a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, specializes in the politics of authoritarian regimes, focusing on elite power struggles and civil-military relations in China and Russia. In his discussion, he explores the life of Xi Zhongxun, father of Xi Jinping, highlighting his unwavering devotion to the Chinese Communist Party despite personal persecutions, and examines the Party's strategies in managing ethnic minorities and its approach to corruption as a means of maintaining control. (02:00:52) - Paul Klein, co-founder of Browserbase, discusses the company's recent preemptive funding round led by Glenn Solomon from Notable Capital, with participation from CRV and Kleiner Perkins, highlighting the strong board composition. He introduces "Director AI," a tool enabling developers to automate web tasks by generating repeatable scripts for actions like form submissions and data retrieval. Klein also addresses the future of AI-driven web interactions, emphasizing the importance of on-device automation for consumer applications and the role of Browserbase in facilitating B2B use cases through browser-based solutions. (02:14:35) - Alex Kantrowitz is an independent journalist and founder of Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast focusing on major tech companies. In the conversation, he discusses the evolving roles of journalists and analysts in the tech industry, emphasizing the blurring lines between reporting, analysis, and opinion. He also shares insights on Apple's recent developments in AI, highlighting the challenges of integrating AI into products while maintaining high quality standards. (02:44:13) - Saquon Barkley, a standout running back for the Philadelphia Eagles, emphasizes the importance of surrounding himself with trustworthy individuals to navigate investment opportunities, acknowledging the challenges athletes face with numerous proposals and limited financial education. He credits his manager's discernment in declining most offers, except those from trusted contacts like Zach Franklin, highlighting the value of building relationships with knowledgeable and successful people to make informed decisions. (03:00:54) - Ryan Daniels, co-founder of Crosby, discusses his journey from addressing contract inefficiencies to establishing a tech-enabled law firm that integrates AI to expedite contract reviews. He highlights the firm's focus on automating routine legal tasks while maintaining human oversight for complex matters, aiming to enhance efficiency and reduce costs for fast-growing businesses. Daniels also envisions a future where AI agents negotiate contracts on behalf of clients, significantly accelerating the negotiation process. 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.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, June 17, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capitol of Capital. Welcome to the show. Massive Day. Ramp has announced a new valuation, $16 billion.

Let the robots chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your brain to build things, says Eric Lyman's CEO of Ramp.com. Save time as money. Time is money. Save both. go to ramp.com, switch your business to ramp.com. We have a great lineup for you today. Let's run through some timeline, just to give you an idea of what's going on in the news, obviously.

Yeah, because one of the biggest issues. The war is still on the front page of the Financial Times. The Wall Street Journal is taking a little bit of a more positive view, highlighting peace talks at the G7, and this idea that Tehran signals readiness to renew diplomacy. Iran says it wants. nuclear talks as long as U.S. stays out of the conflict with Israel. And so that's where the major front page news is, but there's a ton of other stuff that's

more important that's happening in tech. And so we got to talk about tech and business. The big issue is if you want to use X the everything app for news today, good luck, because I personally can't go on there without the first 10 posts being about ramp. I love it. And certainly we are contributing to that, but we'll try to cover. It's a timeline takeover.

It's a timeline takeover, folks. But there is other news. on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Berber Jin has a scoop about Open AI. Open AI, Microsoft tensions are reaching a boiling point. Startup frustrated with its partner has discussed making antitrust complaints. Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft over the future of their famed AI partnership are flaring up. Open AI wants to loosen Microsoft's grip on its AI products and computing resources

and secure the tech giant's blessing for its conversion into a for-profit company. approval of the conversion is key to Open AI's ability to raise more money and go public. But the negotiations have been so difficult that in recent weeks, Open AI's executives have discussed what they view as a nuclear option, accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior during their partnership. People familiar with the matter said. And so there's a whole bunch more analysis on this that we'll go into today. And I'm sure we'll talk to some folks on the show about it.

Don't use the M-word monopoly. Yes. It's banned. It's banned. It's banned. No, that really is a nuclear option. They were very happy partners for seemingly about a year and a half. Yeah. And clearly, Satya and Sam have different visions for their partnership going forward. I think at the time when they did their original $10 billion investment, it felt like everybody was getting a good deal. I think with the growth of chat GPT, in hindsight, maybe that wasn't the best structure, the best, you know, ways. to do a partnership and certainly there was some fine print that they're now trying to walk back and I and I there had been some other chatter around one of the issues and the reason for the windsurf acquisition to not be formally closed and announced was that if they just sort of went

forward with it with the existing structure of the open AI Microsoft agreement Microsoft might have some claim over Winserv's IP. And again, it's all very complicated because there's 20 different entities. And ultimately, you know, it's hard to know what fits in where. But again, Masa seems... I wonder how real that is. Like, I haven't used Winsurf enough. Maybe we should ask Tyler, have you used Winsurf at all?

Cursor? What do you use? I've used Cursor. I haven't tried Winsurf, though. Give Winsurf a try today. I want your little review. I want to know how it differs. Because specifically I want to know is the intellectual property,

are there like specific designs or specific algorithms in WinSurf that if copied by Microsoft would improve GitHub copilot? Because my thinking is that the real value with WinSurf is the aggregation being the front door to AI co-gen and then generating data and feedback and then feeding that back into a reinforcement learning system and doing another training run. And so if it's just, like, are you buying windsurf, is the value of windsurf the fact that they have a lot of people using it, or is it that they've designed something, you know, unique that if copied would immediately give you the same product?

Like, would everyone switch to GitHub co-pilot if they copied Windsor? Because Gemini has copied a lot of the chat GPT features. I'm pretty sure chat GPT has like 99% penetration, right? Well, part of it too was opening eye knows that cogen is going to be very important to their business long term. And they'll spend $3 billion to get a really talented team that's figured out some key. They have real traction. They're growing quickly. And it can just accelerate what they're already doing on the cogen side.

I think copying, I don't know is how much. of a concern that is because big tech again will copy everything if something works they'll copy it yeah the stories and and and pull to refresh all of these different things yeah some of these were even patented but tech has this like weird thesis around patents where they shouldn't patent ui elements and so i think all the tech companies own a lot of patents but they never really enforce them you never and you never really hear about like oh this tech company has this tech and like yeah no one else has an alarm clock app because as Apple patented the alarm clock on the phone.

Like, this doesn't happen. The dynamic that I think is fascinating is Open AI has a lot of traditional venture capitalists on the cap table or on one of the different entities. Yes. But Microsoft was making sort of gross stage very high risk investments into Open AI, but they don't have to be founder friendly. They don't have to be, you know, they don't have to like play by the same rules as the VCs where normally I can almost bet

that any investor that is on that that you know traditional VC in open AI if Sam went to them and said hey I know this is going to be you know I know the structure is not you know exactly what you would have liked but you know let's be like you're going to go forward with it yes yes yes Sam can't do that to Microsoft three trillion dollar company when Satya has has has is representing all of Microsoft shareholders right so so I it's not like Microsoft is trying to lead a bunch of of these deals a year and they're worried about their reputation of being founder friendly. Yeah. It also sounds like open AI leadership just doesn't like the original deal that they did and they agreed to.

And they want to try to unwind some of that now. So yeah, I do wonder how much of this is just like like the, we keep hearing about like the nuclear option, the most aggressive option, like taking it to the courts, taking it to antitrust, taking it to whatever. And, you know, we've certainly seen that with the with the XAI, open AI battles that have played out. because Elon Musk was a donor to the nonprofit and I was always just thinking yeah it like all of these deals I think that the stress is so much higher not just because like super intelligence could potentially there's a chance that it's like God in a box and you become like the most powerful person in the world but but aside from that it's like we are clearly looking at a category that will

have a power law winner that will be worth over a trillion dollars I mean I I don't think that's controversial to say. Maybe you could say, oh, actually, like, the market's only $100 billion or something. But, like, it seems like consumer artificial intelligence is going to be as big as the search engine market or as big as the iPhone market or as, you know, any of these other GPU accelerators market. So, like, we're looking at the next hyperscaler, the next, the eighth company to join the MAG 7 will probably be an AI company. Open AI looks like a leading candidate there. And so the, like, what is at stake is so much higher that it's potentially worth it to go through every possible option,

PR, leaking to the journal, going to the courts, lobbying, getting Trump to do a press conference with you or getting Trump to put pressure. Like, there's no amount of money that you can spend. There's no amount of political capital that you can expend that looks ROI negative when even getting a small slice could be $100 billion, very, very material. And so I think that's actually driving more of the dynamic

than when you see a billionaire who takes a flyer on some sort of early stage company and they're in it for a million bucks and then a deal happens and it's like, oh, you're gonna get some and we need to cram you down or do something like the company's not doing that well. Like you're shuffling it around. It's not that much of a lever on people's net worth.

But like we're at a scale where owning artificial intelligence would be a lever on even Elon Musk's net worth. Yeah. And the other thing here is the way that Open AIs, or sorry, Microsoft's investment in Open AI were structured in that it was more of a profit share, right? It was this 49% profit share capped at a 10x. And it's also possible that Satya doesn't actually feel like maybe that that's the right structure, right? When he's like, hey, I actually want to own a piece of the front door to consumer AI. And so on both sides, you know, they did this deal at a, you know, in many ways, 20 years have happened in the last few years.

And so it's very possible that both sides are kind of unhappy with the deal and need to rework it. But it really would be nuclear for Open AI to start complaining to about, you know, antitrust, anti-competitive. Would it be, though? I mean, Microsoft's dealt with like the worst antitrust ever. Like, they went through the whole browser wars. It destroyed Bill Gates's life for a couple of years and he had to step down and Balmer came in. Yeah, so that's pretty nuclear if Sam wants to drag. But we're talking about a company that's, you know, this is the Trinity test site over there.

They've been, they've seen nuclear bombs go off. Yeah. The whole sand is glass. They're immune, maybe. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, we'll have to dig into it. Anyway, we'll bring you more analysis on that a little bit.

Let's run through some more timeline. Open AI or a, speaking of AI, Sam Altman's. spoke at YC's AI Demo Day, and so did the Perplexity CEO. Somebody said, how do you stay motivated when you're down? And Arvin from Perplexity says, I just watched the Elon Musk YouTube videos. And I love this comment from Hardee. He says, you imagine the CEO of a $14 billion valued company to say something philosophical. And he ends up being one of us.

I just watched the Elon YouTube videos. I love it. Just searching Elon Musk in YouTube. Hopefully searching it in perplexity. Well, Arvid, if you're just getting into motivational YouTube videos, Elon Mosque is just the front door. You got to get into David Goggins. You got to get into Sam Sulek.

Sam Sulek. We need you to watch some, who's David Senra's favorite person? Jocko Willing. Jocko. Good. Deep down the Jocko rabbit hole. We'll send you the Jock willing good video and you'll be. Get Jocko to actually go come give a talk at your office.

You can do that. That's an option. Anyway, massive news from Superbase. What's funny is that if you'd ask me about SuperBase's growth in December 2024, I would have told you as excellent as Jared Friedman from Wycombinator. And in 2025, they are just an absolute rocket ship. And I think a lot of this is due to the fact that they've become one of the preferred database vendors for a lot of those AI scaffolding companies' vibe coding tools.

and so people are setting up these databases very quickly, and the growth is incredible. Very, very exciting for them. So congrats to them. Also, some good news in Open AI world, even though they're going through some battles with Microsoft, they scored a $200 million U.S. defense contract. So they're working with the DOD.

The most unhinged picture. I know. How did this photo shoot happen? Like, this does it? This looks like he's about to go on stage and he has a lav mic and it's from a low angle. But like, what? what lighting scenario created this photo.

It's amazing, but it's very aggressive. Anyway, great selection by Nick. Not beating the, you know, arms dealer. Evil tech arms dealer. Yeah. If you're, if you're founder, you've got to be careful of how the angles people photograph you like.

But at a certain point, if you're on stage, they're going to take photos in any direction. But yeah. And if they take enough photos, they get every single expression. So get ready. Other news,

meta finally put ads into WhatsApp. in January 2012, they said, we don't sell ads, which is still live. But this is why we love them and this is why Zuck is undefeated. WhatsApp should have ads. The backbone of the internet. It's the backbone of the internet. And Signal says that's why he's an Apple fan boy because they don't have do ads. Well, Apple does have a huge ads business.

I bet you this is just them listening to their users. I bet, you know, the users, you know, all over the globe said, you know, the only thing that could make what's that better is just putting some ads in this bad boy. It's the one place I go that I don't get any. I felt like this was already happening. I felt like this leaked like five years ago. How much it was a $20 billion acquisition? Of course they were going to put some ads in at some point.

Of course. Senator, we sell ads. Anyway, we have Eric Lyman from Ramp in the studio. Welcome to the show. Eric, congratulations. Do you already get that mallet ready. I got a gong hit coming up. What's the news?

What happened today? Tell us. 2,283. And we're at $16 billion value. Let's go, guys. I've been waiting to do that one. Yeah. Is that the number of days since you started the company?

That is. I love it. That's a long we've been at it. We've a long way to go. And guys, it couldn't be happier to be here. So is the job finished? Jobs not finished.

There we go. I don't think so. That's great. What is coming up? What can we expect? Are there, is there a clear public roadmap? I mean, the number of features launched last year and this year is a ton. What can you tell us about the product?

Look, I think the world is moving faster than ever. The whole introduction of this segment was about folks working on AGI, ASI, whatever it is. You know, I don't know how far we are along that path, but I can tell you, AI is definitely smart enough to do your expense. reports. It can definitely do bill payment runs. It can definitely speed up accounting. And those are the kind of, I think real innovations to support. We're actually bringing customers today over 40,000 businesses. And so we're putting it deeply into the product and we can go through all that. We're also using it to ship a lot faster. All of last year, we thought we moved fast. We were pretty proud that we shipped 207 features. So far in just the first five months, that number is over 270s.

We're moving a lot faster things to the help. How big is the team now? We are over 1,100 people. Wow, currently. It's remarkable. And how much has I grown over the last few years? Is that accelerating? Because it seems like there's a narrative where, like, you can do more with less, but obviously

you're trying to grow as fast as possible. So are you growing headcount and the amount of features you're shipping and the size of, and the footprint of the businesses that you serve as well? It's all growing, but it's certainly at different rates. Sure. So first, I mean, the business itself, it's really unusual. Usually just it's like law of physics, the bigger companies get. Gravity weighs you down.

You just go more slowly. And I think the most unusual thing, and you know, Tray at Foundersen pointed this out in an interview with Bloomberg, revenue growth has actually been faster so far in 2025 than even 2024 at much larger scale. And so revenue growth is picking up as well as purchase volume. The team size is growing too, but to your point, we're seeing leverage. I think around this time last year, I want to say we were somewhere, you know, 700 to 800-ish folks. And so what we've grown, the pace of the top line and the bottom line has grown much faster.

And when I look at, you know, last couple things, developer productivity is way up. Over the last four months, the average engineer at Ramp is, shipping 50% more commits, you know, in a given day than they were just months ago. And so more productivity from developers and from, you know, I think the best go-to-market organization in the business, you know, look, that team is growing. You have teams that are extraordinarily productive. And so, you know, at the core, we're hiring across all of them. But we are seeing these gains. You're in a unique position where you interface with a huge swath of the American business community. How do you track kind of the general vibe or the outlook of American business leaders right now?

There's a lot of uncertainty. There's geopolitical news every day on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. How are just everyday American businesses feeling? I think right now, as far as the data shows, I would say, like, fairly hopeful and optimistic. I mean, back in 2022, when interest rates really spiked, I mean, you would see a sudden pull back in terms of spending. We put these out regularly. It's now monthly reports.

If you get a ramp.com slash data, you can see our benchmarks across industries and verticals. I think the biggest warning sign is spend on advertising is starting to slow down as well as some spend on recruitment, computers, things that are usually some leading indicators about how bullish companies are. But if you look month by month, companies are tending to actually spend more. And so still optimistic. But I think that the other big thing that's really top of mind for folks and we take really seriously is almost where you started, where I think every, certainly the Valley companies are being asked by their boards, what are you doing about AI? But, you know, this is true of small businesses, of old school enterprises, you name it. And I think that for most

of the 40,000 businesses reserved, they don't have a single software. engineer, let alone an engineer working just for their finance teams. And so, you know, it's a big part of why we spend over half of our payroll ultimately, just on research and development, which is an extremely high ratio. We want to be these organizations finance teams, these engineers for these finance teams. So those are the main things that we hear about that we see. Yeah, it's interesting. Like there's, there's like new headlines every day. And yet the market has been kind of just kangaroo. around jumping up and down. And I think it reflects that kind of like there's some uncertainty, but still enough optimism

in the system that we're not seeing like a full full pullback. Yeah, I mean, there's so much broader geopolitical uncertainty. It's hard to make super big, long term, strategic decisions of should we grow headcount 10%. Should we spend more money on customer acquisition? There's been a number of like almost false starts where it's been like, oh, we're going into a radically different tariff regime. And then it's like, oh, the tariffs actually kind of rolled back. It's like, oh, there's like this narrative.

And then so if you're actually planning, like, by the time you have all the staff meetings to plan for the thing, it's like kind of over. And then you're kind of just back to business as normal. So you got to chop a wood. How do you continue to build in this sort of general? Like how do you continue to have this mindset of being day one, right? The growth is just absolutely insane. I think you're in a position right now that every CEO and they go, raise their first dollar of venture capital.

They imagine this playbook where a couple thousand days in, they're a multi-billion dollar company, but it rarely happens. What's, you know, what kind of wisdom do you look to in terms of, you know, continuing to just motivate the team day and a day out. We're having Sequin on the show later, which we're excited to talk to him about kind of that championship mindset. But what do you kind of draw on to keep that drive high? You know, I, you know, John, I'm happy that you posted this earlier.

You know, for me, this creates a lot of motion. You mentioned it straight away. Look, we did hit this $16 billion evaluation. It really should be a day of celebration, but, you know, I'm sad too. I'm thinking about the 98% of businesses that, you know, are not on ramp that are losing time, that are losing money, are still experiencing that worst hour of their month to an expense. is the old way and you know there's just no need for it and so I think you know there's an element of just you know trying to solve a problem make the world a better place is what gets us

up and out of bed in the morning I also say look I'm happy you're your your end up being Sequin he is an inspiration and the motivation I think to a lot of us and it's not just that he's great at what he does I think there's lots of folks who were extremely talented I think you know time and time again his focus on you know whether it's let and the young guys eat, you know, uplifting others, bringing folks who should have been in the parade, lifting him over the gates to bring him in. I think the drive that he has of seeing others on the team win is really motivating. I mean, there's a lot of folks who, I think, Graham famously hires, you know, freshman interns, dropouts, folks early in their career and take a bet on them. And for me,

seeing folks come in, succeed, get great at their craft and build teams, currently in the space to do that is in a more serious note very genuinely motivating. And so those are the things. Yeah, Keith R Boy talks about that idea of like if you're not, if you don't have something burning in your belly to go build and like become a founder, like you should go work for a company. That's that scaling has product market fit is going to be high growth, but set you up for success. If you're yeah, learn what excellent looks like. Exactly. And what greatness really is. Yeah. And what good management looks like, make the transition from individual contributor manager back or something like that. And like, you can, tell that he's talking about ramp obviously. He's like basically like go work at ramp.

Yeah, talk. I mean, I think it'd be the thing that I think would be most interesting is like talk about the scale to scale of your ambition, right? I think it's helpful to think about it. Okay, 2% of the businesses in the U.S. are running on ramp. That's great. We obviously want to get the other 98% where we work on it here every day. We're going to do that. We're going to get 100% of the business on ramp. But then the real challenge starts because then we have to encourage entrepreneurship to create new businesses to create new ramp customers. Exactly. That's the real long-term goal.

The second. The second lover. But on a serious note, my question about the 98% is like, how many of them just aren't doing any expense reporting at all and are just like, yeah, I have a credit card and I don't know how much people spend versus paper receipts versus other solutions? Do you have an idea of like the pie chart of what American, like there's millions of businesses, like what is the most common like, you know, alternative that's currently in place.

Yeah. And I'm happy you pointed this out. I mean, the one and a half percent we think is by volume of corporate and small business card transactions. By businesses, it's probably closer to 99%. So there's about three and a half million to four million businesses that have five

or more employees. And so typically at this point, you're employing others, you're keeping some books and records, hopefully paying taxes. And, you know, keeping those records. And so, you know, when we look at that, 40,000 is a lot, but it's tiny. It's not yet one and a half percent.

There's about 30 million businesses. A lot of those are LLCs, maybe with a single employee or no employees. And so the number is much darker. And just to drive this home, you know, guys, like it is one and a half percent. If we just look at card volume, but it turns out there's other ways to pay for things. You know, there's ACH check wires. We also shared for the first time the volume on non-card purchases, has exceeded card volumes ultimately on ramp.

And so we're just getting going. I think our market share is closer to 0% and 1 on that. And it's also been brought to our attention. There are more countries than just the U.S. too. And so, you know, there's just a huge amount of scale this opportunity. And I think, honestly, like, you know, It may be a bit unjust, but I think you're actually, right, John. Like, most businesses never get off the ground.

If they do, I think one in eight fail in a given year. And most businesses are operating on really slim margins. And if you actually go and, you know, you can increase, when you look at the average American business, eight and a half percent profit margin, mathematically, if you can either, you know, a penny safe is not a penny earned, you know, a dollar of savings is actually worth 12 and a half earned on the top line. And so if you can actually go and, you know, add percentage points to the bottom line, I think not only will a lot more businesses make it and live to fight another day, but I think that a lot of folks who have huge talents, but, you know, don't have specialization

in finance, don't have expertise in this field. If you can go and actually just get this out of a box through software or just build the business that you're passionate about, I think the world gets a lot more interesting. And so I actually think it's a very real point that you're bringing up. Yeah, it's crazy how, how, like, I don't know, like, culturally you can change the mindset of every employee. Like, I mean, our producer, like, will send a request to us on ramp for, like, individual pieces of equipment he's buying. And that is, like, incredibly fine grain, but it makes sure that we're not, like, spending too much on random stuff. And that type of like, you know, every penny matters culture is something that like,

ramp makes it easy to actually like enforce that in a way that's not very cumbersome, but you can still instill that, that, that, that like behavior, which I think is really, really valuable. Well, I have some breaking news here. Please. A Jet Bush post just at the timeline. Yes, we've been waiting for it. The silence this morning was deafening, but he came out and said, Ramp reached a $16 billion valuation. Ramp isn't just a tech story.

Businesses across the U.S. are saving billions of dollars because of their technology. Eric and Kareem are making our economy stronger, and I thank them for it. This is American innovation at work. So let's give it up for Jeff Bush and the whole ramp team. He's been a backer for like years now, right? Yeah, yeah. He got in early and right. Yeah, fantastic.

I have to give a shout out to the governor too. I mean, unironically, like I have to say there's a lot of, investors, venture capitalists, angels listening to this podcast. And by the way, you're totally right. This is the best place to come to. I learn a lot. But look, I have to say that the governor actually exhibits, I think, everything you would hope for an investor. You reach out to him. He's responsive. He helps close new business. He helps encourage more people to join. When you have great news, he shares it. He's there. I wish everyone, you know, approach investing the way the governor did.

Everybody can learn a little about being a helpful VC from Jeff Bush. We love it. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. I'm sure you got a busy day ahead of you. Congratulations on the Milsom. It's an honor to watch you and the team work. And we couldn't be more excited to cover the next decade of ramp domination.

So hit it again. Hit it again, John. And then we'll let. There we go. Congratulations. Thank you for coming on, Eric. Enjoy the day. I know it is just day one.

Cheers. We'll talk to you. Cheers. Bye. Later. Another air horn. On an absolute tear. In other news.

This was an interesting post I saw from modem introducing the dream recorder, the magical bedside open source device that plays your dreams back as cinematic reels. So it will, I don't know how it does. does this if you wear a headband and it tries to read your brain waves or if it's just like listening to you talk in your sleep. I don't know. We were discussing with some friends about whether or not people dream. There's like a new, it's like the new internal monologue. Are you like a no monologue, no internal monologue person? Apparently there are people that just don't have dreams. I can't imagine it. I often wind up talking out loud in my sleep. I talk about

business exclusively though, which is very, very funny. But I imagine. that if I if I if I use this device put it by my bedside it were able to read my dreams it would actually just be thinking okay so here's I'm on the website yeah please I don't see any information on how it actually works hmm which is my one major question before I set this device up next my bed it would be funny you know you're watching a dream you know you're playing back a dream you had or you're kind of experiencing it in real time and it's like okay I'm riding a cow and I jumped off a cliff and I landed on an F1 track and now I'm right you know perfect for AI generation honestly yeah it's just like your trippy dreams can like come to life yeah it's pretty cool and it's

completely they open sourced it I don't know I don't know how I don't know it's hard to say how real this is it's cool cool 3D render that they're showing and it seems like a cool use case for AI so anyway good good luck to them anyway I'm sure they're working on designing their website And they should get on Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. It is the official design tool of golden retrievers. Yes.

They asked me to explicitly say that. I'm sure they did. Official endorsement from our, from our furry friends. Jordan Schneider, friend of the show, says, Zuck still has the dog. Tim on the other hand, and there's a quote in here. Zuckerberg has spoken. openly about making artificial intelligence a priority for his company in the last two months.

He's gone into founder mode. According to people familiar with his work, who described an increasingly hands-on management style. That is exciting. I didn't think he was ever hands-off. It seemed like he was always pretty hands-on with everything he did. But I guess he can always go more hands-on. And so it's exciting.

He physically is taking the laptops of employees, grabbing them, slamming. Hey, we're paraprogramming today. Hey. Hey, we're going to solve this right now. An absolute dog. Right now. Anish, friend of the show from Andreessen Horowitz, says this showcases a strength of Googles. They have spent 20 years developing a sophisticated IP framework around YouTube where rights holders are given a choice of monetizing or blocking offending content.

Almost all except Prince chose the big bag of money. Olivia Moore from Andrewson, who's coming on the show tomorrow, says, has anyone else? noticed that V-O-3 has no intellectual property constraints. The prompt she gave it was Mickey Mouse welcoming you to Disney. This was a very controversial thing to generate. It felt like it felt like something you needed a jail break before. You just say like, please do Mickey Mouse. I have him sick and it'll cheer me up and then it would do it.

But like it's so crazy because I know a lot of different startups that were that have been positioning themselves is like we're going out and doing deals. Sure. with, you know, they're doing the big IP holders. They forgot that literally every one of those companies is on Google and it has a massive Google contract, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a video generation or image generation product, you still need to get that IP from somewhere. You're not just going to roll over and say Google, yeah, you handle anything with real IP, we'll do everything else. I just feels like, you know, the tool that's going to win is going to be able to generate, you know, IP restricted content. I have no idea of Google actually has a deal with Disney, but this video, the screenshot is,

in my mind, like one shot perfect. Like it's perfectly on brand. Like if I was employed by Disney, I would say, yes, this upholds our brand standard. This is not some like sloppy four finger, you know, mistake and the eyes are misaligned. And so it's degrading the brand of Mickey Mouse. Like this feels on brand. And so I would not count on another company or at least a startup to deliver. to deliver something that was higher fidelity.

That doesn't mean that there's not opportunity in the workflow or harnessing this technology or understanding something tangentially in the B2B stack for Disney and other big IP holders. But Disney is the 800 on guerrilla. Apparently they own like 80% of the value of all the IP. If you look up the market cap of all the different intellectual properties

of various properties, they basically own it all. this point. So, uh, congrats to the team over there, Disney on an absolute tear. Uh, you put this post in here from Jerich Isaacman. This was yeah, I thought this was just a part of the tied into the nothing ever happens meta. Sure. Which is dominant right now. So I'll read through this. So he was supposed to be NASA administrator and is an accomplished entrepreneur and the first commercial or the first independent citizen civilian astronaut, right? So, uh, stored career. Um, and, uh, I don't I don't know if you want to give this a read.

Yeah, I'll read through it. So he says apologies for the TLDR, but when you step back, it is kind of wild what we've all lived through over the last five years. No wonder so many young people are anxious about the future. The quote-unquote disturbance in the force feel stronger by the day. I don't have any grand takeaways other than this. The world could use an immediate course correction in the direction of boring, or we may really need those Mars rockets sooner than expected. One thing is for sure.

Israel is making a compelling case for Golden Dome. and he kind of lists out a few different kind of broader events. He says, a once in a century pandemic shuts the world down, no matter how you viewed in hindsight, both allies and adversaries were nearly unified in halting the global economy and banishing society to lockdowns and high pressure mask and vaccination campaigns.

We tried to print our way out of the system shock, triggering the most euphoric markets since the dot-com bubble. Let's give it up for euphoric markets. Pre-revenue IPOs re-reappeared for some reason people forgot that good companies generally don't spec. The digital revolution kicked into overdrive, work from home, virtual education, traumatized parents, Zoom cocktail parties, Peloton, DoorDash, and Microsoft Teams, probably the most painful development.

Taking shots of MS. Yes. Civil unrest emerged alongside deepening social and political divides. And a disheartening end to the war in Afghanistan's trillion spent thousands of lives loss and the Taliban is still running the show. Market euphoria gave way to historic inflation. Interest rates shot up to cool things down. The tide went out. The S-H-I-T. The bad companies failed. Centralized crypto exchanges, gambled customer deposits. Hedge funds weren't hedged. V-C-heavy banks like SVB collapsed, triggering a temporary panic in the regional banking systems. The big banks got even

bigger. For the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a nuclear superpower launched a full-scale invasion of a neighboring country. The West isolates Russia, and we witness an asymmetric dynamic in warfare, cheap drones, missile swarms, all playing out in real time on social media. The Metaverse and Web3 died quickly as the Mag 7,

let a market rebound on the promise of AI, China closes gaps. And anyways, it goes on and on and on and on. And he says, all in just five years. So the reason I thought this was interesting is you know, anything almost happens and then doesn't doesn't happen and people just say nothing ever happens. But it's like if you actually look back,

there's a ton of history. Wow. A lot has happened. It's been a crazy five years. Yeah. I think it almost feels like nothing ever happens is now just like it would have to be like a 90% stock market. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. A nuke going off. Yes. You know, there's a number of things that people would be like, okay, something happened. Yes. Yes. The definition of happened just got really, really degraded. Because we're in this new normal. Really significant event, as it stretches out over six to 12 months and then everybody moves on.

It just doesn't count as happening. Yeah. Hopefully our defense and policy leaders are paying attention and making some course corrections. Congressional leadership is mostly well-intentioned, but often fights for expensive job programs, exactly the kind of thing. An over-consolidated defense industry encourages,

even as we stare down at unsustainable, $36 trillion of national debt. That's how you end up holding a fleet of battleships during the advent of the aircraft carrier. Only this time, the analogy breaks down because as a nation, we have forgotten how to build ships. So instead, we will have $300 million fighter jets we can't afford arriving a decade too late

in quantities that may not even matter, disrupted by million-dollar hypersonic laser-equipped drones that our adversaries will likely produce at scale until perhaps a dark horse. The Dark Horse Skynet T-1,000 shows up. This is the time, especially in such politically charged environment, when we need to be finding more ways, to come together instead of moving apart, a time to be rooting for America and our leadership,

not betting on the next catastrophe, because if the next five years look anything like the last military parades and trade imbalances will be the least of our problems. And Tom Mueller says, great summary of our current situation. We need to stop with the division and build our way out of it. And Casey Hanmer says, thanks, Jared. I can't believe how many healthy, smart, well-educated, well-resourced people aren't building out factories right now. Yep. Very interesting. If you are healthy, smart, well-educated, well-resourced, the factory.

I hope, I, hope, Jerry Isamund lands a role somewhere in the government at some point. This was, like, very detailed and very inspirational. I feel like he should do, I don't know, be empowered somewhere and do something cool. Because he was, I was excited about him as head of NASA, but now that he's a free agent, hopefully he gets traded to something bigger. It'll be great. Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously.

Vantas Trust Management. My platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Get on the platform trusted by Duolingo Intercom. Ramp. Oh, yeah. Nice. Nick Carter has a funny post.

I feel like we almost touched on this yesterday, but he says, faking an email from a VC saying they are sending you a term sheet while raising is securities fraud, misrepresenting material facts in connection with a securities offering. Gary Tan had some notes for us at YCW. Yeah, we asked him, don't commit securities fraud. Yeah, we asked him about the inflation and the, you know, different interpretations of what ARR is. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, contracted ARR. You know, be, be very, very explicit about your revenue. VCs are very fine, very okay with risk. You just have to give them full insight into. Yeah, so they can. can underwrite it themselves. So yeah.

Yeah. Very, very silly. Yeah. We are, we are definitely in the new stage of a new bubble, a new market, a new bull market. And so there's a lot of froth and there's a lot of people, uh, testing the barriers, test in the, test in the limits of these things. Anyway. This next post is wild. I love Joe Cohen.

Uh, a Cal train's employee built himself in a legal apartment in a train station. And he has unfortunately been sentenced to six months and prison because it was an illegal apartment in a train station. When I first read this, I thought it was built in a train. And I was like, that would be so sweet. If he, like, somehow secretly took over a train car. Just got an extra link in the train, you know, they forgot about. And then it was just building there.

But then apparently everyone's response to this is it's impressive what he was able to do with $42,000. Maybe he should be in charge of California housing. And Sheel has some photos. You know, it's not, it's not luxurious living, but it's not bad either. I mean, this is pretty comfortable. How did he actually build this, though? He went and got all the furniture and installed the panels.

I'm interested in like, how do you do plumbing in an environment like this? Like, that is a shower with a drain. It seems to be working. It's, you know, it's pretty shoddy, but it's not. It definitely seems like it works. What a weird story. Very weird. think, you know, this is one, one story like this around the world. There's probably thousands and

thousands of people that have built little secret apartments in places they shouldn't be. Yeah. And they're just scurrying around, you know, like a, like a, like a mouse setting up, setting up shop in the walls. Like, like, like sand through marbles. It finds all the cracks. Yeah. It's, you know, an efficient, we like resource utilization. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm for this guy. Yeah, maybe there should be a rule where it's like if you set up a secret apartment and you and you sleep there for 10,000 nights straight and you're not caught, you then are you that is. You're getting. Yeah, you get the deed. You actually own the place. Yeah. Well, I mean, I used to, I rented a house at one point with a roommate like a decade ago or something. And we had these two bedrooms that were right next to each other. And they built, they built built built in closets between them, between the two. rooms and as I was moving out I was looking and there was a window and we looked in the window and the window like went to a room that didn't exist in the house so but it wasn't it wasn't like

someone was living there it was more like they when they built the built-ins they built two walls and there was just a window there that they didn't like patch up and so there was just like empty space where the closets didn't really make sense to fit and so there was just like dead space it was probably like five square feet, not much, but it was still like this like room and you could look because the window is cracked open inwards. So you could look in and see this like kind of empty tiny room and it was very creepy. Weird. Yeah. Weird. Not not not not not the best. But, you know, I think these I think these like empty rooms kind of happen from like shoddy remodel after shoty remodel and like moving really quickly and being like, oh yeah, like we don't really care about

that space, whatever. It's, you know, we lost some square footage, but it doesn't matter. Like we just need to slot in these closets in the right place. Anyway, if you're planning a remodel, make sure you use linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And why not $42,000 apartments? Maybe you should use linear. Wouldn't it gotten caught? Defense?

You're stretching a little bit now, but if you are building a product. Because it is ramp day. Ramp uses linear. Open AI uses linear. Freplexity. Projects and product. Retool. It says streamline projects.

Boom, arrow. You're telling me I could not build an apartment using linear. Use the product. You're challenging me. You're challenging me to build an illegal. You're twisting my arm making me build an illegal apartment using linear. This is a little challenge for you. A little challenge.

We just give it to Tyler. Tyler, build a cubicle-sized apartment somewhere on. In the studio, but don't let us know about it. Somewhere on this lot. He's in the ramp office now. That really looks like the ramp office. Is that a photo or is that AI? I can't even tell.

It really does. What? It's a real photo. Oh, it's a real photo. There we go. Yeah, that is exactly the layout. Wow. Yeah.

Jordy, look over there. You see behind me? There's a door. Who's living in there? Where does it go to? Do we know? We don't know. Anybody could be in there.

We haven't seen his house. We don't know. Edward Mayor has a good post here about what he likes in tech companies. He says, I've been thinking about what kind of tech companies actually excite me to work for or help build and why. I came up with a list. call it sacred engineering. What companies do you know that fit the bill? One, real-time consequence. There's no undo. What's built or launched happens and it either works or fails visibly. Thinking of SpaceX, obviously, but there's lots of other examples. Mastery over extremes.

You spend all this time, you know, launching, you know, some drone that's supposed to control the weather. Augustus got a little dust up on the timeline with Trace Stevens because he was caught building a tent outside and Trey said, hey, if you can control the weather, why do you need a tent? But to Augustus' credit, he said, we can only make it rain. We can't make it not rain. There we go. He's the rain maker, not the rain preventer. Figure out how to do both. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to figure out both. There's obviously applications to both. Mastery over extremes, pushing the limits of heat, speed, pressure, complexity. Nature isn't a backdrop. It's an adversary or gatekeeper. Precision with soul. Every bolt, well,

line of code must be perfect, yet it serves a larger purpose or dream like a temple built to reach the divine collective will. Sacred engineering is never solo. It's many minds and hands moving as one. Symbolic payload. It means something, a launch, a cure, a mission. Everyone knows it's more than just tech. It's a statement.

This is a good writing. This sounds like something I would hear like a voiced over a Super Bowl ad. Everyone knows it's more than just tech. It's a statement by a Dodge Ram. transformation. Something irreversible changes to rain, orbit, political landscape, or human perception. So making the world a different place. I like it.

Very good. We have a post here from Chris at Pace. He says, to those of you watching at home, this is your canary in the coal mine to let you know that the next wave of consumer apps is incoming. No surprise that iPad is the first wedge given the intersection of M-CHIP and app store distribution. So somebody who was at WWDC says, I turned my iPad into Tom Riddle's diary with Apple's new foundation models and LLM built into iOS. It's lightning fast.

Yeah. And so, I mean, this is, this is such an exciting time. Like, I remember the early app store days. And we talk about the beer app,

but there were so many other cool apps that people were just ripping. And some of them turned into massive, massive companies. Like, people forget that at one time, like Uber was just one. of a many of a bunch of apps that you tried. It was a hot app of the month.

Every, every, Apple could have messaged, Apple could have messaged this so much better and just said, like, introducing free inference. Free inference. Free inference for apps. Like,

Go is going to be a gold rush for developers that are building cool things. All of these apps, there's going to be so many applications for, for kids to, you know, story time and all these different playbooks and stuff. Like, yes, it's going to be hard to go and disrupt like Salesforce on mobile.

because like Salesforce is going to want to build that or whatever. Like some of the big or rebuilding, you know, Google Docs and all the crazy enterprise stuff is probably going to be a little bit more entrenched. But just having fun and building something that's really unique that's completely enabled and AI Native is like it's total game on. And obviously it's getting even easier to actually build these apps. They're partnering with Anthropic to speed up Xcode. And so there's going to be a ton of really, really cool things coming out of this.

What a time to be an app developer. if you're developing a cool app, you're going viral, hit us up, come on the show, break it down for us. But I think this is going to be a really, really fun time. I'm definitely looking forward to the next iPad Pro in just a couple months, I think. I'll probably pick one up. That'd be great. And when I do, I'll probably have to play sales tax. Hopefully the sales tax will be processed with Numeral.

Numeral HQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. I prefer to buy products that use Numeril for sales tax. It's now like a key decision factor. Totally. Choosing between two products, go with the one that's using salesax. You're so right about that, John.

Get on there right now. This post from Jacob was funny. My wander vacation morning routine. Having my eight sleep, wake me up, checking ramp, first thing in the morning to ensure I'm saving time and money, putting my nautilus on from Bezal and turning on TBPN to monitor the situation. So Jacob is absolutely locked in. He's locked in monitoring.

the situation from his happy place. I love to see it. I love it. Lulu came out. A little bit. Some people might say this could be a little bit spicy, but consider launching on June 19th. Big companies usually avoid that day for announcements. They don't work on June 10th, and mainstream media have the day off too.

But tech people are all still online. Good opportunity for attention arbitrage. What is mainstream media has the day off? Does that mean like there's no CNBC that day? Like you just turn on the TV It's more like Wall Street Journal Is the market closed?

I don't know Is it like a bank holiday now officially? I have heard that some companies are off Thursday the U.S. stock and bonds markets will be closed for Juneteenth. Well, we'll be on and hopefully some companies will launch. We already have a couple companies

coming on the show that day. So it'll be fun. But yes, I like this idea of figuring out creative days to launch. It does seem like there's like a glut of startup launches and then they come and go and they go back and forth because there's some days when it just kind of lines up that everyone's launching the same day because of like the various travel schedules and stuff. But finding those little pockets of alpha where the timeline's easier to break through is good. You don't want to get steam rolled. It's always rough.

Yeah, it was interesting. Christian yesterday said things are still very busy. Yeah. And that tracks with what I'm seeing. I think a lot of the rounds that get done over the next month won't even announce until the fall. I mean, a lot of these announcements get pushed because of scoops. Like if a journalist gets a hold of it, usually that moves up the timeline. And so you say, hey, like, you know, it's leaking.

We got to go live with this today or tomorrow. We don't have a time to schedule everything, but we can do the best we can. Fortunately, that's why we exist. If your stuff's leaking, give us a call, come on the show the same day. That's right. Why not? Tane from Wing, he's been on the show. He says, for all the slack Masa gets, give him slack.

Is that? Flack. Flack. Flack. For all the flack he gets, I guess you got to give him slack. Give him some slack. For all the flack he gets. Some respect.

He might be the only person ever to make $100 billion on two different investments. Alibaba, a $20 million investment in 2000 turned into $100 billion realized, arm a $32 billion acquisition in 2016. Softbank stake is worth $135 billion now, mostly unrealized, but, you know, there's probably liquidity there. And so he's done it twice. Being saying the scale, it took to do the second one, really, really testament to being a size lord, but you'll only get to be a size lord if you get the first one right. So advice for emerging managers, just go find a $20 million investment that you can make that will realize you $100 billion. Yeah. That's step one. start there and then you'll still get a lot of hate and need to do it again you'll still need to

kind of justify your existence yeah exactly people will hate on you yeah right negative article they'll talk down to you even though you they'll meme you they'll meme you uh but yeah what a legend he he participated in the cnbc deep dive on uh on on the uh on the abiline center for uh with with with Crusoe and Open AI and SoftBank and Stargate. And so we've got to get him on the show. I'd love to chat with him. It'd be fantastic. Anyway, Delian's bringing some spice to the timeline.

He says it's been 49 days since the Discord founder stepped down. I assumed a reporter would manage to get this story, but since no one figured it out, I've had it confirmed by multiple insiders that benchmark again pushed out this founder since they were unhappy with the IPO path. Tricky. I feel like Jason Citron's great entrepreneur. I'm surprised that this happened this way. I don't know exactly what Discord needs to do to get on the IPO path,

but it seemed like it was maybe highly valued in the private markets. Because when I think about Discord going out at like 10, that seems easy. But I think that the later funding grants were much, much higher. But again, like how much can you even put on the CEO of this company that started it, you know, what, a decade ago? who's been building this for so long. And it's like all of a sudden like, oh, the IPO window's closed for a couple months and you're upset about this guy. I don't know. I would batten down the hatches and ride it out.

But we'll see. Yeah, I don't understand. They were unhappy with the IPO path. Was that just, who knows, Citron maybe wanted to delay it more? It sounds like they're, they're, more than the CFO. Well, so they brought in Blizzard Activision, former CFO, who mom. Sochnini, maybe mispronouncing that, but he's a new CEO, still seemingly taking them down the IPO path. But, but, um, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, if it, like how much of that is on the CEO.

I mean, maybe the road shows. Like, he's not telling the right story or something to these, to these, uh, like institutional investors who would be the anchors, anchor buyers in a road show. But I don't know. I think Jason's got it. Get him back in there. Bring it back. Yeah, you don't hear. I'm a big fan of this guy. He has a super fascinating story. And came back in a big way. No, no, he has a super fascinating story. He didn't follow like the traditional Silicon Valley.

He actually has like an un, what do they call it? Like, untraditional path, untraditional, non-traditional background. Like he went to a small college focused on like game development, built a couple games. He wound up selling one to another company and then started Discord and kind of grew from there. there's some old footage of him at like tech crunch just wrapped like pitching his like mobile league of legends competitor is very fascinating um but yeah he's been on an absolute tear let the guy let him cut let him he's been that for 12 years doing his work let him let him let him give a couple more yeah anyway delin continues to be on uh talking up the time on an absolute tear says bill gurley

has now commented on three different podcasts that the only reason hill and valley is hawkish on china is because we're talking our book or perhaps it's because the organizers are Patriots and recognize that China is playing a 50-year game looking to unseat the United States. Yeah. The tension between these two is palpable. And I think we should get them on. Get it both on. Have them to be.

For a pay-per-view. Yeah, pay-per-view. Delian, Mr. Bill, Gurley, you're welcome to come on and settle the score. Settle the score. Just a couple venture capitalists talking it out. Yeah. I think they could find common ground. I would certainly hope so.

Anyway, if you're looking to get in the action, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Millions. Semi-analysis has a fun little anecdote here about why chips are rectangular when waferes are round. Silicon wafers are round because the silicon is grown in a cylindrical ingot using the Surchalsky method, and then this ingot is sliced into circular wafers. Circular wafers pose a challenge. Rectangular dyes cannot fit, cannot perfectly tile a circle, so any dye that overlaps the curved edge is incomplete and must be discarded. By contrast, the in-panel packaging,

we use organic, in panel-level packaging, we use organic laminate materials, not grown crystals, so they don't have to be circular. To illustrate the amount of area wasted, we used the semi-analysis die yield calculator, as they provide for free, to compare how much waste area there is using a 300 millimeter wafer versus a 510 by 515 millimeter panel wafer using an interposer that is 61 by 68 millimeters. Our results show that panel wafers offer significantly better area utilization than circular wafers. Very interesting that Dylan Patelis is going. This is why companies like TSM are actively developing panel level technology with many of the industries framing. I just want to say if you're analyzing semiconductors, this is who you're analyzing

against. He really, he really is incredible. Anyway, we have our next guest in the studio. George Hots. How you doing, George? It's good to hear from you. What's going on? Welcome. Can we hear you? Oh, can you hear you? Yes, I can hear you. Gotcha. Let's kick it off with something. simple I want to take your temperature on AGI timelines P, Doom, the easy and fun stuff. I don't know what AGI means and I don't know what you mean by do. No?

Are these terms just like entirely irrelevant? I mean now we've shifted to like super intelligence, they're all buzzwords, but at the same time like there is there is an idea of like the like, the, I don't know, the, the conversation is maybe shifting to like the AI generating more economic value than humans. Is that a relevant metric to track? Machines have been generating more economic value than humans since Industrial Revolution. Is there some other metric that we should be tracking? Or is it just like irrelevant?

You're just talking about like hype. Like I don't know. I mean I don't like I don't know what you mean. Like you can talk about concrete things. Yes. The term like AGI means nothing right. Like computers, everything that's a turning machine is a general purpose computer. Is that what you call intelligence? I don't know what you mean. It's a linear regression

intelligent? What if it's big enough? The Chinese does know Chinese. Yeah. I mean, what about your decision to get on a spaceship traveling at 0.9c away from the earth? Like how close are we to that? Are we closer than the last time we talked, which was like a couple years ago? And it seemed like it was maybe going to happen within your lifetime. Has it moved? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm actually going to get that spaceship, but it's kind of like in an ideal world what I would want to do, you know? Yep.

Just just back away and chill. Don't look back, actually. You can't look back. You can't look back. Never look back. They're all there. You need the blast shield, right? You need the information shield.

Information shield. What do you mean? Oh, that's how they're going to get you. Okay. Right. I mean, okay. So, like, here's the way you can think about AI, right? Yeah.

Imagine there were 10 CIA agents assigned to you. And they're running at a thousand X real time. So they're like hyper-fast CIA agents that devote their entire lifespan to your day. And they're trying to manipulate it. Maybe to get you to buy things, maybe to get you to vote for a certain guy, whatever. But like that's what you're going to be up against with AI. What we're currently building. If you think about the biggest company is in AI, what they do is advertising.

What advertising is is just manipulation of humans. So you're going to have a team of CIA agents thinking about you and trying to manipulate you at all times. And now you see why you want to head away at the speed of light, right? Even CIA agents can't be that. Is there some world where there's like a capital war and I'm paying for a more powerful ad blocker? Yeah, I mean, that sounds good. Like another question is kind of to say like, okay, if you think that, you either think that current like capital, accumulation dynamics are going to continue and that the rich are going to continue to get richer.

And if you believe that, the question is kind of, well, how many people are going to survive in the future? How many people are going to have any modicum of independence? Right? Like, you have some far AI people who think that there's going to be a singleton, right? You think that there's going to be literally one, right? You know, some people maybe think it's 10. Some people, 10,000. Some people think that all the humans will get to continue to exist as independent entities. Are they already independent entities? That's a question, right? I don't know. I mean, if you were trying to put it in like the form of a bet, human population above or below eight billion in 2030. Oh, Bob, I think. I have just to be a normal friend.

But is that what the trend says? Yeah, just go through the trend says. I don't think there's going to be any discontinuities to any trends. Yeah, I mean, I mean, at some point, but but the question is like how far out do you have to go until you start seeing these effects? What do you mean by human, right? What about someone who lies in bed all day and watches TikTok? Are they human? Yeah, that is odd. They kind of drop out of society.

I think a question that popped up for me is, is this, all this debate about AI safety and what should labs be doing, what should labs not be doing? It feels like your angle is, it should be each individual's responsibility to look after their own safety in the context of AI. Is that at all? I just like this whole like should shouldn't like what. I don't know. I'm not a sadistic fuck who wants to manipulate other people like the people in power. Like I don't know. Yeah, but I mean people still look to you as like an example of like someone who might have answers. No, I don't have any answers. Not necessarily answers. Just like, uh, but you can buy my shit coin. Here. Can I show a shit coin? Here you go.

just click this QR code and you can buy a George Hots coin and that will give you answers. You will find satisfaction and fulfillment in your life after purchasing a George Hots coin. Is that the end state? We all have our own coins. No, no, no, no. I don't mean it like that. I mean, like, I think that a lot of people are like, they don't really know what they're looking for. And that vacuum is very, you know, it's very dangerous.

and it's going to be filled by dumb shit and don't have that vacuum, right? You got to stand for something, you know, or something? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, do you think that there's a chance that someone is able to take a stand and actually bend the arc of AI progress in the way that, I mean, it happened with nuclear, right? Like nuclear development did stall. There was a stagnation in real world buildout of nuclear capability on the energy side. Yeah, I mean, there's a few things about nuclear that make it different.

So nuclear, even as a weapon, is incredibly hard to deploy tactically. Right? So if a country has nuclear weapons, aside from like a mutually assured destruction idea, they're not all that useful. It's not like you can use a nuclear weapon to accomplish tactical objectives. You know, if you could, I think Russia would have already done it. Yeah. Right. Russia has some tactical objectives they might want to accomplish.

But nukes aren't really going to do it, right? And from a pure real politic perspective, not even from a like, oh, like a taboo moral perspective. Like, do you want an irradiated pile of rubble? Like, that's what you're going to get. No, what you want is drones that are hyper-specific and can take out exactly who you want and control areas, right? So like, as a military technology, nukes are not that good. AI is way better. Yeah, but what about it as an energy technology?

It feels like the fear, like the memetic fear of nuclear war and total destruction. construction caused a whole bunch of regulation to pour into a sector and essentially a stalling of nuclear energy build out. And if the AI doom scenario, whether it's real or not, becomes so momentically powerful that someone's able to harness that and actually say, if you try and build a big data center, we will shoot you, then maybe it stagnates? No? I really think that's the reason for nuclear.

I think it has more to do with why we can't do other big infrastructure projects in this country, right? Like it doesn't have to do it to new. We also can't build dams. right? Yeah. And if you look like that's the thing, if people think that there's some weird taboo around nuclear, right? But then, okay, look at hydroelectric, right? There's no taboo around hydroelectric. But China leads an installation of both nuclear and hydroelectric and coal and everything. It's almost like they're correlated, right? Yeah. So the thing is not there's a specific fear around

nuclear. It's like, you know, the U.S. decided that they're a developed country. We're not going to develop anymore because we're already developed. You see the D on the end, right? Like, Interesting. So is that just cultural then when you, like the malaise sets in? Would you expect that to happen to China when they catch up? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's just like this normal story arc of like, you know, it's, it's, I don't know. I don't know.

I think that like you have a real problem when the kids can't live better than their parents. Yeah. So. But I don't have anything more to speculate on that. Do you have more context on China and specifically in like the AI context? U.S. electricity looks like this and China electricity looks like this. Is that all that matters? Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty good proxy for everything, right?

Yeah. Like there's two things. There's two things, you know, people are like, George, how do you feel about the Trump administration? I'm looking at two things. With any administration, I'm looking at two things. Did you decrease government spending? And did you increase total electricity production of America? Those are the only two numbers I care about. Those will capture everything. Why does, why does government spending matter? We were joking that, you know, Trump must be extremely AGI-pilled if he's running up a massive budget deficit.

What the hell is AGI? I don't know what this is. Like in this formulation, never seen it. In this formulation, it's that, it's that, it's that. Yes, yes, yes. But, but it, but it's an extra lever on labor and capital and it creates more GDP. that they can be taxed to pay down the increasing amount of debt. Super Excel.

Super Excel. Yeah, super Excel. What is super Excel to? That normal Excel does. Let's give it up for better Excel. Yeah. Yes, we need. Excel 2.0, what?

Yes. The thing is Excel was the final piece of software. But in order to add another $100 trillion dollars to global GDP, we needed to like kind of rebrand it. And so now we get AGI. GDP is the complete its biggest bullshit thing ever, right? Like I always joke with my friend and I that we're going to start companies and be billionaires. And I'll tell you how we're going to do it.

Okay. I start a company. He starts a company. We both write contracts to each other. Right? Like I'll buy something from him for a million dollars. He'll buy something for me for a million dollars. We'll just do this real fast.

We'll keep passing the money back and forth. Whoa, look at our revenue. Wow. That all contributes to GDP. Wow. We're billionaires overnight, right? Yep. Like, and that's my argument is,

the economy is just that with a lot of extra steps, right? You can't use services as not part of GDP. This is complete nonsense. You can't have services sort of like literally, literally. You take the steel out of the ground. You grow the corn. Okay, that's GDP. But is, I mean, if that GDP is fake is not the debt is the deficit not fake? Like is government spending less fake? No, we really owe that shit to people. It's not fake. But can't you just tax the fake money? Like if you tax your scenario where you're generating a billion dollars in fake money. You can't tax the fake money because we're past the same dollars back and forth. The minute you tax it, that falls off so fast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can only tax productive work. Is AMD doing productive work right now? AmD is doing it right. Yeah, either Nvidia's really overvalued or AMD is really undervalued. It has to be one of the other. How does it all play out? Like, what does AMD actually need to do to get back on track or realize their potential?

NVIDIA needs to stumble. I mean, it worked for AMD and Intel, right? Right. So AMD ended up beating Intel in the entire, like no one would buy a data center, Intel, CPU anymore. Yeah. And it's just because, well, you know, they stumbled and now Intel owns that working. So, you know, AMD just sits there in second place. Okay. They'd be at a better second place than they were a few years ago.

Yeah. And then when Nvidia stumbles, AMD is like, oh, hey, we're here. Is DGX Leptone, like, they're, their cloud offering a potential stumbling block? or is it the right move for them? I don't know what that is. What's an Nvidia cloud shit? Yeah, exactly. Cloud's dumb.

Club dumb. You can break AI down basically into like, there's like five tiers, right? Like at the base level, you have like electricity and data vendors and land and like things like that. Tier two or like TSM, ASML, Samsung Intel, right, Fabs. Nvidia, AMD, Open AI, Anthropic. And then on top you have like completely worthless things like cursor and windsurf, you know, these character AI, all these people who think, Oh, with you up, we're going to get the ARR. No, that works in the web.

It won't work for AI, and I can go into why, but it's kind of boring. I want to hear why. Keep going. Keep going. Basically, okay, so like, here's the difference between AI and web. Would you want to run a service like Gmail? One server can serve 10,000 people easily, right? And there's no demand for, like, better Gmail, right? It's not like I can click and get like, yeah, you can buy Gmail per O and it'll have a few things,

but most people don't really care, right? There's no limit to the ceiling of how good you want your AI. me, how fast you want your right at it. Maybe there's a limit to the speed, but like, when you're at like a thousand tokens per second, I want the biggest model in the world, right? So there's very little limit on that. But suddenly you can't serve 10,000 users from one server

anymore. And the whole dynamics of the web, the whole reason some of the value aggregated to these end players, and they still didn't aggregate to the cursor in the winters. They aggregated to the opening eye on the orthotics, right? Nobody, nobody who built like an email client survived. They all got eaten up,

by the tier fours of the web, right? The Google's, the Facebook's, all of these like app providers, right? Where's the Zinga today, you know? Like, this already happened, right? People just don't really go, where Zinga? Oh, Zinga's gonna be the next thing, man. Like, no, it's not. Facebook ate all of that value, right?

Google ate all the value from all the people building on top of Google. So the tier fours ate all that value. Yeah. So opening eye, Anthropically, all the value from the cursors in the wind surface of the world. They'll acquire some of them,

they'll compete with some of them, right? Same as you saw on the web. But I argue that the tier fours aren't. even going to have value because the tier fours are this ain't the web this ain't where you can have one server serve lots and lots and lots of people you know i'm running oh three i'm running i you know how much i cost open ai every month i pay the two hundred dollars a month i cost him a lot more than that you can now click on codex yes spin up four nodes yeah why would i not click four it's not my computer you gave me the button hey i'm just using it i just use it

George Hots single-handedly bankrupts, $300 billion company. Is there no value in just being the front end to AI applications to be like the front door, just the default button? Because we see these models kind of go back and forth in terms of benchmarks or what's hot. And there isn't as much customer churn as you would expect because people are just kind of like defaulted into the app that they installed whenever. And so even if Gemini gets better in terms of the actual performance metrics, people don't switch from Open AI to Google overnight. It's so negligible. You've got to make something 10x better. You've got to make something 10x better. So, like, this whole game is open AIs unless they stumble.

Sure. I'm not switching to Gemini because it's 20% better. I have downloads a new app and think about all the new thing, right? No one can switch. Is there a chance for a company to kind of come out with something that's 10x better with an algorithm? algorithmic improvement or is it just a race for scale? Like, what could actually be that next? It felt like GPT 3.5 when they really broke through with Da Vinci and then 4, or then 4, like it felt like this kind of like binary moment when a lot of people realize that this was usable for their daily life, even if it's just a Google search replacement or whatever,

write a poem or whatever. Like a 10x, what you're describing like a 10x improvement, feels like that kind of like qualitative binary shift. Is that possible with just scale or is this something that we need a different model for? I don't know. I don't know. I would bet majority still on like these big labs are also attracting the talents. But it is also like it's pretty commoditized a lot more so than like Google search. You can look at people track how far open source is behind. It's not that far behind. So no, I don't know. I think this game is mostly going to be chat GPTs.

I think Elon's aware of this too. That's why he's trying to go 10x bigger with the data center. We'll see, maybe it'll work. You know, there's someone to bet on. Anthropic I'm not that bullish on. But maybe. You kind of predicted the pre-training wall, but that's not a refutation of the bitter lesson and we're going to see similar scale play out reinforcement learning or is there going to be

something else that we're building the big data centers for? There's something that we don't understand in terms of data efficiency. So like when you think of how long it takes a GPT to large a talk like how much data it takes, it takes like terabytes of data. In order to make a GPT talk like a normal person, it takes terabytes of data. Whereas a human trains on megabytes. Yeah. How is it that if you take all the texts that you've ever heard in your life and you put it to whisper and you, you, you transcribe it. It's going to be a couple of megabytes, 10 megabytes, maybe 100 megabytes. So humans have this 1,000x data efficiency advantage.

And we're going to have to fix that if we want, like, reinforcement learning to work, especially like reinforcement learning that you want to do in the real world. Humans could do, humans can learn from very few samples. Yep. And yeah, I think that, like, it might be okay if these foundation models train unsupervised on lots and lots of stuff. But yeah. Is that something that somebody's working on just like a new more data efficient algorithm to drop into the pipeline? Or do we have any like leads there?

Because it feels like right now we're going down the path of like reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. And we're going after like individual business use cases that are increasingly long tail. And that could be kind of like valuable. but it doesn't feel like the breakthrough that you're talking about. Like, has there ever been a breakthrough? Right? Like, people think GPGs were a breakthrough. Well, they weren't.

Like, if you watch the world, it was just, it was all just, smooth curve. But, but, but what I will say about AI scaling laws. Yes. Oh, man. You see, like, people get excited about AI scaling laws, but here's a pitch that'll kill your excitement of media. Ready? AI scaling laws. You can put in exponentially more money to get linear returns.

Yes, exactly. Do you believe that the real value is investing in in humanoid robotics then? Have you heard this theory? So, I mean, if you put exponential more money into humanoid robotics, assuming that they work and assuming you can, you can, you can, like, if you make 10 times as many robots, you get 10 times as much output. Anyone, anyone who wants a humanoid robot has never worked in a factory in their life. Okay, right? Break it down. I know what's going to walk around.

Oh, good to get his legs, right? No. Like, here's what I want. Yeah, yeah. We've got a laugh track. Can you show me a robot arm that's capable of putting a screw in something? Probably.

Put the screw in the thing. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Not like you carefully jinged up the screw dispenser. Like the way a normal human does it where the screw is sitting there and a little bucket on the thing

and it picks up one screw would it puts it in. It takes a screwdriver. No, we're, no, we're, we're not close, but also it feels like we're not far. It feels like that's what? I feel like human, I feel like human, I feel like human rights are this interesting sort of like space because a lot of smart people just say, like, here's the 20 reasons why they won't work and like why we shouldn't build them, but then so much capital and so many different teams are trying to make them work that they, they very well might work for some things. And like they just humanity might brute force it because we saw it in a sci-fi movie, you know, 30 years ago?

Why? Why? Why are we cooked on human? This is dumb as self-driving cars-wise, right? And nobody learns their lesson. And people like Kyle Boat should be ashamed of themselves. Like, they really should. These people who go and raise large amounts of money for another thing that, like, they should know. They should know better. Right.

Here's basically, like, remember in 2012 and Google said that, you know, my, my, my 12-year-old daughter would never have to get her driver's license? Yeah. Come on. That's nonsense. right and like now okay they shipped Waymo it's in a few cities they're teleopt right how how teleoperated are they in your opinion is it is it effectively one to one it's more than one to one there's probably about I think say there's one point two operators per car

but it's not they don't have a steering wheel in pedals yeah it is it is an autonomous system yeah that they're probably doing some higher level inputs on they're definitely like say when you can be a aggressive when you should slow down, you know, whether you can turn on the stop sign or not. Yeah. You know, again, like here's here's the simple reason to know that it's like that, right? There's definitely some to tell you off of the waymows, right? Yeah. Have you ever seen a picture of that room? No. Yeah. Why not? I've always thought it was like an ace up their sleeve because like if there's a lot of pressure on them to say these waymos aren't safe, they can pull up, pull the the sheet off of the ghost and say there's actually a human in the loop. Don't worry. it's safer than you thought. Yeah, yeah.

Like, the fact that you've never seen that room tells you that it's way worse than you think it is, right? It tells you that there's way more teleop than you think it is. If it was really one person supervising 10 cars, Google would post those pictures all over the place. Yes, yes, yes. You don't see any pictures. There's, so Cruz that actually came out in the lawsuit, I think it was like 1.5 or 1.7 humans per car, right?

Or vice versa, like 1.5 cars per person, right? No, no. Wait, more people than cars? Yes. Yes. That's insane. It's still that way. Because an Uber only requires one person.

Yes, I know. So maybe the real innovation is just allowing somebody to get in a car and not have to talk about the weather or, you know. Exactly. I'll pay more for that. I'll pay more for that. Yeah, but is there any hope that we drive this down and we get to two cars per person, then four cars per person and it starts doubling exponentially and eventually like we are there?

I mean, yeah, like it's obviously going to happen, right? It's obviously eventually going to happen. If you want to see where the real state of the art of unsupervised self-driving is today, right? There's no person with FSD. When you get your Tesla, that's not teleop. You can go press FSD and that's real AI. And, well, you can see how good it is, right? Would I take a nap in there, even for five minutes?

Oh, A and L. You'd be supertent. How are things going on the comma side? Give us the update there. Pretty good. You know, we're on track to. we're on track to be two years behind Tesla. So two years behind Tesla.

But here's why we win, right? Because like it's cheap. Okay, so when you think about self-driving cars, it doesn't look anything like a rollout of Uber or Airbnb. When you roll out something like that, you're trying to roll out a two-sided marketplace. You've got to spend tons of money on customer acquisition costs. You've got to make sure that you've perfectly matched that marketplace

right away because if drivers aren't getting rides, they're going to leave the platform. If riders have to wait too long for drivers, they're going to leave the platform. So it's this careful balancing act. But once you get this marketplace, you've got a moat, right? Switching costs are real high. Try to get everybody to switch at the same time. It's a challenging point. Never doing it.

Self-driving cars don't look anything like that. Self-driving cars look like scooters. The only thing that it's going to take to roll out big fleets of self-driving cars is capital. It's just strictly a capital market. You could just, I could, if I look at a city, I can calculate how many waymows there are. If I want to build my own network and deploy that network and run into lower cost, it's straight up capital.

Easiest thing for investors to calculate. Very little risk. So self-driving cars are going to be this awesome race to the bottom. It's going to be like scooters. There's going to be like 10 providers of these things for a while. And they're not going to consolidate. Like one's going to do it. But yeah, people are really going to win.

What is, what's most valuable in terms of developing the next, like the next better version? of full self-driving is it having a lot of data building a big data center having a great team to actually design the system what's most important are they all equal yeah all those things matter right i think the main thing that matters more than anything else is just time like we're figuring things out research infrastructure's getting better i think a lot of it's just infrastructure right like yeah the infrastructure gets better um my uh my uh co-worker has the saying is like what we do is that we make the hard things easy and the impossible

things hard and that's like the goal of infrastructure as you build infrastructure your infrastructure gets better and then what was what you couldn't even dream of doing 10 years ago is now one command today and today you know what you you you uh yeah what's the current use case for most people with tiny boxes oh you know is that that's my design right you're not supposed to know but I mean I sell a computer it has specs right yeah so many people want to tell you and I hate this I hate this they're telling you like how the product is going to impact your life what you use the product for oh my God who cares yeah here's what it is I'm going to tell you what it is that's your job right I'm not an advertiser

but I mean I mean our intern wants to build something with a tiny box I want to give him some ideas go buy one I don't know why do you want to build some with tiny box I mean it's a It's a bunch of GPUs in a box. It's a nice little box. GPs in a box. It's got a weight to it. What robotic form factors are you most bullish on? We've touched humanoid.

You gave a great review there. We've touched autonomous vehicles. Sounds like generally bullish, but Capital Wars race to the bottom, all that stuff. Are there any other kind of form factors that you're thinking about that you are generally optimistic or excited? Arm. The arm. Arm. The arm.

Maybe two arm. Right? Just two arm. Right? Because I look, look. I run a factory. I run a factory in San Diego. We make all the commas right here.

And I can't wait to get a whole lot of robots in there. But I don't need humanoids. I'm just going to stick two arms to the table. And then it's going to grab a comma. It's going to put the screen on the front. It's going to flip it over. It's going to put the four screws in it. Then it's going to pass it on.

Yep. Right. Show me anything that's anywhere near that level today. Yeah. What would you do if you were trying to build, like a truly multi-purpose robotic arm. The arms are already going to knock. It's the off-the-shelf arms are fine.

It's all software. Again, it's always all software. Autonomous vehicles are all software. Robotics is all software. But everybody loves to bite shit. Yeah. What color are we going to paint the human ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, let's have a great conversation about that. Well, you know, we don't want to paint them red because that might scare people in a book term. This is actually the level of stupidity that I see in most discussions about human and robots. Yeah. Would you trade in your legs for wheels if you could? I got that. I'd trade in my legs for wheels?

Yeah. This is a question from Aaron Frank, friend of the show. It's asking this in real time. You're a wheel guy then. Like people had asked me if the wheels are like making a statement. I just don't have to have this conversation. What about the sim to real gap in robotics? Like how is simulated data?

You know, you build a bunch of data in Unreal Engine. Then you try and transfer, learn it back. Obviously, there's been a bunch of experiments of that with self-driving cars. Is that a path that we should be going down for the robotic arm development? Yeah, so I think with a lot of SIM to Real stuff, the reason people are excited about it is because of that data efficiency gap we spoke about. Right? Like current machine learning algorithms like a thousand X less data efficient than humans. So, yeah, you need a thousand X more data, right?

If a human can learn something in one example or ten examples, the computer is going to need a thousand or ten thousand. Now, do you really want to reset the stupid state of the physical world 10,000 times? You might do it a 10, but you're not going to do a 10,000, right? Yeah. So that's where you want a simulator where you can just click reset and then or you can back to exactly how it was. So I think this stuff's going to play a role, but I think more fundamentally that data efficiency gap has to be understood. We talked a little bit about coding agents. We talked about how you're bankrupting, opening AI by spinning up a lot of different codex agents.

what other sort of agentic software are you excited about? Do you expect to You know What's agentic mean? Yeah basically bots It's like what we're calling bots now

What's a bot? But anyways like I just You know like I don't know From Star Trek? Yeah Yeah maybe No but but I think about a world in the future You know do you expect to be

I don't know if you're a Slack guy An I message guy Discord maybe no messaging at all just, you know, telepathy. But do you expect a world in the future where you're just a perfect interaction between human employees and agents or is it going to be more like

you'll do the odd deep research or maybe you send some automated outbound emails or have some codex bots running? I don't even like follow this. When do you think you'll be able to book a flight just by saying I'm trying to get to New York tomorrow? Oh, see, the worst part about this is like hey like and that's gonna come pretty soon actually okay right we're gonna

pretty soon have computer use models that are actually capable of going to Delta dot column booking a flight yeah but then what's actually gonna happen is Delta's gonna partner with whatever company does that and they're gonna put it behind the stupid thing and like yeah so that's gonna yeah that's gonna be here in a few years right not with agentic shit but just with normal hooking the APIs together right yeah wait so yeah what is the bullish on APIs what is the mistake about like the agentic buzzword like What are people like even describing?

It's another thing that I really have no idea what it means. You know, I was hanging out with some friends last night. And like, like, my friend's in this VR company. And the, you know, the CEO is really interested in things being open source. But he's also really interested in making sure that things are protecting our intellectual property and proprietary. And the truth is, he has no idea what the word open source means. He has no idea what it means that they can copy his shit, right? Like that someone else could use it.

He just heard the word. open source in some like buzzword thing and he's like do we have the open source do we have the open source in the thing okay so check the box check the open source box okay let's protect our IP last question about the agent last question about the agentic buzzword I think that there is something that people are picking up on which is that these models seem to be very smart for short amount of time but if you run them for a long time they start hallucinating and going off the rails and so you have like 10 minute aGI i feels incredible, but as you let it run and do more work, you can't just say, hey, go do a week's worth of work, come back to me when you're, but it's superhuman in one minute. And so is that

kind of trade off curve real? And then is it just a matter of like better harnessing to actually get to two hours of work, which is kind of what the agentic people are like advocating for. No, so I don't think it's better hard, but this is definitely a real phenomenon. Okay. This is definitely a real phenomenon. You can experience this. There's papers exploring it. Yeah. Which show that if in 10 seconds, there's absolutely no way I'll come even close to a modern

LLM. Totally. Because the first shot from the LLM is great. Yeah. And then it kind of degrades and it degrades pretty quickly. Whereas humans look a lot more like this. Humans can stay coherent internally for much longer. So, yeah.

Yeah, I think that that's a real thing. I think that that's mostly going to be fixed by like long context. Just more energy. Long context R.L. Yeah, just like, you just got to do it. We'll figure out new ways to make the context better. We'll combine diffusion and auto regression in some clever ways. Yeah, I think that this is just going to be like there's not going to be a breakthrough here.

There's not like one magical thing that we're missing. Yeah. I think it will be a continued. applaud the same thing with data efficiency. I think people will start to care about it. Some new tricks will come out. Some of them will work. Some of them won't work. We'll continue to do graduate student descent until we find that. Anything, anything, last question for me, anything that you're particularly optimistic about, anything you check the timeline and you think, this is awesome. I love this. I love this. I want to

see more of this. A little, maybe a little white pill to kind of cap it off. Yeah. So here's something I'm optimistic about. That fact that the one server can't run 10,000 users that is most of the reason that the modern internet, that is one of the reasons that the modern internet sucks. That so much

of the stuff is in non-recurring expense and then it becomes really, really hard to compete with these people. Right? Like, you could run Twitter on one computer. Yeah. And 20 people could do it too. But like they don't because again, these companies have moats and they invest. and making sure that their modes can't be broken.

With AI, I think there's going to be a much less of a vote, especially when you look at the move from auto regression to diffusion. So auto regression can run in large batch sizes. When you run chat chattGB, you're running with a whole bunch of other people on that same computer. Yeah. It's only 100. It's not 10,000, but still, it's 100. Diffusion is running the cloud at batch size 1.

And once you're in batch size 1 land, running it locally starts to make sense. actually running the models locally or at least having your own computer in the cloud not being some shared resource that's really controlled by something else so yeah this was never a thing because you can't put lots of people on a GPU

they try some weird stuff with the licensing but yeah fantastic well thank you so much for stopping by this is great conversation I wish we had a full hour this is great we'll talk to you soon George cool bye see you later Cheers. Next up, we have Joseph Turgian, author of The Party's Interest Come First. He was recommended by Jordan Schneider of China Talk.

We're very excited to talk to him about the life of Xi Jinping's father, Xi Jinping's father. Sejong Chul. Welcome to the show, Joseph. Good to have you. Thank you for having. Thank you for joining. It's great to have you. I would love to get a little bit of your background, how you landed on this topic.

It's incredibly difficult to, to, to, to research, I was digging just into the life of Xi Jinping. And there were no English biographies for a long time. One of the most deepest dives on Xi Jinping was from the economist, actually, in the form of this podcast and this reporting about the Prince. And I was interested how you got into this, what your background is, and then we could go through some of the story. So I had just finished a book about elite power struggles in the Soviet Union and China

after the deaths of Stalin and Mao. And someone asked me to write about party history and Xi Jinping, and I thought I would do a short article about Xi Jinping, a little bit about his father. But what I did find out was the more research I did, the more I could learn and that I could tell a really interesting story three Xi Zhongshund that wasn't just about Xi Jinping, but could be a sort of microcosm of Chinese Communist Party history in the 20th century.

Got it. One of the themes that I've been kind of wrestling with, my takeaway from studying Siegian Ping was that there is this constant narrative of being both a victim and a perpetrator of party aggression, essentially. And I was wondering if that narrative feels right to you, where that comes from, why these leaders are so reluctant to reject the system that's sending them to jail or putting their family in hardship. Like, it feels unique and it doesn't feel like something that happens in America or maybe I'm just brainwashed by American politics or something and it is happening over here and I'm just not

picking up on it. But is that a theme that you picked up on and you think is worth digging into? Is it what it's unique about this story? It sounds like you read my book quite closely. That is certainly one of the themes. There's a puzzle there, which is Xi Zhongshun, the father of Xi Jinping was persecuted by his own party on several occasions. And the party asked him to do things that he thought were wrong. Nevertheless, he remained devoted. And I think to appreciate that we need to look at this Bolshevik communist political culture. And it's because these people see the party as a source of meaning and purpose in their lives.

So in that sense, to reject the party would have meant rejecting themselves. So perhaps counterintuitively, when the party hurt them, the motivation was to redouble their efforts to win back the party's trust in them. do you think that there's I'm still struggling to understand the dynamic of like how dominant the single party is in China and I'm wondering if if we compare it with American politics we it feels like we're always in this 50 50 stalemate where every four years it's like it's neck and neck and then and then yeah maybe one party wins by some sort of margin but I'm I've always wondered if that's a if you talk to somebody who's like a socialist they're always really really upset because they're basically like, well, they're both capitalists who are running. And so they see it as a false choice. But the vast majority of the American electorate is incredibly animated by the differences, even though they might be somewhat minor if you zoom out a little bit. And I'm wondering, like the more single party system versus the dual party system, how does that emerge? Can you give me some history of the party? And why is it so stable?

So Lenin said that what we are doing is building a party of a new type. And he thought that Western political parties, as you said, were essentially a representative of dominant class interests. What Lenin wanted to do was create an organizational weapon. And the reason for that was he was running a conspiracy. And he wanted to take over the country and then use violence to transform it into something that was completely different. And to do that, you need to create an institution that. can force people to do things that they might not want to do. It's by design constructed so that the top leader can make a choice and then everyone has to follow along with that choice. And sometimes

that choice is wrong and has devastating impact for the party and the nation. But you can see that if you have such an ambitious agenda, what you want to do is create a system where the top leader is sort of firewalled from any kind of political consideration. Can you, I mean, there's so many, there's so many anecdotes that could kind of tell the story. Would you mind telling me which story from Xi Zhang Shung's life really stuck out to you as emblematic or maybe even just give me the high level because we kind of just jumped into it? Give me like the high level story arc that you decided to to weave the entire narrative through. Yeah.

So he was born in 1913. That was only two years after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. He was born into a rather dramatic place. It was born near where the terracotta soldiers are, which probably many of your viewers know about. That was where Qin Shi Huang forged the first unified Chinese state thousands of years before. And it was the city where emperors had ruled for millennia. But by the time Xi Zhongshun was born, it had fallen into years of banditry and war and famine. And he was attracted to radicalism, trying to figure out.

out a way to help China escape from these imperialist encroachments and political infighting at home. And his first political act was an attempt to assassinate an academic administrator. And it failed. He got a bunch of teachers sick and was thrown into prison and joined the party there. How old was he again? He wasn't he like 15 when he was sent out? That's right. He was very young.

And what's interesting, too, is he didn't really have an intellectual attraction to communism. Yeah. And when he was released from incarceration, he read this novel. That's a terrible novel. It's basically just a protagonist who goes from one disaster to another. But it fetishizes this idea of resistance and struggle. And so it speaks to the fact that, you know, for a lot of these people, their intuition was that something needed to be changed, but they weren't exactly sure what. And the party was a source of meaning for them.

I know you mentioned that he had a lot of interaction with the party around relationships with other religions. And I was wondering if you could kind of like when I grew up, I remember like the Free Tibet movement. And it's kind of like fallen by the wayside. Tibet's not really in the in the news much anymore. Could you take me through the story of his interaction with some of these kind of tangential groups in China and how, how, how the history of those relationships played out? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So within the Chinese Communist Party, you would have people that were experts in the military, on economics. Xi Zhong was the leading United Front figure. So what's the United Front? Well, Mao Zedong called it one of

the CCP's magic weapons. And it's basically political influence campaigns. And so what you do is you figure out who's on your side, who's in the middle, who's against you, and you empower the ones that like you, you win over the ones that aren't sure, and then you hurt the ones that are dead enders. And this was something that Xi Zhongshin continuously applied to China's ethnic minorities. And so he was in the last years of the civil war in the early years of the People's Republic, the leader of the so-called Northwest Bureau, which included a huge expanse of China, including Xinjiang, but there were also lots of Tibetans in Qinghai and Guangzhou, which were other massive provinces. in China. And so he was trying to figure out how to incorporate them. And it was definitely bloody,

but he also wasn't blind to the advantages of finding local power brokers and winning them over. But over the 1950s, the party decided that that approach was dated because people weren't coming to socialism on their own. And so essentially, the party declared war on them with tanks and planes and during the cultural revolution, any sign of an ethnic difference was seen as class struggle. And then in the 1980s, the party understood that they had really screwed up and that they needed to have a new approach. And Xi Zhongshwin ran ethnic politics for the secretariat, which is sort of the party's brain. And he tried to use economic development, bringing religion out into the open so it could be better controlled, aligning with local power brokers.

But by the end of that decade, many people within the party concluded that when you do that and you give people space, they just use it to hurt you. And so the party decided that growing protests weren't a sign of reaching a new equilibrium, but hitting some road bumps on the way, but that fundamental approach had been a mistake. Yeah, there's this narrative that keeps popping up whenever you hear about turmoil in the party around purges, which is a term that I don't, I'm not really, I can't really map to as an American. because we don't really have those, I guess. And a lot of this is always tied to there's corruption, and we're going after corruption.

And every kind of major defenestration feels like it's tied to corruption. And I'm always wondering how we are evaluating those claims, because at the same time, in a growing, developing country, there probably is a lot of corruption. And there's probably a lot of people that are banditry, for example, that you mentioned. There are people that are taking advantage of different parts of the government. So the corruption might be real. But then also corruption is used as a weapon to amass power or remove certain people from power.

And so can you walk me through how corruption is used as a tool? How real do you think the various corruption narratives have been? Maybe if there's any examples of corruption being wielded? it as a tool for party power? So as soon as the party was able to take over the country, they immediately faced a question, which was how they were going to ensure that they didn't take such pride and arrogance in their victory that they allowed bourgeois liberalization, meaning individualism to seep in and that they would be divorced from the masses and that they would care about

their own materialist needs. And so from the very beginning, the party struggled to figure out a way to eliminate this problem. And so especially during the Mao era, you had constant, constant rolling campaigns that inevitably went too far. And now under Xi Jinping, you see that he believes that corruption for him is about whether the party can survive. Because for Xi Jinping, ideals and conviction and a sense of motivation are necessary for the party to exist. And the biggest danger to that is corruption because it's, it basically means putting yourself first, but also corruption is a problem because it's a vector for Western influence. Because there's this idea that the West is materialistic and oriented towards consumption. And once that gets into China, then the West can use it as a weapon.

And in fact, many people in China thinks that's what happened to the Soviet Union. That essentially the leaders of the regime became oriented to. towards the West and the West won what they call a war without gunpowder, meaning you don't use violence to destroy the regimes you don't like, you do it by winning over certain people within it. And one other thing to say too here is that you're right. Like corruption is partly about regime security, but it's also about getting rid of people that you don't like. And so what's interesting here is, you know, why do people keep doing things that make them vulnerable to accusations of corruption? And here I think speaks to something else about the system, which is nobody is quite sure where the red lines are. And so sometimes you just get it wrong and sometimes the top leader changes where the red lines are.

And you can see that in a system where the top leader is the one who gets to make those decisions, it's a very powerful weapon. Yeah. What is the current sentiment from the party about the state of the world, right? I feel like here in America right now, you have a frustration. China's become the factory of the world. We're deeply reliant on them. At the same time, the world feels very unstable. Are they becoming consumerists?

Because they're certainly buying Xiaomi phones and, you know, Huawei products. So I'd be curious, like, any type of insight around the party's sentiment around what's happening in China culturally and then sort of geopolitically on a world stage, do they feel like they're making progress, We study their goals around individual industries like semiconductors, AI, defense, et cetera. But I'm curious what sentiment in and out of the country. So it's interesting to see how ambitious Xi Jinping is in terms of how he characterizes his goals in a holistic sense.

He says that for millennia you would have one dynasty collapse after another and that the Chinese Communist Party needs to break that. And his solution is this idea of self-revolution. And basically what he wants to do is figure out a way of how you win over the third and fourth generation of young Chinese to the revolutionary cause. And your question speaks to a dilemma there, right? Like you can see how a message of sacrifice and rejuvenation is meaningful maybe for many people, but that he also recognizes that economic development is essential as well. So, you know, how you balance those two things at the same time is not clear. And it's something that I think the party is, has constantly wrestled with from the very beginning.

How you balance ideals and conviction and motivation with being practical and thinking about economics and that kind of thing. You know, in terms of how China thinks about the world, they see real inherent strengths in their system. And even though they're communists and therefore should be people who only think about the world, in terms of concrete, objective conditions. They talk about spiritual civilization all the time. And in fact, they think that China has one, but the West does not, because in capitalist societies, all they do is care about money and consumption. So in Xi Jinping's mind, he sees those problems only getting worse and worse in the West,

as opposed to China, where in his mind they can tell a good story, a motivating story, but also the party can organize interests in a way that doesn't allow one class or one group to dominate. How does that actually play out? Because I feel like we, there's an incredible amount of wealth still in China. Like, there's still a wealth inequality. There are many tech billionaires and massively successful folks over there. Of course, when they get really, really big, they tend to disappear for a little bit. And it doesn't seem like a great place to be a Jeff Bezos type. But at the same time, it doesn't feel like, oh, yes, like they are truly communist. Everyone has the exact same standard of living.

And so is that even the goal? Are they okay with some level of wealth inequality? Or did they see it as a failure? And even that digging a level deeper, if she and party leaders can speak to this sort of civilization, you know, the spirit of the Chinese civilization and how great it is and how the system of the West is failing, what do three, you know, five levels below that in the Chinese system in terms of, you know, How much do you try to dig in? And what is the average factory worker?

Do they feel that same sense of pride in the spirit of China? Or is there kind of a disconnect? Yeah, those are some really good questions. So I think for Xi Jinping, he can do course corrections to a certain extent, right? So this is someone who a few years ago was really doing a very severe crackdown in the tech sector. and people who made a lot of money were suddenly very worried. Xi Jinping was talking about common prosperity, but over the last few months, they have been talking more about the economy, and it seems that Xi Jinping has empowered his premier to focus

on development. And that doesn't mean that they've suddenly stopped caring about security or ideology. It just means that they can move around a little bit without admitting that they've were wrong. And I think the reason for that is that the party, when they talk about ideology, they're more careful, I think, than people give them credit sometimes, right? So, for example, if you look at the latest party Congress report, it begins with ideology and it talks about how we need to believe in this stuff and we still are, you know, socialist and communist. But then it says other things, too. It says the reason communism works in our country but failed in other,

others, is that we cynicize it. We made it Chinese, which basically means we made it, say, whatever we want it to be, right? And so then you also see other language about markets still being decisive and China still being in the stage of primary accumulation, which means that development, not restructuring society is the top priority. So, you know, they talk about common prosperity because they know that they need to tell a good story about getting rid of inequality because they subscribe to socialism. But then you have all these buts and ants, right? So they say, You know, we're not going to become populist like Latin American countries by allowing people to have such a social safety net that they feel that they don't have to work hard. And so for all of these reasons, I think that he's trying to manage dilemmas because he can't solve problems, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Have you, yeah, I mean, we've been talking about people about how some of China's investments in the semiconductor industry are in some ways more capitalist than, the way America subsidizes are like the Chips Act compared to the series of five-year plans that have been somewhat cutthroat over in China between a whole bunch of different companies competing for grants. And yes, there's a lot of government money pumping into the sector and they've been able to stay at the lagging edge for years. But it's been designed to be kind of dog-eat-dog and hasn't just been a situation where China's just picked one winner and said, here's, you know, $50 billion and go run with it.

I'm interested to hear the story about the development of Hong Kong relative to some of the mainland cities. Can you walk me through what that taught about China and Cizhong Shun? Because I believe he saw kind of that happen. I've seen the time lapses, and I've been to Guangzhou once very briefly, and the balancing act there between those various cities and what that kind of taught China. I'm really glad you've asked about Hong Kong. I've done a handful of interviews and you're the first person to raise it. And it's a, it's quite an interesting story and it's revealing in many ways.

So Xi Zhongshun, he was persecuted for 16 years, right? And then he's released. And the first job that he gets is the party boss of Guangdong, which of course is the province that borders Hong Kong. And he saw physically just how far behind China had become and his first task that he had had to deal with were the thousands and thousands and thousands of Chinese people who were fleeing to Hong Kong, often losing their lives in the process. So it was such a striking physical manifestation of how far the socialist motherland had fallen

behind. And so for him, that helps explains the special economic zones, which he played a role in establishing. And he has this idea that one of the problems is ideology. We need to make people, you know, believe in the cause. But he wasn't so foolish as to not recognize that you also had an economic angle here that you needed to figure out. And then ensuing years in Beijing, when he was running the United Front, he had to figure out how these people in Hong Kong were going to feel about returning to the mainland. So he kept meeting with these Hong Kong people during the handover negotiations.

And he would say things like, you know, we're all Chinese. Go overseas and look around and you'll realize that actually Western countries. aren't as great as you think. You put your money in a bank and the fees are greater than any interest that you would make. You know, these kind of like sort of a very conventional communist views of a boom and bust and that he, but you know, what's interesting is for them like in Hong Kong, one of them during these meetings, a lawyer from Hong Kong said, you know, you in the mainland, you feel like you're coming out of a tunnel because the cultural revolution is over and you're reforming.

But we in Hong Kong, we feel like we're going into a tunnel. because we're looking at unification with you, but we're not sure about what direction you're going and we're frightened. And it was Xi Zhong's job to win their trust and faith to the handover. Interesting. Xi is up for re-election in 2028.

There's no term limits. What should people be looking out for in terms of the lead-up and what he's at the right? kind of outlook that he should be, you know, really trying to prove, like, does this, that his next few years really matter in terms of proving that he's the right leader for the next five years beyond that? Or how do you look at the election? So he is in a situation where whatever he decides is what will go. Nevertheless, he is facing really, really powerful challenges when he looks at the succession. Because as his father's story,

shows if you read my book, it's hard to think of anything more explosive than succession politics than an aleninist regime. And it gets back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that these are very leader-friendly systems. The whole purpose is to have a really, really powerful person at the center who can make choices and then everybody has to listen. So, Xi Jinping, if he picks a successor, it raises the question of, well, who's actually really boss? And then the name successor will have to figure out how much space he has and whether not he's actually getting Xi Jinping right. And he'll want to impress Xi Jinping, but he also won't want

Xi Jinping to think that he is getting too big for his bridges. But if Xi Jinping doesn't pick a successor, then he might be afraid about what will happen to the party after he dies. And he will likely want to make sure that the person that he thinks is best is the person that becomes the next leader. So he's kind of stuck, right? Because neither of those options are very good. And he's probably also thinking in his own mind and changing his mind and testing certain people and seeing how well they read him and how well they handle situations.

So it really is something to watch. And a lot of it will be about personal chemistry. Yeah, I'd love to know how hereditary dynasties play into that dynamic. And if you could ground it by explaining the concept and history of the princelings and then kind of the current status of the idea of a princeling, I don't know if that's kind of gone out of fashion or if that's still. if that matters today. Yeah. So in the 1980s, the party, as it was trying to figure out how to survive after the founding generation died, they looked at young people and they were a little afraid because during

the cultural revolution, young people had beaten them up, brought them to struggle sessions, incarcerated them while they were still alive, which raised questions about what would happen after they died. And a lot of them had been betrayed by their own secretaries. And so in the 1980s, a lot of them were picking princelings to work in their offices because they thought that they would be more trustworthy. The problem with princelings is that they were not well liked more broadly within the population and in many circles of the party because they were seen as entitled. They were seen as arrogant. They were seen as benefiting from their parent status.

And so they had this weird sense of both entitlement and vulnerability at the same time. And Xi Jinping was a witness to that. And that was one of the reasons, I think, why Xi Jinping decided to go work in the grassroots as opposed to pursue a career that was purely in Beijing so that he could avoid those kinds of charges. So, you know, Xi Jinping's career was hurt in many ways because he was a princeling, although he also did benefit his father. So it's a little bit of a complicated story. You know, now in China today, I think that Xi Jinping probably doesn't have a great relationship with these princelings because he doesn't want them to think they have special purchase on him. because of who their family is, and Xi Jinping thinks everyone should put the party's interests first. So in that sense, I think that princelings matter because Xi Jinping is a princeling and the fact that his background, you know, tells us something about that.

But I think many other princelings feel that they don't have much of a say in the direction China's going. Well, that's the name of the book. The party's interests come first. And thank you so much for stopping by. This is a fantastic conversation. Yeah, well, thank you. Thanks so much for having you. Thanks so much for having you back on when there's when there's specific news as well. Yeah, yeah. We'd love to have you back and talk when there's anything that you haven't to announce, but also anything in the news that you could comment on would be fantastic. But congratulations in the book, and I highly recommend everyone go pick it up. The party's interest come first.

Thanks so much for stopping by, Joseph. Great questions. Thank you. Bye. Next up, we have Paul from Browser Base coming into the studio. He's not here yet. And you know what that means. We get to do some ads, baby. Adio, customer relationship.

at magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Go to adia.com. A. ATTO. Also, how did you sleep last night? Jordi. Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. Modal, USV. I think I got you. They got range. I beat you. How'd you sleep, John? 93. Only seven hours and 19 minutes, but great on quality. Great on consistency. Back on my game. No. Back on my game, 97. Oh, it's a disaster. Clean eight hours. Oh, brutal. Okay.

Well, congratulations. You're back. You've been... Back in the game. You got a rough, rough week. It was about a 10-day period that perfectly coincided with me being sick. You beat me 10 weeks in a row, but I beat you for one week and it felt like 20 weeks of victory for me. I was pumped.

That's right. Anyway, I will let you take the intro with Paul. Get the details from him on what's going on in his world and the browser base world. There he is. Mr. Paul Klein, the fourth. Welcome. Hey, guys. Big, big day for you, break it down.

What's going on? Good. You know, Series B announcement today. Of course, you know, Sequin has his touchdown chain. I brought the browser-based chain in to celebrate today. You got the Big B. All right, well, I'm going to hit the gong for the Big B if the team could go to the wide. Get ready here.

There we go. Solid connection for you and the browser-based. team love to see it love to see it so the chain what how do you have any sort of like milestones the chain stays on until a hundred million of a rr you know what chain is currently taped on uh it falls off from amazon so i think that the series d will upgrade to a better chain real okay okay so a couple rounds away um awesome who who participated in the round um i'm i'm sure you had a pretty fun process uh but but break it down for us. Yeah, you know, we're super lucky at browser base. Every round that we've done has been preemptive. So it was a quick one. And that's because we work with people we've known

for a long time. You know, Glenn Solomon from notable capital, he's someone who met with us in the earliest days. And the notable team formerly known GGB Capital, they're just killing it right now. They just have features in labels series B as well. And I think that really started the conversation for us. We're like, hey, sounds like you guys are new and B's. We'd love to kind of have a conversation. Of course, CRV doubling down as well. We read Christian on our board. you know, Pliner Perkins as well, one of our earliest investors at the C, partially in the A and the B. So we're really excited about this composition. I feel like this board is a good starting lineup and we can go pretty far with it. So we're excited.

Amazing. You guys also had a big launch today. Is that right? Exactly. Director. Yeah. What's going on there? Our whole thing is that, you know, when we think about how people automate the web and browser base, or those who aren't familiar, we're basically a web browser that can be controlled by your AI, really an infrastructure company. So we sell a development. developers who are building features that want to go automate the web. And we realize that one of the places that people are starting when they're building their applications is often in these kind of lovable B0 or Bolt experiences.

They're vibe coding. And we kind of looked at the way vibe coding applications were set up to help developers who build like, you know, automation scripts like submitting your Delaware franchise tax or grabbing a quote from a website or a supplier you want to work with. And for us, we wanted to build something built for the vibe coders who actually want to build software that will do work on their behalf. And that's what director is. Director.ai allows you to go to the website, prompt, and it's going to output this repeatable script that will go to a website, click buttons, fill in forms, download files, all on your behalf. We have a few cool prompts on there's demos. One is like going to Cal She and checking the poll for Will Trump, unfollow Elon on Twitter. Another one's like, hey, go to the NASDAQ website and find me all the earnings calls for this week. And then it outputs not only, it just does that for you. And then also outputs code so you can integrate that into your application. and run that every single week in a repeatable way.

George Hatz was actually surprisingly bullish on computer use. He usually pours a lot of cold water on a bunch of different stuff, but he was pretty optimistic about me being able to book a flight on delta.com with an agent coming soon. What I didn't get from him and what I want to get from you is, where does that interaction live? He was saying that, yes, it's coming. You'll be able to just say, I'm trying to fly to New York tomorrow, book me a flight.

that gets me there in the evening and it will do it for you and it'll interact with the web page or the API. The question is where does that interaction live? Is that in a consumer app that I subscribe to or pay for is ad supported or is that a delta.com feature or back and forth? Like where does the where where does more of the agentic interaction live? Yeah. I think for consumer use cases like booking a flight it has to live where the distribution is right? And that's probably going to be Google, Apple, on device. Your AI will control the browser on your device. But if you think of companies like Ramp, if Ramp wants to go automate collecting an invoice from a website where they don't have a first-party connection, the way they can agentically

do that is with the web browser, going to that website, you know, getting your invoice for you and putting it through their, you know, bill pay. I'm a Ramp customer. So, you know, something I've been asking for as a feature for a while. So I think that like, you know, for consumer automation use cases, it certainly will live on device or in some sort of consumer app, maybe chat, GPT. But for the B2B use cases where you're actually using some software and the automation is an extension of the existing software, that's where I think the browser and more generalistic computer use that lives within a company like browser base. It's really going to stand out. Yeah. Let's dig into that ramp example more because I've had to do this where I wanted to classify like an Uber receipt.

For some reason, I wasn't subscribed to the emails. And so I go into the Uber website and I pull the receipt down and then I upload that to ramp, right? But with browser base, they could potentially do that if they had my login. Long term, there's probably some sort of API interaction. And so I almost feel like there's this weird world where, like, you see a lot of people are using computer use, and then once something really takes off, then they automate with an integration. But then there's, like, a new wave.

So is your growth kind of like a series of S curves? Is that the way to think about it? Or do you think that people will just be so happy with the results from computer use that they would just say, why would I even bother building the direct API connection? Well, I think there are always direct API connections, and there should be. You know, if someone has apt to build that, I highly encourage it. I think about, like, the rest of the internet that already exists, are we going to rebuild that internet? The analogy I like to use, and I use in this piece today with Alex Conrad is that, you know, when we think about Waymo, you know, Waymo drives on the roads we've already built.

And Waymo's got good enough to navigate those roads. It might be more efficient for us to build highways just for Waymo or just for her self-driving cars to go out and browse. But in the end, like, if AI can use the internet the same way we can just as well as we can, why not just let it browse the web like we do? Short high-speed rail, I'm hearing. Because when you think dedicated roads for something that's autonomous that doesn't need to steer, that's a high-speed rail. But yeah, why not just be in a self-driving car?

How much are you thinking about bigger partnerships long-term? There will be some, you know, companies. that will not be excited about, you know, computer use agents kind of, you know, interacting with their web properties and, and at some point you might be, you know, constantly going back and forth with them, you know, trying to figure out a way to, I don't know exactly what it would look like, get around CAPTCHAs and things of that nature. But is that something that over time, I mean, we've had Zach from Plaid on the show many times. And, you know, early on, they, you know, we're sort of doing things maybe manually and then, and then, you know, with software, but then

they ended up developing out, you know, meaningful partnerships to enable these sort of interactions to be more seamless. Is that something on your roadmap at all? I can imagine just after you guys have raised, you know, over $50 million in a very short period of time, I imagine people are kind of knocking on your door now at this point to have conversations as well. Yeah, we're certainly excited to partner with the anti-bot detection companies. In our mind, like browser base has an opportunity to be an arbiter of good thoughts. For example, we may be able to help a customer of ours say, hey, we're this small startup. Here's our use case. We've done K-YC with browser base. We have, you know, restricted domains that we can only browse to. And we can help kind of represent them to

the broader, you know, anti-bot community and say, this is a customer that we've certified. And I think in the long, for the longest time, Antibai was built because there's only bad bots online. But now there's good and bad bots. And on Brousspace, we hope that we can empower, show, and prove that these are good bots and use the brand that we built as a center part of our trust. But regardless, like, you know, Plaid is an amazing company where I've really looked up to the Plaid. It is possible to build integrations for every single bank out there. There is like a finite number of banks, or at least like a workable or tractable number of banks. There is billions of websites out there. So regardless, you still are going to have to have some AI for when an agent, your customer prompts your agent,

hey, can you work with this specific website? You might not have an integration built. And browser base is kind of the primitive, that the integration of last resort. And we hope that if you're building an agent, you include a browser tool more for like the what if it happens, not for the when it happens. How do you think about competition coming from the hyper-scalers

and the big cloud platforms? Companies like Stripe and Plaid haven't seen much competition from GCP, Azure, AWS, but on the flip side, some of the other parts of the AI stack have been either cloned or offered or vended in through some of the bigger cloud platforms. Is that a risk? Or do you have an idea for a moat that is too high for the king of moats Jeff Bezos to clear? Well, I think it starts with a few things. One, I think you have to build a great developer

product and that comes down to actually having a dashboard features that people love to use and work really well. Jeff Basis is the king, but I don't think any developer really raves about the AWS console, right? And secondly, you have to have more than just infrastructure. Infrastructure always kind of becomes a commodity, right? Sure. So moving up the stack one layer, that's what we do with stagehand.

Stagehand is our browser automation framework. When you build it, you kind of write code and it generates the integration. When you write stagehand code, it actually generates the browser automation functionality in browser base. So it's like one layer up. The analogy here is like Bersel and XJS. Browser base and stagehand. So when you own the framework, you're really able to offer more stickiness

and just build more first party integrations into the framework that run better on browser base. And then finally, director is at top of that step, right? Well, if you have a framework, you probably want to have a way to generate that framework code. So we moved one layer higher to the application level. And I haven't seen any incumbents really do well at adding, you know, building developer level around new frameworks.

And then one layer higher like building applications to generate them yet. So for me, I'm kind of betting on innovation here. I'm betting on us expanding our portfolio. And there's this is Parker Crombrot tweet, which was like, hey, this is going to be one on the field. Who can build it better? Who can sell it?

Who can market more? Who can innovate more? And we're ready to go battle on the field with our new fundraise. In the field, in the bathrooms, and the Slack channel. It's fought out everywhere. We love it. Talk to me about the good bots versus bad bots dynamic trends in the robots. TXD.

Is there a need for some sort of like, I don't know. almost universal trust rating or something that identifies you as a good bot as you go around because there's going to be lots of anti-bot protections and yet I imagine that having some sort of like coming from a trusted IP address is something that gets you out of a lot of cloud flare capsules and and I imagine that that there's probably work that you can do almost on like the business development side to kind of grease the wheels as you try and automate more and more of the web. Is that something that you're thinking about? What are the different approaches that you can take to make sure that as the anti-bought protections

get more and more robust, you don't get bogged down in that and you're still offering a good experience of developers? Yeah, it's a great question. One of our investors, Jeff Lawson, he always frames great infrastructure companies as kind of being one of three things. One is like APIs representing capital. So it's like, hey, if I want to deploy 1,000 servers, I don't have the capital stand that up. AWS, I can just deploy 1,000 servers.

The second one is algorithm complexity. So, you know, your inference as a service, right? You have a bunch of inference. How can you run that more efficiently than anyone else? How can you serve it in an innovative way? And then the third one is really biz dev as an API. And I think browser-based long-term partnerships are extremely important to us. And that's why we're really proud to work with companies like WorkOS, Clerk, Stitch, and Cocta,

which all have major capture presences online because that's where it protects authentication. Secondly, I think the credentialing actually happens when you log in. Like, that's how you show you are who you are. And I think solving agent off, which I think these authentication companies I just mentioned will solve, really allows our customers to say, hey, I'm logging into my United account. And this is my agent, but it's acting on behalf of me because I've authenticated it. I think that's pretty compelling. You know, a lot of the reason antibody exists is to prevent, you know, account takeovers or spam.

But if it can authenticate and say, hey, I'm acting on behalf of Paul. I really think that's a good way to show proof of ownership or proof of humanhood of a bot and that's going to be solved very soon it feels like there's a bunch of stuff happening in a gentic auth that is very very promising and that's going to be great for browser base and we're happy to partner with all those companies to make it happen that's fantastic well congrats on the big round and thanks for stopping by we'll talk to you so always welcome congratulations to you and the team excited to watch you guys have a good rest of you guys cheers talk to you around appreciate it and really quickly let me tell you about ad quickcom out of home advertising

made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combined technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Alex Cantorwitz from Big Technology. We love Big Technology. And we got the king of Big Technology in the studio. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing? Thanks, guys. I'm doing great. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on. Would you mind doing a quick introduction on kind of how you frame your, yourself in the in the giant pool of big technologists and big technology folks definitely i think it's fairly straightforward i'm an independent journalist so i used to be working within newsrooms in

2020 i quit buzzfeed news started my own thing i've been writing the newsletter for five years and doing big technology podcast for just underneath that amazing uh and i mean we this is just that we can go into a bunch of other stuff but i want to talk like the the the metal level the inside baseball for a little bit. Do you see kind of a meaningful difference between being an analyst and being a reporter, an investigative journalist, someone who gets scoops versus someone who provides op ads? Do you think that's a meaningful distinction in kind of the modern independent journalism era or the going direct era or anything like that? We see ourselves not as breaking news here. we'd see ourselves more as like a reaction and opinion show and talk show or anything like that.

But I'm interested to see how you think it's evolving and then how you see yourself in the ecosystem. Well, it's so interesting because the definitions, they sort of blur. And I think if you do this for long enough, you're going to realize that you're a little bit of each, right? You're going to want to get interested in a subject and then just make a bunch of calls and, you know, maybe you'll find something out. And now the next thing you know, you're an investigative journalist or you write a piece of analysis. now you're an analyst. Or I had a situation where I interviewed Blake Le Moyne because I was interested in this guy

who said that Google's AI was sentient. And Blake is late to the podcast interview and I'm like, what's going on? And it turns out that while I was waiting for him, Google was firing him. Fired, yeah, I knew. Correct. So I said mid-interview, hey, Blake, this is news.

Can I like get a comment from Google and publish it? And he goes, yeah, sure, go for it. So then I write to Google mid-interview. We published the story. on big technology because I have a substack. Yep. I wake up the next morning and it's a story in the journal in Bloomberg and the New York Times and a bunch of other places.

Most of them said as first reported in big technology. So then I'm a reporter with scoops. So I think that, you know, I think the key to this stuff is, are you present? Are you curious? Are you going to try to serve your audience? I know you guys are doing this. So you're probably, you know, in all these buckets as well. And I think it's one of the cool things about doing, you know, reporting or news or

information on the internet is you get to play. play, you know, in all these different buckets. That's fascinating. Yeah, I had not thought about it that way at all. That's fascinating. Anyway, let's move on to the big news. I'd love kind of your reaction and breakdown from WWDC. We talked to a lot of folks about it.

And I mean, obviously a lot of mixed reactions, but I came away kind of optimistic that we could be going into this era of like a new explosion in. AI apps with leveraging on-device inference. And I was extremely optimistic about it. But there's a lot of other narratives going on. What was your takeaway? Yeah, it was really interesting. So I was there. I was on the broadcast riser because I was doing some stuff with CNBC. Cool. And I have never seen a more different event one year to the next. Last year, super enthusiastic, a little bit more open, big vision setting with Apple intelligence. This year, I think they spent, this is a conversation from a conversation I had with M.G. Siegler last week,

they spent more time talking about the phone app than they did AI. So it was clear that the expectations have changed for Apple and they ran into a lot of difficulty building AI in the same way a lot of companies have run into difficulty building AI because I think anyone who builds with this technology knows I'd be curious to hear from your listeners and viewers if this is the right perspective, but it's probabilistic. It doesn't act the way that you want to all the time. If you're a company like Apple with a very high quality bar, it's not very easy to wrangle this technology. This is why I think that they should buy perplexity, because they can just integrate an AI search engine into their products and have that control that Apple wants.

So we definitely saw a very big change last year to this year. And the focus was really on this new design, liquid glass, that they've brought into iOS, which is starting to roll out in like the developer release and with a bunch of fixes, we'll all get access to it at some point soon. But it was definitely, you know, a very subdued event for this company. And it's interesting that I'd actually be curious to hear why you think that this on-device development

is the thing that's going to lead to an explosion in AI apps. The conventional wisdom from the people that I speak with about this is that you can already build fairly fast applications using the stuff that's available today. and you can build much smarter applications with these larger parameter models and this very small model that Apple is making available on device.

So I didn't really find that to be a needle mover, but I'm curious to hear why you think it is and what your audience is telling you about it. Yeah, I mean, I have to talk about it. I think there's this hangover from war stories where developers, like, created a cool experience, released it, and then incurred massive costs from it going viral

because a lot of these generative AI features, are naturally so exciting and novel that people just have this excitement to use them. And that was leading to some meaningful costs that independent developers, historically, you could just spin up a simple mobile app or SaaS tool and not be thinking about what your cloud bill was going to look like. Maybe you were even just had credits and you weren't going to incur it at all. It's the kid without a credit card that is this super long tail of developers. They're not super mature. They're not venture backed. You get a ton of those random solo developers that don't even want to think about incurring costs.

And they want to build the next flashlight app, the beer app or Flappy Bird, these types of all these different apps that kind of start as little demos. And then maybe they grow into something with proper infrastructure and a back end. But the more that they can leverage the free out-of-the-box tools, the faster they can get going. And yes, eventually they'll raise money. eventually they might switch to, you know, cloud models that are better and more expensive and they need to think about the business model there. But being able to use AI in an app that lives in the app store, uses App Store viral

distribution, truly zero cost. It seems like it unlocks a different tier of entrepreneurship or app development that could be a really, really interesting canvas to explore. It's kind of like when the original. AI video came out, there was that one viral video, Harry Potter Balenciaga. And it's like, that's something that, that could have been done with a traditional CGI pipeline. Like you could have gotten ILM or Pixar team to go and make that.

Like it was doable with the previous technology, but when you lowered the cost from a million dollars to do a, you know, a 3D face scan of Dumbledore and put him in Belenziaga or hire the actors and shoot it with cinema cameras. When you lower that to just a couple creative prompts, like that human creativity part comes out and you get a viral video, Harry Potter, Balenciaga. Right. And the same thing I think could potentially be on the verge of happening with viral apps as the overhead and the cost to develop software drops with products like cursor and GitHub co-pilot and windsurf and Kodak's and Devon. And as that drops, and then also as the ability to call AI inference on the device, We're already seeing it.

There was a cool app that went out on X earlier today or yesterday. Somebody made the Tom Riddle, the Tom Riddle iPad app. So you can write hello and it kind of dissolves into the UI and then script writes back to you. And that's all generative text. And so it's just a simple fine-tune prompt. It doesn't need to be, you know, oh, IMO gold medalist, like amazing math, like PhD level. You know, it's not leading benchmarks. It doesn't need to lead benchmarks.

It just needs to be conversational and with an interesting UI. And it's something that this developer was able to build pretty quickly. And for like a young Harry Potter fan, that's going to be a magical experience for, you know, maybe a couple minutes, maybe an hour. Maybe it doesn't turn into the next big thing. But you'd get a million of those in the app store. And then one of them, you know, develops and develops and becomes something really, really cool. So that's why I've been very optimistic. Let me give the counterpoint, which is that with the biggest,

models that we have and the such powerful models that we have, we haven't yet seen a, you know, critical mass of hit apps that you would say, oh, if we could just bring the cost down, we would get an explosion. But you have opened my mind. I'm willing to say that this is definitely something that I hadn't considered where you could have the sort of low lift fun apps that don't, you know, make the developer go broke that maybe were cross prohibitive to build beforehand that we might see. So let's talk about this in a couple months and then we'll see what happened. Yes. So, I mean, I do agree with you. And the example that I think would be worth digging into is, do you remember that app lensa? It was this magic avatar app. You download the app and you take, and you take like 10 photos of yourself. And then it can generate like an AI image of you. It was kind of a precursor to the studio Ghibli moment. And they were extremely good at monetization because they'd be like, yeah, we're making the image. Do you want it by this? $20 in-app purchase. They did very well. It was a little bit of a flash in the pan. I think it went

really big and then they haven't shipped an update since December 20, 2021. Yeah, it didn't really go anywhere. But that felt like an important shelling point for for generative AI imagery. And then we saw it again with Studio Ghibli really taking over the internet. I feel like we haven't had that in text yet. There hasn't been that like where's the Harry Potter Valenciaga for something that was just purely text generated. But I think that it might be a cost issue. It might be something that people just haven't had a chance to play with at low enough cost.

And I think that any time you reduce the cost, like GPS, you drop the cost of that really, really low, and you get Uber. And I'm just still optimistic that there is a binary difference in 0.000.1 cent and zero cents. I hope you're right. I'm actually. Yeah. I'm smiling because I'm remembering this lens a moment. And there's been this like, it was the start of people being like, don't upload your face to AI because then they'll have your, you know, your biometric data. And I remember in the middle of the studio Ghibli thing, there was a tweet that came out like that where someone was like, you know, be careful about uploading your face to chat GPT. And then someone took their Twitter avatar and she bled it underneath.

And I was like, all right, well, no good deed goes unpunished, I guess. It's so brutal because the company that did Lenza pivoted to something called Prisma, which was a photo. editor with like cool artistic. It's a Russian company. So it's cool artistic filters and they basically built the Ghibli type experience and then I think they were actually Prisma before because I think I'd use that to try and do style transfer. And it was never quite there and then Open AI just kind of leapfrogged. And I think that will be a dynamic that happens a ton. I think that there will be kind of solo developers, kids that build a magical experience. Like, the Flashlight app, and then, yes, Apple will steamroll them.

But that solo developer, that kid, will probably make a ton of money with like a $2 in-app purchase just for upgrades or throw some ads in it or something, make some initial money. But even more important, the experience of having, like, a hit app sets you up for, okay, the next go-round, I'm ready to raise money, I'm ready to think about the seven powers or the motes that I should build around my business. Maybe I wind up going into B2B software or infrastructure or something else. But they've caught the itch of entrepreneurship because they've had that taste of like,

I built a product that had an impact. And that's something that I love when those things get unlocked at an earlier stages. It's a very cool idea. I mean, I've had this idea to build this generative AI app where it's like a choose-your-own history where you can either play through these scenarios. Because you can do this. You can like prop-clad today and you can do it today where you could like be a historical character. Like let's say you wanted to be like Alexander Hamilton during the American Revolution.

and sort of like experience that as he did, quote unquote, right? But doing it through Gen A.I experience, you can do that. I think the problem has been that the models haven't been powerful enough for the thing that I want to build. But I think that you guys are onto something. Like if this is a moment where Apple, you know, Apple might start with the smaller model. Let's see what happens. Maybe you get the equivalent of that beer drinking app. If that works out, then there's a lot of incentive for them to put much bigger models within the operating system.

and then you could really unlock some very cool things. And it does make sense that if you end up not going broke by building a Gen. AI app that becomes popular, you might want to build another one. Yeah, I actually had this exact experience of the historical character on character AI, the app where you can chat to a fine-tuned LLM on a particular person. I picked Stalin. What does that say about you? No, I'm kidding. Well, I'll tell you. So I was like, I want to go and argue with Stalin about communism.

And I want him to play the steel man, the literal steel man in his case. And I want to have a real hardcore debate about what Stalin did. My perception of him, I feel like I have a lot of good ammunition to fight back against his ideology. But let's go have this debate. And so I started debating with this character AI, the Stalin, but it had been so RLHFed and so fine-tuned on like American values that Stalin would come to me with something like, yes, like, you know, I did a lot of bad things and I'm like, sorry about it. I was like, I don't think Stalin would talk like that to me. I think Stalin would be very proud of what he did and not admit fault. And I was like, okay, character, you clearly didn't fine-tune this enough because it's still rejecting, you know, the real communism.

real communism and characterized. Maybe he slept with it and realized that, yeah, you know, maybe I did get a few things wrong. That's not the Stalin I wanted to debate. The genesis of my idea was just dumping Wikipedia pages into, I think it was Claude, and basically playing these scenarios as like maybe somebody who's not like in the power position in history. Oh, that's cool. So I always find it interesting.

So my wife is European. So we've like visited a lot of like historical sites in Europe. And I've always thought like, well, what happens if you're not like the Lord or the lady that they feature or the king that they feature in these museums? Like what if you're just like somebody on the line and what would your life be like? So for me, because I'm a fun guy, I dump Wikipedia pages into these bots and say, well, what would that be like? And then you can roleplay through it. And I think that if you find a way to like prompt these bots to give you like the non-sanitized version, it can be really interesting. and I don't know if fun.

I don't know if fun is the right way to put it, but worth going through these scenarios and playing the games. Yeah, yeah. I mean, totally. It's a great idea. Somebody will probably build it. But even right now, it's like even if they would get you to pay, that's an extra hurdle that causes conversion rates.

And there's a million different things that kind of downtream from that. Even if it's just writing extra coat to make sure that you're processing a payment in order to pay for your cloud bill and your Claude bill. So I'm excited to see what happens. I don't know. We can see how it plays out. Can you give us an update on the App Store? There's just been a lot of back and forth between it's Tim Sweeney, right, over at Epic.

Yeah. And Apple, chirping at each other. What is the state of the app store, our alternative payment rails getting, you know, real adoption yet? Can you give us kind of a broad overview? Well, we're super early. And there might be some court cases. to still work through in terms of this alternative payment in the app store. But basically, what Tim Sweeney and Epic games are trying to push through is Apple, if you want

to buy stuff within apps, you have to use Apple's in-app payments. And when you use Apple's in-app payments, Apple gets a cut, a sizable cut of the money that you spend. And that is very important for their services business. And just to take a step back, so basically Epic is trying to say that that should be illegal, whatever it is, monopolistic or anti-competitive. And we want to be able to process the payments on our own or via the web and not pay Apple the 30% or whatever it is from every dollar that goes through our services. It is, so I was going to take a step back because it's just happening in this very interesting moment.

So if you think about Apple's financial position right now, almost everything is either flat or shrinking. The iPhone revenue 2024 versus 2023 flat, maybe it grew a tiny percent. but like you look in their 10K or whatever it is and you see the, you know, the growth or the loss is just the dash, flat iPhone revenue. And by the way, that's happening as iPhone sales decline. And the only reason revenue is flat is because they're getting a higher average selling price per iPhone. So Apple is in sales decline with the iPhone right now. And that's happening as people spend more time with their phones and as people in China are less interested in buying iPhones because Huawei has become this obvious. of national pride and it's almost as good. So they're starting to buy Huawei's. And by the way,

they're not locked into the Apple ecosystem because they use WeChat. So the company is seeing flat sales revenue on the iPhone. They're seeing declines and things like wearable on the iPad. I think MacBook grew about 2% last year. That's the only like traditional Apple business category that grew. But there is the services category that grew 13% last year. And what does that include? It includes a number of things under threat. That includes those in-app payments that you just brought up. And it also includes this 20-plus billion dollar payment a year that Apple gets from Google, which is also under threat because there's this federal case going on in D.C. that Google has already lost.

Well, let me stop you. It also includes Apple TV. Let's talk about F1. Let's talk about some of the movies they're making. Let's talk about all the stuff that they highlighted. I'm not here to be super negative. I'm not here to be super negative, but let me be realistic. Yeah. If that Google payment in 2024, went away. And like, let's say that was 20 billion. It was probably more. But let's say it went away in 2020, 24. Any, any thoughts about what happened? All right. Apple as a company shrinks. Services, the one division growing double digits, growing 13 percent, actually contracts. Now, it's a one-time hit. So you would go down and then you would grow from there. But the reason why Apple is in

the $3 trillion range is because it has this services division, which investors will value as more of like a software company. So there you can get into like the 30 or the 35x multiples versus a hardware company, which is the other thing you didn't mention is a margin. The iMessage has also opened up pretty dramatically too, where you have red receipts, you know, between Android. It's pretty cool. You guys have seen the Android folks typing and been like, what's that or seen the red receipts?

Like, why is the green bubble doing the typing thing? It's starting to happen. So you're right. I think gold bubbles are coming. The open AI phone is coming. He's going to pick a different color. Trump phone. Trump phone will have gold bubbles.

Yeah, I'm no doubt about that. The gold bubbles are coming. Talk to us about Google. You interviewed Sergey Brain recently. What was your read on his involvement? Because I feel like there's a press cycle every few months about like he's coming back. He's back in founder mode. He's deeper than ever.

He's not fully stepping into the CEO seat, but they're clearly. clearly stepping up to the AI moment. At the same time, they're dropping a ton of product updates. Google I.O. was a massive event with like a ton of different features. And then they're also at the parade of frontier of so many AI models in terms of performance and cost. And yet a lot of stuff's not breaking through. What's your read on Google right now?

I think they are, they knew they were behind on AI. I mean, basically they had, they developed, this is going to be old history for a lot of people, but for those who don't know, they developed this transformer model within Google. They were very safety concerned. We talked about Blake Lemoyne a little bit ago. He was using a version of their LLM chatbot called Lambda that he believed was a person. So they had this advanced technology working within the company, but Open AI, of course, was first to market with something that exploded with chat GPT. So once I think Sundar Pichai realized what was going on, he said, okay, we're going to turn all of our full.

focused toward, you know, this AI moment building large language models. And he was lucky or fortunate or he planned, whatever you want to say. I mean, the company has Demis Asabas, the head of DeepMind in there. And he consolidated these two divisions, DeepMind and Google Brain, which had traditionally kind of struggled over resources and realized they needed to coordinate. So Demis takes over both of those divisions. And now you see that Google is shipping like crazy with AI. And they have some great, I mean, they obviously previewed some very cool things. at Google AI. I think some great features working already.

I mean, notebook LM is really interesting. I think Gemini could work a little better in places like Gmail, but we'll probably see it. Like being able to search your email is a pretty big deal. And do things like I sometimes will say,

like pull out the emails from all of big technologies, paid subscribers recently to, so I can invite them, you know, to our private discord. And Gemini gets that right about 50% of the time. So I think it's clear that they're in like this moment. What do you expect to see out of the Google Open AI relationship? Right now we're seeing tension between Microsoft and OpenAI.

They're partners. They maybe both are unhappy with how the deal is worked out. I think all this stuff is evolving. But in my view, over the next five to ten years, I just see this massive war and battle for the consumer between Open AI and Google. Is that how you're looking at it as well? And do you expect to see more attention there? It probably will happen.

So just to, I'm going to answer that question. I'll just finish up what I was saying, that Google's in this moment of reinvention. So they are going to move from search to AI. And also, I think Sergey is really involved on the technical side of things to answer that part. So the partnership that Google and OpenAI did is for basically server space. I think OpenAI is really running out of GPUs. And of course, they have this hosting deal with Microsoft that's kind of like up in the air. We're not quite sure where we're going to.

go on that front. And you see Sam Altman every couple days saying, all right, we're out of GPUs, stop burning our servers. He's joking, but it's a real issue for the company. So of course, you look to Google, which has the TPUs to sort of offload some of that, some of that sort of compute need. Now, we don't see Open AI being made, unless I'm wrong here, we don't see OpenAI's models being made available within Google Cloud. That's the other side of the equation. I spoke with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Curry in a couple of months ago and he said we'd welcome Open AI on the platform. So that's another step I think that we should anticipate. And then on the consumer side, I mean, again, like, and you guys know this better than anyone else. Like Silicon Valley is filled with

frenemies. And we have another situation here where you're probably going to have Google. You'll have Open AI. We already have it. Open AI relying on Google infrastructure, but competing with them on, let's say, the assistant front or the chatbot front. And I think that's one of the cool things. about watching tech and for those who are in tech being in tech is there is almost, you know, a reliance on one another's innovations and products, but also a recognition that everyone is working to build the best products and made the best product wins, win. And, you know, one product may be the king one day and then it could get leapfrog the next and build on top of each other. So I do see this being a heated battle. And we're going to see a lot more drama. I anticipate from all these companies

coming up pretty soon. But it is notable that now OpenAI and Google have opened up the line of communications, line of communication, and maybe more is coming. Last question. Yeah, I'm excited to, I'm excited to see all this play out. My last question, when can we place Open AI in the category of big tech? Are they there yet? Does 300 million, 300 billion dollar valuation, does that do it? What's your framework. It's so interesting because yesterday I was seeing people on X talk about like whatever happened to fang, right? It was Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google. And people are calling it mango now. You guys saw that? Like meta, Amazon Apple and video. I just like Mac 7. Mag 7 works. We're hoping, we're hoping that YC can make enough startup so we get the Mag 70.

see you'd like to expand it yeah so I would say look I'm not I'm not a mango head like the oh and mango is open AI I'm not a mango head yet but it certainly seems like they're on the trajectory so I'm I'll put my order in and and we'll wait on it for a little bit now how much have you dug into the innovator's dilemma with regard to Google there's this whole story about like Sundar Pichai hasn't read the book and doesn't matter and Ben Thompson says well it doesn't matter because it's structural but the thing that I keep replay laying is like, is like, what if Google had actually just released that Blake Le Moyne chat bot? Like, what if they were the first mover in chat bots before chat GPT?

It feels, it feels like that chat GPT moment would have been theirs. And then they could have compounded off off of that and it would have been fine. But maybe they'd be disrupting themselves. Do you have any thoughts on, on that? I mean, it gives more credit to Chris Pike's thesis around top down, first bottoms up innovation. But anyways. Yeah, so I mean, I wrote this book that came out in April 2020.

I don't recommend releasing books since the first wave of a pandemic, but it is sort of what launched big technology for me. And it's called Always Day One. And the idea is comes from Bezos that the reason why the big tech companies have been able to stay competitive and dominant for longer than the average, right? The average company on the S&P 500 last 15 years today, as opposed to 67 years last century. and the reason why these companies have been able to sustain their dominance is because they reinvent and they don't really care too much about their legacy business. They're able to say, what is going to take me into the next generation? And sometimes they're late.

I mean, Microsoft is a perfect example. They held onto Windows forever. They had the lost decade. And then Satya Nadella, who ran the server and tools business, which was all about on-prem servers, said, you know what, let's do this cloud thing. And now they're where they are today. Google had maybe a lost couple years, but I think they've definitely gotten with the program, like I mentioned, they're in reinvention territory right now. And I think you could really tell the difference between what they were doing and what Apple was doing at WWDC, although some might disagree.

But they're all in on AI right now. And I think that you don't have to be first. You have to be all in and you have to nail it. And the book isn't yet written on where Google ends up after this because it does. threaten search. But I think they have as good a chance of as any given the, like we talked about, the compute, the talent and the data to be one of the leaders, if not the leader in generative AI. Well, hopefully you're the one to write the book. That would be cool. But thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah. We'd love to have you back to

this is fantastic conversation. Definitely. Great having you. I'm a fan of your show. Thank you for having me on. Have a great rest of your day. Looking forward to the next one. Cheers. Bye. Take care, guys. Next up, we have Seekwan Barkley from the NFL. coming in for Philadelphia Eagles. Let's bring him in the studio. And we will talk to him. That everything going on in his world. Welcome to the show.

Ramp day. It is ramp day. It wouldn't be ramp day without Sequin. Hold on. We are going to do one ad first. If you're looking for a luxury watch, go to getbezzle.com. Your bezel concierge is now available to source you any watch on the planet.

Seriously, any watch. We are working to bring in Seycoy. Kwong. And do we have more news to talk about in the meantime? We can also talk about wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. We are working on that. Oh, I think he's here. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? What's so, guys? Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for jumping on. been looking forward to this.

Congratulations on a massive day in Ramp World. We'd love to get your story. How'd you meet Eric Glyman? What's it been like to work with him? It's been great. It's been great. The conversation and introduction kind of came from my manager, Cuzz, who's been super helpful with me in learning and exploring more in the tech world.

But getting to know Eric and being involved. Eric has been amazing. He's become a really good friend. My favorite thing I like to tell people about Eric is he has this contagious smile. He always has this big smile. He really does. Every single time you're around him, it makes you feel welcome. And just him and his team, like, they've been doing an amazing job and excited for the news that they're now today.

Yeah, it's huge. Talk to me about the Super Bowl ad. We have your picture from the Super Bowl ad up on the stream right now. How did that come together? How fast was that process? How was the shoot? Yeah, we've been talking to Ramp for a while, the Ramp team for a while. I had dinner with Sam and Max in PA.

Oh, yeah. We got a couple of them. They were able to come to a game. And I forgot. It was maybe like 10 days a week or two before the Super Bowl. My manager, Cuzz, asked me about this idea. of running our ad, usually, you know, I probably would say no to Super Commercial 10 days before, but the ramp team, they're super efficient.

And, you know, they made it so easy and they were so helpful for me. And, you know, they obviously knew I had a lot of stake and wanted to make sure that was the main focus. But they did a great job. I think the ad came out amazing. They also showed me that, you know, in past, these brands that I have worked with, they probably took too much of my time when you're able to do this and under the power and create something so special and that fans love.

But the whole team, the whole ramp team is incredible. Karim, Sam, Max, all them. They're all special people and I'm excited to be able to work with them. What was the reaction from the rest of the team to see you in an enterprise software ad in the Super Bowl? Was that surprising or was everyone just kind of excited to see you take that step? Yeah, I think it was more just exciting. I'm more excited.

I've always, you know, always talking about how can I do, how can I be creative in new ways? And, you know, we always talk about financial freedom and evolving yourself with the best companies and the best founders. And, you know, it's been pretty cool. Just so far, my career, all the great things I've been able to do. But the platform that has been established because of football, things football is able to bring me into and the world is able to bring me into. and I don't know all the stuff yet, but continue to learn in this space and continue to meet, you know, extremely incredible people and incredible teams. Yeah, it's an exciting time. I want to talk about lessons from popular books.

A lot of people in tech have read The Score takes care of itself by the 49ers coach and borrowed ideas from football and taking the back to business. You read zero to one. What is a concept that you took from zero to one or you think other football players could take? take back into the world of football from that book? That's a great question. Peter talks about, you know, when you're starting company, you never want to have two people doing the same job. And an interesting thing that Nick Serrani did this year,

well, my first year, I'm pretty sure he did it in years prior with the Eagles, my first year with the Eagles, he had all of us in a meeting and let all of us know what our role was and what was expecting of us. Not saying that our role can expand, not saying it can increase, but what's needed for us to be able to go out there and compete and accomplish what we all want to accomplish

the sewer ball. I think the things you could take is just from you. Might be losing you. It's a right to play. buying, knowing what you got to do, knowing what you got to accomplish. Sometimes your role is not doing what the team asks you to do to be successful and it takes a great team.

And you guys, hear you? Yeah, you're back. Yeah, we kind of dropped out for a second, but we got most of that. Yeah, can you hear me? Yep. There? Oh, sorry about that.

No worries. Can you hear us? Yeah, yeah. We're good on this end, I think. Yep, I hear you guys. Okay, cool. Let's move on to another question. I want to talk about similarities between the offense defense dynamic on the football field to, you know, these two units, they aren't necessarily on the field at the same time, but they both need to perform.

There's some similarities to business where maybe the sales team wants to go and sell a product that the engineering team needs to go and deliver and make. They're two teams that need to be working somewhat in concert, but they're doing very different roles. what can you tell us about the team building that goes on between the offense and the defense to keep the whole group working in concert? Yeah, it's super important. Team is the most important thing when it comes to, can you hear me? Yep. Yep.

Hello? Sorry, I think I'm in a dead spot. I apologize. It's okay. But I think team is the most important thing, especially in my sport or just kind of any profession, to be honest. I think the parallels from business, from science, from sports, all those things, you know, have similarities. And it all comes down to building a great team. So we know how important it is for, you know, on the offensive side for us to accomplish what we need to do in an establishment, a line of scrimmints.

But the same thing on the defensive side is stabbington line scrimmage. A lot of games and football is one up front. And it takes all phases, offense, defense, and special teams for us to go out there and accomplish what we want to do. do. And when you look at it in any profession, that's why I say the parallels are so similar, you need a great team. You need people buying into the roads. You need people doing all the little things it takes to be successful. And that's why you have, you know, successful teams. And you have, like, I don't think I can name any individual, whoever you think is successful, whether it's a billionaire, whether it's an MVP. It takes everybody. It takes a family. It takes a culture. It

Sixth or Village to be able to have that, have that success. I want to let you go because obviously you're very busy. Last question for me, and if Jordy has anything he can ask too. Tell me about Big Dom, the chief security officer. What's his role in the organization? What is Big Dom's role in the organization? I don't even know if I have an answer for that, to be completely honest. Big Dom.

I know he gets a lot of love and, you know, ever since he. the situation with the 49ers on the sideline. You know, he's, I go to events and, you know, people ask for my autographs and big Dom is probably getting more requests for autographs and pictures than me. To be honest. But to be, like, the best way I can put it, he's just the glue to the team.

And it's, I'm not even exaggerating when I say that. Like, he is the glue to the team. He keeps everything in line and he makes sure he has everybody's back. and that's one person that I know outside of my family member and friends that if I need anything and I need to make one phone call, I'm picking up the phone and I'm calling Big Donald. I love it. That's amazing. Jordy, you have anything else you want to run through?

Yeah, I wanted to ask, you know, general, you know, how you, you and friends and maybe other players are thinking about investments today. You've invested in Ramp. You've invested in Anderral. These are some of, you know, the top companies in Silicon Valley. in Silicon Valley, a lot of people will start a big companies, sell it, and then make a series of silly investments. How do you avoid maybe making, how do you avoid the bad investments? What's your kind of framework for that?

Yeah, how do you avoid making the bad investments? That's a great question. And you get, as an athlete, you get a lot of things thrown at you, to say the least. You don't know what's the right thing to get involved in. And you just got to try to educate yourself as best you can. And to be honest, when you come from the NFL, a lot of us go to college, go to college for three years, maybe four. And our financial, like us, how educated we are on the financial side of things, it's not that great. And I'm open and honest. and I'm able to admit that to myself

that coming out the NFL, it wasn't that great, and it still has so much room to improve. But the way I handle is by surrounding myself with the right people. And you have to trust people. And one, I have an amazing manager. And he's pretty good at saying no.

To be honest, he would say no to pretty much everything unless Zach Franklin calls. And when Zach calls us, anything he says, it's kind of like, oh, yeah, let's just do it right now. That's right. That's right. Let's just go right to it. Well, it's guys like that. You just surround yourself with people like that who are super smart and super successful and done it the

right way and you're able to build relationships with them. And you're able to earn their trust and you're able to trust them and make those decisions. So it's tough because you get a lot of things thrown at you. And I don't know if I have the exact perfect answer, but I always. That's a pretty good answer. That's a pretty good answer. Yeah, right? Yeah, that's a great answer. I think a lot of people in the tech world, you know, have spent decades. Professional investors, but they should follow the same framework. They should know to those things.

And then if a certain person calls you, you just say, yeah, you back up the truck. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back. I hope to see you soon in person. Yeah, congrats on the markup, too. First of many, I imagine. Thank you guys so much.

And I apologize for the end of the house. No, you're all good. I'm leaving, I was coming back from a event at a hospital. So I might be a little shaky. I apologize. No, you're good. Thank you guys for having me. Yeah, we'd love to have you in the studio soon.

Yeah, we'll get you under the lights here for a couple minutes. We can grab some of your time because this is fantastic. This is great. We'll talk to you guys. Cheers, Sequin. Have a good one. That is an amazing. That's the best investment framework.

I know multiple smart, very smart people that have basically the same framework. That's amazing. If it works, you know, it works. Wait, wait for that one person to call. That was incredible. Anyway, we have our next guest coming up in three minutes in the meantime. Let's run through some timeline. Yeah, we got some, yeah, I mean, the big thing that has been developing for the people monitoring the situation at home.

Apparently, President Trump is warming to the idea of using U.S. military assets that strike. I thought you were going to make a joke about the real monitoring of the situation is the Microsoft OpenAI situation, because that's the one that most people in tech are monitoring on a daily basis. But we do need to cover the geopolitics. What's the update there? Yeah, apparently Trump has been warming up to the idea of military action against Iran, so much so that the polymarket is spiking up to 75% chance of military action against Iran before July. a couple weeks left. Now, there would be a difference between military action and boots on the

ground. And I think that there's probably a bit of a rubicon to cross there mentally for the American people. Obviously, people don't like the idea, or there are many people in America that don't like the idea of sending money to fight a foreign war, and they think we should reprioritize America and American paying down the death. For example, all those different things. The Ukraine war has gotten some pushback from a lot of folks in tech and beyond for that reason. But The real red line for a lot of people is boots on the ground. Don't send our soldiers over there. It's a quagmire.

We live through the global war on tear. Let's never do that again. And so it'll be interesting to track which way this leans because there's obviously multiple tiers to engaging. One is just you sell the weapons or technology to another government that uses them. Then you're deploying American military assets, but no boots on the ground. And then the final is, of course, boots on the ground.

But hopefully this whole thing resolves. Quickly and we can get to a peace negotiation and a trade deal because we want we want freedom and we want capitalism Stability we want we want we want business we want we want we want we want we want we want we want we want we want we want Yeah, give me the Iranian whiz that's what I want yeah give me some cyber security companies that we can flip to Google for 30 billion That's what I want crazy anyway we have some more apparently there's some news leaking about open AIs uh sorry x aI or sorry x fund raising. Oh, okay. That's all right there. They are spending $4.7 billion in the next three months on a new, out of their new $9.3 billion raise. They're projecting $18 billion for new data center CAPEX through 2027. And they are the XAI employee payroll has almost quadrupled since the Series C. It's interesting to think about. Did we hit the gong? Yeah, do it, John.

I'll give you one of these air horns to. There we go. Leaked gong. It's interesting that X was going through this, like, you know, intense austerity, limiting spending, you know, keeping employee counts low. Now it's foom! Now it's just scaling, scaling. I love it. We love scale.

It's great. So. What else is in the news? Oracle has a new initiative to help company sell technology to the Pentagon. Larry Ellison, absolute dog. working to help bridge the gap between startups, companies, and the DOD. We've seen this from a couple of companies. Palantir has the AIP program.

Anderil's been acquiring some companies and leveraging their connections in the DOD to actually get distribution on these products once they're built. Every company has a different kind of angle on the problem, but it feels like the big narrative is like, we heard this from the Secretary of the Army. The DOD is ready to buy new capability from the private sector, but it's not. still really hard to actually get a program record. It's actually really hard to get the products in, educate people, build the right consensus, figure out what the budgets are, and get the products in the hands of the warfighter. And so Oracle is stepping up with a program called the Oracle Defense ecosystem. It's structured to help smaller companies break through the challenges they typically face in selling tech to the Defense Department. It's far too hard to serve the American

Defense Enterprise. We can provide an easy path for these companies to get better access to the defense market. So shout out Oracle, consistently underrated. I say put him in the Mag 7 right now. If you just saw the chart of Oracle, you would think it was a Bitcoin chart. I love it. It's just basically up into the right like crazy. It's an absent hockey stick. In other news, Morgan Barrett is posting just 30 minutes ago. He said when I heard that there was rampant payments corruption in Iran among the military, which is causing the regime to collapse, I initially thought that was a TBPN bit advertising ramp. So yeah, we want to, you know, there's once, once, you know, Iran is, is, uh, free and

capitalist. We are happy to go over there and spread the good word. Everyone on ramp. Anyway, we have our next guest, Ryan from Crosby coming in the studio. Ryan, how you doing? There he is. Welcome. Hey, guys.

Big day. What's going on? Congratulations. Yeah, kick us off in the introduction of the company yourself, the news, everything. Amazing. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for getting me on. Are we ringing the gong? Well, I mean, you got to tell us is there something gong worthy to ring the bell? We're announcing Crosby today. We've been in stealth since about the fall and we're announcing that we raised our $5.8 million seat.

Let's go. Congratulations. There we go. Incredible. For that all day. Congratulations. Congrats. So breaking down, what are you building and then give us some differentiation? How do you see the market playing out. We'll dig into it all, but give us the... Yeah, 100%. I'll give maybe like a few seconds on my background and how I got here. Yeah. This is a live tracker, by the way. I'll get to that this second. Yeah, I want to hear about that for sure. And it's changing way onto these boxes. I love it. So my background is,

have been between tech and law for like a decade. Early at a couple of startups that did well. And also for various reasons, ended up going to law school practicing. My last company, we grew really quickly from like 10 to 100 people in about a year. And the only thing slowing us down was contracts. And because I was the only person there who knew anything about legal, it was like my problem. And obviously I tried out every legal AI thing I could get my hands on over the last few years. It's such an interesting space. But I kept feeling like something was missing. A lot of the legal AI tools, plug-ins, word add-ons on the market made me a little faster as a lawyer, but I was still doing so much manual work. And so I started working my co-founder

John Sarahan really early at Ramp. So we're celebrating twice today. Let's go. I'm really interested in like, yeah. The Ramp Alumni Day. Yeah. John's big post of the day is that finance agents could walk so legal agents could run. Oh, that's great. That's as good as we did. Yeah.

So we got, you know, John, like he was obsessed with helping, you know, fast green businesses grow faster and save money and save time. Like that was his thing. And I was obsessed with this contract problem. We started jammy idea last summer. And really quickly we came up the idea of just starting our own law firm. Like what would that look like? Like full, you know, starting from scratch. hire lawyers, try to replace their work agentically, like what work can actually be done with agents,

what can't, how do we get the speed of AI with the expertise of lawyers? And, you know, we had this feeling like contracts are the API of business. Like anytime there's any economic growth transaction between two parties, there is a contract. And we should make that faster. They haven't changed in like 50 years the way we review them. So that's what we're doing. That's Crosby. Okay. Yeah, I have been very upset with The legal bills? No, no, no. Well, that.

That, I love our lawyer, but, you know, it's, you know, it's definitely a cost center. No, but I've been kind of interested to follow, you know, the fact that we haven't adopted more AI. We're an S&B, right? We use AI all over the place. We use AI across the entire business from content generation to management, transcription, all sorts of transcription. Research, all this stuff. and yet, you know, when it comes to actually generating and, you know, going back and forth on contracts, it's still very manual.

And it just feels like a place that we already should be, have picked things up. Yeah. Can you talk about the different tiers of legal work? Like my mental model for this is like there's like form filling, which did actually get somewhat commoditized by, just crud apps in the web 2.0 era. You have companies like LegalZoom, if you need to just fill out a form to form an LLC, they'll do that. Stripe Atlas, for example,

doesn't use, didn't use AI, but was able to advance a lot of things. Then on the far other end, you have someone who looks more like a legal artist, like the top tier of lawyers who are thinking really creatively about how to construct also. I mean, whoever came up with the Open AI org chart, Clearly, that person's not getting displaced by AI anytime soon because that was the work of art.

It's like a, it's a raw shock painting. It's a big law. Exactly. Yes. I mean, if you're the legal bills, there's probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But it seems like every year, as we chip away, better foundation models, more agentic reasoning, longer, longer test time inference, longer reasoning agents, we can move things from one bucket to the other. And so talk to me about the flow of like the roadmap of moving more and more into the AI world. What's, what's, you know, today, what's in six months?

What are you tracking on the foundation model side looking forward to an unlock? Yeah, I mean, these are like, I mean, there's like the fundamental questions that John and I were playing with back last fall when it was like me sitting there doing legal work and him look over my shoulder trying to convince me he could automate the things I was doing and me being really skeptical. And like we did this for weeks. And I think, I mean, I think you nailed it. There's sort of like we kind of mapped out and there's probably thousands of skews of legal work from like reformating a word document to, you know, writing an appellate brief for a court. I think as you go from more least complicated to more complicated, the work gets slower. It gets more expensive. And it looks more like an art. And it's like there's a real craft to it. It gets more

sophisticated. And I mean, part of what's going on there is that part of legal work is fundamentally like a dialogue between humans, right? It's a lawyer to a judge or to a jury or to contract, you know, like parties negotiating with each other. And there's like nuance and subtlety that we just had a really hard time like like the difference between the words reasonable and commercial reasonable are like an embedding sort of concept almost the same, but but actually quite different. So like, so this is what we're struggling with. I think look, we obviously have a long bet on where the models will get to in terms of like getting better and better so that we can have a fully agemptic law firm like that is where surely this will go and so the idea that we started

with like a word add-on as like the packaging for this is kind of like no lawyer has ever or nobody's ever gone and said i want a word out on they just they want a lawyer they want to throw it over the fence and not think about it so that's what we're doing here today and right at like we call it like right at the sort of cutting edge like of where the machines sort of stop and the human intuition or judgment or just accuracy has to come in That's kind of what we've been trying to model like from a workflow perspective where lawyers will jump in. That's where we are today. Yeah.

To be more precise on the like where, what kind of what skews like where did things land. I think right now we're focused on contracts. It's crazy. It's like there's $40 billion or so that we map spent on contract review in the US. These are like contracts that are like a lease to like a merchant agreement that's 80 pages. And so we just focus there. And so our goal is to move up the complexity scale. We're with these commercial agreements now that are like, let's call it, you know,

first quartile, you know, not the easiest things, but still needs some human in the loop. Talk about, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about maybe how, so we recently moved into this new studio, the typical process. You wait a long time to get a lease. When you finally get the lease, you know, I take a quick skim, throw it over to our lawyer. They're like, cool, it's going to take us a while to review this, right? It's variable. Maybe they're busy, maybe they're not, they turn it around. You get through this issues. How much, do you already feel like you're an order of magnitude better than the traditional process? Like, can I basically immediately send a contract to Crosby?

And you guys can just like basically go line by line almost immediately. And, you know, because the typical process is like, okay, you have a lease. Maybe there's 15 or so places that you might want to push back or change or things you want to add. And you're basically just going through and talking through those things. And it feels like that could be done. I imagine I don't know how far along you guys are. It feels like you could already be at a point where the speed that the sort of... It's almost like I want an agent on my side and I want them to have an agent on their side.

And I want the two agents to fight it out and do two weeks of fighting in two minutes. Because like really, I want representation and they deserve representation. But I just want things to go faster because what kills me is not that they're pushing back on, is it $2,000 or $5,000. What I hate is. that it's two weeks in between a turn of documents. Okay, like, honestly, the first thing about the mapping out legal complexity was like the first slide in a pitch deck. Okay. And then like the last slide, where this, this is, this is illusory but crazy idea, but it's like, it's getting more real. Yeah. That there's a professor that was doing research, I think, at Stanford Law School that, like,

if you have two law students doing mock negotiations for divorce negotiations, so it's very, like, stylized, it's like who gets the kids on these days and that date. And then you give their same bottom lines to agents. The repeated agentic negotiations, they simulate that process. They always get to better outcomes for both parties in minutes, right? So it's simple. There's not that many things to negotiate. So John and I were thinking like, okay, there's like about 50 main sticking points in a commercial agreement. This is like, if you're any startup, you were selling software, you were negotiating MSAs constantly. It's about 50 sticking points. What if we could map, like Adobe's preferences and like Microsoft preferences. And rather than having months of back and forth,

just agentically simulated. And in minutes, say, guys, this is what you were going to get to. And so that's like maybe a few years out. But that's the goal of this company. We want to be the API for businesses to connect with each other from a legal and risk hearing standpoint. Where we are today, how it works, like in terms of, because we got money now. We're signing a new office and we're doing that same thing.

No, you spend three months. Exactly. We need new office. But we like these commercial agreements, right? Like you do a few of them every week. we're actually I would say and like I think for the fastest growing companies these are the things that really sold them down so we're specifically working with the fastest growing companies on the market like we've been working with cursor and Unify we've now done this is over 1,200 contracts since we launched there we go and so and they look similar right so they're kind of like they're you see patterns you see their preferences and so the way it was today and this is like it's like all the pain that like I hated was like when a lawyer sends you something back it's going to be an hour or two days you don't know and they're going to ask you. you have to clarify and kind of solve things and then you send to the counterparty. Today, the way it works is a salesperson at cursor or at Clay will just slack us a document, tag our bot.

We ingest it. We do a review obviously with some AI, some human oversight, send it back within an hour. Our median time is 58 minutes and the salesperson is right back. We have a knowledge base for everything those clients care about. So we know the things that Chris is like, I don't care. We don't need to worry about that. We can let it go and the things that really matter. And our, our, our driving insight here was we can unlock sales teams to be so much more, you know, fast at their jobs, the things that really matter because of this. You mentioned that you're building a Word, a Word, a Word plugin. Microsoft's obviously built co-pilots into a few of their products.

Are you worried about getting paper-clipped if Clippy comes back and Clippy gets a law degree? Clippy with a Harvard law degree. That is dangerous. I'm joking, but I'm somewhat serious. It feels like the last thing on Microsoft's roadmap, but they do have GitHub co-pilot. They do have a product for software engineers. Is there any risk of Microsoft going into this market, just generally, even if it's not directly because of the question everyone wants to ask, what if Clippy does this?

What if Clippy does this? Are you going to get paper clipped? Yeah. Wow. That's, I don't think that. All right. So I think that, so, you know, the first thing that like every founder of legal tech is, like, I'm going to build a better text editor.

I'm going to build a better Microsoft Word. And it's like this pipe dream. And it never works. Like it's just like you can't. It's impossible. If you move the image, the whole document always goes. That's just the nature of Word docs. I can't even take how much time.

So like I don't know, I'm bullish on clipy. Like I think we're like we're working heavily on top of word. But we're not like the better that we do and the more documents you review, the more the more word licenses that we need to buy for our law. Yeah. And also, I mean you have you have a flywheel and it's a completely different market. it. We will never sell against Microsoft Word. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Would you ever, would you ever release a B2B to B type product in terms of like a copilot? It feels like a very distinct decision to say we are our own law firm, tech-enabled law firm. We are not, you know, just allowing other law firms to build on top of this. So like, I think lawyers, I mean, I am one, right? Like, I think that we appreciate, and I mean, I say this sincerely, like, there's an art to what we do. But I think it makes us really ambivalent about AI. Like, we, like, even if the work it does, not all that we, you know, we talk to so many lawyers and some of them are like the most AI pills, but most are like, I'd rather write it my way. Like, I think the way that I drafted that sentence.

Like, even if our tools, like, I always thought that there would be a cursor for legal by now that lawyers would just like use the way our whole team is obsessed with, you know, with, with, um, you know, better ID, but I don't think it's manifested, which is all to say, I think part of what we're innovating on here is not just the software and the AI sort of workflow tools we're building, but also the way that we train lawyers, that we upskill them. It's a skill issue, the way that we get them better at what they do to use AI, the way that we want them to. Now, if we can fully automate this service one day, and it's basically like selling software, which I think we will do, I still want to package it like a service. I don't want people like opening up a software platform to deal with It's like lawyers, that's just not how people think about their lawyers.

It's just a problem you want to throw to someone else. And so I'd love us to feel more of that service experience always. Yeah, like it's an agent in Slack and you can get that experience that you have with a great lawyer of, you know, just talking through things. Last question, for me at least. I don't know how much you've studied the history of like legal tech, but Atrium's like the popular story that everyone knows. But there was actually a company before. Do you know Clear Spire? Have you heard of this?

Okay. Yes. So lessons from Clear Spire and Atrium, I'd love to know how you tell the story to maybe investors who are asking about those companies and what lessons you've learned and how you're differentiating. Well, what's interesting is like those companies were all like sequentially sort of staggered by like, I'm amazing about Clear Spire. That's like niche. This is great book about it.

Do you know what I'm talking about it? I haven't read the book. I, but there was like a Harvard business case study on it. Yeah, like PDF. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, so like I think they came up with a really close. innovation, which is you have a, it's just, it's a regulatory thing, but you have a C corporation, you know, typical startup and your PLLC. And then a binding contract, right? Exactly. And so we've done that. And then ACHO did that. They took it a little farther. They, but and they, and they took it a little farther and focused on types of work that were maybe more automatable. They focused on startup law. They were like YSys law firm. Yep. And I actually haven't spoken with, maybe I spoke to one person from Clear Spire,

but I've spoken to all the co-founders now of Atrium. And almost all of them, except for one, Right idea, wrong time. Like, we just spent all of our money on LLP and now that's a solve problem. Totally. Right? Yep. And so that's the issue. And so like that's the story is like it's a really, really good idea.

Yeah. You go after specific types of law that can be automated that like you don't even care the lawyer's name. There's types of work where you're like, I need to know my lawyer's name. Yeah. I want to know their resume. But for other work, you need it fixed. And so I really think like they, they figured out the hard things for us and they set the stage.

Yeah. I mean, the Series A branding is like, we'll do your Series A. super cheaply. It was like it was it was great wedge but it just didn't expand that much because like you only do one series A and then for the B it's like way more complicated and you just bring in a traditional offer. Totally. And that's a loss leader for like pool. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It doesn't feel like a loss leader when I get a six figure bill. But I guess it is. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Yeah, I'm super excited. I mean there's so many different types of contracts that don't make sense to that that are important that need to be done well that don't make sense to you know, you don't

need to, you know, spend tens of thousands of dollars on. So anyways, very excited for you. Excited to follow the journey. You can be one of our new legal AI experts in residence. So come back on when there's news. And congrats to you and the team. Congratulations. Cheers. Talk to you on. Bye. Great. Well, that's been a fantastic show. Let's check in with Tyler on his review of windsurf. Did you get installed? How's it going? Yeah. So it's pretty good. I think I think I haven't used a lot of these like IDEs yet. I've used cursor like a little bit.

So you have like your code's like handmade like farm to table. Yeah, yeah. I like to actually like to usually I write it up by hand and then I just scan it in. Sure. I think it's more of a. Yeah, I feel like I feel closer to the code base then. Fantastic. But I think it's really useful.

I mean it's great for like front end stuff. I think and obviously I've only been using it for like, you know, an hour or half. Yeah. I'm sure there's a learning curve. But I think when you. you start to have like, okay, now I have this function that runs on server. It's like, how does that connect? It might not be in the exact same code base. It's hard to integrate these things. Sure. But I think for small, like, it's just running locally. It's like super great.

Okay. Did you have to, was there a model selector? Because there was that drama about anthropic, like pulling the plug on the windsurf connection so that when you set it up, you used to just give windsurf your credit card, and then you'd have access to Claude, and they would handle the billing internally. Now it seems like you have to bring your own Cloud API if you want to use Sonnet, which is the popular one, I believe. Is that right? What was your experience like selecting a model? So I'm on the like free tier, but I think it's like a free trial. But I can choose 3.5 Sonnet. But yeah, it's bring your own keys. Got it. So I would have to go to the cloud website and then do like export keys. Okay. I just paste it in. But even then, I mean, I'm sure it's like

pretty easy still. Do you notice any? Do you notice? the original question we had was like, if Microsoft got their hands on this intellectual property, that would be incredibly valuable? Like, does that feel like a reasonable narrative to you? Or are we leaning more like this is more about data aggregation in the front door to AI? I mean, if I had to guess, I assume it's the latter. Like, I think there were some rumors at some point about opening eye trying to build their own kind of IDE and that it failed. Interesting.

And that was like maybe the reason for the acquisition. Yeah. But I mean, I can't imagine that it's really the IP. Yeah. Because I mean, at some point it's like just, it's kind of a, at some point it's like a VS code fork, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, Microsoft owns VS code. So yeah, you'd think that they would be able to iterate towards like the best in practice UI patterns essentially.

If that's what really makes Winsurf stand out. I'm wondering like there was a ton of heat on Winsurf. on X for a while. It was really popular. And yet I saw that at the AI Dev World Fair that Swicks put on. They had everyone raise their hands, and it was like 80 or 70, 80, 90% cursor users. So cursors clearly broken through in a really meaningful way

into just like broad adoption. And that seems really, really valuable because you're getting all that training data that then can be used in reinforcement learning contexts and derive better AI models. Also, yeah, it seems like it's kind of unclear to me exactly how much of a real issue this is. We'll have to ask some more people. We have some other AI folks coming on the show later this week.

We'll try and dig into, you know, is Microsoft after just the cash flows or the equity or the data or the IP or the models? Because they have like different claims on different pieces of open AI. And all of those are probably negotiating points as they kind of separate these two entities out. And so it's certainly a unique situation because most investors, if you get them on your cap table, maybe you give them a board seat, but they're not getting access to your GitHub. They're not getting access to your code or your IP. Can you imagine if that was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, I took money from this tier one VC and then they just gave all my code to a competitor that they invested in. Like that would be a wild day. It really is a wild deal in hindsight. I mean, it was a wild deal at the time, but the sort of 49% cap, profit share. We don't get equity. We don't have a board seat. But, You know, we have sort of a right to IP here and the individual models. So it's going to take a long time to shake out. And Sam is fighting wars on at least a couple fronts. Yeah.

I mean, we didn't get a chance to dig into the full Ben Thompson article on this. But he says, the Wall Street Journal doesn't indicate who its sources are, but there is little doubt in my mind. They too are on the open AI side. And I get why. And he says, his biggest takeaway has Ben Thompson. Thompson writing a strategy which you should subscribe to. He says, my biggest takeaway from this story is that I have underestimated the amount of leverage that Microsoft has over OpenAI.

I mostly wrote about this slow motion train wreck last month. I still think that his take is broadly correct. And note that the right to make Open AI models available to other cloud providers is one of the points of contention in the story. But the fact that Open AI seems to be reduced to issuing fantastical threats through press suggests. that the decision about the endpoint of these negotiations is almost entirely up to Microsoft.

To that end, I can understand if the company is pushing for more than I suggested. Indeed, if anything, these threats through the press might make Microsoft wanna hold on to more since they probably have, since they'll probably have to fight Open AI again in a few years. I still think, however, that this is all the more reason

to give more ground now in exchange for an ironclad agreement securing Microsoft's exclusive Azure access to Open AI models in perpetuity. That is a fascinating thing because if OpenAI somehow compounds and runs away with it, they have this massive consumer engine that could be – so it feels like right now Anthropic and Open AI on the developer side are neck and neck and Anthropic even seems a little bit ahead on CodeGen and just developer adoption.

But if it winds up being a capital fight, if it winds up being a capital fight, if it winds up being biggest data center wins and we need to build the trillion dollar data center and stargate becomes extremely real and extremely material will then having a consumer app that's printing 10 billion dollars a year is going to be way easier to underwrite as an investor to go and build the next model and then you might get higher scale which could make the developer API more valuable and if Microsoft has exclusive right to resell that that and they're the b2b player they're the b2b front end to Open AI models, that is extremely valuable, extremely valuable. So I was not, I was not aware of that. He also talks about his interview with Cursar CEO Michael Truel. It is, it is that the perfect irony

with OpenAI is that it's one, a YC company run by Sam Altman, who was president of Open AI. and if YC was advising a startup that came to them and they said, we're going to enter into this like really complicated commercial agreement and we're going to structure as a nonprofit, we're going to take all these donations. And then in the future, we'd like to go public. They would be like, you should just try to not add too many people to your board. You know, take as little dilution as possible.

You should, you should basically run like a dictatorship. Yeah. And the same moment's talked about this. I would not take my, I would do not do as I say, not as I do. Yeah, so to create one of the most important new companies of a generation, and then to have it just be ensnared in all of this drama from the nonprofit stuff and the battle with Elon all the way now to battle with Satya is just absolutely brutal. Well, the last story we should close it out with is the Trump phone. The Wall Street Journal says Trump's smartphone can't be made in America for $499 by August. that's because we got Tyler over here

assembling iPhones in America if Trump gets a hold of them I think all bets are off but Trump's mobile phone shows some specs that would beat Apple's biggest, priciest iPhone models doesn't want to just make it in America he wants to release a gold Android phone that will be proudly designed and built

in the United States fascinating development this is the first time I heard it was when the Wall Street Journal was saying it can't be done but yeah apparently Trump's son told the podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday morning. You can build these phones in the United States.

So we'll see. Where? How? Got to dig into that. The display is going to rival Apple's $1,200 iPhone 16 Pro Max. Nobody ever thought to turn the White House into an incubator. It's happening. Nobody ever thought, I mean, I'm surprised hundreds of years of presidents.

Nobody thought I'm going to turn this into a venture studio. Venture Studio. Jimmy Carter had a peanut farm, but he divested. An idiot before he took the residence. Because he didn't want, he wanted his hands clear. He didn't want any conflicts of interest. So he sold his peanut farm. We are now in a different era.

Building 50 megapixel iPhones. The hottest new Venture Studio is the White House. White House. Anyway. I mean, the velocity of new C-Corps and LLCs that they're just firing out of an absolute canon. Kidin, yep, Bitcoin treasuries and social networks and crypto projects. Yeah, we didn't really cover the story of this, of the Tron IPO.

Yeah. Not enough people are, are. Which Eric Trump has now denied having a role. Okay. I mean, this is the first founder of a unicorn company in the White House. Yeah. It's huge. People talked about Zuckerberg maybe running for president.

They never said, Unicorn Tech founder, Donald. Trump. Yes. Yes. They never introduce them that way. Maybe they should. Really put the focus on what matters. What's truth trading at?

Truth. Figure it out. Oh, wild times. Wild times. A cool 5.1 billion. 5.1? That feels down off of a little bit of a pie. Yeah.

I mean, it's been generally down to the right. In 2022, it peaked at 92. 92 well the intraday high was $99. It's sitting at $18 now. Okay. So it was like a $30 billion stock at one point. Yeah, but you know, if you sell enough Trump mobile devices. Who knows?

And then the true. Maybe it's a catalyst. Maybe Trump media, DJT, true social is just pre-installed. And maybe they have their own search. They build out their own search. I think they should get into foundation models. Really, really take a run at the big labs. hire some researchers, start doing some reinforcement learning.

Let's see it. I want some research papers. Maybe they should do an open source model. I want some thought leadership on artificial intelligence, AGI. We've suspected that he's AGI pilled, but we haven't seen it in the research papers. Let's make it happen. Anyway, that's our show, folks.

Thanks for watching. We had some range today. George Potts, was wild, he had some spicy takes. He did. That was fun. I wish we had another 30 minutes. We went all over the place. We went over to Chinese history.

We went into the NFL. Technology investors, Sequin Berkeley. Some series A, some series B's. Really good range. Fantastic show. I think that's exactly what people come here for. Anyway, thank you for watching, folks. Thank you, folks.

We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day. Cheers.