TBPN - Saratoga Water, Amjad Masad, Guillermo Rauch, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Kian Sadeghi, Vercel and Replit

Episode Date: March 24, 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.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:17) - Ashton Hall and Saratoga Water (09:40) - DOW jumps 500 pts (21:21) - Vercel Deep Dive (37:13) - Replit Deep Dive (44:20) - Guillermo Rauch (01:20:50) - Lulu Cheng Meservey (01:51:40) - Cloudflare Deep Dive (02:24:40) - Amjad Masad (02:54:37) - Kian Sadeghi

You're watching TVPN live. It is Monday, March 24th, 2020. We are live from the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today, folks. Thanks for saving me there, John.

How's your morning routine? I wasn't quite sure. I was too focused on my routine this morning. I forgot to focus on the job at hand, which is to do the show. I woke up at 5.50. You woke up at 450. That's right. There's a guy online who woke up at 3.40.

He's doing 3.40. I mean, there's real alpha of your morning routine guy and just getting up. If that's your identity, just be the boss. Also, if you're going to film it, you've got to get up even earlier to talk to your cinematographer. Hey, can you get in the building, set up the cameras for every single shot? But a fantastically viral video. It's actually very strategic to start your day at midnight. Yep.

when, you know, the clock strikes, you know, 12-0-1, just get into it. I've been saying that. I've been waking up earlier and earlier to the point where some days I'll wake up at noon the day before. Yeah. Just to be super ready for the next day. Yeah. But we are, of course, talking about Ashton Hall, the viral influencer,

fitness influencer who has a bizarre morning routine where he dunks his face in ice water and rubs banana on his face. But respect for the hustle. What we really care about is that he's moving markets. He's moving markets and he's also moving views. He is pulled basically a billion views, become a celebrity overnight. He already had millions of followers on Instagram. It's now at 8.8.

I'm sure if I open it up now, it's even higher. He posted. What's interesting is that this broke containment. So this video, he's been posting on Instagram for years. Yeah. This broke containment, it has like a million likes on. You've probably seen some of his other videos where he's running with the G-Wagon. Yep.

And it's always, always great. but this video was art and so it broke out in a completely different way it was actually not even posted by him on x it was posted by tips for men fashion essentials luxury and it has almost a billion views a hundred thousand quote tweets something like that and it's fascinating the way it's structured just to be the most viral thing possible i mean he's obviously very muscular and jacked and then you have this weird repeat heating like imagery of the Saratoga blue bottle of water that he loves he dunks his face in ice. Which we figure this out. It's not, it wasn't sponsored by Saratoga. He was not. He was just appreciating. He's just a fan of it. Just appreciating business. Just wanted to put them on. Yeah. There's a bunch of other funny things where as you dig into the video, there's just more and more Easter eggs. Like at 6 a.m. or something, he dives into the pool. But as he's walking up to the pool, can see that there's a no diving sign. Do you see that one? I didn't see that. I saw that he was in the

air for four minutes. That one's really funny too. So like the editing is genius and clearly the it's crazy because like the cinematographer and the editor on this is genuinely a generational talent in terms of social media. You don't think it's him? No, it's not him. He has a team. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has a team of like three people. I figured he was just setting up the camera. No, no, no, no, no, no. You can actually see the other videographer in there because he has a team of like three people. And in one of his Instagrams, I went on a little deep dive. Yes, I went on a little deep dive

and he said like, if you want to be a successful online coach, he referenced Alex Ramosey and he said you need to build a team. And of course the product that he sells is help you build that team to become the fitness coach

or the online influencer, right? This is kind of like a meta level of like he's the boss's boss. He's the coach's coach. He's a he's a course seller who helps you sell courses effectively. But he talks about you need to start by getting a social media team around you, a great person that can film you constantly so that you're posting every single day. Then you need an appointment booker who just schedules appointments with clients, like your leads. Then you need the closer who gets on with super high energy and is like, yes, like this is going to transform you.

Like get ready to put your credit card down. But that's not you. The closer is not you. No, he's not involved. And then they get them to download an app. And then the app says, here's where your work-out routines are. Here's where your diet is. And then, yes, Ashton will get on the Zoom call with you once. But he's scaling his business out. And so he can't possibly be on Zoom with 50,000 fitness clients. But they can watch his content and they can be in his program that he's overseeing as essentially the CEO of this training corporation,

which is probably doing fantastically well. He says he hasn't made $10 million yet, but he is well into the seven figures. So he's not building in public. He's sort of like partially talking about it. I mean, you never really know what these guys, if they're lying, but I totally believe that he's making millions of dollars. Yeah, I think there's no question. It would be impressive if he wasn't making millions with that much attention.

And he has deals. He has brand deals as well. I think he has a shoe deal already. And I wouldn't be surprised if Saratoga Water partners up with him as well because he's done fantastically for that brand. The face of Saratoga. The news today is that the morning, LMAO, the morning routine guy really added one billion to the stock of the water he drinks.

It's up 10% before hours. Saratoga is actually privately owned by another company, but people are still buying it. I'm just looking now. It's actually basically flat. I guess it popped out of the gates. The short sellers think that it's not going to be Lindy. Yeah. Stick around.

It is a very interesting question of how do you seize the moment on mega. virality. He is not like the Hawk toa girl where he was unknown and then he went mega viral. He already has a machine to convert all this. Yeah. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see him do a whole host of interviews and podcast tour off of this. He already has millions of followers and a complete funnel with a team where he can capture and monetize. I think that was part of the problem with Haley Welch, the Hawk toa girl, was that she became famous and then had to go do podcasts and then go and set up a podcast on her own and then set up a business around it and start making money from it.

She wasn't equipped to capture all that attention and all that value immediately. And so that's why probably when she heard, hey, this crypto thing's interesting, she launched the coin and then that went very poorly. So Lulu, who will be on the show later today, says she's sad to see the Saratoga X account sleep through this. Most posts, most recent posts are from 2022 and their hashtag soup. You're missing the moment. Get back in the game.

You have three more hours before this vanishes, vanishes into the sands of internet. internet history. And yeah, they don't even have their most recent bottle design on there. It's rough. Pretty amazing you can get almost a billion views at this point for free. Yep. For your product. Yep. So my question for Lulu, which we'll get into with her, is does Saratoga actually need to do anything in this case? Like if, if case and point, like the viral video of Ashton, the one that kicked all of this off wasn't even posted by him. It wasn't even an example of him going direct. He posted on Instagram, Tips for Men posted it on X, and that's the one that went viral. It doesn't matter.

The value still accrues to him. Does Saratoga need to hard post from this? We need to go study the Tips for Men account because I don't know what the- Because they've posted other stuff and they get like 10 likes. And then this one was like this good thing. Yeah, it's one of those accounts. Yeah. It's kind of just like slop.

Cool images sometimes, some interesting stuff. But, you know, it's very high volatility because it's just an anonymous like outfeed the algorithm account. So my question for Lulu is like, what do we want to see exactly? Let's try and concretize that more. Because if Saratoga just came out and we're like, we're like, oh, yeah, like this is cool. Like, you know, maybe that gets some virality, but it's not going to be a billion views. They've already got the billion views in their product.

They probably captured most of the value. Like, what do we really want to see from them? This is a company that's been in business since 1872. Let's remember. It's not like a founder's going to come on and be like, oh, yeah, like, let me tell you my whole story. This is a whole other story. At one point, one of my favorite bottled water brands is Mountain Valley. Yeah.

Popular. It's the green bottle. True. I looked, they, like, at one point, like, filed for an IPO or something like that. Then they didn't go public. So I looked at some of their numbers. And however bad you thought the business of selling bottled water is, it's worse. Like, they, at one point, with one of their skews, did 10 million of revenue.

10 million like and they had a hundred thousand dollars in margin on it. Oh, that's rough. Just just don't do it. Just stop yourself. Just stop that business activity. You know, there's got to be like better ways to make 100K. But anyway, speaking of tips for men, I got a tip for men. We have made sleep.

That's right. Nights to feel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate. sleeping experience. If you're trying to wake up at 4 a.m., 3 a.m., 2 a.m., 1 a.m. You're going to need an 8 sleep. It'll help you wake up earlier and get on your grind. I actually did wake up on my 8th sleep at 3 a.m. this morning. I assumed it was time to wake up. I'd check the clock. I'm like, I've got to go back to bed at least for an hour and a half. I'm glad you were up early because you got to experience the stock market open, which was fantastic. Let's hear it for the stock market folks. Let's hear it. It's fantastic.

A massive rally. Stocks are up. The Dow gains around 500 points on tariff optimism. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Investors are welcoming the latest pivot on tariffs with the U.S. set to limit the range of import levies it introduces next week. U.S. stock benchmarks started the week solidly higher. The S&P inched up last week, snapping a four-week losing streak,

partly driven by uncertainty caused by President Trump's trade policy. Many people are saying that this is related to tariffs, but on the other side of this, it is very possible. that the market is reacting to Ashton's routine going viral. And if you can imagine if everybody just started, you know, started consuming products at 3.45 a.m. versus waiting until 9 a.m. It would be a big boost to consumer adoption.

Yeah, just a big boost. And consumer confidence for sure. Consumer confidence overall spending. It is hilarious watching his routine and being like, this guy has been up for five hours and he still hasn't started work. It's like so much time before doing anything. I was, I got very Tim Ferriss coded in college and I would do the whole like wake up, meditate, breathwork, journal. And then I was like, what actually makes me feel better about my life is to just get the things that are important done and be productive.

And yes, be active. But the whole like hour and a half like morning routine just to start your day, I'm much more of the mindset now. I just like to get up and start. Yeah, he's probably taking it a little bit too far, but I do, I do think there is some truth in there. He actually laid out his reasoning for waking up so early and he said, like, you should be up from four to eight. You will be unbothered.

There will be no one else bothering you so you can really get deep work done, which is probably true, whether or not it's just this crazy morning routine. But even if you're just answering emails, it's probably productive. And he was saying that you will be self-selecting yourself, you'll be selecting yourself out of the, you know, 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. crowd, which is usually filled with drinking and partying and all these things that kind of just set you back, both physically and mentally. So I think there's some truth in what he's saying. And if you follow his protocol, I mean, yeah, it's going to be a little silly

rubbing banana all over your face. But you'll probably be, you know, closer to higher performance than be doing the opposite of what he's doing, right? I think my point of view on it is that, like, it seems like willpower is one of those things that, the more willpower you use, the more that you get. Yep. But it's maybe not a perfect rule. Because if you spent all your willpower in the morning, like hammering through this like multi-step routine,

and then you're like, you get to the email and you're like, actually doing my email is a lot less fun than like jumping in the cold pool. Yeah, exactly. So maybe you should just start and do the stuff that takes a lot of willpower and then do the jump in the pool in the afternoon. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he probably could get 90% of his workout done. in like an hour instead of five.

Yeah. But I mean, he's a fitness guy. Like he needs to be doing fitness. Yeah. And I also respect his game of what is the most viral thing that I could do from 345 to then. It's fantastic. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just shows you how extreme the power law can be on social media. I think that, uh, we should spend this week and make the TB version of it.

I like that. And roll it out. It's good idea. Friday. Well, back to tariffs, the important thing. Trump said he would impose tariffs to match those aimed at the U.S. by trading partners. The planned reciprocal action looks set to be more targeted than originally thought, the Wall Street Journal reported. The administration has narrowed its focus to about 15% of nations currently running persistent trade imbalances with the U.S.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bissant calls this the Dirty 15, the sectoral tariff. are now unlikely to be announced on April 2nd. Though the measures under consideration still amount to a shock to world trade, they fall short of the worst-case economic scenarios investors have been girding for. And so another classic economic story where the initial headline news is very bad and then pull back and then you get to something

that's a little bit more reasonable. So hopefully it shakes out, hopefully all of the companies that we're rooting for get through it and are able to make their products in safe places and deliver them to consumers affordably. That's right. Well, if you're looking to trade the tariff news or get in on the action, head over to Publedge.com.

Can do it all. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. Go to public.com and sign up. Do it. Anyway, 23Mee filed for blank bankruptcy. We got some news from Delian, a friend of the show. He says, out with the old, in with the new Kian over at Nucleus, is building the new.

23 and me and the old 23 and me has filed for bankruptcy. Keon says Blockbuster has collapsed. It's time for Netflix to rise, the number one greatest detail that is currently being missed from the story is the chart below. When 23 and Me launched in 2006, it cost about $10 million to read all of someone's DNA, a whole genome test. So 23 and me and the technology 23 used, missed millions of genetic markers that could dramatically shape someone's health and future family.

23 me use something called shotgun sequencing. They basically blast all the DNA away and use a bunch of averages to guess what your genomes like. They don't actually read out a single strand of DNA. Yeah. And so now... Which taking a shotgun approach to your health sounds a little bit bad when you say it out loud, John.

Yep. So we're glad to take the sniper approach. Yes, yes. And so now this whole genome test cost a few hundred dollars. We can now finally bring up. bring to everyone a true DNA health test, family planning, disease risk, and he starts chilling for his company, which we love. So good luck to you, Keon. Let's read from the co-founder Annie, Ann Wojcicki. She says, the 23 Me special committee released news today

indicating their plan to take the company through Chapter 11. While I'm disappointed that we have come to this conclusion and my bid was rejected, I am supportive of the company and intend to be a bidder. I have resigned as the CEO of the company so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder. She wants it back. I love it. 19 years ago when I co-founded 23Me, the direct-to-consumer industry did not exist, and most people had no idea they would ever want to see their genome. So much has changed. There's now thriving direct-to-consumer industry. Over 15 million people have been 23-Me customers. These customers are continuing to learn about their family relationships and how to optimize their health, thanks to the incredible team of

individuals at 23-Me. And this is a pretty interesting bidding process. So lots of people came out in support of Wujicke. Didn't Keon submit an unsolicited sort of bid? He was talking about bidding months ago. We'll see what actually happens. I don't think he's quite at the scale where he could just buy this off of his own balance sheet. But he is a growing company and there's always the chance of a bigger round and got a bunch of

big investors behind it. It's possible. Bollagy came out in support. Celine from Loyal came out in support talking about how inspiring the leadership at 23 and me has been. it really was a formative company in the, you know, 2010s, basically. What's interesting is that Wilmonitis has been beating this drum for a long time about, hey, 23 and me has a lot of genetic data.

Let's not let this fall into the hands of an adversary country. So I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about who buys this and where the data goes. And if you have 20, if you did 23 me maybe like 15 years ago is like a Christmas present, You might want to export that data and then delete your account and make sure that they remove it from their servers just so that your data's not up for sale at some point. I don't know. It's not health advice, but it seems like a reasonable thing to do. And I do believe that if you ask them to delete your genome, I really well. And that is the, I would imagine that the core asset value of the business is the genetic data of the 15 million people that have used it or potentially.

I don't even know. I don't think so. I mean, I think the core asset is really just like getting people to come and pay $100 for something. Some P.E fund is saying, you know, look, we can buy this. No, I don't think P.E funds are thinking that. I think maybe some venture investors might be thinking that in terms of let's train a custom. I think Kian is thinking that. But I don't think private equity is thinking that. Okay, it has this much revenue. People kind of, like, there's a thousand customers that come in every week and buy this thing that's a hundred bucks. And here's the profit margins. Can we strip out any of the cost? Can we actually make this? work. I don't think people are thinking about this trove of genetic data because it's, it's very hard to monetize at this point. It's not like, okay, Reddit is for sale and you can just take the Reddit data and immediately train an LLM and boom. There's going to be so much scrutiny on this

acquisition and who buys it, what they, what they intend to do with it. There's millions of Americans, and I guess people globally that are going to be, have, you know, want to have a say and what kind of happens. And so the Wall Street Journal reports that 23 and Me said that there will be no changes to how it stores, manages, and protects customer data. Any buyer of 23 and Me will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data. And then they immediately move on to the next segment in this, in this Wall Street Journal article.

How do I delete my 23 and Me account data? But saying, and then it's very clear. It's like log into your account, go to the settings section, click delete data, permanently delete data. So you can go do that if you want. Anyway, what will happen to the genetic data in a bankruptcy sale? In certain bankruptcy cases, a judge can appoint a consumer privacy onmbudsman, who makes a recommendation on whether a bankrupt company should be allowed to sell consumers' private information. This happened when lab testing startup U biom filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

the court appointed one who ultimately recommended approval of the sale of personal data. So watch out. You might get your data sold. Anyway, did you have something else to say that? Yeah, I was just going to highlight that. It seems like a very real possibility. I think that Anne would have come out and said there is no scenario in which a company buys 23 and me to then sell your data to other companies. She would have been very explicit about that.

Yep. So the fact that she's not being explicit about that, and then they're highlighting this U biome. Case where they did sell the data. Case where they did sell the data. Yep. I would just, I think the safe thing to do is assume your genetic data will be sold to the highest bidder. Yeah.

And so if you're particularly jacked and have great genetics and great muscle insertions, you should go and put your data on 23 and Me, so it leaks out and then we can create more super soldiers. That's right. That's my recommendation. Huge alpha there. It's kind of like training an LLM. you want to put a lot of content online. Put your genetic data in 23 and me.

Do whatever. Go into debt. Well, if you don't want to go bankrupt, what should you do, Jordie? Run on ramp. Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Don't go bankrupt people.

Manage your expenses, manage your finances. Get on ramp. It's that easy. Anyway. Time is money. Should we move on to the drama that's tearing up the timeline? Tearing up the timeline. The timeline was really in turmoil this weekend.

We got a post from Nico over at default. He says, this is like Kendrick versus Drake for people who know react. And it's because Amjad, who's coming on the show, is beefing with Guillermo from Versel, who's also coming on the show. And we will try and take you through a little bit of this back and forth. And I just lost power to my... John needs a new battery. Yeah, so this, you've got new batteries here, right? You're good?

Yeah, so this was tearing up the timeline over the weekend. We also tried to get the third party show. We did. Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, you're invited on the show. Please come on, if not today, maybe later this week. But Amjad took some shots at Versailles. So basically, we should start by setting the table with exactly what's happening here. It all started because there was a vulnerability found in Versel.

And so Versel is a web hosting service for NextJS apps, which is a open source React framework that they maintain. And so research suggests that Vercel face criticism for unclear communications about the vulnerability. The drama centers around a critical vulnerability, CVE 2025-2929-2. in NextJS disclosed around March 22nd. That's two days ago, came out on a Saturday. And this allowed attackers to bypass middleware authorization checks. This affected versions of NextJS using middleware with Next Start and output standalone. But applications hosted on Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare were not as, were stated as not affected.

And so Vercel's CEO, Guillermo Rowe, acknowledged communication missteps, especially with key industry partners, and committed to to improving processes. Cloudflare led by Matthew Prince, released a tool to migrate projects from Vercel to Cloudflare, Savage. Possibly to capitalize on the incident. So he's saying, I think a little bit more than possible. Beating, beating him when they're down saying, hey, there's a, there's a vulnerability get out while you can. RepLit under Amjad Massad highlighted their proactive scanning and patching of affected applications while expressing a preference for more open frameworks over NextJS. And then, of course, there was a back and forth there because Replit uses NextJS for their website.

And so it was like, how could you possibly come for us when you're using our open source framework? And so public exchanges on X saw Guillermo accusing Matthew at Cloudflare of using, quote, childlike tactics and memes suggesting competitive tension. The CEO of Cloudflare often refers to Guillermo as the triangle boy or something like that. because I guess the logo for Vurcell is a triangle. It's actually the aesthetics of Vurcellar are fantastic. I think we were talking about this earlier. The design is fantastic. An ex post by Anselm I.O.

noted attacks from Cloudflare and Replit on Vurcell as being in bad taste, indicating a broader controversy. Additionally, there was a mention of a significant customer switching from another company to Vursal, potentially heightening the rivalry. And so we can go into a little bit about the history here. And I thought it might be good to give a little bit of an overview of Versel and then Replit and then Cloudflare. Let's do it.

T up our guest, which we'll be joining in 20 minutes. So let's kick it off with Versel. Founded in 2015. Yeah, one other thing to highlight, there was a post that you had flagged here from this guy, Juergely, Juergely. Gergely Ogerzors. I'm sorry, man. I tried to say it right.

John made no effort. It looks like Gergley. Is not gurgly? Gergley or rose. Up to recently, if a vendor had an outage or security issue, their competitors would purposely not take advantage of this, would not badmouth the vendor or tell customers to switch, at least publicly.

Feels like this is changing. Riplet and Cloud Fair are both doing this following the next JS-CVE. And, yeah, so anyways. I was talking to a friend, and he said, open source and security fights always seem to lead to no winners and everyone looking worse. Yeah, one thing that I feel like is, potentially broadly happening in tech is when when there was so much internet to build and there was

so many sort of like greenfield opportunities it was very easy to have this sort of positive sum mindset of there's plenty of market we're just going after these sort of legacy incumbents we're creating new markets and then when you get into this sort of hyper competitive dynamic where there's a bunch of different substitutes yeah then you get like rippling deal issues right where it's like yeah we are going to spy and try to steal customers that our competitors getting. So I feel like this is just the evolution of software broadly where in other industries, if a competitor has an issue, their competitors will try to highlight it and use it to their advantage.

That's just business. Yep. Yep. And it is a little bit, it's not necessarily winner take all, but it is kind of zero-sum, the sense that like you're either on Cloudflare or Versal. and in many ways there's been this kind of upgrading process where maybe, I mean, the story I think we'll get into is you prototype and build kind of almost like vibe code and app on Replit. Then you might take it a little bit more seriously and deploy something on Vurcell, which is going to be very fast and we'll talk about some of their clients. But Mr. Beast famously did a merch drop on Vercel, drove hundreds of millions of hits very quickly.

Versal was able to manage it. but Versel is on top of AWS and can be very expensive at scale. And so Cloudflare might be the cheaper option when you go a little bit more professional. And so they play in similar markets, but they're all at different tiers. And so they like to chirp at each other, especially with the coming wave of like AI and vibe coding and even less infrastructure, more abstraction. They clearly are all coming for each other's markets. And so over at WOP, Sharky says the Vurcell team has been a great partner to WAP engineering.

They are always available to debug and solve our complex critical issues. Recently, we've hopped on several calls with their lead engineers. They all care deeply about what they're building, excited for the future of next. And Paul Graham came out in support of Versal. Guillermo said one of our main values at Versal, iterate to greatness. We're constantly learning, adapting, and improving. We have an insatiable appetite for feedback. The job is never finished.

Keep your asks and complaints coming. We're listening, and PG says a sign of a company still run by the founder. What hired CEO would solicit complaints? And so I think Versel is doing a pretty good job of managing this, but it's getting a little nasty on the timeline because people are going back and forth. Anyway, let's give a little background on Versel, founded in 2015, Guillermo Rao. Oh, he created Socket I-O. I remember this.

Socket I-O was a, what was it, Web Sockets framework for doing like communication in the browser in real time. So you open a socket from my computer directly to yours. So instead of going through a server and kind of round-tripping, I can communicate with you directly. Great for chat apps, great for video and anything where two people are communicating directly. Lots of cool web apps came out of that around this time, 2012-2015 era.

He found ZEIT, which was the precursor to Vurcel, with co-founders. The mission was to simplify global cloud deployments and streamline developer workflows. workflows. So at the time, you know, you go to AWS and you have your application. When you open up AWS, you see a slate of like 75 different products that AWS has. They have databases, servers, cloud storage, S3, like long term storage, cold storage, hot storage, like all these different things. And you have to decide what you need to build your app. And so it's an infrastructure as a service,

infrastructure first product. Now, they do have versus. sell competitors. They have Heroku, which is kind of a Versal competitor in the sense that you Yeah. To be clear, it feels like, I mean, Versel ate Heroku's lunch. Yes, it was an era. There was an era where I feel like every Y Combinator company was on Heroku. I built on Heroku. It was great. And then it was, okay, everybody's building on Versel. And basically, it's a more expensive option, but it allows you to come product first. I just wrote the code and I want you to handle the scaling, and I'm willing to pay hand over fist for it. It'd probably be a lot cheaper. to go direct.

And it's even cheaper to go below AWS at a certain point. You wind up like, you know, these big LLM foundation model companies are building their own data centers right now. They're out renting those from AADVS because you get, you save money as you go down the abstraction layer,

but you lose flexibility. And so early product launches in 2016, they launched now a one command development service for static sites and Node.js apps. In 2016, October, they released NextJS 1.0, which was an open source, React framework for server-side rendering and static sites.

Now, React, there was a whole battle in JavaScript frameworks around this time. I don't know if you remember this, but like JQuery was like the popular JavaScript framework. People were debating should we use J-Query or vanilla JS? And then the JS frameworks got like more and more bloated. Google came out with this great one called Angular, which was, it had basically the model view controller. Like you could basically say on my front end, I have an idea of data. like I have on our website you have all of our sponsors listed there

and there's like a row for ramp and a row for bezel and you pull those in and then as you're dynamically changing them the front ends updating Angular was really cool it allowed you to you had to learn it but it was pretty performant and then Facebook came out with React and just

like ate their lunch and Angular went through the second version they came out with a new version and it was much more complicated to use in my opinion and so React really took off NextJS is a framework for React, so they're layering on top here. And they wound up building an ecosystem around immutable deployments, preview environments, and serverless architecture.

So the idea that you don't need to think about what's happening on the back end. And if a million people show up or a thousand people show up, Versel will just send you a bill that scales, but you don't actually have to go in and say, okay, I need 100 servers today instead of one. That's the whole pitch. And so in 2020, they rebrand to Vercel, and they wanted to reflect a broader focus on developing preview and shipping.

They retain the triangular logo while adopting a name that suggests versatility, acceleration, excellence. I got to say, Versailles' website is the fastest site in the West. It is hilariously quick. It's amazing. It puts every other site to shame. It's really great. They're obviously just like flexing the power of their product. But go to Versel.com and just click around.

It's almost addicting. When I figured out that these. like CDNs and you can basically build the entire app and then deploy it onto a CDN so that when someone hits your website for the first time, they're not pulling it from your server on AWS in Virginia. They're pulling it from the local server that's just like a couple blocks away from them and it's much faster. I was really hooked on it. But at the time, if you wanted to deploy your whole site to Cloudfront, which is AWS's product or Cloudflare, which we'll talk about later. It was a lot of work. You had to bake everything down into HTML and make sure it was

served just like a single file and there were no server calls. And it was very difficult, but it was a magical experience when you click on the link and it just loads immediately. It's amazing. Let's go through some funding milestones. Verselle does a series A. So they were kind of grinding for like five years doing this open source stuff. This is a 10 year old company. 10 year old company. But in 2020, things start working. They rebrand. There is $21 million from Excel and Nat Friedman. What do you know? He's in there early. Of course. GitHub. Classic. Goat. Series B, they get 40 million from Google Ventures. Series C. That was that A was a COVID round too. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe announced. Maybe. Maybe. I'm saying if it was announced in April, it was getting done. March maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in series C, June 2021, 100 million dollars at $1.1 billion valuation. Series D, just six months later, they get a hundred. 150 million from GGV capital. The valuation goes up to 2.5 billion.

And then a series E just last May, 250 million from Excel. Company valued at 3.25 billion, and they hit over $100 million in ARR. And they have over a million monthly Nextjs users. And so we can go through some of their technology. They've built their whole game plan is build NextJS into the best React front end framework

that everyone kind of needs to use. Now this is a cut down that that is a controversial statement. There's a lot of NextJS haters out there that say, hey, you should just be writing React. Why are you, why are you messing around with NextJS? It's gonna lock you in a box. And then there's a lot of people that might say, hey, you could use NextJS,

but why aren't you just hosted on ABS? Just figure it out, figure out the actual implementation. And so they also launched the V-Zero tool for generating UI components. They wound up partnering with AWS to bring in some AI features, will need to talk to Guillermo about. And in January 2025, they acquired Tremor, a React component library for data dashboards.

And so they've built their team. They've made some acquisitions. They've done some partnerships. And now they have a pretty diverse list of customers, Airbnb, GitHub, Uber, Nike, Washington Post, Under Armour, Fanatics, HashiCorp, CenturyAuth, OpenAIi, Perplexity, Chick-Flea, reduced build times from 25 minutes to five seconds. Wow. Love it. You love to see it.

Wow. And Stripe developed a viral Black Friday promotional site in just 19 days. You love to see it. And Mr. Beast, as we mentioned, also. Absolutely dogs. Yeah, I think most of the sites that I've been involved with building over the last few years were Versailles-based. No, of course, because you want to just get your product out quickly, worry about

the scaling later. and at the low end, optimizing your infrastructure is just not a key cost. The server bill is going to be so much lower than what you spend on designers or implementation. So you should just be able to not really worry about optimizing your infrastructure or your servers. So that's kind of where Varsela is.

I'm very interested to hear where Guillermo is planning to take the company because now they're talking about, well, we're going to host anthropic APIs. We're going to host LLMs at the edge and deploy and scale those for you.

So you should, in theory, be able to have a front-end website that has an interaction with an LLM and it's not needing to go call back to some anthropic server because one of the most time-consuming things if you're wrapping one of these APIs, if you're an API, if you're a wrapper,

is, okay, I take the user's request. The user said, you know, write me a funny joke. I take it to my server. and then I take from my server over to OpenAI server, and then I get the response from OpenAI, back to my server, back to the client. And that's just extra round trips,

and Vurcell's all about speed. You can't have that. It's unacceptable. That's right. Well, should we move on to a company that's been going even longer, I guess? Or, I mean, I guess the story has been going on for longer. This is Replit.

They were officially founded in 2016, basically the same year as Versel. Very different product approach. But Amjad Mossad has, been in the development technology world for years. In 2019, he wanted to build a browser-based coding environment, a Google Docs for coding. He envisions a REPL, which is a read-evaluate print loop, running entirely in the browser. Normally, you have to open up the terminal, get installed Python. But what if you could just do all this in the web? It would enable you to share these,

and then obviously, like, add a bunch of features over time. So he released an open-source version in 2011 called JS Repel to allow interactive coding in multiple languages. Brought some people on the team, brought some design stuff. And then he worked for companies like Code Academy and Facebook. He built development tools there. Then JS Repel used to power in browser tutorials at Udacity and Code Academy, proving the concept value. So if you go to Code Academy and you were learning Python or learning JavaScript, you would be

able to write the JavaScript and then also evaluate. it and run it in the browser, which was very fun. And it definitely helped people learn this stuff. And so the platform grew to over 100,000 users, primarily students and self-taught coders. He founds Replit in 2016 with some co-founders, initially bootstrap with personal savings and early community traction.

They received seed investment from Bloomberg beta and initially targets both the education market, coding classes, and hobbyist developers. And so Repple, has always been about like democratizing programming, much less about, hey, let's, let's abstract away the complexities of AWS infrastructure. It is abstracting away complexities,

but it's taking a much more product-focused approach. And that's led to, you know, a lot of fans, basically. A lot of like solo developers, indie developers have really come out in support of Replit throughout the years. PG's been a big supporter. And so in 2017, Yeah, and it's interesting, you know, both these companies felt like they exploded

onto the scene in that 2020 era. Totally. They actually had been toiling away for almost more than a decade before that. So it was like these sort of like 10-year overnight successes. I mean, he didn't get into YC until winter 2018. But then once he was in YC, he quickly closed a four and a half million dollar seed round from Andresen. They surpassed a million registered users and developers started launching hundreds of thousands of projects. And so the focus is really on

these interactive multiplayer coding kind of like Figma for software development, writing even back end code, any scripting multiplayer functionality was really new. There's GitHub integration, support for many programming languages. They raised $20 million. The big moment really came in in 2021 when they got the dot com. Right? That just really put it. That's the turning point. March 2021.

Pouting the table saying, we're here. Let's hear from replet.com. Moving away from the dot IT. Go to snag.com and reach out to our friend Rob. You want a great domain. I love it. So they upgrade the, from the Ace editor to Monaco in 2017, later transitions to Codemir.

The move to Codemir sparks community backlash, which is later resolved with rapid bug fixes. There's Series B funding in 2021, another COVID round. remember when these were happening he raised 80 million at 800 million valuation the user base exceeds 10 million infrastructure is scaled to handle massive growth and there was always this question of like of like is replet for learning and testing or will someone actually build a real business on top of a replet or something that they develop in replet is it more for for practicing and prototyping is it a tool or is it an infrastructure yeah and I think as we talk yeah and who's who's What is the long-term customer base going to look like, right?

Is it the indie hacker who wants to create their first one to ten apps? Or is it somebody who's, if you look at their website now, it's really oriented around this similar thesis to like lovable, which we talked about with Harry last week, turning your ideas into apps of the AI. What do you want to create a website for your dream business, a habit tracker, an education app for your kids, et cetera. So kind of, you know, long term, this feels like the user base could, and he might not like me describing it like this, but it could look like something like what Squarespace did for websites. Hey, anybody can make a website and other platforms like that, but more so with anybody can make a website that actually has like crud app sort of functionality. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's what all these companies are fighting over. Is that everyone recognizes that that's a huge opportunity. And whoever gets to it first and becomes the portal for making new websites is going to be extremely valuable.

But at the same time, Versal is very much also competing with Cloudflare and competing over the enterprise and moving up market and moving into these other use cases. Yeah. And so Amjad and Replit have launched a few things over the past few years. They had a bounties marketplace for freelance coding tasks. You could just put up a bounty and say, hey, I need this. built. Yeah, I remember that. And they had this massive community of like kind of indie hackers, kids who were learning. It was like, hey, let's give people the first time making money with, you know, by writing code. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was a really cool, a really cool thing.

In September of 2022, they debuted Ghost Writer, which was a competitor to GitHub co-pilot, something to help you, help you, AI powered coding assistant essentially, fancy auto-complete, but extremely valuable in the context of Replit. And then they partnered with Google Cloud in March of 2023 and quickly secured a 97.4 Series B extension, reaching a $1.16 billion dollar valuation. So up there with Vercel in the Unicorn Club, they continued rapid growth to over 20 to 30 million users. And then they fully removed the education product, the free starter plan limits new users to three public projects.

And they're kind of going upmarket, trying to be more serious in like the business world. They relocated their headquarters from San Francisco Soma to Foster City, and now they are over to 150 employees with a sharper focus on professional and enterprise development. It says they remain committed to innovating in cloud IDs and AI-powered coding tools guided by the founder's original vision. And so that's the story of Repplet. We have four minutes. Should we try and do some Cloudflare? We got the biggest one yet, but we can kind of rip through this. Cloudflare.

Let's do it. Found in 2009. Oh, wait. We got Guillermo on? Okay, let's just bring him in right now. Let's do it. We'll do it after. Welcome to this show.

How are you doing? My man. Great. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this. Me too. I think everyone's looking forward to this. There's drama on the timeline.

We need to have a TVPN segment. We really appreciate you coming on. Can you just give us like a breakdown of what's happening in the world of Versel right now? Well, yeah. Maybe to introduce Vercel too for those that are new to our company. Versel creates frameworks and infrastructure to deploy great web applications. We're super invested in open source. We created a framework called NextJS that empowers a lot of the internet,

and we're very proud about it. But we also have investments in a bunch of other open source projects. I have a long history of being involved in the JavaScript ecosystem, typescript ecosystem. So if you're building a new application, Versel and NextJAS are a pretty good choice for people. Fantastic. And what's going on most recently? Yeah, I mean, if you go next, there's a lot going on.

Maybe the thing that started a lot of this was we got a ping from a security researcher about a potential security vulnerability on NXAS. We get lots of this operating at the scale that we're in. We have millions of monthly active developers on NXAS, tens of millions of applications deployed at the VERSEL platform. And so we get a lot of things. But this one in particular was interesting because it was a. potential off bypass, which in the security industry, it's as bad of a bug as you could imagine, like bypassing, login, sign up, things like that.

We took a look at it, we processed it through the queue, we remediated it. And then when we disclosed it to the world, we could have done a lot better in how we disclosed it. So we filed a CVE in partnership with GitHub, which is the standard mechanism for how you notify every next day user on the planet, whether they use VERS sell or not about this vulnerability. But the awesome thing about NXIS is that once you use NXAS, you're actually not just getting

the Open Source project, NextJS, you're getting a huge ecosystem of products with it that you can use and integrate really nicely into NXIS. There are a lot of off partners, a company like clerk, Stackoft, Better Off, Lugia in the open source ecosystem. It's awesome products. And I think we should have notified those people before that CVE. went out so they could have had the opportunity to look at what the impact would have been to their projects and things like that. On the other hand, we did test internally like, okay, is Netlify,

which is another deployment option for Next Chas affected. And again, we could have done a much better job at partnering with companies like Netlify and Cloudflare for most Next Chias as well. But it kind of became like a Twitter thing, you know, that like it got big and then Cloudflare got involved. I think you guys were just talking about it before I joined. And yeah, there's some banger tweets being exchanged here and there. Yeah, you're entertaining. I'm curious to get your read on it. You've been in the game for, you know, you founded Socket back in the day. Do you feel like the environment now, there's let, you know, there's still a lot of internet to build and there's still a lot of opportunity. But at the same time, we have these sort of scaled businesses like

cloud flare and Vurcell and things like that. Do you feel like the environment today is like more hostile or emotionally charged than ever before? Because there's, you know, people are, there's now like sort of like the market's established in many ways. It's not maybe quite as quickly as it used to. There's new opportunities. But it's like it's started, you know, is this sort of more zero-sum environment making things a little bit more charged today. I think not. I do think that on X people get really spicy.

I was very shocked that the CEO of Cloudflare came. I mean, he's a C. of a public company, and he came guns blazing, even putting out some like cringe-worthy memes against Purcell, which is a company that is very developer-loved. We invest not just in NextJIS, but we power, for example, the AISDK, which is the most popular way today in the JavaScript ecosystem to add AI to your product. It has a million downloads a week. It's provider agnostic, it's deployment platform agnostic. So to come after in such a aggressive way, I was I was a little taken aback.

Our style has always been, if you look at my ex-feed, the thing that I love to do is highlight great products. If you create anything great, especially if you use next year, I just love to say, like, look at this really cool thing. Yeah. I never talk about competitors.

I never, especially in a diminishing way. Sure. But in this case, I had a reply. Because he's saying, oh, if you want security, come to Cloudflare. And the record shows that if you want security protection, come to Cloudflare, there's a very mixed bag there. There's a mixed bag.

And like, I had to recover from the adults of Cloudflare. I did bring up Cloud Lead, which legitimately was one of the worst thing that has happened to the internet. You could, I don't know if the audience knows, but you could Google and literally find off tokens of different companies. company is like Uber, indexed by Google. So that was an important. And by the way, our bug was bad.

I'm not here to say like, oh, like whatever, make excuses for middleware and whatever. Our bug was really bad, but theirs was catastrophic. And the attack, the impact of the bug was Googling. It's like accessible to everyone. The impact of our bug is actually very nuanced and I'm super thankful to the researcher because it takes a lot of like thinking and reverse engineering to arrive to these conclusions. But yeah, to your point, I think that it was uncalled for.

We've tried to, I think, and that we could get into like the speculation of why he would do such a thing. We tried really hard to use Cloudflare. We were a customer. We tried it out for a new compute product, which coincidentally, it was edge middleware. And it didn't work out for a number of reasons. So maybe there was some soured relationships there as well that, you know, we had a piece out of the, as a customer, we had to build our own. but I can only speculate. Let's get into more of the positive and talk about kind of the future and what the biggest

opportunities that you feel like Versel has in this sort of new, probably the most exciting time of my life. John's a few decades older than me. It's good business to be in the internet and AI. It really is. Yeah, let's talk about, yeah, let's kind of ignore the drama for a second and I love to talk about the future. Everyone loves drama, but my message to all of the vendors and partners and people in the ecosystem would be,

the pie is about to get as large as we've ever seen in the history of technology. Purcell doubled the number of signups year over year, mostly due to the introduction of V0, which is our coding agent. I don't think we've ever seen a technological platform shift of this dimension, where every piece of software will be rebuilt and reimagined. with AI. And the pie is about to get so big that being paranoid about the size of your slides and taking cheap shots of your security competitor, to me, does signal short-sightedness on this AI opportunity. In fact, the AI SDK is powering competitors to V-Zero.

So today, one of our partners announced knew that email is like the B-Zero for crafting email campaigns, all built on open source technology that we've sort of taken from the zero and given back to the world. And so, and I also had a, you should check it out, I had a banger ideas thread on X the other day. Every single day I'm thinking, here's a bunch of ideas of amazing products that you could create with AI that customers are so willing to buy. I just actually interviewed, we're at a company offsite slash Ordebo, and I interviewed one of the

greatest public company CEOs of our times. I can't disclose who. And I asked him, what are your priorities for AI? It's like, oh, we're completely reimagining the company across this three dimensions with AI. I want to buy AI for this, AI for this, AI for this. So to your point about the positivity is there is room for everybody. There's all this amazing open source technology

that you can use to create new products and new ideas. I also believe part of my optimism is that in the beginning, two years ago, there was maybe a belief that there was going to be one gigantic chatbot to rule them all, like a sci-fi movie. You go to one computer or you talk to the room, hey, computer, everything is computer. Or what I believed at the time, and we actually, this is why we started creating a lot of open source technology, because it's going to be expert AIs, focused products that cater to specific requirements. And that's actually what's ended up happening, right? So on Varsel, we host companies like Open Evidence, which is a chatuby for medicine, getcccgc.

which is like the chat GPD for lawyers. Amazing products for finance like Heavya. And so what's actually ended up happening is that there is a redistribution of wealth, so to speak, that's happening with AI. There is also I call it sometimes the unbundling of Google. It's no mystery that a lot of companies or a lot of consumers, sorry, are not going to Google for certain queries. And they're going to specialist products to answer.

Like when I think knowledge, I may go to perplexity or I may go to grok and do a deep search. Right. So that unbundling of the one of the largest companies in information technology services in the world will create massive opportunities for startups and companies of all sizes. So I really do think I share your optimism and positivity beyond the drama that that happened. One thing I always think about with Varsel is just like the focus on speed. I feel like that's almost like the core brand tenant is just like I mean, Jordi pull up Vursell.com. It's like it's so fat. Is there a. And that's the whole brand. And I want to know what's the importance of like speed in AI deployments? Oh, it's dramatic. I know you're hosting AI, but are you hosting AI at the edge or kind of delivering it in like a CDN? Like how does that work?

And how does that, what impact does faster AI usage happen in like the consumer experience? There's a couple of things if you're running a business that you should know right off the bat. Number one, a lot of traffic will shift towards answer engines. I reported recently that we see 5% of our Versal signups that also happen to be some of the highest intense signups coming from Chad GPT, which is up from being like 1% or less than 1% six months ago. And it's growing.

I didn't share the growth metric, but I'll share it now for you guys since I like you. It's 30% month over month. Wow. That's insane. So walk me through that. It's people going to chat GPT asking, how should I deploy this? What should I build? It's recommending NXAS. It's recommending Versel.

Samma had a really good take and also if you want to see a fast website I'm very proud that we host openaI.com. Samma recently shared you might not want to learn so much coding or only coding. You might just want to learn how to use AI which one of the artifacts of that

and I love the clod artifact name I think it was one of the most important inventions as it has happened in AI in recent years is that coding and writing code is an output of what you ask the AI so what's happening is people are asking what is the best way to build the website?

What is the best way to deploy? I actually posted, so we have a little tool, a little playground. You can check it out is sbk.vicell at AI, and you play playground. You can ask a bunch of models what they think about you. And that will give you a glimpse into how the AIs are thinking. But not only how they're thinking, how they're directing the world's behavior in choices. I was very proud I shared a screenshot that I asked, like, four frontier models in parallel, what's the best way to deploy?

And they all said Versel. And I actually constrained it to like, you can only, you know the classic thing. You can only do one thing. Or I've hurt myself. Like, okay, Bersel, Bersel, Bersel, Bersel, Bersel. And so to me, that was, I actually didn't know at the time.

I was just like messing around in the weekend with the tool. I think that's the canary in the coal mine of how you should be thinking about AI sending traffic to different places. The consequence to our business is, number one, SEO still matters. Sure. So one of our customers, for example,

sponsored this fantastic show, Ramp, during the business of being found. And so it's going to be through Google searches or it's going to be through these agents. And so the agents are super forming a web search. So you still want to be in good terms, so to speak, with the people that are like retrieving and crawling the internet, right? So that's one thing.

And Varsel really helps companies with SEO. That's an interesting thing to think about. Yeah, sir. Like, it's interesting to think about Google over time. If nobody's searching on Google, they just, every link is paid for. They sort of still have this sort of like, you know, pay to play model. Has the train left the station on SEO? Or is there still an opportunity for new companies to kind of bootstrap their way into AI recommendations?

And I also want to hear your second point. Sorry for cutting you off. No, no, it's totally fair. So I think what's still relevant is that quality content, Facts, proof. These agents will be, I actually like also Elon's truth-seeking AI goal because it really matters that you train a model that is subjective and is post-trained on truth-seeking, right?

During pre-training, you throw a bunch of data added. During post-training, you sort of orient its behavior. And this model, so this is why I'm a big fan of open AI in the sense of open source and also in giving developers choice. The AISDK lets you very quickly swap models. I think it's going to be very important. As the community, I'm not talking about entrepreneurs or business people, I'm talking about as citizens of the Internet,

we have to be very vigilant of the behavior of models, the decentralization of AI. Something that Bercille deeply believes in is, and we have a template, you can clone, you can basically roll your own chat GPD within two clicks. And we recently partnered with XAI to power the default. model so you can go to chatovercelad AI and you can basically clone and deploy your own chat GPD in your own domain name. And so what would be great for society is if we all invest in

massively decentralizing intelligence so that we're not at the behest of like the one truth center or truth company of the world. Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's one kind of question that comes to mind. So you guys are powering openAI.com. And openAI.com somewhat recently as like very much reoriented around being a sort of like, you know, search our answer engine. And opening eye right now is being priced like it's the next Google, right? At $300 billion plus like that is the next Google. You talked about sort of. Yeah.

By the way, one comment on that goes has been super double mind. I actually think that's a brilliant design. So I talked about how every piece of software will be rethought and rebuild as an AI product. What people will expect is that when they go to your product, there is an, interface like that. And I actually think that's really good design because they've blended marketing content, which is what typically we think of as a website. I sometimes dismissively call them e-brosures.

To remind the team that we're not in this world to take a magazine and plaster it on the internet. The whole point of NextJS and Versal that we bet on 10 years ago was a more dynamic web, a web that powered products. And so what's brilliant about that design is that you're immersed immediately into the product experience. it's AI native. And I think that's just a sign of things to come.

You're going to go to so many other products. I mentioned the email one, and open evidence, there's so many of those where the interface will be, okay, what do you need? What do you want? When you go to V0.dev, the question that we ask is, what do you want to ship? Because we want you to convert an idea into an application.

Talk about the line between developers and non-developers, right? It seems like it's sort of blurring today, Vursell's entire brand has been around building, building products for developers. That is the core of the mission. But is there a point in the future where, and you have your coding agent now, right? There's this full sort of like stack. Is there a world in the future where, you know, you land on Vurcell.com and somebody that's not a developer can just type in, what do you want to build?

Yes. Right? Because it seems like, you know, part of the drama, if you extrapolate it out, it's like there's, you know, real. Whoever becomes the aggregator for building new websites and apps will be incredibly valuable. Yeah, that was going to be my third point, actually. So the other huge opportunity for us is what we call agenic deployment infrastructure. So there's going to be all of these agents that create for every user on the planet. And also to your question, I think that the tam of what a developer is is going to so, I mean, we're already seeing it in the numbers. I'm already seeing it in the customer interviews. I was chatting with it lately yesterday.

on the X-Black from the Everything app, she was reporting feedback about V-Zero. And at one point in the conversation, he goes like, by the way, I do want to be very clear. I have no idea how to code. I used B-0, and I get stuck and I need some other, like another expert's opinion, like go to another doctor.

I asked GROC, and she brings it back and forth between the two products. And she's creating, the reason she was giving me feedback is what she was saying, like, the app has gotten so big, what do you recommend? And so people are like just having the best time of their lives, being able to create they couldn't code before.

But going back to the agentic infrastructure, think of this way V0 is automatically calling out to Vercel to create deployments, to assign domain names in the future to even buy domains. VZ might even just say, hey, I thought of a Bangor domain for your product. What do you then? And so we're very excited to see the growth of this infra.

And by the way, there's a defensibility to it that's really interesting, especially for people that are working Infra that are listening to this call, I'm very convinced that Vibe Coding will eat a lot of the world of creating front and the applications. Meaning this AIs are so good at writing React and Tailwind and Next.js. It's actually shocking to me. And I've been a front engineer. I started a front engineer when I was 11 years old in Argentina. And so I had my ego tied up to this thing of riding front and towed.

I contributed a library called Moot Tools when I was 15 years old. I was like the kid that could do Prontent. And now I'm ready to give up on part of my identity of like, hey, V0 is creating an opportunity for a lot more people to be like me and experience that joy of creating Fronance. Now, what I'm not so sure about, and you've seen all this conversations on X about security and you can vibe code, but it's hard to vibe debug. I believe that you don't want AI in your infrastructure just yet. We operate in 20 regions worldwide. We reach dozens of cities through our POPs in our CDN network. We have to maintain uptime for the world's most valuable properties,

from, you know, AI companies to cryptocurrency companies, some presidential meme coins, whatever you think of, So much is going on on Varsel, every second of uptime, everything that can happen to this platform is absolutely mission critical. It's life critical. So many healthcare companies banking on Versel. And so I don't want AI to necessarily be messing with the foundational sort of infra and software that needs to ensure that these things run perfectly, the train runs on time.

On the other hand, and this is why Carpathia, I think, pointed by coding, when you're exploring, when you're creating, when you're designing, when you're crafting the interface, that's where AI is completely dominating. And now it's gaining full-stack powers where you can integrate with that infrastructure. So we recently partnered with companies like Subabase and Neon and Upstache, that they also hire those cracked infra engineers that, you know, they might be using some AI, but, you know, hopefully for our partnership, they're very careful.

And that creator, that new creator is getting the best of both worlds. That you vibe code and you're working on rock solid foundations. Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about value accrual in AI? I know that there's been this debate over the model layer or the application layer. You could even abstract that. And now people are just saying, I either want to be the aggregator, the chat GPT app that's installed on 100 million phones, or I want to be in energy.

And get me shares in a nuclear company because I think everything else in the middle is going to be commoditized. You don't have hardware yet or your own infrastructure. Does what you're seeing in AI change any of those decisions over time? How are you thinking about just the different opportunities?

It seems like you're obviously going up market to be more of an aggregator where you could come to develop apps, but are you thinking about going down the stack further, building your own models, developing your own chips. What does the far future look like

for Vursal? I really believe that the best metaphor for AI is what happened with the cloud and mobile, but it's going to be much bigger. And so if you look back at the cloud and we in this room have all studied it,

there wasn't a particular player category that had a lot of upside. It was all over. It was the foundational infrastructure and hardware, obviously, and we're very proud of partner with the AWI. to provide sort of that quote-unquote hardware layer to Vurcell as a global network.

There was a lot of upside for developers that quickly change their behavior. So this is very important, by the way. When I noticed AWS, I was very quick to this, luckily for me, I was very quick to dismiss the other DIY options that were available to me because I got so excited by the automation potential. And there's merits to all solutions, but being an early adopter in writing, the right way that can be transformational to your career. Later on, it happened with React. React was open source by meta.

I believe that's one of their greatest inventions. And I was also quick to adopt and I noticed its potential as the engine for what later became Next. And so I think my advice to people would be, you know, just adopt AI and see where you can add value. I think the application layer is extremely exciting because the interfaces to AI, as I mentioned, will decentralize and unbundled. There's going to be a lot of upset for agentic infrastructure,

so companies that know how to work well with not just humans, but agents. And that's a remarkable shift, right? A lot of products have been so far created for developers, not for the agent. Think of it as a representative of the developer. You have to create products that are good for the representative of the developer.

How do you... Yeah, I was going to say, how, you know, as a leader, how do you work with your team? You know, a lot of people that sort of like high level leadership advice is like the CEO helps the team focus. But then in the case of Versailles, there's so many different areas of the business now. And it seems like you're very focused on serving your customers, the developers and the sort of, you know, companies building on Versel. But at the same time, you have like all these different bets. How do you kind of like prioritize internally? And, It seems like you're okay with just doing things in the way that, you know, Facebook releases React. You know, they've benefited from it, but they haven't nearly captured all the value from it. And so it seems like you're okay with sort of you're very open to sort of releasing things and not, it's less oriented around. We need to, you know, capture 100% of the value that we create or.

Yeah, I think short term obsession over value capture is that is not the right recipe to build a generational company. And I'm obsessed with growing the size of the pie. my number one allegiance is the web. So I was in Argentina, I was able to, and this, you know, when you're a kid and you try lots of different programming languages, the thing that blew my mind is the URL. In fact, if you look at the success of Versal so far, it really is about the success of a URL,

is that I thought, holy crap, Kubernetes is so hard, CDNs are so hard. What if people could just deploy with one click, or one press of a button and get back a URL of what they're working on, that they can share with the world. Look at other companies that have been massively successful, or products, like Google Docs or Figma. They've essentially done that.

Like, I think that didn't have a URL before and now has a URL. We're doing that for every application on the planet. So it's primarily an infrastructure business. And then on the other hand, we know that in order to cast the widest possible net and attract the widest, the biggest number of people, open source is the only way. It's non-negotiable.

And in addition to Next-A-S, I can mention we created NextJAS, sorry, Next-JAS, in AI SDK, and Turbo, and we acquired a bunch of companies like Shadzien, and so the more we can, you know, cast this message out of the world of the web needs to win, and also it needs to win because we have the best products. You can think of our competition as all these other products in the developer ecosystem.

Another reframing that is perhaps more interesting is think about Apple. Apple is holding an entire world hostage to a lot of arbitrary rules. They make all the calls. You know, the web that I experienced when I was a kid was a web that is completely permissionless, which is also why I'm triptopil and we can get into that and whatever. But permissionless is actually the most important. It's like freedom of speech is up here. And then right up there is also permissionless,

which is also increasing the form of speech, is that you can get something into a URL without asking Tim Apple for permission. And so that is the true enemy, so to speak. And I think my message to all desired comments would be like, let's band together and make sure that you can publish without going through an absolute review process. You can launch crypto companies without asking Apple what they think about crypto. Whatever you want, you should be able to.

And AI, right? like AI models need to decentralize and get into the hands of developers as quickly as possible so that we build defensibility against the sort of like monolithic AI systems. I think I'm trying to think about like how 9,000 or whatever that is like or sky. I just, I don't want to go to one interface. Bursle needs to this decentralized and democratized URLs and interfaces to the world. And by the way, my other point was going to be, I'll give credit to Apple. They have a culture of quality.

and they've managed to permeate that culture of quality to their ecosystem. And I want that for the web as well. I want to make sure, I actually don't even have a particular force in the race. We not only support Next. I have to support another 35 frameworks. Whatever framework allows me to go to a website,

like a blind tasting and be like, oh, this website is freaking great. You should be able to work backwards to, oh, they use some technology supported by yourself. That's my fitness function. I'm curious, did anybody ever come to your office with $5 billion in cash and tell you to, ask you to train a foundation model? And how did that conversation go?

Because I'm sure, like, you know, and all the craze in the last couple years, there could have been an opportunity to just like, you know, I'm sure there's a bunch of people that would have been happy to say, hey, you're really well positioned to build. Yeah, when's the humanoid robot coming? Yeah, not that fun. People seem to be very obsessed with the V-0 data. So I'll tell you, I also haven't shared this before, but so many. many companies have come and asked for, because by the way, the interesting thing about

B0 is, and going back to the design mindset and quality mindset, is we're trying to produce things we're proud of and nested. We're proud of, our customers are proud of, and users of the internet say, okay, now there's a better web. I think we should also ban against AI slop. Like, we shouldn't create a web that has this overly brushed texture images coming out of, like, low quality models and whatever. So a huge inspiration for me was actually mid-journey.

Mid-Journey, speaking of which is that NextJS user, that self-hosts NextJS, extremely proud of that. And there's something about the taste that it gets embedded into this models. So it's not just the data that you want. It's also infusing your preferences and taste. And it's almost like casting an opinion into the world. This is what I believe products should look like.

And by the way, you also want, and this is why the conversational interface is so fantastic, you can still leave the customer to their own creativity. So you can say, you go to V-Zero and you say, build me a product for travel, like Wander, actually, also over-sell customer. And then you're like, well, I don't like it. Make it more yellow.

And like the model will follow. So it's striking that balance between creativity and best practices for a better web. I have a question. So I'm like completely convinced on the strategy of bringing in new development. developers, allowing even non-technical folks to build and deploy websites. But some of your companies, some of your clients are absolutely massive.

And one of the critiques is like, well, you're abstracting this AWS infrastructure. It can get kind of expensive. What are the conversations like on your side to keep a Nike or an Uber on Vercel long-term? And how do you see those relationships going and how important is it to not only enable someone to show up, non-technical, prompt, build an app, but then scale it into that one person, one billion dollar company. And they're saying, yeah, you know what? I'm sticking with Vurcell forever. Yeah. Yeah. Your question also contains the answer because you said, you know, Versailles has been getting a lot bigger. Yeah. And because we've been getting bigger,

which, you know, comes to this challenges, like X drama and whatever. But the ultimate privilege is the amount of incredible infrastructure optimization that we can do. When you're starting a company, a little company, like, you're not thinking about optimizing. If you're thinking about optimizing, you're probably not doing the... You know, we have this motto that we introduced at NextJAS Conv that is a famous, there's a famous essay in the software engineering industry of like, you first make it work, you then make it right, and then you make it fast. And I would add a fourth, and then you make it cost efficient.

Sure. And actually, from a computer science point of view, fast and cost efficient actually almost come together, we've done so many optimizations of the infrastructure. I think this year, we've already announced eight price decreases, or like last quarter and this year, and we continue to announce price decreases because we're passing on the cost savings that we realize in our infrastructure. On all sides, the CDN is getting more efficient. The compute, we just announced fluid compute. It's staggering what we've done in terms of compute efficiency.

Some customers saw an improvement in efficiency of 80. So what I would say to the 90s of the world, the previous story of Versailles, which is still fundamentally awesome, is you won't have to worry so much about DevOps and platform engineering and on-call and those human costs, which are ginormous. And now you'll be fighting for high-quality infrastructure engineers with all of the AI companies as well. So the human cost is very real of doing something like Versel. But then the scale cost of like Vurcell actually gets more efficient.

the more I use it is awesome. And we're committed to continuing to sort of share those infrastructure savings with our customers. And by the way, the inspiration here is AWS. I think when I started using AWS, it was quite expensive. And then they just announced so many price decreases because, and by the way, that's kind of the dance. We manage Next.js for people. You can also self-host and manage it yourself.

And we're actually also partnering with companies that are even competitors oversell to help them manage NextJS better when they want to create an offering like that, and we know that there's work to do there. But the nice dance is that if you let up and let us manage your workload, we will be able to optimize it to a level that is sort of unbelievable. Well, it's noon. We'll let you go. I'm sure you have a bunch more to do today.

Great having you on. Great having you on. Please call back in when you have more news. I love it. It's a really fun conversation. I love your show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for you. This is fantastic.

See on next. See on X. See on next. Yeah. That's fun. Always a good excuse to use drama to get the real story. I feel like we struck the balance. It's great.

When somebody's able to speak with more than 144 characters. Yeah. All of a sudden, the nuance just comes in. It's amazing. Emerges. Yeah, fantastic. But very, very cool. Very cool company.

And it's a crazy position to be in where you're hosting potentially the next Google. Yeah. Right. If you go to Open AI right now, this is relatively. relatively recent. I don't know exactly when they searched it. It just says, what can I help you with? Yeah, yeah. And then. Yeah, there's no landing page anymore for learn about Open AI jobs. It's like you're here to do. Yeah, they still have a little bit on the side, but, you know, they're very, very oriented around. Anyway, we got Lulu coming on to break down the drama and the comms. We're going to talk to her about a bunch of stuff. But we got to ping her.

because she's not in the waiting room yet. So let's ask. Let's see. Okay. Good. We do have her on... Okay. Maybe I should send her the link.

She's extremely busy. She is. She jumped on. She only had 30 seconds. We weren't ready. She bailed. No, I'm kidding. I believe it.

Yeah. Anyway, let me try and send her. her this thing. And in the meantime, we should do some posts. And she is back. Is she back? Let's see. Well, I mean, in the meantime, we can tell you about Bezle. That's a great time. I got a beautiful Vacheron-Constant on purchased from Bezle. Highly recommend you go pick something up over there. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, folks. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezle's team of experts, this watch right here, it shipped from the seller to Bezell. And anytime I see drama on the timeline, I can't help but think if the two people arguing

just went watch shopping together. I was thinking about that watch to watch. If they went or no, if they just went and they browsed around Bezell together for an hour talking about what they like and what they don't like, they would find common ground. Exactly. Squash the beef. This is, Bezel is a technology that will bring harmony to the timeline, I believe. know a lot of people said oh we got lulu in the chat let's do it hey there she is how you doing

hey good to see you welcome to the temple of technology we're live you're live the fortress of finance the fortress of finance the capital of capital great to see you i'm so much to talk about surprised it took this long to i know former brother of the year 24 and for some reason we had to do 75 guests before we could get you to sit down what happened i had to make sure the show is good oh yeah okay yeah i i big dog in us she It makes sense. It's reasonable. Fair.

But we're glad you could take time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down with us, chat. There's so much to talk about. I want to talk about the comms around Saratoga water. I want to talk about morning routines. Did you wake up at 340 this morning and dive directly into a pool? Or are you taking a little bit slower today? No, every morning I dive for five minutes. Yep.

In the air. In the air. In the air. In the air. I like to go for five, sometimes seven. Fantastic. Average five for me. Great.

I duck my face like every once every 10 minutes. I think just got to go a little bit above and beyond. Stay ahead of the pack. Rub the banana peel. I don't just do the face. I do the neck, get behind the ears. So fully ready for this show. Always taking it.

Always taking it to the next level. What do you, you would critique that Saratoga Water, their last post was a bunch of it was hashtag soup. You described it. Yep. If you were, if they were a client, do you have anything particularly that you would have advised him on of what they could have done better. Yeah, I don't have any fancy water companies in my portfolio.

Not yet. You might be got a call later today. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not fully diversified yet. I thought I was. Okay. I think they just have to wake up here.

There's somebody whose job is to run social for them. I'm sure there's like a person whose area of responsibility is this. And they were just completely out of the game. Like some people said they were on Instagram, but on is pretty generous there. Like they were present on Instagram with a checkmark. The post weren't actually that good. I think there's some brands that are like boycotting X because of Elon, whatever, but you're just kind of hurting yourself.

Like it's like you're owning your own balance sheet to try to own Elon. You're owning your own cash flow because you're mad at Elon. Just like go on X, make money, do what you need to do. Forget about your personal feelings. I don't know if that's actually the reason, but if it is, it's bad reason. It does feel like it's a bit of a 15 minutes of fame. for them. And so I wonder, like, what is the good ending here? Like, they quote tweet the video, they lean in, they're making jokes, they capture a bunch of, you know, attention. Maybe they grow their

account from a thousand followers to even like 100K because it's such a viral moment and a billion people saw the morning routine. But then what do they do with that after that? I think they have to, okay, I think the gold standard for this before the famous rug was the hawk to a girl. Like she took the 15 minutes and just extended it beyond what the laws of physics seemed to suggest what's possible. Yep. And I think what the water company could have done here to extend would be like lean into the routine, like partner on some routines, lean into the unhinged. Like I know that they're this sophisticated fancy type of person, but still sometimes you just got to roll with it. Strike up some partnerships, have like follow on content, like lean into the funny.

they just do. The bar is like literally anything. And then it's like getting creative and then it's like something really enduring. If they want to do something really enduring, maybe it's like a program, maybe it's like some pop up stuff to just stay top of mind. But the actual bar of just like showing a pulse was not that hard to hit. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the challenge is I have no idea what Saratoga's brand stands for. But now in my mind it stands for getting up at 345, putting the banana on your face, having four minutes of air time. And so it's almost like they, they, I'm, I'm the most water obsessed person that I know by a long shot. And I didn't know what they stood for before.

It's almost like the right thing to do is that the right deal to do is you hire. You just say, hey, we're going to kind of scrap our brand from the last 200 years. I think they're very old company. We're now the Ashton brand. You know, we're signing, we're signing into a maxed out. It's just 150. It's 150 years. Yeah, it's 150 year old brand.

172. Well, listen, it's time, it's time for a refra. Do a brand partnership with Chiquita Banana. That's great. There we go. Yeah. Some people commented when he opens up the journal. He's on page one of his kernel. Oh, yeah.

A notion partnership. There we go. The world is no oyster here. There's a lot you could do. Let's talk about, you created a meme going direct. I feel like. it's one of the most powerful yeah like basically means was there a trend of the year potentially trend of the year i mean that and founder

mode are the two when you think about when you think about things that have sort of influenced founder thought in the last five years it happens to be in my view going direct in founder and they go they go hand in hand uh have you i'm sure you're already thinking about sort of what what the next play is is the next is the next is the next play going Going indirect and sort of like it going getting puff pieces and stuff like that. No, but what do you think is now that sort of this sort of like way of comms has become the standard. Is this just the enduring approach for the next however many years until we get better institutions? You got to always outrun yourselves.

I'm really glad you brought this up. We did not coordinate by this. By the way, like you guys gave me virtually nothing to prepare with and no talk points. No prep. Totally unprepared. Thank you. So we didn't, but I actually had been thinking about this

because Rossra launched around a year ago, almost exactly a year ago. And in that intervening year, founder mode has kind of become part of the canon. Like it's here. It's not evenly distributed. Maybe Deloitte is not going direct, but like founders going direct

is now part of the default playbook for cons. Like any YC company that's coming out into the world today, they're thinking the founder is going to go direct. But the thing is, you have to outrun yourself. Like once something becomes the thing that everybody does, that becomes the new norm. And you always want to be standing up above the norm. Like I remember for a while last year, I was doing manifestos.

I was having all of like my founders and my companies do manifestos. And then for a three months span, it was just like every other week of manifesto. It actually became, I kind of got like manifestoed out. And same with like the secret plans. Same with the vibrails. Same thing. Kind of burned through them. That one happened really fast.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, everyone. Yeah. Well, so how do you think so? More montage wheels, guys. Yeah, so we just had a Guillermo on. Verselle creates Next.js.

They released it to the world. And then they say, yeah, we'll manage it for you if you want. Or you can just use it by yourself. You basically open source the concept of going direct, but then you have sort of playbooks that you run with your founders. Is there anything else that, you know, the thing about something like going direct is you can tell somebody exact any, any sort of like highly specialized skill set. Double fisting Celsius? What is that in front of your hands? I go I go Yerba J.

John goes Celsius. That's pretty reflective of our brands. It triggered me because the week before last, I had two. I didn't know how caffeinated. Oh, they have a lot of caffeine in there. I needed like a defibrillator. Well, red bulls. Yeah, it is six red bowls, I think.

Technically. Who's counting, though? Yeah, got to be careful. Sorry, Troy, but the idea is like, is there. other things that are that maybe fall outside of that that you feel like you can sort of like open source like things that you can just tell the world they're very hard to execute so they should still go to your firm to actually pull them off but what else are you thinking about kind of like open sourcing yeah or they can just do it I like the concept of open sourcing like in fact you

should be able to do it by yourself whether I get hit by a bus or your team gets hit by the you know gets hit by a bus it should never just like rest on any one person I think the next era So going direct was probably the big thing for the last year. I think the next era is in shorthand, attention is all you need. Like in a world where AI can just do anything all the time, you can see people like shipping and launching stuff. It used to be monthly, then weekly, and now daily. There's just like huge drops all the time.

And it's a tree falling quietly in the forest unless you can get people to actually care about it. So the two things are, number one, how to get the attention and just like focus it for a small period of time. And then number two, how to harvest it and turn it into something. Like the big mistake that founders make is they'll do something to catch a little bit of attention. And then it goes away, like we're talking about Saratoga Water. It goes away and you didn't do anything with it. So you're doing like attention, catch and release. Like California with illegal migrants or like sports fishing.

Like don't do the catch and release. Hold on to the attention and turn it into money. Like your job is turning attention into money. I mean, that's the beauty of the Ashton Hall thing. He went super viral, but he already had been on Instagram for five years, had millions of followers over there. He goes super viral. He already has a whole business set up on coaching and fitness stuff.

Like, there is a funnel. And if you found him from this ex post, you're going to be paying him if you like him very quickly. Whereas with Hawk to a girl, we were talking about this. Like she had to spin up a podcast. And then I'm sure at a certain point, she was like, well, this crypto thing seems like a good way to make money, whereas Ashton already has a business and can just go capitalize. We got a delivery here.

Oh, thank you. Thank you, brother. Here we go. We got the Saratoga. You should do the dump lives, the new ice bucket channel. Yeah, we also need holes to dunk our face. Yeah, we definitely do it. So here's a question for you that I think is actually an interesting one.

So the three of us are dear friends with David Senra. And David has sort of studied all these entrepreneurs that were able to build these massive careers or massive sort of family empires completely in silence, right? He made a post two weeks ago. that was somebody the effect of like I talked to this family. They had written biographies about the family and he asked if he could do an episode on them and they were like absolutely not. We're not giving away our sort of secrets. Do you think that, you know, do you think that that the playbook of just sort of like building in silence and you're sort of in the shadows and nobody, you know, and not really sharing what you're working on?

Do you think businesses like that will, well, there seems like there's tons of examples throughout history, but that was pre-internet, right? Yeah, yeah. If you take the strategy of we're going to kind of like build in silence, you know, be very secretive, does that playbook work when you have 10 competitors that are going to be extremely loud, constantly sort of like accumulating attention? Yeah. And I just wonder if that's sort of a pre-internet strategy.

So the thing here is, you know, one day soon, maybe you'll have the one person, billion dollar company. But for now, the company that wins is the company that can recruit and attract the best talent and the pool of super elite differentiated talent is pretty concentrated and they're all being head hunted by like the same firms and so the way to get ahead is to get that talent before your competitors can and they'll join you if they know you and trust you and believe in you and so if you're someone who's already a household name like if palmer lucky went silent for a while it'd be fine because people know what he's about ilia satskova has been silent for quite a while and

people know you don't have to try to figure out like what am I going to get if I try to go work for them and they have like demand knocking down on their doors but if you don't have that then you do need to build it and I think where your question is coming from too is like we see a lot of founders get dunked on for like yapping too much and posting too much and it's like when are you when are you building your company you're tweeting like every hour and I think the the one thing to know is it's not about how much you yap it's about the ship yapped ratio you have to respect the ship yapped yep-yap ratio. And if the rig he was right, you can get away with anything. That's great. Yeah, Elon is a perfect example of this. Nobody's like, hey, bro, you're posting, you know,

20 times an hour, relax. The rockets are going out. Okay, the rockets are being caught. The rockets are being caught. It's sitting in the chopsticks. He can post what he wants. On ongoing direct, I've always thought that there's a little bit more nuance there. Obviously, it's, it's really key to tell someone that like, hey, it's okay to start posting and going direct and doing, you know, founder-led communications. But that doesn't mean that you should close off the indirect channels. And I see it almost as like, like tiers or levels. So level one is like you start telling the world what you're building, build some credibility. Maybe there's some posts on X from the founder's account. Then you start doing new media, like podcasts like this, calling in, telling, you know, you're using

other people's platforms, but you're accelerating. And then eventually the traditional media comes in and writes like the big profile. And that still has a lot of benefit. Can you talk to us about how founders should think about riding up that curve and where the value is across all three of those? Yeah. So roughly, you want to think of it as like concentric circles going outwards. Sure. And you cannot mess up the order. So the inner most circle is your co-founders and executives and the people who work for you. And they have to believe and you have to fully saturate them with the propaganda and the sense of mission before you go out to the next circle.

Next circle maybe is investors board. And then you get to customers. And then you get to maybe regulators, maybe other people. But the problem with trying to skip one of these in the sequence is let's say that you didn't brief. Let's say that you're launching like a new mission and you didn't brief your employees on this refreshed mission. But you go to the press and now your employees are.

reading it in the press and there's a disconnect, two things can happen. One, they're like WTF, this isn't what I signed up for. Now you have a world of pain because any pain coming from inside the house is like a thousand times worse than external. And two, your employees have freedom of speech and they have Twitter accounts and they can go on X and post like, well, wait a second, are you sure? This doesn't, this doesn't seem right. And then all of a sudden, everything downstream of employees has lost credibility because people figure if it's true, employees would know about it. sequencing it correctly and not getting too greedy too fast is really important like always go from the smaller circles to the outer circles. That makes sense. In terms of getting every, every company

wants to get attention. The challenge is that there are some sort of cheap things that you can do that get massive amount of attention that are sort of like, you know, basically like slop. I won't name it, but there was a launch video in the last 30 days that was just in my group chats, was like super cringe, but then it got like millions of views. And I was looking at it. And I'm like, all right, like this seems like cheap attention, but then maybe it just got so many views that it works. Talk about, maybe talk about like taste when it comes to getting attention.

And is there more longevity if you're sort of building that sort of slower base of sort of like tasteful releases and messaging and comms versus like the cheap high attention moments. Yeah, tasteful, tasteful vids. So there's, there's two things. One is, you know, the, the crazy hot chart? Yeah. The crazy hot chart. Of course. Yeah. There's like a company crazy hot chart where if you're really hot as a company, there's a lot that you can get away with. But if you're new and people don't know a lot about you, then every single thing you do is say is like disproportionately affecting how they think of you. And so, So if you have a 10-year history of just like wins and bangers and you have one thing that is kind of weird or a flop or a little bit cringy, you can kind of get away with it.

It gets absorbed a little bit better. But if your company is launching for the first time and the one thing people see is 100% of the data points that they have about you, you can't really afford that. So I'm not saying don't take risks. I'm saying that the importance of taste goes up like even, even more when you're new and there's not a lot of data points about you. And then the second thing about just taste versus quantity is a lot of things that get a ton of likes and engagement are just total garbage. And the responses are all like bots. Like if you go to a TechCrunch ex post and look at the replies, it's just straight up bot replies. If you go to these like framework bros or I don't know, the like mental model bros.

Sure, sure. Here's what happened this week, thread bros. He had a lot of engagement, but I would not trade that for the world. And so the thing to look for is like, who is in the replies and who is not in the replies? Yeah. Because the replies are usually really positive too, but it's positive from people that like, it's a counter signal if they like it. Yeah, exactly.

It's all about signal, right? Signal. Yeah. Do you think the best sort of like going direct founder mode to put it in one buck? CEOs are sort of like born that way and maybe you need to help uncover that ability of like sort of communicating their story to the world or is it something that anybody can figure out with sort of proper training and understanding sort of social mechanics and the platforms that we distribute content on and all that kind of thing. Okay. There are different archetypes of super cracked

impressive founder that you want to just throw your life to the side and go follow them and do whatever it takes to get on that rocket ship kind of feeling. There's different archetypes of founders who can inspire that feeling. But the key is you can be in an archetype, but you can't be between archetypes. You can't be in the cringy, uncanny valley of here's the real you and here's the online you and you're sort of like make it halfway there. You can be the like super brash, controversial, loud type. You can be the Mimi funny type. You can be the strong silent type of founders and just like one thing once a year. But if you're type three and you're trying to force yourself into type one, it's going to be painful for everybody like most of all you. And people can tell,

right? So I think it's less about there's one type and you have to be it and can you learn it or do you have to be born it. It's more like there's different types and you can fit into one of those types, but you can't try to jump from one type to another and kind of like fall into the abyss halfway in between. Yeah, I think about the difference between like David Holes and a Justin Mayors. Like Justin is doing threads, but they're very detailed on health and breaking stuff down. David Holes just shows up once a week and tweet something like about the future and how AI will like change.

Yeah, like alien civilizations. Yeah, alien civilizations, but they're both great posters. But if they tried to swap, it would be really, really weird. You sometimes see people like online larping as Palmer like where they're like Someone else yep exactly I have a chip on my shoulder and I always say this for the going direct thing is like how do you communicate Because there are some people who their their authentic communication is best in a blog post or a long post Other people can be really pithy and just post bangers other people are really great on video and should just do a podcast circuit

Other people are great on you know national TV and so out where the founder sits and then accelerating that instead of being like, well, X is the popular one, so I got to figure that out. It can be very hard. This is what we were talking about and you were saying I should describe it as default out. Remember? Oh, default out. I don't remember that. Explain that.

Were we, you and I were talking. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Standard out. You were talking. Oh, right. So in programming, in programming, standard out as the way, as like a metaphor for the default, for the default. the default type of medium that somebody should use. And if they need to go outside of that, they can. But everybody has like a strongest, like a default medium.

And you can, you don't have to like only stick to that. Like you can go outside of it. Some of these like Andre Carpathie posts are actually a blog post and just dumps it into the Xbox and hits post and it's fine. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that's about the flexibility to X platform. But there are definitely great CEOs out there who's like their default out should just actually being going and sitting down with, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin and doing an interview and they will they will crush that. And then and then that clip should live on X and someone else should post that.

But they should not try and turn it into a bang or hilarious post because that's just not authentic to who they are. I have a prompt for you. One of our, one of our 2025 goals is to get a glowing puff piece in a mainstream journalism outfit. What's the strategy for getting TBPN on the cover of the New York Times or the New Yorker? What should we do? Or the journal would be the journal would be the idea. So how can we reverse engineer this? Take us through the steps. I think financial times could be for you guys.

I see you looking really nice with that salmon pink backdrop. Oh yeah. That'd be fantastic. Okay, yeah. Financial Times. How do we get the profile done? Okay, so the first question is what is the business goal here? Like how do you convert attention to money, right? And you guys convert attention, okay, let's work through it live.

You guys convert attention to money by getting a lot of listeners. so that you have leveraged with advertisers, and then the advertisers pay you, and then it grows and continues being the most profitable podcast in the world. That's the business, baby. Number one question is, who are those marginal listeners? Are they people in tech that you haven't reached yet

and you're gonna get more bang for buck by converting, like people in tech who've been living in a cave and don't listen? Or are you gonna go out and reach a new community that you haven't gotten into yet? Or you're gonna go to some like in between, like adjacent community, where it's people in, let's say it's people in D.C. who now understand that half of Silicon Valley is in Washington, D.C.

And they need to understand tech better. So it's like policy people who I would want to understand tech. So here's my first question to you is like, who is that next group of listeners that you're going after? Probably slightly older public markets investors. We were pretty big in the private markets for tech, but moving. We like to think of it as like YC Demo Day was our NFL Combine, earning season is our Super Bowl. And so we want to deliver on, you know, a Super Bowl level event for TBPN covering public

company earnings mag seven. Okay. So you want to go to sell side analysts. You want to go to the big banks. You want to probably the exchanges have some events like New York Stock Exchange has events. You probably want things that are like Citadel adjacent, like D.E. Shah adjacent to get into that community. And also, there's a lot of overlap between young tech people and young hedge fund and quant trader people.

Obviously, like the young Jane Street people just go back and forth. And so if that's the audience, then I would work backwards like reverse engineer this whole thing and think, okay, where are they getting their information? And what do they already care about that we can tap into? Like it's hellishly difficult to make people care about some new thing that they've just never heard of. Whereas and Derek Thompson had this insight too, the best viral thing is something that something that's a little bit new, but a little bit familiar.

Yes. Okay, let's say that we're talking to those people. You're probably going to aim for, I mean, they'll read Wall Street Journal, they'll read Financial Times. Let's just say journal because the paywall is less strict. Now you want to think about how do you fall into one of the coverage areas. Like, are you in tech? Are you in culture?

Are you in finance or something else? So, for example, New York Times has a guy who is like between, tech and culture. And so maybe someone like that. Or let's say it's the journal and their tech, honestly, their tech desk, their tech team is in like shambles right now because they had

this super bizarre layoff a few weeks ago. And there's just like a crazy management decision to lay off a bunch of AI and tech people at the cost of AI. It was crazy. Weird. Yeah. So maybe you want to aim for like culture, finance.

And then now you're, putting together two pieces. One piece is like what are the, what do those young hedge fund analysts or whatever care about and what are they thinking about? They're probably trying to understand what's coming out of the tech world and which companies are worth watching versus which are not. And they can see publicly available information, which is very scant, but they're trying to read behind the scenes of like which founders are respected and how good are they really and can they recruit, that kind of thing. And then what is the paper cover? And the paper probably covers big trends and what's happening in the world of AI, like as well.

we approach AGI, what our changes happening in the world. So, and then the third circle is like the unique perspective that you guys bring. So I would start by not doing a pitch at all, just vibing, networking, going out for drinks, chilling, and starting to talk about what's in the middle of that Venn diagram, which is like you have the unique experience. It's interesting to the people you're trying to reach. And it's interesting to what the journal has been covering. Do that, like, for three months or so.

and then figure out one hook that's in the news and then offer to do a deep dive into the hook and then have somebody who's not you, like have somebody else that they respect who's in your network and their network, tell them, or like a me or like a founder, like Eric Lyman, you know, go to them and just tell them like, this is the thing blowing up in tech and they should really take a deeper look. And at that point, you're familiar to them. Familiarity breeds affection, positive feelings, but it also breeds credibility. So people who are told a fact 10 times tend to believe that the fact is true just because they've heard a lot. So at this point, you're familiar, you have the story dialed in, you have your unique area of expertise,

and then you have some third-party validator telling them to look deeper into it, and that's how begins. Well, thanks for coming on the most profitable podcast in the world. Last one, I know you've got a minute left. We try not to swear on this show because swearing is vulgar, and we're very short, bearish using cuss words online right now. How are you advising your client? in a world where, you know, big names are thrown around mean words? I think it's the same thing as before, which is like, whichever bucket you're in, stay in the bucket. And if, like, if there's a founder who just talks like a sailor and that's how they are,

you can try to ask them to clean it up. I've never seen that work. I've just never had an experience where someone tells the founder, like, clean up the potty mouth and talk different and they actually do. And so it's just that's your archetype. You stay there. But I will say the big takeaway, if people are trying to figure out like, what is the next era of comms and just if there's one thing I as a founder need to know about building a cult

and a movement around my company, it's we're entering the era of personality hires with respect and affection. You guys, ultimate personality hires. I'm one two. Safe space. It's okay. Cheers. Cheers.

Cheers to that. But in a world where AI is better than us, at pretty much everything, every human is going to be a personality higher. So just figure out what your lane is and lean into that. And if you have that fire in you and you get into fights once in a while, it's not the worst thing. And if you don't, don't try to Larp as Palmer Lucky and find the fights

just so that you can have something to beef over. Just find your lane, be in the lane. Don't try to jump into a lane that is disingenuous. is an unnatural for you because people sniff it out. Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that a lot. Authenticity, as silly as it sounds. Great.

Well, I have to say, thank you for coming on. When your clients have historically that I'm aware of have come on the show, I'm sure there's been some that I'm not aware of that have come on the show. I always come away and just tell John, ah, he was too, too media trained. Too prepared. Too prepared. Too good. So you're doing great work.

And thank you for being the former brother of the year. and a friend of the show. We'll see what happens this year. Keep up the good work. You might be too time. Just be clear. Just be clear. It can be two times.

You need to do the ceremony where I go and put the crown and then we all cry. Yes. Well, I mean, we're going to have a black tie event this year for the award show and I'm sure you'll be invited. That's it. Perfect. All right. Thanks, guys. Amazing.

Thanks for stopping. Take care. Bye. That was great. Lots of great insights from Lulu. As always. What's your review of the Saratoga Water? Is this going to put Rora out of business?

Is this going to put every water company out of business? They're getting so much. Let's do a taste test. It tastes good. I mean, it tastes fine. It's okay. This just screams to be the restaurant that a mid-restrault or the water that a mid-restrault would stock. Trying to be like, oh yeah, we have bottled still.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we have Saratoga. Oh, okay. There's Saratoga. Yeah. I think it's fun that it's going viral. Good luck to the table. No, I'm happy for them because I enjoy and appreciate

value creation. So I'm glad they're doing. I'm sure their numbers today. Fantastic. They must be so happy. Yeah, every single. Well, you know what they should do if they want to keep up the sales coming out of this viral sensation. They should buy some ads on. By every billboard in the United States. They really should. Just take advantage of this moment. They should go on ad quick.com. They have out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data. to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. That's great.

Do you want to dive into Cloudflare? Should we just move on to some timeline? What are you feeling right now? How much did we actually get into of CloudFlare? We didn't start Cloudflare. But they are the third player in this debate. We're going to have Amjad Massad from Replit on in 30 minutes. And I thought it would be good to kind of show the three companies

that have been duking it out on the timeline. Yeah, we broke down Versailles. And then we'll go into the timeline. Fantastic. So it's an older company. It's a public company founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince. That's the CEO who has been chirping at Guillermo on X. The goal was to build a globally distributed network to improve website security and performance.

And so when you run into Cloudflare, it is a CDN. And so when you're scaling, you're getting a ton of traffic. The idea is instead of those hits triggering database queries and all the stuff that's going on wherever your server is on ABS, they hit Cloudflare first. It can mitigate DDoS attempts because it's just delivering the front-end web page first, and Cloudflare is a product that helps your website similarly to VersaSle be very quick and fast. And they started with a $2.1 million series A round in 2009 to develop a prototype and kickstart operations. They launched a TechCrunch disrupt. What a throwback, 2010. They had core services. Cerews.

CDN, DDoS protection, which I mentioned, performance operation, and it was all a freemium model. So you get on the Cloudflare, free for a little bit, and then quickly as you start scaling, they start charging you more. But as the tenor on X has been, Cloudflare is still pretty affordable, even when you scale up. Amazon, AWS has a lot of Cloudflare competitive products. Cloudfront, I think, is literally a direct competitor to the CDN product. But Cloudflare's being price competitive, roughly. and so you get a lot of stuff,

and then we'll go into kind of what they're doing to add features and functionality to their product catalog. So in 2011, there is a series B by NEA. They wound up hitting billions of page views, millions of domain served. They're scaling pretty quickly after only two years.

They get to that $20 million series B. Then the next year, 50 million series C. I mean, they were basically five years-ish ahead of Versailles. Yep. But it's interesting how, Versailles Series A was 20, you know, so it's like everything just kind of like, yeah, pull forward around. That's just standard. And now it's a 50 million dollar series A is common.

20 million dollar series B. Yeah. The company does that and doesn't say, hey, we, we intentionally raised, you know, less money than we could have. You're like, okay, they're probably struggling. And so Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures comes in for the series C. That's 50 million dollars in 2012. And they added more points of presence, which means more local servers that can deliver content even faster because the whole name of the game is if you're in Chicago, you want a server in Chicago that's delivering that website. So it's extra fast because the speed of light and physics come into the equation when you're going, even just going across the U.S. and back is, you know, at light speed is several milliseconds and that matters. I think it's

almost like 30 milliseconds. I don't know for sure, but it's significant enough that a content delivery network makes a lot of sense. Roughly, is that roughly how fast I was running this morning? Oh yeah, yeah. When I smoked the whole team. Yeah, we had a little race, a little foot race this morning with the team and Jordy came out on top. He's a fast, fast brother.

In 2012, they reached a $1 billion valuation or close to it based on rapid growth and network expansion. In 2013, they added DDoS mitigation and they successfully defended against high profile attacks, the spam house incident. You know, that's going to be a good start when you dig into Spam House. But I'm sure there were a lot of DDoSing going on. I mean, basically, anytime someone was upset,

I mean, did DDocing was so crazy at the time. Yeah. The backstory here is hilarious. So in March 2013, Spam House, which is a non-profit organization that maintains block lists of malicious IP addresses experienced a massive DDoS attack.

Wow. Which experts called the largest in history that knocked their website offline and broadly disrupted the internet. So, hey, let's, you know the guy that's trying to stop us from doing what we do? Let's stop him. Oh, yeah. I mean, DDoS stuff is serious.

I mean, a lot of nation states use it to knock off different services that they think are not aligned. X has been the subject of DDoS attacks. Elon's talked about this. Somebody thought it was a nation state potentially. But it's happened all the time. And it can happen on a very small scale, too, if you're just running a small company and there's some kid who's a script kitty and gets upset with you or just wants to troll you.

I used to dedos my dad's website. Oh, yeah, that's right. From our own home. I'd set up, I'd set up a computer. Yeah, and it's basically, I'd be,

and I'd mess with them and I'd go, like, dad, why is your website down? And then you'd go spend like, yeah, I don't know. But it's really as easy as just going like,

like in the Python code, while one, like infinite loop, request this website. And it just requests it millions of times. And it can just be done so quickly that if you don't have something. set up, you can be in a lot of trouble. And so they doubled their domains to 1.5 million, servicing roughly 5% of global web traffic getting really, really big. Then they go on an acquisition.

The best thing is when companies do the mean. It turns out these generational companies, they do the meme. And that's the lesson. Always do the meme. Whatever, whatever percentage of your TAM that you put in your pre-Cde deck that you want to achieve, just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Yeah. You'll be a big company. They face and resolve scaling challenges. Then on 20, in 20, 2014, they go on this acquisition spree. They acquired Stop the Hacker. What a great name in February of 2014 to boost threat detection. They acquired Crypto Seal in June of 2014 to enhance encryption and certificate management. Crypto seal, I believe, founded by Ryan Lackey, good friend of mine, great, just kind of genius programmer, honestly. Major initiatives, they launched Project

Galileo to protect vulnerable public interest websites, introduced universal universal SS. free HTTPS for all customers and keyless SSL for high security clients and then they expanded their global network to over 30 data centers That set them up for their series D 110 million dollars from capital G that's Google Microsoft and by do They got three of the hyperscalers essentially in the company They expanded to China and then they adopted a bunch of other technologies web application firewall Introduced the I'm under attack mode to counter layer 7 DDoS attacks and at this point in 2015, they hit 62 points of presence worldwide. So they're continuing to grow.

And whenever you're deploying fast applications on the edge, we saw this with Versal, Versal going to something like 30 points of presence, Cloudflare's up at 60 in 2015. And that's the name of the game when you're trying to deliver the internet very quickly. In 2016, they acquired eager platform company to build out Cloudflare apps platform. And we'll talk about that, because that's kind of the product

that will compete with the replet and Versailles. sell stuff is actually being able to run your entire app on Cloudflare instead of just deliver content. So the traditional CDN is images take a long time to load. Let's put those on servers that are close to the people requesting them. Netflix is a great example. You want to put, you know, Squid Game, the video for Squid Game, you want that to not come from far away.

You want that to be up close unless you're cashing it. But in general, you want it to be close so that when someone clicks that button. We had explored high, you know, people talk about high frequency trading. We had explored high frequency podcasting, trying to. trying to get. I mean, with the rate we're growing, we'll probably have to build

our own Cloudflare, honestly, and just buy our own hardware. We'll probably have to set up our own nuclear plants to run the facilities, create our own chip fabs, and ultimately design our own chips.

Yeah, exactly. Just completely vertically integrate down to the mining and extraction of nuclear fissile material. That's right. But that's the modern media game you play. Yeah. When you're a 75-person company now,

I'm sure we'll be at thousands in a couple years. That's right. Cloudflare in 2016, they hit 100 global cities. They had some outages and operational errors. It's a rough and tumble game that they're in. In 2016, this is what Guillermo was mentioning, the cloud bleed incident.

A security bug led to data leaks, quickly identified, patched, and mitigated. I don't think there was a huge impact on the business. I don't think information, and we didn't get a chance to talk to Guillermo about this, but I think both with the Versel security issue and with Cloud Bleed, I'm not sure that there was a lot of, like, you know, customer credit card data that was stolen. But it was the potential for harm was really significant. And that obviously hurts reputations and needs to be addressed with open communication, which is what all these CEOs are trying to do now.

There was also a little bit of a little bit of like a political content debate because the Daily Stormer, which is a very controversial right wing website, was using Cloudflare and obviously was the subject of intense DDoSing constantly. Cloudflare had taken a stance of, hey, we're just an infrastructure provider. We abide by the First Amendment, free speech. If the government wants to shut you down, they can do that. But we are not the arbiter of what should and should not be on the internet. We're just an infrastructure provider. But in 2017, they did drop the Daily Stormer after public pressure and internal reviews. And they had to kind of rewrite and figure out where is their content policy, what's acceptable and what's not.

of course their private company they can decide what is appropriate to use their server for and they have the right to refuse service but it was a kind of later they had they had they had 8chan was the same thing yep so they dropped them at some point and so that's always been kind of a hot button for all these infrastructure platforms when Alex Jones got deplatformed it was all the way down to like you know the Shopify plug-in that he uses for reviews wants to not let him use that review widget anymore. And it's all a nested bottle, like bag of worms, basically. It's very frustrating.

And I mean, we saw this with Trump where he got to platform from like Pinterest and stuff. So sometimes these things can become like big hot button issues. But back to the interesting tech stuff, they launch Cloudflare workers enabling serverless code execution at the network edge. So what that means is that if you do have something that needs to be computed on the server side, you're not just delivering your content on the CDN anymore, your HTML and your images, you're also allowing the user to interact with your app and create actual server-side functionality through these Cloudflare workers, part of the whole serverless trend. They acquired new mob to

optimize mobile performance, implemented creative entropy generation lava lamps, pendulums, Geiger counters to enhance security. That's crazy. Have you seen the lava lamps thing? You've have this. So basically, there's this big question on it when you're working in security. A big piece of that is how do you generate random numbers? And so one of the ways they do it is they create a wall of lava lamps that all move in a completely random and not predictable way. And so they take a video of that and then they compress that image and that generates a random number that can't be predicted. Because even if you're even if you're just like, we're going to use some random number generator from the computer, there's sometimes vulnerabilities in there

where you can actually truly predict. They're all pseudo-random number generators. So there's this like race to create the craziest. Yeah, look up cloud player lava lamps. They have a picture of the actual wall. It's so cool. It also just like a great vibe. So I love that. Yeah. 2018 they launched the one.1.1. DNS service. There's a free privacy first DNS Resolver. They expanded a domain registration, wholesale cost domain registration with no markups, formed an alliance with major cloud providers to reduce data transfer fees, which can actually get really crazy, expensive. Zero Trust enhancements, Cloudflare Access, and Argo Tunnel setting the stage for

comprehensive security suite. So they're taking security seriously. Oh yeah. Putting the screws to Google and they set themselves up for an IPO. So in 2019, they go public right before they did, before they did pre-IPO funding series E. It's $150 million at around $3.2.2 to $3.5 billion. They dropped more controversial clients, as you mentioned, 8chan. And they had a few operational hiccups around this time, some outages, some software

deployment issues, but nothing that stopped them from going public. This is what Guillermo was talking about. The number one thing is mitigating outages. Yep. And so they filed their S-1 in August, went public on September 13th, 2019 at $15 a share. They raised over $525 million. Let's go.

Historical size gone for them. There we go. They launched Cloudflare Warp, a VPN mobility service, and then they went on another acquisition spree. They acquired S2 systems for browser isolation technology and link to bolster developer tools leading to Cloudflare pages, getting more into the application layer. And then they appointed the co-founder, Michelle Zatlin, as president, marking a milestone in tech leadership.

Revenue reached $431 million in 2020 with significant growth in enterprise customers because again, even though they are competing with AWS, they famously have built their own servers, own their own hardware, and it can be much more competitive on pricing. So they enhanced workers with support for new languages, launch Cloudflare pages and R2 storage,

which is S3 compatible object storage, but it doesn't have egress fees. So if you're storing a bunch of images or text or JSON files on S3, you can just move right over to R2, which is, I think, isn't that the one letter more and one number less? It's a very funny name. And so they're all about getting people to migrate more and more stuff off of AWS onto Cloudflare.

And then they acquired Zara's to improve third-party integrations. Revenue grew to $656 million in 2021. They surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue in 2022, introduced D1, a serverless SQL database, and went on some more acquisitions, sprees, navigated complex issues during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, balancing service continuity with policy adjustments. They block Kiwi Farms, which is another controversial website.

There were harassment issues there, and so they're constantly scaling and then dealing with the fallout of having a whole bunch of companies on their platform. Launched workers AI in 2023. We partnered with NVVVNVD to deploy GPUs at the edge. So if you wanna do AI workloads in an actual city, very low latency, Cloudflare now offers that.

More acquisitions, zero trust networking company, secure infrastructure access companies, cloud native security company, just tons and tons of acquisitions as they go. And now they are aiming for net profit and targeting $5 billion in annual revenue in the coming years. They're expanding enterprise sales and enhancing zero trust

and edge computing offerings. And they're deepening their AI integration, broadening the developer platform. Yeah, and one thing I love about Cloudflare is they sponsor the US ski team. Oh, that's great. And so if you like skiing, you might also like their set of products.

And this is a Cloudflare at the moment is a $42 billion. billion dollar public company and they've actually, you know, they've suffered, you know, much of the same sell-off that other firms have, but it's just wild to think about whatever that pre-IPO round was the series E. They did a 3.2 billion. So they're up 10x, those IPO buyers, something like that. That's great. And certainly a good outcome for Union Square and all the early early investors that got in at those $10 million, $20 million rounds, but it took a while to get here. Yeah, it's interesting.

One thing that's fascinating, so Cloudflare is a sort of scaled platform, has plenty of pages comparing itself to other providers. And you would think if Matthew Prince, the CEO is coming after Guillermo, that they would have be positioning Cloudflare. I would expect a Cloudflare versus Versailles. landing page. There's no mention of Vercel on Cloudflare's website at all. Who are they copying themselves to?

Versel does mention Cloudflare. But I'm sure it's... Cloudflare does not. Interesting. Maybe that changes after today's spicy episode. Yeah, I mean, I just think like, you know, who knows what's going on behind the scenes, right? Guillermo didn't mince words when he said, like, we tried to use Cloudflare for a pretty important project internally. It didn't work. And so now I can imagine there very well could be

some ego involved. Yep. But anyways. Yeah, it does feel like a little bit of like a big dogging going on. Just like, hey, little bro, like you don't even have servers, you know, Versel, like, you know, we have our own infrastructure. We compete with AWS. You, you're not even in the conversation. Like that's kind of the energy Matthew Prince brings. But, you know, hopefully everyone can benefit from a rising tide and a growing pizza pie and the pie slices will get bigger for everyone because that's what we want to see.

We want to see bull markets everywhere. You know where you can enjoy a nice piece of pizza pie? At a wander? That's right, John. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander.

Go do it. Use our code. Yeah, use our code. Enter. They're giving away a trip to TBPN audience. Yeah, go check it out. So go check it out. Wander.com slash TVPN.

Inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. That's right. Anyway, we got eight minutes. Should we hit the timeline? Let's hit the timeline. Let's go to Sheel? Yeah, great post from Sheel here.

He's pulling up, he says, venture capital in the 90s was wild. Good funds had triple-digit IRAs, and he's pulling up. So, KP here, vintage, their first vintage. This is why they're in the whole Trinity. Yep. This is why they're in the holy trinity. So their first fund, it's an $8 million fund. They only got a 31.

31x multiple. So only a 51% IRA. But why is the IRA so low given the multiple? Is that just because it was such a long fund? It took them a long time to get liquidity on those? Like, because they had a 32x fund, fund seven, but it's 122% IRA for, for Klein of Perkins fund seven. I wonder what's going on there.

There's no other, there's no insight here. Yeah, ever at Randall from Kleiner Perkins on the show. But anyways, their best performing fund was in 1996, unsurprisingly. Right before the dot-com boom. They IPOed everything in that portfolio. Yeah, so they have a 17x multiple, but their IRA was 286%. That's crazy. I mean, they turned 300 million.

It was a much bigger fund. Yeah, so they turned into like almost $6 billion. Yeah. Wow. And then there's a bunch of other funds here. Five billion at Mayfield, which I feel bad. I should know better, my venture history better. legit. Very old school though. I mean, you can see in the 80s, they were already on fund for. Can you imagine

KP comes out their little eight million dollar venture fund? They 31 exit. They're like, oh, I think we might be on to something here. What's also interesting is all through the 80s, they just were like, we do 150 million dollars. Like that's what we do. They were very disbanding. Yeah, but the fascinating thing is they have their first fund in 1972, $8 million. They don't raise their second fund until eight years later. Oh yeah. The $55 million fund. Probably just so slow and took so long for those companies to get to liquidity. And it's funny that the learning is like they do this huge we don't have any data past their 96 fund because I think it just switched to being KP at a certain point. But it's funny that like they didn't learn their lesson on like upsizing the fund because they just put up this

ridiculous performance on the biggest fund that they have outlined here. Yeah I mean I wonder what's in that 72 vintage. It might have been. been like Intel maybe? I don't even know. Apple. That kind of thing helps. Yeah. Get a couple of those. A lot of bangers in there. Sequoia also doing quite well, putting up big numbers. It'd be fun to do, um, I have a feeling that this summer, the new cycle will slow down a little bit. And it would be fun to do deep dives on like the top 20 individual funds ever and the individual partners. I want to talk. I mean, if they're, they're still in the game or they're still got to get them on the show. Maybe probably retired,

probably skiing where they don't have chair lifts. That's right. honest. But we'll get them on the show. We'll have them break it down. We'll have them toast to the good old days where you could put up a 31x multiple in a couple years. I want to find somebody that was doing venture capital in the 70s. Send him a bottle of Dom and a bottle of Saratoga. I'd say hang out with us for three hours straight. Yep. And let's just let's do it. Talk about the good old days. Anyway, should we go to some nominative determinism? Yep. I love this one. It's Andre Carpathie. And if you break down his last name it's car path and of course this is the man who worked at Tesla and self-driving cars

an AI pioneer and DJ cows says I think about this every day I think about it too a lot not every day we do think about this I love but I love this yeah the Bill Ackman is really a denominator of determinism that's why he's Ackman activist man sure yep makes sense yeah it's a great one it's a good one uh should we go over to super dario talking to yeah I just thought I think this is funny because it's been this ongoing sort of thing that we talk about on the show. So Arvind, Shrinivas from Perplexity says, we're building, explaining why they're building a browser. He says it's the only way to create AI agents with enough control over multiple apps,

especially on iOS. The goal, agents that can book travel, buy things, and act as a personalized assistant. So we're just waiting for one person to build an agent to book private jets. You know, this is a very silly bridge to what's basically an ad read, but ramp travel is fantastic. I, like, it is a magical product. And I'm not, I know I'm saying that I'm super conflicted. But honestly, like, you go there, it aggregates all the flights. It saves all your information perfectly.

Yep. You, you click it, and it's just automatically expensed, automatically put into, like, you just, you just show up to the airport and, oh, wow, like, TSA precheck is in there. Cheapest rate too. Yeah, it's a flawless product. And then you can also book the hotel right there. It is such a good product. And of course, like, as a, as a, you know, a manager of a company, you can decide what's in policy, what's out of policy, how much you want to spend and stuff. But, you know, for us, it's more of like you put a minimum on how much you spend on the hotel so that we're not staying anywhere.

But for some companies that want to save time in money, they can put the cap on that. well. But it really is, it really is a magical product. And I, and I wouldn't be surprised if the first time I have an agent book for me, it's in, right. Yes. Because they've, they've built all of the, like, the harnessing to actually plug in in a really, really seamless way. And there's no like ads or upsells. It's, it's so much better than booking. No ads in there, so we'll put one in here. We got a post from Austin, a friend of the show, has been giving me a bunch of just, you know, he built the morning brew into a monster has been very helpful on TBPN. He's retired for a minute. I put this in here because I want to call him out. Stop it. This is like one of

the worst things I've ever seen. I really, really hate the idea of someone with as much talent as Austin retiring. It's like get back in the game, create some shareholder value, build a massive business. You should be working 100 hours a week. America needs you. And I saw this and I was just disgusted. Okay, but, it was revolting, honestly. But it's, it's really, really depressing. But okay, but clearly he's a marketer. He's a media man.

And he's retiring so that he can unretire, come out of the gates with the maxed out. I still, I just have a lot of sensitivity around our word specifically. Yeah. I don't think we should be talking about retirements. I think we should be working to the bone forever. Well, he's staying busy. He is staying busy. I love it.

He's got a bunch of things. that he's doing. And we're going to have him on the show soon. I love it. I'm trying to pull him out of retirement. We're going to pull him out of retirement. We'll convince him. We'll give him a talk. We'll get on the show. Yeah. We'll give you a dedicated spot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is funny because he's like, I'm in, I'm in retirement and here's my focus. I'm training for a half Iron Man. I'm investing. I've written five angel checks. I'm tinkering. I'm playing with dozens of AI tools. I'm growing. I help three X oceans talent monthly growth rate in two in two point five months. Obviously, he's still in the game. He's merely in his Michael Jordan playing

baseball era, I believe. He's getting back in the league. I was looking for the right sports analogy. I was like, I just don't know these things, but did Brady, Brady retired at one point briefly? Did he? I don't know. Is that not even correct? It's more like doesn't Bo Neckle retire in between every UFC fight, right? And then he comes back. Is that how that works? It's technically a retirement. Amazing. Amazing. You always find something new to not understand. Well, come out of retirement, come on the show and announce your life's work and get to work, Austin. You're on notice. Let's skip the humanoid thing because that's a bigger deep dive. Let's do just a funny, funny post because we only got a couple minutes. Actually, how are we doing on Amjad? Is he in? No? Okay. We will do this Ashley Vance post.

Dan Primak shares, remember when Elon and Zuck said they were going to fight in a cage and lots of people believed them? I believed them. And Ashley says, I heard somewhere that Italy was, wanted to charge them $300 million to use the Coliseum. Not sure if it's true, but I think it is, and I think it killed the brawl. What a miss. It would have been so good. In general. It would have been amazing.

Cash grab, not usually a good idea. And missed opportunity to make Italy the center of celebrity grudge matches, paper views, things like that. Huge miss. Also, they had a rough week. weekend. Who do you think would have won? Because there was always the thing about like Elon is just much physically, is physically bigger, but Zuck had been training more. And so it felt like if the fight had happened like that week that they were beefing, Zuck would have won. But if you gave Elon a

year to train, Elon could learn enough of the basics to put his size to work and win. What do you think? I think in a pure play boxing rule set. It was going to be mixed martial arch. Oh, it was. Yeah. This is something I know about. The only thing I know about UFC is from the Zuck. It's actually so funny because I do think that Zuck could nerd out enough on technique and get the right. And Elon would go into it being like, yeah, I'm just going to rely on my size advantage and just try to not work out at all. Yeah. Show up.

And then Zuck would just be nerding out. He'd get some like super technical submission. I mean the weight alone, I mean, there has to be like a 40 pound gap or something. It's like pretty significant, right? Yeah. Well, speaking of the Italians, they had a rough go and F1 this weekend coming in at... What happened? Both didn't finish.

Leclair and Hamilton. They've had a rough start to the year. People are saying... Was it mechanical issues? Was it the car? It's always something with Ferrari. It's always something with Ferrari. People are saying, like, Lewis has gotten like a full season of, like, the typical Ferrari stuff just in, you know, barely starting the year.

two races. It's unfortunate. It's rough. But predictable. Well, should we go to Zach Glabman? I don't know how to pronounce that. It might be Zach G. Labman. He says, crazy ad placement, try ramp.

And it's a United worker at an airport. And in the middle of his bright yellow vest, it just says ramp. And this just makes a lot of sense because you have a bunch of business people traveling ramp. travel products. I actually saw this and I was like, wait, is this actually? Did they actually do this? No. Of course not.

It's a joke, but the guy works on a ramp, I guess. We got a chart here from Orrin Hoffman. He says, insane growth. What an amazing company. And he's showing the flock safety ARR chart from Soccer. We got to have the soccer guys on some time because they have some of the best insight. We got a fact check. Adcock came out and said that figure is the number.

one most in-demand stock in the private markets, which I think is categorically incorrect based on my insight into the market. But I would like to have soccer on to talk about what are the sort of, they do this research, heavy research on private companies, kind of pulling out random different data sources and putting it together nicely. And yeah, I would imagine they would have something to say about that but um yeah i mean yc company flock safety we've talked about them before 200k in revenue in arr in 2017 growing to 285 million in 2024 wow that is a lot and i wonder what they do next um i can talk briefly about uh persona who's the founder of rippling sounds like he had a was really in a pickle over the weekend.

This was yesterday. It's 6 a.m. A lot of people sent this to us. I like when there's just something extremely dramatic. People send it to us. Yeah, I get some of these texts. And I'm like, is this a tech story?

We'll cover it, but it's not necessarily top of our list. But it sounds like he has had some. But you got to pay attention when there's a billionaire on the run. That's always an interesting story. A beginner on the run. Something like that. I don't know. It's close to it at least.

We just spend like, 10 minutes analyzing like dilution. Delusion. Well, Green Oaks came in at this valuation. They wanted 10% dilution. But then they had the SVB thing and they had to take, you know, kind of an emergency round of shorts.

And were they 50-50 when they start the company? Yeah. We don't. We don't. We don't really know. But anyways, he's going through divorce, had a bunch of issues over the weekend,

but they've been resolved, I think. So I was happy to cover that now. he sent an update post. Yeah. So, I mean, the high level here is that Prasana posted a massively viral thread. 17 million views, 68K likes. He said that he's going through a divorce and he's on the run from the Chenei police hiding outside of Tamil Nadu.

He had a rough go with his wife who he was married to for 10 years. They have a 9-year-old son. Their marriage broke down and his wife was having an affair. He was accused of a bunch of crimes. The police came for him, but it sounds like he's been more or less exonerated from all the accusations and is now safe and sound. And fortunately, the kid is unharmed.

And I think that's the silver lining of what really matters here. Yeah. We got a post from Will Brown. He says, bro. This is why we do the show. Last night was a deep seek moment. It's funny because like that makes sense. And the whole deep seek thing, the whole reason that that phrase makes sense is because

people were saying deep seek is a Sputnik moment. Yeah. It's like now last night it was a deep seek moment. I love it. The internet utterly snapped. Did we kind of miss coverage a little bit on deep, deep seek? There is a new version of deep seek out, but I don't think it was as revolutionary. It was much more incremental.

And it didn't have the narrative of, oh, it was built for $10 in a shed with, you know, screws and hammers. Yeah, it doesn't hit the same. Doesn't hit the same. And you have a bunch of fake news around it. Yeah, they, uh, there's also the new bydo model that they're,

they're training right. Or no, it's Jack, it's Jack Ma with, uh, with, uh, with Ant.

Well, speaking of someone as handsome as Jack Maugh, we got, I'm John Mossad in the building. Welcome to the show. There is. No. Crazy intro.

How you do? What's going on? How are you? good I just dunked my head in a bowl of ice oh we got the Saratoga here too I hope you I hope you got your banana on there too yeah my banana is the banana is key you can't get you can't start your morning without banana on your face and just some banana all over you know are you still lifting like crazy last time I saw you you were deadlifting like 500 pounds or something like that I lost a lot of weight you know it's just like you get you get to a point

where it's unhealthy. It's not exercise. It's fucking killing you. It gets a little risky. The risk of injury gets up there. But you got to be able to break a sweat every once in a while. You see Daniel, growing Daniels tweet is like, if you want to look like shit and feel like shit, start powerlifting.

Yeah, because you just, oh, well, if I want to get the number to go up, I better bulk more and then I'm just eating so much. Yeah. I still maintain some of the muscle. but, you know, just trying to work out for longevity and help. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining. Can you give us just like a brief overview of like where Replit is, what you're working on, how's it going?

Yeah. So Replit kind of like the genesis of it has always been how do you make it so that, you know, programming is more accessible to more people. It's had a profound effect on my life. like, you know, coming from Jordan, growing up there, you know, lower middle class family, being able to come to the U.S., come to New York initially, and then move to the Bay Area and be able to build a billion-dollar company. That's outrageous, and it shouldn't be possible. But the reality is that, you know, we have this massive wealth engine machine that's

called the internet. And for a long time, you know, it hasn't really been possible for a lot of people to kind of take part in that. There's the, I think Peter Thiel said like the paradox of the internet. It was supposed to sort of decentralized wealth, yet somehow concentrated into Silicon Valley. But I think what we're seeing now is finally the tools of creation are becoming more accessible. And that's really been my mission. And so, So initially, Replit was about let's get people learning how to code. And I think that was a good pursuit. But people don't want to code.

The reality is I spent whatever working at Code Academy and Replit. I mean, it's good. I think we taught a lot of people how to code. And at Replit, we built a ton of infrastructure around how do you set up a virtual machine, the runtime, install packages, automating all of that, and all the way to deployment. But really the big unlock was the agent. putting an agent on top of all of that. We were the first agent in the market

to be able to configure services, databases, deployment, and go all the way to deploying an app and it kind of transformed our business just in the past seven months. Can you talk a little bit about the benefit of knowing how to code and how that collides with vibe coding? I see a lot of people that are like,

oh, I vibe coded and it didn't really work. And then Andre Carpathie's like, I vibe coded it and it worked great. And I'm like, there's probably a little bit of a difference between when Andre Carpathie is vibe coding and when someone who's completely non-technical is vibe coding. Like, is there still value to learning to code in 2025? I think there. I think there is. But, I mean, it depends, John, about what is your prediction about where AI is headed, right?

Like if, you know, in the up case, like, you know, what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. You know, I assume this optimization path we're on where agents are going to get better and better and better, you know, the answer would be different. The answer would be no. It would be a waste of time to learn how to code. But, like, you know, you could have different predictions, and I think different people will make different assumptions. I'm at this point, like sort of agent-pilled. You know, the progress we're seeing with agent, we just are rolling out V2. agent, I've never seen a sort of like an A-B test as we're rolling out.

I've never seen metrics in my entire life. I worked at Facebook, other places. We're moving metrics like crazy just by improving the agent, like 100%, 500% on certain metrics on success that users are having. And so I think where vibe coding goes wrong is when a beginner is using cursor, some other platform, great product, but they don't give them guard. Like, you know, there's the guy that lost six months of work on Reddit. There's the guy on Twitter that leaked his API keys.

Like on Rapplet, we do get commit for you. You don't have to worry about that. We hide the API keys in a secure vault. And so I think a lot of it goes to like, hey, these beginners should not be using a lot of these tools. And instead, they should come to places like Rapplet. But that being said, I'm very bullish. Like, you know, I sort of changed my answer. Even like a year ago, I would say kind of learn a bit of coding.

I would say learn how to think. Learn how to break down problems, right? Learn how to communicate clearly, you know, with, you know, as you would with humans, but also with machines. Can you tell me some stories about like success stories from Replit, maybe like the, what's possible as a solo dev today? I mean, we're seeing Peter Levels I.O. do crazy stuff. But what are you seeing from the most successful Replit users? Let me start with the business cases, because I think those are kind of really profound. Because we've always had micro entrepreneurs, like make money.

And it's certainly accelerated massively. But 100 plus year old company, Sears, I don't know about you. I didn't know they continue to exist, but they have this spinoff. called Sears Home Services. About a year ago, they hired a team to, like, a more trendy sort of tech team to get them off of Cobalt, which is whatever 100-year-old program language. And they were able to do it very quickly. And then after they done that, you know, basically most companies, as they're modernizing,

they go adopt a bunch of SaaS tools and no-code tools and local tools and to become, like, a modern company. They actually skipped all of that and went to AI. And their operations team, which manages the kind of field workers that go out and every day, kind of do house repairs and all of that, they started building AI tools. So one AI tool that they have is like the worker would go and would talk to the AI and it would optimize its their route. And that made it so that they're making a lot more money.

And now that team, everyone in that team started building AI tools. And so you have this ops theme that's highly levered that are able to move business metrics. And they leapfrogged an entire era of computing and landed on AI agents. And now these are the journalists that are building the business. And I think this is a view into the future where firms would not be made of like, you know, SDR and like, It can't EA, whatever, it's going to be like, I'm a sales generalist, right? I can do all that stuff because I can spin up AI agents that can do all these things. That makes sense.

How do you think about balancing the sort of needs and demands of the different types of people and customers of your platform, right? You have somebody that comes on, they're sort of early in their sort of like entrepreneurial journey. they build something, but then suddenly there's this moment where they become a business. And once you become a business and you're sort of like servicing, so like you have the challenge of having so many people on your platform and they, and some of them can end up wanting different things. What it, what is, you know, just what does it look like in terms of, you know, you want to be able to continue to service these users over time while still making sure that Replit is

the best place for somebody to sort of like start their journey. We've taken a difficult approach and perhaps not the smartest, right? The reason I've been working on it for my entire life is because, you know, what I try to do is like build an end-to-end experience where we infuse a lot of taste and decisions and choices on behalf of customers. Actually, you had that in that past where, like, the Apple ecosystem kind of makes a lot of decisions for developers. And even Windows, as much of as we, you know, look down on it. But, you know, Visual Basic was a great product. It made a ton of decisions for you.

And like, you know, a lot more people were making things at the time. And so then you had the open source movement. And the open source was this radical, disruptive, you know, bottoms up thing where there's 100 competing libraries and 100 computing ways of doing things. And that created a lot of mess and create a lot of power, but now getting started and doing things programming became a lot more difficult. Like imagine sending up a modern web, you know, app, let alone trying to set up like a Python environment. Like if you mess up your Python environment, the best thing you could do is throw your laptop in the garbage and get a new

one. I've been there. It's miserable. It's terrible. So, you know, so you had this, you know, bottom Zoppa innovation, kind of like the early hacker lingo, you had the cathedral versus the bazaar. So the Windows ecosystem is the cathedral. The open source ecosystem is the bazaar. And so in my mind, well, build, let's build cathedrals made of bazaars. Like I think open source is awesome, but let's actually build tasteful experiences on top of that. So my work at Facebook, I was part of the early reaction.

team, you know, I was working on the tooling there and especially like React Native, we made it so that in five minutes you can spin up a Hello World app as if you're trying to do it using Apple and iOS that would take you, you know, hours perhaps. So, you know, now fast forward to Replit and we built basically all the way from nuts and bolts to the UX of what it means to make software. And so that's been a lot harder, but I think you end up with this general purpose, horizontal tool that can't satisfy a lot of needs. The challenge, of course, is like positioning and marketing this thing. You guys know as entrepreneurs, like people like to do to pick one product on the market. But look back on the history of computing. Typically, the best products

that end up being a core part of our lives are the general purpose horizontal product. There's kind of a narrative that's floating out there right now that companies that are aligned with the AI growth trend are seeing extremely fast rates of adoption. You're seeing companies get to 100 million ARR faster than ever before. The risk that people are kind of worried about is that maybe churn rates are going up as customers test a new AI tool and then kind of bounce around.

They're using cursor one week and then clog code the next week and then they're bouncing to this one. What are you seeing and what do you think is happening? And do you think there's any merit to that fear in the market or on X right now that maybe the AI revenues that we're seeing are not as sticky as previous SaaS installation cycles? It's certainly suspicious. I mean, anyone who tells you differently is sort of, and I was a little worried about our growth, like, is it going to go away? What's going on?

Like, this is like a little too fast. And I think, you know, we really start focusing on the metrics that really matter, which is the revenue quality of retention, things that more advanced companies are thinking about, like net dollar retention. We actually have above 100% net dollar attention, even for our consumer plan, which he's probably unheard of.

But, you know, I think that, I think maybe ARR is becoming a bit of a vanity metric, like how fast you can grow the ARR. I think you won't make sure you're providing an awesome service and also make sure that people just want to stay on your platform. I think especially on the VS-Code wars, the switching. cost being so low is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from co-pilot to Cursor in like five minutes, same project. Quite little. Like it's one click you can open the project. And so they're going to have to find a way to differentiate the great thing about

Rapplet. We provide this really great convenience. And so if A&Broke, don't fix it. You deploy something on Rapplet and people really tend to stay. That makes sense. Internally, I'm sure the entire team is using Replit all day long. Is there still a place for traditional prototypes, or are you, is everyone across the team sort of like doing rapid prototyping and features, which is obviously something that your end customers use? Or is there still like, hey, let's just, you know, make this in Figma and kind of align around it first? there's certainly a place for Figma. I think there are

first of all, there are things that are tough to prototype and there are things that you want to do very, very quickly even faster than than sort of any kind of software prototype. And it depends on how people think. I think designers still would want to canvas to think. I think these products might end up growing in that direction where maybe you go to Replit and you initially have some kind of canvas and that kind of results in a piece of in an application. But right now, I still think there's a place for Figma.

But the way I think about what Rupplet is doing to our organization, I hope more and more companies, is like everyone is highly levered. Like, we just built, you know, agents are new. And part of the exciting things is that no one knows how to build agents. Yeah. There's no tracing tool, you know, like an APM, like a neurotic or dare dog for agents. So we built our own internally. And, you know, a couple people on our team spent like a week using Replit and vibe coding.

This really a great infrastructure tool that has. has saved many, many hours of engineering. We have even more exciting story. We have someone in HR that couldn't find an org chart tool that really fit what she wanted to do or was too expensive. She spent three days, she spun up this org chart tool with connection to ADP and sort of versioning history. And it's amazing.

She never coded, right? So I think the way to think about it is how to increase the product. activity in your company and less about like oh what should we displays you know i think i think these these tools will have their place yeah how do you um how do you think about sort of buying software as someone that enables the creation of software when you know you've obviously been building replet for a very long time 10 years from now you guys are in market for a new CRM you're talking to the big players is is building it yourself just become a part of that sort of like RFP process where the

team is like okay well we can build this like this is you know what we think is going to it's going to cost to you know basically build it maintain it it used to be the biggest bear signal if a startup was like their own CRM it was like oh no you're way over your skis this is going to get terribly wrong and you're going to be maintaining this thing for years and you actually don't have a special You're not a special snowflake in this case. Just use Salesforce or something. But it has a name for it. Like NIH, not invented here syndrome.

Yep, totally. So yeah, I agree. So I think I thought quite a bit of like future of SaaS. I think that the question is like if you can conjure up a SaaS product, can like is there even a future there? And we do see this every time I wake up on Twitter. I see someone using Replit and replacing a piece of software that cost them 15,000, 100,000. I just retweeted one this morning. And so there's a lot of, I think,

vertical niche-specific SaaS tools that are generatable very easily. Even with today's technology, let alone like a year from now, I think you'll be able to kind of generate them, especially on a platform like Replit, which gives you all the cloud services involved. I think there are ecosystem SaaS products that are fairly hard. So I think think about RIPLINK, how embedded into your company as like the, what are they call the like system of record. Yeah. And Salesforce, think about the ecosystem and the developers that they have.

So I think if you're starting a SaaS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus. You want to build a Chinese style company. I think what Rippling is doing. And I think this idea of like being generative and having larger pieces of software, I think it's going to become more important in the future. So I think I'd be really worried about vertical specific SaaS, but I think I would bet on those horizontal SaaS companies.

Well, we got to ask about the Vercel drama. We talked to Guillermo earlier this show. What's going on there? What's your take? Can you break it down for us? Well, you know, I, someone asked me, do you plan on support next yes and replete agents? I said no, because we want to bet on something like Viet that is open, like community builds. And the way NextGS has been trending is that it's optimized for a Vassel.

They disagree, but it is actually not a controversial statement in the larger community. there's a project called Open Next that makes it so that NextGS is deployable on more platform. Matt to the CEO of Netlify, commented agreeing with me. The larger community feels like

NextJS is perhaps more tight of herself than they would like to admit. And I think they overreacted to my comments and they strisend my comments. I think it would have been less of a story if they They, you know, they don't overreact to it.

And look, Bursale is an amazing product. It's an amazing brand. They've done a great job managing a lot of open source projects, not just NXGS. And for me, water on their bridge. Like, you know, I, you know, I think, you know, emotions get, get high on Twitter and you start their name calling. And, you know, I wish them really the best. Yeah.

How is next different than React relationship with Facebook? I mean, with all these big main core frame. works. If you're in Angular, you're aligned with Google. If you're with React, you're aligned with Facebook. But has Facebook or Meta done a better job of kind of releasing that into the community? They're not trying to monetize it as aggressively. Well, not at all. Not not monetize. Look, I worked, I exclusively worked on open source at Meta. And the advantage and disadvantage of working in open source at meta is that there's no direct. tie in to the bottom line, right?

So we were not trying to monetize React. So far, they haven't monetized Lama in terms of like selling an API. And so generally, as long as they are sort of they're using it internally, they're going to maintain it and support it and get some value out of the community and mind share support. Now the disadvantage of that, we actually weren't ever able to like, like make a complete product because like if you go to Google and you know use now flutter I think that thing is actually much more polished of an experience because they have a direct incentive to advance the Android ecosystem for example and so Facebook we built really cool

pieces of infrastructure but the ux around them are bad so you have companies like expo building on React native to make it a better experience Companies like Versailles, building a React to make it a better experience. And these are amazing companies, and I think that's how it should be. I think where it gets tricky is when you end up also maintaining the core software and really tying them together. What do you think about kind of the Ben Thompson aggregation theory around there might be a new company to emerge from the AI boom that is the hub for these vibe-coded apps and websites and games? obviously for a long time it's felt like web development services if you could call it that were very much it was bifurcated like there was shopify which is power law winner but then there was also

Squarespace and Weebly and like dozens of other companies that did quite well but if there's a new aggregator emerging and Nikita beers written about this like maybe there will be one company to really break out and be the the hub for vibe coded n64 level games, that would be very valuable. It would also be more of a winner-take-all environment. How do you think that that plays out in your category? Look, I don't really, that's not the model for our business. The way I think about it, in the early computing era, you had the mainframe. It was the domain of the expert. And then you had the PC, and it became possible for anyone to use computers. And that ended up eating

our economy, essentially, because that's how disruptive technology. technology work. And so in, you know, the modern era, the modern software engineering is also the domain of the expert. And now it's become so that anyone can make software. Initially, it looks like a toy, vibe coding, games, and things like that. But I think it will fundamentally change and transform the economy. And my model for what we're building, it's let's build an Excel. It should be fun. We do a lot of things that make it fun. We actually build a 3D gaming stack.

But the model is like can a billion people use it to, you know, as part of their everyday work, to build businesses, to really be a core piece of the infrastructure in the economy? And the idea that, you know, it's going to be a Roblox. I don't see that as interesting. I mean, Roblox is a great company. You know, maybe Roblox is the aggregator for vibe-coded games, but I think it's really not the big prize. It's like, you want to build a trillion-dollar company, you've got to think a little bigger than that. I love it. Yeah, do you have any, do you have any words for your doubters?

Something you said is like the next big thing looks like a toy. It's been this idea within Silicon Valley that you can apply to, you could have applied it to crypto. So this was Chris Dixon's, I think, original thesis. It still feels like, you know, Ripplett is this billion-dollar company now, but I still think your doubters and your haters would say, Oh, it's just a toy. Like it's, you know, kids making apps or whatever. But do you like that people still kind of underestimate this potential?

Is that part of what creates this sort of the opportunity for the next 10 years is people not realizing like the tsunami that's kind of about to hit the industry? Yeah, I used to bother me, but now I think it's, it's actually an advantage. I think, you know, when, you know, when we're at the height of like AI trend in us and it roughly was early, you know, we were the first outside of co-pilot to train a code model. We're like this company in the city and we're growing fast and, you know, hired a bunch of executives that I think are part of the sort of the hype kind of Silicon Valley. They jump from one company or another. And, you know, last year, you know, I did the founder mode. I cut the team

in half. Wow. Now like 65 people. I moved us out of the city. We're now in Foster City. Literally, there's no other sort of, there's actually nothing out there. It's sort of a desert. And so we have this nice sort of kind of office that we're turning into a campus. We have we have food. We have all that. And the team here is sort of a tight-knit team. There's a selection effect on who joins Replit. If you are smart enough to figure out that Rethlet has this amazing potential in the future, then we would want to on the team.

If you really think it's a toy, it's not worth your time, then great. And so I think these things that just sort themselves out. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Love having you. have to have you back soon. Yeah, I'm incredibly excited to watch what you guys do for the next year, the next two, the next five, the next 10. And yeah, I would love to have you on again in the future sometime soon. Yeah, this is fantastic. Thank you, Bert, for doing the show. It's been, it's been really

cool. Thanks so much for joining. Cheers. Cheers. Awesome. Do we, do we have another guest? We have a surprise guest for you. Surprise guest. Is he ready? I just sent him the link. He's jumping in in just a minute. And he should be all cued up. We'll go through some more posts while we wait. Oh, Bryce Roberts bought two cars. We got to talk to him. We got to have him on the show, figure out what he bought.

Bryce Roberts over at IndivC says, bought two cars today. One dealership wanted me to come down to the lot, get on a bunch of calls and refuse to send me basic info over text. The other was willing to send me anything I needed and requested requested over text and email. Can you guess which one got the sale? And it's not a Tesla.

He said he's done being a Tesla customer. Not a political statement, just that his leases up and his Model X was absolute trash, according to him. I wonder what he did to the car, but we'll have to talk to him about what car he chose. I'm hoping it's a Dodge Demon and a Lamborghini LM-O-O-2. I think that would be a perfect fit two-car garage for Bryce.

but we'll have to talk to him about it. But it really is an interesting take. We talked to the car dealership guy, and I've wanted a car dealership that, I mean, sometimes I just want to buy a car. I just want to click a button, and they don't really care. Jordy likes to go to the dealership and take a look at everything. I completely disagree.

I want to just push a button and have it arrive, which is maybe stupid, but I don't know. I certainly enjoy it. And let's see if I'm ready when you are. So we are going back into the 23 and me news, and we'll give some more context on this. But I like that we're able to be responsive. It's actually crazy that Keon's single-handedly bankrupt. Yeah.

He was barely in market for. Well, I mean, it's not a surprise because he did the TBPN interview. And I'm sure the market saw it and said, hey, you know, if he's going to be in the temple of technology every week. Let's just get out of the stock. Let's just call it. So let's bring them on down. Keon, how you doing?

There he is. What is up? Welcome to the show. Are you guys celebrating? I mean, it's kind of depressing. It's kind of macabre to celebrate on when your rivals go bankrupt. But what happened? Listen, let's put this tweet up, John.

We got a tweet up here. I put up late last night, I think it was around 2 a.m. Eastern or so, they won 2 a.m. Eastern. Okay. I saw the announcement. The first thing I have to say to 23Mee is, thank you. Because the reality is, you know, we've seen the shoulders of giants here, right? We spend the shoulders of giants.

All companies do, you know, you go from Blockbuster and Netflix. You go from, you know, BlackBlayer to the iPhone. You go from MySpace to Facebook. And now you go from 23 of Me to nucleus genomics, right? The industry is wide open. Nucleus is years ahead. And we're going to seize the moment. But before I talk about that, thank you to 23 of me.

Did a great job building the foundation. And now it's time for something new. That's the reality. So, yeah. talk me through the key, it seemed like your post was really focused on the, on the technology and the price to sequence and the difference between shotgun sequencing and full sequencing. Talk to me about that. How different is the technology?

And also, why can't 23Me just use the same tech as you? Yeah, great question. So, I've another tweet here, John, that actually I just put another tweet right out here that I think I should pull up on the screen, give some further context on what's going on and what 20thmi users should actually do. It's currently riding high on Twitter. But no, the difference between micro reading whole genome sequencing, and it's massive. It's like a horse versus a car, right?

You're talking about 20s-Meets technology missing millions and millions of genetic markers. Effectively, it's not actually useful for any really disease risk assessment. So it's fundamentally different here. And the same question is the class of innovators dilemma's problem, right? Why can't this big company do this thing? Well, because imagine, you know, 23 means a castle. They have to pull out the foundation of their castle. Everything has to change.

Technology, product, regulatory infrastructure. Every single part of 20-3 million have to change to actually embrace whole genome sequencing. This is capitalism at work. We love capitalism around here. 20 to me is dying because they couldn't adapt. Nuclease is sending because we are embracing the newest genetic technology. But actually, I think even goes beyond technology. Yeah, go ahead.

John, have something to say? No, I just want to push on that more because, like, if I'm, like, I like you, I'm not going to compete with you. But if I was a potential buyer, I would buy 23 and me, rip out shotgun sequencing, drop in, you know, call up, I don't know, alumina or something and figure out how to do whole genome. And you would independently derive nucleus. That's the beauty.

Yeah, exactly. So maybe you need the DeNova approach. Yeah, maybe the DeNova approach is correct. And I mean, that's why I'm bullish on you. But, you know, at the same time, it just, it, I'm still not really understanding, like, why is it such rocket science for them to just offer, all right, hey, we're on V2 now. We're like, you still spit in the tube. You still pay 100 bucks.

You mail it to us. We just put it in a different machine. It doesn't seem that complicated to me. No offense. Well, it's a massive informatics change. It's a massive regulatory change. It's extremely non-trivial. It's kind of like being like, you know, horses both get at places.

Why can they just make an engine? It's fundamentally different, you know? But really the thing that 23 got wrong, it wasn't just technology, was also actually the philosophy of the business. They really viewed data gathering as a means to make drugs. But because it's such a small sliver of your DNA, you actually can't really make drugs off of it, which ended up making that such that the customer wasn't the customer,

the customer is the farmer company. And I want to say here's something really important, which is a lot of people ask you right now, what should I do with my 23-me data? What should I do with my 20-3-D-Data? Well, first and foremost, you should move it to a hippocomplying environment, right? Like, one of the most shocking things about 23-means is actually not hippocompilient, right? It doesn't follow the gold standard clinical regulations that ensure your data is safeguarded. So, Nucles, for example, we are hippocomplying, we are a physician-ordered clinical-grade test. We make sure no genetic or protected health information is shared with any third-party.

It's very similar to like going to your doctor's office. Another thing to know, and I hope you have the threat up here, which is, you know, we outlined some of these things is we, you know, 23 and me, the reality is that it's actually been illegal since 2008 for any insurance company, any health insurance company, as well, any employer to use your genetic information. That's been illegal for two decades. It's very, very important to say that. So there are some safeguards in place, even though not 23 is not hip compliance. But if you're a 23 user and you're listening to this, you do two things. One is you download your genetic data, secure your genetic data, and then two, which is microrate data, small, SNAPS-R-DNA, but two, you should probably put that in a hippocomplying environment. You can actually DME. I can help you doing that. Some customers are currently uploading their DNA to nucleus currently because they know that we're going to take very good care of their DNA because it is, of course, ultimately all about the patient.

Talk about there's not total clarity right now. 23 and me is not HIPA compliant. I'm trying to understand in a, you know, 23 million in a bankruptcy environment is the value of them as an asset. It's pretty damaged. It's pretty damaged brand. There's not a lot of brand value necessarily. What are some of the risks of the types of buyers for that business?

And it seems very possible from our initial research that somebody could buy it. And with the explicit intent of not even rebooting the business, but just monetizing the underlying user data. Is the value the data or just the revenue stream? because I'm sure that they have marketing campaigns running. I'm sure they're bringing in customers and charging them $100 a test or something. There's some normal business going on there. It might not be profitable,

but maybe you could cut costs and get to profitability. Or is this nightmare scenario of someone buys it just for the data? Is that at all credible? Yeah, so it's a good question. I think one thing is nucleus actively is looking into right now, considering whether it makes sense. Earlier, I'm sure you remember, you know, we explore the possibility of requiring 23Me.

And we're looking into right now whether that would make sense to go and see what we can do and how we can help in this situation. I think the thing to members is that, again, this is microarray data. It's a small sliver of someone's DNA. A lot of the most critical genetic markers that you wouldn't want someone to know about simply do not exist in the data. And that cannot be overstated. Because it is microarray data, it is a small sliver of your DNA.

It misses the most fundamental helpless that someone could have. So in some respects, it's a little bit overblown when people are worried Sometimes this is funny narrative. People are like, I did 20 to me. I learned that, you know, my pee smells like asparagus. You know, if that gets out, I mean, that's bad. It should never have gone out. But like, you know.

Not that big of a deal. Yeah. Yeah. You can't be both. Yeah, yeah. It can't be both. Yeah. Yeah.

And also the product isn't that good and it's not that reliable. It can't be both. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You know, there's two really extreme narratives about 203 minutes. Totally. Totally.

It's like, oh, I learned nothing. It's like, why do you think you learn nothing? Because it's a small sliver of your DNA. That's like one narrative. Then it's like, oh, it's the end of the world of my data shared. It's like, well, actually, you know, the reality is that it's a small story of your DNA. Obviously, no data should ever get breached. No, no one's saying that.

Of course not. But of course, it's my career data. And so what I recommend is download the data, knowing that one, there's better regulations that protect you and protect all people who do genetic testing. And that there are actual regulations that exist in clinical genetics companies like nucleus that can safeguard your data. It's like on your doctor's office. So that's the thing I think that should be top of mind for consumers right now. You mentioned that they were potentially selling data to pharmaceutical companies. Again, that's kind of this weird narrative where if the data is not that valuable,

then who are they selling it to? Is that true? But this is also, again, again, this is a great point. This is one of the reason why 20thMe failed because originally the founder and she said, okay, listen, we're going to use this data. People are actually, she has a quote on the record. People are going to donate data to 23M. In other words, one of the reasons why 20s me failed is they never wanted to build a true consumer health application.

He was never actually about, hey, can we? we provide you with life-saving or medical insight. It was about, hey, because it was really genealogy business for a long time. They wouldn't get ancestry on. We're going to get as many people as possible. We're going to take this data and then go to GSK. They worked with the GSK, for example. The problem with that is, this is the thing they underestimate is because it is a small

slip of your DNA, it's fundamentally not useful for drug discovery, which kind of with them. Because then if your business models, they stop collecting a lot of data to then make drugs, but it's micro-rary data, it doesn't work, right? The customer doesn't want what you're buying, which is why eventually 20th may collapse. So in some sense, it's a technological problem, which is, again, it's a small step of your DNA, but also I think it's a philosophical problem. The customer wasn't the customer.

The farmer company was the customer, right? And so that's why people say, I didn't learn anything about it from 23Meet. Their goal was not to actually really help you in your health. And that's another big shift from 23Me to nucleus, right? We're hippocomplying. Our technology is far more advanced. We actually want to give you medical grade insight that helps you live longer, helps you have healthy family as well.

And then also we want to continue to build out that platform beyond just genetics, blood, wearables, urea analysis, full body MRIs, and beyond into a true consumer health application. Imagine 23 we shipped, right? How far ahead that would be? They'd be 20 years ahead of everyone. Consumer health has just recently hit the zeit guys, right? 20, they would have had a head start, but that wasn't the customer. And so it's just not just technological difference.

It's actually a very strong, a softball difference as well. How were they such a, you know, they have this sort of one-day, time purchase problem, that could contribute to challenges from a business standpoint. It becomes much harder if you sort of get this upfront payment. And then, you know, I'm assuming the average 23 and me customer just like, you know, gets testing done, you know, maybe references back at some point. But why don't you think they were able to avoid bankruptcy given the scale that they were at, right? This is a company that does hundreds of millions of top line revenue. You would think

they would be able to figure out some economic, like they've been in trouble for a long time. You would have thought that they would have gone found, you know, Anne would have gone founder mode and like it sounds like she tried and is now bidding on the business to go founder mode maybe. I always say that there's no such thing as a genetics company. There's only such thing as a healthcare company. And the reason why people always say 20 is one time, 20s me is one time, right? There was actually no difficulty for 23Me to add in other diagnostic tests and build a more consumer health application that was vertically integrated. But again, their customer was the pharma company. They actually, they didn't care that it was one time.

They got your DNA. And that is the fundamental difference. 20% could have solved that problem. I mean, you look at some companies today, you know, some blood testing companies that have built on top of Quest diagnostics. 20% could have sat their fingers and launched that product in one minute, right? But of course, that wasn't the customer. That wasn't the business model. It wasn't the strategy.

So this is a good example where strategy needs technology, which eventually results in failure, right? You have the innovative alumnus problem. The genetics has really changed at 20-3demeanism, but around since 2006. The cost of the genome was 10 million a sample. Today, nucleus sets over a couple hundred dollars. It's one of the greatest technologists ever, right? And so all these pieces together, you have 20-30 collapse, which is sad, but I also think

it's the sign. It's time for something new. It's time for a true health, consumer health application. Can you talk a little bit about Ancestry.com? They were required for by Blackstone. for 4.7 billion. It seems like that business is doing pretty well. Again, not a genetics company, particularly they have their little niche in ancestry. People really love that. They become experts there. But how does that business play with you? Great question. 23 me. You know, it's interesting because

once I'm a very, very wise investor of ours said, he said retention isn't about the product, it's about the use case. It's a very sharp comment. And I think ancestry is a good example of that. Because genealogy is a very super high touch point of business. People love genealogy. They love looking at who their ancestors are. People would literally spend their entire hobby actually around this, right? And ancestry capitalized on that. They realized that genetics was a mean to do better genealogy.

23 and me never realized are they a genealogy business? Are they a health business? Are they a drug discovery business? They never got that right. For nucleus, we use genetics to help people live longer and have to healthy families. The value property is very clear. It's not about DNA. DNA is a means to accomplish some end goal for the user, which is namely better health and having a healthier family, right?

That is a fundamental difference. And to your point, answers to this a multi-billion dollar business. Netara, people say genetic businesses don't work. Natera is a clinical genetic business. It's about $20 billion. Okay, so genetics is in its absolute infancy stage here. And I really do think in the next decade, you're going to see the rise of a concern. consumer health behemoth. And that consumer health behemot is going to have a whole genome,

an entire of someone's DNA at its foundation. And it's going to impact not just someone's health, but again, also their family and nucleus is building that future. So is it, is it possible then that 23 and me had become this sort of toxic brand? And even the pharmaceutical companies said, you know, we like the data they have, but we don't want to kind of like even mess around here because there's huge potential for blowback, right? I imagine. you know, there's some risks there? Is that part of why they potentially... Well, the farmer companies worked at 23Meet,

but because the data is such a small sliver, they realized that there was something to be found. The most important thing for drug discovery in a genetic context is finding rare genetic markers, because those actually elucidate mechanism. To identify novel rare genetic markers, you need a whole genome file, right? Because a microarr, again, is such a small bit of your DNA.

If your DNA is a thousand-page book, 20-th century said one page is. One page. You can't actually get anything out of that. So it didn't work from a drug perspective. business. It didn't work from a consumer health business, hence it's collapse. There's a great actually chart here. I don't know if you guys, it's old tweet, Peter mine, maybe you guys pull it up later. It's on bedrock.

Does screen sharing work? Can I share my screen? I think you can actually. Oh, here we go. We're going to try. This is a technology brother's first year. Whatever you screen share is live. So do not share your API keys. Ignore the tabs. There's a lot of tabs up there. It's actually. It's actually cropped out perfectly. Yeah, it looks great. Okay. So here we have, you know, this great thing.

I shout out to Bedrock, right? They have this narrative violations, right? Clean tech is dead. You have Tesla. Dana's always fads. You have Tinder. Consumer is dead. You have Canva.

And then, of course, the most of these around artificial intelligence has been overhyped and delivered for 10 years, you have open AI. I will tell you what is next in 2024. Popular narrative right now is consumer genetics is dead. And then right now, nucleus is open AI. That is what's going on. Let's go. There we go.

Let's ring the size gong for Kion on Nucleus. Do you have any idea how quickly Do you have any sort of read on how quickly this is going to get resolved? Well, you know, this might be the one resolving it, you know what I'm saying. Listen, I'm talking about. So, I'm rubbing his hands. You never know. I love it.

Some of our big boy investors is in my, you know, they currently text me saying, yeah, what can we do here? And you know, we tried for a quarter of a billion dollars. You know, what's $50 million? Hey. You have to ask. Getting cheaper every day. Getting cheaper every day. day. There we go.

All right. Good luck to you, Kian. I hope you can pull it off. I know you'll be successful regardless. Thanks for jumping on. I hope this gong is going to get hit for a very specific reason soon. Absolutely. Good luck to you.

Thanks, guys. Take care. Thanks for coming on. Bye. Breaking news. I love some breaking news and I love having founders hop on to help us break it down because we are going full golden retriever mode. I don't understand anything about that,

but that's why we get the experts. on. That's the way the show works. Trust the experts, folks. Trust the Seed Stage founder pumping his bags. Don't even trust yourself. Don't even trust yourself. Just trust the experts. Exactly. You want to finish out the timeline right now? What do you think is interesting? Yeah, we can do a little bit. I thought this one from Liz Wessel, this has to be the frothiest VC market for seed and pre-seed I've seen in my tech lifetime 2012 to present. It's becoming truly

absurd. Ramp investor. Seed stage. Wow. She did the Seed round. Crazy. Yeah. Goaded.

I haven't seen anything crazier personally. I mean... Than 2022. I was going to say crypto stuff was really crazy. Like the last company that I committed to was like a $60 million post seed round. But the founder had sold his last company for hundreds of millions. and I don't care.

But again, I'm not an institutional fund that's trying to, you know, cares about ownership targets or anything like that. This is a good context from Jason Lemkin. He says, I would be fine with it if public multiples were higher. And so, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, we had Logan Bartlett on the show

to kind of break down what's happening in the public markets because there should be some sort of tracking between these two. And it's when there's a really crazy disconnect that you think, hey, maybe the public markets are a leading, indicator on what will happen to venture evaluations. But at the same time, there's a lot of

companies that are getting to hire ARRs faster than ever. And it'll be interesting. The weirdest outcome, I think, would be that seed and pre-seed deals, they get overpaid for, and they don't produce the same number of power law outcomes. Like, maybe there's not a single trillion dollar company that comes out of this vintage. But all of those companies wind up producing like a hundred million of EBITDA. And they're like good businesses. And then like the funds kind of perform anyway. That would be a very strange outcome. It would look nothing like venture has ever. But to see a, it would be very interesting to see a venture fund vintage 2025 produce a reasonable IRA without a power law winner in the portfolio. I have no idea if it's possible, but it'd be

to steel man that there's potentially we've accumulated in the last 25-ish years the know-how to repeatedly build valuable software tech just technology businesses generally and in that scenario paying these expensive prices because you have this incredible team yep and maybe you only get a 3x on that one investment, but you get a bunch of other three-xes and collectively you get a two-x fund and that becomes venture. That'd be very interesting. And there's nothing, if that happens, and I don't, I can argue against it easily as well, but if that happens, it's not necessarily bad because ask any dude in private equity that has just been doing these sort of two-x funds for however many decades, they've done very well. So, yeah, of course.

And we want higher success rates for founders and teams too, even if it's lower terminal sort of exit values. It's also interesting that, I mean, Open AI is maybe positioned itself as like potentially the power law winner of AI. Like people are clearly underwriting that deal at a future valuation of like a trillion dollars. I think it's going to be a big consumer tech company. And no one's really concretized how, like what the source of monopoly power will be in that company. Like there's not really a network effect yet at least. There's, no, the value is a scale. It's just an aggregation theory thing.

It becomes a verb. Yeah. And it's like Google. Competition is always a click away. But you accumulate so much customer support that you just. Data. And by nature of the usage, the product gets so much better. I would think so too.

Yeah. So maybe we're bullish. Who knows? But, I mean, it's certainly not cornered resource because the LLMs are, you know, commoditized now. It's not really scale because everyone can serve these. All the hyper-scalers can serve these. It's really just that attention. Anyway, we should have Augustus on to talk about this next one soon.

Yeah. From Lee's Jin. I actually want to have him on to talk about his. Oh, yeah, the debate with Ron DeSantis. Or, yeah, his. He was debating. Ron? Well, Ron DeSantis has been trying to ban cloud seating. And RFK recently came out saying, I support what Ron DeSantis is doing. Like part of the Maha movement is anti-cloud seating. And

Augustus came out very strongly saying like, no, RFK, like don't do that. Like, like this, there's more nuance to this argument. And so we should unpack that. We should unpack his testimony, which was very interesting. And we should also have him talk about this, which is that China is erasing deserts from its map. The first time I ever met Augustus at Josh Steinman's house having some cigars was he just comes up to me and is like, oh yeah, did you know that like the gobi desert is going away? And I was like, what are you talking about, dude? It's the gobi. And he's like, yeah, China's erasing their deserts. And I was like, how? He was like, yeah, they're basically just planting tons and tons of trees. And that's exactly what this video shows. He says, by far 65 million M.U of desert has been greened.

that's around the same area of Denmark. And you can watch this video. And it's crazy because it's just like literally just sand dunes. And then the most verdant, lush greenery you've ever seen. And it just looks like, wow, like I would never want to live in the desert, but I would absolutely live on this beautiful lush farmland. Like imagine plopping like a nice farmhouse on that. And that's just like the American dream.

And we could do that with our deserts in America. And so we talked to Augustus about this earlier saying, you know, after you do cloud seeding, like, is there a tree planting startup that needs to be built or will that be your company? And he was kind of saying, maybe it'll be a different company. But I want this to happen. And I want to figure out what the economics of this business are. Is it just a handout from the Chinese government? If so, do we need to do that in America?

Is there a way that you can do this just with the free market? That would be amazing. Yeah, this ties into the terraforming stuff with the, what's the salt and sea? if we can get water back into that bad boy, then everything around it. But we have some breaking news. I wanted to pull it up. It's not actually breaking, but, well, it is breaking. It's the nucleus genomics team.

Oh, yeah? They were all posted up watching Keon come on the show. So Ben, pull it up if you can. Look at the team here. That's amazing. All meetings were canceled. But shout out to the team. Thank you for keeping our genetic data safe.

That's great. It's great heaven. Kian on the show. He's definitely built for television. We talked about this. We talked about this earlier. Oh, yeah. Lulu. Like, what is his format? What's the format? He's a good poster, but he's great in an interview. And just come on and rock and roll. And rub the, he thinks about acquiring a multi, former multi-billion dollar company. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Well, that's a great place to end the show. Yeah, thank you for watching. Go leave us a five-star review. Put an ad for your business or your fund on the show into the review. If you're breaking news, if you're raising,

the big money, if you think we should raise the ring the size gong for you, give us a call. We'll have you on the show. And we have a number of founders this week coming on to break their fundraisers. Yeah, we can't wait. I can't wait. Yeah. It is a beautiful day. We're going to have to set the minimum threshold and then just raise it.

It's like, oh, 50 million. That's, you know, that's a Tuesday for us. Yeah. Call us when you're raising 80. Exactly. But right now it's a golden opportunity for anyone who's making waves and venture. It's a beautiful week to get. get to work in and around technology.

For sure. So many interesting stories. And if we keep up this pace, we will be doing a DOM episode probably next week. I can't wait. We're at 26K. I can't wait. 6K out.

Let's go. Thank you for everyone who's been supporting us. We really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your Monday. Have a great day. Bye.