TBPN - Shaun Maguire, Harry Stebbings, Blake Anderson, Sean Frank, Adam Ryan, Connor MacDonald, Perplexity $18B Valuation, Tornado Cash

Episode Date: March 22, 2025

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You're watching TVPN live. It is Friday, March 21st, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. Jordi, what's going on on the desk? There's a bottle of Domperian on there. It's not a Dom episode. What's going on?

Our friends over at Slow. Preempted our Dom episode. So they said, hey, the growth this week has been tremendous. We wanted to have the next Dom episode be on us. So thank you to Sam, Yoni. They're kind of in the business of extrapolation. The team over at Slow and Jack, of course. So yeah, they're just basically preempting our DOM episode.

I love it. Yeah, we'll have to. I got very excited when I saw this. I love a nice bottle. Yeah, when I was opening it, like the way the box was, I thought somebody sent me a plant. That's great. And there we go.

So thank you guys. This is a 2015 bottle. Very tempting. Very tempting. It isn't Friday. Very tempting to cry. into it, but we like to do Dom episodes on Monday. Yes.

Sort of power lunch, start the week strong. But thank you to the slow ventures team. Fantastic. And let's get into the show. We got some great guests today. Yeah, we got some great guests for you. I think we have four different guests coming on in about half an hour, but we're going to rip through some news.

There's a ton of stuff to talk about. First up, perplexity is in early talks for a new funding round at 500. They're raising between $500 million and a billion dollars, at an $18 billion. valuation. I mean, you've got to kick it off with a sized gong for perplexity. Absolutely dogs. Absolute dogs. Big numbers. They'll be doubling their valuation from December. That's right. And it's March. So that's three months, double. A.R. is also nearly $100 million. Not too bad. Let's break it down. Let's read this little Bloomberg article. I will say that I feel like the posters didn't like this, but we can wait for some of the reaction. Mixed. I found some very

positive posts in here we'll get to. I found some more critical posts. We'll break it all down. We'll give our take. So, Perplexity AI, a startup building artificial intelligence search engine to compete with Google is in early talks to double its valuation to $18 billion in a new funding round. The company has discussed raising as much as $500 million to $1 billion in the round. Founded in 2022, it's a pretty young company, just three years old. Perplexity has emerged as one of the most prominent startups using generative AI to rethink core internet services. Last year, Perplexity tripled its valuation from $1 billion to $3 billion, and then triple it again several months later, a sign of the immense investor interest in all things AI.

This new $18 billion valuation would include the amount raised in the round, so that's a post-money valuation, but still, 17 billion pre-money isn't that bad. What's pre-or post among billions? At this point, it doesn't really matter. Their ARR is nearly 100 million. Perplexity said it has more than 15 million active users. They're facing growing competition from Google and OpenAI in its core search business. OpenAI rolled out a search product to all of its users of its chat bot, chat GPT.

And of course, Google has those AI generated auto fill answers. I forget what their product name is for that. But basically when you go to Google, you get a AI generative AI. And they count all of those as Gemini users. Yes. Which is cool, too. It's great. It's cool.

If you're optimizing for usage, it's great if you are literally Google and anytime somebody Google searches, you can sort of add it. Yeah, they're a user. Put it on the... I mean, this is what's happening with Lama too. I mean, like, Lama's forked into WhatsApp and stuffed into Instagram. Put it in there. Yeah, it's the number one LLM.

That's the one people are talking to you. Let's talk about the backers. Perplexity is already backed by SoftBank, Vision Fund 2, NVIDIA. I didn't know SoftBank got in there. SoftBank. early in this case. Oh, don't they have some big, I think SoftBank is a big customer too. Oh, really? They're doing this thing where they're sort of investing and becoming heavy users, dog fooding the product. Well, we should have the founder on because he's a very interesting,

he's a very interesting figure, very interesting poster. And obviously, I mean, I've used the product. I'm not, I'm not like a daily active right now. But I think, I think it's cool. And I think we'll get into this later, but Sam Altman was just on Stratory. interview talking to Ben Thompson. And on there, Ben really tried to nail him down on where the value is going to accrue in AI. Is it going to go to the application layer or the model layer? And this has been the big debate with all the new foundation model companies. And Sam, and it's funny how it's funny how Ben like phrases it to try and kind of like nail him down. I'll actually pull up the exact post. It was from Tane. According to Perplexity, SoftBank, Vision Fund, too,

invested between 10 and 20 million in perplexity as part of a larger $250 million funding round. This was back last year. And so South Bank has gotten almost a 5x, I think, on this, more than a 5x, potentially on this. So hit the size gong for that. So Ben Thompson was interviewing Sam Altman trying to get to the bottom of, does the value accrue to the model layer or the application layer? And he can't just say that.

So, of course, he has to come up with a good question. and he asks Sam this. He says, what's going to be more valuable in five years? A one billion daily active user destination site that doesn't have to do customer acquisition, wink, wink, wink, chat GPT app installed on everyone's phone already in the home row on my phone, or the state of the art model.

And Sam Altman says the one billion user site, I think. And so Sam is now, you know, he was at the forefront of the state of the art model race. now he is somewhat acknowledging that the value might accrue to the application layer, and he is actually, this is a very bold case. I think he's more than acknowledging that. Yeah, he is pushing that narrative now because. I think he views it, and we've talked about this before, the reason that Elon can train a model fairly,

he makes it look easy to train a model that's competitive with OpenAI, much harder to get an app that is pacing towards having a billion, you know, users. And so that says it all. Yeah, so it's like if you have distribution through X, you own X or you own WhatsApp or Instagram or you own Google.com, you're going to do very well. Harder to bootstrap a new destination site with billions of users. Yeah. We saw on the perplexity numbers, 15 million active users. That's a ton. Yeah.

But they got to grow that. They got to get into the billions because that's where the consumer tech apps really play. Yep. But it's interesting. The B, they call it the B zone. The B zone. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, like, for a long time, the, the Hater, the Sam haters were very much like, oh, like he's, like, all the value is going to accrue to the application layer, not the model layer. And he's stuck on the model layer.

And now he's kind of like pivoting his argument and the narrative's kind of shifting. And now it'll just be interesting to see how that plays out because it seems like. Just oscillating back and forth. Yeah, yeah. It's always unclear. It's like, it's like, is the CEO spinning a narrative? Because Ily is saying is. It's the truth.

Yeah, you guys can have fun at the app layer. Yeah. I'll see you. I'll see it. See it ASI. See it, ASI. Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to go through some reactions to perplexity in general.

Our buddy Emmett Shine said, this was a couple months ago, but he said he set up perplexity as my default search tool within ARC. I use Claude for creative work and chat GPT for general larger processing work. I like perplexity's multimedia results for search. So far so good. And in the little video he shares, what's he searching for? Rora P-Fast filtering. I thought that was really cool Easter egg.

He's doing a little shout-out for our friends over at Rora. Well, Emma did the branding for Rora. Yeah. And he's a shareholder. Oh, there we go. Okay. One hand watches the other. Which we love.

A little cycle. Ash Aurora has a funny post here saying, at this point, perplexity not raising every six months is a bare market signal. but yeah they've set the bar they've set the bar high and if you're trying to go after google if you're trying to go after a trillion dollar company yeah you're going to need a lot of capital you're going to need a lot of aggressive growth targets so it's not an unreasonable strategy if you're underwriting it against yeah we're going to be the next google uh but it is a high valuation yeah and on the next uh arvin the CEO says uh on the next post perplexity will make apple intelligence work um so that seems that seems obvious that seems like true like like He's not bluffing that. In many ways, perplexity, the team at perplexity would do a much better job leveraging the power of Apple and their position in the market

than Apple's current AI team. Totally. So I can, there is a world where, there's a world where Apple, you know, has to, like, pay a huge premium to just buy a great AI product team. Which is not in their DNA at all. I don't think they've ever done a multi-billion dollar acquisition. It's super, super rare. Yeah, but they're all.

Also, but you're thinking, you know, Apple's evolving as a company. They're not, they're not seemingly in a position now where they're able to do deep, innovative, you know, visionary work. They're shuffling. They're shuffling. They're shuffling up. And if Apple was ever going to move from a, hey, we just, we do all of our R&D in house, we, you know, we don't sort of acquire teams, et cetera. This would be a big shift. Yeah, it would be a big shift, but it might be something.

that over time, you know, I don't think if Apple paid $20 billion to acquire perplexity today that the market would love it. Yep. But you could see a world in the future where, you know, something like that could make sense. Yeah, I mean, the shareholders would be like, Apple, what are you doing? You wasted like six weeks of cash flow on this company. What are you doing?

No, it's, but honest, I think it's more like, I forget the actual number, but when we ran the numbers on, like, Tim Cook's comp versus like. how much money they make and like Tim Cook like barely makes like you know a day is so cash flow poor guy poor guy but you know that the dynamic here that's interesting him saying we're going to make Apple intelligence worth Apple makes $20 billion a year from Google through their search integration so for Apple to want to integrate I'm sure that there's something related to that contract that would that would prevent well they also have a Apple has a deal with chat chip PT and in theory, you can ask Siri to go to chat GPT. And you can actually, on your phone, if you're on

the latest OS, you can add your chat GPT pro credentials. And it basically uses the consumer API key to send the query to chat GPT should be a great experience. I can never really get it to work though. It still gets confused about where to route the query, which is really rough. I think they're just so spoiled from the experience of Google where it was just, there's just this one little bar in Safari and they routed to Google and that's the end. And this is a much more nuanced consumer experience. But clearly, a strong deal between Apple and perplexity would be transformative for perplexity.

And so good luck to him as he tries to hunt that down. Should we go to Neer? This is a great post. Great post. It's just like tangentially related to perplexity, but I like it. Every man has a stack. For some, it's creatine and magnesium. For other, it's Arch Linux and Vim.

Some just answer perplexity and Claude. Others have Versal and Cloudflare or EngineX and Redis. Some guys will even say Bitcoin and Ether. The essence of being a man, you must have a stack. I love that. I mean, my daily show stack is very much Lucy and Yerba Lame. I'm on the Celsius and the nicotine pouches and the creatine and some chat GPT here and there. A lot of X.

Scaling the stack. Yeah. And a stack. of weights in the weight room beforehand. This is a very funny post, but I agree. And then there was this interesting perplexity ad. They're doing, it's like Apple-level cinematography when I saw this. So they, this is from a few days ago, March 17th, perplexity just dropped its first celebrity

ad starring Squid Games, Li Zheng Jay. I botched that pronunciation, I'm sure. Anyway, he's the guy from Squid Game. We love him. The AI search startup takes a jab at Google. They call it Pugel with a cheeky line, don't use glue, which was a reference to a very niche Gemini. I think Gemini was suggesting that you should eat glue on pizza. Yeah, something related to mozzarella.

Yeah, and then Katie Nutpolis over. What I like about Arvind is he's not willing to poke the bear. No. So in the case of Google, he's not afraid to poke the bear. He's not a, so yeah, sorry, he's not afraid to poke the bear. he will clearly, you know, frequently get in Sam Altman's, you know, comments. It gets a little spicy. Sometimes he gets a little too far, but I like a challenger CEO.

It's like a, you know, you're fighting with a bowl. And just from a comms perspective, we should talk to Lulu about this, but I think like there's something about when someone is so much bigger than you, your downside is so limited because if they reply to you at all, you're blowing up because it's like, oh, you were acknowledged by the gods. He probably runs the numbers on what percentage of chess. GPT's users, can I sign up for my product if I get Sam to reply to me? Yeah, I'm sure this proves every time.

Poked the bear. Poke the bear. Yeah. Yeah, this article was, I mean, this ad was. Can we pull up a little bit of this ad, Ben? Because it was a little controversial. So token bender here quote tweets this and says, perplexity seems to be on a path to be a case study. I will not elaborate.

But look at this ad. This is beautiful. It's really, really well done. And I mean, the lighting, everything, the sets. Like this feels like it would be at home with Apple. But I think people are a little bearish on this because it's like, oh, they're spending too much before they have like true breakthrough consumer adoption. Feels like a Super Bowl ad. People are always really skeptical about like, oh, you're advertising too much.

But it's like this is a consumer war. You got to get people. You got to get people on. And I think it's fun. I think it's a well-produced ad. So he goes to Pugel and does not get. a good result. I mean, they clearly made the font smaller.

I've never watched this show. Oh, you never watched it. Yeah, I watched it. It was pretty good. It's very funny because they created like a fake Google and they clearly size the text down. So it just looks like a complete wall of text. Whereas when he uses perplexity here, it's just like a single answer. It's just like very clear, much larger text on.

I like their positioning as an answer engine. It's a good phrase. And they also have nice merch. There's been some cool like coffee cups I've been seeing on the timeline that are pretty cool. Clearly like, you know, the token vendor line was in reference to perplexity launching a venture fund. And the response at the time was, hey, I don't even think they were in the top 25 apps in their category at that point. And so the pushback would be like, why do you have a venture fund? And you know, you should just focus on the product. But yeah, yeah, they're getting

attention. They're getting users. They're 16 in the charts right now. If I have to go long, short on this, I would go short perplexity venture fund, long perplexity cinematic ads. Because you're trying to get consumers to use it. It's much, you have to do this crazy dance of logic. We'll invest in this company and then our product will become better. All the ads, all the ads. All the ads. All the ads from the Super Bowl from the big AI players, the Googles were very mid.

I don't remember any of them at this point. I remember bits and moments. I remember the open AI one. The Open AI one was more like a design film. cinematic and cool. Yeah. But for a lot of these, it's just like you've got to just remind Normies that you exist. And hey, yeah, you should try this out, you know, if it drives in stalls.

Yeah, this marketing is better for the average American. Perplexity's new ad than the Open AI sort of sun god, black son. Yeah, the black sun was weird. Worshiping the black son. We're all turning into bits. Anyway, you do an $18 billion. You raise a billion at an 18 billion. billion post, let's say, $800,900 million of that secondary? What's the first thing you're doing?

You're heading over to Bezzle. Bezell. Yeah, Bezle. That's right. Get Bezle.com. Shop over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezle's team of experts. That's right. Pick something up. And in terms of other amazing wearables, we got breaking news from big screen VR. They launched the Beyond 2. There we go. I am so excited for this. This is just a fascinating story of a company that's just been grinding in in VR for so long. I hate to take anything away from big screen, but I almost forgot briefly about that Soul Reader company. Oh yeah, that's Trace Company.

Yeah. I have one. E-ink screen. Very different product. But that's, that's what I want. Are they selling, are they delivering it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can get a Soul Reader.

You should. That's great. Soul reader's great right before bed. Yeah. Because you just throw it on. It can pull in articles. It can pull in e-books and stuff. I read the driver, that story about cannonball on the Soul Reader.

Nice. It's great, great. Alex Roy. Yeah, my main thing is I'm falling asleep. Yeah. Right now I do a lot of audio. Yeah, you don't want light. So it's just, it's very, uh, it's very warm color temperature.

There's no blue light. So big. And so you'll just fall asleep in like five pages. I'm honestly hard to finish. I'm sorry to the big screen team. We got sidetrack here. Well, it's a very different use case. No, no, I know.

It's a very different use case. So with big screen, it's for this like really immersive, like ready player one style VR. And it's so, so light. They launched the big screen one last year or maybe the year before. They launched the big screen Beyond 2 just a few days ago. We're trying to have the CEO on soon to talk about it. And actually, one of my friends, Kyle Russell works over at Big Screen now too.

Oh, nice. So it's 107 grams, which is phenomenally light. And John Carmack, when he was at Meta, working on their headsets, said that the key to creating consumer adoption in VR was, I think he said like $100, 100 grams. So if you make it super light and super cheap, people will just start throwing it on. And there's a bunch of interesting posts that we'll go through here. But they're claiming breakthrough optics, 116 degree field of view, edge to edge clarity, a massive sweet spot, reduced lens glare, increased brightness, and eye tracking, improved for shareability.

We added adjustable IPD so you can adjust where the lenses actually go over your eyes, so you can give it to a friend. The first version was they would actually like 3D print your face onto the mold. And we should pull up the video if we can, Ben, to kind of ship. That's cool. They're shipping in less than a month. Oh, yeah. And the demand was crazy.

I think they sold twice as many as the previous version. How does it integrate to any headset in the world? And our community loved it. with Beyond becoming people's daily driver VR headset for VR chat, racing sims, and other VR games. But our community's been asking for more, asking us to push further on optics and a wish list of new features. After years of cutting-edge research and development,

we're unveiling our most advanced product yet, Big Screen Beyond 2. Let's go. Let's go. I'm so hyped. I'm never taking these off. Yes. That looks very cool.

Yeah. Somebody actually did a tear down of this headset too. They cut out even more stuff and got it down to like 60 grams, which is like nothing. Feels like you're just having like a pen on your face basically. But I mean the weight thing, this is the number one complaint about the Applevision Pro. They've just gone completely the other direction to give you a super, super light headset. Now they've made a bunch of sacrifices to get there. Like I'm pretty sure this thing has to be powered by a computer.

It has to be plugged in. There's a bunch of different things that you have to do. It's for a pro sumer or kind of a developer almost. But I want to figure out how to get this rig built out really, really easily with maybe some small Mac mini powering it or some Nvidia box that I can just use super simply and just have this wonderful experience. But Palmer Lucky's actually been a big proponent of what big screen is doing. He wrote, we're on the path, or he was interviewed and was talking about it. We're on a path where we can make virtual reality devices that provide matrix level immersion. The big screen VR costs $990 and it weighs one-fifth of the Oculus Quest Pro.

Apple headset display is the next generation for the same company. And so he was interviewed by Peter Diamondis and talked about how excited he was about that direction. And Carmack was saying the same thing. We mentioned this. Big Screen Beyond feels like a prop from a futuristic movie. but it works far and away. I really want to do sim racing in here. Totally.

We have to, in the new, in the new studio, we're getting a sim racing set up. Like the most ridiculous rig. I went, there's a place in Pasadena that has like full sim. It doesn't do VR because I think people get sick and it's kind of gross to share them. Yeah. But they have full VR, full like three screens. And it was fun.

I was at Laguna Seika racing some Porsche cup car. It was fun putting up lat times. I think it was on the simulator for like an hour. It's blue right by. It's great. Avi Schiffman chimed in. This is an interesting old quote from Steve Jobs. Steve said,

there's no such thing as headphones for video. Steve Jobs would have turned 70 today, and I can't help but wonder what he'd think about the early steps for Apple Vision. Avi says Apple should have made something closer to big screen beyond's tiny little goggles, just a more immersive content viewing experience that fits into the Apple ecosystem is enough. It didn't need apps and neither did the watch. And that's a really, really good good point. You just put it on and it's just whatever's on your phone is just boom right there. There are a couple companies that are not even doing VR. It's just basically a big TV screen and it has

the form factor of like sunglasses. And so if you're on a plane, you want to watch a movie on a huge screen, you just throw those on. There's a couple companies, but they're all like a little rough around the edges soon. But just to put the weight in perspective, Kyle Russell, my buddy shares this. He says, even the tiny iPhone SE weighs more than the big screen beyond at 144 grams. And back in the day, do you remember those VR headsets that were like, you literally slot your phone? It was Google Cardboard. And so you'd slot your phone into a holder and then strap that to your face. Yeah. Yeah. And there was another one, the Samsung VR something. You needed a Samsung phone. You put that in there and then you just bought the lenses. And there was this

idea that like your phone would be driving the VR experience never quite got there but you can go even lighter if you're just purely focused on VR like big screen is and then Kyle also shares a little meme from the big screen team discord silence optics engineer a physicist is talking because clearly internally they're always bumping up against the limits of physics it's very difficult that's the number one constraint for these I can't believe how cool this thing looks this is again this this is why we need new science fiction for the products from like 40 years from now because this feels like a device out of, you know, snow crash. Yeah, we're going to check the box and then and then we're going to need to move on

to the next big thing. But I'm excited for VR to finally get here and I can't wait to get my hands on a big screen beyond two. We'll have to do unboxing on the show. Well, if big screen wants their next million customers, what should they do? They got to buy billboards. Immediately. Immediately.

Immediately. Immediately. We got to figure out how many billboards are on the 101. Small device, massive billboard. A power play is to just get every billboard. Get every billboard. Right around Cupertino,

really let Apple know, hey, we're putting the screws to you. We're home. This, ours way is nothing. Yours way is more than the truck. You can't make even, you can't make your 29th generation iPhone way. Does your neck hurt?

A brutal logging. Get a big screen beyond. I want to see it. on an ad quick billboard, 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. Anyway, you see the tornado cash news?

Tornado cache. Yeah, you were telling you about it. This has been a story that's been developing for a while, and it feels like tracking, it's kind of hard because it's moving in slow motion. There's been little, basically, just to set the level set on tornado cash, tornado cash it was a uh i believe like an ethereum contract it was just code but it would allow you to deposit crypto it would get basically like tumbled around with all the other mixed in with all the other tokens and jam it in the smart contract basically the blender on yeah turn the blender on just let it

run and then you can come back later and kind of sneak it out no one knows who's taken what and it's like basically like money laundering on the blockchain but it was a big question because although it was used by criminals a lot, is math a crime. And a lot of the libertarians and a lot of the crypto folks were like, privacy is important. That's why we got into this whole game. What are you doing? I believe the founder was arrested and has a court case coming up. But the most recent news that just dropped today is that tornado cash has been removed from the OFC sanctions list, along with many other addresses. Shout out to Brian Armstrong and Coin Center for suing the government in court and winning for your human right to privacy.

Beware many front ends to tornado are fake and scams and will empty your wallet. So maybe don't try and use this. But from a libertarian political perspective, everyone's celebrating in that crowd. Yeah, this seems like a win for human rights. And law enforcement will still be coming after the criminals that try to use tornado cash. Totally. As they do with, as they do with the, you know, Ross Oldbrook using Bitcoin.

The problem is that like tornado cash was a lot harder to attract than Bitcoin. There's still our ways to. Little insight. So former teammate of mine and friend Dylan Abrasado is the founder of this online survivor style game called Crypto the Game. He ran, I think it was the first or second season two. Sure. Before they were acquired by Uniswap, the winner of the season won all this money from playing the game. And then donated it to the legal.

defense for tornado cash. And so, yeah, this was a, yeah, this was just a very big issue. Brian Chow here at PsychoSort says the tornado cash founders are political prisoners. The case against them should be immediately dismissed. This is a couple months ago. And there's a little breakdown from one of the founders, Roman Storm. Great name. Tornado.

Strong. Wow. He says, my name is Roman Storm and I am one of the founders of tornado cash, a non-custodial privacy protocol. I am being prosecuted for writing open source code that enables private crypto transactions in a completely non-custodial manner, meaning his company never takes ownership over your crypto. It's the opposite of a bank. It's not designed to be like Coinbase. It's merely a smart contract. This prosecution represents a terrifying criminalization of privacy. The charges against me threatened to criminalize software development itself. If successful, the implications

could extend far beyond the crypto industry impacting every software developer. I face up to 45 years in prison on charges including operating and unlicensed money transmitting business, conspiracy to commit money laundering and sanctions evasion. This case has already had a chilling effect on developers working on software tools. Recently, a developer filed a lawsuit against the DOJ seeking relief because my case has made them fearful of releasing new software. And so this has been very, very controversial. Vatelic actually chimed in.

No man left behind Roman Storm. and Alex Percev next, Tornado Cash itself won an important case today. And the whole crypto community is behind this. There is a flip side to this that we should talk about, which is that the allegations are that, you know, maybe this operation was profiting off of the money laundering in like maybe more criminal way. And I think that's what they're alleging. But this has always been the challenge with crypto where you have these.

sort of open source on chain protocols that in many ways can operate autonomously. Yet they have to, they end up building sort of front end services that have to, that end up using like AWS. And there needs to be some company that sort of like puts a ramp card down. And probably not ramp in this case, but it has to put a card down or pay for these services. And so then you have to look at what is the company that is, you know, a U.S. or some type of corporate entity that can pay U.S.D. for services. And then what is the protocol? And this is why in crypto, they historically would have the sort of foundation that sort of manages the protocol. And then there's usually a C-Corp that sort of engages with the foundation.

You know, it's like very, very complicated structures, which is why all the big crypto funds would have these pretty massive internal legal teams to help their portfolio. companies think through this. Yeah. I think in general I'm pro-privacy, but anti-money laundering. But it's obviously very nice. Veck commented on it apparently and says you can't go after the, you can't go after the developers of code. What you actually need to do is go after the individual bad actors who are breaking the laws

that already exists. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like you don't go after, you don't try and lock up Satoshi for creating Bitcoin. Even if you could find him, you go after Ross Olbrecht for creating the platform. So, Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, said, no man left behind. Yeah, tornado cash itself, one, an important case today and the founders are next.

So yeah, interesting that, you know, just because tornado cash was able to sort of beat, beat their case doesn't mean the founders are fully out of the woods yet. I think the case is going to trial in April, so we'll have to track that. Crazy. But if you want to avoid money laundering at your company,

if you want to avoid waste at your company, you should go to ramp.com, time is money, say both. Easy to use corporate cars, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. You can see on this image here, you got a little picture of Sequin. Oh, yeah. It says keep your team focused on the game, not expenses.

We're going to get Seaquin on the show. Yeah. It's only a matter of time. I'm excited to have him on. He can teach us about football. And investing, apparently, because he's a fantastic investor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's in Ram and Andoril now.

Yeah, he just got into Anderrol. He's over at the, at the Anderall offices. Huge alpha, just being a pro athlete and getting into the, the non, the typically non-sexy categories. Totally. Normal for an athlete to be like, you know, we've got an NBA player and like Rora. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Protein powder, but that's very competitive. Yeah, the real alpha is saying, no, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna become an American dynamism investor. Fantastic. Well, speaking of guests, before we have Sequin on, we got a whole bunch of guests hopping on right now. We got Harry Stebbings coming on. The King of Europe.

The King of Europe. The King of Europe, Harry Stebbings. Harry sent a nice note on the timeline yesterday. He's been super supportive. It's interesting. I was DMing him with him a little bit, and I'm sure he's going to be in the waiting room any second, but on how he's in the waiting room.

Yeah, he was saying he listens to the show, and I think we finally made a show. There he is. It's long enough for his marathon walks because the guy's putting up 40,000 steps a day. How many steps have you racked up today? I do 50,000 now. 50,000. I'm under like two and a half hours and I listen to you on the walk.

That's fantastic. We got to, so just let us know when we need to go from three to four hours. Yeah, just we want to pace with your walking your, your steps. Honestly, I walk with my mother on the weekends. If we could do weekend additions also, it would save me having to talk for six hours. I love, it's been, it's awesome to see your relationship with, with your mom. It sometimes makes me feel like a bad son because I don't walk for. for that many hours with my mother.

But I was just saying you had a nice message yesterday on the timeline. No, thank you for the story. It's interesting, you know, the shows that we really respect, all of them are highly ephemeral, right? Like, they're shows that aren't really oriented around the news. They're oriented around individuals, people, companies, et cetera. And ours is the exact opposite, right? Like, it would be kind of crazy to go back and listen to it to the back catalog.

It's kind of crazy. You know, sometimes we'll talk about a story. that maybe is more evergreen. But you've built up this sort of crazy catalog of some of the most amazing investors in venture ever. I wanted to have you on for a few reasons, but really to give you an opportunity to talk about Project Europe. We joked on the show that until you guys came out with this new program,

the Project Europe that most VCs thought about was planning their sort of trips to St. Trope over the summer. But you guys are taking it back. Do you know what we're taking it back? We also have Portafino. Yeah. I'm fundamentally, the world has decided that Europe has, you know, lost innovation. We've lost entrepreneurs.

And I meet great founders every day. And do you know what they're told? You've got to move to the valley. And I'm like, you don't have to move to the valley. You can build a massive company here. And I think bluntly, we need to change the vibes. Vives is everything. Elon.

You like him or you don't. the guy knows how to master vibes. And for us now, we've told our young entrepreneurs that you should leave, that you should build a company elsewhere. There's a guy, Gary Stevenson, who is blowing up in the UK, who tells young people that bluntly, it's the system's fault, it's not your fault, and there's nothing you can do about it. There is.

I was, guys, 10 years ago, I had no money. I was a kid in a bedroom. today we manage over $750 million, the show and the media companies, multi, multi-millions because of the internet. I'm not doing that as a meet. It's the internet and the empowering nature of, I DM'd Mark Benny off 53 times before he came on the show. By the way, we remind, sometimes we'll message a friend about coming on the show and they

like don't get back right away. and I'm like, I got to channel Harry right now. Yeah, for sure. I just got to hit him up again. And it's important to show those, a lot of people would just, you know, have the temptation to make it look easy. Yeah.

And say, oh, yeah, I just message Mark, Benny Off. And he just, like, popped on. It was easy. But it's important to remind people that that persistence is what creates. Totally. I mean, Logan Bartlett's the same way. I think he, I think he DM'd, he said he emailed SBF like 15 times to try and get him on the show.

And I was like, I don't know how you could do that. It feels so awkward to me. But you've clearly, like, broken it down. And it's paid off massively. But you know what? You've got to get innovative. I use suno. AI to write songs about people.

And then I send them to them. So I'm like, you know, write me a song asking John in a like male folk guitarist tone. There we go. About the future of M&A. And then I'll send it to them. I promise you you're the only one who's going to do that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's so important in like fundraising, sales and, you know, even growing a podcast. It's all the same thing. Oh my God. Totally the same. thing. But on Project Europe, yeah, it was like the doom loop just pervasive. And I have so many friends in the US who are just like Europe, dude, like, why are you still there? It's just,

it's just not true. But the timing, but the timing seems incredible. You've been, you know, banging the, the, the European drum for a while now. But it does seem like even in the last month, almost, there's been this sort of shift. And that's sort of potentially coming from this, you know, the US is getting into trade wars with our neighbors, or some of our close as allies. This is just sort of like nationalism happening around Western Europe kind of waking up. You know, people are, there's more, you know, the people are talking about what is going to be the anderol of Europe. You know, I'm sure you're looking at some of these companies, but the timing seemed great. I think we're going through this intense period of de-globalization. And what happens

in intense periods of de-globalization is intense patriotism. And I think we're at the start of that now where absolutely we're starting to see Europe once again get a little bit more. patriotic. It's funny. You said there about like the Andrel of Europe. It's Helsing. And my favorite thing is when you see defense funds and you're like, no, no, I don't quite know if defense is quite the category. It's more like and rural and Helsing. Like yeah. Very cool. Do you, I'm curious, you run your fund. You run the media business. Do you LP into other European funds? Are you trying to kind of create a sort of like a marizu, no, but one of the things here in America is great if I've got a buddy who's raising a pre-seed round. I talk to them. I'm like, okay, I know

30 people that could lead this pre-seed round. Like, don't worry if any one person says no. Like, you're going to get a yes. Just talk to a bunch of people. But I imagine when there's probably not 30 London pre-seed funds that you kind of, at the moment, but maybe there should be or maybe there are. I mean, I don't actually LP really into other funds just because with the network from the show, if I LP'd have to LP into one, I'd have to LP into all of them. And so I find it easier to say just like, I'm sorry, I can't do LP checks. Otherwise, you end up being Mark Andreessen. Well, I don't know a fund that Mark Andreessen is nodding.

I've been paid so many funds where Mark is an investor. And so, listen, he has more money than me and can afford to do that. I couldn't do 100 funds. Can you tell us a little bit about the patriotism in Europe? Is there, are there layers to this where, you know, know, a Spanish company will only want to raise from Spanish investors and say, hey, get this British guy out of here? Or is, is Europe kind of solidified in the same way that the United States is kind of a block, even though obviously there's a difference between Florida and New York

and California? I would say that Europe has solidified completely. There's definitely not this. I was an isolationist element of like, oh, Spanish versus Italian versus whatever. And Jesus, even the English and the French are getting on these days. That goes to show just how much. much of a united front is. And I think especially in the wake of, you know, the divide that's growing between the US and Europe, that becomes ever stronger, that unified country element of Europe.

And so I don't see that at all. And Europe really stands as a block. And I think you see that in how people have responded to Project Europe. And we've had, you know, thousands of applications. I started with 25 founders that I was like, hey, I'll go get 25 founders that are amazing. And they will, you know, to check into this vehicle to back the next generation. We literally went to 150 in three days.

We've had another three to 400 request to be in. There's a legal cap of 250s. We can't actually do it. It was amazing. Talk about when you, you were an early investor in Lovable, they've seen ridiculous growth. It's one of those charts that's not really a line. It's more like a wall. Yeah. Talk about that round, how that came together, are you getting these companies like weeks earlier than American investors that would want to shot at it? Is it months? You know, talk about your edge in Europe on the ground. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Lovable is a great example of a global company that's being built from Europe and Sweden in particular. Their numbers are insane. They're growing, you know, 2.3

to 2.5 million ARR per week. Their retention is better than chat GPTs at over 85%. I mean, it is a monster and their attention is really important. It is not sugar high AI revenues. And so phenomenally impressive. Listen, Anton is quite obviously brilliant. I think we over exaggerate how difficult our role is as venture investors. Our role is to invest in the 1%. And generally, the 1% I find is quite obvious.

And so when I met him, it was pretty apparent that he was bluntly creating an entirely new category. I've learned one thing in investing that when you're able to make your customer a superhero, it generally works very well. Nike is a good example. Everyone's an athlete. That message is empowering. Shopify. Everyone's an entrepreneur. And Loveable allows anyone to build a website. My mother who has a bakery uses Loveable to make her bakery website. That is incredibly. I love your commentary on just the website market in general, the sort of, you know, you've got the framers, the web flows, you know, all these different platforms. It's felt over the last few years. Yeah, it's felt over the last few years.

If you just waited for, you know, web flow to kind of become four years old, then you could create the framers and then you could do the lovable. It's been like the unending gold mine, honestly. Yeah. And it seems like the, you've got a couple of different segments here that I don't think people are really talking about enough, which is like you've got the number ones, which is. which is P-E-owned, larger, older players. Now, they are in a lot of trouble. They've lost innovation. They've lost product-centricity.

They're in a real world of pain. I'm really looking at a lot of the P-E-Bored assets, your ANA plans, your Coopers of the world, thinking, wow, you were bored at the height of the market. You don't have the founder as the CEO. You've lost product-centricity. This is going to be a really tough slog to get back to that acquisition price.

And they know that. And then the second that no one's talking about either is this really worrying segment. This is almost what I'm most worried for, 50 million to 200 million AAR SaaS businesses that are growing in the teens and they're not profitable yet or they're barely profitable. They are not acquisition targets for P.E. Those are not good enough numbers. They're not good enough to IPO. What happens in that case? And there's a lot of these companies.

That is a really dangerous chasm to fall down that I don't think many people are talking about. What about just the broader market? We're seeing a pretty significant sell-off in the U.S. Is Europe seeing something similar? I haven't been tracking it very closely. When you say sell-off, what do you mean? Yeah, I think he's talking public equities, but I mean in your position, do you, as a venture investor, probably don't care.

But I even talk about maybe just like pricing in the early-stage market, which is probably what you're more clued into. I mean, there's so many things here. I think one thing that no one's doing about it, I'm so shocked about it, is like bluntly how LPs are responding to a lot of the endowment policy changes enacted by a Trump administration.

I mean, like, this is a very, very difficult position for a lot of endowment funds to be in. They're forced to rethink a lot of their private allocations, and that will significantly impact management. abilities to raise funds this year. Can you step back and explain exactly what the change is? Well, so you're seeing essentially the Trump administration reduce a lot of the budgets that they're able to have to their privates.

And so you're seeing that reflected in how they're engaging with new managers. When I speak to a lot of endowments today, they're simply not adding new managers and they're even trimming their existing. And so I think that's bluntly going to really impact the amount of new managers that we see this year. In terms of pricing, honestly, it's higher than it's ever been for the clearly great assets. And there's a lot of people who come and say, oh, it's so unfair, it's so unfair. I understand that for a lot of the market, you're not coming out of Stripe or Facebook or you name it.

But if you are, you have more money than ever before, and the prices are honestly higher than ever before. The prices are absolutely nuts today. And so you either have to be, if you want to win in Ventures State, you have to be one of two things. I believe I'm a better picker than anyone else and can find diamonds in the rough. Or I believe that I am such attractive capital that I can win a beauty contest and still pay a very high price but beat everyone else. Yeah. Do it all at the same time. No, I think that was it.

It's funny that like any investor who's claiming, you know, complaining about high prices is just like just like just. price every investment perfectly and never miss. You'll put up a great fund. But by the way, entry price really matters. When you look at WIS and Insight, something very timely, you know, their entry price was very high. And so people are really shitting on it as an investment saying like, oh, it'd only returned a third or a quarter of that fund. It's not, it's just that the entry price was so high.

And we'll talk about that. I'm curious. Do you know any dynamics? I was wondering, imagine you're the partner who leads, you know, $200 million investment, turns it into two and a half billion. And then you're kind of waiting around for your other partners saying like I kind I kind of did the heavy lifting here, but I need you guys there because they're not in carry yet.

Is there a scenario where that partner doesn't really see much of a personal benefit from having, you know, returning $2 billion? I mean, let's just say, I think they'll be getting a pretty big bonus at the end of the year. So I'm not too worried about them. But I mean, it is just testament to the like fun size matters. scale. Yeah.

The scale is massive. It's never been bigger. Yeah. All right, Harry, there's a lot more to talk about. We'd love to have you on again. Go enjoy dinner. Thanks for coming on late. Yeah, we appreciate you going on late.

We really appreciate it. It's fantastic to have you. Guys, honestly, you are a fantastic company on the walk. Always let me know what I can do and huge love, guys. Fantastic. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Enjoy your evening.

Cheers. Yeah, I was coordinating timing with him and being in London. Well, he seemed like he got to a great podcasting studio. He's locked in. He's locked in. You love it. Over time, over time we're going to get the Dalians, like, a permanent sort of like hub in the office. Just say, come flip on the lights.

You'll be live. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'll set it up. The remote studio. I mean, that's what the big TV channels do. It's like, oh, if you're doing a spot on, you know, NBC, go to the local NBC affiliate in your town. And we'll have a green screen and a great microphone and a teleprompter for you. And you'll look great if you can stop by.

Anyway, we got Adam coming on the show in a couple minutes. Give me some background on Adam. How do you meet him and what does he do? The godfather of media, Adam Ryan. That is a bold intro. So Adam Ryan's a very good friend. I was actually on the board of his company through the Series A. And he prior to that was at The Hustle.

He like ran sales there. Eventually was the, I think the president and the CIO under Sam Parr. He also was at. under armor when they acquired my fitness pal so he's just been kind of like right in uh he also was at um he was at uh spice works as well so he's always been at kind of the intersection intersection of like software and business media and content and so he can talk a little bit about work week and then i wanted to get him on to talk about the tech crunch acquisition that happened today which uh there's a lot of turmoil has the number actually leaked or is that private information it's

private information. But we got them ready? But should we be ringing the size? There he is. There is. That's what we'll ask Adam. Adam, we heard TechCrunch was bought. We have this beautiful gong right here.

Should we ring it or not? I think this is like a poor noise champagne bottle situation. It's time to ring it. Okay. We'll hit it. We'll hit it. But great to see you, Adam. I just want to say you always thought.

that I would be good at podcasting and always believed in me. So, you know, thank you for that. You were the first person to say, you have a Facebook podcast. You should be podcasting. So, but it's great. I gave a quick intro earlier, but it'd be great to have it in your words. And then I want to kind of get into the news. Jordie, I think I sent you a contract once to become a podcast. So we can talk about, we can talk about that. But yeah, it's a big fan of the show, guys, has been, been amazing. I've never seen Jordy just in his natural element of getting to shoot this shit all day. It's a perfect job. It's fantastic. Yeah. So Workweek is, imagine of LinkedIn was only for people that were verifiably in your profession. So think about if you're in e-com or on a hospital

system or HR, you have a platform, social media platform that's built, just for you, conversations that are authentic around your lingo. You get it similar to what this podcast is all about, actually. I think this is why we all like it as founders, as you guys talk like us, you think like us, you bring that out. And we've built that in a social media platform. So that's largely what we do. I think one of the areas that we've focused on is like,

if I wanted to go launch an HR social media platform, I would never have a shot to do it. HR people would not listen to me. And so our go-to-market is to partner with operators, practitioners in these industries, and have them create newsletters and podcasts that then help us build an audience to drive to these memberships in the future. So that's most of what we're up to nowadays. And previously, as Geordy said, the hustle, My Fitness pal and SpiceWorks kind of at various different points of media. Yeah. Cool. Amazing. Let's jump right into T.C. You know, we've talked about this on the show before. They were owned by, what was it, AOL, Apollo, the private equity fund bought AOL. It seems like at some point there would be an incentive to sort of dismantle AOL, the underlying assets. And I imagine that Apollo doesn't want to just hold that position forever.

maybe just talk about kind of the history of maybe why you think TechCrunch has really just struggled. I think it was owned by it was it was owned by Verizon. I'll give you some background. So founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington, partners of Archimedes Ventures, eventually they went under the Yahoo! After its former parent, AOL and Yahoo were acquired by Verizon. So it became a Verizon company. And then Verizon sold to Apollo. So it's been private equity back since 20.

2021 and now it has been sold to Regent, a media investment firm. Yeah. It's the property. It's like the hot potato that no one wants, right? It's just been sold and sold and sold. But I mean, I think the through line is looking, if you look at their search interest on Google trends, they peaked. Any guess what year they peaked of search interest? 2012.

2011. Good guess, Jordan. Wow. 2011 was the peak of their search history. Today, their search history is essentially the equivalent of what they had in June of 2006. Wow. And it's just been a depreciating distressed asset for 12 years, and that's why it keeps getting tossed around. And, you know, I actually think it's, they're an interesting one to study, though, because, like, why were they so good?

And they were so good because they figured out one move that was just awesome. which was building relationships with VCs in Silicon Valley, breaking the news, having Mom be proud, creating the cycle, keep going. The Mom Be Proud engine. It really is true. When you start a company, it's so fake for so long. Even if you go to your parents and you say, hey, I got $2 million from Andrews and Horowitz. They're like, who?

That's not Bank of America. And at some point, you get the TechRunch article and you can send it to your family and be like, hey, I'm in business. I'm a real person. At some point, I had one funny TechCrunch story. So we announced our seed round from Andresen. We simultaneously launched our pre-seat. It was this awesome moment. We had been in the timeline a lot.

And TechCrunch agreed to cover the story. They didn't tell us when they would release it. They didn't even tell us they were for sure going to cover it until like a couple days before. And then when they did release it, they refused to use our product imagery or any assets that we created. And they used a stock image of a birthday cake. And we're just like, hey, like, we're really excited about the article and like we want to share it broadly. But like, this is not on, you know, not a brand for us and like feels kind of random. And they like fired back and they were like, you're not, you don't.

You're not a writer here. Like don't. And it was like very hostile and it left this like terrible taste in my mouth. And I was like, okay, I'm never talking to tech crunch again. And I think a lot of founders have had that sort of frustration where it's like, hey, I, we still love the tech crunch brand. Because like for me, I grew up reading it. I remember just as a kid going to the homepage and being so. excited and I think it has like a ton of potential as being a place to inspire

entrepreneurship but the fall off is potentially that and this is like the entire work week thesis is that business people whether you're an investor founder etc want to like learn from other business people and so at some point along the road after Michael Arrington I think was out of the picture there was private equity on they maybe stopped hiring sort of founders or or people that just deeply loved venture. And it sort of coincided with this explosion of just like content creators broadly within venture capital

that Packy would start breaking fundraising news. And you knew if you work with Packy, he was gonna publish it on the day that he said he was. He was gonna make you look good. And actually deep dive it in a much deeper level than you would ever see on TechCrunch. Right. And I think the other piece of that, like two things

I think they really screwed up. Like one, when you build your actual best product, which was their like fundraising, breaking news around the relationships with the investors, you can't write anything that's actually like deeply critical, even in the future. And what they did was they got stuck in middleman land of like, you can have like the Axiocer, Sarah Fisher's of the world, Pachies that are like, hey, I'm here to like tell a good story, a real story, but like to support you. Or like hard hitting journalism, like I'm going to like go.

say the thing that no one wants to say aloud. They like live square in the middle. John Kerry Rue. Like he broke Theranos. Like right. He's a serious investigative journalist in the business world. They try to do both and you just can't win in the middle. Like I think today like either your editorial and your audience like it can't be rounded anymore.

It has to be pointed. And like you have to be like this is what we stand for. This is what we do. This is who we support. If you're like anywhere in the middle, you're just going to get forgotten. And I think they they lost that like 10 plus years ago. I mean, look at it. X account. They have 10 million followers on X and their announcement.

50 likes. 19 likes on their announcement that they have been sold, which is like big news in their own world. It's just so rough. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we had heard months ago that it was for sale and was trying to find a buyer. And I do think the actual purchase price came in a lot lower than what they had hoped. But what I can imagine happens now is whoever this guy, I don't know the guy who bought it, but I imagine he basically fires everyone because I can't imagine that, that, uh, he's, he's, he's not going to. So Regents is a private equity firm that owns a bunch of logos that 15 years ago were cool. Um, and his playbook is and tech crunch put this in

their own press release. Um, you know, they, they, I think their chief yes line was like, this is, this is a software update, not a system restart. Um, um, um, um, but, But he said he's not firing anyone, but he owns a bunch of different logos and publications that are typically distressed assets. And I kind of see it as like they're hoping. His playbook is like, I own 50 of these. If I can make a few of them a little bit better, flip them in five years. And so I don't think they're actually going to probably fire a ton of people, unfortunately. I think it's actually going to continue the path of not being relevant or good because they're going to not lose money.

And I think they need a whole restart to do. do that. Let me give a little overview of who they own at Regent Computer World, Network World, CIO magazine, CSO magazine, Mac World, PC World, IT World, Rate My Professors, Cheddar News, Military Times, Defense News, Marine Times, Army Times, Navy Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times. So a lot of like these hyper-verticalized small trade publications they've put together And then they own some stuff in fashion as well. And then industrial and consumer products as well. And it says that they were in supercuts for a while.

Yeah. I saw that. I saw that too. That was a fun. And I was like, actually, I'd like to hear that story. But I mean, the, I think, you know, when was the last time you heard a founder and I'll say, like, I can't wait for tech crunch to, like, break my story? And I think that's, like, the core of what's going on. Because founders would still want them to break this story, but it's hard to get them.

to respond even if you have something that's somewhat newsworthy. What else is going on in media today that you find interesting? I know you wrote earlier this week about the skims, which was like a hustle era, super hot, you know, newsletter that that sold. How did that go? Is there any takeaways from it? Yeah, they, you know, they were started 2014. Oprah said she loved it, Reese Witherspoon, Chelsea Handler, kind of like went on this, raised like 25 million from 21st Century Fox, a bunch good companies also hit their search interest peak in 2016. So I think with them, they had a great business. They were probably seven years too late. I think that's a founder not, founders not selling at the right time than like being bad builders and their time had passed. But I don't

think they crossed the press stack. So, you know, 12 plus years down the drain for them. And pretty sad considering one time they were they were a household name among like millennial women for a few short years. But yeah, that happened this week. And I think that's what we're seeing. It's like, it's the onslaught of like if you're not loved, you're out. And none of these people that are getting sold today, like have people that are truly like logging every day and loving what they're seeing. Yeah. I mean, last question. We'll let you go. What do you think the founders of the skim should have done differently? Is there a path where this could have been a great cash flow engine if they'd not raised and kind of run it more as just making them influencers? Could they have been

next, you know, call her daddy or something, if they played that differently? What do you think? I do think they were more of a faceless institution than they probably got credit for, which is kind of against my belief of what you have to be today. I think you have to have individuals at the forefront. But also my interesting analysis there from 2014, their press release was like our advantages that were low tech. In 2018, when they announced their series B, they said at the heart of what you do is technology. And I think there's like, it's okay to today to just admit who you are and what you do. And they tried to be something they're not, which is a technology company.

I think they wasted tons of capital trying to do shit that they have no idea how to do. And they should have just kept with building content for women their age and building creating for themselves. And they would have been just fine. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you follow anything? Last question on my side for now. And I'd love to just have you back on when there's media headlines.

The, did you follow? So Caller Daddy, like, you know, had all this big, big issues with Barstool because they just weren't really getting a good deal. Alex Cooper eventually leaves, starts her own network, does very well, but then creates this sort of new superstar in Alex Earl. And then Alex Earl, like, announced this quarter that she's leaving. Do you think it's possible to build networks anymore long term? or with these sort of like, you know, scaled networks, do you eventually just lose, you know, your best talent? How does that work?

I think it depends. I mean, the Alex Earl wants interesting. I was confused because she was already a superstar. I mean, she was like, she was already making like a few million a year pre-Alex Cooper. I think what the net, what the best networks do, I think, is find emerging talent early, early. like in pre-seed stage essentially as like a content creator. And to keep them, and I think there's been plenty of good examples. I mean, everyone talks about a bar still leaving, but like Big Cat, PFT and all those guys are still there

and drive most of their revenue actually and always have. And so what would happen? How'd they do that? They get paid a lot of money. And they feel like they're treated fair. And I think that's like at the core, not everyone wants to do everything. And I think when you're when you're building out those networks, the only way to keep talent is, I think, to talk to the talent and be like, what kind of life do you want? What kind of pay do you want?

And you've got to build for that. And I think if you look at TV, they actually, this is what people should take away is like Stephen A. Smith just got a fucking whopper of a deal. They kept him. But they like knew what he needed. He wanted to be the high, he wanted to get the highest contract. TV's done this really well for a long time. Friends cast giving them their new contracts to keep. them together. Those were all innovative contracts that keep talent. I think to do to sustain,

you have to kind of take that same approach. That makes a ton of sense. Well, thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you, Adam. See you later. Talk soon. Bye. Very interesting. Nice. Who we got next coming in. Adam's always, he's never, he's never pulled punches in his writing. He's got a great newsletter where he just kind of says it how it is in media. Because he's been in the trenches, right? He built a million subscriber list. while at the hustle and it's certainly not easy. We got Blake Anderson coming in from the cage live from New York City where he's been in an apartment for 33 days straight. How are you doing, Blake? Can you guys hear me? We can. Yes. Welcome to the show. They can hear me, but I cannot hear them.

Okay. Try it again. Check, check, check. Do y'all, uh, you all, uh, you'll say something? Check, check, check. Go to public.com investing for those who stay seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry yields by millions. Like, can you play music and do you hear it in your AirPods? We got stocks, bonds, treasuries, options. Can you hear that? What about eight sleep? I know you guys are sleeping on eight sleeps out there.

Nights that feel your best days. How do I sound? Bed into your ultimate sleeping experience. Go to eightsleep.com slash tbp.n. Can you hear that? Blake? Yes, I can. Cool.

What about getbezzle.com? Can you hear that? I can hear that. Blake's a watch. Blake's a watch guy. Ramp. I was about asked about ramp. Could you tell me about them?

Yeah. Time is money. So say both. You can hear that. Okay, good. Are we good? I think we're in a good spot. Blake, Blake,

Blake, it's great to have you on the show. It's a big day today. Thank you for taking the time. You haven't been, I think everybody here is very familiar with you just from PMF or die and everything. You haven't left the cage for 33 days. Today you're launching the app and maybe you start to get a sense that freedom

might be on the horizon. Freedom might be on the horizon. But yeah, talk to us. How are you feeling? You know, I'm feeling very stressed out. I feel like I have this pit in my stomach that is not going away for anything. And I think that the only way that I can release that is achieving PMF. And if I do not achieve PNF. I think I'll be in a very dire spot, you know. Yeah, yeah, we're going to have, we're going to have the audience who gets to vote on the sort of fantasy football style punishment. Like you might have to be pink, pink hair or something like that. No, but we're believers. Why don't you break down 10x in your words? Maybe just start with kind of the manifesto. It feels like the app is, you know, extremely timely with everybody sort of realizing that

one of the biggest opportunities with AI today is giving everybody, you know, a tutor. But yeah, tell us about 10x in your words. Yeah, I think that the power of AI education cannot be understated. Everything that I've built has been on the backbone of AI. And yet at the same time, I have so many friends that constantly ask me how they can use AI to learn more efficiently, to learn how to code, to learn how to market, to learn how to do anything, any digital skill. And I don't think that there exists a platform that's kind of synonymous with AI-based learning.

And this was the general background thesis on building 10x. And next came the medium, right? What is the form factor? And so the original form factor with how we were launching and the version that's going on the app store this evening is a duolingo-style learning path where you can select your skill and progress through the foundational knowledge needed to learn how to code with AI, market with AI, you know, build a business with AI. And so that is one key function of the application. Additionally, we have the ability to custom generate lessons. So you can generate a 15-minute podcast on anything that you want to learn about. I find myself going down these like

interesting podcast rabbit holes on Spotify. And what I found is that once you get past the very base layer of any sort of, any sort of domain, it could be machine learning, it could be complex systems. It could be American history. It's very difficult to find these sort of of custom tailored information to progressing to that next step. And TEDx provides that for people. Additionally, you can track your skill progression over time, as well as chat with a chat GPT, groc-like basic chat bot within the application. Very cool.

I saw a post earlier today from this guy, Chris Pike, who's over at Pace. He says, when elite universities uploaded all of their courses online for public consumption, we collectively realized that the limiting factor for global. Global intelligence is not access to information, its motivation. What's your read on how motivated is the sort of next generation of builders who the initial 10x app is like, how do you make somebody, how do you turn somebody into a developer, right? Who right now maybe knows nothing.

Do you feel like there's like just a ridiculous amount of sort of motivation that doesn't necessarily have like a pathway yet? Do you see that 10x is like, hey, here's how you go from zero to builder? Yeah, so one of the most popular questions that I get on social media is how can I learn to use AI? How can I learn to code nowadays? And there doesn't seem to be any resources that are really constantly up to date with the newest and best techniques. In addition, if we look at what duolingo has done for language learning, the big thing that they've done is they've gamified it. They've made it fun.

And I think that that's in line with your point regarding motivation. And so right now with 10x, it is significantly more enjoyable to learn through 10. X, then through a basic standard chat bot, though obviously we have the chatbot embedded within. But going forward, one of my primary North Star metrics is how much dopamine do you feel rushing into your brain when you hear those little sounds and get that XP and see yourself level up? Do you have haptics yet? Do you got the phones vibrating or is that rolling out soon?

Yeah, we've got we've got haptics. But, you know, I don't, you know, haptics are just just a small step and a very very, very big mountain in competing with Instagram and TikTok because, you know, my view for the 10x mobile application is that it might not be the platform that you sit down on and use for three hours straight, but it certainly can fill the latent space in your day instead of Instagram and actually put it towards something productive. Yeah, talk about this. Talk about the concept of like character building and sort of leveling up your character because a big part of 10x is like, okay, I'm a character. I'm Jordy. I can go on 10x and like level up my character to learn how

code, that's awesome. Was there a specific video game or anything that inspired you as a kid that you were super into, like that you got maybe way too into? Was it, I think World of Warcraft was probably way before your time. But was there any specific? Yeah, absolutely. So I would say Skyrim was a big one. So not to be confused with the World of Warcraft, I think a big difference in terms of

the type of person that played this two games. No, that said, no. I think that games where you can see your skill and level progression over time are just inherently so much more addicting. Skyrim, Madden, FIFA, even Minecraft in a bunch of these different mods that I would use when I played as a kid. And that was essentially the thesis behind UMax and what made it go so viral is the ability to scan your face and get this sort of like six-factor rating system about like your skin quality and your jaw line and like your overall attractiveness and potential. And so in its current form, it's just XP-based. But moving forward, I think that really interesting thing that we can implement is the ability to take these sort of preliminary challenges and quizzes to assess your current skill position and then make this into more than just a system to come and learn statically and linearly, but something that can dynamically update based on where you're at, where you're progressing, and then become somewhat of a status symbol, right?

Right now, we all know the term 10x engineer, you know? I want a level 99 in 10x to be a hallmark of somebody who has agency in this post AI world. Love it. Talk about your go-to-market. I know this is historically how you've grown your apps is sort of leveraging these sort of short form video platforms. You're taking all that learning and, you know, channeling it into 10X's GTM. Are you doing anything different this time or is it the same playbook that you've sort of happily shared with the world because it's easy to talk about. It's hard to actually do.

Yeah. So, you know, I think that 10x is inherently less viral than the previous products that have built. Now that said, has so much more long-term upside. And so if I were launching a RISGPT right now, it'd be like, done, wraps. I'd be, I'd have completed it. I'd be at a million error. But I'm trying to build a big business here and I really believe in the long-term mission. Now, that said, I think that I'm taking a lot of the learnings that have had from my previous applications and figuring out how to how to make something that isn't inherently as viral or maybe like no scandalous into something that that people really resonate with and still can go viral on organic platforms and so you know I think that one of the big marketing messages that we have is

you won't be replaced by AI you'll be replaced by somebody using AI learn to use AI now that's inherently a little bit scary and like digs into insecurity and I think that that'll be that'll be conducive to to, you know, engagement on these social platforms. We're split testing a ton of different niches. We're working with self-improvement creators, with AI and tech creators. We're working with OnlyFans creators. And so we've got the whole roster.

This is what you were saying before, that somebody logs on to OnlyFans for whatever reason. And then it's like, hey, why don't you learn how to code? When are you, when are you, I know you're launching today. I got the pre-order page pulled up. When do you think you're going live? Because I know you probably still have some stuff to do there. No, we're going live immediately after this call.

Amazing. Okay, everybody listening. Blake really wants to see the sunlight. He wants to surf. He wants to go hiking. Go download the app. I just changed my bio real quick to my ex-bio, which used to be M.J. of AI apps and then everything. It's now, I haven't left my apartment for 33 days.

Please download so I can surf and hike. I love it. I'm putting it in the chat right now. You're the man, Blake. Good luck today. We will talk to you later and excited to see. I see Sam Schaeffer in the background there. He's collecting all this footage.

I can't wait to see the documentary on it. It's going to be amazing. And Godspeed today. Thanks for having me, guys. We'll talk to you, Steve, Blake. Cheers. Bye. What a hilarious project.

So chaotic. 33 days without going outside. I mean, they do have the roof deck. I know you haven't seen the Shawshank redemption but when he gets out of prison and he's just being like they do have a little sunlight it's beautiful yeah i guess he can go outside there's somebody in the chat says if he fails he has to this is rusty pitch for if he fails he has to buy a dodge charger evy and use it as his daily driver there you go uh brutal so much fun um well should we go to one more story because we have sean mcuer

joining in 15 minutes but i think we got enough time to break down the uh uh billionaire who just bought the Celtics. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page. No one knows about this guy. Sean Puri said, The Celtics just sold for $6 billion to a guy with no Wikipedia page. Money talks, wealth whispers.

Send tweet. I love Sean. And it does crazy numbers. It does crazy numbers. I love when you can drop something that's, when you can drop something that's just like very niche, like only for your fellow posters. Yeah,

it still does numbers. It's also great because like Sean's been on the show. obviously we're notorious yappers and basically the opposite of whispering. But we love wealth, so we'll break it down. William Chisholm was a complete unknown to sports fans and most private equity investors until earlier this week. He just bought the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion. By the time they're ready to spend their billions, most sports owners are already

celebrities in their own right, Wall Street Titans, CEOs of prominent companies, heirs of America's richest families. But when the most prestigious team in the NBA was sold for $6 billion, a record price for a pro sports franchise. The most shocking part of the deal wasn't how much the buyer paid. It was the person who bought it. This is from the Wall Street Journal.

William Chisholm, the little-known managing partner of a little-known private equity firm will become the new owner of the Boston Celtics after agreeing to purchase the team from Wick Grusbeck. The parties announced on Thursday.

The deal stunned NBA insiders and private equity investors and even Chisholm himself. You think of me at eight years old, 10 years old, watching the Celtics, dreaming that this could possibly happen. It's just a pinch me moment.

Chisholm has a far different public profile than other NBA owners, especially those who have splurged on teams in recent years. He's nowhere to be found on Bloomberg or Forbes billionaires list. Little L for Forbes there. They missed a big one before the sale was announced. He paid to say off the list. Yeah. He's getting on there now.

He didn't have a Wikipedia page. So this line from Bill Simmons. We know so little about this guy. I don't even know how to pronounce his name. Yeah. It's Chisholm, apparently. not Chisholm, Chisholm, Chisholm, whose firm's Symphony Technology Group invests in technology companies that handle cloud security software or run job search platforms has been quoted

in the Wall Street Journal exactly once when STG bought the construction data unit of McGraw Hill. We look forward to helping the business achieve the next level of success, he said. Amazing line. Goated. No private equity bro has ever said something like that before. Yes, yeah. Except every time if they don't actually want to make a comment. Yeah, you could have just said no comment, but he's on record with the Wall Street Journal just once.

Now the man whose firm invested in companies called Unclusive Reich and Keltra has a slightly more recognizable brand to his name, the Celtics. Chisholm, who grew up in north of Boston and Georgetown, Massachusetts, spent his professional life far from the site, a spotlight. He attended Dartmouth as an undergrad, received his MBA from UPenn, Wharton. he worked at the private equity firm. Bain Capital. I wonder when he worked at Bain. Probably pretty, probably in like the 90s or something. And then set off to start his own private equity firm. STG.

You were at Bain. I was in 2010, I think. Do you have like a Bain alumni chat that you're part of? Definitely not. I would not be in that. No way. But, but. You could have made a generational run at the top, for the top spot.

Yeah. Got the height for it. Yep. They would have just said, hey, we got to push this guy through. The hype thing is real there. I was working out at the corporate gym at Bain Capital once when I was interning there. And one of the big shot MDs comes in is on the exercise bike. It was just like you, like me, race right now.

And it was just the most like magging ever. And he's like, I could put up, it was like the fan bike. He's like, go as hard as you can. I can do 21 units of electricity or whatever. He had some weird metric that he was benchmarking against. And he just wanted like the young guys to see like, Oh, like push me harder, you know, because he's like a 60-year-old guy. Really competitive.

I love it. STG, which Chisholm co-founded in 2002, invests in companies your average hoops fan have never heard of, but it positioned Chisholm to strike when the opportunity of a lifetime came calling. The capital to put something like this together is frankly, the easy part, Chisholm said, based. After striking the largest deal in pro sports history, it's getting the right folks around the table.

The investors alongside Chisholm include current Celtics minority owner Rob Hale related companies president Bruce A. Beale and investment firm 6th Street. The Celtics shines a light on the changing financial landscape of professional sports. This was done over a group chatter around a golf. Probably.

Before the Celtics deal, the last three NBA teams that changed hands were sold for between three and four billion. So the price is soaring. The league recently allowed the league recently allowed private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds to buy team stakes. So they're allowing more capital in. The price goes up.

It's just supply and demand. It's fascinating because the narrative around the NBA is that they've lost ground to the NFL. Then there's also this larger narrative that just professional sports are falling off and becoming less relevant. And yet prices have never been higher. Yeah. Yeah, these are trophy assets. Yeah. They've,

you know, over the last 20 years, they've been fantastic investments, but they don't need to make money to be valuable. Yep. Based in Menlo Park, STG manages just under 12 billion in assets,

according to Pitch Book. I wonder how much of that is his because he's putting a lot of money into this deal. Chisholm's backing from 6th Street drew some shade throwing from current Celtics minority owner, Steve Pagluca.

I'm definitely mispronouncing that. And I bet all the sports fans know exactly how to pronounce his name, who would also be leading a group bidding to buy the team from Grusbeck. We had no debt or private equity money that would potentially hamstring our ability to compete in the future, he said in a statement on Thursday. The former co-chairman of Bain Capital is no stranger to private equity. Oh, so both of the guys that were building on the deal were Bain Alums.

It probably was a Bain chat. You're right. Bain Chats. He said he and his group would remain at the ready if the announced transaction does not end up being finalized. We'll see if this Chisham guy actually has the money. He's throwing down the gauntlet. If you have one false step, I'm hopping in with my deal.

Chisholm attended Celtics games as a kid, sitting in obstructed view seats in the rickety old Boston garden. So when he learned that the team of his dreams was available, he didn't take long to make up his mind about pursuing it. It was certainly a discussion with my wife and family for about a second. Hey, honey, hey honey. I know you're working on dinner, but can I spend six months? billion on the Celtics. Oh, okay, cool, cool, got it. Yeah, okay, at least we talked about it. Yeah, great.

Chisholm said that every, every husband has gone through that at some point. Yes, yeah, the GT-3-R-S or the Adam R. Cedill Royal Oak. Yeah, you know, these are conversations that you have to have as a family. A little family meeting. Hey, I'm buying a six billion dollar sports team. Let's go. Uh, he said a central goal with the Celtics is to maintain its current success under previous leadership, the team won the 2008 championship and added another last summer, this season is well positioned to become the first repeat NBA champion since 2018. To that end, Chisholm agreed to an unconventional arrangement.

Grusbeck is to remain the team's governor leading its team operations through the 2027 to 2028 season. Chisholm referred to that decision as an intelligence test. Why would you want to mess with that, Chisholm said? That is working at every level. When Chisholm does take the reins of every part of the Celtics organization, though he is confident that what put him in the position to buy the team will let him hold on to its winning ways. In our little way at STG, we've done that too. They've done it in so many good lines in here.

They've done it in higher job platforms apparently and now he's doing it in sports. Very fun story. Anyway, one day you'll be able to trade shares in these in these teams. Hopefully you'll be able to do it on public.com investing for those to take it seriously. What's the, go to public.com. But we got to move on to, uh, we talked a little bit about, Whiz. I don't know if you want to do some timeline. We got seven minutes, but Sean McGuire's hopping on. We can talk to him about WIS as well. I just was curious. What are the publicly traded sports teams? I don't know. There is the Atlanta Braves, the MLB. Really? You can just go buy shares. That's major league baseball. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Good clarifying.

Just our audience follows business like sports. So you've got to clarify these things. Manchester United. It's got some shares on the New York. I'm looking it up because I wonder how these things. So, Manu is trading at $2.3 billion on the NASDAX. You can go buy that on public. Madison Square Garden. Oh, yeah, I guess the MSG group.

But that's the garden. That's the actual holding company for all the different media assets. Founded by James Dolan, who also, or I guess his dad founded it, but then he runs it. And James Dolan created the sphere. Oh, interesting. So the Green Bay Packers have done sort of these public offerings, but they're not doing it anymore. But I have a special announcement.

It is Jeremy Giffon's birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Jeremy. And I figure we could sing him, happy birthday. Ready? Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you, Jimmy. I hope you find a special situation today.

We love you, Jeremy. Fantastic. You deserve all the success in the world. you're still a young whippersnapper. And you have such a bright future. Yes. May all your deals go through in 10X. 10X.

Much like this whiz deal, which did more than 10X, it turned into a $4 billion windfall for index ventures. They're set to earn a 250-fold return on seed money in a startup Google has agreed to buy. And the partner on the deal is Sederer Shal. And Shaw got the call he had been waiting for on his 30. 37th birthday in January of 2020. A promising Israeli cybersecurity founder that he had been asking for years to launch a company was in need of funding. It's time, said the voice on the other end of the line.

Shah kicked in $3.5 million on behalf of index ventures. Flash forward five years and that original seed money earned a 250-fold return this week, turning into an $875 million stake when Alphabet agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion. dollars. An index didn't stop at its first check folks. It went turbo long. It put more money in WIS during every subsequent funding round. Let's hear it for folks at index. They built up a 13% stake. In total, Index has turned its $240 million investment into $4.3 billion. You love to see it, folks. So Bryce over at Indy, Bryce Roberts, friend of the show, taller than you, I believe. I don't think so. Really?

I don't think so. Sit up next to him. But nice time. Nice try. And yeah, he broke down. The challenge here is how many they need. They just need so many. This is,

this is the biggest software MNA transaction in history. Yes. That's crazy to think about. And we've been on a dry spell since the WhatsApp acquisition for a decade. That was like $25 billion or $30. I think it was like 16. But yeah. Oh, wow.

Okay. Which is crazy. So Figma would have been the next. which is the next biggest. And the crazy thing is index or insight needs like 10 of these to have a 5x fund.

Yeah. Because it's an $8 billion fund that they're investing out of. Although was that the case for this particular seed fund? Because their seed fund, it might be a different vehicle. Yeah, who knows.

Either way, a huge win. They made a lot of money. But yeah, we talked about this with Harry. It's possible that like they still got to do more work. Can't retire to the slopes just yet, index, keep it grinding. Find five to six more whizzes. Come on. Yeah, I'm excited to ask Sean about... Yeah, because Sequoia was also big in Wiz. Yeah. Yep. Success stories such as these were once dime a dozen during the go-go years of Silicon Valley when massive startup exits

dominated the headlines and made being a venture capitalist one of the hottest jobs in finance. These days, the IPO market is dreary. Prized startups such as Stripe and SpaceX have chosen to stay private for over a decade, putting their investors into perpetual holding pattern as they await a chance to cash out. It doesn't really matter from a fund performance perspective. From most LPs, they're happy to hold on to stripe and SpaceX shares at a high mark. They don't really mind that. But still, it's an important factor in terms of getting cash out of these things.

Regulators, meanwhile, have become more cautious about blessing acquisitions. Google's Whiz deal still needs regulatory approval from the Trump administration. We talked to Joe Wisenthal about the new head of the FTC, the new Lena Con. and it seems like they will probably be more friendly to MNA. If this deal gets blocked, ventures dead. Yeah, it's over. It's all over. It's so over if that gets blocked.

But this is a weird one because it's not, it'd be very hard to make an argument about a monopoly in the cybersecurity cloud market. Obviously, we've talked about how Google is third in cloud. They're not even first. When you look at Adobe and Figma, Adobe is the number one creative suite of apps. And so it's not like WIS is going to be competing with Google's core business. Yeah, exactly. It's not really consolidating the search market.

I'm sure Amazon and Azure both have cybersecurity products that compete directly with WIS. And so it would be harder to make the argument, at least I think it would be. We'll see what happens. The review process itself could take years to conclude. So don't buy those vacation homes just yet. If the WIS deal proceeds, investors hope it will pave the way for similar startup exits in the future. Getting the call, when Shah received Asaf Rappaport's call, the entrepreneur and his three co-founders, hadn't yet settled on a name or a specific plan for the startup, beyond wanting to go big in the fast-growing world of cybersecurity. The how and what, Shaw said, was still waiting to be discovered. In his head, Shaw called the startup Asafco, a testament to his conviction in Rappaport, the founder. It was completely unexpected, it was completely expected and unexpected at the same time because I had been waiting. Shaw said of the 2020 call.

Shaw's hunch about Rappaport, a dog lover and veteran, which we talked about, they have dogs at the office, and I believe their dog is the chief dog officer or something like that. And a veteran of the Israeli Army's elite cybersecurity unit dated back to 2014 when Shaw backed Rappaport's first startup called Adalom. It was later sold to Microsoft for a disappointing 320 million. But I love the Washington Journal. But Shaw felt he had spotted an entrepreneur of rare talent after.

to the call. Yeah, I mean, when someone's sold 320, they're in a position where they've gotten tons of experience. They've known how to run the full playbook, probably hired a great team, can build a team very quickly, and they probably want to go bigger, maybe two orders of magnitude bigger, which is exactly what they did. And they exited for 320 million, the first one, 32 billion, the next one, it's exactly 100 times as big. Awesome. You love to see ambition like that. We love to see it. Should we talk briefly about the 1X and Nvidia? Oh, sure. Yeah. They're doing a research collaboration.

Okay. You see the, you pull the picture. All I saw was the picture of the robot holding a jacket. But I thought it was cool. I mean, insane aesthetics. Insane aesthetics.

It almost feels like out of sort of easy, easy inspired to some degree. Yeah, we're getting somewhere with this where it doesn't look uncanny valley, creepily human. It looks more friendly. It doesn't look terrifying.

It's not as scary as some of the purely terminated ones. It would so be weird to have this. this thing walking around your house at night while you're sleeping. But I could get used to it. This is the friendliest looking humanoid I've seen so far, I think. Yep. But I like it. So anyway, so developing AI for humanoid robots involves tackling many open research challenges

and safety, dexterity, visual understanding, and much more. It helps to compare notes with other labs tackling similar challenges in order to accelerate progress towards a future of Neo's doing all the tasks needed to keep your home in order autonomously. To that end, I like OneX's, focus on the home. It's obviously going to matter a lot to just like pick it. Focusing on the home is just critical. I like one X's focus on the home. I like Wander's focus on the home. I could imagine having a wander with a one X in it. We got Sean McGuire himself. He's back.

What's up team? I didn't wear a counterstrike t-shirt this day. I let you down. Sorry. You're still looking good. It's great. And whoever that lady that said anyone that comments on your hair is just jealous. us. Yeah. You guys are very good looking men. Everyone, everyone on the call has good hair. But, I mean, it's been, it's been a rough week. Sequoia's only making like a few billion dollars these days off of these acquisitions. What are you going to do to turn it around after the Wiz acquisition kind of fell so short of expectations? Yeah, you know, it's been a tough one, you know, five years after investment. Yep. Pretty mega outcome. What are you going to do? Congratulations.

Congratulations. Breakdown. I'd love to hear the quick highlights of meeting the team and how that that investment came together. And then what you think from your view, how they were able, because we talked about this yesterday. The WIS team, the reason they were able to get such a tremendous price or one of, I'm sure, multiple, is because they just were growing so quickly and getting so much traction that they didn't need to sell. So it's, you know, they had infinite optionality. But how do you think they, pulled this off. So on the team, I mean, Gilly Ranan and my partner, Doug Leone, get all the credit. They are both absolute legends. So the backstory there is, you know, Skoy used to have Sequoay Israel. Gilly was one of the three partners there.

Gilly's an insanely talented guy. And he started his own fun called CyberSarts, which we ceded. And early on, meaning like Sequoia invested in his fund, which we don't do very often. And Gilly called up Doug, said, I have the next one. And it was Asaf and the team. Doug holds like four of us into a rapid fire meeting.

I was in that first meeting. And I mean, to be very honest, the learning I personally got from watching Doug operate here and like getting to see like a phone call from Gilly of I've got the next one with these crack, like crack team to multi-billion dollar gain five years later. Like it's really hard to explain how much learning goes into that. But I think there is a lot of really interesting stuff from the beginning here. And so this is my recollection. Different people have different recollections.

But basically dug out the call, set up the meeting. four of us joined from Sequoia. The team had, it was obvious how insanely good the team was. They had sold their last company to Microsoft, and they're basically running cloud security there. And they had a very strong point of view on what the problem was. The problem was cloud security, no one had solved cloud security.

They had very, they had like an extreme articulation around the problem, but they didn't really know how they were going to solve. that problem at the time. And so they had they had a really clear insight into the wedge into the market, which was mapping that basically people don't even know what assets they have in their cloud environments. And so the first thing they're going to do is they'd figure out how to map people's assets kind of outside in. So you can tell a customer in a first meeting, this is everything you own, you know, and therefore these are vulnerabilities. But the original idea of how to solve the problem after that wedge in was like basically a networking solution, like a zero trust networking

solution. And so it's, I wouldn't say it was a pivot because it was, they had identified the problem they wanted to solve. But the actual solution changed dramatically in the first few months. And so, you know, people talk about like market versus team. This was a market and team. But I think it's interesting how like the idea. change so much in the first few months.

And I think it... But digging in a little bit more, you guys made the first investment. Was it 2020? Yeah, it was called January, February 2020. Okay. In 2020, was the average venture capitalists believing that no one had solved cloud security? Or is that something that you had to really be in it running it at Microsoft

to realize that it wasn't a solved problem? because, you know, I think the market was reacting to the news saying, wait, does Google not, did they not have a coherent, like cloud security? They didn't think about security at Google? Like, that's why they did this deal? What was going on before? But yeah, was it, was it? Yeah, so it's really good question.

And it's funny. I mean, I personally have like an extreme background in this space. Sure. I had started a company called Expans, originally KDM a long time ago, started in 2012. and to be very kind of like we were a precursor company to whiz, like basically directly. And we started off in an on-prem era. And so doing like the mapping of on-prem networks from the outside in and like our primary value proper, like our sales wedges, we would show up and we already knew people's networks and their

vulnerabilities when we would show up. And so like I personally had a prepared mind. But I think very few people, there was this extreme skepticism of the cloud has been around for 15 years, why, like, why is cloud, why now? Like, why is cloud security not solved? But I think to anyone that was like a practitioner, it was clear it was not solved at all. And I think the lesson is that, like, the way I think about it, the cloud penetration was still very, like, very low in call it 2015. If you look at like total percent of like compute in 4,500 companies, I don't know what it was in 2015, but it was probably like 5% or 7% or something.

That'd be my guess. And by the time you got to 2020, it was a much bigger fraction. And so it's like, I think we had just flipped where customers and buyers in their heads, if only like 5% of your network is cloud, you care more about securing the on-prem than the cloud. And if you're a second class that is in, like you just doesn't really get done. by 2020 cloud was like the first class citizen. It was by far the most important thing to secure. And no one had, everyone before had us, including my own company.

Like we started with an on-prem solution, then we started to bolt on a cloud solution. And our cloud solution wasn't very good because that's not what we started. And so to come in and only do cloud, that lets you have a way better product experience for the cloud. And they just, they entered the market when it was, you know, it, maybe not in terms of total compute, but 40, 50% of the mine share in an org had become cloud. And then they were able to grow with that as it went from there. And so it's just

that something can happen. Like the cloud can get created, but it may not be the right time for to build like the cloud security business for another 15 years. You have to wait for maturity of the market and all that. And I think they just timed the maturity perfectly. And then the last thing is you need to solve this from the outside in. Like you can't, Microsoft can't solve this themselves. You have to have a solution that is kind of looking at all clouds and looking at the entire industry because people are multi-cloud. They work with multiple vendors.

And like I think that this has to be, you have to have, WIS like very much came with the right approach for that time. That makes sense. Can you talk about Kella got announced a few days ago. I think five days ago, a very high profile round. I heard about it, I think, last year at this point. So they're probably already getting, you know, preempted on the next one. But talk about the team there.

How quickly did you know that you wanted to back them? I mean, basically we're killing it, killing it in Israel or made it the wrong language. We're investing very well in Israel. Anyways, so Kela, my partner, David Kahn, led the investment. and I'm his wingman there. Cal is another amazing team. We have known kind of one of the two primary co-founders, Alon Jor, for quite a long time.

He was an absolute legend. One of the things we've been doing in Israel is, and actually, like, let me make a bigger point about Israel. One of the things that I think is very unique about Israel right now compared to most other places, it's much easier to concentrate talent in Israel than it is as like a Stanford spin out. Let me unpack that. If you go back in time, basically every great company I can think of in the past has done a phenomenal job concentrating talent.

If you think about Palantir, like they got all the best people out of Stanford in a few year range. If you think about Google, like they got all the best people, you know, 10 years prior. And after the dot-com crash, they went and aquired a bunch of the best teams. They brought in Jeff Dean and they scooped up a bunch of the best talent after the dot-com crash. If you think about PayPal, obviously the PayPal mafia, like they had concentrated insane amounts of talent. SpaceX in the early days, like anyone in the world that wanted to work on rockets, like there was only one place to go and they went to, you know, SpaceX.

And the best companies concentrate insane amounts of talent early on. for a bunch of reasons, I think it's become much harder to concentrate talent spinning out of like Stanford or Harvard or wherever than it used to be. I mean, like to be very blunt, one is these universities have become like they basically lost meritocracy and they lost, you know, like there's great inflation. You don't even know where you stand relative to other kids. Harvard last year implemented their first ever remedial math because there are people coming in that don't know algebra because they drop the admission standards. It's the truth.

It's crazy. Like they dropped the admission standards so much. And so like the people coming in are no longer as good. And then there's great inflation. So you don't even know who the absolute most crack people are. If you go back to like call it the 80s and onwards for a while, Harvard had this insane math class called Math 55. Math 55 was legendary in the math community. it's like, you know, probably 50% of people that even finished the class went on to be math professors. Wow. It was something that you would basically learn like a whole undergraduate math curriculum in one year so you could just do graduate classes and research after.

Is that class like YC where if you enter into it, you're kind of doing it for 12 hours a day type of thing? Is it that intense or is it? It's the only, it's the only thing you do. when you're at Harvard, like if you're in that year. It's like Bill Gates actually did math 55. And so did a bunch of the other kind of Microsoft founders. The like the fact that they did math 55 and survived as say computer oriented people rather than pure math people and that they went and started a business, that that calling card let them recruit anyone from Harvard, like anyone they wanted would go work for them just because like people knew,

how smart they were because of math 55. It's like these things are actually very important as like signals to other smart people that this person is on a level above me. And so therefore, like I should lower my ego. Like I was not able to finish math 55, you know, some hypothetical person like tries math 55 gets absolutely smoked, weeded out in the first week. And then, you know, Bill Gates crushes it. And so they want to go work for him. We don't have that as much anymore at Stanford and Harvard, et cetera. There also just weren't as many companies getting formed back then. And so, you know, the ones that actually did get form, you know, I graduated college

to 2007, Facebook was the hottest company in the world kind of when I was an undergrad. And at the time, I think Zuck is probably two years older than me, there were basically no startups coming out of Harvard at the time. And so like everyone that was good that would consider a startup or was technically, brilliant, like they would just go recruit them. Now there's like 50. And so the talent gets spread across all of them. In Israel, there is still this insane concentration of talent. And it comes from, this is my weave. This is my Trump weave coming on. There's this insane concentration of talent that comes from the fact that because everyone goes into the army, there's extremely rigorous

selection of people for the army and call it from an intellectual standpoint there's like 60 slots for the most prestigious best thing and is like extremely rigorous vetting to get those slots and so the people that go do that are already kind of selected on a totally different level than those other people and then out of those 60 people one or two will emerge as like the apex you know alpha men or women that just do insane work and our geniuses and everyone else wants to follow. And so when they come out of the army, they are really able to concentrate talent in a way that is basically impossible if all you've done is gone to a school that has, like, if, you know, if you've gone to school that has past fail grades and your admissions, like process is basically

non-meritocratic and like an essay. And so anyways, like with Kella, I mean, if you go back to Wiz, like the Wiz founding team were absolute legends, like psycho-level legends in Israel and therefore able to concentrate insane talent in the first couple months of the company, like basically day one, they hired 20 people that were ultra elite. And it's just like, when you're that good and everyone knows it, you can bring in these incredible people from day one. And Kela is of this mold as well. You know, like a lot of people know what VCs are now learning what Talpiot is.

Talpheot is kind of one of the most elite forces in Israel. It's people that have extreme aptitude in mathematics, physics, and leadership ability. And so three of the four WIS co-founders were Talpiot, Alon, Jor, one of the kelo founders was also Talpiot. And so, like, there's the, the Talpioch mafia, and he's especially highly regarded there. And so anyways, they've done an incredible job concentrating talent. And, you know, alone teamed up with this woman Hamutal Meridor, who complimented him perfectly. She'd been at Palantir for a long time.

And just, like, really understand. Obviously, when you're working, when you're a defense-sac company, you need two things. You need to build great technology, but you also need to be able to sell it. And you need to understand that government sales, government procurement, and alone is a genius at building great technology. And Hamatol is a genius at, you know, selling it and navigating government relationships. And for those words, I think both Palantir and Andrew L did this unbelievably well. They kind of established this playbook.

Well, related to that, what is your take on the latest continuing resolution? It seems like there's not this massive increase to the defense budget that some, you know, Defense Tech startups we're hoping for. Maybe there's money that's going to shift around. But what is your advice to maybe young defense tech founders that are hunting for that first program of record, looking for some government money in the new era? It's so crazy that we're having this conversation. Like, you would have told me 10 years ago that someone's going to say in like a live podcast, what do you say the young about is hunting for a program of record? It's like that, Language, you know, this was like, you are an alien 10 years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Look, I would say to the young founder that's hunting for program of record, only one or two of you a year are going to do that. And it's going to be like of new companies. And it's really hard. And it takes both having great tech and great, you know, government BD. And so don't underinvest it in either of those.

Yeah, it's interesting. It used to be extremely difficult to raise venture capital. Now it's seemingly very easy to raise venture capital. But the hard part is in this category. And I want to hear your take on dual use. There's a theory that we were kicking around yesterday talking about, well, maybe you're better off if you're a dual use company. We talked to a satellite company, Albedo.

Obviously, they do imaging of the earth at 10 centimeter scale. that has military applications, but that also has commercial applications. So if the DoD money doesn't come quickly enough, maybe they go sell it to hedge funds and oil and gas companies? Do you think there'll be a shift in VC or defense tech VC towards I want a little bit more of a dual use story earlier just to hedge against defense budgets? So it's kind of crazy that you're asking me these things because the company I started was a cybersecurity, company that was basically a worse precursor to whiz where it was dual use and about two-thirds of our revenues from the U.S. government and one-third was enterprise. It's like these maximum two sets of overlap of the threads you're asking.

I think, I mean, like with our company, everyone told us you cannot be gov-only. It has to be dual-use. That's what every investor told us, every expert. And so therefore we did it because we wouldn't have been able to raise money otherwise. But I think dual use is kind of a mirage. Like it can be great. But I think you have to, I think we're entering an era where investors are okay with just government sale companies. Sure.

Single use. And I think you just have to do what's best for your. company and what's best in any given moment. If it's natural for your company to be dual use because the product is basically the same in both enterprise and gov, then do that. But if it's, if it's going to like really cost you on one side to do the other, then I would just not do it early on. And like, Palantir, I don't know, I was never in the building of Palantir. I don't know the story that well. But my kind of my understanding was that early on they had way more pull with the government than with enterprise and but like they tried to do both. I think with Founder,

there were different points in time where they had way more pull with the government than with enterprise and times where they had more pull with enterprise than with government. I think there was pressure on them to always be doing both. And I would just say lean into wherever you're getting a lot of pull right now, but don't close the door on the other. Yeah, it depends on the product. I mean, obviously Microsoft Teams is ITAR compliant, right? Like is it a dual use technology? Yes, I guess. But then if you see 4 on it, like Windows 95 is whichever ones are still certified to run. You know, at least when I was in the DoD, like the most current operating system was from the 90s. Yeah.

Crazy. There was allegations in a lawsuit of corporate espionage earlier this week. I don't need you to or want you to comment on that incident. But do you think that corporate espionage is a sort of potentially broader issue in Silicon Valley, something that needs to be taken more seriously or is this just sort of like a you know one-off sort of crisis oh man well i i think that you allan was right when he said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely that's just been true over over it's like second love thermodynamics um look i i don't have a super strong point of view on this but i'll just say i

I think that nation state espionage in Silicon Valley has been much, much bigger scale than people have understood for at least the last decade and probably beyond that. And, you know, Delian yesterday, whenever, I think he's right. Like, if you're, like, if you're a hardware company, just go try to compete on the merits of the hardware and obviously do what you can to, you know, protect your IP and data assets and everything. but at the end of the day, in hardware, you're gonna win on the merits of the product. On the software side, I think you have to be a little bit more concerned, but it's just in hacking, there's this expression, you wanna be a target of opportunity, sorry,

you wanna be a target of choice, not a target of opportunity. Meaning like, if some nation state says, we are going to hack this company, like they can hack anyone, but you don't wanna be like the, slow pack animal that's just like the target of opportunity. It's the slowest gazelle. It's taken down by the North Koreans that are just stealing your crypto or something like that.

Exactly. I love to give you everything out. Well, yeah, I'd love to give you another victory lap on X because I think last time we came on, it was rumored that there was this new announcement. But before that, could you talk about what's your sort of takeaway from the incident with the NASA astronauts? We're very happy to have them back here on Earth with the dolphins. but, you know, is there any learnings that you think, you know, that, you know, the space industry should be taking away from that broadly and, you know, NASA in general?

So I might have mentioned this guy before, but one of my closest friends from Caltech, his name is Casey Hanmer. He's a brilliant guy. Brilliant. He's a, you know, prolific blogger. Love him. I mean, very, very smart guy. He has been saying for, so he worked at JPA.

And he's been saying for many years that this is not what he's been saying. So I'm sorry, Casey, I'm making this more provocative than what you actually said. But he's basically said that NASA's been underestimating SpaceX and that it's in NASA's interest to kind of understand and anticipate just how fast the progress of SpaceX is. And what he actually said is that they're underestimating Starship and that Starship is going to really change what's possible in the future. and that NASA has been still designing missions with the constraints of 10, 20 years ago, which is when launch costs are in the limit infinity and there's very few slots per year,

then like the economic rational thing is to spend close to infinite money making sure that your satellite works the first time because the launch cost dominates in the return math. infinity divided by infinity or whatever. But, you know, if you have any, any large constant number divided by infinity is zero. So anyways, like they've been had this state of mind that launch is precious. It's infinitely expensive. There's very little of it. I think NASA needs to get in the state of mind that launch is becoming abundant.

You know, in the future, it's going to be in the limit going to zero. Like literally if you go 20 years from now, I think that, I mean, Elon has said that the forecast for Starship or something like $20 a kilogram or something like that. Just a few across basically. Yeah. You used to be $100,000 a kilogram. And so I just, we have to get in this mentality that like SpaceX is not, SpaceX is not, SpaceX is an incredibly well run company that has like a very diverse. of leadership and, you know, very robust, you know, team, and that they are bringing insane capabilities to bear

that will deeply, deeply benefit NASA, and we need to intersect the future, not the present or the past. I love it. Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, we talked about the X funding last time, but I want to know about X's clearly on the warpath to becoming an everything app. We're basically running the entire show on X now we have group DMs for how we organize the show and stuff.

It's been a really robust platform for us. But I see that they're rolling out payments and all sorts of different features. There's always been this narrative that everything app can only happen in the East. It's America. Happened in China 10 years ago. Exactly.

So can you lay us out, like what are the hurdles, what are the milestones, what are the opportunities for X to become a really, like really fully realized the vision. It's not my place to fully lay this out. I'll let, you know, I'll let Elon do that. He's pretty good at setting vision on things. But I think people are going to be, look, X has been underestimated the last few years and not by you guys. Like, you guys are part of the small cohort of people that realized the 80s was a great decade and, you know, and that America is the greatest country in the world and that X was the place to be the last few years. But by a lot of

the world has been underestimated. And I'm very optimistic about where it's going the next few years. And I'll just say, like, instead of saying the roadmap, I'll say the company has had to sensitive private, there's been like a few years of like fixing the foundation of the company. And we're starting to enter the era where like the foundation. The foundation. is strong and they get to now like actually build on top of this new strong foundation. And so I think we're going to see it's like the progress has been below the ground the last two and a half years. It's about to go above the ground where we all see it. Yeah. A lot of the products that got built or rolled out were just things that had kind of

been on the shelf and maybe we're like not really launched for whatever internal political reason. Elon kind of got all those out the door. And I feel like the app's been working really well. The algorithm's been more satisfying than ever. I feel like I'm seeing really interesting content, so I've been satisfied. One more question. Do you think MNA is really, you know, is the WIS acquisition? It still has to be approved from what I know, but is MNA really back on the menu? Do you feel like, you know, when you're talking to some of these later stage founders that are exploring, you know, thinking about the future and saying, does an IPO make sense? Does some type of strategic acquisition makes sense? How are you thinking about this personally? I'm sure you're

general advice is just be a great company and grow really fast and you'll have a lot of optionality, but do you have a sort of feeling about where things are going? Not about WIS at all. My general kind of M&A view is I think there's two things that people are looking for. They're looking for guidance that things will actually be approved. And it's not just in America. There's also, for most companies European regulatory approvals, and that has been the bottleneck for quite a few M&A deals in the last few years. So I think it's like greater clarity on the global U.S. and Europe, but everywhere kind of regulatory approvals. And the second, I think there's still, like when I When I talk to bankers or anyone in the last six weeks, there's a lot of macro uncertainty.

Like, people are very nervous about tariffs and very nervous about, you know, like, Doge. And kind of people don't want to go do a big M&A transaction when the markets can change 20, 30 percent, you know, either way quickly. because it just you don't know exactly what you're underwriting. This happened with Square and after pay or whatever. They bought after pay for like $20, $30 billion, some crazy number, and then Square was worth something like that like a year later. You know, it's just like, those are the two things. I think if we get clarity, like favorable clarity on those two things,

then I think M&A will rip, but it requires both. Well, the new head of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, is out doing podcasts. We'll have to have them on the show. Maybe you can join and we can put the screws to them and say, let's do some deals, Andrew. He's not coming on after that comment. Anyways, thanks for having me, boys. Yeah, thanks for stopping. Have a great.

We'll talk to you soon. I've got to say, you guys are crushing it. I appreciate it. Absolutely crushing it. Thank you for being a part of it. Good man. Bye. very cool it's great it's always uh difficult to get him in trouble with uh sequoia regulatory

yeah that's a challenge of being an r a yeah yeah i mean we we're we're getting better at it we should have a we should have a um we should have a button a cone of silence we should have a button that we hit before this is not financial advice and it's like you know um and then we have to beep each other because i lean into it so often because i think i'm just asking like hey do you think the tesla's a cool car and he's like that's a public company i can't talk about it but uh but still lots of insights and always a fun conversation with Sean and speaking of Sean's we're having another Sean on the show Sean from Ridge is he in the temple there you oh no we got Connor Connor's first surprise surprise we got Connor so for those that don't know you I'm sure everybody already knows

so Connor and Sean are business partners and leaders over at the Ridge dear friends of mine Connor, I wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons, one, because I knew you were going to dress for the occasion. Of course. Looking sharp. Showing some respect to TVPN. Yeah, yeah. And a little fun fact, piece of lore for the fans in our first launch video, when you see

us having dinner and drinking wine, Connor was at that dinner with us. Yeah. And he is pictured. He's the shoulder that you see us over. Fantastic cameo. A little cameo. Early, early technology brother supporter for sure. Thank you.

We appreciate it. And now you're on the show. Welcome. It's great to have you on. I wanted to get a kind of a market update on how performance marketers are thinking about the various platforms and planning for the rest of the year. We've lived in a world. You're also a young adult. But our entire lives have just been every single year. Ads get more expensive. So you kind of need to plan around that to some degree, but you're very plugged into the sort of e-commerce space broadly. There's challenges in e-com on the sort of tariffs side, but there's all there's sort of this like sort of dual pressure. It's hard to get products. It's expensive to get products. It's expensive to sell them.

Maybe I'd love just sort of like a high level sort of like market update around how you're thinking about the different ad platforms and maybe we can get into like where you're finding an edge. Obviously don't give, you know, give away the stuff you're doing like, nine months ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. No, perfect. So to take a quick step back, yeah, Ridge is a direct-to-consumer brand. As Jordy mentioned, the last 10 years, it's gotten harder and harder every year.

I think DDC acquisition has been like a war of attrition. Things get more expensive. You're reaching that new marginal buyer who's harder to acquire, more expensive. It's been a difficult environment to scale and as a DTC brand, regardless of kind of consumer sentiment. I think what we're facing right now, clearly what all the data is telling us is that not only are things getting more expensive, ad platforms are performing worse, there's restrictions on privacy, but I think people are spending less money. And when it comes to the business of selling minimal as well, it's like I do, that that's become increasingly difficult. So I've got two quick data points, one anecdotal, but there's a great, there's a great service called DDC Index.com, and they have something called the direct consumer confidence index. So it's like a stand-in for CPI, which has like, you know, they only take that snapshots of data sparingly throughout time. DTCCI is measuring the sentiment of consumers every single day. And on the 18th or just a couple days ago, consumer sentiment about the

economy dropped to the lowest level since October 14th of last year to paint the picture of how are people feeling about spending dollars today? The second point that I have is from our contact at Meta, who described the current climate for D2C brands, at least the growth-oriented ones as a quote-unquote bloodbath. So that's my quick... That's my quick performance update is that that is what we're working with. So I can talk maybe what we're doing to work through that a little bit. Let's hear it. Yeah, that would be great.

Yeah, what's great? Yeah, amazing. What is working right now? So actually, with a little more dumer news, and then I'll get into what's working. Consumer's tougher, that makes everybody's lives harder. On top of that, I think there's been changes within meta that makes everybody's lives more difficult. And people like to pippoo the importance of meta, but it's like, you know, there's that stat it was like 40% of every BC dollar went into meta advertising. It's like 30% of all digital dollar spent, something like that.

So when meta is worse, it's harder for everyone. And right now we're at this point in time where it feels as if the meta platform in and of itself is not doing what it used to do. They began kind of weighting outcomes differently. It's become more middle and bottom of funnel to say, you know, it's serving to warmer and warmer audiences. us as marketers or, you know, growth people, like we want to be driving incremental results. Meta is harder to get that done with, at least in the way that it has always been. So that gets to what has been working. We've basically had to completely change our strategy.

Real quick, Conner. Why is meta worse? Is it stuff that they sort of need to do? Or is it stuff that they did and that it was sort of the unintentional effect? is that the ad product gets worse for advertisers. Like, why is it happening? And are your contacts at Meta saying, hey, we're, we know this is not great and we're actively trying to get back to where we were? Or is it just get used to it? This is the new normal. Totally. Yeah. No, some of the things are out of Medas control. Like,

META's obviously gotten less efficient post iOS 14, which was when Tim Cook and Apple really put a lot of restrictions around what data did META have access to. Um, At that point, you went from, as an example, being able to optimize for a 28-day outcome. So if you're optimizing for a purchase, I could happen over 28 days. And meta could attribute that that purchase to itself. Now that's just a seven-day period, right? So now it's like a much smaller period. You have fewer or less ability to exclude the customers that you want.

And metas began weighting these click-based outcomes. So all of those things together means meta is only able to attribute orders to the platform on a shorter time frame. There's less exclusions and it's serving to people who have already seen your ads. If you're trying to introduce new people to your brand and actually generate awareness, generate intent, and drive incremental orders, that's just a harder environment to do it within. And those are like, that's half things that are out of their control. And then part of the things that I've mentioned are within meta's control.

And I think they are trying to address. So the answer to your question, Jord, would be a combination of the two. Yep, that makes sense. Anyways. I have a question on AI ads, not AI genera. ads, but actual ads in LLM responses. Perplexity is starting to monetize by allowing advertisers to inject advertisements into, you ask perplexity, what wallet should I buy? Boom, Ridge wallet ad. People are proposing that OpenAI will do this as well in the chat GPT app.

Are you thinking about that? Will that be something that you're testing this year if you're not already. Well, I will say I just got off a phone call with the VP of growth at Ramp, George Benachi. He wanted me to remind everyone that if you're looking to save time and money, go to ramp.com slash TEPPN. There we go. Save both. Thank you. Yeah. But no, we were talking about, we weren't actually talking about paid ads in perplexity. What we were talking about was SEO optimization within chat responses, which is not something we've done a lot of so far. It's one of the things as a more established brand, I think we immediately benefit from. Of course.

There's already Reddit. We are, we are you, right? And so Reddit gets baked into all the LLMs and you already pop up. Yeah, totally. So we, I don't think we have to focus on whatever you want to call that, like LLM SEO optimization versus someone else who's less established. But I think over time as people hatch on to that as a opportunity, then we'll have to pay more attention there.

But I'd be more interested in it from a organic, a quote unquote organic perspective versus the pay ads on perplexity. Okay, interesting. Interesting. Yeah, do you feel like the sort of e-commerce industrial complex like needs another great ad channel right now? Like it seems like throughout the history of selling products online, like things have gotten a bit rough. And then, you know, we got Instagram or then we got reels or then we got, you know, TikTok or whatever. And it just seems like in order to like keep the, you know, keep growing, there always needs to be that sort of next platform. And could that be LLMs?

Like right now I don't see a lot of, from my lens, it's not commercially oriented searches happening on chat GPT. People still discover products on places like Instagram. And then they ask chat GPT, how do I make a good cassidia maybe? But it's not like there's not a lot of commercial intent there. But do you think, do you see a world in which LLMs can be that next like 10x ad platform?

or do you just think it's a different? Probably, I wouldn't say a 10x ad platform. I think the important distinction is like there are certain brands and industries that benefit from like these high intent channels, right? You are looking for a mattress or you are looking for insurance. They're the ones where as people discover those products through LLMs, like that's probably a massive opportunity for them. How many people on a daily basis are going to be searching for men's wallet in chat chit chat chippy? I don't think is going to move the needle on our business. What has moved the needle are these like discovery channels,

which was like when Snapchat was introduced or a TikTok or whatever else is, how can we get out in front of millions of people and say, hey, we've got a better wallet than you currently own. You know, they're supposed to launch ads in meta's threads. So we'll hold out hope. Maybe that's the 10x ad platform.

There we go. You never know. There's always a bold market somewhere. I love it. We had Kenan Davison on from ICON. His company helps D2C companies like yourself build and scale out AI ads, not fully ad generated, a lot of repurposing content. Can you tell us a little bit about how AI is incorporated into the creative workflow? Who's actually doing this work on your team?

It seems like it's probably still like a Centaur model where there's a human working with an AI editor of some sort. But can you break down the creative workflow and how AI is impacting that right now? Yeah, awesome. And I'll start with, you know, from a performance perspective, I think one of the most important things we've been able to do is scale up our content creation. So those are like one and the same. We have two performance creative strategists on our team who went from manually concepting to writing briefs to sending out two creators to receiving that content, to editing it, to creating ads. We're trying to like truncate that all down via AI. So you can imagine the further upstream parts of the creative process, the concepting, the briefs, is we're probably doing five, ten times faster and probably more with more novelty than we were otherwise, just because it's easier to ideate with something like we use Claude mostly. We found it to be very helpful in that sense.

So that's really benefited, the ideating process and has speeded up, sped up that, that workflow quite a bit. I'm a big fan of ICON and Canon. And they're a really cool example of once we've generated all of this content, how do you go zero to one on like some new concept? We have thousands of hours of content just laying around in Google Drive. So how do we repurpose that and kind of like elongate the value of that? And Icon's been cool in that because it is basically an AI video editor. We can say, hey, we want a concept to appeal to 40-year-old men in flyover states and it will put together a concept and kind of piece together and stitch together the content to do that.

Got it. Do you have another one? No. I was going to make a joke about asking Siri to, buy me a wallet with high grade materials lifetime warranty and a 99 day risk free trial. But I don't think Apple intelligence can do it yet. But maybe operator can. I don't know.

I had one more. How are you thinking about sort of activations and stunts and things like that? Ridge is at a scale. Once you're doing hundreds of millions of revenue, you can start to think about, oh, should we sponsor a NASCAR team? Should we, you know, do this? You have a big partnership with them. A racehorse.

Yeah, George is thinking about getting a Bentley Continental GT Speed and I thought you could wrap it with the Ridge Wallet logo and maybe help him with the payment on that as he commutes in. Yeah, that'd be great. You can have, you know, it'll just be $3,000 a month. Yes, exactly. No, but how do you think about these sort of bigger stunt marketing and is it just brand marketing or do you historically just see like how do you think about attribution? Well, we're kind of gearing up for right now from a stunt marketing perspective. Each year we do a sweepstakes. So last year we did a 24-carat gold-plated cyber truck that we gave away or that's right dinosaur raptor yeah so um so that's what we did last year and i think each year we're just

going to try to raise the stakes that's kind of the name of the game so what we're we're doing now is we're geared enough for that can't share too many details but we'll have more cars bigger activations um that'll be live in august so everybody can look forward to it i feel like the last one it went really far because i i think i saw mkbh dvd do something with it but then later like doug d'emuro was auctioning it off. And I saw like, we're now like four steps away from the Ridge guys, but I'm still seeing Ridge on all of this stuff. Like how did this happen?

Was that kind of intentional that you talked to multiple influencers and you say, okay, you're going to have it for a day. You're going to have it for a week. You're going to be watching it off. Was that the plan? Yeah, no, totally. So it was, that was a part of the plan. Some of it was serendipitous.

So we had realized the year before, hey, if we can get the car in a YouTube creator's video, things just perform like three times as well, which is like no real surprise. So the game last year was just like, yeah, how do we coordinate getting one or both of these trucks in as many videos as possible? The serendipitous part was I had the cyber truck here in Salt Lake and Jerry Rig Everything, who has a very big tech channel, tweeted. He said, hey, does anybody in Salt Lake have a cyber truck that I can use for a project? And we were like, hey, we do. And that's how we got into his 24-carat gold-plating video. So that kind of started it.

And then we got it in a Marquez video. We had it all over the place that we made it in 24 videos. Colin and Samir did a did an ad read in the truck, which was really cool. And then to top off the campaign, the winner selected the cash, actually, so they didn't take either car. But we were able to auction off the 24-kart gold-plated cyber truck on Doug DeMiro's cars and bid. So it was a very YouTube heavy campaign, which was very fun. Is it tricky running these sweepstakes? Because I think legally you have to be, you have to say no entry required.

Anyone can just write in and then people can kind of like batch mail in a thousand entries. I remember hearing stories about someone at Caltech, in the very early days of the original photocopier figured out that McDonald's monopoly didn't require any purchase, no purchase necessary. So they dropped off like thousands and thousands of pages of like, I would like to enter the contest and they got like every single code back and then they changed their rules or something like that. But what do you think about in terms of like manipulation of these sweepstakes? Is that a risk at all or is it pretty standard these days? we use a we use a third party legal team who like run sweepstakes professionally so i think we're

relatively buttoned up you we have the uh you have to be able to mail in you've got some free entries on the site um we we we are able to see some people trying to game it um we had this like yeah yeah yeah so we were able to take care of that um but otherwise it's very above board we're not doing any like sort of uh macdonald's monopoly sort of schemes over here yeah yeah you can get in trouble if you're if you're running an unregistered lottery you want to stay away from that We're in a clean game. Last question I have, because you're talking about a bunch of these different creators you're working with. You guys have your MKBHD kind of like core partnership.

I grew up at a time like following the surf industry where every surf apparel company had like, you know, their core ambassadors and they had other people on the team. And then they had the people that were trying to like, you know, just more like development side. Is there a world in the future where Ridge has effectively, you sponsor a ton of creators? So you're just like spending money across all these different channels. But is there a world where Ridge has like a proper team of ambassadors that are just sort of like in a more serious way like representing Ridge within industries helping with product development? Or is it the kind of thing that makes sense to do with like one tent pole kind of creator and then everyone else is just more commercial relationship? Yeah. I think it's a combination of both.

I mean, we went from kind of the spray and prey approach. We've sponsored thousands of graders and billions of views. And now our goal is to just do deeper integrations with creators over longer periods of time. Marquez being like Marquez being the flagship example of that. But I would love to assemble like an Avengers team around him of cool creators and celebrities. That's very cool. We'll reach out if you're that creator. Where can people find your podcasts?

Oh, marketing operators. You can find it anywhere you listen to podcasts. There you go. Only weekly. So we're not putting out that much content. But well monetized, you guys would appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, you do have ads, which is great. We'd be very worried.

We probably wouldn't have you on the show if you didn't have some ads. Are you guys going to be sponsoring the All-end Summit? I know you are you been running that back this year? That's the one place to add, so it's a great place to be. But yeah, TBD still. TBD, yeah, we got a sweet deal on it last year. If that comes about again, maybe. Cool.

Well, good luck. Good luck. All right, guys. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on, Connor. We'll talk you soon. Bye. So what's that? An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. What's the word on Sean? Is he joining or should we move on to some timeline? I mean, we can start some timeline and then when he's in the waiting room. I like timeline. He's coming in right now. He's coming in hot. We got Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet, back-to-back Ridge Wallet guys today.

Welcome to the show, Sean. Look at that microphone. That thing is serious. Do you podcast? Dude, I am so happy to be in the capital of capital, the fortress of finance. This is this is my my Zen garden. I do podcast.

I just want to say I was listening before I jumped on. That last guess you had does not work at Rich Wallet. Never seen him before. Just been LARPing. He's got the LinkedIn set up. He's got all the wallets, everyone.

He actually works for a rival wallet company and he's been selling secrets on the side. There's an alt, I mean, are you worried about spying at Ridge? No, Ridge has had so many knockoffs over the years and from all different parts of the world. There's an alternate reality where like 10 years ago like Sean and Connor like,

you know, have a blood feud and then like Connor goes and works at one wallet company and Sean does the other. And then like they're just always like the same because they're like, you guys are like yin and yang in terms of like I think like being good. You know. Anyways, great to have you on the show. Sean, how's your week going? I'm good man. Yeah, Connor is my Rital. So I'm dealing the scenario. I'm going to steal all the secrets. Okay. That's great.

The rippling to my deal. Fantastic. We want to talk about that. Yeah, I wanted to just have you guys both on to just get a high level read on what's happening in e-commerce. It certainly hasn't been an easy start to the year with the tariffs. I mean, technology companies are in a pretty good spot if you're just selling SaaS, worried less about the impacts of all of, you. different sort of policy decisions, you know, talk to us about how the start of the year's gone. We had you on the, you were one of our very first guests, but I feel like a lot has transpired

between then and now. Totally, man. And I changed my mic. So hopefully this sounds better for you guys. Way better. Thanks. Nice. Dude, I'm reading chat on the right hand side.

So I'm here to support. Dude, the biggest thing about tariffs is just the uncertainty and the rollout. So like we're friends with a lot of nine figure brands. And everyone would like to bring stuff to America, right? But that is a that is a two to four year manufacturing timeline, right? Ridge has been working on our U.S. factory and our capacity for like two and a half years. And I can currently make 20,000 units a month. Okay.

I sell 50,000 units a month, right? And in peak, I sell way, way, way more than that. So it is just, I've not been able to keep up with demand. And maybe in four years I could get there. But with all of the whiplashing on tariffs, it's very hard to know what to invest in. And what that leads to is just me hoarding capital right now. Like I'm not going to do distributions. I'm not going to hire anybody.

And it's really this freeze because I don't know where the puck's going, right? We had tariffs come in, tariffs come out. Tariffs come in, tariffs come out. Section 321 was stopped and now it's back on. It's just very hard to make a decision when you don't know what's going to happen in two weeks. What are you seeing situations with brands that have less of a, you know, that have less of a sort of fortress balance sheet where there's like actually, you know, like I imagine there's certain brands that are kind of running the calculus of like, are we even going to make it to Q4 with how this is going? What's kind of like the chatter in the industry? Yeah. So there's been like five years of bullshit when it comes to. D-C, right? Like, you know, there was COVID, which was really good for some people, horrible for some people. Famously, away sales dropped 90% because people stopped traveling, right? And then you have

tariffs. It's just the latest flavor in this. You know, there was iOS 14 issues and everything else. What we see is away credit cards going up, you know, it's going to hurt consumers. Totally, dude. Yeah. I mean, you were talking about credit cards. Bracks very famously was an e-commerce credit card provider and they shut down all the credit cards when COVID happened. So that's why I'm so glad you guys work with Ramp, the better of the credit card providers. So what we're seeing right now is a wave of shutdowns and smaller sub-10 million-dollar brands, right? Like that's always been a trend, but it's really ramped up the past like three to, probably

the past three months since Trump got elected because they just can't absorb tariff costs. Things were on the water, right, to be brought into America and then costs went up 25, 40% for these people. And when you add that in with everything that's happened, you know, iOS changes, advertising changes, consumer being softer, there's just a wave of bankruptcies and shutdowns happening. So if you haven't secured financing, if you don't have a solid balance sheet, it's just a really, really hard time to be trying to sell stuff on the internet. talk about solo brands they're currently being priced at 12 million dollars on 450 million of revenue they're not profitable i have to imagine this is a tariff thing but like we were we were trying to figure out what was going on with the company did you track this at all it's like the the numbers just don't make sense to me what's so Sean is like Sean's got his finger on the buy button it's like I can just buy the like the every every share is they also chubby it's like a pretty popular men's fashion brand too and they're doing like a hundred million in sales over there too so i know solo so intimately um i know spencer the original founder i know birchram capital the private

equity group at the bottom i know summit the private equity group that bought them from the private equity group to take them public they had a roll up strategy they overpaid for some assets um and they've they've depreciated all of them except for two so they have solo which makes the stoves and they have Chubbies. And they used to not break out revenue. Last quarter was the last quarter, they actually broke their revenue out. And what you have is Chubby does roughly $100 million in sales and is EBITA positive. And then you have solo, which is a shrinking business, shrinking 25% year over year, losing,

you know, $50 million or whatever. And the reason why the market kept so low is they have so much debt on that business. I think it's over $250 million in debt for a shrinking business that loses money. So, you know, they will sell chubbies that, like when you break out the finances like that, that's, they're looking for someone to buy that asset to pay down some of this debt. And then they're, they're just to take private. It is just some, somebody will swoop in. Does it happen before or after bankruptcy?

That's the whole challenge, right? Yeah. You're not just going to pick that up for 12 million bucks. You're going to pick up $250 million of debt with it potentially. And that's a big, that's a big decision. You've got to be ready to do something with that, right? Refinance that or pay that down somehow, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, the obvious suitor is Yeti, but there's a bunch of outdoor roll-ups. I mean, there's, it's one side that's, somebody, it makes sense to own that asset, but it's just, it's a, it's really, really hard to be solo stove right now.

That's rough. Well, good luck to them. Is, uh, do you believe there's potentially another ad platform, uh, on their horizons that will save, uh, the industry, uh, swoop in and provide cheap ads that allow everybody to scale efficiently. Everyone in DDCs just one more ad platform. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one more. Yeah, I mean, I mean, we, you know, you guys have talked about this a bunch, right? Ridge benefited massively from the rise of just meta platforms and being able to buy cheap ads and scale very profitably. But what's your conviction level? Are LLM is going to, LLM ad network is going to be a thing?

Or are you short there? Well, they will find a way to monetize, right? I mean, Google is the most profitable best business on earth, $80 billion in fucking revenue or whatever. It's all straight profit. And it's all just people searching and then get in the middle of that. So, you know, if you're Chashyvety or perplexity, you could probably build an amazing, you know, sales business on top of that. But, dude, this year, meta, is working. Like last year, meta did not work.

And we are giving so much of our money to the Big Blue Beast. And we're spending more today than we spent in December. It's just because I think they're taking AI seriously and they're really trying to bring AI across their ad networks. They do have threads. That's new ad space, right? You know, Twitter is looking to highly monetize its ad space. I think their daily users are going up.

Famously, there's Reddit, which has never been able to monetize well. The revenue per user is dog shit. So all we're hoping for is that AI helps people bring the power of the Facebook ads engine to more places. We think App, Apple Levin did that in Q4, but just more ad space to be more higher-powered. And unfortunately, if we're in a

recessionary environment, the first thing that gets cut is marketing budgets and then Ridgewall swoops into by those cheap CPMs. So podcasts crushing it right now. It makes so much sense why ramp, Bezell, wonder, public.com, ad quick, AIDS sleep, are sponsoring this

podcast because podcast ads for us crushing right now. Yeah. I love What's your take on I need to re-download threads. I deleted it because I'm just so loyal to the Everything app. But are you using it at all yourself? Do you think it, do you think it will be like if anybody could make the sort of like text heavy format, the sort of conversational format be have good ad units. It would be meta platforms. Are you guys spending it like can you spend on threads yet? Are you getting invited to spend on it soon? So I don't use threads. I'm trying to spend last time on the internet, dude, trying to touch him that delicious sunshine. It's been hit my face lately.

But dude, never bet against Zuck. You give him pixels, he will monetize them. So if he's got users, he's going to monetize it. The rumor is that threads ads are coming in Q4 of this year. And with that, they're also going to better monetize messaging and WhatsApp in general. So, you know, WhatsApp still has 100 million users in America. Like if you're not logged in every day using it, a lot of people are. And they do have, you know, just DMs and everything that hasn't been monetized.

So Snapchat lost messaging ads, last Q4. Whatever Snapchat does, meta will just scoop up and do it too. So we got more ad units coming, guys. Are you long or short Apple ever doing an ad platform? You'd think they sort of like handicapped the American online ad industry. it would have been nice if they had offered up like, you know, a stick and a carrot at the same time. Is there any, you know, if Apple's entering this era of just like, you know, toll road operations, you know, squeezing margin everywhere, getting these sort of incremental fees,

do you see a world where? They do App Store ads. Yeah, App Store is obvious. But not much for direct to consumer companies. Yeah. Correct. So my wife was interviewing for a role at Apple years ago. And she, she, when you interview at Apple, they make you do these like presentations.

And her presentation was the advertising opportunity at Apple. And they, you know, the executives there were very much like, we're never going to do that. Like that is so, so against who we are. But then, you know, what we've seen in the past two years is that, no, they're actually totally, it'll be, it'll be an ad exchange, right? So I don't think they'll actually monetize any of their ad space. They have the app store, right? They have, you know, Apple TV. They have, you know, I messages a social network, I think.

We all spend away more time when I messaged anything else. They won't monetize it, but they will sell your data. And that was the whole iOS 14 breakdown, right? Is that Apple wanted to, they wanted revenue from Facebook in exchange for that data. And Facebook said no, so they shut it down. So it, they will get a, they will get probably $40 billion in the next two years from just ad data exchange. I think that's tracking. That makes sense.

I'm curious AI telemarketers. Like they have your phone number, so you pick up your iPhone. It's just ringing and it's just an ad on the phone. Hi, this is Sean Frank here. I was just calling to see you if you wanted. You're interested in your Ridgewall. And it's just AI, Sean. Last question.

Are the various platforms treating you nicely enough? Are they taking you out to dinner as frequently as they should? Do you feel like you have, do you feel like they're a huge customer for them? And client. Didn't Ramp send you like a huge like tombstone for how much ad you've spent, has, has META sent you anything? No,

dude. I mean, I think I'm at, you know, over a quarter billion dollars in meta spend. So I'm waiting to get to a billion and then maybe, maybe they'll give me, you know,

maybe, maybe just a cameo for Mark Zuckerberg being like, hey, man, I appreciate all the work you're doing. But no, I did ramp. Ramp's a great partner.

I got a little tombstone from them. I love it. You know, Snapchat is the, in terms of like, understanding in client relations. I think they're best in class. Dude, Evan Spiegel super involved in the ad platform. I've I've had lunch and breakfast with him probably three or four different times. And he's just like, how can we get these ads to work? That's all he cares

about. So yeah, dude, love all of the network. Also, Shopify is the best partner out there. That's amazing. One one breaking news story that I want to get your take on. DoorDash and Klarna signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments. There's a lot of chatter on the timeline about this. I know Ridge Wallet has afterpay installed Shopify integration. What's your take on paying for your Chipotle burrito over several years? Well, so the previous guest you had on, a good friend of mine Connor, where you live together. And when these things rolled out, he was so bullish.

He's like, dude, I can smooth out my burn. He's like, everything should be finance, interest free, everything, take advantage of the ZERP environment. Surprisingly, we see a large percentage of our purchases go through a firm. It's probably 15% of all purchases are running through a firm. So they do do serious revenue. There is needs from consumers. And I think people, it's probably more bearish for the credit card industry than anything else. Like alternative merchant provided financing, eating high,

interest rate credit cards. Who pays for it in that transaction? A firm takes a higher payment processing rate than Visa does. So that's how they're actually funding this whole exercise. Do I think people should be putting Chipotle burritos on layaway? I do not think that's a good purchase. So that makes me very, very scared. And the memes have been great. For me, it's such a contradiction because, like, leverage is awesome and then burritos are awesome. So like you would think you're putting them together would would be, you know, this sort of 10x experience, but it feels very dark. It's a little bit risky. And what about like conversion rate effects for Ridge when you rolled that?

Do you remember when you rolled that out? Was there actually a lift in in conversion or revenue that you could see? Or is it just something you kind of feel builds like a better customer experience over time when you roll out something like after pay? So the reason why we did it is because, you know, at one point, not that long ago, 2020, 2021, e-commerce was the hottest industry. everyone was rushing into it. The glory days, all of those providers would pay you money to actually add it to the website. So I think it was either Klarna or a firm gave us $50,000 to have it as an option

on that. Wow, that's awesome. And also, I mean, Ridge's product portfolio has grown a lot. Like, you could easily wind up checking out with, you know, a whole Christmas gifts of luggage and wallets for a lot of people wind up into several thousands. And at that point, you know, yeah, doing something after pay makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, everyone listening is probably billionaires, you know, multi-billionaires. But if you need to get gifts for your staff, ridge.com slash Sean, use code Sean for 10% off. There you go, guys. There we go.

Sean, I love you. Good luck in the trenches. And hopefully there's not news in the next week that is so dramatic that it requires us to call our e-commerce correspondent. But if there is, expect to call. You know what? I would like to go on your guys as the e-commerce correspondent. I'll get a whole outfit and I'll just I'll be out there in the warehouse is telling you what's going down. So I appreciate you guys. Goodbye.

Well, I don't know about payroll. I mean, we're trying to be the most profitable podcast here, but we'd love to have you on. Yeah, we'll do it if you quit. We'll do it if you quit your show. No, sorry. If we can buy, if we can acquire your show, we can work out a deal. You don't have to do. All you got to do is turn on, all you got to do is turn on Zoom. Yeah. I was, I was going to pay you guys. Oh, that.

Oh, okay. Now we're doing. Oh, okay. Now, now we're doing deals. Yeah, this is the Klarna firm show. Yeah, yeah, you can pay over time. Great to you, Sean. Good to see you. Bye.

Our new studio, if it goes where we think it's going to go, will be much closer to Sean. Oh, fantastic. You just pop by. That'd be great. Drop in. Well, should we finish up with some timeline, wrap it up, and get out of here? Because we actually got to see some new studios in 20 minutes,

and I think they're about 40 minutes away. So we are fully screwed. Fantastic. Anyway, there's some new polymarket. it, very exciting. Will Jesus Christ return this year? What do you think, Jordy? It's a 3% chance.

Are you long? Are you short on the return of Jesus Christ? I don't feel ready to make a bet, although I would like to talk to the 3% that are going long and just try to see if we could get some insights. Yeah, I bet the comments. We said we don't talk about politics, but we never said we wouldn't talk about religion. Anyway, let's move on to LinkedIn has discovered loot boxes. Kevin Kwok shares that jobs are being recommended that are just some from stealth startups.

And so you apply to the company. And there's two jobs that look identical as chief operating officer at a stealth startup and chief operating officer at another stealth startup. And so you click, you apply, you might wind up at the next decacorn. you might wind up and something that's bankrupt in six months but it's a lot of fun.

Speaking of unknown stealth startups, I have a portfolio company stealth robotics company. Is that the name of the company stealth robotics? Because that's a good name. That'd be a good name.

I mean, why not? It's not. So they're coming out of stealth. They're going to be coming out of stealth later this year, but they're absolutely ripping and in a very interesting category and that's really all I can say,

but they're hiring for a ton of different engineering roles. And if you are in the market to join a robotics company where you want to learn more, DME on X, I will connect you to the team. Well, we got some quick hits because there is more news that I want to make sure we cover because we'll be going deeper on these stories next week. First off, we didn't get a chance to talk to Sean about this, but Sequoia Capital has stepped in and backed Elon Musk in his Delaware battle.

A comment from Sequoia rare, they say Delaware law should not subject founders to heightened scrutiny for being an asset and benefiting to all and benefit to all stockholders. And so if you haven't left already, leave Delaware is the comment from the account, leave Delaware. And so I want to go deeper here. I want to know exactly what it takes to leave Delaware. How many companies are actually moving where they're moving to the Texas Stock Exchange, all these different things that are going on? Isn't it? I want to know what's going on. Something crazy, like half of Delaware's, like, tax receipts are from C-Corp's. I think it's more than half. I think the state makes like all of their money from C-C-C-cores.

I want to see, and didn't this, I'm pretty sure that the governor was like going on television and kind of mocking. So anyways, they got to really turn this around. We'll see. Unless they want to be relegated to obscurity. I always wanted the vacation in Delaware, the home of the C-Corp. Oh, okay. Just because I just love business and I respect the, you know. If they're going to have a Hall of Fame of Business, that's where it should be.

The biblical home. Yeah, yeah, the Hall of Fame. The ancestral home of the corporation. The Business Hall of Fame. In Delaware, we should build it. Let's go to Sheel Monot. He says, exit mania is upon us. $2.6 billion exit for next.

Exit mania. Exit mania coming soon. Like WrestleMania? Yeah. Yeah, we got to have Sheel on to talk about. So Next Insurance, the rumor is that it was 8X revenue, 14 and a half X, 24 gross profit. They got scooped up by Munich Re for $2.6 billion. Congrats to them.

A little size-gong moment for the folks over at Next Insurance. You'll love to see it. Lots of M&A stuff going on. Let's also move to more news about Apple. We've been talking about the Apple intelligence delay on repeat for the last few weeks. Well, now they're getting sued. They're facing a false advertising lawsuit over Apple intelligence. Yeah, you never know how much to read.

This is a pretty wild ad. You never know how much to read into this kind of lawsuit because they'll, you can just sue anyone or anything for anything at any time. So this could just be a. Yeah. I mean, it could literally be like, I don't know how many. I don't know how much. I don't know how many.

Settlement wherever it gets 75 cents, but it's bad press and you know Apple hates bad press. So they're shuffling executives around. We covered that yesterday. And I'm sure the folks at Apple are thinking about how to handle this crisis. they probably need to call Lulu, who will be on the show on Monday. Anyway, Gary Tan, he says, this is the golden age of building. He shares some news from CNBC,

why combinator startups are the fastest growing, most profitable in fund history because of AI. You think did CNBC get the scoop from us when Gary was on the show? They should have quoted us, but, you know, for attribution. We'd like our scoop. Attribution required on everything we say. Although, who knows if we will give you attribution when we cover you? We'll try.

We'll try. We'll do our best. We'll at least do a sponsor acknowledgement. Yes, definitely, definitely. Yeah, who's advertising on this CNBC landing page? We'll shut them out. Anyway, we got some great math by Christian Kyle. This goes viral every time he posts it.

It's insane. He just knows how to play the hits so well. My three-month-old son is now twice as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh seven and a half trillion pounds by age 10. Great. and it's awesome that this is definitely this is the first time his his son has been on TBPN but I'm sure he's going to be an absolute Chad hard tech founder someday. Yes.

We'll be interviewing him by the time he's at least a teenager. So he posted this once on X. It got 100,000 likes easily. He just posted it again, got another 100,000 likes. It's made its way over to Reddit become the front page of Reddit over there. love math jokes like this and exponentials. Very fun. What else should we cover from the timeline? Sequin Barclay is in Anderil now. That's exciting. He says thank you to Paul. Huckie. Hit the gong for that. And the entire Anderl team for having me out couldn't be

prouder to be an investor. I mean a lot of people wore Eagles gear at Anderall headquarters that day. That's a lot of fun. Sequin pull up the Founders Fund portfolio page and then just DM every single CEO. Because if you look at Founders Fund performance, Arfra Rock leaked it. And he was quoting Harry Stebbings, who earlier this month says, I've never seen such institutional demand for fund and the current demand for Founders Fund Growth Fund. And the reason for that is they are putting up incredible numbers. And I will say this because John can't comment.

Can't comment. But I can comment. And this is a kind of performance. performance that you're pleased when it's leaked. Inspiring to the whole community. Yeah. So, Sequin, go hit up the FF portfolio. Get in however you can.

We got a post from Jason Levin. We'll close it off here. Let's do it. Jason says, when TechCrunch gets acquired by a PE firm to be chopped up for parts. This is a very creepy deep fake. It's pretty good. Is that? There's a little bit of me in there.

Ant, is that? It's from the Shining. Oh, it's you. It's me as Jack Nicholson in The Shining, breaking through the wall with an axe because he's gone insane. I think that's the story of the Shining. Well, yeah, we love private equity. And we love... Compare it on the street.

We love private equity. We love when companies get bought by private equity. Yeah, very pro-private equity. Especially when they're potentially competing for attention with us. And, I mean, if you're the private equity firm that bought it, we have a job. We have a genius idea to turn it around. We've said it before. Turn it into a lifestyle magazine about skiing.

That's how you get the capital allocators back on board. And that's a great way to leave it. We should have the new. We should go skiing right now. We should go skiing with the acquire and break down the plan. The plan to turn tech crunch. Thank you for tuning in today. It is a pleasure to do the show.

We're pretty bummed. It's the weekend. It's not normally 21 hours and we'll be back. 21 hours. And that's what I think. Just 21 hours. And now it's like almost 72 hours. Yeah.

It's 68 hours, 70 hours. We'll just be brooding. It's going to be rough. But we'll get through it, folks. The timeline's always there. We'll still be posting. We'll be posting clips. Follow us on X.

Review us on Apple and Spotify. And enjoy your weekend. Thank you. Thank you.