TBPN - Ryan Petersen, James Cadwallader, Quaid Walker, Sarah Guo, Nicholas Harris, Raunaq Singh, Deel Spy Scheme, Tesla Deliveries Drop

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight 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.com/Follow 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(00:43) - Deel Spy Story (38:42) - Tesla Deliveries Drop/Elon Possible WH Departure (01:00:33) - Ryan Petersen/New Tarrifs on the Horizon (01:34:17) - James Cadwallader (01:48:31) - Quaid Walker (02:01:14) - Sarah Guo (02:34:06) - Nicholas Harris (02:46:23) - Raunaq Singh

You're watching TVVN. It's James Bondi. It's Tuesday. It's Wednesday. April 2nd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital.

We are enjoying these pistols. Apparently you don't get a gun if you're a spy for a B2B SaaS company, but you do get a gun if you're a podcaster. So that's fun. And you do get cool code words. Yeah. We're going to be busting out lots of code words. You're going to want to send that watch to London, John.

and then I watch to London. We love a good tech spying story. We've covered it before the allegations that deal implanted a spy or recruited a spy from Rippling, the rival B-to-B SaaS company that handles H.RIS and payroll, amongst other things. We've covered it when the story broke a few weeks ago when I was in Washington, D.C. Now we're back in the Temple of Technology and we're covering it again. And it's fascinating because the spy, so to give you just a little bit of background, Guy works for Rippling, deal is a rival. These two companies are very similar size and scale, but they've been bidder rivals for years funded by different sets of venture capitalists.

Guy from Rippling starts applying for a job at Deal, maybe thinking about jumping ship or starting some consulting and doing some work with Deal, the rival company. winds up messaging with apparently the CEO of Deal and sending over secrets and potential clients and strategies that Rippling is using to win the H-R-I-S market. And it's a fascinating story because you think about spying as being much higher stakes and maybe reserve for the Palantiers of the world or something that SpaceX would need to worry about or maybe Anderl needs to worry about it. You don't think about it in the context of your payroll providers. The lesson is, but it's not one's safe.

No one's safe. And so I think we will go through the affidavit, which we shared on X this morning. Parker Conrad, also the CEO of Rippling, also chimed in with his analysis. But I thought Everett Randall summed it up very nicely. You got to hold it in camera. Boom, boom, boom. We got these water pistols. T-mooglox.

T-mooglox. but they look very, I mean, you spray paint this black, and, you know, that's going to be an issue. That's going to be an issue. They're fun. They actually click when you click on. Anyway, so, Everett, quoting. Yeah, Everett summed it up really well with a great meet. Parker's Post.

So can we pull up the Everett Post? Everett Randall over Klan of Perkins, if you're not familiar. He says, there was a deal spy. Oh. The deal founder told him it'd be like James, James Swan. Spy was directly on founder's payroll. sloppy payment trail, which we'll get into. Founder's dad, also the CFO and chairman, set up a code language to make it feel more like a spy movie.

I honestly am going to be using these lines for a long time. My favorite is send that watch to London. Send that watch to London is going to be in the canon of tech phrases forever. It's going to be like sweet baby rays or the cat is in the bag, the bag is in the river, that whole phrase. I'm trying to think of the other like iconic, Senator, we sell ads, that tonight. I'm not, I don't, I'm not doing it for the money. What was the Sam Wilming quote? Like, it just became like a meme forever.

There's going direct, founder mode. Send that watch to London. You know it's going to be iconic. That is going to be an iconic phrase. But let's start with, let's start with our post and then we'll do some reactions. And I'm sure there was some more reactions that are happening on the timeline right now. So I will run through a little bit of this. And Jordan, feel free to scroll the timeline.

So we covered this story the morning that this was all breaking. the original Parker Conrad post. It was very explosive. At that time, it was unclear, right? The spy, we talked about this, is sort of caught in the middle in a weird way, right? He's not really on anyone's team at that point. We had so many questions.

You know, just in the past month, he'd been paid by both rippling and deal. But now he's out in the wilderness by himself, right? And so there's this big question of which side is he going to take? Because that obviously gives a lot of leverage to the side that he sort of, Blake says, this is my team. Totally.

I'm riding with them. And so. And it even seemed like he was ready to, remember, he was like, I'm willing to take that risk. Yeah. And it felt like he was like rider to ideal. And then all of a sudden he flips and goes, and he starts cooperating with Rippling. And so why don't I, why don't I do some, some reading, we'll kind of trade off the post that we highlighted this morning.

So the affidavit is basically step by step all the different sort of sections to the story. Remarkably readable, 12 pages. Oh, yeah. And it's like, it's not total legally. It's very much... It's in plain English. You can just go read it. We posted it.

We shared it at the bottom of our main thread on the Deal spy. And of course, one of the most fun exchanges here comes very immediately. And it's the reason we are in James Bond mode today with our pistols. It's because... So this all started in September of 2024. Alex, the CEO of Deal, who will need to remember his name's Alex, because we're just going to be calling him Alex. We're called Parker Parker. Rippling, there's a lot of people moving around, but Alex and the spy, his name has leaked,

but I think we're just going to keep calling him the spy because, I don't know, why draw more attention to this guy than he needs? Yeah. Alex suggested that the spy and him discuss career considerations, kind of a normal recruiting cycle. They talk on WhatsApp. They had a phone call and they exchanged messages on LinkedIn and WhatsApp, very normal. Yeah, so the backstory here is the spy was working for Rippling. applied to work at deal and didn't receive an offer.

Which is normal. And so he reached out to Alex to get feedback on the application process. And Alex said you kind of bombed your presentation. Yep. But they built a relationship from that point on, allegedly. Yeah, yeah. All of this is alleged. This is a signed affidavit.

So I think if he's lying in here, he could be committing another crime. He's committing another crime. But let's just be honest, like, Deal has not responded. Maybe they have some amazing response. And like, we'll hear them out if that comes out. It would be super interesting. It would be a crazy plot twist. And we love plot twists.

And so he takes a WhatsApp call with Alex from a meeting room in Rippling's Dublin office while he is at work. And Alex told him, I have an idea. He suggested that he remain at Rippling and become a spy for deal, which is in quotes. So he must have said the word spy, not just like, he could. have been like, you know, dog whistling and said like, hey, like, you know, we would, we would love for you to like give us competitive intelligence, you know, no euphemisms, just straight up spy. And then, and then he says, he suggested that I remain at rippling and become a spy for deal. And I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond, which is hilarious,

hilarious to be like, you're, this is the opportunity to be James Bond in B2B SaaS. He said, I asked him what he meant. He said, he offered me a monetary reward. If I agree. to spy on Rippling for Deal. I told him I'd have to think about it. And so communication immediately starts spitting up between the spy. Alex and Philippe, who's Alex's father and deal CFO.

So it's a father-son combo kind of running the company. And they move from WhatsApp to Telegram. So of course they're unencrypted and probably disappearing messages. And so a lot of those probably won't enter the record anytime. Later they talk about how like a few videos and sort of... Well, later the

The spy, to be clear, breaks his phone with an axe. Destroyes his phone with an axe. Which, as we know, destroys all the information inside for sure. Exactly. Maybe. Who knows? He also flushes down the toilet. He really, like, went after it.

It's just iconic. This is, like, one of the best tech stories in history. So fun. So they have a three-way call between Alex, the dad, and whose deal's CFO and the spy. Alex asked me if I was agreeing to his offer. Once I agreed, Alex said we should move the conversation to Telegram. And so he sets up Telegram to engage in secret communications. Now, this was something we were very interested in hearing was how much was the spy paid?

Because it feels like extremely risky to do this. It seems like it's extremely illegal, maybe criminal. It's like a lot of risk. And these are very high-flying companies. Like the top people at these companies are making millions of dollars, right? they're getting huge comp packages, huge equity bonuses. You would think that to do something that's so risky and so, and also moves the needle for deal a lot.

Like if they poach like one or two of rippling clients from this, like that creates millions of dollars of value. And he should be capturing 50% of that. Yeah, if we were his agent and this is all legal, let's say, we would never advise him on that. We would have said, hey, you're going to put up some historic numbers for deal with what you're doing. you're creating some massive shareholder value for deal,

you need 50% of that. So, like, it's got to be 100K a month. But it wasn't 100K a month. It was 5,000 a month, which feels very low. And it feels like, 5,000 euros. The thing that makes this whole thing so serious is that some of these customers

would have potentially, you know, not gone with rippling or switched from rippling to deal. And those contracts, even if you land a few big logos, could be worth tens of millions. of dollars over the lifetime, over the lifetime. And not to mention that, but there was also, you know, the spy was allegedly passing

information on the superstar talent. Yeah, yeah. Also poaching. And I mean, superstar talent, if you can get someone like that, I mean, what's a recruiter fee? 50K, right? 30K, something like that. And so, you know, he's going to feed some superstar talent and get 5K.

Yeah. Yeah. So to put this into perspective. though 60,000 euros. 6,000 euros. Sorry, it's 5,000 euros. So 60,000 a year and, you know, 5,000 annualized. Spying.

Is what a general practitioner, like a doctor, makes in Ireland. Oh, interesting. And so it's actually like, you should put this into the equivalent of like, he's basically, if he was in the U.S., you'd be getting paid like $300,000 a year. Okay, sure, sure, sure, sure. Like the entry salary for a doctor. So it's not inconsequential. It's very possible that he was making more.

more from this arrangement than his actual base salary. Because he wasn't super senior at Ripley. He just had access to all the system because he was on the team. And man, they must be redoing their security like crazy at Ripley right now. Yeah. Bull market and IT jobs over there. Sure. Well, there's so much irony in this whole story,

but the great irony is that Ripling was selling payroll with IT. And it seems like they were able to use. their own product to catch the spy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is a great, I'm sure they'll use that as a case study basically forever. Yeah. On why you should use Ripley. Yeah.

And so initially he wants to be paid in Fiat because he's worried about volatility in crypto. And so he asks that payments be made through Revolut, but over time he asks to move over to crypto, which DLCFO incorrectly believed would leave no trace. And in fact, it leaves the most trace. Permanent, public one. In fact, anyone can trace it. It's on the blockchain.

Well, in this case, I think he was getting paid to a centralized exchange. Yeah, so probably not. But, like, you can easily subpoena blockchain.com and ask what happened. He's claiming that the payment came from the wife of the COO of deal. And the reason that that becomes an issue is if it's true, it just ends up incriminating basically the entire exec team, the CEO, the CEO. It's like every single person was involved. Yeah. And then the lawyer comes, the general counsel comes in later too.

Yeah. And so there's like, that was unclear to me. I couldn't tell if it was external counsel or something they brought in. Yeah. But it seemed at least one lawyer. Yeah. From deal was like, you know, actively working on trying to fix this issue that that seemed to be internal.

Yep. And so he would get the crypto, he'd get Ethereum for in his blockchain.com cryptocurrency wallet. And, and then he would liquidate the funds and try. transfer it. But it's, again, it's so funny. We've talked about a little bit insider training before. Like, the most obvious thing is just like, oh, like, I don't want this payment to show up on my account because I'm working for a deal. Like, I'll have to use someone who's like arm's length for me. And it's like your wife who's like clearly tied to you. It's not like it's some, oh yeah, someone that you are not even connected with on social media. No one could possibly know. Like you cross paths. And the issue is love each other, but like you never talk.

The issue is like so obvious. If in this situation, if the spy had said deals my team, I'm riding it out with you guys. He like all this stuff makes it so much harder to for them, for deal to spin, right? Totally. Onward where the spy is giving a record of the code words and phrases they use to coordinate payment, which Philippe, the CFO and chairman would say, would send a picture of a watch to the pay.

The spy would send a picture of a watch to their payment chat. And Philippe would say, send that watch to London. And then he would respond, the buyer is very happy. And so they were sort of communicating and, you know, trying to imply that like there was, I guess, some type of like watch transaction and that was the payment. Yeah. That's how I read it. So they wanted some plausible deniability that like they were just trading watches with

this guy. I think that's what they wanted to paper over a little bit. This corporate espionage is brought to you by. Bezzle. I mean, as soon as I saw. We're not going to monetize this. Not going to monetize this. But yeah, I mean, seriously, you should not, you should not be doing fake walks transactions.

You should be buying real watches instead. Work hard. Make legitimate money. Yeah. So the crazy thing, the crazy thing is that deals, CEO would allegedly would message this by multiple times a day and if the spy didn't respond quickly would follow up and sort of double and triple text his texting style is wild yeah honestly sounds seems like pretty cool throwing the word boss around yeah yeah it's funny because like he's the CEO of a multi-billion

dollar company very successful uh and uh and and and and he has the spy who's like clearly on like many levels below him only making 60k is there really really um like many levels below him only making 60k is there reason you're pointing gun at me constantly? No, no. It's very threatening to just do an interview. Jordy's like this at me. Under the table. Under the table.

John, don't say, don't cut me off. Don't say what you're about to say. Never cut me off. Never cut me off while I'm talking. Erwan coffee in one hand. Pink Timo gun. Can you see it on the other screen? But he texts in all lowercase,

which has been a contentious issue on the timeline for a while. But he always he always addresses he always addresses the spy as boss. So he'll say hi boss or hey boss can you search for this. Alex would frequently message me on Mondays with Hey boss good weekend with two question marks which is something I don't normally do.

Casual and fun and hey let's give him some credit he wasn't calling him bud. Yeah it could have been a lot worse. It could have been a lot worse. I like boss I think I think it's a good Austin Chief are solid. Yeah, Chief is respectful. Sorry. Take it on the other side. I can't stop pointing the Timo water gun at John.

Anyway, so what did Deal actually want the spy to search for in rippling systems? What we heard about Tiny Bird before, but we also know that they were searching for Tom Brady. We don't know why, but I think maybe Tom Brady is building a startup and needs. HRIS, maybe? Do you think that's what it is? I was trying to... Or maybe they were going to do a sponsorship with him. Anything we'd say here, I think would just be pure speculation.

Iran seems pretty obvious. Yep. Because there were like allegations that deal was being used in sanctioned countries, I believe. There was a rumor going around and there were some reporting by the information that maybe some clients. And this is the nature, I mean, I don't want to be too harsh. Like this is the nature of like online platforms. people try and abuse them all the time.

Sometimes it's, you're doing everything you can to stop abuse and you still get a little bit. But the allegations were that they weren't really doing that much. Yeah, and who knows? But clearly he wanted to know if people at Rippling

were talking about Iran and probably in the context of deal. Yeah, interesting. But who knows? And then, yeah, they was also asking for superstars. What was up with Tiny Bird? I don't know. I don't know what Tiny Bird is.

It was mentioned in the previous thing. I think it was like, wasn't it the leak of the, it was, it was something that was, it was like, wasn't it like the honeypot? It was like, there was an article that was going to go out that was going to mention Tiny Bird. And so, and so Rippling sent an email to the executives a deal and said like, hey, there's this hit piece coming out that's implicating you and it's about this thing called Tiny Bird and then they they knew that they searched for it and they would have no way to know that that was the keyword that was going to be in that article unless they had read that and then passed it to the spot which is exactly what they did

yeah um Tom Brady though could there's potentially a Tom Brady a B2B sales you know oh yeah maybe that's it you're looking for a superstar you want to know who the goat who the goat is rising up the rank them yeah looking around the next San Blanc the Tom Brady next Sam Buck. Everyone who's good in V2B SaaS sales, Sam B, always. Yep. Sam Blonde,

Sam B. The CEO and Spy were friendly and enjoyed talking about sports. Alex, the CEO of Deal, was also just chatting it up about Paris St. Germain Football Club, the soccer team of Paris. He reached out to me multiple times

today to request information about Rippling. It seemed constant. It had been a few hours since he had heard from me. He would reach out. And then the level of deal detail here and like the management. I mean, you join an organization.

It's usually pretty hard to get face time with the CEO, but you come in as a spy. You're going to get direct access. You can chat them up. You can get all the mentorship you want. Maybe this is the path of career acceleration. If only it was legal. Yeah. So here's where it gets particularly spicy.

So at the end of February 2025, Alex told the spy to search rippling Slack system for the channel hashtag D defect. And remember, this was part of the Honeypot operation that Rip Lang was running to try to prove that deal senior management was coordinating with the spy. The spy ran the search immediately and began to look at the results within minutes. Alex had messaged him and told him not to run the search because he believed it was a trap. The spy told Alex that by the time he got his message, he had already done the search. And Alex said, oh, shit. Wow.

And the spy said, I told him that deed defectors had Matt Plank. Rippling's chief revenue officer in the chief. It's like, it's such a virtual world of like walking into a room and like the big guy is just there and be like, how about you have a seat? Like we, the jig is up.

The jig is up. I wasn't expecting HR to be here. Yep. I told him I was frightened, but he said, don't worry. Thereafter he continued to press me to pass him information from Rippling, which is extremely bold. Like you think it's a trap.

It looks like a trap. It went in. You went in and looked round and it was like only this chief revenue officer is there no the like the thing that you expected was not there it feels like a trap you suspected it and he's like don't worry let's just keep spy you're good like they should have cut it down then in February yeah who knows but it was probably already too late yeah maybe he ran the calculus of yeah you know let's just should we talk about the escape attempt I don't even think he attempted I mean obviously when he was confronted in his office

This is the spy. The spy made a bunch of excuses and said, oh, my phone and my laptop are down here. He had them. He said he went into the bathroom and he flushed the toilet a few times, but I don't think he flushed anything. That's what he implies. And where it gets particularly interesting is that the, apparently, a Sif deals in-house lawyer was, you know, at this point,

starting to talk to him. and said that he was speaking in a personal capacity. Rippling has nothing. And Asif suggested that the spy and his family fly to Dubai that night, saying, we all need a holiday. And, yeah, Dubai has, I don't believe, has extradition agreements with anyone, do they? I don't think that's true.

I think they do. I don't think it's non-extradition. I think it's just hard to find someone if they're there. land low. I think you have to go like way, way more obscure, but I don't know, you can look it up. The spy proceeded to smash his phone with an axe. He also deleted his LinkedIn account.

Like that would do anything, but it's very odd. Yeah, they do. They signed an extradition treaty in actually late 2024. Ireland and the UAE. Yeah, they were ahead. It makes sense. I mean, there's a lot of people that go there. It would be weird for it just to be like a free-for-all of criminals.

And so he smashed his phone with an axe and put it down the drain at my mother-in-law's house as the deal's lawyer, as the deal's lawyer had advised. That evening, Deals lawyer spoke to his wife for 45 minutes to an hour on a telegram call, reassuring her and corroborating what I had told her that Rippling was lying and making all of this up. My wife later expressed concerns to me about the call with Deals lawyer. she said that what he was saying did not add up, and she felt he was being pushy. And so the spy finally decided to cooperate with Rippling after getting a text message from a friend that said the truth will set you free. And so family members were advising him to just tell the truth, and that it was the fastest way to move past all of this.

And so he realized that he was harming himself and his family to protect a deal. He was concerned and am still concerned about how wealthy and powerful Alex and Philippaar, but I know what I was doing was wrong. After I spoke to my solicitors, I started to feel a sense of relief. I want to do what I can to start making amends and writing these wrongs. Yeah, and I'm not surprised now getting his side of the story that he very quickly flipped to team rippling. Yeah.

It just doesn't, it's hard to imagine. Like seemingly if he went with deal and this was the situation that it was going to be hard for him not to go down with the deal ship Now there's a lot of different stakeholders and players involved here. There's there's there's deal and its management team. There's deal shareholders, right? And then on the other side you have rippling and rippling shareholders and it's going to continue to be extremely messy, but and to be clear here like the spy nothing about this. I'm not going to continue. makes the spy look any better. In fact, it's like he knew what he was doing the entire way and repeatedly made the choice to commit crimes. Yeah.

Steal. Like, there are gray areas for some... There's not a lot of gray areas. There are gray areas generally, not in like corporate secrets, but in like strategies. Like, if you go and work at, you know, some high growth company and then you're recruited somewhere else. leave. Like, yes, you can't, you can't export GitHub code. Everyone knows that. But can you call up someone that you got drinks with and maybe you met them in a corporate context, but then you became friends

and then you get them as a client? Like, probably. Or can you just say, hey, my last company, we worked really hard and we had this fast-paced thing and this was our strategy. So why don't we implement that strategy here? Like, that stuff happens all the time. That's the reason why VCs love to back, like former Stripe operator, now doing us. startup. It's because it's like, well, we hope that you're going to kind of steal the stripe culture or copy it in some ways and bring that to bear in your new organization. Now, the line is drawn at like stealing secrets, IP, contacts, connections, and then also, and then obviously way, way further. But the whole thing is that to your point, this wasn't even

framed as anything like that. It could have been framed as like, hey, like, you have this, you have this depth of experience at a rival company. We would love to get you. you out of there and then put you to work in a much higher growth scenario very quickly, very, very quickly take advantage of this, all the expertise that you learned over there. Obviously don't steal anything, but you're going to hit the ground running very quickly here as opposed to if you came from a company that has nothing to do with this industry. That happens all the time, right? Yeah. So, but it doesn't look like that at all. And the fact that it literally kicked off with like, hey, do you want to spy and beat James Bond? Yeah. And to be clear, we don't

have any insight into Rippling's employment agreements, but there's things like IP assignments and things like that. And there's no spying clauses. Yeah, there's going to be plenty of documentation around that would make it very obvious that by giving company secrets and IP to, to a, and getting paid by a direct competitor is just going to be. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing that's sort of unclear with the case so far and how this is going to shake out is like there's the civil case yeah there's potentially criminal cases the way this is shaking out now i mean if we saw like um he was jd ross said never seen anything like this in tech these guys are all going to jail uh and deal will likely die as a business um i don't know very aggressive i don't know if either those are true uh there are so many layers

of irony in the story it's hard to even know where to start which i do agree with but the the first part is it's hard for me to imagine how Philippe and Alex stay in management roles or or the COO right like seemingly like they all probably have to go for the company to move forward will they go to jail it's unclear I think that again it will kind of be on rippling and rippling shareholders whether rippling wants to right now I believe it's a civil case, right? And so that doesn't mean that, and there will be, if that were to proceed, there would be sort of penalties and, you know, a number of consequences for that. But it could switch to being a criminal case. And at that point, you know, who knows, there could be jail time.

But before you get to that, you'd have deal and deals, you know, board and shareholders broadly that could go to Rippling and say, like, you know, this was clearly, you know, a big mistake. Here's what we're going to do to correct it. There's probably a massive settlement associated with that. It's very possible that Ripling could basically get like a series E done here to move forward. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like, hey, if you want this to go away, you're going to have to pay us a hundred million dollars or something like that. That would be crazy. It's possible. The thing that I was talking about with you earlier was, okay, so if deal winds up paying rippling a huge settlement to make this go away, well, now they have a new problem on their

hands because their investors should be upset about that because that was a massive liability that was not disclosed to the investors. That could be considered securities fraud, and they might have a case there. And so you're kind of fighting a war on two fronts. You want to keep rippling happy, but then you also want to keep your shareholders happy. And if you can't do both, you're going to face pressure legally and how that will manifest. I don't know if it's, if it's criminal, I don't know if it's civil, but like you're going to face pressure and there's going to be unhappy people on one side or the other. And that's a really, really tough spot to be in. It seems like no matter how much control Alex and Philippe and the COO have over the business today.

Yeah. Just purely from a corporate standpoint. I don't see how they make it out of this. Yep. I agree with you. Still running the company. Yes. I completely agree with that. There is the bigger question of like, this could be where there's smoke, there's fire situation where like there's other problems with the business. And there's been like rumbling about that and reporting. But let's assume that deal has, you know, huge book of business and a lot of companies that are, you know, relatively happy with the product and they run their payrolls on time and do HRS stuff.

And they're just like happy with it as a SaaS product. And they couldn't even tell you the name of the CEO if they tried. You know, like we use, you know, Sure microphones here. I can't tell you the CEO of Sure. if sure was embroiled in a conflict or some controversy, like, I wouldn't be aware of that. And so it's totally possible that a lot of deal clients just don't know that this is going on. And they don't care. And they're like, well, did my employees get paid?

You gave the example earlier off air, like tires. Like if you went to, like people in tech, this is the biggest story. It is the biggest story. It's so dramatic. The year so far. Even, even though, you know, Monday night, you get this like 40. billion dollar biggest venture round ever who knows if that's you know completely real yeah but still like this is the craziest story ever is yC on yC violence right yeah it's crazy like talk about

talk about being a rough spot if if you're why combinator right now you're you're looking at two of your darlings just sort of duking it out in a very sad way but but the example you gave was tired kind of disagree with that actually because oftentimes competition is for losers, you want one power law winner. So the value of a single really concentrated winner might be higher and higher margin. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But again, I don't believe that a deal with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue is going anywhere. Like they have tons of multinational companies working with them. It's going to be a big business, I think, for a long time. My example of the tires. Yeah, so the tire example I thought was good. if you go if you work in the tire industry and michelin and bridgestone are doing corporate espionage on each other you're like this is crazy we've never seen anything like this like it's like you're

fixated on it with your friends but then if you go to like if i went to my mom and i said hey mom like i saw you have michelin tires did you know that michelin was stealing from bridgestone like their rubber you know uh supply chain yeah you just never know she would be like okay sweetie like that's Yeah, you know, I'll keep that in mind. And then she's replacing her tires in a year and she's like, doesn't even remember. Yeah, unless it actually affects the client, like the way FTX locked your funds or Theranos was giving you the wrong information. But if there's just, if there's just chaos at the top and you never even knew who the CEO was, you might just be like, hey, I'm not going to rip out my HRS system. I'm just going to stick with what's working.

At the same time, it's got to be the best. best time in history to be a Rippling sales rep. Can you imagine sending those emails? Hey, I saw that you're a deal client. Did you see the latest affidavit about the spying thing? I'd love to hop on the phone and tell you about Rippling service. They must be having a blast selling this product. The sad thing here, and I'm sure the frustration for the deal team and the shareholders is that deal, despite the spying, ignore the spying, has executed phenomenally. It's built a one of, it's one of the most impressive revenue ramps that we've seen in the last 10 years and they had a big lead of a rippling sure i don't know what their growth rates look like exactly but the spying thing

reeks of desperation and it didn't feel like they were quite in a desperate situation yet right no these markets are these markets are huge even if rippling and deal just feasted on ADP and Paycom and all these big federal providers. They could have each eaten another 500 million of ARA a year for a very long time. Totally. Both been fine. And now it seems very unlikely that this company is going to be founder-led by the end of this month, I imagine. I just don't know how you let this go.

I wonder if there were any serious. I wonder what deal was doing against ADP. What was their strategy to beat paycom, paylosity, any of those larger public payroll companies? Because to your point, I think that really is somewhere where you could just feast on the market cap for a very long time. And probably not as aggressive of a counter-espionage effort as Parker Conrad, who clearly has taken deal seriously as a competitor for a very long time. He's like the, yeah, he's the hornet's nest. you probably want to take. Yeah, when you look at their product strategies, right?

Rpling is the original compound startup. They did R&D for years, I think, before they actually went to market with their product. And RIP deal started with a simple idea, enable global payroll, complicated, you know, sort of actually underlying product and infrastructure to do that. But then they both were just converging back. You know, they sort of started in their own lanes. got up to hundreds of millions of revenue and then started aggressively converging

onto the same core opportunity, right? Yep. And yeah, so these companies were just always destined to collide. Collide. Collide they did. I liked Will Mnitas' take here. He says, talking about deals, CFO, using code words and phrases

to coordinate payments with the spy, send that watch to London, the buyer is happy, et cetera. Will says, it is a useful law of human behavior that whenever you're engaging in something your heart knows is wrong, your brain tries to rationalize it in narrative terms. The second you find yourself using code words,

you're doing something wrong, speak simply and speak truthfully. I thought that was a good take. Good take, Will. But code words can be fun, especially when you repurpose other people's code words for your own. Well, those are just memes then. I liked Andrew Reed's post. He said, paid man's in ETH on blockchain.com sounds like straight out of a UK rap song.

You can always count on UK rap to tell me how many people were in the car. That's funny. You like UK rap. Yeah. Stormsy. We were listening to the storms in the storms in the studio. Paid man's in Eith on blockchain.com. It really is so silly.

Yeah, Josh Puccini says. This one went super viral, by the way. you're like James Bond, but you only make 60K, you don't get a gun, and you steal B2B SaaS secrets. Not the best trade. But yeah, Europe, Europe honestly came, like, took some brand damage here. Yeah. If you're willing to spy for 5K euros a month, got to get the economy going, guys.

Risking at all. Risking it all. Yeah, what are you doing? Yeah, I'm sure deal spy massively regrets his. actions yeah and I'm sure everybody involved does yeah it's always yeah whenever there's a crime Parker the wartime worker war time CEO for sure yeah whenever there's a crime like you know there's always you know there needs to be accountability but at the same time I think there needs to be some empathy like

this is a frustrating and and difficult situation for all involved and I think you know I just hope that there can be a resolution that where like there's some sort of resolution and we're closing the book on this chapter of tech history in a meaningful way across the board. But I'm sure there'll be a lot more news related to this over the next few weeks and next few months. The story's moving incredibly fast. This whole thing started just five months ago.

And then it broke just, I mean, the honey pot happened in February. And then in March, boom, the story dropped. And so everyone's been moving very quickly here. And it's been fascinating to follow. Moving quick. All right. Well, we should move in to the next story. Yes.

Tesla's global vehicle deliveries sank 13% in the first quarter. Recent surveys have shown an erosion in the brand's appeal, especially among Democrats in the United States. And so Tesla was putting up massive numbers for the last two years, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 vehicles every quarter. in Q1 of 2025, Tesla delivered 336,000 vehicles. Still a lot of cars, but a 13% fall is nothing to ignore, and so you got to dig into it.

And I was always wondering if there was going to be, you know, obviously there's a decline in interest from Democrats. Would that be offset by Republicans who now like the brand? Well, we kind of have the answer, at least right now, that demand has not. The issue is the average. Republican that has switched and said, I'm a, you know, turned to an Elon fanboy, loves Ford Raptors.

Yes. And that's the big challenge. Yeah. It's like no matter, you know, even if they think they're on team Elon now, the Ford Raptors still probably, you know, the greatest. I still think that's an opportunity, though, because there's no reason why Elon and Tesla couldn't build something like a Ford Raptor or a Ford Raptor R, like a lifted truck. Well, that's a cyber truck.

No, not the cyber truck, because it needs to have a, you know, It needs to have an internal combustion engine for sure. Yeah. And it needs to have, you know, you need to have an option on the Tesla configurator to say, like, I want to check the, I'm rolling coal button. And then it just has the massive smoke stacks out the back. It needs to have a really, a really aggressive engine note. These things are important to the new customers of Tesla,

and I think Tesla needs to adapt. But let's dig into it at Wall Street Journal. There's further evidence that a growing consumer backlash against the brand is hurting Tesla's business. The analysts were expecting 396,000 shipments. It came in at 336, much lower. Tesla shares were up 4% in midday trading Wednesday following the release of its latest delivery figures.

Fascinating that it went up, but I guess the market was expecting even more of a sell-off. Musk's active role in the Trump administration and vocal support for far-right parties in Europe has made Tesla a target of political protests and boycotts in recent months. including in some cases by once loyal Tesla owners. Yeah, it's... Yvonne's probably looking around like now, watching the stock pop 5% being like... Hmm.

Interesting. But it's possible this is more of a reaction to... China. No. No. The news that he may be leaving the White House. Oh, sure. So if he goes deeper into just like...

I'm back in just the tech world. That would certainly offset things. It seems clear that there's a limit to his, there's some sort of limit to how much he can multitask. And I would imagine that Tesla shareholders will benefit from him shifting focus out of the government and back on to. Yeah. So we saw this from Joe Wisenthal. He took a picture of a computer showing Bloomberg.

And there's an article in Politico that says Trump tells inner circle that Musk will leave soon. obviously just kind of rumor mill at this point, but, but interesting if true and unclear what that would mean for Tesla, could the Democrats who have been buying Tesla's kind of forgive and forget and move on and come back to the, to the brand? I certainly think it's possible. If Elon wanted that,

he could go on, he's a very good communicator. He could go on a press store and say, you know, like, hey, like, yeah, I'm actually just really focused on cars.

right now. And, you know, I was thinking about this. Like Tesla should be the most nonpartisan vehicle in the world because it's, it's electric. So it appeals to Democrats. And it's built in America. And so it appeals to Republicans. And he could, if he was purely focused on that and didn't care about the politics stuff, he could have, he probably could have gotten the Tesla brand to a position where it was loved by everyone in the same way that like Nike is loved by both Apple, these are very bipartisan brands, nonpartisan brands. But I think he really did think that this, I think he was a true believer in this idea that the 2024 election was deeply important

and it was worth him coming off the sidelines, risking everything to move Washington in a different direction. And he did that. Now he kind of, you know, there's going to be some, like, we were talking to, I think we were talking to Senator about this. Like, like, what is the net effect of Elon's going political? Will it be good or bad for him? And it's like, okay, what are we talking about here? Like aggregate net worth?

Like some of his companies might do better. Some of his companies might do worse. We have to like add all those up. I think if he was running the calculus would be like this is probably short term bad. Yep. But if I can be effective and sort of change the course of history with the country, then it will be net good in the long run. Yeah.

But certainly it would have been hard to argue that going in short term, is just going to be default good for everything. Yeah, I mean, you could even imagine it's like, okay, so what if the work that he does winds up, streamline the FDA, speeding up neurolink development, and Neurrelink, every single person winds up getting one, and they cost $50,000. And all of a sudden, that's a bigger,

oh, really? They're opening up a patient registry. Fantastic. But there's two polymarkets I want to look at. So right now, Elon, out of Trump administration before July, sitting at 50%. 50% and then out of the admin in 2025, you know, sort of basically by the end of the years, at a 76% chance.

Wow. So I also wonder what that will mean because it's totally possible that. So people have been predicting like the Trump and Elon relationship is going to dissolve and blow up. It's going to blow up. Like they're two, they're both too hard charging, aggressive figures. It doesn't make sense. They just can't last. That's been the narrative, right?

But it's possible that they, that Elon is no longer a member of the staff, of the White House. He doesn't have a dot-gov email, but they're still friends. That is a, that is a possibility. I don't know if that's where it's going. I really can't predict any of this. I've not really tapped in in D.C. It would be very short-sighted for both of them to blow up the relationship. Yeah, I think so.

It seems like it's been pretty mutually beneficial. I don't know. I mean, no one expected them to win and then they did. So, you know, it seems like it's good. Sales from China, which exports to foreign markets, fell 49% in February, but fared better in March after it started delivering the refreshed Model Y. I saw the first refreshed Model Y on the street the other day. It looks great in China.

According to China Passenger Car Association, the company sold 78,000 China-made vehicles in the month, down 11% in the same period last year. Despite the decline, Tesla climbed back to third place in sales in the Chinese car market after dropping out of the top five in February. And they have some stiff competition that I'm actually very excited about. I think just from a consumer perspective, seeing some of the demos of the cars

and the way the Chinese car companies are pushing things forward is awesome. Have you seen that demo of the adaptive suspension? So you're going around a corner super hard and it's tilting the car. So it's perfectly flat and they have a wine glass on the center console. It's not spilling.

Amazing. Or like going over bump. and the car is like adapting to the bumps so it's just perfectly smooth. There's all these like they do all these like weird features like there's a car that floats. We talked about that. There's there's a bunch of simple features that just makes sense. Yep. They have hand tracking so you can be like this yeah and then it'll pull down. There's even like this LED bar on the back of some of these cars so you can send a message to someone in front of you or behind you being like like sorry like I was on my phone. That's

why I didn't go when it was green like you could send that. I think there's all these funny, weird things. There's an explosion of innovation and like testing weird things. And I like that. Tesla puts pressure on our companies. Totally. Yeah, Tesla did the same thing with the noise. Yeah, the part feature.

Yeah, or like playing video games or playing, you know, all these different things. Tesla very much did that. And while I absolutely want American companies to win, I do like the idea that there's now pressure to say, okay, we really need to step it up. Innovation is good. Innovation is good. I want to see Mercedes execs. look at these videos of these Chinese manufacturers and be like, okay, they're like way ahead of us

on so many dimensions. Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty sure that, I don't know if it's a Yangwang U-8, but the CEO Ford was driving a Chinese car, like daily for like weeks because he was like, I need to understand what's going on over here and like we need to figure this out at this company. Bounder mode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit of, a little bit of that. So in Germany, home to Tesla's European factory, new vehicle registrations felt 76% in February compared with the same period last year, according to the country's motor transport authority. In the U.S. sales failed 2% in the first months of the year, according to research from firm Wards Intelligence. And so that's not that much of a drop, considering that I think of Elon as being more

politically controversial in America, then, I mean, maybe in China, maybe in Germany, but it seems like it's a little bit more distant there, but I don't know. I think people make car purchase. I think these purchases are super considered outside of somebody's home. It's one of the most expensive decisions that they make and, you know, or costly sort of products that they buy. And if you're looking at buying a car, you're looking at the cost. If it's an EV, you're looking at the range, you're looking at the features. Yeah, maybe you care a bit about the founder, but that's only one factor, right?

And so right now, Tesla is basically giving away these cars. you can get a test of Model Y for $300 a month. Your phone bill. Yeah, it's not far off from your phone bill. So it's an extreme, and who knows if that's at all profitable. Yeah. But it's extremely solid offer in the market. And the reason for the sales decline is despite these sort of massive incentives,

every other manufacturer is overproduced EVs. So they're also giving these things away. You could get a Rivian pickup truck last year for like 500 bucks. It's like, it's like, it's like, great. They're giving these things away. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's an amazing time to be a buyer in the car market. You have a lot of options. And the sales decline, like, I'm sure was anticipated by analysts, right? Tesla basically had a monopoly on quality, cheap EVs for a period of time. It also felt like they were reaching saturation. Like, every car on the road in L.A. is a Tesla. Like, at a certain point, like, I understand the monopoly power. that accrues to the iPhone and the integration there.

And everyone wants the blue bubbles and everyone, it's nice. If I have an iPhone, you have an iPhone, we can do AirDrop. Cars, it's a little bit less so. And I feel like cars are still a little bit more of like the status symbol, what it says about you,

the difference of the Ford Raptor driver versus the Audi R-Aid versus the Lamborghini. Like they all say slightly different things. And at a certain point, if every single person is driving a Tesla, which is like this appliance car, there's just going to be some people in the, world that say, you know what, I will accept a lower quality of car, even on a price per power

or horsepower, any ratio that you want to measure, like quantitatively a worse car, just to express myself and actually say something about myself and say, hey, I have a convertible, and that says something about me. Or I have a truck. And even if I don't need that space, I have it because, like, it makes me feel like I cowboy and I like that. And like if Tesla's not offering that brand feel, that will drive. Cars are so emotional. Totally. People use them. It's like a handbag for women or a watch for guys. It's a way to express yourself. Some people still just say, I'm going to be practical. I'm going to buy the cheapest, best option. Other people, you know, do what I did at one point and bought a lifted Ford Raptor because I just like wanted to live out my childhood dreams.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That's great. And I had a great time with it. And then it was so funny driving a raptor because I felt like I'd go to a meeting. And if the person I was meeting with saw me pull up in the Raptor, I had to like explain like, well, I'm actually like driving it like kind of ironically. I'm kind of driving this more for like my like 10 year old self more than my current self. I just want you to know that. I'm not like really a Raptor guy, but like I kind of respect it. Completely murdered out and it's tinted.

Yeah. Anyways. Yeah, that's great. So in California where Teslas are among the best selling vehicles, the new vehicle registration of Tesla's fell 11.6% in the state. Obviously, California has like a D plus 30 state, and so very democratic, maybe more affected there. But also there's such saturation happening. The market cap of Tesla reached a high of $1.5 trillion in mid-December in the weeks after the inauguration, the shares, the price per share returned to pre-election levels.

Was that? It's also been vandalization. That was their all-time high? Yeah. And so now Musk is trying to refocus investor attention away from car sales and onto its driver assistance software, which it calls full self-driving supervised. And its optimist humanoid robot technologies, he has claimed could one day boost the automaker's market value

to as high as $30 trillion. You'll love to see it. The humanoid robot market, it's also fascinating because everyone is so skeptical about it. The anti-Elon people are like, it's teleoperated, it's a guy in a suit, like, it's nowhere near any commercial scale. And like, that's probably true. Like, like, the optimist does not seem to be something that's going to be shipping anytime soon.

But at the same time, like, we've seen the Chinese humanoid robots. Like, they work. You can just buy one. Like, it can't do everything, but like, it's out there. It exists. It's not some sci-fi. We have no idea how to do time travel. And it's like people are writing academic papers about,

how one day you might be able to make a humanoid robot. It's like Boston Dynamics exists. You can see the Atlas robot running around. You can see the, and you can actually get a Unitri robot dog for under three grand on Amazon. Yeah. And so, and so like Unitree is shipping these things. They're not great, but it's like, can Tesla copy that and just copy paste that?

Absolutely. Can even figure, Red Adcock, like, can they just set up a plant that copies unitary. Like, that doesn't seem that crazy. Even the legacy car makers were eventually able to make electric cars that were in the same ballpark as Tesla's. Like the Ford Machi is,

like it has similar range, similar performance. Like a Tesla fan would say like, oh, it's like, you know, too expensive for the power and you don't get the self-driving stuff. And it's like,

yeah, that's all true. But it's 80% of the way there or 90% of the way there. And there are some electric cars that give you a better experienced than Tesla in certain in certain categories like the Rivian the Rivian has a full-size SUV Tesla does not like they they have the crossover and so and and even like the the Tycon the Tycon comes in a in a wagon configuration like Tesla just doesn't have a wagon which I think looks fantastic I like it a lot and and also like Tesla doesn't sell a convertible like if you want a

convertible electric car, like, you're out of luck with Tesla. And so there's all these ways where you could kind of like slice up the market, figure something out. But like, you know, these humanoid robots, like, they do exist. And so even though it feels silly to think about Tesla is like, oh, yeah, they're going to win in humanoid robots. It's like, well, they're probably going to do something there. And they're probably going to make it.

Yeah. They're probably going to make something work. And so I'm very interested to follow it. It's fascinating to see how this. pencils out. It'll be interesting to see how Elon kind of reintroduces the company or if he does. He had Trump pushing like, hey, go buy a Tesla. There was those note cards. You saw that. Of like, the Tesla costs $60,000, this and that. Is there a way that he can beat the Ford Raptor at its own game without putting an ice engine in, which I think might need to do? that would that would go crazy cyber truck yeah internal combustion engine he needs a hellcat competitor

he needs a dodge charger competitor he needs something that trades uh i mean one of the problems with with tesla i'm sure one of the problems of tesla is like is like there's too much technology in that so you can't really like trade it on facebook marketplace just like here the keys like i don't have a title because whoever actually owns it will be able to just like, it has low jack basically because it's so connected and they can just disable the car.

But if they take some of that stuff out, they put in a V8 and maybe throw some superchargers in there. Yeah, really get the secondary market pumping. Get the secondary market pumping. Get the thieves involved. Anyway, we're having some fun. That was always a good bit of ours.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Tesla sells products online. They sell cars, but they also sell stuff like merch. They'll sell tequila from time to time, you know, a bunch of hats, things like that. And what should they use for sales tax compliance and automation? Numeral baby. They should go to numeral HQ.com.

Benchmark Series A. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. They work with thousands of high growth companies. And if you were selling products online or your SaaS business, go sign up for Numeral and just for old time's sake tell them the technology brothers send you. They'll know what you mean

and there's 25 states that are taxing software sales and if you have any type of scale with your SaaS business I'm sure you're dealing with this already so go check out Numeril and this monitoring feature is actually genuinely very interesting if you're a startup

and you're growing because often times you don't have to pay sales tax until you hit some sort of threshold. And so their example here is like they're monitoring your sales in New Mexico. When you hit $100,000, you're going to need to register and start paying. But as long as you're under that, the state doesn't care, which is great because the state, it's cumbersome to file these new tax, these new sales tax reports. So they're going to, they're going to, you know, track that and then help you file that as soon as you need to. So, I mean, I've been caught so many times that, like, I can't even count where it's like, oh, I We hit the threshold, then we had to go pay a lawyer to figure it out and do all those things.

This is a really great product. So go check it out, Numeral HQ. Anyway, let's move on to some watch news. Some big watch news. So we got Quaid. We got Quaid coming on. Co-founder of Bezell. He's calling in today.

We're going to be breaking down what's happening at Watches and Wonders. Basically, every watch company launched new. watches. The one that I wanted to highlight here is Vashron Konstantan has released the most complicated risk watch ever created. The Solaria Ultra Grand Complication featuring 41 complications and 1,521 components, eight years of research and development, 13 patent applications. And it tells you everything like, you know, sunrise, sunset, moon phase, day, month, year, time, you set alarms, like all these different things on it. And the funniest thing is I'm sure this thing costs like a million dollars.

But I was looking at this and I was like, yeah, like that's actually like really useful stuff. Like I need this. That was my reaction. It was like, yeah, this is like totally justifiable. Yeah. Especially for high. Just practically. Yeah.

High output, you know, podcasting. Yep. Yep. You just kind of need this level of performance. Yeah. I was like, I'm sure they charge a lot. But like look at all the complications. Like you kind of need this.

I need to know where the tides are. on my wrist. With a mechanical device, I can't use my phone for that. But I mean, this is a fantastic watch and it looks very cool. And it's also pretty huge. And on the back,

they have constellation charts. Do you see this? It's insane. You can see where, what the night sky looks like. We've been saying this, but Vasharon is, we believe,

yes. Going to go on a generational run. We think so. It's already on the run. It is. It's fantastic. Well, I'm excited to have Ryan on. He is going on.

with Kramer later today. And so I think we should help them workshop some just crazy things. Crazy bangers, crazy bits. Yeah, you just want to go big. You want to go extreme when you're on there. Yeah. I mean, we should set the table a little bit. Basically, Trump is giving a press conference today at 4 p.m. Eastern.

So in exactly one hour, this should start. This should start. tariffs are looming, but Trump has called it Liberation Day, but the stock market is up, maybe calming fears that there will be really, really aggressive tariffs. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note ticked up as well on pace to snap a three-day streak of declines. Gold prices rallied, sending the precious metals towards another all-time high. Trump has declared April 2nd Liberation Day for U.S. trade policy.

He is due to announce the contours of a sweeping tariff plan at 4 p.m. Eastern. in a Rose Garden address. The Wall Street Journal will stream the president's tariff comments live. The tariff fight has ignited worries about a slowdown in economic growth, driving a steep sell-off in shares of small companies after weeks of unease about how Trump's tariff plan will shake out and which industries they will reshape investors and business leaders around the globe are hoping for more clarity. And that's the big deal here is just clarity.

People want to know what to expect. You can't move a whole factory. in a day. Yeah. It takes years to reshor manufacturing capacity and the bigger the company,

the harder it is to do. Yeah, this was, this was Sean Frank's, you know, big point, which was, you know, even if I want to react

to tariffs, it's going to be, you know, damaging to my business and every other e-commerce business in the short term. And so Trump clearly

wants to make big, quick change, but there's still, you know, a lot of companies caught in the crossfires in the short term. Cool. We got Ryan in the studio. Welcome, Ryan. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,

are you not traveling? Was yesterday. I'm back. You're back. Congratulations. Enjoy home sweet home. First, I mean, we got to ask you, are there, are there any spies? How are you dealing with counterintelligence, counter espionage these days? Oh, there's always spies, yeah. We're good. We try to make sure that our code base is super buggy. So if you steal it, it just works. That's my tactics. Do you think this is a symptom of like, just zooming out from, you know, the deal

Rippling thing and anything that's happening at Flexport? Like, do you think this is a symptom of like tech becoming a little bit less greenfield, a little bit less positive sum? There's like two or three major backed companies in the exact same category now. And it's less of like the anointed power law winner who's going up against some company that's so sclerotic that there's just, it's just, it's just, oh, you're just stealing billions of market cap all day long and it never really matters. So you're not, it's not so much of a knockout, dragout fight. Like how do you think about this in the context of like the history of Silicon Valley in like your career? Oh, I don't know.

I mean, you know, our issue was like, I think very different than deals. Like that was like few arch rivals going at each other and like someone. You know, that's crazy. I just read the deposition. That's crazy, right? Really crazy. Our issue is very different. It was a couple of employees who are just making bad decisions.

Downers. A lot of stuff on their way out. And the company they started is pretty insignificant. My general news never punched down. But when you see someone committing ultimately a crime, yeah. Yeah, there's a sense of moral righteousness that needs to happen some justice in the world. So. Yeah.

But it's quite different. I mean, this company's not a threat to flexport the way maybe deal is to rippling or vice first. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very different.

So, yeah, I mean, on tariffs, like, what are you expecting? What are you looking for? How do you think it's going to go down in an hour? It's, yeah, I don't know what to expect. I feel a little bit like, you know, maybe you're in Florida waiting for a hurricane and about to hit. Florida, man. I don't know if you get our American flag out and stand in the wind and, like, you know,

enjoy the show or be horrified and go, you know, get in your car and try to drive a thousand miles away. There's no escaping in your business. Yeah, there's no escaping. It's going to hit hard. It's really ugly for our customers already. I mean, they've already on the, the China tariffs, it's hard to imagine how they go much higher. Really? Because of the, they added 20% to what was already 25%. And then the Venezuela stuff hit today, I think.

which is another 25% on top of that because China imports Venezuelan oil. Oh, wow. What am I, 45 plus 25, 70% a tariff? And then if you do steel or aluminum, which if you have that component, you're pushing into 80% to these go a little bit higher. I mean, at some point, you're just like, oh, okay. So I don't know how much worse China can get. It can get worse.

They can do whatever they want, I suppose. The tariffs on other countries is the big wildcard here. what other countries get. You know, you've already seen Israel and Vietnam both went to duty-free on American imports. So we'll see my impression from having talked to a cabinet secretary last week that what he told me was that this would be April 2nd today is the start or not the end process. And he means that I think in a positive way for companies that they're going to come out with a big bang today. it's going to be ugly, and then he would expect that countries will come to the negotiating table

and make deals to bring the tariffs back down. But they want to send a very clear message that they're dead serious about, you know, that they mean business. And then he expects countries will come to the table. But somebody read it the wrong way and kind of retaliate with their own tariffs, and then the administration may escalate further. We've seen that as a pattern. So my advice to all the presidents of the world is to go read the art of the deal and not that hard to figure out how these guys work. No, it's like similar to FF.

It's like how does FF make investments? You know, read zero to one. Yeah. That's basically it. It's all out there. They're still doing the playbook. Are you, do you think, is this already happening or is it going to happen? Companies sort of dying before they can onshore manufacturing?

Is that something that you're super worried about? Or are people just battening down the hatches, like you said, Florida style and just figuring out a way to, you know, obviously everybody wants to survive? But are we seeing sort of like an extinction level event within e-commerce yet specifically? Certainly not yet. It's very hard to say.

I mean, the reality is tariffs alone won't bring most of these industries back to the US. The US dollar is just too strong. I was talking with a company yesterday that imports garlic. I was like, wait, that California, like, has the best farmland in the world

for growing garlic. Like, why do we need to import it from China? But it's just, even with the tariffs, it's cheaper to import the stuff from China. And it's, you know, our soil is better than there. It's like California is the Gilroy, is like the garlic festival. I mean, it's the best place in the world to grow garlic.

So, but the U.S. dollars is being so strong as the reserve currency makes it, like, no matter what you do almost with tariffs, it's still cheaper to buy from another country. So I think that tariffs alone won't do it. And nobody's, there's no political will to make the dollar cheaper. But if you want manufacturing to come in the U.S., the U.S., it just can't be that we're that much richer than everybody else on a dollar basis, because it's kind of big. Yeah. But haven't, haven't some people argued that with extreme enough tariffs it would you know get people to you know try to just move off the dollar maybe it's impossible there's got to be a number yeah it might move off the dollar which might actually

cause their problem not the way they intended to yeah i'm not like i've always been a macroeconomic skeptic it was i'm either too smart or too dumb to for macroeconomics i'm not sure which uh i couldn't figure it out they'd have all these advanced it all seemed more complicated than they were making it out to be uh so you never say i s i s i ISLM, all the different charts and graphs, interact, interhac, like the only class I ever got a bad grade in in college is macroeconomics. Yeah. Is there, is there a hope that, I mean, it seems like, obviously there's like the micros, like, what is the actual tariff rate in the country that I'm operating in? But then the real hope from the market, at least in companies, seems to be,

give me a framework and a real understanding of what the future is. going to look like. And is there a chance? I mean, it sounds like we're maybe even just starting that process of really understanding how the business community can respond to like a larger trade policy strategy. And like, is that what people are pushing for? Is it really more about just clarity over the long term? For sure, business needs certainty and clarity.

it's really hard. These supply chains are multi-year, maybe ideally decade-plus investments that you're making and how you're going to set up your supply chain. If it's changing every single week, like you're just paralyzed. You can't make any decision at all. I think Canada stuff's pretty harmful in that way because if there's going to be tariffs on Canada, then there's going to be tariffs on Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and everybody else. So it makes it really hard to make any decision. Let's say a company finally says, okay, it's very clear we're going to have to move our manufacturing out of China, this administration. And the Biden administration, by the way, I was also

ratcheted up the first Trump administration's tariffs on China. They didn't lower them at all. So both parties are aligned on that. So if that's clear and you're ready to make that move, then you go, okay, where do we move it to? Unless you're ready to move to the U.S., there's no ability to make a decision at all right now.

Do you think it would be better to take a more gradual approach to implementing these tariffs? I'm just thinking like instead of saying, hey, there's a 24% tariff coming in on this country. It's like, no, we're going to raise the tariff 1% per month for the next two years. And so you know exactly where it's going. It's not going to just destroy your profit margin today. But if you don't figure it out in two years, like you probably will be done. And so you're signaling to the market exactly where it's going to go.

But it seems like I've never seen a policy like that rolled out. Yeah, they were talking about that. I mean, I think that was one of the things that Trump or a lighthouse. one of the administration people close to the administration said they were going to do during the campaign. No, I think it was Besson who said that, Treasury Secretary. That would make sense to me or even just giving people, you know, six months notice of this is coming the year notice. Like some of the policies they've enacted have said, okay, this kicks him tomorrow or next week. And you're just like, oh my God.

Like I have a friend who's importing stuffed animals and he bought $100,000 worth of stuffed animals and while the container was on the water, the duty rate went up and he got hit with his $20,000 ability. He didn't plan. Like, oh, brutal, you know. And so you need some notice period that they haven't done that this time around. I think, yeah, gradual ratching it up, but ultimately just providing clarity.

Like, where are we going to be? It's also the ultimate challenge of the U.S. system is, you know, here at least the two parties are mostly, aligned when it comes to China. We'll see about other, we'll see what policies they actually roll out. But the two parties are mostly aligned on trade. They both hate trade right now. And so at least you have some longer term view of what it's going to look like. But in the U.S. system where it can totally flip overnight, it makes it very hard to deal with as a country. I mean, I think this is one of the things that has made it difficult for a deal

like with Russia, for example. I mean, the two parties are just polar opposite in policy. So how do you, how can they make a deal with either party when it might just flip in four years to someone who's got, who won't hold up the deal? Yeah, I've seen, I've seen the, uh, like the Flexport 747. There's one right behind you. Uh, if, if onshoreing really happens and there's major, major production shifting to the United States, what does that look like for Flexport? Are you going to get into like more rail, more trucking is the market even big how would you think about that I would imagine there would be an expansion of the US opportunity but like what what does that look like for flex sports specifically yeah winners and losers in different parts of our business

for sure the air freight we every business a lot of our we do a lot of e-commerce products from China to the US of course that's about 50% of all the air freight in the world now is coming out of Chinese e-commerce and so that that is at major risk and the price of air freight will probably collapse there that would be back for our air freight business. Our customs business is already booming as we help, we provide a lot of advisory services to help companies figure out what this means for them, how to mitigate, minimize duties, be compliant, get refunds on duties. Every year, even before all these new tariffs, $7 billion is going unclaimed in refunds that people are owed. That's right. That's crazy.

So we got people $140 million worth of that last year. I know that's our goal for the this year. But that's still a big market. You know, we should be 10 times bigger or even more than that. So that part of our business is booming. Trucking. We do about 200,000 truckloads a year. Domestically, moving trucks that have nothing to do with the international freight. That would probably grow. We'd want to get more. We will be getting more into kind of trade with U.S. and Latin America, US and other parts of the world. I don't really worry too much about the macro. Like, we're still pretty small.

We estimate our market share is about 0.25%. Wow. Right now. So like, even if the market shrunk in half, yeah, we've, okay, now we're 0.5%. You know, hold on to the we have, but if we'll come to all of it.

So I'm too worried. I have a question about a market. I'm sure you've thought about. So we've been having a bunch of, you know, there's a bunch of new defense tech companies emerging. You know, they have to move big, expensive, flammable, you know, things around all the time. Is that a vertical that, like, you guys have looked at at all? Because I think it's obviously, you know, a bunch of compliance issues.

Yeah, a little bit. I think you tend to want to be more, those guys want to work with people who own the assets. Interesting. Yeah, more tighter control security-wise. Like, actually, I heard about this company that does trucking. for the DoD or for big defense contractors, and they ship missiles as like a very lucrative business. But they own all the trucks.

And we're trying not to own any assets. Sure. Very hard to maintain to provide the kind of like ultimate security that one of those company needs if you're not asset heavy. So they'll, it's a cool space, but probably not one that we're best suited to play in right now. Yeah. What about, what about self-driving trucks?

I feel like we're seeing so many just, like the studio Ghibli moment, the chat GPT moment, like AI feels so big. And yet the self-driving trucks aren't really here. What are the dynamics? And do you have a timeline for that actually affecting the market? What's kind of the impact? It'll be huge. I mean, it's the Waymo's here.

My Tesla mostly drives itself now. And Tesla's making a truck. So, but I don't know how many of those Tesla. semis they've really shipped. And there's two different problems of the electric truck and the self-driving truck that maybe you didn't have been conflated. Like, because I think the electric truck actually has more problems than the self-driving truck, it seems like. Yeah. Just because of like charging and range and different things that don't make that much sense for a, from what I've heard. I'm not, I'm not that close to the physics of it, but the recharging network

has just like not been there for it. Yeah. It's going to be really huge though and a massive impact on a lot of things. You know, right now, transit time even. Like a truck that drives 24 hours a day can cross the country, I think the loss, as you can only drive eight hours a day, so crossed it three times faster.

Today you would need three drivers, and they charge you a huge premium for that team trucking, it's called, where you have multiple drivers running shifts. And it's a shitty lifestyle, like riding overnight, like never getting out of the truck as you cross the country. That is crazy.

But you, but, you, You could be very competitive. I once drove across the country in 53 hours with four friends, just taking turns. Were you doing a cannonball? Being hardcore. Four broke college kids. There's something about that that sounds like amazing with your boys once, but I take your point on maybe as a lifestyle.

We've been talking about it. Yeah, we want to do a race, try and get across the country. I think the record is something like 22 hours, which is crazy. Yeah, over 100 miles an hour the entire time. Very illegal, very controversial. From Maryland, where I'm from, to Oklahoma. And actually, the only reason we stopped a car broke down, we were going to go the whole way without stopping.

Yeah. So the 53 hours, actually, there was a stint while the car was in the mechanic. Okay. I'm ignoring that part. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. You cut that out, yeah. And then we stopped to the Green Canyon and, like, looked around a little while. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The real cannonball is from the Red Ball garage in Manhattan to the Portofino Hotel in California. in California. And it's been done for years. Alex Roy was the famous guy who did it originally. And then Ed Bolian destroyed the record during COVID when there was no one on the streets. It's a fascinating story. You should go check out. Yeah, this will be big in trucking. Oh, not, you know, jobs aside. It's like, I think truck driving is the most number one profession in 34 states. Yeah. By a number of people doing the job. So that'll be massively impactful. And yeah, I think there's a lot of, positives for the industry and productivity and stuff, but certainly it's an interesting problem

for the society. Speaking on AI, you know, something we've talking about on the show is like, you had this Ghibli moment last week where something that was historically super time intensive and expensive and costly. Like if you wanted this sort of like beautiful hand drawn animation style, yeah, you could go on Upwork or Fiverr and get that kind of thing done. It's not going to cost a ton. Most people wouldn't even bother to do it. And I think that we are racing towards like the gibbleification of like all goods, right? On like a long enough time horizon, like automation robots will just, you'll have sort of an idea for something that you want. And in theory, like, you know, you just, you know, something can be made with no human involvement and that could really drive

the cost down. Now if the cost of a lot of goods goes down over time, then in theory there would also be a lot more sort of like a Jevin's paradox dynamic where like if things get cheaper, people want more of them, which means that like we, there's a scenario where like we're ordering 10 times as much stuff from China in, you know, 10, 20 years. How do you think about just AI? Like it's easy to see how AI is, you know, going to make flexport a better business by rolling sort of systems out internally and building these sort of customer facing experiences. But have you thought at all about like how automation broadly can actually sort of like impact like the flow of goods around the world at sort of a more macro level?

Well, actually just coming back to the ebullification of everything. So I'm a I'm a published children's book author. You guys may know. That's right. Yeah. There we go. Big shift in the little digger. I wrote this myself.

It was not written by Chat ChitpT. It was not illustrated. I didn't illustrate it. I just wrote it. So you can write a children's book about 45 minutes. I love it. But the design took a long time. My designer who used to work in Flexport did this.

It looks great. It looks great. It's a wonderful story. Took him like, man, the better part of like six or eight weeks to do that. Yeah. I, when Chat Chacheebtee released their new image model last week, I was like, oh, I'm going to write a new children's book. And I did it in an hour.

And on my phone, I could have done it faster if I would have been on desktop and had parallel tabs open or whatever, but on the phone, that jvt app didn't let me. But in one hour, I was able to create a really cool book. And I think I could publish it and be done. It's also so cool, the customization being able to like make it about the more kid. I make these really cool, iconic flexport posters. We have 40 offices around the world and one for each office that, like, That's super cool.

Like iconic from the golden age of like ocean travel liners out of like good prompt for that. And it I asked the same designer to do it for me. One of these posters like, you know, I asked him six months ago and he quoted me something I couldn't afford. So using the children's. And now I made them all last night in like an hour. Yeah. So let's use a children's book as an example. My son is obsessed with reading.

He's three years old. He could easily burn through five, six books. a day. Like he would happily read he'd probably read 20 new books a day if we had 20 new books available in the house. And he'll read I bet you he'll read even more if the protagonist of the story. Yeah, exactly. So if like he's a protagonist, it's customized to his interest. It's perfectly matching his level. But I also don't want him on screen. So like there's a world where if like the cost of producing the books drops, books are, you know, 80% less because there's, it's just generated. There's a world where I'd order five times as much. And that means that you're going to be shipping in

theory like a lot more goods and that's just like for one category right could be yeah um and there'll be categories like that i i you know if i wasn't so busy i would definitely try to set the ginnis book of world records right now for whoever wrote the most children's books in the world right now in a 24 hour in a 24 hour period yeah i thousand children's books can we hear a little history of the flexport lion and the generative ai stuff and is the flex port lion coming back or yeah yeah well when dolly first came out i you know i think every company should have a mascot yeah ars is the lion because it's king of the jungle um you know lion probably kill any other animal in the world so that should be but i you know i wanted to claim that and make it

really we're the lion you can be something else like we're the lion uh and so yeah i probably went a little crazy on dolly when it first came out making lion in a shipping container in port whatever Yeah. Yeah, so you should expect to see more Flexport Lions out there. Yeah, I remember you got the access. Every company you could have a children's book for your marketing. It's great marketing. Kids love it.

And parents love it. And then you should have a mascot. The best of this is, by the way, dualingo. Like, apparently their owl is like, oh, yeah. Their owl has like 50 million followers on a different app. That's amazing. Yeah, we need to instantiate the Flexport lion with its own.

Yeah, I need to make a little bit more about it. Yeah, it can be posting. It's not an obvious shipping reference. I don't even know if lions are good at swimming or anything, but... Well, I mean, you do shipping over land as well. But, yeah, it's not a pack animal. No, but it's not like a king of the seas. I would expect, you know, an octopus, tentacles everywhere.

Who knows? Are there any transportation platforms is probably not the right way to think about it, but things like airships, you know, drones that you're excited about? We had a founder on earlier this week who's built. building sort of kind of plans yeah it's like a sea plane drone for like short-term transport you know if you that went viral they like five guys I made it in their living room or whatever yeah yeah yeah David David co-founder I think seems sweet if you like forgot something at home and you lived by a body of water yeah yeah yeah I'm

quiet I don't know yeah yeah like I've been pitched airships you know there's been a bunch of attempts you know at that I'd be curious at think as you think about the future 10 years out, what's what's exciting to you? And are there, and is there in white space? Definitely. Actually, man, I'm forgetting the name. Eli Derrata is a backer over to this airships company. Yep. Yeah, that one. Pretty high potential. I met with the founder recently. And I originally was very skeptical. I'm like, I don't think anyone needs this and sounds really complicated and whatever. But you walk me through it. It can carry the same volume as a 747. Take.

three days to cross the ocean instead of 15 hours, but like three days is pretty fast compared to a ship. So if you get to a price point in between air freight and ocean freight, that's very compelling. Yeah, it's just a new tier. And so some people will opt into it for a certain class of goods. That will be very compelling as a replacement for air freight. That would be cool. Does that kind of unblock the port system because we have a new set of ports?

We could go automated from day one. What's really cool about his model is his idea anyways. is that it would just go straight to your warehouse, not go to it at all. That's amazing. Land at your wherever your warehouse is. And not any trucking or any, you know, laying on. That's pretty cool. Hopefully somebody awesome funds it because it's not cheap to go launch these things.

And yeah, that's what real venture capital should be, right? Take some risk and do some badass stuff like that. So, rooting for them. I think the self-driving ship, I see that all the time. It's really stupid idea. just because these ships are like 20,000 containers with 20 guys. Like there's just not that much labor savings here. And most of those guys are doing maintenance.

Like they're like painting it and doing engine maintenance. Like you still need them even if it's self-drive. There's one guy driving the ship. Like, yeah. Well, yeah, we've had pretty good autopilot in boats. Yeah, it kind of drives itself anyway. Right. So I think the self-painting ship is kind of interesting.

Oh, that's cool. Just kind of painting itself as it goes. What about those crazy? ships that have sales or nuclear power, different modes of power for ships? Yeah, the nuclear power, I think, is going to be probably regulatory problem more than anything else. Like nobody really wants that you're new sailing into their harbor. It's been probably the problem there.

I've seen some cool ideas where, like, the ship, the mother ship would stay offshore, like 200 miles and then deploy like little baby ships that would bring the cargo to support so that it never had to get within your coastline. But still a ways away. What about the sales? Yeah, so I've also seen there's a really cool company called Clippership, really tiny seed round companies. But with a big vision of little autonomous drone sailboats

that would carry like five or six containers worth of stuff. And again, like sail not to your warehouse, but to like a little tiny port, upriver or something. and set up their own network of ports. They're trying to go live soon. All of this stuff is pretty cool and I have no idea. You know, it requires venture capital. And it's very interesting.

You know, founders fund is the obvious one, but like it's really interesting to see when do they get excited about something. Not everything can be the next SpaceX. And SpaceX was a crazy vision until it worked, right? And could have lost a lot of money if it didn't. Yeah, what about SpaceX point to point? point. Yeah. I mean, obviously the first, the first like beachhead is like the most expensive like private jet traveler needs to get to Tokyo in like an hour from New York. And so they're like,

yeah, 50K, no problem. But where do you see that technology going over the long term? The problem is that like flying to can it, can SpaceX launch like in bad weather and it's raining or something? Like you're no, not really. I think they need pretty clear skies. But they're in Florida and Texas. It's pretty clear most of the time. We don't scratch too many. I think from a cargo standpoint is probably not worth any premium because cargo care that much if it gets there in 15 hours or in 30 minutes. It's basically the same for most everything.

For military, those are very big differences. Like if you need to get supplies to some soldiers on the ground in 30 minutes, like that can be life or death versus 15 hours or whatever. So like military applications are huge, rich people. Yeah. Care a lot more about their time. So yeah, I would be certainly bullish on that, but it's just like hard. The cargo doesn't care that much.

If it takes 15 hours, very rare, you would spend that much extra for something to get it there that fast. I mean, maybe it would shorten down your trips, which would be nice. One that I'm very excited about is zip line. Oh, yeah. Which is I can't figure out if they launched or didn't launch yet. They're supposed to launch any day now in Dallas. And you'll be able to buy anything that's for sale in a Walmart on a drone delivery.

Wow. in less than five minutes. There's 25,000 items in a typical Walmart and 24,000 of them are small enough to fit inside their drone. Wow. And then I understand they're going to go live. I don't want to reveal anything I'm not supposed to, but they're going to go live with some restaurant chains.

Oh, cool. Get your burrito in a bit of a bit. This is one of those things like, you know, they had the early hype where like everybody was like, oh, this is the future. And then like they had to do the thing and like actually like make it work. So the hype like dies down and then suddenly like a burrito lands in your backyard in five minutes and you're like, we are so back. Last last question for you. How do you think about sort of managing like the team and the company at a time when you're running a business that's, you know, most companies have the benefit.

Like, you know, if you're running like payroll software, you can be like, let's ignore sort of like politics and like what's going out. Just buy on each other? Yeah, like let's ignore the world and just like focus on our business and our customers. But like you're in a business where like in 30 minutes they're going to announce some news that's going to be very impactful to your customers. Like, you know, how have you messaged everything with the team? Like do you got, are you going to be like, you know, doing a war room as the news breaks out? What does that look like? I'm curious.

We always, there's we do. We have war rooms as we call it too. And they're Slack channels basically where we get together to go run out of Oodal loops and observe what's happening in the world, orient ourselves. Who needs to know? about this, make decisions, take action. And our ultimate, you know, my message to the team is what my dad used to tell us when we go camping and say, you don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the campers in the next site over.

That's great. And our competition, we've just got to be better. We can't outrun this bear of tariffs or geopolitics, terrorists, or blowing up ships in the Red Sea or whatever it might be. But we can be better at responding. to this than any other competitor. And it's a moment for us to actually double down on being the most customer-centric.

And tech gives us a huge advantage here. When the new tariffs hit, we will be ingesting that into our databases and publishing it to our customers within minutes, right? And our account management teams within the hour will have a plan and script and start calling down and letting people know what it means for them, how much it would have cost them.

like start setting up advisory appointments to talk through. You know, things like you're in tariffs, it's your value of your goods times the tariff rate, times the duty rate. Well, there are a lot of perfectly legal compliance strategies you can do to reduce the valuation of your goods that nobody bothered with when it was time zero. And you can get refunds, as I was saying.

So it's all about how do you respond to these things. And yeah, we think we have a big advantage there. So it's fun is why Flex Sports is the most fun business. in the world. I don't want to sit there and run payroll or other companies. It's boring. Get out there. See what's happening. Hey, it's an entertaining time to be in payroll. You picked a bad day for that analogy because it is high stakes. It's James Bond out here. We got the we got the guns in the studio straight from China, the team of pistols. They're water pistols, but we're having a lot of fun today. We got James Bond on the soundboard. We're having a great time.

But thanks for stopping by. This was fantastic. Always great talking to you. Good luck. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. happens with these sarah maybe i'll need to come back and talk through when we actually have yeah yeah yeah that'd be great we'll have you back of course yeah all right have fun later we'll talk to you later great to see you fantastic always an entertaining interview uh thanks to an absolute dog so we got an absolute lion an absolute lion we got james from profound calling in we are going to be talking about uh i spoke with james yesterday for the first time what he's doing is absolutely fascinating yeah he's helping companies understand how they are appearing in LLMs.

Okay, yeah. Let's bring them in. James, how you doing? Boom. What's going on? Are you live? Can you hear us? Yeah, I can hear you.

There we go. Fantastic. We're live. What's going on? Cool. How are we doing? We're good. Can you start with just a brief introduction of yourself, your company, what you're

doing? Yeah, I'm James, co-founder, CEO here at Profound. We're a New York City-based startup. Yeah, we're building a marketing platform that helps brands understand and control how they show up in AI responses. We launched in August, August 17th of 2024 and kind of like came sprinting out of the gate.

We raised a $3.5 million seed round that was co-led by Keith Rabeweboi, Coastal Ventures, with saga sort of code eating and yeah we've been growing pretty fast pretty quick we have built this platform that's

relied on by brands like MongoDB Indeed Mercury, Rippling, Ramp Ramp Yeah we love ramp here Yeah talk about talk about like the genesis of the idea because I think what you're doing

and we'll get more into how it works but what you're doing is now like blatantly obvious, like it's a blatantly obvious idea, right? Because all you have to do is kind of compare like as search became a big market and companies sort of rapidly realized like we need to understand and control how we're showing up in results. You know, there's a lot of parallels to now. But I thought your backstory of kind of like how you guys discovered the opportunity in the first place at the beginning of last year was cool. Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, you know, myself and my co-founder, Dylan, we were at South Park Commons, which is like a VC incubator accelerator, that one in SF, one in New York. We were lingering around the one in New York, spending our time trying to figure out what business we wanted to work on. And there was this kind of sort of ironic moment where as we were thinking about other businesses to work on, we kind of realized that we had just been using perplexity. all day, every day for weeks or months on end without actually going, you know, and doing traditional blue link search.

And yeah, again, it's one of those ones where, you know, it seems more obvious now. But this is back then, but even at the start of last year, chat GPT didn't have web retrieval. So it was no good at search. Perplexity, it felt like this streaming to CDs type moment. And we just went all in on that inflection point. We said, hey, either perplexity is just going to take everything here because this is so good. This makes AI answers, makes so much more sense than Blue Link search. Or everyone else is going to jump on board and do the same thing.

And probably closer to the latter is the way it unfolded. ChatGPT introduced web retrieval. I mean, Adobe did this huge study that they released a couple of weeks ago. It's based on a trillion web visits on American. American retail. And it's like, I think, 40% of consumers now are trying AI search for shopping for commercial. So it's definitely... Yeah, we had somebody, we had Aiden from Open AI on yesterday who said that he just, anytime he wants to buy a product, even if he's just buying hand towels, he just does like a deep research report. And he's like, it's worth just waiting five minutes to

figure out like what's the best product based on any category. My interest. I'm curious, like, how aware, it makes sense that companies like Ramp are using these tools every single day, and they start to realize like, hey, this is a product discovery mechanism. We should get on top of sort of understanding how Ramp is appearing in results. But for how aware are legacy companies, you know, sort of like multinational public companies aware of how, do they realize this is almost like a hair on fire problem yet? or do you have to kind of explain to them like, hey, by the way, you know, 20,000 people are searching about your products every single day and like you have no grasp of how you're appearing or what that's causing people to do, et cetera. They're all over it.

I, like, reject this thing of the incumbent. I think the incumbents all had their lunch stolen in the early 2000s. And I think that everyone's like wiser now when, you know, they can sniff a platform shift. We work with some really big companies. Like, I know everyone's got the, you know, the founder yet. We genuinely work with some of the biggest like Fortune 100 companies in the world. I just can't say their logos because they just don't like that. But yeah, they're super clued up.

They're super wise to what's going on. They may be a bit slower in terms of the workflows because understanding is very different to like taking action and like trying to improve the results. But I mean, as an example to give one of our customers who I won't say who it is, but that big company, 12,000 plus employees, they did like, a big global PR push around this new product launch last, I think, a week or two ago. And they saw a 50% increase in their visibility on that, their visibility in answer engine responses. Without giving away the secret sauce, can you just give us some general guidelines for how a company should think about steering, how they show up in LLM responses?

because you can imagine everything from like do more SEO stuff, get on Reddit, make sure you're in the next crawl in the in the pre-training data set, or you could even go and say, hey, there's some inaccurate information about us. Let's just go directly to Open AI and say, hey, can you trim this out of the data set? Yeah. So I guess that there's a sort of wide aperture or sort of a philosophical response to this, which is I think understanding that this is that this is, that, the, The failure mode here is to think this is like traditional search where, I mean, traditional search was essentially a marketplace system. You had the website and the end user and the Google index just helped the end user, you know,

come into a website, maybe top of funnel and, you know, thumb around in the ecosystem of eventually get pushed down the funnel into a conversion event. AI answers that there's three parties acting here where we have the, we said the same website and the same end user, but sat in the middle is the answer engine. The answer engine changes everything because it's not connecting the two. The answer engine is essentially, for the intensive purposes,

stealing the relationship from the end user or stealing the relationship with the end user from the brand. So most brands aren't really grocking this idea yet, but most brands are about to lose the majority of connection they have with their end consumer. Because now when I'm researching a purchase,

I go to chat GPT, and if I need more information, I send a follow-up question to chat GPT. There's no need to click out. And eventually, I mean, if you read the Stratacri article that came out, the interview with Sam, I think this week or last week,

you know, it's obvious that OpenAI are going to go into shopability. So we're going to see, like, agentic browsing, agentic shopping start to take place and you will transact within these answer engines, you will consume media within these answer engines, you won't need to, we're going into a zero-click future. So as a brand, the impetus, you know, going back to

that sort of philosophical point, that your impetus is, how do I distribute information to these answer engines in real time accurately? The first step is like to just understand what the hell is going on. So, you know, if I'm ramp and I want to show up more in accounts, payable, cool, let's like run a bunch of interrogations. Let's see how the answer engines respond when we send a huge variety of questions about accounts payable, open-ended questions, not brand direct ones about Ramp. Let's see where they go, which sources do they go, does chat GPD go to or perplexity go to or co-pilot go to to get that information.

And then from there we can start building strategies. I mean, in Ramp, you know, we just published a case study with those guys, so it's public information. They increased their visibility. by 7x in one of the indices that they were looking at by just looking at what was going on and what they could do about it. But then I guess, John, to give you a more direct response, like, you know, tactical stuff, lLMs.txte, our website, tryprofound.com, we get as, our web, our LLMs.txte now

is getting as much traffic as our site map, which is pretty interesting. We think for like very, for rich, extensive websites, you know, websites like, I don't know, Stripe is an example. We have tons of documentation. I think LLM's full.txti will be very interesting because it's just essentially cramming a huge TXT file of everything all onto one page because answer engines don't mind that. I think going, you know, just cycling through other ideas,

you know, things that we're seeing work are lots of structured data is very important. Like, you know, remove all verbosity or creating content essentially for a retrieval agent to pick up, not a human. Images are useless. Answer engines don't care about images, so like kind of ignore them to an extent. Metadata needs to be very thoughtful. You can essentially, you can just spoil the whole article with your metadata,

and that will often be pretty effective. So, I mean, I could go through, I could cycle through this. Yeah, what, I have a couple kind of questions. You're sort of building in a, what's a new category. Do you call it AEO, like answer engine optimization? have you coined it yet? Obviously you want to own it. Yeah, I think you have to let the kind of market decide what it's going to be called.

AEO, AIO, LLMO, GEO gets thrown around a generative engine, optimization gets thrown around a lot. Considering we're all techno-optimists and Silicon Valley is meant to be full of techno-optimists, the desire to use heuristic is quite interesting to me. I've seen like so we as human beings we love to use heuristic. We just want to say this is SEO for AI. But there's all kinds of like new surface areas that just like didn't exist before. Yeah. Can you talk about do you have any type of vision of what paid ads in LLMs will look like?

I had gotten multiple pitches over the last year of people that were building these sort of like ad networks to fit within different LLMs. And my general read is like I sort of believed that, you know, paid ads would be heavily integrated into LLMs. But I sort of felt like it might, I wasn't necessarily convinced that in a world where there's, you know, an infinite number of different answer engines that everybody has a different favorite, maybe this sort of global network makes sense. But then if open AI is getting like, you know, long term or GROC or whoever's like the sort of power law winner, if, if they're getting 80% of the traffic, like maybe they end up with more of like a meta style ad network where they just build it, you know, from scratch. But I'm curious what you think. I mean, I definitely,

I kind of think, well, I believe there will be a more fragmented marketplace this time around. I think there's just more, everyone knows what's at stake here. Google search has been the biggest monopoly in the history of the internet. And I think there's more capital, more energy going into trying to ensure that doesn't repeat itself this time round. But answering the question, I think it's actually two things. I think it's generative advertising in a conversational user experience will be that the convergence of those two things will be one of the most powerful unlocks in the history of marketing. Language models are really good at language.

and being able to synthesize net new ads on the fly that are perfectly tailored to that exact moment in the exact conversation in the exact way that is most compelling, I think is about to melt marketers brains on the efficacy of how powerful that advertising medium is going to be. I mean, we want it to happen. We think it's very interesting and we think it will speak. it will be a very obvious next move for our business. I don't know. We're not holding our breath right now. I don't think, you know, I'm not sure if it will unfold like that, especially with Open AI.

You know, they have that corporate, the corporate structuring, I think, is a bit of a hindrance, just the kind of the values of the business. I can't, I don't know. Your speculation is as good as mine, but yeah. Yeah. Well, very cool. I'm sure I'm sure you're going to be raising a lot in the next few years

So when you're when you're ready to announce anything Come back on and bring it down Keep sending me different learnings and stuff in the meantime I think we just have a ton of founders In our audience that probably aren't taking LLM Optimization seriously enough now So go DM James or sign up for a demo or whatever And it's great having you on

Thanks for having you guys. Congrats on everything. That's cool. Cheers. Thanks for stopping by. Later. We got Quaid in the waiting room yet. We got Quaid coming in to the Temple of Technology, breaking down watches and wonders,

which of course is, it seems like the biggest watch event of the year. Every major watch brand announced new watches, and we're going to get the update from Quaid. I'm very excited for this. We discussed the Vachron Complications watch that launched, but I want to hear about Patech. I want to hear about Rolex.

landweller. I want to hear about everything Quaid has to say. So break it down for us, Quaid. How you doing? What's going on? It's James Bonday. I hope you have your, your, your, uh, your, your, uh, because we're all secret agents today. Um, what's going on? Uh, what time is it over there for you? It's 9.48 p.m. in Geneva. I'm in, uh, a tiny little Geneva hotel. So apologies for the background, but we're on the ground. You look great. Uh, yeah. break it down. What is going on? Why is everyone in Geneva? What's going on in the world of watches? Yeah, it's watches and wonders right now. So it's kind of like the biggest year or biggest week in watches for the year typically. It's when the watchful comes together. A lot of the

brands come out and they reveal the new models, discontinuations, and everyone comes out here and nerds out together. So what's making a splash? Like what are the biggest announcements? And then what are the announcements that I might have seen that are kind of overrated? Yeah, so it's it's typically a time when when brands like Rolex and Pat Tech come out and they announce like iterative improvements on their models. I'm sure a lot of you folks have started to see a lot of the press coming out of it. We got quite a splashy year specifically around Rolex. It's not very common for them to come out and release a new model. And so they dropped the landweller.

And it's definitely like penetrating popular culture a little bit more. I was in LAX on my way here and a bunch of people. who clearly don't talk about watches. We're talking about the landweller and that excited me. But so that was the big splashy one. First new model. What's the hardcore enthusiast collector reaction to the landweller? I look at it. I'm like, okay, you took, you know, the best of AP and you combined it with, you know, a day date and that seems like probably like it's going to sell well, right? I just look at the bracelet. but like as a, you know, a very much like a hobbyist enthusiast, you know, I'm curious what the sort of

on the ground reaction is to the new model. Yeah, I think there's like the consumerified reaction and then there's like the nerd reaction. I think the consumerified one is like integrated bracelet homage to the late 70s, Orster Quartz. I think, Jordi, you're spot on there. Like it's the first moment in a long time or maybe ever where I think Rolex is building a fully integrated bracelet that like really puts a model directly in the Royal Oak Nautilus category. And so Rolex has been largely dominant without doing that. And so now that you have a bracelet where I'm wearing a Royal out today, like I haven't put on the land dweller, but does it make sense to have both in my collection? I think it's like you start to ask that question, which is quite exciting. For the watch

nerds, they released a new caliber with it, the 7135, which has a new escapement in it. And so like for most people, they're going to buy the watch because it's a hype new Rolex. I'm sure every 80s line is getting blown up right now. But for the watch nerds, it's just a really efficient new escapement. It's pretty exciting to see it come out for the not watch nerds in the room. Like the escapement regulates the hairspring. The hairspring is what you're winding to power the watch. And it's kind of being regulated and releasing.

And that's what's driving power to the gears. And so super nerdy. But to have a moment where they not just make a new model and make it exciting, but they also invest in kind of the technology and push the innovation forward in the watch perspective. And then to have the confidence to drop a new caliber and a new escapement in like a sport watch, I think it's just kind of a balzy Rolex move. So I think the watch world likes it. I think everyone wants to like it. That's cool. I'm curious, how do you guys think about estimating how these things are going to price? Obviously, as soon as an AD releases a land

dweller from their hands into a consumer's hands, some of them will get listed on bezel immediately Do you have any sort of sense of how this is going to price? It's a little bit different than seeing a new GMT, you know, release where it's a different color way, but it's certainly not a new model. Yeah, it's, it'll be interesting. And I think, like, it's very hyped and it falls, like, right into the hype stream and everyone's going to want this. I'm sure 80s lines are getting absolutely blown up. It's also expensive at retail.

It's a $14,000 watch, I think, is the retail on it. So, like, you know, it's $1,500. more to get a Daytona retail. Granted, those are obviously impossible to get, so it's not even real numbers. Whenever Rolex drops a new model, specifically one that's desired, you pay a premium to wear it first. And so I'm sure if you want to be courtside, you know, wearing your first land dweller, you're going to pay an insane premium on that. I would not be surprised if these things are selling like well over double retail. That probably seems like the entry ticket, even at a stable market. But we'll see. It's like, you know, there's not a lot of hype

date jests out there, even the hype date just still trading in the mid-teen. So it's certainly a new market, but I think it's going to be pretty frothy with my guess. Can you talk about some of the other launches and how they've been received either this year or specifically at watches and wonders? Yeah, so I think like it's been interesting. Like usually when it's up happening is like I mentioned you'll drop a watch. It'll be popular even if it's like a funky watch. Like we saw the the day date with the emoji you know it's not a Tetris one that was kind of wild yeah like it's crazy but because there's inherent scarcity and it's high up you end up seeing these things trade for insane figures sure I think there's a lot of other really exciting ones that that drop this year it's they

don't touch the land dweller but it was kind of a theme of really interesting color dials you had the the the sprite get kind of a big brother the the green and black GMT that's a left-handed I never thought I like I thought they were going to launch that model and then discontinue it because it just inherently was weird in a death row. But we got a white gold version of it with the first ceramic dial that Rolex's ever made. It's all green. It looks kind of hulky meets the sprites. That's exciting. You got this crazy iron stone, Tiger Ironstone dial for the full gold rupeer, which is like gemology mix of Tiger's Eye and all these other crazy metal or crazy stones. Op. Colors got some new ones. They brought in like a hyped turquoise

dial in the Daytona. So it seems like they're investing in technology, but they're also playing like right into the hype cycle and giving color dials and things that are strong. How are some of the Holy Trinity brands playing watches and wonders? I saw a launch from Vachron. I saw some Patec news that you guys broke down on your ex account. Can you give me just an overview of like how big is this year for each of the Holy Trinity? Yeah, it's not it's not quite the level of Rolex I would say like obviously Vasharan's had a big year with the two two two twos. kind of riding that lightning. As far as Pattec goes, we got the 61-96P,

the newest iteration of the Kalatrava. The Watchwork loves it. It's kind of being hailed as the best modern Kalatrava we've seen in a really long time. It has that amazing salmon dial at the market love. So still active, but I would say more like a normal year than kind of Rolex having the standout new model. What is the general sentiment,

like industry sentiment right now on the ground? we obviously had the COVID ZERP boom and then things crashed. There's a lot of models that are down 50%. They're obviously still trading, you know, above retail. But is the sentiment good, even though we're maybe back to like a new normal, but the new normal is just like, you know, sort of higher than, you know, 2019, let's say? Exactly. Like I think the hype models are still high, but still trading well above retail.

you know, Daytona, 155 retail is still trading in the low 30s. It's not a $55,000 watch anymore, but, you know, it's still trading at a meaningful premium, still very hard to get. And I think, you know, the correction that we saw over the last two years actually in many ways, I think accelerated the market. You have a lot of people that were watching the price of a Daytona being $55,000 and just feel prohibitive to enter the market there. Now all of a sudden see the watch at the low 30s and they either feel like they're buying

the dip or they just want the watch well enough that they are willing to. to make that price at that point. So we're seeing a lot of energy come back in the market. On our side, last month was the best month we've ever had ever. So, you know, we continue to grow. Congratulations. We love growth here. It is.

We have to shout that out. That's fantastic. Congratulations. Thanks, guys. But yeah, so I think the market's still frothy and it's there a little bit less speculative than it's ever been. I think people saw the highs and they saw the drop. And now they're, you know, being more careful.

But still a lot of watches to be lost. We love a little bit of froth. Not as big on speculation, but I love a little bit of froth. I love the froth. Is there anything else? Anything else? Yeah, anything else that's been anything surprising from this trip so far, or is it all kind of expected?

It's all what you'd expect. It's always fun to see everyone in Geneva rocking the most fire watches ever, and they're just casually on the street. I had lunch today, and I think I saw two crashes, a bunch of. bunch of open works like all sitting in the same vicinity. And it's fun to see how this stuff regulates in the secondary market. Like we're already seeing these celebration dials like, you know, they're, they used to be trading in the mid teens.

We have a seller that's opportunistically listing them in the 30s now trying to get this the speculative buyers to be ready to move. But then we're also still selling them, you know, in the low 20s, right? So like it'll, everything will shoot up immediately and then it'll find its way down. And if it's a hype model, the celebration model and our dial is inherently a crazy watch. Like it's people who rock it, hats off to them because it's an impressive watch to be able to pull off. But for the ones that have staying power and they're discontinued and have a lot of demand, obviously the price shoots up. Can you talk about some of the smaller brands? What's going on

with FP Jorn and some of the more challengers, the up-and-comers, the brands that folks might not have necessarily heard of, but are making big splashes in the last few years. What are they doing at watches and wonders? And what are they doing generally? Yeah. So I think most of the brands are here. even some of the big brands like tend to be a little bit quiet even not just the independence like like ap didn't participate in watches and wonders but did like some quiet announcements of new ceramic colors and things like that i went today there's a a small little wait just just one step back is that like interpersonal dynamics like they don't like who runs the show like why why why do you decide to not be at the biggest you know watch event of the year i don't know if i don't

have like the nuance there and and I don't know if like reps and them are not participating and things like that but I just know like they're not making as big of a presence as as other brands are and I think that's just like a selective choice but obviously they announced they love the ceramics and they announced a new blue ceramic that is aligned with the color of a specific sky in a Swiss Valley which is very AP and super cool of them so yeah they're just doing their thing and on the independent side, there's a fair actually next to Watches and Wonders. They're in the same little area by the Geneva airport that is focused on specifically independence. And so I actually spent time there today and you're kind of working with brands like Ming and kind of these like new

up-and-coming brands that are doing really cool stuff. So you get a mix where it's a fun moment where I think a lot of attention is brought into the watch world of Watches and Wonders. And I think it, you know, rising tide rises all ships in this kind of stage. That's awesome. Love it, dude. Well, thank you for joining it at 10 p.m. your time. Have a great rest of your trip. And thank you for responding to John and I at all hours of the day. Every time we have watched. With like the most obscure risk checks. Hey, we, we, we saw this VC with this watch. Let us know what it is. And you're always on top of it. We appreciate it. And thank you. Watch is I am I am available 24-7. Thank you. Yeah. It's been it's been fantastic working with you and partnering with you.

You're the man. Have a great. Have a great rest of your trip. Yeah. Safe travels. Thanks. Bye. Good timing. So much watch news. I'm glad we were able to have him on as our official watch correspondent. I love this stuff. Well, next up we have Sarah Guil coming into the Temple of Technology talking about, she runs a fantastic AI podcast if you're not familiar, also a big time investor.

And wasn't she the reason that Andrew Reed joined Sequoia? Wasn't that the story? Yeah. It was about the backstory. Yeah. And she's here now. Welcome to the show. Sarah.

Good to have you. Hey, hey. Hi. What's going on? Great to have you. It's going. Thanks for having me. What's new in your world?

How did you process the studio Ghibli moment? How are you feeling? I mean, you've been, you know, bullish on it for years now. What's, how is it like updated your world model and what's exciting going forward from here? Well, it's super cute. Right. I have a lot of, I generated a ton of images of me and my kids and my family. my friends and so I should not be ignored like how much people actually do want to create.

I think it updates I think it should update a lot of people's world models in terms of how early we still are in quality. I think the fact that like quality is a very broad term. I think the fact that you had image generators make things that were beautiful or realistic. I feel like people kind of thought that you know to some degree like images were solved. like other domains were already more well solved. But like what I think the GPT 4-0, Studio Ghibli moment taught us is, first of all, it's like a different technology for image generation. But it allows a lot of controllability. And there's more knowledge of like why the image is the way it is.

And so I think we're going to keep seeing a ton of improvements in our ability to create different things that like surprise people. Have you gotten a chance to dig into how much of the, I mean, it's clear that like this new model, whatever they're doing is much better. How much of it is just the design, the algorithm, the strategy versus like scale? And I really hope that we have almost like a deep seek moment where we're like, oh, now it now these, now it's a filter on Instagram and it's just a button and it takes one second and it runs on your phone. We're compressed it down. That seems to be a trend in all of these models. Something comes out. It's really cool.

It's really big. It's really expensive. then it gets really cheap and quick. What are you expecting this year as this evolves? And do you think any of those trends will like unlock new use cases? I mean, I think this system can do things that were really hard to get right consistently before, right? And it is different.

I mean, I don't work at OpenAI. But lots of people believe that GPD40, it's not diffusion-based image generator. It's just starting with noise. and you like gradually cleaning it up the way like mid-journey models supposedly work. You're building images piece by piece, like sequentially, like you have tokens in a language model, right? And if the image parts are more like words in a sentence and you're creating the image one element at a time, so it's like technology brothers in a cyberpunk city with a blue dragon, it's understanding the request with language. It's connecting the words to visual concepts it knows, and then it's doing it like step by step.

And this is great because it's more controllable and it's really high quality, but it requires a lot of compute, which is why Sam is talking about servers melting and, you know, it's still slow. I would take, I would take like every bet that in general, all types of AI capabilities due to competition and continued investment and technical progress and distillate. Like it all gets cheaper and faster, right? So anybody who's building with this stuff or using it should expect that curve to continue the way it has for the last 18 months. And I think a lot of it will be open. I mean, opening, I just said they were committed to this too. And so, like, do, I definitely think that the data would suggest that we should continue to see, like, new capabilities as the models continue to, like, invest in, or the, the foundation model companies invest in multi-modality and continued scale.

How do you, what advice would you give to somebody that's doing anything around image generation of the app layer? I think that prior to last week, if you were building like something that generates Facebook ads, you felt pretty good because you were like, well, we have great UI and like customers care about workflows and like, you know, we help with this sort of like effectively like, you know, baking in prompt engineering to get great outputs and then OpenAI releases something that like consistently one shots, you know, prompts with like three words and it's like a fantastic output. Yeah. Do you think that, you know, do you think if you're working on like sort of image generation or ad generation SaaS that you need to like pivot to just having like new ideas and like kind of

thinking deeper into the stack? Or do you think that there's, you know, do you think that you can still kind of like stay ahead by focusing on workflows. I definitely think there's a lesson here of like watch what the labs are doing. Watch what anybody who is doing like core research is working on and you don't want to fly too close to the sun. Right. I do think one surprise might be what anthropic and open AI explicitly care about is like AGI or ASI, whatever you want to call it.

Right. And one might have argued that like image generation voice, like these things are not on the path to AGI. Right. They're, um, their products you kind of get for free. Yeah. I think there's like maybe two lessons here for entrepreneurs. One is, well, these companies they do care about making like end user progress and commercial progress. In part, because they need to build a business that requires consumer engagement to keep justifying the training cost and the research cost, right? And so I think if they feel like there are capabilities that fit into a broader consumer engagement or like productivity platform, they're probably going to pursue them.

But I also think that like the, at least my experience with creative tools is that people want a huge amount of control and not one tool will serve everyone. And so like the things that Open AI and the labs have produced are very democratizing. And yet like that is lowering the floor for if you want something that looks like a decent ad. I also think there's a lot of room to like continue working on the last mile and raise the ceiling and we're going to have just like much better content, much richer content, more diversity, higher quality from people spending a lot less money. And there was an opportunity in that. Yeah, I think last mile is just like an interesting framework where like, you know,

the base models are going to get you to like, you know, pretty great. And then how do you get to excellent? And there's like probably a lot of value that you can capture by delivering excellent. And I think you can make like reasonable predictions about what the labs care about, right? Like, let's just use some examples. Like do they care about cogeneration? Yes, they care about cogeneration. They think it's on the path to better reasoning.

But do they want to build every workflow for a certain type of code base or migration, every workflow and service, like in customer service or law or finance or accounting or even, I don't know, video capture and editing? Like, absolutely not. They neither can nor want to do that. Yeah. It seems like there's been this trend over the last few years of maybe don't train a foundation model, stick to the application layer, and then go operate.

on highly protected data sets like legal or finance or investment banking, medical records, etc. And I'm wondering if there will be a version of that that relates to image generation. But do you think we're kind of at the end of that trend or do you think there's more niches that people can discover if they just think really hard about where the labs aren't building towards and then go find something really cool? I actually think we're still like pretty early in quality. Like in your like artists and advertisers and communicators, like the specificity that people have for what they want in an image, like, you know, the concept here is controlability. Like I think the ceiling is really high.

And to the point at the beginning, like I think people thought we were kind of done and we're not done. And so I actually think there's still an opportunity for large companies here. And then relatedly, like video is much harder than images. requires like different architectural change and so if images are this expensive and slow to generate today like I do think also efficiency is going to matter here and workflow is going to matter here and collaboration is and so I I still think there's opportunity for other companies that are not necessarily just training pure text image models yeah oh sorry I was going to take it in a different direction but I was going to ask um it seems like there's been this evolution of the value will accrue to the foundation model layer.

Now it will accrue, at least in the short term, to the application layer. Every foundation model company kind of has a dance partner on the distribution side, whether it's Google, obviously, has their own distribution through their apps, and meta has all the different social media apps. X and XAI are now partnered and together.

Even OpenAI has gotten so many people who install the OpenAI app and the ChatGPT app. Do you think there'll be an, increasing trend of, hey, yeah, it's not enough to just be a foundation model company. You've got to find a dance partner on the distribution side if you really want to accelerate over the long term and remain relevant. I certainly don't think it hurts, but the, like, the best example would still be opening eye and chat GPT.

They didn't actually, like their distribution is their own, right? It depends on how novel the capability is. And so I think there's a deeper question in, like maybe that you're implying that, in what you just asked of, like, well, are people going to build new experiences that are so different that they can create their own distribution? It is fascinating that they have this deep partnership with Microsoft. I've used Outlook for one email inbox for the last two years. Haven't seen any Open AI products in there.

I don't know if I just haven't clicked the right button, but doesn't seem like Microsoft is really pushing like, hey, we're going to build these models in, although they've talked a lot about co-pilots and different office products. But Jordy, what's your question? Do you think that it almost feels like there's never been more hype for AI, but I almost feel like it's like underhyped. Like you shared an article yesterday or a study that shows like AI therapy, like actually seems to work really well.

And the idea that like society broadly, everybody would have free access, infinite access to high quality therapy, like should probably be like the top story in the world. because of how transformative it could be if every individual could understand themselves better and sort of, you know, mature and whatever they're getting out of therapy. It feels to me like just AI broadly is still underhyped even by the cohort of humans that is like, you know, like fully AGI pill. I think it's, I think it's wrongly hyped. Maybe that's the answer. Like it is still underhyped. and the things that people are really excited about

are not necessarily the right ones. Maybe I'll go back to the Microsoft thing for a second. This is not like, I mean, clearly Saya's done an amazing job with Microsoft, but it's still a very large beast. And I think it is like kind of impossible to overstate how hard it is to get existing products in existing businesses to move quickly, right? And all of this shit has happened so quickly.

And like should there be intelligence in your email? Absolutely. Right? Like that technical capability exists today. But what does anybody who is a traditional email vendor, Microsoft or Google, like navigating here? And they're like, oh, what does our user agreements say about if we can process that data? What is like the safety consideration around processing that data? What is the user promise around privacy?

Right. Like there's how much is it going to cost? does like, do we even have our infrastructure set up to share that data with model inference? I think it's complicated to go deploy this stuff, especially at scale with organizations that by virtue of actually having users and customers are more conservative. And so I think people can go challenge it by. Yeah. I mean, staying on email, I was setting up a new Gmail inbox.

And there's Gemini buttons everywhere, but they don't seem to do it. anything that I want to do. It's just like, oh, give me a two-line summary of this email that I could already kind of skim. It feels like, you know, during the mobile era, there was this whole drumbeat of like mailbox. I don't know if you remember that company that got acquired by Dropbox. It like went viral. Everyone was using it. It introduced a couple different UI patterns that were really cool and then eventually adopted. And it was never like a power law outcome, this massive trillion dollar company. But it was like a really cool product. People enjoyed it. It was probably a good outcome for the investors, the founders, the users. Everyone had a good time. And I feel like there's a little

bit of a meme right now that like, oh, you're just a chat GPT rapper. You shouldn't even go and try and build that. And I've always wondered like, should we be telling founders like just go build and maybe don't even worry if it's aligned with venture capital necessarily. It's okay to go build something because there's there's so much opportunity with these new tools. You might become really big, but you also might just build like an okay subscription business and people are paying 20 bucks a month for it for a while. And then maybe you get steamrolled, but maybe you land somewhere great and you get acquired somewhere and it's all worth. And at least we get the product. It just feels like again and again, I think of a product and then I can reason my way out of, that's not a venture bet, but we don't get the product in the

interim. And I'm like, I just want the product right now as a consumer. Yeah. I don't think like you can give entrepreneurs advice on things that are really about like personal motivation. Sure. If they want to just build the product, like go build the product. If they want to build a hundred billion dollar company, they should think a lot about like what's going to make a hundred billion dollar company.

Yeah. We're explicitly not going to back anything that's going to like be a small outcome that is at least that we believe is, right? But I also think that there are spaces that people think of as like very red ocean that people have creative approaches to. What does red ocean mean? Red ocean means like just overly complicated, competition, a blue ocean. Yeah, the opposite of blue ocean.

Yeah. Exactly. Like a lot of people are fighting over it. It's not like an unknown market. Like, you know, I think I'm pretty excited for notion mail. Lots of other mail services exist. Sure. Have you, I'm sure you've looked at a bunch or gotten pitched a bunch.

Have you done any AI rollups or do you have a broad thesis there? When I look at some of these strategies where we're sort of, you know, a startup. people like basically are trying to reinvent the private equity playbook being like we're going to buy businesses and make them more efficient like it's sort of the same thing as like you can make them more efficient with software and now the narrative is is AI how have you thought about opportunities like that there's obviously a bunch of them and I'm sure you've yeah probably seen them all yeah we have something still in stealth in the portfolio that you might characterize this way I'll I'll like talk about what I think the component parts of this thesis are and probably piss a bunch of people off by stuffing with, I think that there are asset classes where finance people are pretty good at finance. Yeah. Right.

Right. Yeah. Like a bunch of engineers being like, you know what? We're going to be really good at underwriting private equity. I'm like, why? Why would you have any alpha in this? Like I think you seem really smart, like a very good engineer. But like the component pieces of, I think it's really interesting when people just like discover other sectors that have existed for a long time and don't think about what the basis of competition.

Well, that's the classic Silicon Valley approach being like, I'm an outsider. Like I know how to do this better than you do. And then it's like private equity is like the most optimized asset class ever where there's people out there that we're like, I will buy this knowing that I will only get a, you know, 7% return. But that's okay. Because like I'm going to do it enough times throughout the fun life cycle that it's going to, you know, work or whatever. So I'm glad we're on the same page here. I'm like, I'm pretty skeptical of most of these things that start with like we're just better at finance. Yeah.

But being, you know, I could imagine hiring or actually being good at the under like the asset selection and underwriting piece of this as being like a baseline for a roll up type play working. And then the other premises here are like. we think that there are a bunch of sectors in the world that would benefit a great deal from technology or AI and benefit being like it shows up in the growth rate or in the EBITDA pretty quickly. But they're not by virtue of the industry structure, they're going to like adopt these technologies very slowly. They're fragmented, they don't invest in technology, the user base is really far away from Silicon Valley and like sales is hot. right? Yeah. Like that's kind of the premise and and like it and maybe there's some broader technical thesis about why working across these companies is interesting. I just said there there is

something in our portfolio that you would characterize as a play on this and I would just want to believe that these component pieces are true, right? Yeah. That the team can be world class at finance. The team can be world class at the technology piece and the technology piece. is going to translate to something that is not like incremental, but fundamental to the quality of the business and your scalability in an industry or ability to compete. You heard it first. It's an HVAC roll up for sure. HVAC plus docu sign printing money.

How do you think about as a GP wanting to constantly learn and learn about new industries and get enough conviction to make bets in areas where maybe you didn't have like a ton of context five years ago, while at the same time sort of like knowing your lane and like having areas that you're super confident in and having a deep bench of sort of like experts. Because like the thing that I think is, you know, every VC became an AI investor over the last, you know, year and a half, two years. But also a bunch of people became defense tech investors and a bunch of. And like for us, like, we angel invests. It's low stakes. If there's a founder we like, we'll put money in and we want to support them. But then you're running a firm. You kind of have to know your edge and

your lane and I'm curious how you sort of like sort of balance that like what I had to think about like your sweet spot. Yeah, it's a pretty poor question. I was actually having this discussion with my friend Eric Vichria who's at benchmark and he, you know, is like an infrastructure enterprise software person by background more like me. We're talking about companies that are out of domain. And his point, which I think is like pretty aligned with my view is if you are too familiar with the status, now I'm going to like, you know, make fun of myself because I just had all this stuff about the private equity roll up. But if you are too familiar with the status quo, you, the experts in the fields do not necessarily see the future. Yeah. And especially as you, like I genuinely, I mean, believe that large models can extend to many domains that were not software before.

Like, I was not particularly interested in vertical SaaS for the legal industry before Harvey. But I think Harvey is a really interesting company. I still don't know anything about the legal industry. I know, like, 1% of what, like, I should as an investor here. But the point is the TAM has massively expanded because we are not just doing some incremental little productivity thing. We're trying to take huge amounts of the profession and democratize it and raise the bar of expectation for what you get from your lawyers. And so if that opportunity is large enough and I think the hammer is a really good hammer, like I am so excited to learn about the legal industry and work on it for 10 years. We just got a legal bill like a day or two ago, and John was like, oh, maybe we should have

chat GBTed some of that stuff. And I was like, I think we're like in the last like maybe like few months before we're going to have good enough, you know, legal AI. I think we're going back to handshakes and smoky back rooms and threats of violence because you can't handle these legal bills anymore. But yeah, going back to your question, you said that I think is an interesting thing to pull out. You said like experts can't see the future, but they absolutely can see. It's like sometimes you like, you know, look and you, you hear pitch and you're excited about it. And then you talk to a friend who like actually knows the industry really well. And they just point out like here's like the one reason like why this is not going to work today.

It's very very different framing. Is it just you have to like step back and like almost kind of view things at a macro level and then ultimately make a founder bet? Um, I mean like why do we end up working in areas where we don't have deep domain expertise? It tends to start with like we love the founders. And there's some first principles view of like, it makes sense why, like, we should be able to restructure the industry or the technology is going to be massively important. Like, the thesis just makes sense, right? And so at least my personal approach is, like, I'm going to try to understand what every expert in the status quo believes. And usually, if it's a good thesis, like somebody thinks it's viable, right?

And you'll just get mixed opinions back. but I don't want to discover that there were obvious reasons it was not going to work. I would like to understand why everybody else believes it is not going to work and then like, you know, still believe. Yeah. It seems like there's a lot of, I mean, obviously there's a lot of money sloshing around in the AI deal making space right now. But at the same time, it's easier than ever to test an idea and see, oh, well, we got to 100 million ARR in three months.

Like maybe there's something here. Can you talk about just like the pace of pull? play in AI, both on the deal-making side and then on the actual revenue-making side, because it feels very different than the dot-com boom, where companies were going public with like $2 million in ARR and they're trading at a billion-dollar valuation. Some of these companies, they're at high valuations, but they have a lot of money coming in. Yeah. I mean, if any of you guys are experimenting your way to $100 million on run rate, please call me. I still think it's pretty hard, but maybe to your point, like people are doing it very efficiently.

And I think it just speaks to, like, the technology, the magic box is very powerful. And you don't necessarily need, it's not like if you just think about the SaaS world, right? Like, I need an army of engineers to implement the business logic of like how does payroll work in Slovenia. Like, I'm turning the law into code. Yeah, yeah. And I think that the experiment, like the iterative nature of, It's like I'm trying to make a model produce outputs that are great in these specific workflows, but the workflow is so valuable enables some of these companies to grow in an unhinged way.

Like the ROI is there. I think health care is a really interesting example of this because for, you know, for like a 10-year period, I was like, oh, man, like I would be really careful about, you know, we've loved to my friends who are healthcare venture capitalists. Massacist. It's not a super fast-moving area. Huge part of the economy, very important, but it's just like, you know, it's not, it's not like an early adopter industry. And yeah, you have companies that, like a bridge and others that like have massive revenue pacing, including the enterprise. And I think the basic answer is like now people are making things that are worth buying quickly.

So the fundamental piece is like pretty exciting here. I think the pacing for entrepreneurs and for investors is either also very very, very important. exciting or very stressful depending on your personality. Yeah. Do you think some of the sort of bad activity in the space, like is there so much pressure now on, like the bar and AI has now been set that like if you're a general access products and you're not like two Xing every single month or like, you know, not every single month, but like, you know, growing like extremely quickly.

Everybody's seen the charts of like, you know, WIS and Cursor and Ramps and and and deal and all these companies, it just feels like the pressure is now so intense that people are like counting C.A.R. as like, you know, uh, and the trials, like demos. Do you find yourself giving advice to founders of being like, you know, ignore these sort of like, uh, ignore the charts and just like focus on your, on your customers because if you're too focused on like, how do we just grow like best in class, then you maybe end up like not building, you know, building. You know, building stuff that's not reliable or, you know, robust. Yeah, I think people focus more on what's out there instead of what's possible for their

business way too much, right? Like, I think it's a pretty, so there is something fundamental in what you said, which is like, the world has become faster and the internet gave us the ability to distribute software products much faster than previously. Like, you were not going to go to like 100 million of running. rate and a couple months before you could discover things on the internet, right? Like, what are you going to do? Like, call somebody to the phone and be like.

Come here with the CD-ROM. That's how SoftBank got started. I mean, or it was, it was just like structurally a bit slower. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the ambition for the number of connected people in the world, the number you can serve, how quickly things can grow should structurally increase for entrepreneurs. but and like an investor from the outside being like best in class is this company

which has nothing to do with your company is not very useful if it is like if there is a data point in your customer segment of how quickly something can grow and you are not winning that is relevant data right then the bar has actually risen and like you should figure out how to win but I don't I think there's also like an important question Like, we talk about, there's another investor who calls it chicken nugget revenue, but we just talk about revenue durability, right? Yeah. Like, there's a big difference between, like, deep usage, multi-year contract, enterprise revenue

with integrations. Yeah. And, like, people trying something with 30% a month churn. Is that what chicken, chicken nugget revenue is trial revenue, basically? Yeah, I don't know if people, like, yeah, you trial revenue or just like revenue that you know is perhaps commoditized. Yeah. Low switching costs.

It's the novelty of people trying new things. Just like AI can do so many cool new things. Yep, that makes sense. It's not really changing their day to day. Like it's not like a 3D7 behavior where I'm somehow working better like playing more, being happier. And so I think people should figure out what the bottleneck to growth is in their business for durable revenue.

and then anything else they should treat as distribution. And it's like, I don't know what to tell investors about that. Buyer beware. Byer Beware. Last couple questions. What introduction have you made that's generated the most enterprise value? Andrew Reed was on the show and said that, like I think he said that you connected him to Pat. And that's, you know, been pretty good intro.

Is there anything else that comes to mind that you're particularly proud of? I know, I make a lot of introductions. Yeah. I think Reid is a very good investor. No, I think the, I think like probably created the most enterprise value. I think there are companies that I've been a part of, be it Figma or Harvey, where I'm like giving an investor friend a hard nudge and being like, I really think this is going to work. And this guy or gal is like good, you should work with them. And that included, like, Andrew Reed had the thesis at Figma, but I was also like,

you should do this, right? Like to deal with me and Andrew. And I think everybody's thrilled about that. I introduced my husband Pat to Harvey. I think that is making progress. I introduced a very close friend, sinking Zeb to Harvey at GV. And so I think I'm excited about this company. Right. Well, I'm excited, I'm excited like, you know, 20 years from now for the email screenshots from you of like all, you know, all the AI winners being like, yeah, I made that intro. I made that intro. Last question I had and then we'll let you go. I know we're at time. Did you ever intend on being a solo GP? You hired, you know, Mike. I think that got announced last year. I'm assuming you just had this like 30 year master plan to like build a real firm or or something like that. But how did you think?

When are you IPOing? I've heard Andresen's going out. When can we expect to buy some shares? I don't think we have the ambitions for selling equity carrier scale. So I think I would be much more interested in how high the hit rate can be. That's great. And how high the multiple can be and how we are by our entrepreneurs. So master plan. No, kind of the opposite. Right. I had a very strong instinct that I wanted to do, I wanted to do early stage investing in a concentrated way, and I believe in partnership. And then also, like, I was in a big hurry to, like, get going.

We launched in October of 2022 if you'd, like, seen research previews or played with AI or, like, thought about it for a number. Like, it was accelerating, right? And so I thought that there was a window to go figure out, what was going on and try to be in great companies. And so I just figured it would be better to start figuring it out and, like, date very slowly, right? The idea that the perfect partners would be immediately available right when I was leaving Greylock seemed like unrealistic. Yeah. And it took me a year to convince Mike that he like wanted to work 110%. And I'm super thrilled

to be working with him. That's awesome. Amazing. Thank you so much. much for coming on. It's great to have you. Yeah, this is fantastic conversation. We'll have to have you back soon. See you guys. Have a great day. See you. Thanks a lot. Coming in next, we got Nick from Light Matter. Going to go deeper on. Nick Light Matter himself. Interconnect. It's a very interesting company that raised a ton of money,

all focused on how we can improve these huge gigas scale AI training runs. It's a fascinating company, very deep tech, basically. He's going to have to do a lot of explaining for us because I'm not up to speed on his technology, but I'm excited to talk to him. So Nick, are you here? Yeah, I'm here. Good to meet you guys. Good to meet you, too. How are you doing today? Doing great. Yeah, we just had a big launch event yesterday, sharing our products and excited to chat and tell you guys what we do. Yeah, yeah. Why don't you just start with a break breakdown of

yourself, your company, and what you announced yesterday? Yeah, I'm Nick. I'm co-founder, CEO of Light Matter. Been building a company for about eight years now. We're based in California. in Mountain View. And, you know, we're about eight years old, spin out of MIT, and we're looking at the future of computing. So our goal is to continue to make progress on the cost of computation, the scale of computation, and the energy efficiency. In a time when computer chips are no longer making progress, you know, really principally the only way that chips get better these days is by, if I want to double the performance, I double the number of computer chips inside of. package and so you're seeing over the past 10 years these chips getting absolutely massive and then the next challenge is around how do you link them together especially in the context of training these large language models for AI and that sort of thing and that's what we do is we build these

optical links between GPUs to power foundation model training and and that sort of thing so how does that interface the rest of the products in the market i mean invidia is known for nv link i used to have to 3090 graphics cars that were kind of linked together of the PCI slots, like I imagine it's much more complicated on your side, but can you give us a couple more concrete examples of like how this rolls out, what the timelines are for this type of thing, what kind of performance gains we can expect to see? Yeah, so right now, in terms of timelines, chips are coming out this year. We've got big semiconductor partners that will be releasing products this year based on our technology passage. And the way passage

works is it's a silicon photonics engine. So it leverages all the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain that's used to build all modern chips today. So it's built in these big semifabs. You hear about companies like TSM, global boundaries. That's where we build the stuff. And what we do is we 3D stack GPUs and switches, these really like heavy data center AI products on top of our photonic wafer. And then you cut out the dye size that you want, attach optical fibers. And now you can wire up these massive AI data centers. You know, you're hearing about XAI with 100,000 GPUs. You know, Elon and team deployed that thing in, what was it, 30 days or something like that.

Yeah, that's insane. Which is breakneck speed. We are the wires, the photonic links that connect up these massive data centers. Yeah. And the seeups are enormous. So we just announced yesterday 114 trillion bits per second. State of the art is about 1.6 trillion bits per second. So about 100x.

Wow. So obviously there's a lot of trademps. I imagine that you're, yes, thank you, the gong goes off when we hear a big number. I imagine that there are tradeoffs probably at the early stage cost, but are we just talking about speed, or is there also a heat component that's important to think about? I know heat dissipation is super important on these big training runs. Yeah, I mean, on the heat point, so something to notice like at a global scale, we're building data centers, humanities building data centers that use as much power as the biggest cities on the planet.

So five gigawatt data centers. New York City is 7.5 gigawatts. LA is 2.5 gigawatts. Yeah. So if you were to look at planet Earth through a thermal imager, the brightest objects you would see would be the megacities, the deserts under sunlight, volcanoes, and these new data centers. Fascinating.

That's the scale of what's being built. And the real task at this point is how do you wire them up? How do you continue to drive performance and build bigger monolithic computers to train these AI models. Got it. How did you process the sort of deep seek moment? It feels like a decade ago at this point. But the narrative was that they had GPU constraints,

and so they found more ways to be efficient. Do you think the American kind of like tech world just hasn't cared enough about efficiency to date because it's all been about speed and we sort of haven't had that much capital constraints just because of how much investment is sort of pouring into the category, but I'm, you know, sort of broadly curious how, how you and the team processed it. Yeah, on the deep seek side, you know, what people are thinking is that you don't need as big

of AI clusters to build a frontier quality model. And they had some innovations in how they train the model. And some people suspect that a lot of that came from using existing LLMs to build the new model. And that's not novel. Think about how we design computer chips. Like the CPU today was designed using the previous CPU. And you're stacking up this ladder. That's how exponentials work. Yeah. So to me, it's like, yes, obviously that would happen. Yeah.

I don't think it's really slowed things down. And I think that reasoning models are going to require an enormous amount of computation. And they require lots of links, like the kinds of photonic links that we build, so that you can take these models. Have you ever tried deep research? It's like 12 minutes to get a result back. What if you could get it back in one minute? And what if the energy cost on communications was one fifth?

Yeah. That's what we enable. Can you talk about a few of the other paradigms for fighting with Moore's Law and improving the speed of these models and inference? You know, there's etched, which is baking the transformer architecture down into silicon. There's, you know, if you look at the history of Bitcoin, they went from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASIC. Are you excited about data interchange in a world where, you know, the latest and greatest Dali 3, or four model is baked down into silicon into an ASIC, is that still valuable? Well, the past 30 years have been a million X improvement in operations per second for GPUs and for ASICs.

A million X in 30 years. Interconnect is only approved by about 1,000X. Today, Interconnect is the bottleneck. And the next 1,000X in performance for AI training and AI inference will come from Interconnect. And that's fundamentally what we innovate on. So that's the thing that we're excited about. I think if you look A6, it's a spectrum. You start out with a GPU, which is relatively general purpose, and then you go to an ASIC that's like, okay, I'm going to target AI training or AI inference. When you talk about etched, that's saying like, let's go even further, all the way to the bottom. I'm going to bake one model into this thing. And of course, you should be able to get efficiency gains that way. But these are architectural tricks. Sure. You could have built that computer 30 years ago if you wanted to.

So it's a one-off sort of hit. What you really need are new scaling laws. And at Light Matter, we're focused on the fundamentals like how do you make compute faster and more efficient are there new ways to do compute how do you make the interconnect fast and more efficient we need new scaling laws got it i i don't know if you've been following george hoss's journey with AMD but some of the foundation model labs and the folks who are working on these big a i am models have been kind of banging the table saying like the cost per flop should be better with these other chip manufacturers and yet i'm locked into NVIDIA's ecosystem effectively because of bugs and just go fix the bugs. Do you have any pushback that you have to overcome when you're pitching a somebody who's

building a big cluster to say, hey, slotting us in is not going to create any extra overhead on your software engineering team? Yeah, that's, you know, that's one of the exciting things. We're not building processors. We're building the interconnects that link them together. It requires no change to any software and thank God for that. There's no lift. The TAM for this thing is absolutely massive. 300 billion a year spend on AI hardware. About 30 percent, 25 to 30 is networking. And that's where we play. So it's an enormous market that requires no software change. You can run CUDA, whatever you want. It's all fine. So what are the major hurdles or like next milestones for you in terms of scaling up? Do we need new machines? Do we need new machines that make the machines? Is it,

Just are you, are you demand constrained, supply constrained? How are you thinking about the next roadblocks in the business? So I would say that the ramps are happening now in terms of volumes. So this technology, silicon photonics attached to GPUs, attached to switches. It's happening now. You're going to see a rollout in 26, 27, some of these big data centers are going to be using it. And the trick will be, can we make sure that the supply chain can handle it if everybody comes online at the same time. Right now, I don't think that that's possible.

but I think you could handle at least half of the world demand. There's about 14 million GPUs or XPUs that are shipping per year. I think you could get at least half of that. And it's not too hard to imagine building out the capacity to get the rest of the way. But the tech's been ready for primetime, you know, for a couple of years now with us. And it's been an eight-year journey. So it's not exactly overnight. We've been working on, you know, all the problems on every front for quite a while.

Well, we're still going to call you an overnight success when you. and finally, you know, deliver some massive corridor. We're going to say, oh, yeah, just happened all of a sudden. Because we love overnight success. How skeptical are you when you see new seed stage anything on the hardware side of AI? People love to come out and sort of make these big promises. And then some companies actually can manage to get public just purely on big promises. Yeah, how like do you think we need more founders coming in and starting to build

at the hardware level or is it just so hard that, you know, focus on the rappers and, you know. Do we need to start an activist short hedge fund? Because he seems like he knows the science here and could probably make some good calls, but I'm sure he's too nice to do any of that. Yeah. So I would say that the pitch early on, so we started in 2017, that was the AI accelerator boom. You think about Graph Corps, Somba Nova, like all of these companies, Cerebras, all coming out. Largely, that's been a really tough slog.

like it hasn't really worked out. I wish those guys the best. Yeah. You know, to be frank here, I wish them the best. But it's hard. The software moat around Nvidia, the adoption, the models are designed to fit on Nvidia GPUs. Yeah.

Like that is the moat. Like everything is architected for Nvidia. And so good luck bringing in something else. So the new pitch, the new like pitch for these guys is everyone did this wrong. I know what they did wrong. If you just do this, it's going to be fine. But my fundamental issue with it is you're all using TSM in the exact same node with the same packaging technology. You can't tell me you're going to have some breakthrough.

It's the exact same tech. That's fascinating. Well, good time to be in the compliments to Invidia, not in the substitute's business. I like your strategy. This was a fantastic conversation. I honestly, I didn't know about the business last week, but I'm super excited we got to talk to you. And we'd love to have you back. This was fantastic.

Thank you so much. Awesome. Yeah, happy to be on and thank you guys. Yeah, I appreciate it. And congratulations. And we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. See you. Switching gears. We're going over to an eight year overnight success. An eight year overnight success. An absolute dog. We got a, we got a hit the size gong again for all the big numbers we heard from that. Didn't understand most of them, but liked his attitude. Size gong. I love the size gong. Well, we got Rome Mortgage coming in the Temple of Technology in just a few minutes. Fascinating business. heard about this and the pitch made so much sense. You're locked in to a 2%, a 3% mortgage fixed. You want to move. You feel chained to that specific house forever.

That shouldn't be the way it is. So you can move and kind of keep your rate or sell your mortgage. But I want to hear it from the founder. So let's bring him in. How you doing? Hey, John and Jordi. Great to meet guys. By the way, if you're wondering, I say my name like Ronic.

It's like ironic without the eye. Ronic. Okay. Great. Well, thanks so much. Would you mind, I tried to give the pitch. I probably botched it. Would you mind giving me the pitch for Rome just from the horse's mouth? Yeah, basically you can buy a home with a 2% rate. You know, the basic problem we're solving is that today there's millions of sellers who are locked up at home because they have this 2 or 3% rate. They don't feel like there is a value or ability to be able to move. And 75 million families in the U.S. cannot afford a purchase because of high rates are.

So we help buyers wind back the clock and purchase the home with the seller's mortgage included. That's amazing. Is this a regulatory, regulatory innovation or a technological innovation? innovation. Why didn't this exist a decade ago? Or is it just a function of we didn't need it when rates were low? Yeah. So actually, you know, these were very popular in 1980, 81 when mortgage rates went from 2% to 15 to 17%. And at that time, all mortgages were assumeable, actually. Oh, interesting. You know, for other reasons because the savings and loan crisis, we ended up regulating it such that all the other homes had to have their loan paid off when the home was sold. So we could

avoid, you know, everyone just purchasing a home with the seller's mortgage. But what remained were these FHA and VA VA and VA VA and VAVA loans. So the government back loans. And there were 1.5 trillion of them, basically, if you think back to the low rate years of 2020 and 2021, whenever we was getting a 2 or 3% mortgage, that remained as simple. But the problem was nobody knew how to find them because no seller knows what type of loan they have. And if they know what type of loan they have, they don't think there's a marketing advantage to it. And even if, you know, by the grace of God, you could find one of these loans, it was impossible to transact on them because the banks made less money on it. So we thought we could build a platform that basically vertically integrated all the problems

within that, you know, purchase process and give it to consumers as a simple tagline, buy a home with a two percent rate, come to Rome and you know, you can find all of the homes that are relevant. Yeah. Yeah, so break down, I guess what, what like the obvious thing is just like for Rome to be, you know, truly, you know, widely just incredible, right? You just need scale, right? You need options, right? When people go and they're looking at a specific, some people want to go down and, you know, I have friends that want to move to where I live and like they're trying to buy one of like 160 homes and like 90% of them aren't on the market, maybe summer for rent and summer for sale. So how do you think about just getting getting, it feels like it's a supply problem in terms of

just getting the supply on. And then once you have the supply, then the demand is just obviously there. Yeah. So we actually did something pretty scrappy. You know, I think had we waited for every seller to come on board, it's like any other marketplace issue. If you wait for all of the supply to come on board and opt in, then try to aggregate all the demand, it's going to take like five years. You know, by that point, consumers have lost interest. So what we did is we actually, in a pretty novel way, found every home in America and then every mortgage record in America and cross-pollinated it. So we just loaded up all the supply on the site. We didn't wait. I love it.

Yeah, I'm on board. So you saw the supply side because you can uniquely show all of those homes. And then you just hammer demand. And you're basically like, hey, do you feel priced out? There's nothing wrong with that. All of us feel like we can't afford a purchase a home today. And there's a better way you can actually afford to do it. And it's credible and legitimate and trustworthy.

And in cases where, you know, for instance, like the banks want to drag their fee on closing some of these transactions. So, you know, we're like, let's just pay for it. Like, let's say that if it takes longer than 45 days to close, we'll pay for the seller's mortgage until it closes. So it's kind of a combination of using technology to find all of the homes that are relevant, taking advantage of some of the partnership stuff and getting some of the mortgage lenders to come on board and see that there's value in this. And then also just like really pushing on the experience, you know, like I tell the team every day, like if somebody doesn't want to close one of these, I will personally call and we will make sure that this gets closed. You know, it's like, we'll just ask you.

Do people ever realize that they have an, like an assumable mortgage and then try to sell their house for more? Because they're like, look, you're carrying cost is going to be a lot lower. You should be able to pay more, right? I know John has a very low, low mortgage rate. And I was like, he was like, you know, if he ever moves, he could be like, well, pay me more. Yeah, pay me more. Because when you're carrying costs is going to be lower. Yeah.

Where does the value actually transfer our crew? So basically an independent group of economists recently studied Rome and it's always fun. You know, when you like start a company, you're like, okay, we have like these set of ideas on like what the seller is going to get, what the buyer is going to get and what's going to happen. But like independently, a group of people who'd never even spoken to me studied Rome. And what they found was sellers get 5% more for their home sale when they sell their home with their low rate mortgage included. Buyers $700 a month. And that if this option was widespread, it would remediate basically the lock and effect you see today. And one of the reasons I got really excited about starting Rome was that I was at Open Door before this, which is how I had a chance to work with Eric and Keith. And I just pulled 50,000 homeowners and I asked them, what's the interest rate on your mortgage and what's your preference share for Sond Open Door? And like 90% of people who had a 7% mortgage were willing to do it. But if you had a 2% mortgage, you would only do it like 5% of the time. So I'm intuited there was like a large chasm, both emotional and functional, that they wouldn't be willing to cross. But somebody could give that optionality to that. That's cool. Can you take us through the news?

today what are you announcing how to come together give us the story yeah so today we announced that Keith and Costa led an 11.5 million dollar round into Rome with founders fund we actually had two investors and the whole process happened in like a week so it was really fast but we're thrilled to continue working with founders fund and Cozla you know founders fund led the pre-seed and the seed round and it's been great to have a chance to work with Keith and all three investments that we've done so pre-seed, seat, and Series A, Keith led all three rounds, and then he joined the board alongside Eric, who's the founder of Open Door in Series A.

And in terms of the use of those funds, I imagine it's almost entirely R&D. You're not putting up any capital for these mortgages or buying things. There's no, it's a very asset-light business, right? Exactly. So we're not taking any capital risk. You know, I still hold all my Open Door shares, RIP, and, you know, saw some of the dynamics there. but basically we help people without putting balance sheet risk on. We're like connecting all of the layers through the stack.

So yeah, no balance sheet risk in the business. That's great. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Go. Do you just get frustrated that, you know, there's millions of people that are, you know, looking at Zillow all day long and you're just like, like, I feel like the big problem in terms of scaling Rome is just like making people aware of it now.

Like do you walk down the street and yell at people and just say, Like, by the way, have you heard about Rome? Like, you can get a 3% mortgage. Like, if I were you, I'd just be screaming it like on the street like a crazy person because it would probably be pretty effective marketing. But I'm curious, like, what are the next two years look like? This almost feels like, you know, with the Series A, it would be not super practical to spend it entirely on a Super Bowl ad.

But it almost feels like the kind of business that you could be doing this just sort of like mass, you know, at scale marketing and find results with that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I like, walking a bar, and the first thing I ask people is like, do you want to own a home? And then do you feel like you can afford a home? And like, nine of ten people want to be able to own a home, but like one of ten people feel like they can. So that's immediately like the opportunity to tell everyone about is like we can close that gap. And then we think about getting distribution in three ways, basically. So we tell sellers and listing agents who like actually have that inventory with an assumeable loan that instead of advertising like everyone else that you got a cozy, two bed, two bath, garage and Decatur, Georgia, you need to lead with the fact that your home is differentiate compared to everyone else

because it comes with the 2% rate. That's why somebody's going to buy it. It's because it's not a rate that they can afford. And for buyers, it's, as you mentioned, more mass market, just getting the word out there through media as well as through some, now we're trying a few paid channels, but telling people that they can actually afford a home of the 2% rate. And then we're actually getting like some other partners, you know, like mortgage services and agents to distribute the product for us to their clients because they see there's value in it

now too. So a lot of the distribution, you know, we had found signs of early on, but now we're diversifying that and bringing out really what's going to be super repeatable as we look to get like, you know, massive scale. Sorry, I'm not distracted. I'm just shopping on Rome right now. There's some absolutely banger mortgages available here. I'm seeing some potential future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, wait a bit. It's way. It's amazing. Honestly, I think people, what you need to tap into is people's addictive behavior around Zillow. Oh yeah, totally. And you just need to convert that to because the dopamine of seeing like I see a house that's,

it's seeing a number that's like, oh, two grand a month or three grand a month. Yeah. It's like, oh, that's like completely like the stinger shot goes away. So I'm seeing a house that is almost three times as expensive as my house within a half mile, but the mortgage is only like 60% more. Yeah. And it's like that is like the dopamine rush for a user to be that sort of like basically take the magic of like look home shopping and then you just make everything like, you know, whatever, whatever the average is 30% cheaper from a carrying cost standpoint. Because that's what ultimately drives affordability for most people.

That's why we have this right through visualization, everything on Rome because, you know, we didn't even need to make a map if Zillow would have done this. If you go to Zello and you search for like, I don't know, like a city like Houston, and you go in keyword search because that's how you'd have to find it. And you just look for sellers you're advertising a symbol loan, you'll find literally two results. And then if you come to Rome and search in Houston, you'll find 2,000 results. And it's because sellers don't know they have it. And Zillow is basically just beating what the MLOS gives them,

which is like, you know, an unimportant perspective into it. And, you know, we raised the capital too. We had some investors asked like, oh, what happens if Zill does it? And I'd be like, great, you know, like now everyone knows, put a button on there that says buy this home with their own and cut your monthly payment in half. So it becomes like a firm for home buying where it's a button on every listing card in the U.S. to help you cut your monthly payments in half. Yeah, that's very cool.

I mean, speaking of customer acquisition, like what is working and what do you think the next year of customer acquisition will look like? Yeah. So right now, what's really worked super well, you know, preseed, Cid, series A, like when we did the preseed, you know, and we're like, okay, like, is this a real problem? Like, let's announce it. It was like the front page of the Wall Street Journal. you know, which like blew me away. And that's not because of me or anything that I've done. Like, nobody even knows who I am.

It's mostly about like the fact that it resonates with so many people that they feel like they can't afford to buy a home. And so we saw that continue for like the last 18 months, basically, that there's just, you know, quarter million buyers that come to the site and we didn't pay for any of them. And they're just like looking to be able to buy a home. Now it's like, okay, how do you really deepen that penetration and get to work within each of the local markets?

And so now we're finding ways to work with agents, which is like for listing agents, hey, let's help you win more sellers because you can actually show them why you can get them to move, kind of relating to that study at down at Open Door. And for buyer's agents, it's like, hey, you got like 10,000 contacts in your CRM that basically said, no, I'm not interested because insurance is high, taxes are high, prices are high, rates are high. Go and reengage all of them. Be like, hey, if I got you in a home with a 2% rate, you might find that you don't get

qualified for $325K, but now you get qualified for $470. 5K. So maybe that makes you interested in buying a home now. Have you seen investors using Rome to buy homes with the intention of just leasing them out? Because like I imagine, you know, I'm just like scanning the marketplace around LA. There's rental units that I'm, you know, or I'm seeing like three bedrooms that are whatever for like four grand. And I'm like, I know where that is. It's probably like a seven, eight K a month rental. And if you're an investor looking at this, I don't do anything in real estate. I prefer highly liquid private shares my friend's companies. But there's a lot of opportunity, I imagine, just like in kind of like, you know, potentially alpha on room.

Yeah, totally. So we actually launched a page just for that. I think if you go to the home page, there's a tab called investors. So it shows you all of the homes that have an underlying VA loan. Those don't require primary residency. And so any investor can purchase that. You can put in the cash and you can take over that loan and, you know, go on to lease it out. So facilitate those all the time. And most people don't even know that's possible. You know, there's so much misinformation about this stuff. Because if you think about it, nobody's really incentivized for it to succeed. Most people are incentivized to originate new mortgages at 7%,

not like to recycle the cash to purchase your friend's mortgage at 2%. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a ton of sense. It's very exciting. Well, now we know you. We know how to answer your name. And yeah, we really appreciate you stopping by. This was fantastic.

And congratulations on the Series A. Congratulations. Stack lineup, too. on the round size going for you so enjoy it i appreciate that guys and then if there's anyone listening who is interested i think of it as like the manhattan project for housing affordability we're actively hiring this is going to be the most important and i think only solution to affordability in the next five years fantastic the politicians talk about like oh we'll increase permits or something like that that's just not going to take impact to like 2035 sure

you want to contribute to making it more affordable today email me i respond to every single email i'm ronic at withroam dot tom or at unaq up withroam.com so amazing Well, thanks for coming on. Fantastic domain too. Hit the, yeah, yeah. Oh, with Rome. Sorry. Hopefully you're getting Rome.com soon.

Soon. That's series B money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We will have you back as soon as the series B drops. And anytime there's housing news, we'd love to chat with you about it. But have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for stopping by. Great to meet.

We'll talk to you soon. See, yeah. Bye. Well, you know, if you're looking for a new house and you're roaming around, you're trying to see if you want to live in a community. Go on wander. Find your happy place. test it out, rent a lecture at home, and then get on Rome and buy a house next door.

Book of Wander with inspiring, use hotel grade, then these dreamy beds, top tier cleaning in 24-7 and what do we say about Wander? We say, find your happy place, find your happy place. And we also, we're getting better every day at that. Yeah, we are. We're getting good. Well, let's go through some news and some timeline. This is an exciting story.

So the co-founder of Robin Hood has started a company called AetherFlux, Etherflux, and Chad Byers was posting about it. Baidu co-founded Robin Hood and helped scale it to a $40 billion company is today. He's back with a new company to help deliver energy from space. I'm excited to be a small angel to work on space lasers. So they're putting solar panels in space, as I understand it. I got like a pizza with him like a long time ago. I think he'll be able to come on the show in a few days.

And I think they're putting solar panels in space and then beaming the energy down with lasers to a receptacle that takes the energy. It's all very sci-fi and futuristic, but I'm excited to hear how he built out that model because that feels like something that lives and dies by the Excel spreadsheet of like what our launch costs, what do the cost of the solar panels cost? And if you play it out,

there's a bunch of controversial things about like, are we going to black out the sun? Like we'll be able to see the sky. There's space trash-based junk questions. There's also a ton of hard tech engineering stuff. We've talked to Deli and a bunch about how hard it is to actually manufacture something, get it in orbit quickly.

And so lots of challenges. But I love that he's, made a bunch of money in finance and then is taking it into hard tech this is what we saw with Elon this is what we saw with a lot of folks who had this is what everybody says they say i'm gonna i'm gonna get the bag and then i'm going to change the world and he's doing it few actually and he's doing it so so yeah happy to support and i'm sure we're going to see a lot more from his company in the near um i wanted to cover the circle IPO filing they've filed their s one yesterday uh we have a post from omar who i believes over a dragonfly he says nothing to love in the circle ipo filing and no idea

how it prices at $5 billion. Gross margins getting crushed with distribution costs. For those that don't know, Circle pays Coinbase, as an example, a lot to effectively distribute the stable coin. Omar says core U.S. market being deregulated and banks and financial institutions about to crash the private party, spending over 250 year in compensation, another $140 million in GNA, core income driver, which is rates already topped and heading lower, 90% chance of two cuts this year.

And they're pricing it at 32 times 24 earnings for a business that just lost its mini monopoly and facing several headwinds. And it's expensive when growth is structurally challenged. TLDR feels like a Hail Mary for some liquidity before the squad rolls in. Who is the squad in this case? Oh, it's just all the banks and other financial institutions that will launch their own equally stable coin. Sure, sure.

Yeah, that makes sense. I heard a take from a crypto investor I was texting with. She said, you know, there's no real crazy take here, but it's the first stable coin IPO, which is just a cool way for public markets to have a clearer way to be long stable coins generally. And so that's a product that really hasn't existed. Prior, you had to go into the private markets and invest in something like Bridge, which Sequoia did.

Or you had to go on-chain and do all this more manual stuff and get some, like, leverage and do all these crazy defy things. And now you'll just be able to buy it on public.com. So if you are invested in Circle and waiting for the IPO and you're stressed out, what kind of bed should you sleep on? I need sleep for sure. Absolutely. Go to Aidescape.com.

Go to Aidescape. How'd you do last night? I think I did poorly because I woke up so early because of the Rippling Deal spy news. We had to get up early to talk about that story. Dig in. Let me see how I did. I imagine I'm a little low on. Total time. I was right. I got a 79. I was asleep for six hours and 31 minutes. What'd you do?

We were we were scooping. Yeah. In our defense. Would you do? I did a 97. 97. That's great. That pales in comparison to a friend of mine and listener of the show Bailey. Bailey, Bailey, put up 100 last night. He texted me this morning. Congratulations to Bailey. Congratulations to Bailey. Give him a little gong for that. A little gong moment. But go to eat sleep.com slash tbpn. Get yourself a pod. You will not regret it, and your body will thank you. Who else we got about?

Oh, big news from Patrick Goshonezzi. He's launching issue number two of Colossus Review. We did a whole deep dive on the first edition of Colossus Review. It was a fantastic interview and really a lot of content in that magazine. Not light on content at all. Great layout. It will be free for everyone online that the print is magic. You've got to get the print.

print edition. That's a good strategy, by the way. And I feel like one of my friends had, his parents had a subscription to National Geographic since like the 80s or something. And so he has a collection of every single magazine of National Geographic. And so when you go over to his house, he'll kind of say, oh, like what month and year were you born in? You'll pull out the National Geographic from that year. You can kind of see what's going on in the world at that time. It's kind of a fun, like, party trick. And it's not every day that you get a chance to actually say, okay, I think this will be, I think Coloss's review will be around for a long time. If I order the first one and then stay subscribed forever, I could wind up with a library full of

these things and actually have a complete collection. And I'm not saying that that's going to be wildly valuable. It'll just be a cool artifact to put in your library one day. And a way to understand history from the lens of Patrick himself. I'm just excited about this. Because of the topic. Yeah, because the topic. Green Oaks is one of those firms that is intentionally.

goaded under the you know there there there are many ways under the radar you don't seem on the timeline a lot but then every time there's a you know 10 billion dollar plus exit it's like they're in their their way in there snuck in um very excited yeah so they're covering neil meta and green oaks it's written by jeremy stern and you really won't want to miss it so check back tomorrow uh to get a copy of colossus review can't wait i mean i think colossus review i'm i'm super bullish super long. I wish, you know, Patrick obviously posts about it and he talks about it on his show, but I think he should buy some billboards. And I think you should go to adquick.com and I think should make, you know, focus on, put Neil on the 101. Yes, 100%. I'm sure you'd love that. I'm sure.

Yeah. I'm sure Green X would love that. I mean, AdQuick would allow Patrick to tackle out of home advertising in an easy and measurable way. Yeah. You know, Patrick and Colossus, they'd be able to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising because only ad quick combines technology. out of home expertise and data to enable efficiency, was ad buy across the 12. So it's kind of a no brainer for Patrick. It's a no brain to text him and let him know. Should we go over to this fun story that people were generating AI generated receipts

trying to fool the expense management software's ramps on the case. They solved it within 24 hours. Within 24 hours. Eric Lyman Post, spec designed widely shipped to production in under 24 hours by Will Yee and the applied AI team at Ramp, and he shares the Michael Jordan meme of, I took that personally. ChatTPT's new image generator is really good at faking receipts.

Well, you're going to have to try harder. Good luck. To sneak it by your ramp expense policy because ramp's on the case. What's the scenario where somebody's generating a fake receipt? They didn't catch a picture of the receipt? No, no, no. I think it would be, you know, your boss says, hey, yes, you can go and take people out,

but you can't get a bunch of drinks. And so you go and you say, yeah, we were at the, we went to this restaurant and we bought salads and we weren't buying liquor, basically, something like that is wrong. You know, you could change that. No power lunches. Because you're not going to be able to change the name of the swipe on the credit card, but you could fake the items that you purchase. So you could say, yeah, yeah, I went to Best Buy boss.

I got a new office chair, but really you got an iPad and you like sold it or something like that. So like that type of fraud, I think is what, not to give you any ideas. But that's the type of fraud. you want to avoid. And that's the reason why Ramp is built around, like, take a picture of your receipt so you know actually what people are buying on the corporate cards. Yep.

Anyway, speaking of Ramp, go to Ramp.com. A lot of people say both. A lot of people say, oh, wanders where you find your happy place. But when it comes to corporate cards, expense management, and bill pay, Ramp is where I find my happy place. Yeah. Every day a week. You use corporate cards, bill payments accounting, and a whole lot more. in one place.

What else would be good to go to before we wrap it up? We got. I liked to round it out Chris Backy's post on, summary. Quote, he said, The plan, you're James Bond, but it's at a global payroll company, and you only get 5,000 euros a month.

And when you get caught, you'll lock yourself in the bathrooms and delete your LinkedIn account. And immediately confess. phone with an axe and immediately confess and join the, it's a great summer. Join the, you know,

the enemy. It's such a bizarre story. It's really entertaining. The truth is stranger than fiction. You really can't write this. It is. The new season of Silicon Valley. What a wild day.

But yeah. And yeah, thank you to all the sponsors. Show's been really fun. Go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. And check out, Market, ad quick, eight sleep, wander, bezel, numeral. All of our sponsors were really thankful to them.

Do it all in time. We got to get a new. We got to get a new. So I was looking on Polly Market. There's a lot of stuff on who will acquire TikTok. Apparently App Lovin and Amazon emerge as TikTok bidders ahead of the deadline. So right now, perplexity, Larry Ellison, Oracle, et cetera. I don't know if App Lovin.

I don't think is even listed or people. Yeah, we're not seeing it up there. So we're going to get this update or we're going to get this market updated because Apple Oven is in the race. And last I checked, I'm going to look on public. Applevin actually had the market cap to potentially absorb something like this. And they have, you know, the. Also, I mean, just the last thing we should cover today because it was news today.

The tariff announcement did happen. Trump gave the speech at the Rose Garden for Liberation Day, and the result is that the U.S. will impose 10% tariffs on all imports and even higher rates for some nations. The president opened his remarks Wednesday by saying new tariff policies would make America wealthy again. He said he would be announcing reciprocal tariffs on countries across the world. It can't get any simpler than that. You tariff us.

We tariff you. Later, Trump held up a chart with a list of countries saying it was too windy to put on an an easel, which is kind of funny. There's a funny image going around. he began to read off the list with tariffs of the countries imposed on the United States, and then the tariff, he said the U.S. would levy in response. He said that the U.S. was going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff because the U.S. is kind. For China, the U.S. is levying a 34% tariff.

Then for Europe, we're going to charge them 20%. Japan, 24%. He is going down a list. 31% tariff on Switzerland, meaning that the price of your existing watches just went. Oh, yeah. And in general, the market seems to like it. The Dow Jones is up half a percent. The S&P 500 is up 0.6, and the NASDAQ is up 0.8 percent today. And so not a bloodbath in the markets. People were expecting some stuff. They got some stuff. They met their expectations. And so things move forward. The march of capitalism marches on. We should have Joe on tomorrow.

Sure. It would be fun. I don't know if we have time. stack lineup tomorrow. Joe Wisenthall would be great. One of the top posters in the world. But wait, we got to give away. We got to, so let's give away the DOM tomorrow. Sure. I realize we didn't prep and pull all the,

yeah, of course. Reviews and everything. But, yes, a little bit of an update. We are giving instead of, instead of drinking a bottle of Dom pairing on, we are re-gifting a little bit of Dom pairing on. And so leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Send us a screenshot of your review.

and you'll be entered to win this wonderful bottle of Dom Paring-on. It is a 2015 vintage if you care. But we think it all tastes pretty good. Everybody cares. Thank you, folks. Thanks for watching. Excited for tomorrow. Have a great rest of your Wednesday.

Bye.