TBPN - Tesla Robotaxis Go Live, OpenAI Pulls Jony Ive Promotional Materials, Iran Updates | Yacine, Farzad Mesbahi, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Jon Chu, Eric Romo & Thomas Mueller, Derek Thompson, Alex Robinson, Jesse Zhang

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, June 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Massive news today. Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robotoxy launch in Austin, Texas. This afternoon. That was the big technology news. It was the big technology news. Of course, we will be covering what's going on in Iran. We have an exclusive interview with Shervin Peshavar, the investor and Iranian entrepreneur who came to America decades ago, has been waiting for this moment for 46 years, as he put it to us. We pre-record an interview with him because he is in Paris. It's very late there. But it was a very fascinating interview.

Starting point is 00:00:46 You'll hear that at the end of the stream. We have a great lineup. Tons of interviews going on. We're talking to the founder and CEO of Klarna. We're talking to a partner at Kosla Ventures. Tom Mueller from Impulse Space is coming on. Then we have Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance and owner of a new substack, as well as we're doing a lightning round with a bunch of founders who have raised money recently,

Starting point is 00:01:10 and then we're talking to Yaxine, the ex- software engineer of X. He's an ex-X software engineer. So it'll be fun to talk to him. Anyway, we have someone who's written about the Tesla CyberCab in the role. Robotaxi in the back of a Robotoxy, hopefully calling in this very minute. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in.

Starting point is 00:01:34 Hey, there he is. How you doing? Perfect timing. How's it going, guys? Can you see what's happening? Here, let me see. Can you see it? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Wow. Yeah. There you go. Amazing. You got a safety rider right here as well. Oh, very, guys. Okay. Got some sick, sick glasses on.

Starting point is 00:01:49 But yeah, we're in the robot taxi right now. This is my fifth, right? I'm also here with Harry from the UK. Oh, Harry. What's going on? He's a fan of the channel. Yeah, so yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been amazing so far. It really does feel like Tesla has hit this one out of the park, truly. The geo fence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now, but I think they did that with the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch. We want to make sure that it's going real nice and smooth. But so far, the rides I've taken have all been really, really good, very smooth. It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the car is. unless you're familiar with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on

Starting point is 00:02:31 the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience. It's just, there's just nobody there now. And that's the freaky part is that, you know, for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is wild. That's awesome.

Starting point is 00:02:56 So is that better? The stock is up 9% today. 9% today. Wow. You're welcome, everybody. I'm kidding. Yeah, give us your other takeaways. I saw you posted a good breakdown from your experience.

Starting point is 00:03:13 What else do you have to share about the process? Did you need to go through a pre-registration to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely open access just yet. Yeah, so, yeah, we were invited. we're a part of like a very limited group of people that were invited i think tessa was just uh here so somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that no problem um the um yeah it's a very small group of people i think uh a lot of us that have followed tesla very closely uh over the years uh tesa went out of their way to sort of you know get us uh some early access so we can go out there

Starting point is 00:03:47 test the test the system getting out there for people to see how it performs uh so far it's very very limited um in its use case and i'm showing you you guys here just on the road hopefully does it come across can you guys see the yeah it's a very steep um yeah i think i think tassel very specifically started this very small but now if you go and their zip code and their phone number and email address um so they can sign up for the service and that's probably a way for tessa to get some uh some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there. But so far, it's very small, small geofence area, small group of people.

Starting point is 00:04:33 And I think, I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt is more than 10 right now. We're a four-way stop right now, and it's navigating that, no problem. But, yeah, I think it's very limited on purpose. But I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this firsthand, And it's just, it feels surreal because it works. It works. It just takes you around and there's no one there. It's wild that we got full self-driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities.

Starting point is 00:05:05 You're breaking up a little bit. I mean, I have one more question. We'll let you go. Yeah. I mean, what's remarkable about this is not just that it's a self-driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 model. Why? Is there anything? Are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket added to extra cameras? Anything? Nothing, nothing. I mean, there's different software, but I mean, that's just a software update.

Starting point is 00:05:34 Totally. There's nothing that I can gather that says, oh, this is a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors. This looks to me, like the point you made is exactly in. This is why this is such so mind-blown, like, I just can't believe. is happening the best selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than 40,000 dollars, potentially less than 30,000 dollars to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid $4.20 and it's driving me around, the best selling car in the world. Like that is, that's a weird thing to process. Yeah. Because it fundamentally breaks the like how we think about self-driving transportation. Because you think about, oh, self-driving,

Starting point is 00:06:17 a lot of sensors, et cetera, et cetera, no, that the cost structure for this thing is the scale that Tesla has been able to achieve, that same car is going to drive itself. And that just breaks everything because their cost per mile plummets. The method they've taken as far as training the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can. And they have the cars, right?

Starting point is 00:06:42 So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total. Right? And that's the mind-blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible, such an incredible technology. And I'm really happy they exist. But the scale piece is the challenge. And it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to our destination, that's my cyber truck right there just hanging out.

Starting point is 00:07:05 You know, it's like it's monumental. This is really a monumental thing for them. This is like Disneyland for Tech Bros. You can just keep taking rides around all day long. Yeah. This is like, thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, brother.

Starting point is 00:07:18 Yeah, dude, it's like, you know, sometimes I'm, like, afraid I'm like, does my, does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like, am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? But it really is like it's, it's just upending, you know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just appending the equation around the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle, now with self-driving, they're going to get into the human or robot space. This is what they do.

Starting point is 00:07:41 And so I think this is just another reminder that they're full steam ahead. And it's very exciting. And it's just such an honor. to be part of this release truly. It's an honor. Historic. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for calling in.

Starting point is 00:07:52 This was great. Yeah, we'll talk to you. Have fun out there. All right. Talk soon. Thank you guys. All right. Bye.

Starting point is 00:07:57 Yeah. The scale of this thing. I mean, like Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that. And so scale. Scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point.

Starting point is 00:08:16 And yeah, they seem really. set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the Robotaxie and you'll love to see it. A little bit of side quest going on for the last six months. You know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not the main mission. Pot a gold. Pott of gold. Anyway, there's some other, there's some other news here. Power bottom dad says time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well. Very dramatic.

Starting point is 00:08:54 I'm not, I'm not, I think power, power bottom dad is a very strong poster. Yep. And, you know, the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now, it's sounds like it's 10-ish cars in a very, very small area. But, but again, they can potentially scale. thousand times faster than Waymo. It's all just going to come down to safety

Starting point is 00:09:22 and what's actually going on behind the scenes. George Hots last week was saying that, you know, Waymo has, is our teleoperated? He said, you know, I haven't fact-checked this. Thankfully, we're not journalists. We don't have to fact-check. But he said something like 1.7 people per car, you know, sort of, you know, overseeing.

Starting point is 00:09:41 More than a taxicab because tax cap way has one. Yeah, so the real question will be, you know, Is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they, you know, how long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once. I think the real question is what corporate cards should you use? That's right. Ramp.com.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, no payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. No, it's a good point. And I don't know about Waymo and Google. I think I lean with PBD here saying that they have a lot of explaining to do, Waymo, Google, and Uber. It's hard to imagine how you can compete if your product's 10 times the price. Or if you, like the Uber has the, the bold case for Uber is that they have the customers, right? And that everyone has the Uber app installed.

Starting point is 00:10:41 but if the only way to hail a cyber cab or a Tesla Robotoxy is through the Tesla app, how hard is it going to be to get people to install that app? I think it's going to be very easy. Because the brand awareness is huge. The brand awareness is huge. It's not like Zooks where it's some, oh, you've got to be an insider to know that they're doing tests

Starting point is 00:11:03 and that the other major player in the space or whatever. And the virality of seeing Tesla's driving around with no driver in the front seat. Army. Like he's doing the promotion for free and getting a ton of Yeah. When it comes to Uber you have to remember that Dara CEO was formerly the CEO of Expedia which was a booking website. Yes. So if Uber can figure it out it's like hey we're just routing demand and we're taking a cut. Yes. But we're integrating with multiple different you know autonomous vehicle providers. That

Starting point is 00:11:35 that actually would be the bull case. But the question is does Tesla just say can that happen? We got this. We're not going to give up. We're going to let consumers go direct. A lot of question depends on the timeline. Because if the Robotaxi, so we don't know how much work they did. These might be somewhat teleoperated. They might have a safety driver literally in the car, right?

Starting point is 00:11:57 Although it's interesting because the safety driver, did you see the safety driver? Did they have a pedal? Because if they don't have a break, what is the safety driver doing? Like, is the safety driver going to reach over or push a button on the screen? Kind of unclear. But the question is, if the robotoxy can't generalize to odd conditions, then you wind up in a situation where if you have the Tesla Robotaxy app and it doesn't work in the snow or it doesn't work in the rain or it doesn't work if you need to get to the beach or we won't go into the mountains. Well, then all of a sudden you actually do want something like the beauty of Expedia is that it can book me a Southwest flight. to from Burbank to SFO, but then it can also book me a, you know, Dubai Airlines,

Starting point is 00:12:45 first class Emirates Air all the way across the world. And so if there is a world where, where I want a variety of products. It's benefiting from variety and not this frequency of booking. If you're booking a Tesla cyber cab multiple times a week and you can save by going directly to the app, you're just going to do that. Yeah. Overall, I thought the Robotexie did an incredible job under pressure, probably it's the first sort of live show that it's been a part of. Yep. And so the fact that it stayed composed, that it didn't, you know, make any erratic turns or anything like that, I'm pretty impressed. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:21 It's very exciting. But, you know, you don't always want to be in a self-driving car that costs $38,000. Sometimes you want to be a Ferrari driving Harvard med graduate AI angel investor. We saw this photo on the timeline. Incredible. Loved this. It seems like pure bait for VC congratulating themselves for VC Braggs.

Starting point is 00:13:45 So humble. Harvard Medical School. Is that a Roma? I think so. Would it hit harder if it was an SP3, you know? Like, yeah, okay, you're an AI angel investor, but probably weren't seed investor in scale.

Starting point is 00:14:03 But clearly has done well and enjoys. Ben is saying it's an SF90. That's not an SF90. No way. I think it's a Roma. I think it's a Roma. I think you're wrong. Let us know in the comments.

Starting point is 00:14:16 And you know what's missing from this picture? A luxury watch. This person's got to get on. I'm sure they have a hitter on. They might even have a racing machine on the wrist. They might. Go to get Bezell.com. Shop over 25,000 luxury watches,

Starting point is 00:14:29 fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts. Trump, this is the news of the day with the Iran. crisis. Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking directly to the market. Everybody's saying, everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried. People always say, oh, all that matters in, in oil prices, supply and demand. Yeah. Well, all you got to do is say, hey, supply, go down. Hey, supply go up. And demand go down and we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that.

Starting point is 00:15:09 Has it's been tried before. It's worth it's worth trying something. If you do signal, I mean, there, there are, there are stories about, uh, oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were going to be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like that does happen every once in a while, but yeah, very, very odd to post anyway. Um, uh, back on watches, the watches of espionage account says men who guide the destinies of the world, well, where, Rolex watches, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razine Kane in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT. Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time

Starting point is 00:15:47 it is in Toronto. We got to start doing these. This is a good one. I haven't seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the break cracking your knuckles. But this is special. It's like four points of attack. I mean, I guess they did hit four sites. So you got to point to all of them. Yeah. That's right. Interesting. Well, it's been an eventful morning. Iran attacked a U.S. base in Qatar. Yes, that's the latest. And people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties.

Starting point is 00:16:19 Apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air. And this could lead to a de-escalation and a return to a steady state of tension. Yeah. This has been my position for a long time. I'm pretty anti-aggression, anti-aggression. anti-war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes. I want to be able to shoot down every missile before as soon as it leaves. No matter where it's leaving from, let's shoot it down immediately, from space, from land, do whatever you can, but missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs,

Starting point is 00:16:52 these things should not be relevant in the future. But Druva has a breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Ford Dow represents over one year of US production capacity of the G.B.U.57 Bunker Buster. Its primary explosive, AFX-757 is difficult to produce, and we don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Wisenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds.

Starting point is 00:17:33 of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by? We didn't actually take them. President comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke. That would be bad. Which would be bad.

Starting point is 00:17:49 That would be bad. The other thing that's interesting, the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed before July Polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4 million of volume. So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed, or at least that's what the market is saying. So it's impacted but not destroyed even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation. Well, the the crown prince of the opposition party gave a speech in Paris earlier. We talked to Shervin Pischvar about it earlier. You'll hear that interview at 230 today. And he launched a

Starting point is 00:18:26 website to help recruit defectors. If you're designing a website, you got to get a Figma. That's right. Think bigger. Build a faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma.com. Combat Learjet says, my buddy was a B2 pilot. He flew one of those extremely long missions several years ago. The mission was two pilots, 36.3 hours of flight time, Missouri to a rock and back to Missouri. The mission required five air refuelings, taking on over 500,000 or 500K kilograms maybe, 500 kilograms of gas total. These pilots are legends. Yeah, that's insane. Oh, I guess pounds. 500 pounds I don't know anyway what would it be so 36-hour grind I never want to

Starting point is 00:19:11 hear you complain about you know sitting at your desk for 10 hours or coming on the weekend when I ever complain PowerPoint or some Excel the investment maker specifically yeah oh I work so long no 36 hours get it done yeah really wow anyway Jacob Helleberg was celebrating this very excited he has been confirmed by the way and he says and he's shifting the conversation, I think, in a good direction. He says, not a single Chinese humanoid robot should be sold on U.S. soil. U.S. government should preemptively ban Chinese humanoids in the U.S. without delay.

Starting point is 00:19:43 In all caps. And Jason Calcana says, the fact that you need to tweet this is crazy. You realize this was posted a year ago? Oh, this is a, whoa, and he just reposted it. Yeah. Or he edited it or something. Yeah. So he was out of the curve.

Starting point is 00:19:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now he's part of the admin. Now he can tweet. Actually make some of this stuff happen. And so excited to see him. Yeah, we talked about this. Why are we, you know, let's not allow what happened with DJI to happen again with a new robotic form factor. Yep.

Starting point is 00:20:14 Anyway, there was some news that maybe the Johnny Ive OpenAI deal might not happen because OpenAI apparently scrubbed everything about Johnny Yves and Sam Altman off the website and YouTube. It's just completely gone. YouTube video, private, blog post removed. Everything is gone. I confirmed that. You get a 404 when you go to the original web page. Mark German, so everyone thought the deal was falling apart. Maybe Johnny Ive was getting poached by Zuck over at Meta.

Starting point is 00:20:42 That would be dramatic. Mark German has the story. He says the Johnny I have an opening I deal is on track and has not dissolved or anything of the sword, I'm told. Here's what happened. They were sued over the name I.O. And there was a restraining order issued by the judge. They had to pull all materials with the name. That's interesting.

Starting point is 00:20:58 Also interesting that they didn't, we knew that the name of the company. was I.O. before this acquisition, right? No, it was love from, and then they had an internal project called I.O. But that was not. I thought that was, I thought, I thought, I thought that we knew that the new project was called IO like, like six months or a year ago. Yeah. But they're suing now. This happens a lot. There's, there's kind of multiple sides. We'll hear both of them. Nick, who I believe is more in the Elon camp, is, is saying that, you know, it's the beginning of end for Sam Altman and Johnny Ives project. He says a federal judge has banned open

Starting point is 00:21:37 AI to use the word IO to brand for their upcoming AI hardware device device. A little rough language there. The ruling caps a fierce trademark battle sparked by Silicon Valley startup IYO similar but a slightly different name which spent the past six years developing its voice controlled AI wearable the Iyo one court filings revealed an eyebrow raising series of events. So this is from IEO's point of point of view. Yes. I'd say from 2018 to 2024, IEO publicly showcased its earworn device investing heavily to carve out its niche between 2022 and 2025.

Starting point is 00:22:15 Altman's Apollo projects and Ives love from team participated in extensive pitch meetings, factory tours, and hands-on testing of Iyo's product. On March 5th, 2025, Altman declined investment in I.O. disclosing he was working on something competitive, which ended up. being called I-O, i.io, not I-YO, said when OpenAI revealed a six and a half billion dollar venture named IO in May of 2025, IOS fundraising immediately stalled as Sam Altman influenced investors to stop investing in the small startup. Obviously, these are all allegations. Yeah, what's interesting here is like Sam invested in Humane and that project didn't really get to fruition. And so there's this question of like, like, it's possible that he was like, okay, idea is good, but team maybe can't deliver at scale or can't deliver as an independent venture.

Starting point is 00:23:09 And so for that reason, I'm out and that's kind of clear. You also kind of know if you're pitching an investor that's actively running a huge company that you, like you can go pitch Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor. But if you're pitching him like Instagram 2.0, you kind of know, okay, I'm So the thing that's clear here. I'm letting the fox in the headhouse. Yeah, the thing that's clear here is that it's very possible that the company IYO has great grounds around the trademark. Yes. They've been operating for a while.

Starting point is 00:23:38 And it is confusing, right? Even when we're saying it out why. Yes, yes. Also, I.O. It's not such a good name that, like, they have to stick with it. I would just change that name immediately. Yeah. I never thought it was that great name.

Starting point is 00:23:50 And I would rather just have it called like the chat GPT phone or something, you know, or the open AI phone or something. Like, there are other, they probably couldn't get a. away with that because it sounds too much like iPhone. But there are other brand names that they could spin off of to create a device that's the open AI device. And they don't necessarily need to use that I.O. keyword. And so backing off of that seems fine. There's also this trend of like when big dollars are changing hands, like $6 billion in this case, oftentimes there are folks that come out and file lawsuits because there's a whole bunch of money changing hands. Everyone wants it to change hands quickly. And so if you can show up and say, hey, I'm owed $100 million, a lot of people

Starting point is 00:24:30 just settle to make it go away. This happened to Palmer Lucky during the meta acquisition or the Facebook acquisition of Oculus. There was a guy who came out and said, I invented VR. I have a patent. You have to pay me. Palmer went all the way to court, bought it and won. But it was still, it was still framed in the press for a long time as like Palmer Lucky stole the idea for virtual reality, which of course is one of those things where it's like, okay, like the idea of virtual reality has been around for like decades, if not like a hundred years. Palmer used, he stood on the shoulder of giants, used some patents and some technology and licensed some of that stuff.

Starting point is 00:25:08 And so you might have a claim. There might be some sort of settlement. There might be all sorts of different things. But at the end of the day, like, yeah, like it didn't, there was no evidence that Palmer was like literally cheating off his homework, like looking over there being like, let me just take this to market. Also, the general idea for virtual reality had been. something that had been written about both in venture and in sci-fi for decades.

Starting point is 00:25:30 And it's the same thing here. Like this IEO device looks really cool. It's this headphone. But again, it's like, our AirPods is it's interesting here is it's a potentially new type of product that could ultimately be similar to what OpenAI develops with Johnny Ive and love from. Sure. So the IOIIO is a product design.

Starting point is 00:25:54 be an ear-worn device. The device uses 16 beam-forming microphones to create a quote-unquote audio display or an immersive audio environment for both speaking and listening. The I-O-1 achieves this through the use of natural language. The user does not have to learn, know, or memorize special commands, words, or gestures to cause the device to do what is asked of it. Instead, all the user needs to do is speak to the device naturally as though the user were conversing with a person. Yeah, I mean, like this feels like souped up AirPods in some ways or completely disruptive. And it ultimately depends on the how great the software is, how great the interaction pattern is, the branding, the design, the go-to-market. It's not, I don't think that they own the idea of like put a thing near your ear and play sounds.

Starting point is 00:26:46 Like that's not like if Open AI comes out with something that competes with this, I think, we would more likely comp it to AirPods and ask what is Apple doing to respond? How are the AirPods going to be a competitor in this category? I mean, it's the same thing with the meta, the meta quest and the Apple Vision Pro. These are somewhat similar devices, screens on your face. They have slightly different design choices, but they're both in the same category. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say, oh, like, Zuck should 100% sue Apple for launching the Apple Vision Pro, right? Like, that is not specific. Like, they don't own the idea of screen on your face. And I would say that Apple doesn't necessarily own the idea of audio in your ears

Starting point is 00:27:36 and Johnny Ive doesn't necessarily own that idea either. So it's going to be a much more nitty-gritty question. You might be more quick to come to the defense of IYO if you knew they were funded by both big tech and big defense tech, Lockheed Martin, and Alphabet are both in the company. They've raised over $20 million in venture funding to date. So, yeah, I mean, it could definitely, yeah, it could definitely be a valuable product, but I think the game will be one in the execution of the software and the hardware,

Starting point is 00:28:12 not strictly the idea of like voice first computing in your ear. That's not enough to win. Just like screen on phase. AirPods have already done some re-aventory version of this for a while. And it'll talk to you a little bit. It's like they're not executing well. Or you can call your executive assistant and say, hey, can you book this up for me? Hey, can you call this person?

Starting point is 00:28:33 Hey, can you schedule this? Hey, can you book me a flight? Yes. In many ways, they're just trying to recreate a great EA. Yes. Well, whatever IA.O is building, they got to get on Vanta. They got to automate compliance. They got to manage risk.

Starting point is 00:28:47 And they got to prove trust continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the, work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. But yeah, I mean, these lawsuits are always, are always interesting, could wind up being a big settlement. I mean, if they can even get $40 million from the $6.5 billion in a settlement, that's a series B for them.

Starting point is 00:29:10 They get to keep going, keep building. That's probably a good outcome for them. Maybe they can get them to change the name. This is because I agree with you that the name is crazy. The most attention, you know, if they spin this and say, hey, the Open AI, team spent years ordering our products meeting meeting with the fitting specialists doing all this stuff because it's so great maybe they'll get some more out of it you know the best thing for everyone in this scenario what's that we're going to get some emails and discovery that are going to go on

Starting point is 00:29:38 big tech history emails the the the X account and you know we're going to find some funny back and forth between Johnny Ive and saying I'm speaking of speaking of lawsuits and emails and discovery, Elon's lawyers are apparently claiming that he doesn't have a computer as part of the lawsuit between Open AI. Who doesn't have a computer? Elon. He doesn't have a computer. He doesn't even have a work computer.

Starting point is 00:30:03 You posted this earlier today. I found this out because I posted. Yes. I posted earlier. If your CEO has a quote unquote work computer and a personal computer, it's time to start polishing your resume. And so somebody responded to that with notes to basically claims that. How does Elon play Diablo?

Starting point is 00:30:25 Well, he probably has a gaming rig. Oh, it's a rig. It's not a computer. No, but the verge posts this. Your Honor, my client doesn't have a computer. He has a rig. He has a gaming rig. Oh, you want access to his rig?

Starting point is 00:30:38 Yeah. Where he plays games on it? You want to see if he's really that good at Diablo? There are people that would actually definitely want that for sure. The setup. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe the second greatest Diablo player of all time will subpoena that in front.

Starting point is 00:30:51 information. I want actual data. How many hours did he log? I need to know the real account. So Wired is reporting this morning that the claim appeared in a court filing related to Elon Musk's ongoing lawsuit against Sam Altman and Open AI. He said that the lawsuit also flags that he has posted about his laptop numerous times in the last year.

Starting point is 00:31:16 So people are trying to put him in the true zone. That is crazy. So he doesn't have a computer. He doesn't have any apps installed on a computer. He doesn't have linear installed on his computer. I'm sure his team does. His team must. Because how would they get anything done

Starting point is 00:31:33 without a purpose-built tool for planning and building products? Like they need a system for modern software development. How else would they streamline the issues, projects and product roadmaps? How else would they run such a big service with so few people on their team? It would make no sense.

Starting point is 00:31:48 Unless everyone is just significantly... I think we're going to find the computer and when we find Elon Musk's computer we're going to find there one app linear for sure that's right linear dot app an anonymous little birdie told me that he does have a massive a gaming PC with an ultra massive screen and indeed does not have a work computer l-o-l so pretty base okay anyway wealthfront is filing to go public very exciting we've heard about this fintech platform before Seems like the window's open, John. The window is wide open.

Starting point is 00:32:25 If you're a Series D company, Series C company, Series B company, maybe Cluelly gets out. Who knows? I could see Cluelly getting out with Chimoth. It's possible. Anything's possible when the windows open. So go for it. If you're a founder, our advice to you, just go public. Just take your company public and then go on a generational run, compounding it 40% a year stock price for a couple decades.

Starting point is 00:32:49 Yeah, a couple decades. That's all it takes. And then you'll be in the MAG 7. Yeah, many ways if you go public earlier, those initial years can be easier because it's such a small base. Yeah, everyone says, oh, like, the SEC requirements are so difficult. And you could be shorts, you should be short sellers could attack you. It's like, that's just inspiration to grind harder with, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:11 putting up incredible quarter of a quarter results. Blow them out. Blow out the shorts. Speaking of the public markets, Anthony Pompliano posted this morning. Today, I'm announcing a $1 billion merger to create ProCap financial of Bitcoin Native Financial Services firm. The company will be a publicly traded entity on NASDAQ at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company ProCAP, BTC, LLC, and Columbus Circle Capital Corp 1, a publicly traded spec.

Starting point is 00:33:40 The ticker for the publicly traded entity right now is CCCM, and he has raised over $750 million. dollars. They will focus on acquiring Bitcoin for their balance sheet while also developing products and services to produce revenue and profit from Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Some people would say that should be the first goal. Let's give it up for revenue and profit, everybody. We love it. Love to see it. It's trying to be the Warren Buffet of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:34:13 Buy companies, invest in Bitcoin, funnel the Bitcoin back in and buying more companies. companies produce more Bitcoin. The flywheel continues. That's right. That's the goal. Whatever company you buys, got to put them on numeral, numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

Starting point is 00:34:31 Should we do some of the downstream fallout from Cluelly? I didn't even know if it's fallout. Yeah, I just wanted to cover this post from Will Brown first. Zuck hired Alex Wang for a half to 1% equity. He's basically a founding engineer. Thought that was good when the when the 15% 15 billion number was being thrown around just a week ago. Everybody was freaking out.

Starting point is 00:34:53 But it's basically, it's barely a point. Yeah, we, I mean, we identified that. It's like, it's like, what would, uh, what would it take for Alex Wong to move me as market cap 1%? Well, like, I don't know, a great Lama 5 release. That would probably do it, right? Like, there's a ton of things. There's a lot of opportunity.

Starting point is 00:35:11 If you're just talking about that's being the stakes, it's not that he has to overnight double the company in size. He just has to, he just has to, he just has to, to implement a rational and effective AI strategy. Ben Thompson was talking about this earlier today. For a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's so many places where AI products

Starting point is 00:35:30 can have an impact. Ben Thompson was talking about this, this idea that the researchers are really important, but what Zuck has been on a terror about is hiring actually great managers. When you look at Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Alexander Wong, like these guys are everyone, the criticism, they're not researchers,

Starting point is 00:35:47 but that's actually probably the benefit to the strategy because we are in the application war right now. We are in the implementation of these AI tools and the capabilities of the models are clearly way, way ahead of the actual foundation models like the like the actual science that's happened. I was thinking about this just like for for Instagram during the Dolly moment. I was like I wonder what would happen if you just took every single people persons on Instagram their most recent photo and Ghibli'd it, Studio Ghibli'd it, and just sent them to it.

Starting point is 00:36:24 Send it to them proactively. It would cost a ton of money to do this in the inference, but you do that. You send it to everyone and you just say, like, would you like to post this? I bet you have like the biggest day on Instagram like ever, right? Yeah. Because you're just creating all this like viral fuel for the day. Or what does it take to distill that model down, bake it into just a filter. So when you upload a photo, you can just select the studio Ghibli thing and it runs efficiently. And that's almost that's not really a research task it's more of like product management and I'm not even like a product manager at Instagram right it's good like for product managers but like those types of like the volition that it'll take and the will

Starting point is 00:36:58 and the incentive alignment that it'll take to actually roll out a product like that and really push the team to be like no we want to spend all this money rendering these ghiblies because we think this is a calculated risk that will put us back in the AI image conversation or we want to you know spend all this money to distill down images image generation diffusion to a point where it can just be a filter button on the on the Instagram app like those are product management those are cost like it's almost like more of a CFO question than a research question at this point like we know that the Ghibli filter is doable and it's great and so

Starting point is 00:37:30 how do you actually get it out into the world effectively and that's more of a manager manager discussion so he's basically a founding engineer but I think he's going into more of like a C-suite role so we'll we'll keep tracking it anyway should we keep should we keep going into the AI Apple application layer with the rapper of all rappers, Cluid. The final rapper, the final boss of rappers. Yeah. We should, we should get Tyler's take on this because the question that I think people are

Starting point is 00:38:01 digging into is that cluelie, it's like the easy, the easy take was like, oh, this is like Theranos. And it's like, I don't think it's like Theranos at all. Like the product works. Like you, you tried it and you would agree that it is a real product. Yes, yeah, for sure. 100%. It does what it advertises.

Starting point is 00:38:21 It does what it advertises. Now, there are some questions about, like, the actual long-term value there. Or I think the risk, the bare case for Clueling is. The risk is that the risk is that the opportunity does not align with the marketing strategy. So, like, the opportunity for helping students with their homework and the sort of, like, traditional nature of cheating. aligns with the marketing strategy. I think they can dominate there. The enterprise opportunity of let me intake all the information from every call that you have internally,

Starting point is 00:38:57 every sales call that you have, every, you know. That's a very competitive space. That's a very competitive space that the labs will probably want to own because it's very valuable data. You can imagine OpenAI having a desktop application that's permanently running. They already do. They already have a, yeah, but they haven't adopted that pattern. degree and so yeah the risk is like is like if if if the pattern really works and people are like this is what we want we always want the screen capture and constant uh constant responses from

Starting point is 00:39:29 lLMs like if it's a really big opportunity you're going to face competition from the really big labs yeah if it's a smaller opportunity it's hard to kind of scale up so so so there there's a lot of the more the more the other pushback was high level you know why are we funding these types of businesses that are loud and not, you know, truly sort of bending the world in any type of positive direction. And it has the cheating angle, which some people, I think that was very intentional. Yeah. The pushback I would have there is like, it seems like, it seems like there is enough venture

Starting point is 00:40:02 capital right now. Like if you have a great idea in hard tech, defense tech, manufacturing, et cetera, you will be funded. Yep. And it's, you know, it's not like some great, you know, manufacturing American dynamism business is not getting $15 million this week because clearly got 15 last week. And so it's not zero sum.

Starting point is 00:40:24 Yeah. We had some good reactions. Kevin, aka Plant Daddy, was quoting a segment from our interview and said, Roy was basically saying, like, there's not enough viral content, which is actually interesting. Take his take at a high level is like if you make something like great, novel, engaging, it just will naturally go viral because there's actually a scarcity of like viral content. I think it's an interesting point, and I think that he's probably right to some degree.

Starting point is 00:41:01 Kevin fired back at a high level and said, this is not correct. While it is true, that when, oh, and sorry, the last thing, Roy was basically saying that consumption is just shifted so dramatically to TikTok, which is a new form. factor and so that's change of the dynamics. Kevin is an active creator, I believe on YouTube, and I'm sure he's everywhere. So he was just firing back. He says, this is not correct. While it is true that when TikTok blew up in 2020, there was a brief moment where there wasn't enough short-form content to satisfy consumption, that lasted 12 to 18 months. I remember it well because I was one of the first gardening accounts on TikTok in 2019. It was free back then. Literally any video popped off.

Starting point is 00:41:39 Then millions of new creators came onto the scene, coupled with 10x, reduced friction in creating content due to TikTok's native editor, filter, and cap cut, you saw an explosion of short form videos. So both the number of creators and number of videos dramatically increased. Consumption just increased even more because the videos were all 5 to 15 seconds long. So one scrolling session equals 100 videos instead of 50 to 70% of one YouTube video. It's not true that for the next 6 to 12 month, anything that you post has a potential to go viral will go viral. That's only true when there's a paradigm shift and all platforms have to catch up. The phase where IG meta released reels and YouTube released shorts to catch up to TikTok was truly a free attention grab era and thousands of creators made a fat bag during that era.

Starting point is 00:42:22 From 2020 to 2020, I grew epic gardening from 300,000 to something like 8 million across all platforms. It was that free. That time isn't today though. He says, I think what you're seeing right now with Cluelly is someone applying a Mr. B style hyperscale influencer content model into something that VCs will salivate over B2C AI. whether anything comes of it is another story, but it is somewhat comical to see the tech, VC space, go crazy for the viral attention grabbing when the type of attention they're grabbing as well as the scale of it

Starting point is 00:42:54 is dwarfed by almost any top 1% creator of which there are thousands of. Yeah, Christian Kyle was pointing out that clearly is getting millions of views on X, but only a few thousand views on YouTube, and so it's very, very platform-specific. And, yeah, but it's, he, Roy is really fantastic. applying that the viral playbook that works for X on X. And it's been very successful. I think they're successful on other platforms too.

Starting point is 00:43:21 But it is interesting. Yeah, and it's interesting slow ventures. Yeah. Created a fun. Megan Light Cap over there runs it. We've had her on the show, I believe, right? We had Sam. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:43:32 We had Megan on, but we should. Basically saying, hey, there's all these creators that are getting a massive amount of attention. If they have capital, they can monetize it. So some people are paying attention to this. It's still, like, I've been surprised by how much the cheating buzzword has been really controversial. It seemed very clear to me that that was deliberately edgy and just kind of an edge lord statement. And that it was pretty clear that the tool was very much just like embracing the new norm of co-pilots happening everywhere. and that cheating was deliberately used as a word

Starting point is 00:44:15 to kind of spark controversy. But it really is acting as baggage on Roy. And so Sarah Guo over conviction said, we should celebrate hacking, not cheating. Cheating quietly pockets extra monopoly money, insider trading, plagiarism, inflated metrics. Hacking openly flips the game board, exposing rigged rules and inventing a better game for everyone.

Starting point is 00:44:39 Wikipedia, replace, Britannica, Airbnb, monetized spare rooms, Linux openly challenged Windows, both break the rules, but hacking doesn't compromise integrity. It reveals the old game wasn't worth playing. Yeah, it's interesting because he could have totally reframed the Cluelly launches as hack everything, hack dating, hack your, you know, your online interviews or whatever. And it probably would have been much less viral, but much less controversial. Yeah. But it's the other thing is. like give yourself superpowers in any of these domains. Totally.

Starting point is 00:45:14 Right. Yeah. I mean, the co-pilot thing is like the friendliest framing of all of this, right? It's like, yeah, it's just like something to help you out. Auto-complete saying auto-complete for everything is not nearly as viral. And many people have said that over the last year. And I think this is what Roy is already battling with is he, I think generally has good intentions, right?

Starting point is 00:45:35 He has his own intentions around. He clearly is excited about being famous. Yeah. Many ways he already is a niche tech celebrity. Yeah, over 100K followers. But at the same time, he does want the respect of insiders. You can tell that from some of his comments over the weekend and replies. So anyways, he's young.

Starting point is 00:45:56 He's going to figure it out. Well, if he's going to try and sell this into enterprise at some point, he's got to get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds scales and grows your company the next level. Lou Louon continued the conversation saying, One thing clearly got really right is hiring only marketing people who have already built large followings on their own. Any marketing person that isn't bringing you an audience is just being subsidized by yours.

Starting point is 00:46:19 I thought this was a good take. I don't know how it's tricky because many people who have built large followings have their own businesses, but Roy's clearly created some sort of like great relationship with them such that they can come in and earn a paycheck and at some point get paid very high. kind of unclear how much is cash and stock, but it's enough to get people to step back from a TikTok account that's 100,000 followers or something like that,

Starting point is 00:46:48 but that type of person understands the algorithm and actually can do marketing more effectively. And so I think there is an interesting lesson there in that the new marketing, like we transitioned from resumes to GitHub profiles for hiring programmers. We've seen this with folks that the interns that we've hired,

Starting point is 00:47:08 where someone will come in and say, I built this this weekend, here's an example of what I can build, or here's an example of something I built in the past, an open source project. And the equivalent in the marketing world now is building some sort of following and actually understanding content creation

Starting point is 00:47:22 at some level. And so it's, yeah, it's very bullish. Maybe marketing departments should be doing more proactive outreach to folks that are building large followings but not quite monetizing them just yet and saying, hey, you clearly understand Instagram, TikTok, whatever you're doing,

Starting point is 00:47:37 you should come in, inside the organization and work here in our marketing team, which I think can make sense. Dylan Field had some alternative framing of the Cluelly story. Cooley isn't just good marketing. Roy hacked the Algo feed with an anti-fragile memetic virus and the more energy you throw at it

Starting point is 00:47:55 the stronger it gets. Well, here we are. Throwing more energy at the memetic virus, baby. That's what it's all about. We can move on from Cluelly in a little bit. Teddy Blank says, Roy Lee disturbed people because by any measure he should be a successful crypto slash 4x influencer course hustler but instead he chose B to B SaaS and it feels unnatural funny that he's saying B2B

Starting point is 00:48:18 SaaS because the previous the previous post by plant daddy said B to C SaaS and so no one even knows they're doing they're doing both I guess yeah they'll sell to willing buyers at market prices also interesting in the open source world Ian has the story while clearly spent that $15 million on marketing videos. This random guy on Reddit built an open source, the exact same project. Always interesting to see when these open source projects break through, because I remember there was a competitor to Devon, open Devon, that was open sourced and everyone was like Devon's cooked.

Starting point is 00:48:54 But we saw the data, and it seems like Devon's producing tons and tons of GitHub pull requests and has a very different go-to-market motion. And that for a lot of enterprises that are doing replantial, forming of their dot net application to Python, they might not want to use an open source product. They might want to have a team there that's actively improving the project on a daily basis.

Starting point is 00:49:13 And so the open source did not kill Devin in that case. In fact, their more significant competition comes from Open AI and another large enterprise-scaled, you know, $100 billion company, not just some random developer. On the flip side, we saw Deep Seek and Manus come out with open source projects. Manus?

Starting point is 00:49:33 But not quite these like, you know, I just open source didn't made it free. Like deep secret madness, nobody would call it as like true side projects. So it's unclear how much this will affect. At the same time, if you are hesitant about sending screen recordings to clearly, maybe open source is the one that you actually want to run. You want to run this locally because of a privacy issue. But it will be interesting to see whether or not this is a, a factor in Cluley's rollout.

Starting point is 00:50:07 I would be surprised if this is, if this is something that makes a difference to them. I would imagine it's much more about it. Yeah, they're clearly marketing to people that don't know how to run open source software. Yeah, yeah. The thing that was interesting, Gary Tan shared, are people building brands ahead of the tech just to try to hold space right at the moment that the just right models hit.

Starting point is 00:50:31 Somebody named Ethan Ding was highlighting that, that he was comparing Cluelly an icon, both of which have been very controversial. Ethan said, I'm surprised no one's connected Roy Lee's playbook to the icon ad maker, playbook a couple months back, have an unusable product,

Starting point is 00:50:48 dominate Mineshare for potential buyers, buy time for the AI to catch up, to bail you out. I don't, you know, Roy Lee's product is not unusable. We used it on the show Friday. Yep. It worked for the use case

Starting point is 00:51:01 that they advertise the most. Yep. clearly are dominating mind share. The question is, will AI catching up actually enable them to win in the enterprise or these categories? The issue is that the two categories is that Cluelly is going after being effectively like B to C, so like students, and B2B Enterprise, are two categories that ChatGBT is already dominant in. And so the question again is, is are they going to be able to win head to head with Open AI, even if Open AI doesn't have as many viral TikToks being produced in-house?

Starting point is 00:51:42 Yeah, he calls out the risk of churn here. I think that's very real. I think the bigger question is, Cluelly and very much is rapper, but at the same time, it's not trying to compete on the foundation model level. And so if the models get better, clearly should get better. And so you are very much riding the rocket

Starting point is 00:52:02 or riding the wave of technological improvement, which seems like a good strategy. I guess it just keeps coming down to the question of, if this is truly the UI paradigm that people want to interact with ChatGPT through, you would expect the ChatGPT app to launch this. But, you know, who knows? Maybe it gets popular,

Starting point is 00:52:23 and maybe there's other pockets of opportunity that come through. And there's a bunch of, in other news Mark German was reporting over the weekend he said Apple will need to leave its M&A comfort zone to succeed in AI basically calling out that Apple has held various early conversations with different companies like perplexity and thinking machines around potential acquisition people were pressing him saying why perplexity Mark responded which looks like it's an output from chat GPT.

Starting point is 00:53:03 I don't know. It's not. It's not. He actually wrote this. It's got so many M dash. Look how many m dashes it has, though, John. Wait, no, no. I actually, maybe this is from, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:53:13 I'm confused. I can't tell anymore. Yeah, this might be from chat. So he says, a proven consumer ready product. It fills a clear need, a decently sized team, and a reasonable valuation at around 14 billion perplexity wouldn't break the bank. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:29 And the timing, too, is interesting Apple's long-running search deal with Google is under threat from a U.S. antitrust suit. This iPhone maker has to prepare for a post-Google search world, and acquiring perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple-branded search engine. My question about perplexity going to Apple is what is perplexity building on top of that wouldn't be an issue in an Apple acquisition? because I don't think that they trained a foundation model themselves, and I don't think they necessarily wrote a massive web scraper, so I feel like they might be sitting on top of a few APIs that might be renegotiated if all of a sudden Apple's the buyer on the other side. So Google Search or Bing, I think Bing also had for a long time an API

Starting point is 00:54:19 where you could search the web using Bing and resell that as a product. But if Apple's the buyer, it's going to be a different conversation with Microsoft, right? So they use a number of different. They have their sonar family of models. Those are perplexities in-house models. Then they have R1, 1776, which is a deep seek. Then they have a bunch of different third-party models that they use OpenAI, Anthropic, X-AI. So they're routing to a bunch of different, but they say the default model is optimized for speed and web browsing, delivering fast, relevant answers.

Starting point is 00:54:54 So, perplexity has been solid. I use it once a day. I don't know if I... Oh, you do? At least once a day. I don't think, I don't know if I'd use it if I wasn't running the show. But I get value from it day to day. Yep.

Starting point is 00:55:12 I'm not sure if it'll happen. I mean, it certainly makes sense. I posted over the, over the weekend that Siri was a, an acquisition. And so even though Apple has this culture of let's never, let's never acquire anything or let's never, let's build everything in house, everything needs the Apple polish. They do have a lineage of acquisition, although Siri was a much smaller acquisition, a much earlier stage. 200 million. And I think Syria had been around for like a couple of years, kind of similar. And if you think about what a, I mean, it's 100 times. 200 million. And

Starting point is 00:55:54 2010. It's a hundred times as expensive. It is a big, big deal, but still, it's, you know, it could, it could happen. Well, in more important news, the All-in, All-In podcast released their new tequila brand over this weekend in L.A. There was quite a lot of pushback, but I thought the bottle was quite unique. And I would be down to a stack of poker chips. sample it as well. Also people were saying, oh, this is so out of character. But Elon Musk has Tesla tequila and Donald Trump has Trump tequila apparently. And so or liquor brands. I guess Trump has a liquor brand. And so this is this is a proven strategy. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, our second guest technically since we already had that call in.

Starting point is 00:56:46 The CEO of Klarna, welcome to the stream. How are you? What's going on? Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I was just realized the light in here is very, very old, but I hope this is fun. I think you look great. You're good. You're good. Thank you so much. I imagine you had to stay up late for this, so we always appreciate it when someone can do that.

Starting point is 00:57:04 Would you mind getting us? Last man in the office, it looks like. Leading by example. Exactly. This is what your team said. I hope there's some more people here than me. Yeah, no, your team said this about you. They said that you're obsessed with artificial intelligence right now,

Starting point is 00:57:18 obsessed with digging in the weeds, tinkering with stuff. Probably goes back to the early history of the company. Maybe that'd be a good place to start. How did you actually, like, what was the inciting element or the inciting incident that led you to start the company? Wow. Well, so as you may know, I've been at this for longer than many others. So I'm at the 20th year of this venture. An overnight success.

Starting point is 00:57:44 We love an overnight success. We love an overnight success. It's been easy. But I was 23 back then. So I'm not that old yet. 23. Great. Did you ever have a real job?

Starting point is 00:57:54 What? Did you ever have a real job or did you go straight into an entrepreneurship? I had many jobs. I had many jobs. I started working when I was a 15 year old at Burger King, flipping burgers. That's great. Were you any good? Were you any good?

Starting point is 00:58:09 Flipping burgers? Yeah, I think we actually had a competition for like making warpers really fast. No way. With quality. With quality. I think I scored pretty well. That's awesome. So yeah, walk me through.

Starting point is 00:58:23 History of greatness. So 15-year flipping burgers, 23, you're starting a massive tech company that would go on a 20-year run. What happened in between? Very shortly, well, first, for whatever reason, I always dream to be an entrepreneur, kind of an odd thing to do as a kid. My father really wanted me to be a doctor. But I was inspired by Richard Branson and Inver Campra, the founder of IKEA and stuff. And I went to business school, bad idea. I should have learned to code the first thing I did.

Starting point is 00:58:51 but that was a bad idea but anyways um and then you know after a few years of just like testing a lot of different jobs i ended up by a very odd story going around the world without flying coming back too late to continue my university studies and as a consequence ending up as a sales guy at a factoring firm that was doing like account receivos last thing in the world i ever thought i would work with yeah and at that point of time realized there was a lot of these very small newcomer e-commerce companies that were selling stuff online and they needed a better payment solution because their customers didn't trust them, didn't trust that they would ship. So they preferred the idea of buy now, pay later, where you would first receive the product

Starting point is 00:59:35 and then kind of pay for it once you had it. And that was pretty much the beginning of clona. That makes sense. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, walk me through the more recent developments. How big is the company today? So we're about 100 million users worldwide.

Starting point is 00:59:54 We do about $100 billion worth of payments volume annually. There's about half a million merchants. But a lot of them are really large. So there's like Nike, Macy, Sephora, Walmart nowadays. And yeah, what else? On a number of employees, about 3,000 people. Yeah. Wow.

Starting point is 01:00:14 Yeah, what was the initial go-to-market? I seem to remember there were specific dynamics in Europe around cash on delivery being a unique kind of vector into growth. Can you walk me through kind of like what the early go-to-market was and how and it seems like you almost like leapfrogged the technology curve a little bit? Well, the truth is, funny enough, even in the U.S., if you look at the beginning of credit, Bureau's. They actually, a lot of them started as mail order companies where the first credit was provided actually by you shipping a product and asking for cash on delivery. And then the third time you shipped to that same address, you would say, well, this customer seems to have money every time I ship to them. So I'm going to provide them a small credit line. That was actually

Starting point is 01:01:07 the beginning of a lot of credit bureaus, even in the US back in the early 20th century. So I kind of same thing happened across Europe, across the US. So the idea is that the idea of the of doing like cash and delivering and then turning that into credit line based on the performance of that customer always having cash at hand when they were buying those products or paying for those products that they ordered at that point on time mail order catalog orders right um that that actually worked so in the end to us when online came along most people were offering debit card payments and the problem with debit card payments is the customer ships money and then maybe receives what was on that picture that they ordered and so basically offering credit uh not necessarily for the length for

Starting point is 01:01:46 of lending, but more for that kind of security of getting and touching the product before you paid for it. It made a lot of sense, especially in markets where credit cards were not as prevalent as they were in the U.S., right? Yeah. What was the, like, as you were looking at the global map of expansion, what informed, like, where you go next? Like, walk me through the different markets that you had at the top of the list and how you chose to kind of rank those as you expanded. How soon did you know the American consumer was undefeated? And you had to be here.

Starting point is 01:02:22 We like stuff. We like stuff. Yeah, we like to buy stuff. Exactly. Funny enough took a lot of years before we realized the user's market. I mean, first and foremost, like, when we started, you have to remember at that point time, there was one, one globally successful European tech startup. And that was Skype.

Starting point is 01:02:40 That was it. Like Skype was the thing. Everything else had been launched out of Silicon Valley. there was no real European tech success of that size that had like global consumer, you know, recognition, right? And hence to us, it was like, okay, where are we going to go from Sweden? Let's go to the massive market called Finland that is half the size of Sweden because it's very close. I mean, I don't know what it means, right? So we kind of started with expansion in the Nordics, then went to like Germany, which was a huge thing for us, figure that out,

Starting point is 01:03:10 and then went to UK. And we ever, we always thought that we never like figured out, how are we going to come into the U.S. market because credit cards are so prevalent. But the funny thing that we hadn't realized was due to the financial crisis in 2007, there was a lot of regulation introduced that made it much harder to get a credit card. One thing that kind of sounds sane is that credit card companies couldn't advertise in campuses anymore. We just want their most common places to sign up credit card holders. And so there was a lot of that regulation. So it meant that between 2010 and 20, debit cards in the U.S. grew like a credit card volume,

Starting point is 01:03:44 grow about 2x, debit card volume grow 10x. And so actually, rather than us figuring out how to be successful in the US, it was the other way around. The US market became more like the European markets with much higher debit card penetration, where I now pay later and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly

Starting point is 01:04:05 for this new consumers that didn't have credit cards to the same extent or didn't have as much credit limit as they used to have historically, right? Yeah, what was the, to roll out like in Finland, Germany, the U.S., from a regulatory perspective, do you have to get like banking licenses, their approval? Is it mostly like regulatory or are you more focused on the engineering challenges, setting up servers, localization?

Starting point is 01:04:28 All of them. All of them. All of the above. But I think from a regulatory perspective, we quickly identified that it would be a benefit to be fully licensed over time. So about 10 years ago, we did get our bank license and we were fortunate that EU had implemented legislation that meant that you could take your Swedish bank license and passport it across all the European countries, right? So we run on the Swedish bank license,

Starting point is 01:04:53 but it's applicable for all. And it included the UK up until Brexit, right? So that worked for a long period of time. But obviously, technology was an important challenge for us as well. What are the knock-on effects of having a bank license? I talk to fintech founders all the time where it feels like they're in the money moving business, but then you find out they have all this float and they're making a ton of money on on treasury bills or something like that. Is there an aspect of your business where you can actually drive more profit and bottom line on the basis of having that bank license or is that less relevant? And then I want to go from there into stable coins and what's going on and how that might be changing the market.

Starting point is 01:05:35 it. So I think that the, in our case, what you're referencing is kind of funny enough, something we have underutilized the clana, which is the ability to generate the deposits and kind of earn an interest of those deposits, right? Funny enough. And that's something we're addressing right now where we're introducing more products and services in that area. But where the big advantage for us was, if you look at like the history over those 20 years of a lot of fintechs who were credit providers, a lot of them. offloaded their balance sheet and did so effectively up until at some point of time something went wrong in the underwriting model and it turned out that the losses were higher than they expected at

Starting point is 01:06:16 which point of time the people that had taken on their balance sheets realized that they wanted to shift the liability back to the fintech but the fintech was not capital-wise equipped to take that on meaning that like their valuations either collapsed or the whole thing went bankrupt so and this happened over and over again, if you look at a lot of the fintechs over the last 20 years. In our case, the benefit of having deposits is we are a bank. We're fairly capitalized as a bank. We need to hold the same capital that any large bank needs to do in comparison to our balance sheet.

Starting point is 01:06:50 And it means that we're much better equipped. Like even if our losses go up and down or whatever, it doesn't change the sentiment of our balance sheet. It doesn't mean that we can dry up funding. We're not dependent on the funding in the market. The whole thing that went down in 07, right, which was the problem. We're basically, we only have deposits and that are insured by the government and so forth. So it gives us a much more stable way of funding the bank, basically.

Starting point is 01:07:14 Then on stable coins, is there any benefit to you there? We've heard stories about lower fees and faster payments. And obviously there's a massive, you know, the frequency of payments across the Claren Network is massive. Are you looking at it? Have you already looked at it? What's your takeaway on stable coins or the genius act that, well, seems on the customer passing. We've had Fintech CEOs on the show that have said, actually, traditional banking rails

Starting point is 01:07:41 can be pretty awesome if you utilize them properly. So curious, I think that the, I have been one of the cryptosceptics for a long period of time. And the reason for that is when like I started playing around this stuff in 10 years ago, I felt that, you know, I always asked myself, like, how is this technology going to make my mom's life better? Like, how is it going to make our products and our customers experience better? And I didn't really see any benefits. fits of the technology, apart from the fact that people have been speculating that it's an

Starting point is 01:08:10 interesting asset and alternative asset to hold, right, like Bitcoin or whatever. But then I gave it a second chance, a second look now about a year ago, started looking at next generation of stable coin implications and implementations. And I very much agree with the fact that like now the technology is showing strong promise, both in its speed, in its cost, et cetera, such a versus the traditional bank rates, especially obviously obviously obviously in intent. international transfers in corridors that are more like, you know, you're moving money from like UK to US. You're probably not going to make that big of a difference. But if you're moving money from, you know, Brazil to let's say Greece.

Starting point is 01:08:47 Oh, sorry, that was a Euro country. Stupid idea. Stupid suggestion. But another one, which with a smaller currency, you're going to have a very real benefit of it. Right. So I think that stable cons definitely are going to be a major thing. I think also like crypto is here to stay and the bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets, right, that people find our interesting assets in their portfolio. So I don't think that's going to change either any time soon. Yeah, I'm always interested in in where the value will accrue with these technological shifts, specifically like with stable coins, you can imagine if you're going from two day settlement

Starting point is 01:09:20 to instant settlement, well, if the customer would accept one day settlement, all of a sudden you have one day afloat that's going to sit there that you could kind of keep as your own margin and maybe putting T-bills and maybe it gets to be a big number. And so I've been, I've been, I've, I've been kind of trying to understand their, like when their time is money and when, you know, when time decreases and systems get faster, you can pass all of that along. You can pass half of it along. And there's different things that different companies can do based on the consumer. Right.

Starting point is 01:09:54 I think you're totally right. But that also means that in some degree, which is something I tell my investors, right, it's a race to the bottom. Like this payments industry has had a, you know, combined revenue globally addressable market of like $2 trillion or whatever. It's not going to stay that way. There's no real good reason why it's more costly to send money than send an email, right? There's a little bit more risk involved. There's a little bit more like, you know, security involved.

Starting point is 01:10:21 But in essence, you're just like shifting data between two accounts. And so like in some to some degree that like that those kind of solutions will drive. And that also means that the revenue generated from these services will be significantly lower than it is today. What's your broad, not to go too broad, but I'm curious to get your broad market outlook right now. You have this interesting view into consumers, companies all over the world. It's a very interesting time right now. We have geopolitical instability. We have, you know, and effectively war.

Starting point is 01:10:55 We have tariffs, trade wars, all happening at once. yet at the same time, you know, we've seen circles when public and is now trading higher, I guess higher than Coinbase, you know, so it seems like the general excitement around capital marches on. Yeah, capital is marching on. But yeah, how are you thinking about markets broadly from your view? To me, from my perspective, because of kind of the deep, interest that I've taken into AI and tried to understand the implications on how to apply the technology, I am very much convinced that it will have implications on white-collar jobs. Effectively, you can have like economical swings that, you know, recession, non-rescession,

Starting point is 01:11:42 it may, you know, higher inflation, higher cost pressure and so forth may have some implications for consumers' sentiment of spending and, you know, I don't like I'm going to spend a bit more, I mean, spend a little bit less and so forth. But the, but the true life-changing moment that affects people's true ability to pay back, right, is to a large degree loss of jobs, right? If you lose your job, then it severely impacts your ability to do so. I think that the key question now is to what degree we're going to see an acceleration of loss of jobs among white-collar people, which in itself then potentially leads to a recession and less spending in that group of people, which is obviously a group of people that have had a lot of money.

Starting point is 01:12:24 So I think that's the area that I'm like mostly, because, Because the tariffs so far obviously have been announced and kind of changed and then announced again and changed and so forth. And now it almost feels like if I look at our merchants when the first tariffs were announced on Labor Day, they really did adjust their marketing spending. We saw changes in the transaction volumes. We saw, for example, some of the larger Chinese companies that we work with would shift their marketing spending from U.S. to Europe and would try to offset more of their inventory in the European market as opposed to the U.S. market, et cetera. But as now also like there's been more and more like turbulence around these things, people start also discounting it. Say like, yeah, it was announced this week, but who knows what's going to happen next week?

Starting point is 01:13:05 And so we're not going to draw too early conclusions from this. We're not going to change, you know, the business of what we're doing until we know it's for real, right? And until this actually going to happen. So I don't actually see currently in the trends the direct implications of terrorists themselves in our business. But and I'm more just like they're trying to second guess if I'm going to see a. major change in the in job. And what are you tracking on the job side? The other thing is you're kind of hedged in some way and that I think people would be more

Starting point is 01:13:35 likely to use Klarna if they have, if they, you know, in some ways have reduced spending capacity or, you know, more likely to leverage a product. I'm curious, just getting, getting, you know, more specific around this. What is your updated hiring strategy throughout the net the rest of this year and next year? What are you hiring, what areas are you hiring in or kind of shifting away from? So we, about almost now two years ago, after experimenting with Chachybati and so forth for a few months, our conclusion was that this will lead, this will change our ability to get more done with less people. And that we believed that in an AI world, revenue per employee will be a very key metric.

Starting point is 01:14:23 because the higher revenue you have per employee, the more profit you make per employee means that you can spend more on marketing, means that you can acquire more customers, which you can scale more. So if you have a low revenue for customer, you'll be less competitive, basically. And so for us, the question then was, how do we catch those efficiency gains? And so we decided to stop hiring about two years ago. At that point of time, we were about 5,500 people. And since then, we shrank to about 3,000 employees that we are currently, which is basically through natural attrition. because, you know, in a tech company, about 20% will leave on an annual basis voluntarily

Starting point is 01:14:58 because they're going for other jobs or their opportunities. And so by just being very strict in not rehiring, we have been able to shrink down the company and continue to do so. Now, we've hired a little bit. It doesn't mean that we haven't hired at all. We've hired in some areas and so forth. But if you look at the net, you can see that we've shrank from about 5,500 to the 3,000. And then what we also done is internally, we've been very honest and open about this.

Starting point is 01:15:23 And we've communicated to our employees that what's going to happen is the gains, because obviously this means our labor cost is shrinking, while our revenue actually has been growing, right? So revenue as a consequence of that, our revenue per MP went from about 400K to about over a million now, which is kind of equivalent to where Goldman's back is. Now next step, yeah, thanks. Next step is kind of, you know, Apple, Netflix being at $2 million. I sometimes joke because like only fans is it like $30 million.

Starting point is 01:15:52 dollars. Don't go there. Don't look at Tether. Don't look at Tether will have you looking at net income per employee. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not sure that's a great, the comparison you want to have. But the thing is that like the anyway, so we are continuing down that path. And the point is that what we've communicated internally, however, is that as the total labor cost shrinks, we are reinvesting that in an acceleration of compensation for our existing. And So as they participate in the efficiency gains, we have been able to accelerate both equity and cash compensation at Klaana to our existing employees more than we had in previous years. And that's kind of a way for them to share the benefits with the shareholders of the efficiency

Starting point is 01:16:37 gains that this creates. So if you're a new, if you're a new grad and you want to get a job at Klarna and make a career out of it, maybe be there for 20 years and earn a lot of stock and cash over a great run. Come for your job, maybe. cover your job. What should a new grad do? Should they learn prompt engineering?

Starting point is 01:16:57 Should they learn to vibe code or program? Or should they be focused all on networking and management skills and people skills and the things that the robots seem to be mediocre at? I think very clearly is there's one area where we have not reduced number of people at whole and that's sales. In our case, I mean like B2B enterprise sales. So we have people locally on the ground. across the world in over 50 offices, you know, whether they sit in China next to

Starting point is 01:17:26 to Xi'an and TikTok and so forth, or whether they sit in Portland next to Nike or whether they are in, you know, somewhere on the East Coast or in parts of Europe. And those obviously, there's no like immediate expectations that those are affected by this, right? Rather the opposite. Like that human connection in customer relationship is super important. I've never seen a chat GPT have a power lunch and a steak dinner. Exactly. It's impossible. So we get better humanoid.

Starting point is 01:17:57 But on the rest of the jobs, actually been quite interesting because for a period of time now, we said, okay, let's stop hiring all other competences than engineering. So if you look at that 5,500, of them 1,500 were engineers. Today, of the 3,000, 1,500 are engineers. So actually the number of engineers have kept the same, while it's all the other like marketing, you know, analytics, whatever. whatever it might be, that shrank. Now, with that said, however, in the last like months, because of the acceleration of Claude code and, you know, and cursor and all these tools, what you're seeing is now is a group internally at Clana who are like a few hundred business people that in the last two years have, you know, learned how to code. Not necessarily like the most complex things,

Starting point is 01:18:43 but inspect code, understand code, interact with code, but doing so with having all the business knowledge, understanding what the customer wants, understanding a lot of things that engineers sometimes have struggled with. Like they can't articulate why we're building the product for what purpose for how it's going to solve customer needs and so forth. And they've been maybe sometimes more focused on just like latency or technical implications or, you know, et cetera. So I kind of see a convergence now of the truly kind of renaissance people that are kind of, you know, on both sides that can understand the code, but can also understand the business. Those are the ones that are now truly becoming the most productive in my opinion.

Starting point is 01:19:18 What is your framework for buying AI tools versus building AI tools internally? Right. So we have been fairly vocal about the fact that, you know, as part of acceleration of AI clon, one of the first thing that we can do, you don't remember chat GPT came along. There was this like, hey, I can now connect all my PDFs to chat chypD, you know? And like, and people were like, oh, that's awesome. The only problem with that is that like the truth in data modeling and data science is always, It's been like shit in, shit out, right?

Starting point is 01:19:50 So if you feed it tons of like internal stuff that is contradicting, inconsequential, not truthful, whatever, it's just going to get lost, right? Just like some of our MPs get lost when they start navigating the internal workings of flana. So the first thing that we realized is we can't silo the data anymore. We have to have a common data model. And that meant that we started removing software as a service providers. So we close down Salesforce workday. I think the next big one that would go is at Lashian, Jira and so forth. But then there's also like a long amount of smaller software as a service vendors that we have utilized.

Starting point is 01:20:32 So actually, if you kind of counted in total, there's over 1,500 that we have closed down in the last two years. Now, obviously some of them are like super small, like some plug-in to Jira or whatever. It's not like every one of them is like a tremendously big software as a service application. And then we've kind of harmonized and standardized our data layers so that we have one data that we can then let the LLM interpret and run on top of, allowing us to do more with less, right? So currently, there are a few things that we will use 11 labs for voice. We will use specific people that are really proficient. We use a company called Full Story that's fantastic to kind of catch user interaction. So there's some places where we just found like this software is so strong that there's really no meaning in like trying to replace it.

Starting point is 01:21:25 But a lot of traditional SaaS may have just been a database with some nice UI and some data and some process logic on top of. And that is easier to replicate today. And it's not easy, but it's easier. And the problem is if it's spread out, it's inconsistent. And we need it to be consistent for both humans and LM to make sense out of it. Well, this is fantastic. This is super interesting. I feel like we should talk regularly about the situation with white collar workers and just the advance of AI tooling. There's so many interesting things where you have a unique insight because of your position. Last question for me before we jump. Do you think cookies hurt conversion rates across Europe? Yeah, just the fact, just generally.

Starting point is 01:22:15 Well, generally, generally, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could spend half an hour. But generally, like, the more clicks you need on a website to get to the eventual purchase, you know, the worst, the conversion rate. Maybe that's why the American consumer is outperforming. Yeah, it's just purely technicality. I think the challenge of GDPR, which is the legislation that led to those, that cookie, sorry, a shit show is that the problem was it came from a very, very good principle an idea. And that is that we as users should own and control our data,

Starting point is 01:22:51 not the companies, right? And if you think about it, when a few years ago, WhatsApp, there was some rumors that they have updated the terms of use and now there was so much more privacy infringing and everyone should shift, right? Now, how many people really shift to telegram or whatever? Not enough, right? Why? Because at the center, the way it should have is you should have been able to go to WhatsApp with a click of a button, extract all the data, all your contacts, all your messages, and be able to then feed them into telegram or, you know, signal or whatever your choice of preference would have been.

Starting point is 01:23:27 That would have been true customer mobility. And that was the purpose of GDPR is to allow that customer mobility. But because the legislation wasn't implemented thoughtfully enough, that hasn't materialized. because in that world where you had 100% customer mobility, the point is if you lost trust in WhatsApp as a provider of your primary chat messages, you would have instantly been able to move to something else. And the fear of losing all your users in such a very mobile world where everyone could move

Starting point is 01:23:59 would have forced WhatsApp to be concerned about privacy and not just speak that they are concerned about privacy, right? So like I think that, and that was the only. original intent, but then it was implemented with these cookies, which actually creates the opposite, which is that like we're just tired of accepting cookies. I don't want to go to a new website because then I have to click again on 55. Like the people that the people that wanted these kind of laws had the right intentions, but the implementations are horrendous and actually cause the opposite, which is less customer mobility, people less willing to shift services and try different things.

Starting point is 01:24:36 And funny enough, are hence playing into the hands of the same companies that they were annoyed with for infringing on our privacy. Because as that creates just like the bigger success of these big tech companies, full customer mobility, they're being able to take your data with you and go wherever you want is the key to creating a better competitive internet, where companies actually have to compete on creating more value for you as a customer rather than locking you up and locking your data up. and then, you know, creating models that just forces you to use the same thing. Makes sense. Makes sense. Thank you for joining.

Starting point is 01:25:14 It's fantastic. Thank you for having you guys. Thank you for an amazing pod. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Cheers, Sebastian. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously,

Starting point is 01:25:24 multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions folks. And they're the sponsor of Aston Martin F1. That's right. Public.com. Head over. We have our next guest in the studio already. We have John Chu from Coastal Ventures.

Starting point is 01:25:38 What's going on? Welcome to the show. Good of here. It's great to have you. We didn't prepare at all, which is the part of the beauty of our show. We just come in. You're live. We'll do it live.

Starting point is 01:25:51 The show biz. It's great to have you. I've got a bunch of questions. You're always getting spicy on the timeline. We'll talk through a bunch. But why don't you introduce yourself, quick background, what you're doing at Kosa, all that good stuff. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:05 So I'm John. I'm one of the partners here at KV. I do a lot of technical things. So basically anything I've really written code on in the past, so like data infrastructure, dev tools, a lot of AI stuff from foundation models and the app layer, if I really understand what it does, right? Yeah. Awesome. Let's get right into it. What did you read, what are you reading into the news around DG potentially going to meta and all that. Was that a surprise to you? What can you talk about there?

Starting point is 01:26:42 Yeah. So it was a big surprise. I actually say like the funny thought that came to mind when I first heard the rumor was like, should I be buying meta options? Because does that mean like Zuck got Ilya, right? And then that gets announced and meta just jumps. But like, look, it's pretty obvious what's going on here is that there's a giant market in AI, right? Open AI kind of proves that.

Starting point is 01:27:03 The pie is huge. And Zuck has a shot on goal. And Zuck is not someone that likes to lose shots on goals. So if he has to pay up to get the best talent that he thinks that can actually compete, he doesn't even have to win. You don't have to beat Open Aad. You just to be number two. If he can get there, billions of dollars is worth it.

Starting point is 01:27:20 Right. So like all of this makes sense when you think of it through the lens of like Facebook is a giant company, a billion dollars, five billion dollars. That's a drop in the bucket. If you take on this new market that ends up dominating. And the last thing he wants to be is like Microsoft and his phones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think about the phone story?

Starting point is 01:27:40 At one point, Facebook was working on a phone. And maybe the lesson that Zuck learned is that he should have put more resources into that instead of not try to do it at all. I'm wondering because there's all these different stories, VR, he's investing way ahead of adoption. Reels, he was a little bit behind. but wound up rolling out a product that I believe produces tons of profit. And so it was totally worth investing in and taking the shot at building out all those data centers to do the recommendation algorithms. So yeah, I mean, what other examples do you think we should be pulling from from the meta history? Or do you think that might be relevant here?

Starting point is 01:28:21 Well, I mean, there's basically two things to know about meta, right? One is that they are fantastic fast followers. They either buy or they copy. like Snapchat is a fantastic example of that where like the stories literally like that was a team that just copied stories and just executed better. So like if anything, Facebook is an execution machine and they are able to pull that off. And then the second takeaway is Zuck is willing to date bets. So like I think Oculus, the acquisition and the whole metaverse is a great example of that. And you don't win all of them, right? But like I think on the upside, he's willing.

Starting point is 01:29:01 one more of them in terms of like call it shareholder value than he's lost so this is just another one of those yeah and this one i think he has extremely strong conviction behind more so than you like the fact that AI is already doing real things in the real world that actually are impacting enterprises and impacting real people gives you a significantly higher confidence bar than like the metaverse bet totally to have significantly more confidence here i was talking to like a at windsurf who like runs their field engineering team and he was like oh you know I talked to his enterprise and they're like we're gonna buy like 2,500 wind surf licenses because this was fantastic and those guys he's like why you should buy 5,000 because like you

Starting point is 01:29:45 have 5,000 engineers and he's like yeah we're not going to have 5,000 engineers because of windsurf we're gonna have 2,500 engineers like wow it's actually doing real things yeah yeah how how can meta benefit broadly from AI not in the just found in the foundation model game or image generation or things like that. We've talked about just getting slightly better at AI across the entire organization can have tremendous benefits on just improving delivery of ads and these sort of like basic things you were working on ML at Facebook back in the day. So I'm sure you have some strong insights. Well, so I think like there's a few layers here. If you start from the product level. The obvious is that there's new products that are going to be built, right?

Starting point is 01:30:33 There's the whole like Joniive and. Simulini-A-I thing, right? And that's some kind of hardware thing. We're all guessing. That's probably a new product. And if you just take the lens of like, if this technology in five years gets significantly better, I have a bunch of hardware products inside of meta. I can add more. I have a great research team that knows how to build great hardware. I know how to handle this supply chain. What can I build? There's like random upside there in products. If you go back to the current Facebook suite, there's meta AI is like already doing a lot of this, but you have chat apps, you have messenger, you have WhatsApp, right? Like you can already do chatting in there. You have a

Starting point is 01:31:14 great Lama model. If you have chat GPT in there, you can just pull them into conversations and already add value. That increases engagement. That increases ads views, right? That's that's automatic money there. And then if you go back to where I worked, like in ads models, there's a, you're seeing less of it with generated by today mainly because everything is doing attention on sequences and ads like ranking models are a little bit different. But people are already applying research to different layers of the ads models. And like if you have a 1% uptick in ad score, that's like a billion dollars. Actually, it's like a percentage increase in revenue. So like a billion dollars today in the future, one percent is going to be.

Starting point is 01:31:54 be like $10 billion, right? If Facebook goes tax. And there's some really interesting research there. Like I have a port code that I invested in actually was a distinguished adj at Facebook or at meta. And like he's kind of got some technology that's a foundation model for ranking where you really just don't need any feature engineering. And I saw another company this morning, which is the same. That's like that rips out giant pieces of infrastructure has like automatic increase in ad score ranking. And you can like fire all your ML engineer. You probably don't want to do that. But like you can fire those of the ML engineers at Facebook, like, that's gigantic, right? That kind of stuff is going to happen.

Starting point is 01:32:29 I mean, the time scale is a question, but it's going to happen over time. Do you think that the UI paradigm around AI's interface with social networking is defined enough? I'm thinking of the example of Snapchat and Facebook and Instagram stories. It was very clear that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat did enough of the experimentation to define how vertical disappearing. video and images would be distributed on social networks and then Facebook was able to adapt that and adopt that and bake it into Instagram. When I think of what big tech companies, which of the Mag 7 is most closely cheating off of ChatGPT's homework, it feels like it's Gemini and the Gemini app feels much more directly competitive to the ChatGPT app. I would be surprised if Facebook

Starting point is 01:33:21 or meta or Instagram tries to stuff an entire chat GPT experience into the fifth panel on the hamburger menu. So I'm wondering, like, is there, is the story of meta's AI rollout really just about ad optimization or are we actually going to see it instantiated in different UI and like interaction paradigms? You're going to see it everywhere. Ads is just an obvious place. You get a win, right? Yeah. But like, you're going to see it. Actually, someone might stick it in a tab somewhere. If I know anything about Facebook having been there, like, if the number goes up and to the right, they'll do it. So, like that might happen.

Starting point is 01:34:01 But like I said, inside of Messenger and WhatsApp, I think there's going to be lots and lots of usage there. And if you think about it, like, people ask this question. I was actually a little confused at first. They're like, why did you pay $15 billion for what it sounds like just Alex Wong, right? Like, that's my guy. And then you think about it for a bit and you're like, okay, well, what makes Open AI open AI? like, yes, there's great tech, but Sam, like, Sam actually runs that thing. And Sam makes it successful.

Starting point is 01:34:27 And then, like, if you ask anyone in why, even Paul Graham is like, okay, if you had to pick someone again, that's like a top founder inside the YCE network, that's not Sam, who would you pick? Even Paul Graham says Alex. So like, if you're looking at products inside of Facebook or even outside of Facebook, like pick the guy, right? Yep. Yeah, I mean, it feels like a really, really strong, like total reset of meta's AI strategy, bringing and three absolute hitters and turn them loose on whatever the next phase is, Jan Lacoon was there for kind of the research,

Starting point is 01:34:59 like journey and the research part of the AI story. Now we're in the application story, and so go get the managers, right? How much should people read into, again, this is all alleged. I don't think it's been confirmed that DG is joining meta yet, but rumored. How much should people be reading, into the CEO of SSI leaving to work at Meta and using that to inform their general timelines,

Starting point is 01:35:31 right? You know, if we were on the cusp of developing superintelligence in two years, maybe you wouldn't leave billions of dollars on the table at a company that had the potential of cracking that. Even getting a billion dollars-ish liquid at Meta, it's great. Still, I think it's hard not to read into the move if it happens. I have no knowledge here. I don't know Dan well enough to know what his what his kind of thoughts behind us are and what drove the decision right. But like I can say honestly for myself, working with Ilya would be like an amazing dream

Starting point is 01:36:12 and it's kind of amazing to do. At the same time, like SSI is a pure research lab. So it's not like Open AI where Sam is over here trying to build products. It's a pure research lab. And I don't know if that's what Dan actually finds fun and also like what he actually excels at. Versus like meta also has a giant research lab, tons of opportunity and like unlimited GPs and money. Right. And distribution to scale products.

Starting point is 01:36:41 And get data and get data to feed them back in the models. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. This is like distribution. everyone underweights that. All these gems that come out of Facebook and pitch me, the thing they always miss is like, no, distribution is not trivial for you at Facebook,

Starting point is 01:36:56 but it's like not a person for a world. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you got a billion people to, you know, click on your new button. It's like, that'll be a lot harder when you're starting from zero. Do you think, I want to talk about Apple? Yeah, I was going to say,

Starting point is 01:37:06 do you think Apple will make a big bet here? There were conversations reporting over the weekend. You're talking about Tim Cook going to meta to get a pay bump? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he's barely scraping by it at Apple. He's making $75 million. Under 75. He could probably double that if he went over to meta.

Starting point is 01:37:20 Yeah, something there. No, but do you expect Apple to make a big bet here? There was, you know, rumors over the weekend of reporting that they had spoken to perplexity and thinking machines. Do you think they, do you think that they're willing to make a big investment? You know, Siri over 10 years ago was 200 million. That's like an AI seed round for ants these days. So I'm curious.

Starting point is 01:37:45 Man, seed rounds are so expensive. You're like, don't remind me. Dude, I've been priced out of almost every round in AI research I've tried to do this year. There have been a few exceptions, but like it's not like I'm priced out by a small amount. It's like 2x my price or whatnot. How are you even underwriting an AI research bet these days? Are you pulling out a spreadsheet and building the market size? Or is it just like, based on the vibe of this founder, I'd pay 50, but the price came back at 100?

Starting point is 01:38:16 I get in the glory and go to the future and then I figure out if it's actually going to work. Yep. That's good. It's basically you got to underwrite the team and then the opportunity size. That's really all you can do. I mean, that's basically what we did when we did Sikana. Yeah, I was going to ask about Sikana, the Japanese language model. Very cool company.

Starting point is 01:38:36 But that like today it's even worse is like that's really all you can do. Yeah. And then part of it's like if the price is just not there given the confidence interval, then like you got to step back. Right. Yeah. At the same time, I mean, the SSI deal, the scale idea, like it feels like it's potentially easier than ever to get taken care of as an investor. Even if you overpaid and did a seat at 300, like the MAG 7 has money to spend on multi-billion dollar acquisitions. Like a lot of these crazy looking deals might get rolled up.

Starting point is 01:39:08 But I don't know how many of these there will be. Like you have to be backing a founder like an Alex Wong or like a, you know, Nat, Dan to even have that on the table. Yeah, if you back a generational entrepreneur, you'll have a little bit of a safety now. But they have to be. I mean, yeah, it's funny. We don't typically underwrite to acquisitions, right?

Starting point is 01:39:30 We only underwrite a Kansas company IPO. And I think most investors do that. If you think about it too, there's like seven of the nine seven. So like, thoughts on goal is like not really an investment. You're going to put like 200 Moe Post on, right? Yeah. That being said, I made this, it was a half joke when we were looking at one of these hot rounds in the seed rounds. I was like, you know what we should do?

Starting point is 01:39:52 Like, we should just invest now and then sell it the next round. It'd be like the best fire on the planet. And Minot like looks at me dead. And he's part of me. He looks at me dead. And he's just like, you'd be a great hedge fund manager. We don't do that here. Yeah, that's great.

Starting point is 01:40:05 I think it's a good strategy for angels, to be honest. The angels are the only, the check sizes are lower. You can get a quick 10x and sell in three months. Yeah, would you rather a $4 billion SPAC or a $14 billion aqua hire on your, on your ROI? Yeah. I see it's back again, too. I got pitched a SPAC recently. Wait, why are they pitching you a SPAC?

Starting point is 01:40:26 They're like, hey, got any port codes? Then he wanted us in the pipe. But I was like, wow, there's SPACs now. They're coming back. Wow. What's your updated thinking on memory as a lock-in and a moat for different model providers and app? App layer companies, you had been, it sounds like you've been pitched by a bunch of like

Starting point is 01:40:48 plaid for memory type companies you've been posting about this. What's your kind of framework there? I still don't have a clear view, to be honest. I think it is a move. So, you look at all of the model providers, they need different ways to keep their customers coming back to them versus going to other model providers. And memory is one way to do it. If you have enough history on the person, you can tailor recommendations, tailor responses, et cetera, et cetera, right? You've seen this play isn't like the first time someone's done this. Like, I think the best example of a data mode is effectively Google and search. It's literally like, oh, I get so much search data that I can do better ads and make a better

Starting point is 01:41:32 product. And then like no one on the planet can get more search data than me because I am the best. You all come to me and you give me more data, right? So it's kind of the same play. at the same time, like, I see why users want this memory thing of like, oh, I can like shift memory from Open AI over to like Anthropic. But then like I have the same question of like, well, why would Open AI let you do that? Like, why is Google going to let you take their data and give it to like thing, right? Just like not going to happen. So I still don't see what the outside function is where like an anthropic or an opening eye would be gained for that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:08 That makes sense. I mean, this seems like the entire dynamic is that it's a good idea, but customers won't demand it. It's the same dynamic as, you know, should I be able to, we're having this discussion back in like 2010 about like Google's walled garden. Like, can I export all my Google data or all my Facebook data and just give it to Google to get better ads? Like that potentially, but no one's demanding that from the customer side. And so it'll never happen from the from the B2B side. Yeah, are you worried in general about, you know, there's been a bunch of different app layer companies. that are kind of B2B players that are building products that ultimately will just potentially

Starting point is 01:42:43 be built into things like the Google suite, right, and happen where you can get sort of these sort of fast revenue ramp, something like a calendar leave, and then ultimately just get added as a functionality to core Google workspace or teams functionality. Yeah. So this is kind of funny. This is like one of those questions that keeps coming up is like started with like GPT wrappers where it's like, oh, my startup is going to die. And now it's like, oh, what's inside the space of these model companies?

Starting point is 01:43:11 And the answer is like, you need some story for defensibility. And I actually don't understand why this is so hard for people to rock because like, this has been the history of technology forever is like, yes, there's tech. Tech eventually gets eroded. Like what stays along that gives you defensibility? Is it like community? Is it some kind of open source thing? Is it like workflow locking?

Starting point is 01:43:30 There's like these moats that have existed forever that everyone knows about. And for some reason, because the word AI is here, like entrepreneurs and and VC's just like forget about the existing notes. They're like, yeah, this is like something different and new. And it's like, no, it's not. It's just like technology like before. Right. So that's really the story is like, yes, things will get eaten.

Starting point is 01:43:49 And like, yes, you're already, I've seen plenty of companies get killed that are shallow GPT rappers. And I'm seeing some actually deep like technical modes getting overrun by opening eye and Anthropic. And you just need the story on like, okay, how do I get to something defensible? and can I get there in time? What do you think about these new generation of startups? Some of them are in AI where it seems like the efforts of the team are like 90% marketing and they're really, really good at getting a ton of attention and they're being very noisy and Gary Tan was kind of framing it as like maybe they're trying to win in distribution

Starting point is 01:44:36 and then kind of hold on to the attention until the AI models pick up. It feels like it's almost like a necessary evil of the current market and how fast things move that if you want to accelerate revenue and kind of live up to the standards of the day, you have to be very, very noisy online. But do you see this as like a counter signal, or do you think that there's something where maybe this is around to stay? It's not necessarily a counter signal.

Starting point is 01:45:05 like it's the same as like when we pick companies if you're too early you're wrong right same thing for founders here is like some of these founders are fantastic especially like these like younger founders are fantastic at getting attention yeah and I think historically with any company any movie any like pop star any type of hits eventually the attention wanes right yeah so So really, it's a timing thing of like, I need the attention to translate into customers. And if my product's not there, I'm going to see churn. Yeah. So how long can I capture attention?

Starting point is 01:45:46 Does that overlap before my product actually doesn't have churn? If I have enough timeline in the middle and I timed it right, then I win. Yep. And if I don't, then I lose, right? Yep. It's like pretty much that simple. It's like, it's simple to say. It's not an easy game to play.

Starting point is 01:45:58 But if you play it correctly, you have a giant company. Yeah, yeah. The organic attention getting, it seems like a. a really great go-to-market or like early beachhead, but it doesn't feel like a sustainable flywheel versus some of the other permanent go-to-market motions or like viral loops that drive, you know, meta to beat earnings every year for decades or something like that.

Starting point is 01:46:21 It can get you into one, right? Exactly. Yeah, it's an opportunity. Yeah, it gets you the shot on goal where as a lot of entrepreneurs that are maybe those PMs that say, I'm gonna get distribution and they just put out a press release and they're like, where did all the customers go?

Starting point is 01:46:34 I don't have any clicks on my button. So yeah, it is kind of a necessary thing. There was a market map a while back showing all the different venture funds, investing in all the different labs. You guys at KOSLA are OpenAI purists, so passed on, I'm sure, had the opportunity to invest in all the different, you know, Anthropic, XAI, cohere, all these different players. Talk about kind of that, was that always an intentional decision? Is it let's stick to Venture's roots and have our bet?

Starting point is 01:47:07 Or was it sort of a lucky ability to just be in, you know, the breakout winner that's the lab and the consumer app? And so, you know, talk through that decision-making process and maybe kind of insights from different partner meetings. I don't know if we've ever like discussed this intentionally until we kind of came to the like opening eyes it thing. But I think it happens kind of organically. Or you work with a founder, you work with a team, you have giant breakthroughs and giant wins,

Starting point is 01:47:40 you own enough of a company where, like, their success is basically your success. And it kind of looks like they're going to win it anyways. Like, I mean, we had this back and forth on Twitter, I know, but, like, Keith was kind of like, yeah, I don't think another Transformers based or another, like, foundation model company is going to be a great VC return outside of acquisitions. and it's kind of like, yeah, how are you going to be at Open AI? Like, it's quite hard. They have distribution.

Starting point is 01:48:11 They have marketing brand. They can have a shittier product and they probably still win this, right? So like, and they have money. Money is actually very important in this game because of GPUs. So it's both the like, we bet on this horse. We love this team. We work very great with them, very closely with them. There's like symbiotic value here.

Starting point is 01:48:28 And also like they're probably going to win this. Yeah. Yeah. We'd love to have you. What are you, last question, what are you expecting out of, are you expecting to see ads in various LLMs, consumer apps this year? I'm sure you've been pitched people saying, I'm going to build an ad network for LLMs. I'm sure you have opinions on that as well. But what are you expecting to see out of the next year?

Starting point is 01:48:52 A big question I have is, will the average American pay for their favorite LLM three years from now? I've been trying to figure that out or will it just sort of, you know, go closer and closer to free over time? I don't actually know. Like, I think. What do you mean? You're a VC. You should have a crystal ball on your desk, you know? I like technology.

Starting point is 01:49:16 And I think there's many ways to monetize this and people will try all of them. So, like, are there going to be like ads? Yes, people will try it. I mean, like, Arvin, Nova complexity already said he was going to try it, right? So we're going to see that at some point. Yeah. If it's going to be the model that works, who knows? But it is like a nice tried and true model, right?

Starting point is 01:49:35 So there's a good probability that it does work for some set of products. I saw somebody, somebody had a pretty viral post last week saying, I'm so sick of being asked to sign up for different services across the whole internet. And then what's his name at Antonio at Coinbase was like, I'll tell you a model for this, you're not going to like it. That's ads. Anyways, thank you for joining. Appreciate all the insights and welcome back anytime.

Starting point is 01:50:07 Yeah, this is fine. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you, guys. This was fun. Have a good one. Cheers, John. Bye. Until you can buy ads in chat, GPT,

Starting point is 01:50:16 you've got to stick to ads out of home. Out of the home. Out of the home. Using adquick.com advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology. of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the studio, Tom Mueller from Impulse Space.

Starting point is 01:50:36 I'll be right back. I will handle the intro. Cool. Tom, how are you doing? We are bringing him in in just a second to give you more background on Impulse. I met Tom, oh, it must have been two and a half years ago. Legend in the space community worked at SpaceX. also a car aficionado who engaged with my post about the Kugin test, which of course is the challenge to have a

Starting point is 01:51:08 humanoid robot step into a Dodge Viper ACR and lap the Nureberg ring in under seven minutes. It's been done by a human in seven minutes in one second and a few milliseconds. It's an extremely difficult challenge requiring physical endurance of the G-forces, but also a bunch of dexterity. and obviously image processing. And I was talking to a bunch of AI folks about how long it will be until humanoids are actually at that level where they could do something like that.

Starting point is 01:51:36 And it took, I think the consensus was around 2045, something like that. Anyway, Tom, great to meet you. I don't think it'll take that long, was it? How long do you think it'll take? This is a great question. I don't, when you take fear out. Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a big one. I don't know, you've done a lot more laps than I have.

Starting point is 01:51:53 So please. Because what do you think? Haven't they already shown that flight or aircraft can beat a human and, you know, in dogfight? So yes. So the difference there is that I, I'm adding the challenge of the Dodge Viper ACR must be stock. And so the humanoid must operate three pedals and the stick shift and the steering wheel. And that's a lot more challenging than just plugging into the steering column and, you know, controlling it. you do with a Tesla or Waymo.

Starting point is 01:52:27 And so I think that adds a wrinkle, but I don't know, 2045, 2035, it's clearly going to happen. But that's a good way to say that you're bullish about humanoid robotics. Yeah. Do you anticipate that human robotics will have an impact on your business in the next decade in terms of maybe manufacturing or something even more narrow scope? Certainly manufacturing. Sure. I think for manufacturing robotics

Starting point is 01:52:54 are doing help you have. But I think, you know, I think humans should explore space, but it's really expansive and dangerous to put humans in space. So if you really want to like, you know, use the economies of space, I think it's going to take a lot of robotics. So I'm bullish about robotics. We got to put

Starting point is 01:53:10 a Nureberg ring on Mars and then ship the light on the moon, which I'm all about. Yeah, I would love a track of the moon. Let's use taxpayer dollars to put a racetrack on Mars. I would love that. Anyway, sorry, we jumped straight into it. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for both of you and a little bit about the company? Yeah, sure.

Starting point is 01:53:29 Yeah. I'm Tom Mueller. I'm the CEO and founder of Impulse Space. I was one of the founding members of SpaceX, where I led the development of propulsion systems for Falcon 9 and Dragon and a little bit into Starship. Yeah. Left there in 2020 and started Impulse in 2021. and we have our four-year anniversary here coming up next month. Congratulations. That's great to hear. That's amazing.

Starting point is 01:53:57 And it's been doing great. And Eric, would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, sure. I'm Eric Romome. I'm the president of the company. I've been with the company for the last two years. I've known to Tom for a better part of, God, Tom, 22 years, I want to say now, 20, 23. So I was in an early propulsion engineer at SpaceX in the very early days. And then when did a bunch of non-space, non-proculsion stuff for a long time. found my way back to Tom a couple of years ago. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, as I describe it in kind of layman's terms or in terms even a venture capitalist could understand, you can get to Leo

Starting point is 01:54:30 pretty easily, but you need impulse to get to higher orbits. Is that still kind of the bread and butter of the business? Am I describing it even remotely accurately? Yeah. At, you know, at SpaceX, we, I think we really made Leo very accessible, lowered the cost, made it, you know, you get, you know, polite's going there, you know, every other. day. I want to do the same for for everything beyond Leo. So make it much easier to get to high energy orbits to get to the moon, to get to Mars, get to outer planets anywhere in space. Like let's make it much easier, much more affordable and you know really start the true space age. Yeah. When you were at SpaceX, did you have an idea of how valuable Leo would be? I think a lot of folks

Starting point is 01:55:13 Starlink took them by surprise basically in terms of not just how awesome. that services if you've been on a plane and used it, but also the business that was to be built there. Did that take you by surprise? And then is there something that you can use as a concrete example of what is exciting about the higher orbits? Well, yeah, I'm old enough to remember the first time we try to do Leo Constellations, you go back in the late 90s, and actually worked some companies that tried to do it. And, you know, it wasn't the right time. Technology is improved. a lot, especially low cost launch, you know, better bandwidth, easier to manufacture spacecraft, all the things. So I kind of realized it was the right time when it was, you know, when when SpaceX first started talking about it, it really clicked. I'm like, yeah, we need to do

Starting point is 01:56:04 this. Yeah. And so in terms of the higher orbits, what are, I mean, obviously going to the moon is very concrete. Are there specific, um, obvious business cases or, or, or any, anything that would be inspiring or immediately relevant that somebody would be geostationary orbit is still probably the most important orbit because it's the 24 hour orbit over the equator. So you just point your dish at that and it's always there in the sky or your antenna. Or you can cover the whole, you can cover the whole Earth with three satellites. So making access much more affordable to that, I think is a huge help.

Starting point is 01:56:49 But then I'm, you know, I've always said I'm really all about a lunar economy starting and even mining asteroids and things like that. So those are the things I'm most excited about. Question. I'm sure you guys have gotten asked in every single pitch meeting. So I'll ask it. Why do you think this is on SpaceX's roadmap? Are you guys partnered with them already? Do you expect, do you expect them to want to prioritize this in the future?

Starting point is 01:57:17 or, you know, what does that kind of partnership or competitive dynamic look like? Well, do you cover that one here? Yeah, I mean, they're pretty busy, right? And so this is the equivalent of the Silicon Valley startup question of like, why doesn't Google just do that or Facebook just do that or, right? They could.

Starting point is 01:57:31 They could do anything. All right, they're technically an amazing company that's shown them they can execute on pretty much anything they sink their teeth into. I think the question is will they. And where would this be on the priority stack? So, you know, one of our products, Helios is really good at getting large payloads

Starting point is 01:57:45 to hindage orbits like medium Earth orbit and geostationary orbit. SpaceX can certainly do that with a Falcon Heavy, but they've been super vocal about the fact that they would prefer not to. And there's operational reasons for that, cost reasons for that. So this is a space where we think that we can actually help them and other launch providers get to a thing that they're,

Starting point is 01:58:03 to some degree, ignoring right now. And then on the small spacecraft side of things, we make a small, highly maneuverable vehicle called Mira, which is largely usable for Space Force. So we announced some contracts with them late last year and a partnership with Anderl to go to market with Mira. And that's a thing that's pretty far afield from anything that SpaceX is working on today.

Starting point is 01:58:23 You know, the Starlink is awesome, but it, you know, kind of just sits there, right? Yeah. Constellation, whereas Mir is designed to move very quickly as its core competency. Can you talk about the lunar economy and how you imagine that developing? Does it start with tourism or scientific exploration? Do we need an ISS-like base that's kind of taxpayer funded on the moon first? or do we go straight to mining or helium three? I remember the movie Moon.

Starting point is 01:58:51 But what are like what are the rest? What is the tech tree look like as we build out the moon as a capability? Possibly all over the above. Like mining helium three certainly could be a good starting point because it's even right now on Earth, if you don't flood the market, it's on the order of $20 million a kilogram. So you can certainly, if you can get it on them, I don't know how the part of getting it. Like you've got to mine apparently millions of tons of regal it to get it. Okay.

Starting point is 01:59:17 But if you have it there, transporting it back is like one 500 to that cost. So it's definitely, it's economically doable, assuming that you have, you know, a can of it. But I think if you're doing megastructures or massive manufacturing in Leo pretty fast, you'll figure out that it's 23 times roughly more efficient to bring mass from the surface of the moon and from the surface of the Earth just because the gravity well is so much lower. And I think that's when the real use of the resources of the moon will happen just to get material to lower Earth orbit. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:55 Yeah, I've always thought that the moon was also just a great staging ground for Mars. You imagine if you're up there, the moon's always facing Earth, so something goes wrong, you know, the sci-fi version, oh, there's a crack in your suit. You can just dive in an escape pod and you're aiming in the right direction, whereas Mars you have to deal with the transfer window. It's a whole different problem. And if we can get really good at living on the moon, we're probably going to be able to get good at living on Mars. I am interested in kind of these questions about when the, what, what, what, what, One of the great stories about SpaceX is that it feels like it's a relatively smooth handoff of capability in terms of launch capacity from NASA to SpaceX, from the taxpayer to the

Starting point is 02:00:38 private sector. At the same time, I love that NASA put a helicopter on Mars because I can't imagine that would ever happen no matter how crazy the VCs are. I don't see that happening and being underwritten against any sort of 10-year, 20-year, 20 20-year life cycle of return on investment. And so my question for you is like, what type of space projects should we be pushing into the, you know, the NASA world, the government-funded world, even the nonprofit world, versus what is commercializable today?

Starting point is 02:01:14 And do you see both as important going forward that we kind of have this, you know, taxpayer-funded R&D, the really fringe scientific experiments, and then we commercialize thing when they're ready. Well, I think two things really that I'd like to see from from NASA, mainly, is, is answering the big science questions, like, is there other life out there? And also, let's explore what's out there. Like, I just posted a picture this morning from the new Bureau of Rubin Observatory, amazing, you know, just amazing stuff. They should continue to do things like that. And, but I think as far as developed, they should develop technology that's, that, that takes a lot of money to develop that maybe commercial companies aren't going to invest in now. Like I think the next

Starting point is 02:01:58 thing, you know, Jared Isaacman was talked about is an EP. I'm always counting that too as the next step in propulsion. So rather than build a giant rocket that competes against people that already build giant rockets, why don't they go develop the next thing? The next technology. I think that's probably the best use of taxpayer money through NASA is to advance science. How do you think about, oh, sorry. I was just going to say fundamentally, I think NASA needs to figure out if it's a jobs program or if that goals, right? I mean, I think that's the, that's the thing, like SLS made no sense in a commercial rocket economy. Maybe it did when it started planning 20 years ago or whatever, but for the last decade or more, it's made zero sense. But yet it's still kind of hanging on because

Starting point is 02:02:38 Congress wants the fun jobs in Alabama, which is, you know, maybe a noble purpose, but, you know, is that the purpose of NASA, I think is the thing that they need to figure out. Yeah, how do you think about extraterrestrial life? Do you ascribe the dark forest theory or like, like, Do you think it's promising? Do you think, you know, we will have an answer to this in a few years? Do you think we're getting closer? What is your take overall? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:04 We need to get, we need more information, definitely. I hope it's just life is extremely rare. And it's not, you know, some great filter that's still out of us. Yeah. Yeah. That would be good. What are the kind of upcoming events in the next one to two years in commercial space that you think can be major catalysts for the industry overall that maybe you guys are working on

Starting point is 02:03:29 or that you want to see from the industry broadly? Well, something that we're not working on, but something that SpaceX is developing is Starship. I really started this company realizing that Starship and other, you know, reusable rockets are going to be bringing massive amounts of cargo to Leo. And it needs to go other places. So that's what's the premise of this company. So I'm excited about Starship finishing development and becoming a commercial.

Starting point is 02:03:54 commercially viable spacecraft. And then we have really, you know, we have the mirror that Eric talked about earlier. And energy is really for government and defense. And then we have Helios coming on online here next year. We're developing it right now, which is basically adding a third stage to Falcon 9 and other mid-sized rockets.

Starting point is 02:04:16 And that's what it can allow us to get, you know, more easily to high-endry orbits. So those are the two big things for us right now. Yeah. Super excited about lunar landers, Mars landers, all kinds of cool stuff. I was just going to tack on. I think you're seeing one big trend is that Space Force, the rhetoric of counter space or space defense activities has really ramped up in the last six months.

Starting point is 02:04:40 In the public sphere, there's not been a lot of investment in, you know, sort of space on space defense. But in privately, Space Force has been talking about that a lot more. And then they started about six months ago really publicly, not coincidentally with the change in administration. And so the question I think for companies like ours is, you know, do dollars follow that rhetoric? You know, is there increased investment in that sort of thing? And then on the commercial side, I think you have an awful lot of operators who are trying to figure out how do they carve out a niche and survive in a post-Starlink world.

Starting point is 02:05:07 How do they figure out, you know, what their space is as a commercial ComSat operator that, you know, once you have the dominant Starlink player in the market? I'm interested to hear about the challenges of developing rocketry or, you know, or engines at different scales. I've heard this story that one of the reasons the Raptor engine was so successful was that it wasn't a mega project, in the sense that you didn't need to bring in a crane necessarily to work on it.

Starting point is 02:05:37 There were more smaller modular pieces. Is that true? And then I'd love to know about the challenges of scaling up and making bigger rockets. I was tracking, obviously, I want Starship to work as soon as possible. It feels like it's a really, really tough challenge. And it feels like it's a harder challenge

Starting point is 02:05:57 than the Falcon 1 or the Falcon 9, which it did crash several times, exploded several times. But SpaceX is a much more mature company. And so you would expect that it's not just, the first time that they're doing it. It's actually something fundamental about the larger scale engineering that's going on there. So can you share anything about that?

Starting point is 02:06:18 Well, we've become a lot better at developing rocket engines, you know, or the last, you know, 20 years, certainly. When we started SpaceX, there wasn't really, it wasn't like startups would do rocket engines. That's why I had such a hard time hiring people in the early days because nobody believed in it. And now there's many teams all over the world that are developing liquid rocket engines. And it's never easy. It's not. But it's doable. And modern, you know, modern tools are affordable and available and certainly modern.

Starting point is 02:06:48 factory techniques like 3D printing is almost cheat code for rocket engines. But when you're doing something like Raptor, which is extremely high pressure, full flow, stage combustion, very advanced engine, the most advanced engine ever. It's just, it takes the difficulty to 11. So not surprising there's been setbacks. Also, one of the hardest things to do in launch vehicle recovery is getting back and upper stage. You know, you saw we had pretty good success with Falcon 9 getting that. first stage and certainly flying the boosters back and that awesome landing but second upper stages

Starting point is 02:07:24 are coming in with a lot of energy so really hard um they're going to solve it um it's it's just a matter time yeah this time well it is rocket science after all you know you're saying people don't people don't use that phrase it's not rocket you know this isn't rocket science anymore because we've gotten really good at there's a lot of stuff that is rocket science how many times i heard that come on tom it's not rocket science. It is rocket science. Well, I'm sure you have a lot of rocket science to do. We'll let you get back to it. We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks to the insights. Have a great rest of your day. Next up we have Derek Thompson.

Starting point is 02:08:01 We have some breaking news from truth social where news breaks. His breaks apparently. Trump says Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response, which we expected and have very effectively countered. there have been 14 missiles fired, 13 were knocked down, and one was set free because it was headed in a non-threatening direction. I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, if they've gotten it all out of their system, and there will hopefully be no further hate. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region, and I will enthusiastically encourage.

Starting point is 02:08:46 Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter. That'd be good. It's a good way to it's a strong way to end your post now if you want to come across presidential. Just bolt on. Thank you for your attention to this matter. That's great. Well, we have our next guest, Derek Thompson, the author of abundance in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Great to be here. Thanks, thanks guys. Congratulations on the move. Being a businessman now. You're a businessman now. I'm a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a CEO. I mean, I'm everything. You name whatever piece. We're in hats. Corporate suite that you want to name. I guess I am that. I'm CTO. I'm C.O. I'm C-O. There we go. It feels great. He's about to become a hyper-capitalist.

Starting point is 02:09:29 Vibe shift. Yeah. Talk to us about the move. I mean, we're going to go and do a bunch of stuff, but maybe just start with a little bit of background and then the decision to move. Yeah, sure. So I've been running for the Atlantic for 17 years, which is like, honestly, like, very, disgusting to even contemplate. That's crazy. Wait, how old were you when you joined? I want to say four. I mean, I think much better about myself.

Starting point is 02:09:53 The answer is 22. So I joined in September of 2008. Wow. After graduating from college, I was like a comms intern for a while. I'm currently the comms intern for my substack. So it's right back to that all position. And I wrote for 16, 16.7, five years at the Atlantic. And it was great.

Starting point is 02:10:13 And the truth is, like, I've always had like a little bit bit of wanderlust. I've always felt like I had a bit of an entrepreneurial bone on my body. There was never a great time to leave because the Atlantic is really a wonderful place to work. They let you write about my position in my case, about whatever I wanted. Tech, science, economics, social mysteries and conundrums. And finally, I just thought, you know, abundance, the book has become a lot of things. It's certainly become something almost like something that could be a full-time job. Like if I just wanted to reply to and engage with like the political feedback, that would be its own job.

Starting point is 02:10:49 And part of this was like, this is an opportunity to do something on my own, to do something that's really independent, not put the Atlantic in a position where they're like a non-political organization with a writer who's doing some things that are explicitly political. But also like I just kind of wanted to know, and this is what I said, I think, my original essay. Maybe you guys felt like this when you started this show. like what does my mind feel like when I wake up in the morning with a new job, a new task for it, right? Like you work at like a, made like a VC, right? Or you work at maybe a private equity firm. And like you wake up and like, how do you process the world? You process the world the way it's most remunerative to you at that private equity firm or at that VC.

Starting point is 02:11:29 And when you change your job, you change your mind. New tasks, new questions, new mysteries are unlocked. And I wanted to do that for myself. I wanted to wake up with a new set of questions. And so that's what I'm doing right now. Was there a price that could have kept you at the Atlantic? Many people say everyone has a price, but it feels like legacy media is not set up to retain superstars.

Starting point is 02:11:51 And I imagine... No, look, the Atlantic paid me well. And the book paid me well. I'm really lucky from that standpoint. There's not really a number, right? Like, you know, $1 billion. Okay, now suddenly you're talking about something completely silly. but like I wanted the freedom, the freedom to say, all right, like I'm 39 years old, right.

Starting point is 02:12:14 If I stay for another 11 years, I'm 50 years old. Like now I'm basically on the other side of the hill. At some point, you want to like be in your sort of in your electric prime and be like, what is my mind like? What is my life like when I give myself an entirely new task of starting my own company, of thinking about the world from perspective of I'm writing for myself, not writing for a dust institution. So no, I don't think there was a number. And I also think it's important to say like the Atlantic is one of these places that as much as independent media is growing,

Starting point is 02:12:44 and obviously I think that's great. There are a couple empires that are going to. The Times is growing like crazy. The Atlantic is hiring like crazy. They pay their writers overall, I think, quite well. So this was not really about about money at all. This was about being in a fortunate position to take a risk that had nothing to do with money. Yeah. If you just cared about money, you'd become an AI researcher and you join Meta. Get $100 million. Well, we got to pitch him on private equity because he sounds like he doesn't want to be a private equity guy. But I think scale the substack start acquiring, rolling up other independent journalism.

Starting point is 02:13:16 Could happen. Could happen. I do want to talk about advice from Ezra about this. Obviously, you wrote a book with him. He's been at the New York Times. He's been started his own thing. What was his advice to you as you kind of stepped out in this next era? Yeah, that's interesting question.

Starting point is 02:13:30 No one's asking that question of course. So I told Ezra three days. before the book came out. We had just done here, I'll set the scene for you. We had just done Fried Zakaria show and it was one of the first day to use that we did together. And we were in the hut, you guys are based in San Francisco? We're in LA. Okay, cool. So in New York, Hudson Yards is that like enormous skyscraper mall, right? And we go like get some food and we get some lunch. And we sit down and I say, hey, by the way, just so you know, I'm starting to think a little bit about doing something independent. This was before abundance became what it was. This was before

Starting point is 02:14:04 a single book had been officially sold. I said, I kind of think I want to do something on my own. And he said, you know, why? Like the Atlantic's a wonderful perch. And I honestly told him, I told him what I told you. I was like, like, the job of like being a content creator, right? It's a weird and wonderful job. Your job is to wake up in the morning and think, what do other people want from me that lives in here, that I can put out here and give to them? It's a really weird and wonderful job. And I feel like that work requires a certain amount of churn and experimentation. If you're stuck somewhere, and I didn't feel stuck at the Atlantic, but I was there for 17 years.

Starting point is 02:14:43 If you were in one place for 17 years, there's a certain amount of experimentation that you're essentially choosing to block yourself out of. Right. And so I told him, like, I really wanted to experience, like, you know, what different kinds of questions, with different kinds of writing styles and podcasting styles, maybe eventually like, you know, video podcasting styles, would eventually be unlocked by going independent. I think that's a lot of the appeal of Substact for people in a certain place, or Beehive or some of these other places.

Starting point is 02:15:09 Patreon is really getting into the game here as well. It's this opportunity to be like, all right, what does it feel like to be a content creator for myself? I'm not answering anybody else, and I'm taking on all of the responsibility and the stress that comes with, you know, being my own boss. I feel like that's an experiment that more people should run on themselves. What about the timing of the launch?

Starting point is 02:15:32 You always hear about the big bump that comes from like a big podcast appearance or something like that. Is there a world where you think you should have been doing email capture in the lead-up to the book? So when you did the interviews for the book, people could just go subscribe immediately. Is this the ideal time? It seems like it's really well time because the book has really, really done extremely well well. And so you're in this like capturing moment. It would have been probably much riskier to launch this a year from now. But did that factor into it?

Starting point is 02:16:03 Did you do you think about doing it before or later? How'd you land on this time? Look, here's here's a framework that I thought about. It's not like the only framework that in my head is definitely one. Obviously, having a number one New York Times best selling book is a good opportunity to do something new. Yep. Because a certain number of people are already paying attention to you. Like, there's a certain amount of obviousness there that I don't want to be, like, cynical or,

Starting point is 02:16:29 or conceited or vain. But I think it's just flatly true. And there was a certain calculation that was like, if I do want to do this in the next 10 years, does it really make sense to think, am I going to have another number one best selling book in five years? Like, almost certainly not. Yeah. Let's get a polymarker.

Starting point is 02:16:44 Like, it is an incredibly fortunate. And frankly, just strange thing. I mean, I don't think there's no reason if you know this. Our book did not hit number one on week one. It didn't hit number one in week two or three or four. It hit number one in week five. Like a discourse built around the book. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:17:02 It allowed it to sort of like hover in the two to three range and then spiked number one in a way that my book agent said she's never seen this before. Like no book she said, she said, I've had a lot of books hit number one, none for the first time in week five. So it was a really original, not original, really maybe unique experience in terms of the way that it hit the discourse. Was that a directly popularity of the democracy? Yeah. Was that a product of like the podcast appearance strategy I saw as we're going and you, both of you guys going on like a really wide swath of podcasts and bringing the message to places? And I think a lot of authors when they launch,

Starting point is 02:17:37 they think like, I'm going to do like five big things on week one and then like, you know, I'm done. But it felt like you were kind of taking the message to all these different pockets of the internet. And really capitalizing over a long time. And it didn't feel like it was necessarily. like, okay, you got 50% of the audience in week one and then 10% and then 10% and the 10%.

Starting point is 02:17:57 It felt more like you're having different frames on the same conversation again and again and actually building that momentum. Yes. So if we were doing like book publishing economics 101. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. The book publisher controls very little distribution themselves.

Starting point is 02:18:16 There's very few channels of exposure that the book publisher controls themselves, right? Even if you love reading nonfiction, my guess is that you aren't. going to Randomhouse.com to check out their nonfiction titles every Tuesday when the new nonfiction titles come out, right? What do you check? The New York Times book review. Podcasts that you listen to. Other sites that review books, right? TV interviews. Those are the channels of exposure. When you're a book author, you're basically in a position of begging. You go to Fritzhakar and you say, please, please, can you talk to me at this book? And you go to Barry Weiss and you say, please, can you talk to me? And you go to the far left podcast. You say,

Starting point is 02:18:53 please, if you go to the right wing podcast, you say, you know, Ben Shapiro, please, please, please, please of everybody and their assistance, and the assistant's producers and the producers' assistants, you're begging the entire world. And almost every author is doing that. Every author is in this position of begging because often other people control channels and distribution if they don't. Now, in Ezra's case, he arguably has, with the Esra Klein show, like the medium of

Starting point is 02:19:20 exposure that is most successful for launching books. That's unique experience for me and my co-author. That said, two things. One, I would guess that if you really looked into the numbers, what sold this book early on, despite the impression that you gave that this book was on a lot of different podcasts, what sells books is still television.

Starting point is 02:19:43 And the reason why is not because television is bigger than podcasts, in a weird way, is because television is shorter. And it's a worse product. But a worse product gives, you a better amuse bouch for the book. If I talk to Lex Friedman for four hours about abundance, that makes sense. Exactly how many more hours do you want to spend inside of abundance?

Starting point is 02:20:05 That's a great point. That's a great point. If you talk to Fried Zakaria for 10 minutes about the book, it's this little amuse bouch that makes it how people think, ooh, that sounds like exactly what I want, the future Democratic Party, the future of liberalism. So my feeling is that while podcasts are important, Because in a weird way, the product of a book is even more the conversation about the book

Starting point is 02:20:26 than the product than the book itself, the best way to sell a book weirdly, even in this like podcast heavy moment, is still television. That's my, that's my unempirical, viety bet right now. That's fascinating. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I mean, I noticed that with, I mean, Ezra on his, I believe it's his own branded podcast channel put out a 20-minute video essay outlining the thesis for the book. It also, that video did very well.

Starting point is 02:20:55 I believe it went viral and got maybe millions of views. That feels like number one bestseller on that week. But I think that happened on week one, not on week five, which is interesting. Which is where, yeah. I mean, so what happened was John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, who's become a nonfiction writer, wrote a book called Everything is Tuberculosis. and that book, I don't think I can share the inside numbers that I have. But he smoked you.

Starting point is 02:21:22 We did great, week one. That book kicked our ass. We weren't even close. Like, I don't know if you guys are what kind of sports fans you guys are. Like, that book was like the Miami Heat. That book was the Cleveland Cavaliers. We were the Miami Heat. Like, every single thing is a blowout.

Starting point is 02:21:38 It destroyed it. So, like, we weren't even close number one in number one. That's amazing. And that does go to show that. with book selling, it's all about channels of exposure. And there's already a celebrity owns their channel of exposure. And so the book publisher, by giving them a lot of money, is essentially buying their channel of exposure. And that's partly what they're paying for.

Starting point is 02:21:58 But yeah, the strategy, beyond strategy, there's this question of like, how do you sell, how do you sell a book? And there's also this question of like, I don't need to get like weird existential, but like, what's the job of a book? Like, what's its job? And I think the job of a nonfiction book is to get people talking about it. Of course you want people to buy it. Or start your presidential run. Or start your presidential one. Honestly, you should do it the way around. Because the best way to get attention for yourself, like if you dods, if you guys run for president is a ticket, you'll get a ton of media exposure. A ticket. We haven't even thought about that. That's hilarious. Then you'll build. Then you'll buy our book. Totally free. It's totally free media.

Starting point is 02:22:39 Because all these people, the New York Times is like, what are these guys doing? In the Washington Post, like, what are these guys doing? Right. You get all this free media. It's totally free media. It's, it's You get all this free media exposure. Then everyone knows your name. Then you go to a book publisher. Then they give you a lot of money. And then you have this platform that's been co-constructed by media organizations that were conspiring to build it, even though they didn't even mean to. So you should not write the book and go for president.

Starting point is 02:23:03 You should do it the other way around. But the product is the conversation. And so the reason to go on podcast, the reason to go on shows like this. because like you want these ideas to get out in the ether. Like no one should write a book if they don't want to talk about it for 50,000 hours because that is the experience of writing a book. You finish it and then if you're lucky, you talk about it for the rest of your life. Okay.

Starting point is 02:23:26 Well, talking about things actually in the book, this has been fascinating so far, I've really enjoyed this. But one of the narratives that I keep coming back to you is the story of California high speed rail. I grew up in California, friends and family members who have worked on that project actually. And I think for a lot of technologists and Californians, the comparison between SpaceX and the California high-speed rail story really draw a very clear conclusion in people's mind, which is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. And I'm wondering how you do you think that that narrative of, you know, one was literally rocket science, but at the same time we had put things up into space. It wasn't entirely a new capability. The other was a train, which, you know, we've had trains for generations, and we tried to build a train, and we tried to build capability to get to low Earth orbit.

Starting point is 02:24:22 One feels very successful, and the other feels like we didn't get anything out of it. And I think for a lot of people, the takeaway is let's not have the government even try and do things. Let's let the private sector do as much as possible. And that trade-off between if there is an economic feedback or there is a profit motive or a payback, that will act as a better incentive to actually get the result that people want, which is transportation or the ability to get to space. How have you grappled with that anecdote specifically? I'm a liberal who believes in a large role for private sector innovation. There's no question that SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has done things. for rocket technology and especially for rocket efficiency that no other company in the world

Starting point is 02:25:12 has done, no other individual in the world. Yeah. How many people has it moved to space? A lot. How many? Like dozens? A thousand? Hundreds?

Starting point is 02:25:23 I don't know. Do you have people in California? This is our Iran population question. Yeah. We're getting out. 50 million, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:25:34 To build infrastructure. Yeah. public good for 50 million people is a different challenge than building technology whose proof point requires several dozen. These are entirely different challenges. And that's why we need. Yeah, I would just, I would say like SpaceX has provided internet infrastructure for billions of people kind of count as the people in this case. Like, because that's the, that's the benefit that people really want out of. The public benefit is that people in around right now can get satellite internet. And I think the value of Starlink is sensational.

Starting point is 02:26:08 But when you're talking about, I mean, when you think about like broadband technology, broadband technology is already being built by a lot of private companies, right? So it's not as if the creation of Starlink is taking away what has historically been a public service and is creating a private company out of it. Like, broadband companies exist, like charter exists. Comcast exists. So I think it's great that they're private companies that are working on that. When we're talking about questions like public goods, when we're talking about roads and bridges,

Starting point is 02:26:44 things that are frankly quite difficult to monetize. And it's not entirely clear that we want to, like, directly monetize them. Like, do we want to charge poor people a certain fee every time they use a road or a bridge? Or does it make sense to live in a rich society? with a progressive tax structure, such that we can tax the rich a little bit more than the low income and use that money to create a set of public goods that makes life better for everybody, that allows, frankly, low-income people to use those roads, to drive into areas where they can provide services for high-income people such that everyone turns out better off.

Starting point is 02:27:20 I see a large, large role for the federal government and for state and local governments to look out for public goods. And to me, when I say public goods and you look at the actual budgets, the federal, local state governments, overwhelmingly what we're talking about is health care, subsidized health care. We're talking about infrastructure and transportation, things like roads, things like bridges. I think there's a huge role for government to play in these places. I'm totally with you. I like having mixed economy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:27:51 Muscular government and also even more, I would like to see in the book is probably about this, even more purposeful. pro-tech, pro-science strategy, because the truth is, if you look at what SpaceX did for rocketry, why haven't we done that for Alzheimer's? Why isn't there like a SpaceX for like chronic inflammation or SpaceX for carbon capture technology? So I see a huge role for both of these things. I don't think that the success of government in some places proves that the private sector can't do certain things very well or the success of SpaceX means that the government should get out of the business of building bridges. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you on the roads and bridges thing. I guess my My worry is like the free market solution to how do I, the real problem that you're solving is like,

Starting point is 02:28:33 how do you get people from L.A. to San Francisco? How do you move people around California? And the free market solution is a one hour southwest flight that costs $100 or a Camry that drives you there and maybe costs $20 in gas or something like that. And so the free market's kind of solved like if you have six hours, you can do it in 20 bucks or if you have one hour, you can do it for $100 and you kind of choose those. And we kind of came in with like, we want something that's cheaper for two hours, but it, there wasn't this like massive market pull.

Starting point is 02:29:04 And so it was more like the decision to, to create that interim solution just never really happened. But I mean, just to stop there. I love Southwest. I love flying on airlines. At no point in my life, and I'm like, what we need to do is like nationalized. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:29:22 But like, who built LAX? Totally. Right. You need public infrastructure or infrastructure that is partly publicly financed in order to create a kind of platform technology of platform for the private sector to succeed. In this way, if you look at the history of Elon Musk's companies, like what is the total number of government contracts and loan guarantees that SpaceX and Tesla have benefited from in order to become the companies that they are?

Starting point is 02:29:52 I'm pretty sure numbers in the billions, especially when you count to all the NASA contracts. Yeah, so I guess the question is like, should we, a huge opportunity for a public-private partnership to give it to the outcomes that we're most proud of. Yeah, with the California high-speed rail example, the question, I guess, is, is, was it a mistake for the government to pick high-speed rail as an important project? Like, was it a misranking? Should have spent more money on roads and, or was it just the execution? I mean, billions of dollars were spent on a rail system. I mean, $33 billion were essentially, tacitly approved by a bond that was voted on by the public.

Starting point is 02:30:30 And several million dollars were actually spent constructing rail that isn't connecting anything to anything right now. So clearly, if you were looking back, the total number of man hours spent and dollars allocated on high-speed rail has not been worth it for people who live in California. I don't want that failure to indict the good that the public sector can do any more than I think you

Starting point is 02:30:51 would say that the failure of one SpaceX launch proves that SpaceX is in fact totally overrated. How much switching gears a little bit, how much are you digging into general research funding? We had Andrew Heberman on the show last week talking about his concerns around NIH funding. Tell me his concerns. Can you actually, I didn't see that.

Starting point is 02:31:13 Can you summarize? So he had a long interview with Jay Batacharya. And essentially the proposal is to cut government funding to university labs, and research and scientific research labs by something like 40%. And that's a pretty significant chunk. He was very worried about this. There are some unnecessary costs potentially that he highlighted,

Starting point is 02:31:37 but in general, this is the research that cannot be underwritten by the private sector because it does not, if you're just doing research on how do we fall asleep? Or like, how does the brain work? At a very abstract, or what is DNA? You can't patent DNA as soon as you discover it. And yet as soon as you've discovered it, boom, there's a huge, huge, you know, massive boom in, in biotechnology. But it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying.

Starting point is 02:32:08 Yeah. Yeah. So that just feels like an area that you could really dig and dive into in an area where it's okay to be kind of skeptical of this hypercapitalist viewpoint. And, you know, venture-backed companies can solve everything when some of the smartest people in the world. it's broad. It's a ton of funding of a whole bunch of different research areas. They're all, they all can't be underwritten by the private sector in any way versus being very prescriptive. We need to train from here to here and we are going to hire the people to build it. That feels like much, much harder for the government to get right. I agree with the way you guys are thinking

Starting point is 02:32:41 about this. Maybe it means I agree with it and you're thinking about it as well. I think what's happening at the NIH right now under HHS is horrendous. I think if what you wanted to do was to reduce America's annual deficit by $18 billion, which is what we're cutting from NIH, you could either cut NIH the fountain of scientific discovery for it, not just the U.S., the entire world, you cut NIH by 40%, or you could cut the corporate income tax cut by 0.4%. Like, why not just, like, kind of reduce the size of the corporate income tax cut by a microscopic percent and still fund scientists to discover the basis of Alzheimer's and chronic inflammation and multiple sclerosis and pancreatic cancer. You said it really well.

Starting point is 02:33:30 Knowledge can't be patented, period. When the first scientist who looked inside the Gila Monster's mouth discovered that there was a little hormone there that seemed to suppress its appetite and regulate its insulin, you can't patent a lizard's tongue. But our knowledge, our subsidized knowledge of the liquid on top of the lizard's, its tongue gave us GLP1 drugs, which now appear to be something like a miracle drug for everything. I mean, they don't just help people lose weight. They don't just help people reduce inflammation. They literally seem to, there's a study going on right now, that they might reduce rates of Alzheimer's,

Starting point is 02:34:04 because Alzheimer's might be caused in part by inflammation in the brain. And if GOP1 drugs work by not only reducing obesity, but also reducing chronic inflammation, they might ironically or incidentally be a neurodegenerative drug that works through the gut brain interface, that's fucking crazy. And we see this by looking in a lizard and no smart VC. Like Mark Andreessen's brilliant, but he would be an idiot if he told scientists, if he gave scientists tens of millions of dollars to just look in the mouths of a bunch of reptiles. That's dumb.

Starting point is 02:34:37 That sounds really dumb. But it's really wonderful to have a publicly funded organization that asks scientists who simply discover the truths of the universe with the hope that if it's true, someone along the line can find a way to make a product with it that makes money and save people's lives. So I think we need a really aggressively funded NIH and NSF. I think what's happening right now in the Trump administration is really, really sad. And Jay Batacharya, if you're out there, I would love to talk to you about what's happening at NIH because I know you a little bit.

Starting point is 02:35:10 We've talked a little bit. I know you don't want this deep down. And I would love to talk about how we could amend NIH policy to truly make Americans healthy again and make America great again because cutting NIH by 40% ain't it. Yeah, I think the frustration from Andrew was seeing, you know, the increased spending and trying to reckon with the two decisions there. Let's switch to something less politically charged. Can you give us the highlights of your conversation with Mom Donnie? You released that this morning right right before. we got on the air so we haven't had a chance to listen, but I'm sure it was, I'm sure it'll be

Starting point is 02:35:48 entertaining. Look, let me give you my reaction as a like a person and then it's like a political thinker. He's unbelievably charming and engaging and thoughtful. Like you know when you're talking to someone who's listening or at least is very good at performing the act of making you think you're listening to them. Like I only know this guy for 30, minutes, but I loved our conversation. I really, really loved it. I think he's wrong about a lot. I think rent freezes are a terrible idea to increase housing supply. I think fundamentally, you cannot try to cap the price of something whose supply you're trying to increase. The way I put it in the podcast is that was like, you want grocery stores in New York to be

Starting point is 02:36:35 better. If you pass a law that capped receipts at grocery stores at $50, what do you think grocery stores would start doing. They would stop, they would stop stocking the shelves because you can't make money selling nice stuff to people if it's illegal to make $51 on the receipt. So in the same way, if you cap the price of a good and you're trying to increase its supply, you're tying the hand behind your back that you're trying to use. He was respectful, but we disagreed about that point. We disagreed about the fact that I think I'm persuaded that while I'm not against public sector unions in the big picture. If you look at wide New York City Subways have among the highest transit construction costs in the world on the per mile basis, one part of it is that

Starting point is 02:37:20 their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average. You cannot build, you cannot build anything efficiently. If the first rule of your company is your staffing levels have to be four times higher than all your competitors. It just doesn't work. So I asked him whether he was interested in talking to public sector unions, which are a Democratic ally, of course, if he was interested in building public transit efficiently and increasing public excellence. Again, he disagreed. That said, I was really impressed by his insistence that he wanted to be a politician who was outcomes first and process second.

Starting point is 02:38:01 And there was a certain amount of ambivalence that he seemed to communicate to me. Again, maybe he's lying. I don't know him that well. who's a nice guy on the phone. There's a certain amount of sort of procedural ambivalence that I really like in a politician. Like if Jay Batacharya came on your show, right, or if RFK Jr. came on your show or whoever else in tech policy,

Starting point is 02:38:19 someone who's doing AI policy. And they told you that the outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that you wanted, they were ambivalent about what process it took to get those outcomes, but they were going to try their damnedest to make sure that when they left office, those were the outcomes that everybody could agree about, right? There's something that's like very refreshing and like non-ideological about that perspective.

Starting point is 02:38:41 And I heard a little bit of it. That said, you know, I'm... Is that tying into changing his mind around how police should be funded? We talked about him changing his mind on two things. One, he told The New York Times he's changed his mind in the role of private developers in housing. I think he used to be more on the side of like the government should build up the houses. I'm more on the side of the government should fund some of the housing construction.

Starting point is 02:39:02 But like, we've got private companies that are really good at building housing. Let's not do what the private sector is already doing too much. But the other thing he changed his mind about, as you said, is defund the police. He talked four years ago, five years ago about defund the police being a slogan that he believed in. And now really his policy has fund the police. He thinks that police don't solve crimes fast enough and that in many cases they're forced, and this is clearly true, to act as social workers rather than police officers. And so if you've got a police officer or say 100 police officers who have to basically be, you know,

Starting point is 02:39:34 street therapists and social workers all day long, how are they going to solve crimes? How are they going to stop crime? And so he said he changed his mind there a little bit as he talked to more police officers. And the end of our conversation was, I thought, a really refreshing point that he made that he thinks that his job, he sees his job as surrounding himself with people who aren't too fast to say yes to all of his ideas. He likes being around people who challenge his ideas. And I think that's, I think that's a useful thing for really just, I mean, anybody, any politician or executive. And so there were many things in the conversation that I was impressed by. But, you know, also fundamentally, I think it's just important to say there's, there are very big differences

Starting point is 02:40:12 between socialism and liberalism. And he's a socialist and I'm a liberal. So we're not going to agree about everything, but you have to be able to talk to people you don't agree with. What are you hoping to see out of tech, the intersection of tech in Washington in a post-Elon White House world? You know, we got to get beyond. this insanity where the administration attacks on progressive thought become a tax on the kind of talent American needs to train and attract and retain to keep our dominance and to keep the really valuable information clusters that we have here. If we attack Harvard because we're pissed off at them and force all of the international students to leave? Or if we encourage some of

Starting point is 02:41:09 the smartest people around the world who deep down want to be at Caltech, want to be at Harvard, want to be at Duke, and we push them to be in London and Beijing and Shanghai, we are losing so many great ideas, so much agglomeration, the interaction effects that happen, when you put a lot of smart people together in America. Like, it's important that Silicon Valley is in California and not in Brazil or France or Poland. Like there is a special sauce to America, I think. You want to attract and retain these people. I want us to rationalize our talent and immigration policy

Starting point is 02:41:45 and not have it be a kind of unfortunately like assassinated bystander in this war between the Trump administration and a progressive movement that they think has gone too far. I think we really need to get back down to a reasonable basis on immigration policy in particular. And then I would like to add, I would like us to add back the funding to NIH and NSF. You know, I'm sure Andrew talked about this a little bit. Like, is it possible that there are so-called indirect costs, right?

Starting point is 02:42:14 Money that I work at Harvard, let's say, you're NIH. You give me some money for my Alzheimer's study. You also give me money for Harvard. Is it possible that Harvard money, that those indirect costs are too high? Yeah, sure. Let's have a public debate about that. Let's have public testimony. It's not cut NIH by $18 billion and say, well, hopefully we're only cutting the fat and none of the muscle.

Starting point is 02:42:35 So better immigration policy and better science policy, number one, I wish I had a good answer on AI. I don't know what the hell the next five years look like. I feel like the smart people that I follow change their mind every six months. Sometimes they accelerate. Sometimes they decelerate. I wish I had like this sort of crystal ball that could tell me what like optimal AI policy coming out of Washington looked like right now I don't but hopefully in the sub stack I'll be able to get some answers there well we're excited to follow along that is great thank you for joining this was great

Starting point is 02:43:06 thank you so much yeah we'd love to have you back we can talk all day all right great I'll do it have a good one awesome later bye um sorry I went way over I thought we I thought we were five minutes over we have we have a light system in the studio but uh the golden retriever does not concern himself who the lion does not concern himself with who's in the waiting room we have our next guest from juniper square thank you for waiting great to talk to you and we got some news we got some news we got what do we got here guys what do we got uh we got two things we got a 130 million dollar series d oh congratulations i've been waiting to do that all day uh we got it out yeah we got it out And then we launched our AI product that we called Junie AI.

Starting point is 02:43:58 Congratulations. That's our second bit of news. Now that we got the important stuff out of the way, who are you? What do you do? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've become a fan of what you guys are doing. I appreciate it.

Starting point is 02:44:10 I'm glad to be on the show. It's really interesting and unique. So keep it up. But yeah. Yeah. So my name's Alex. I'm the co-founder, CEO of Juniper Square. Thanks.

Starting point is 02:44:20 And Juniper Square is an 11-year-old technology. and services company. All of our customers are private markets GPs. Sure. So venture capital firms, private equity firms, real estate investors, crypto, private credit, you name it. If they raise an outside fund, then we help them with fund administration. We help them with technology to manage that fund, reporting. Basically, everything is not the investing. And we've got close to 2,500 customers now, trillion dollars that were responsible for stewarding at about 750 employees. 2,500 customers. Is that, is that not all of them?

Starting point is 02:45:00 How many investors are there? I feel like, I saw that number on your website. You need to update it, by the way. It says 2,000 on your website. You're at 25. Yeah, we got to get those numbers out. But I mean, I feel like there's, I mean, we try and talk to, I thought we talked to all the VCs.

Starting point is 02:45:13 We've had, we've done hundreds of interviews. I thought we talked to them all. Apparently there are more. There's some left. How big is this market? It feels like, like, you know, you talk about private markets investing. That feels like a small market. Yet Series D is a billion point one.

Starting point is 02:45:30 Like you're building a big business. How big is this market? Right. So the, you have to kind of take it by asset class. Right? Because VC is relatively small. Sure. As an asset class, both in terms of the capital that it manages and the number of GPs

Starting point is 02:45:46 or investment firms that are out there. Private equity. and real estate are respectively probably five times as big as venture. So there's thousands and thousands of, you know, just think of all the middle market, private equity, kind of LBO, growth focused firms out there. I think of all the different real estate investors focused on, you know, apartment buildings or retail or whatever. There's probably about 20,000 GPs globally that matter. Was the ZERP crash hard for you? Was that a slow growth period for your business because it seemed like it was really rough for all the VCs and

Starting point is 02:46:24 a lot of investors pulled back but it's not as like they really shut down their funds. Yeah, it's more like net new fund creation slowed. So yeah, was that a real driver or are you just going after the existing players and so the new ones don't necessarily matter as much? No, we definitely felt it and you're right that what we're sensitized to is in a given quarter, a given year, how many new funds were created. Our market share is so low that we still can sell to existing funds and people switch their providers all the time, but it's always easiest to get the new funds that's raised. So we had the double whammy of, you know, big focus for us is commercial real estate. So when COVID hit in spring of 2020, you know, it just took out retail. It took out

Starting point is 02:47:07 hospitality and hotel. And commercial real estate was, it was really tough slaying from like 2020. you know, really until 2022. And then the rate hike started in commercial real estate's, you know, heavily cap-x intensive. It's super rate-sensitive. And then we had the big bust in, you know, public markets correction. We had the big overhang of everyone investing at, you know,

Starting point is 02:47:32 100x revenue multiples in 2021, 2022. We're going to bring those back. Yeah, we're working on it here. The sober days of 100x revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now. Yeah. There is. How do you get through all those times?

Starting point is 02:47:46 It's recovering. It's coming back. How did you get through the tough times? Did you have to do layoffs or change the direction of the business? Were there any pivots in the story? Specific meditation track. Yeah, I'm going to meditation actually. Okay, cool.

Starting point is 02:48:03 Yeah, bring it down. Yeah, all of the above, you guys. We had to do some layoffs for sure, like everybody. I mean, we were going into, you know, the Fed started hiking rates in like late 21, but by spring of 22 is when we had that here. huge correction in the public markets. And by that summer, it was clear that companies like us and pretty much every high growth late stage tech company was spending too much, right? We were all investing for revenue growth and we all had to pivot to invest for growth efficiency.

Starting point is 02:48:32 So we did a round of layoffs then like a lot of people did. It was the first time I ever do that as an entrepreneur. It's not fun by any means. But it was necessary. But then the big thing for us is, you know, we started out as a technology company, but then we added, in 2019, we moved into the world of fund administration and we became a full service fund administrator. And fund administration is like a really critical market for private capital. There's probably $30, $40 trillion of private capital out there in the world. And almost all of it needs a third party administrator. So we kind of moved into this market that was like 50 times the tam of our previous market, concurrent with this big correction happening. And so those forces ended up working out that like

Starting point is 02:49:18 the company did really well. And we continued, you know, we grew up, we've grown really quickly through a really challenging market period. So it wasn't without its bumps and bruises, but overall it's been really well. Talk about the new AI product. I imagine it's a difficult one to build. You can't really, like, LPs and investors can't really tolerate hallucinations. I can imagine, you know, a product that works well. I don't mind if you leak my fund returns to my direct competitor. No problem. Less of that, but if you're trying to understand fund performance and things like that or reporting, you can't like, oh, I'm sorry, I've misreported TVPI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that is the crux of the challenge.

Starting point is 02:50:04 is, I mean, as you guys know, you talk about it a lot on the show, you know, generative AI is probabilistic, right? So next token prediction is is probabilistic in its nature. And the kind of work that we do of reporting on financial assets is deterministic, right? Like one plus one always has to equal two. It can never equal, you know, one or three or anything like that. And so the real trick is, And as if you guys ever know, if you've ever like taken a pile of invoices or something and uploaded them to chat GPT or any LLM and been like, hey, tell me the invoice amount for invoice number eight. It's terrible at financial data extraction. And so the big hole that we have in the market that we're filling for our customers is if you're an asset manager, if you're financial services firm, like a venture capitalist or a real estate investor or whatever, one of the key things you have to do is you have to report to your regulators. You have to report to your LPs.

Starting point is 02:51:01 That reporting is like, you know, you're putting your brand and reputation and your ability to raise more money in the future and everything behind it being accurate and correct. And so the trick is how do you leverage all of the power of generative AI? It's like all these summation use cases, document extraction, the chat interface that we've all become so accustomed to. How do you fuse that with a set of deterministic tools that do all the precision stuff? the precision math so that like you're calling functions in Python to run some code to, you know, answer a question. You're not trying to have a next token prediction be the answer of that.

Starting point is 02:51:38 And that's basically what this platform is, is multi-model. We have a bunch of different models running inside of it. And the idea is think of it as like a model orchestration layer, where if you're a private market's GP, there's a lot of work you've got to get done. You want agents for different things. Different models fit different. use cases and you need a way of orchestrating all of that work ensuring it's compliant ensuring it's accurate and that's what this layer does anything else this is great yeah we yeah we got have you back on we're running behind today as you saw but we really appreciate you stopping by yeah congratulations on making it through the fire and come back on when you have more news yeah we'll talk soon having to be here

Starting point is 02:52:22 guys guys see you and the team cheers Alex bye yeah um really quickly how did you sleep last night I'm on a run. I'm on a run. 94. If you beat me last night, I'm going to be extremely 86. Oh, let's go for John. It's crazy. Ever since I got sick, I've been trailing you by like 10 points. Off your game.

Starting point is 02:52:47 Well, we got Jesse from Decagon in the studio. He's certainly been on his game. How you doing, Jesse? What's going on? Welcome to the street. You need to see you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for hopping on.

Starting point is 02:52:57 Give us the news. What does the company do and what's the breaking news with you? Yeah. Hey, everyone watching. I'm Jesse. I'm one of the co-founders of Dekegon. If you don't know about us, we're essentially an AI customer service agent. And so what this means is, you know, imagine next time you're booking a hotel room or something, right?

Starting point is 02:53:14 There's an AI agent that's there that you can call or chat with live and it knows everything about you. It can book rooms for you. It can upgrade. It can answer questions about your loyalty points and so on. And so essentially what we do is we work with these large, usually consumer businesses that have a lot of customers and a lot of context center volume. And we're there to both drive a ton of efficiency for them because now their human agents don't have to deal with these more mundane issues.

Starting point is 02:53:41 But also, we are able to give a better customer experience for the actual customers. So that's what we do. And then today we're very excited to announce our Series C, co-led by A16Z and Excel at a 1.5. Let's go. Give it a bigger hit, John. Oh, there we go. Talk to me about the early beachhead for the company. I feel like LLMs are so generalizable, and yet go-to-market is so specific.

Starting point is 02:54:15 Every vertical industry has slightly different customer service needs, whether it's a Shopify store that needs access to an inventory management system or refunds or Stripe versus a SaaS product. versus a SaaS product. What has been most interesting to you? What's been, where has adoption been the strongest early on? Yeah, it's a good question. So I would say that with most of the use cases out there, the ones that have had the most impact from AI

Starting point is 02:54:43 has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity, where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for you. And it's kind of adding this extra layer beyond what traditional chatbots have been able to do. because I'm sure both of you have used chatbots in the past. And usually it's a pretty frustrating experience. It's horrible.

Starting point is 02:55:00 Yesterday I was trying to cancel, I was trying to cancel Spectrum Internet at our old office. Good luck, John. Couldn't do it on the website. This is 100% deliberate by them, by the way. Couldn't do it on the website. Of course, like, you know, this is a CRUD app. I should be able to click a button and update the, you have to wonder if it's intentional. It's 100% intentional.

Starting point is 02:55:21 They broke one password so I couldn't log in. Finally, they say, hey, text us. and I'm texting with their chatbot. It texts me natural language, but then asks me to click a drop down for two different options every single time, finally get through all that flow. And they're like, you need to call us. And by the way, we're close today. It was awful.

Starting point is 02:55:38 Yeah. Is that, is that some maybe friction in the sales process where people are like, I get it that you want to make this more frictionless for our customers, but you're going to increase our churn, you know, 10%. I don't know if we should sign up for this. Are there actually tradeoffs there? I'm super interested. Yeah, no.

Starting point is 02:55:54 that is one use case, right? So to your question, what use cases are good, it is where you need a little bit of complexity. Because in the old days, the reason why you can't do that today is because it's really easy to gain that system. Oh, sure. They made a disentry, then people, someone would make a Reddit post about, hey, here's how you actually cancel easily, and everyone will just do it immediately. Yeah. And it impacts the revenue, right? So the nice thing about LMs now and the thing that it really unlocks is this level of nuance. You're able to create much more complex flows and sort of situations that are tailored to specific users. Because of that, you're able to cover way more ground. So we have customers, for example, that use us to process

Starting point is 02:56:34 refunds. We have customers that use us to, you know, either book flights or reorder of credit card or things like that. And that's really powerful because it's just wasn't possible before, right? Before you're kind of in this more, you know, dumb decision tree that you've, you've, have to get forced down a certain path. And maybe that path is kind of what you want, but you want something slightly different and you're just forced to go down the path. You get stuck and you get escalated, right?

Starting point is 02:57:00 So that's one of the main benefits of these LMs. Last question from my side. I know we're going crazy on the timing. But in my previous jobs, when I've hired a really all-star customer service agent, the thing that's always impressed me is when they're able to expand out of their role as just customer service,

Starting point is 02:57:21 just doing specific flows, and actually turn into sort of a salesperson, and actually turning the interaction into customer education or upselling or cross-selling or, you know, hey, yes, you said you wanted to cancel, but I think you want to cancel for a reason that we could actually alleviate by switching you around or giving you discount or doing something like that. Some of that can be deterministic. We've seen this with like, are you sure you want to cancel? We'll give you 20% off. But the real best customer service agents tend to do it with more touch.

Starting point is 02:57:51 Is that something that you're seeing already being able to be handled by LLMs? Do you think that's coming with more agentic workflows? How do you see the role of the customer service agent or human evolving over the next couple of years? We work with our customers a lot on that exact concept, which is what is the definition of customer experience over time? Because when you start, you're generally working on the low-hanging fruit, like processing transactions or looking up information. Even FAQ, right? Right, exactly. But if you end up having a really, really good AI experience, and if you just think about it with the products in your life, right, you're just going to interact with it more.

Starting point is 02:58:27 Like, it's not that you're going to, it's like, oh, I'm done with this. If it's a good experience, you're going to interact with it a lot more. And that opens up a much broader surface area for what customer experience means. You can start being proactive instead of just reactive. You can start looking at revenue generating use cases like you just mentioned, right? And it doesn't just have to be a cost center, which is a lot, a lot of enterprises look at customer service, right? It's like, oh, it's this thing that's not really strategic to us. we're just going to put it off to the side and try to save as much money as possible.

Starting point is 02:58:52 AI is changing a lot of that. And a lot of the customers I use Deccan are super excited by this concept that, hey, if you have a good system there, it almost becomes essentially a concierge for your product, right? It becomes like a new UI that customers can use to interact with you. Because if it's really good and it can do everything, like, yeah, maybe people are just chatting with it instead of using an app or kind of going through a bunch of drop downs and stuff like that. So yeah. What's happening in the call, sorry to interrupt, what's happening in the

Starting point is 02:59:21 call center BPO market right now, or is there already pretty massive impact from companies like Decagon, intercom, Sierra, et cetera? The, yeah, the call center market is definitely thinking about this space a lot, as you can see, right? When, when AI first came out, a lot of their stocks went down by quite a bit because it's, it's one of the most obvious use cases for, for AI. I would say the best BPOs out there are really figuring out how to become AI native in either partnering with solutions like us or spending a lot of effort in building their own. I think partnership would probably be the realistic path because when customers, when end customers buy these services, they usually kind of see BPO as a service provider.

Starting point is 03:00:06 So there is room for partnership, but that's typically the way it will happen. Yeah, I mean, just the advent of software as a service or just what? websites in some ways reduce the amount of humans in a sales interaction because you could go through the chopify checkout by yourself and yet there was still a role for the humans so I'm sure that will be evolving but it's exciting stuff thank you so much for stopping by congrats on the round and congrats on picking up max garnetia a couple months ago star sales leader I went to uh I went to college with max no way he's an absolute Chad that's he's telling me about you earlier yeah No way. So shout out to Max.

Starting point is 03:00:47 Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Next up, we have Yaxine. Welcome to the studio. Yaxine. How are you doing?

Starting point is 03:01:00 What's going on? You are on mute. No audio yet. And I do love the background. We got the weight rack in the back. Is that a weight rack or? It looks like. Hello, test.

Starting point is 03:01:13 Yeah, we can hear you. How are you doing? Testing. I'm doing. I haven't set up my DAC yet, so. No, you're good. You're good. What's happening?

Starting point is 03:01:19 Let me just ask, let me just check, like, let me just look at something on. Sure. Yeah, we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out. The poster who needs no introduction. He needs no introduction. Founder of Dingboard, a web-based. of the hosts of John and Jordy John and Jordy

Starting point is 03:01:49 Hey how's it going nice to meet you guys My name is Yassine Apologies Good to meet you Hello thanks for thanks for the introduction I appreciate the time as well And I'm like actually like a huge fan of you guys Like someone I used to work with

Starting point is 03:02:02 Introduce me to guys so I like found a lot of enjoyment That's great That's great to have you on How have the last few days been? A little bit stressful to be honest I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun. And unfortunately for fun or stressful. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:19 So both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting. And that's not good for me. But I will basically just not stop posting. But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salary? You were making in the seven figure mark. You got to really ramp it up a little bit. I used to go on 4chan and people would be like, yeah, I'm making like a million, like a two mill at these AI companies. I'd be like, no.

Starting point is 03:02:40 way. There's no way you guys are making two million of these AI companies. And I started making like seven digits at an AI company. I was like, wait, like these guys weren't actually lying. Like, you actually make that much money at these AI companies. And it's like pretty fun work too as well. So yeah. For most worth like I didn't work on AI. I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app. And that's why I joined actually. So I joined X because, uh, there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. I fixed quite a lot of them. So I'm pretty happy like with the work I've done. X, X is the product I use that I find the most bugs yet am not just, I don't abandon the product. That's how a dick today.

Starting point is 03:03:11 That's a super interesting thing. And it's because there's like when it's a very large app, right? So the scale is huge. And you guys are like right tail users, like you guys are famous. Like the podcast of the tech bro podcast. Sorry, the host of the tech pro podcast. You guys are famous. So the amount of notifications you guys get.

Starting point is 03:03:27 The amount of replies you guys get. The amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail. Like how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you. For most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not going to be buggy for them. And for what's worth, this is true across all the apps.

Starting point is 03:03:44 Our users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to like, really like, you know, talk to them and like understand what their pain points are. And for what it's worth, X does a really great job. Like, I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is run as a company. And like, just working there, I got to learn a lot about like how to get engineers motivated and like really like get shit done. Like it was awesome work there. It was like super how, how, do you wish you had the opportunity?

Starting point is 03:04:08 You were working remotely the entire time. and that was maybe counter to the broader ex-culture. Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're gonna work there, you should just 100% be in the office? Or do you think you can do that? Yeah. So the person who hired me like,

Starting point is 03:04:22 you're gonna have to get to the office. My wife, so at the time I got the offer, in between I was interviewing, I found out that my wife was pregnant. So I let them know. Congratulations. Because, yeah, so the kid is born now. He's seven months old.

Starting point is 03:04:35 So by the time I joined, I was like, okay, well, we're gonna, I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. kid got older, my party started changing a bit. And I was kind of like considering and talking my wife about like different ways that could come to politics. I could totally work remotely like and be productive. I think after the X and XAI merger, the information attractor got so strong. And the talent at XAI, they were like ship, they're ships so much. Like I used to be able to read every

Starting point is 03:04:58 commit. Like I used to actually just like sit there on my email and like click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went to the code base. But after the XI AI people joined, it was just like literally no way. And I mean, I told one of the. the XAI guys this. It was like, you know, when you have like, um, dinosaur shit and, you know, which is the Twitter code base and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent. You get diamonds. That's how you get diamonds. I was like, I was so bullish after that. Like it's like they're really like, they're really pushing on it. It's like really awesome. I want and honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like I wanted to go. I think it was like probably,

Starting point is 03:05:34 I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, um, can I like maybe come like twice every quarter or something. And he was like super, I mean, for us worth, by the way, like my manager was reading between the lines. Totally surprised. Totally surprised. He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. But if you're watching this, it's okay, dude, don't worry about it. Seriously, like some people, like, probably the best thing. I think like working at X is like, I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys are onboarded onto everything. But that wasn't the case. Like, my manager literally could just figure anything out. It felt like he was.

Starting point is 03:06:08 already onboarded onto everything. But he could actually just like read the code, look the logs and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes and it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must have been here for years. No, he's like actually just that good. So I mean, I really loved working with him. He was like a really awesome guy. I think he was surprised. I guess like I guess I kind of guess what happened to be honest, but it doesn't really matter. But anyways, like it's been really great working there. So I was going to go to visit, actually we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going on a trip with their mom with the baby. And I was like, okay, like, that's one week.

Starting point is 03:06:40 I know I'm not going to say, I didn't want to go on the trip because I had work to do. Not anymore. So I'm probably going to go and it's going to be pretty fun. But like, I was going to, I was planning for that week to go to Pal Palo Alto. But also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she's like literally like, you know, baby in her arm like, you know, trying to like scar food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had just to clearly dying. So at first time parents, right? So we're kind of getting used to it.

Starting point is 03:07:04 But yeah. No, it's a crazy. It's a crazy change. Why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X, Dingboard, and then I want to talk about the future. Is that the exciting stuff? Okay, sure. So you guys can, I'm probably going to work a bit more on Dingboard.

Starting point is 03:07:17 There's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix. I just didn't have the time with my full-time job. So dingboard.com is the best app ever. Dingboard.com, if you want to make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds, meme. I was a paid user. I loved it. It was amazing. Thank you very much for paying.

Starting point is 03:07:33 Actually, very, very good. You know, like, your money actually helped pay for this. Let's go. This is John Coogan. No way. 2% of this is John Coogan. No, it was. You should give him naming rights.

Starting point is 03:07:43 It is actually crazy that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages. And I feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called like Photoshop Mix or something and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it. And then they put ads in it, which was I was dealing with. And then they just shut it down. And it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing it. It wasn't great, but it was okay.

Starting point is 03:08:06 And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom. And so I'm using two different apps. And neither of them are good anywhere near what you need. And so I was always, I was always a fan of dingboard. But I was actually like in the process when I joined them. I was in process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web like applications. Sorry, on iOS and Android. It's actually like if you guys, if you guys are a nerd, there's something called Sokol.

Starting point is 03:08:28 Okay. Sokol is made by the Swedish guy. I think he's retired kind of. He works three days a week. And on the four days that he has, he's working on this cross platform GL, graphics library like a I guess like transpiler so you write it in one gL language it'll

Starting point is 03:08:41 it will produce the metal version for iOS and it'll produce the version for Android and it'll produce the version for a web so I can use the same code and the code can be basically like it can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps and then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on X.com. I'm so ready. This is the future I was promised.

Starting point is 03:08:59 Yeah it feels like an incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes. I mean like The reason I made it was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool. And then they like started adding a watermark and I was like, fuck this. Yeah. He fucking ruined my meme making tool. I am going to war.

Starting point is 03:09:16 Yeah. Yeah. I remember you had you had sponsors. This is, I love this. There were sponsors when you would open a new dingboard file. It would just have a semi analysis ad from Dylan. I mean, yeah. Still there.

Starting point is 03:09:28 Still there. So I mean, some of analysis, Dylan Patel, you should go check out his substack. He sponsored me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it. Oh, no. He's not a zip-back, but he's on passport with Ben Thompson. But anyway, he's the man and we love him. But the big question is like, dingboard, you're super popular online. Why didn't you go and raise like $15 million from a grossage fund? Oh, dude, man, that sounds so lame, man.

Starting point is 03:09:56 Like raising money with managing people? I'm so not down. I'm so not down. I mean, I deserve, like, literally, dude, like this is. I have two plugged in right now and I don't have enough. power going to my house to like plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged. Yeah. But like I could serve literally a fucking million people.

Starting point is 03:10:11 Okay. Okay. So we're going to blow your mind. We're going to blow your mind with this. But sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. Oh. You don't have to hire that.

Starting point is 03:10:22 Yeah. So you could raise like 50 on 500. Exactly. And it's, you know, take 40 million straight to the bank. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.

Starting point is 03:10:32 Safety net. I feel like, I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never. the founder who asked for that. Tell him, he's joking, he's joking. Yeah, I'm joking. Never happens.

Starting point is 03:10:42 You don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey. New dad, new dad or new dad. He's got to figure it out. I've got to figure it. I need,

Starting point is 03:10:53 I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, CEO, I think of Cluelly. He got, you know, kicked out of his university.

Starting point is 03:11:05 A disgrace, Tard and Feather, he has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was raising. I would have written, I need the money, right? Like, I got a kid. I would have ridden a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the fuck he's doing. Yeah, you're a royally defender.

Starting point is 03:11:17 Okay, okay. Yeah, so here's about. I want a number for dingboard. Like, how many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of number so we can ring the gone for you. I think the peak MRR was like, like, I mean, I don't remember. I don't remember.

Starting point is 03:11:31 Roughly. I'm not raising. I don't want funding. He is raising. 10K. 10K! Indie developer, let's hit the gong for you. Let's let's go!

Starting point is 03:11:40 Let's go! Honestly, really ringing that for your fans, too, because you're genuinely, you're an internet celebrity and you have real fans. The question I have for you is, because you're a Roy Lee defender, what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you know, you sound like much more even keeled, you know, on the show right now. All my rage baits.

Starting point is 03:12:08 Here's what makes people so mad. Sure. That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it to piss people off. I really believe it. Like I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. It makes them just like, when you're honest, like, I mean, like, you know, I'm a big believer in like honesty and stuff like that.

Starting point is 03:12:23 And like, like, when you're honest, like, you kind of like, also the same amount of haters that you gain, you kind of gained twice as much as like people who like are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out. So like, I mean, the reason I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got like an email, which was a bunch of like really scary legal words, like non-disparagement. I had like to like Google what this meant.

Starting point is 03:12:45 Like I even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay, wait. I'm not going to sign anything. I'm going to wait for a lawyer. And then Roy Lee did this thing. And I realized like, you know what? Like Roy Lee's a fucking legend. He's got skin in the game.

Starting point is 03:12:55 Like Roy Lee has to win. So you know what? I'm just going to fucking be retar. I'm going to be a retard. I'm going to be a retard online and I'm going to have to win. And then I'm obviously capable of winning. But if I have like, you know, like the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like work super hard, like super smart and like, you know, Elon's done. He's got like compounds.

Starting point is 03:13:12 He's got like, you know, tons of children you can spend all day all day with. Like he's got all the toys you could also want to play with all the engineers he could talk to. Like if I was him, I would just like goof around with fun toys. But like he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like I feel like I feel like sometimes it's like so I think about. being Elon. I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil. I'll be like, all right, I'm done, dude. Like, this is me. Like, I did my part. Like, I'm going to chill with my zero turn tractor on my two acre lawn. Um, so I gotta know what you want. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. So,

Starting point is 03:13:40 but like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders is like, get enough money. Like, Palmer Lucky. Palmer lucky, it was like a chip on her shoulder. He was like, he was like, fucking Jason count. I'm going to fucking get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed. I'm going to do it again. And he did it again. He 100% did it again. Um, by the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love I love Paul. I want both of them. And you know what? Jason is like the, it's like, it's like, you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason. He's the Joker of Jack. Okay. I see it. I see it. He's a Joker for Palmer Lucky. For me, the Joker would be the middle

Starting point is 03:14:11 manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs. Okay. We're getting into the story where we're learning what actually happened. We're unraveling it. Don't worry about it. I never said anything about my, no, we're about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's next? Yeah. I mean, yeah, so what's, What's next? All in on Dingboard, building out the team. Okay, so Dingboard is doing great. I'm going to keep on growing it and like try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some land.

Starting point is 03:14:35 I've been building things. This is the Ding bot. The ding bot. The ding bot. See this? What does it do? I three, I three-d printed this. What does it do?

Starting point is 03:14:43 This is an arm ESP 32 attached to a motor driver attached to a stepper driver. Sorry, sorry, steper motor. Some 3D printed things that I made with dingcad, by the way, dingcad.com. It's currently down because I had no time to work on. on it, but I have like a local host version. Ding Cat is coming back. Breaking news. Popsicle sticks, no events.

Starting point is 03:15:01 Oh, here's the genius of it, okay? It is. I need cash flow. You know, hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and like, you have an iPhone. It's like good for like 30 years, right? Yep. But with Popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one.

Starting point is 03:15:15 Oh, it's a cash flow. There we go. There we go. Get them in the border. And you know what? It's like you have a Dobby, the elf robot that's like cleaning the house and like, you know, it costs you 30 bucks and it makes them. And it makes a mistake. You just go in and just fucking eat it.

Starting point is 03:15:28 You like kick it across the room because it's like 30 bucks. You can just buy another one. It's like that's a feature. You're not worried about getting you're not you're not worried about, you know, getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot. Because it'll come back to get you at some point. Oh, no, you just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know, it's like Dobby's like, you know, please, you know, please sir.

Starting point is 03:15:48 You just program it, right? This is like a soft problem, by the way. Like, no, we're not going to get run away. I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like, YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids all like, like I saw a kid like, so, uh, he, ate, a dinner. So with my family. This kid was like at the, uh, trying to get to the bathroom. He's 12 years old. And he was on his YouTube shorts. And he was like trying to like find the the door now like clicking like like not clicking around like like reaching around.

Starting point is 03:16:13 I was actually kind of kind of brutal. But like that I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth like YouTube shorts specifically. So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you come out of retirement? Could you? Who's anything about retirement? I was coding yesterday. A $100 million offer? I mean to get you back into a mega corporation. Yeah. What's going to take?

Starting point is 03:16:32 It's going to take 80 million, 100 million, 120 million. What gets you to take the job for those? I'd probably like find it really hard to say no. It's like 2.5 probably like. But I don't think like the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean,

Starting point is 03:16:46 I think of they do. Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies? I'm talking like we can run a process right now. I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number? All right. I'm going to just start doing an auction here.

Starting point is 03:16:56 I got a message for 500, 500. 500. Do I have 600? 600? 600. Our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million with five million in secondary. I could raise money like super easily and like I could also get a job super easy.

Starting point is 03:17:12 I mean, I have friends. The thing is like I'm a very honest hard worker. Like the places I've worked at I could I could go back like I have like a really strong network. So I don't really need a job and I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job. Yeah. But if I wanted to join in terms like for me, mission, alignment is super important. Like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it.

Starting point is 03:17:27 Sure. So I sold some dingboard t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome. Yeah. And then co-here, I think is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up. But mostly like I mean, he's in Canada. He's in Canada. Hold on. Yeah. Breakdown Cohere. That that is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aiden and I think it's incredible. But but it does seem like, you know, there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out. I think, I just think they're based, dude. Yeah, I just, yeah, I just, yeah, so it's just pure, pure culture. They'll figure it out. Yeah, just like, I mean, like, you know, like it's, it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think they're

Starting point is 03:18:07 fucking cool. Like, they got it. They need a poster in residence. Are you a thousand X their, their, their impression. Do you listen to death grips? Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it goes, it goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because, Aden's a big death grips guy. Oh, that just bumps, cohere. On top of Shopify. Yep, yep, yeah. Yeah, he did an interview in a Death Grips T-shirt. I saw it and I was like, that's amazing. This guy's a killer.

Starting point is 03:18:31 But what's wrong with just becoming a full-time poster, getting a substack set up, getting a nice little revenue stream? I think I'm going to try to become like an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it. That's cool. And I'm not going to race. I think I can do it.

Starting point is 03:18:46 I probably can find people to do this for it. There's a lot of things I'm really interested in the way, which is like doing like reinforcement learning for like control of robots certain types of robots. I think I figured something out after listening to a popular lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software. And I'm pretty good at software. And I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly it's not hard enough to start. What? It's easy actually. You proved with that that it's easy. Yeah. Explain that with the reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking like you're going to do stuff in simulation and then transfer the got,

Starting point is 03:19:20 the knowledge back with reinforcement learning. Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the, you know, on the harnesses trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement? So I don't think like humanoid robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. And I would do whatever is possible.

Starting point is 03:19:41 I have a pretty good solid network. Like talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich. I don't know how pronounce it. Yeah. And just be like, hey, just give me, feed me the papers. And like some shitty Python code all clean up and make good. Sorry, researchers. You guys are not very great programs.

Starting point is 03:19:55 This is extremely Matt Friedman code. He's out of the game. Someone's got to build a robot that picks up the leaves. Yeah, no, exactly what now. Because it's like, I'm fucking sick of like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these dandel eyes. I'm, I'm actually so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this.

Starting point is 03:20:10 It's like literally 3D printer. Like you could even 3D print the wheels. Like you can get like five bucks on the Alphabet Express. And ESP 32 costs like three bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like get my ex ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on Ali Express. My house like constantly has like these random Ali Express packages. And it's like maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life.

Starting point is 03:20:30 Like yeah. I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new. I could also sell for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month. Oh, there we go. Yes. There we go. Because people are taking their dobbies.

Starting point is 03:20:43 It's like if it breaks, it's like I literally will tell the users, hey, I'm just, you know, a dude and there's a CNC shop here. that does wood. So like they do wood CNC. So I'm going to make the robot chassis out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa. And I'm going to laser on like made in Ottawa on it. Except, you know, modulo the motors inside that will be made in China

Starting point is 03:21:03 until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. But I guess like the core inside I have after doing dingboard and like honestly working for a lot of these big tech companies is like there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something. Like I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to realize like holy shit like all the cats off were fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, just like ripping on my credit card. What about Grock?

Starting point is 03:21:29 Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper. It's faster and it's good enough. Like I'm not like giving all of my work away to, I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write React. Like it's not that hard to write React. I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of like doesn't avoid using too many if statements. So just stop using if statements and like yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 03:21:55 Okay. So but here's the thing. You want to build a bunch of stuff. Yeah. You need some cash flow. Why not set up? Why not set up? You know, some type of subscription.

Starting point is 03:22:03 You have a lot of fans. A lot of people want to give you $10 a month so you can have forever. I mean, honestly, that was the dingboard subscription that I signed up for. It was like support this guy who's doing something cool. Yeah. The issue is dingboard is so hard to sign up for. How do I even sign up for dingboard right now? Go to dingboard.com.

Starting point is 03:22:19 Okay, I'm on. Okay, first of all, Jordy, never dealt my conversion levels ever again. I am a conversion. I can convert anything to anything. I am, I am a conversion god. Okay, go to dingboard.com. Wait, you're so good. You're so good.

Starting point is 03:22:33 You don't have a buy button because you want to inspire yourself to grind harder. Go to dingboard.com. Okay, I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first. Do I have to sign in? I don't even have to tell you what to do. Legend, legend.

Starting point is 03:22:45 All right. I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I? Ding Scribe. There we go. Do you want to know what ding Scribe even means?

Starting point is 03:22:53 You can't not dig Scribe. 1299 per month. You got to get your numbers up, dude. $1.99 per month? I actually don't have the code. It's like on my server. You got to do what Google does. It's $500 a month, but they give you six months at half price.

Starting point is 03:23:06 And then it just auto converts up. Yeah, that's the real ticket. Well, I could just level the price. Yeah, yeah. But the price should be, you know, cheap on day one. And they just get more and more. It should go up by 10% of it. Every month.

Starting point is 03:23:17 Dude, I'm not doing that. That's some YouTube shorts. Try some kids' brainshap. All right. I'm a dingh pro subscriber. You're a ding subscriber. I'm dinged up. No, dude, you're a ding scriber.

Starting point is 03:23:28 You have to get that. Dude, Jordi, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scriber. Ding scriber. You're part of the crew. I'm ding maxing. Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro are you cursor guy?

Starting point is 03:23:39 Curse. Curse. Never. Never say. Never say. No. Never say curse. Okay, I have a custom framework.

Starting point is 03:23:45 I've written for a Neovin. So basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and before Gemini was good, Claude and Open AI's models, they go down all the time. Like the infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. I don't blame them. It's like that's a large problem to solve. So I have like always, I always have a model available. Like even if both of them are down, like I can hit deep seek over open router, right?

Starting point is 03:24:10 Like it's a facade. Can you do that in cursor by just switching the model router? switching Was there a hockey? So for me, it's like, I have a weird, I mean, let me,

Starting point is 03:24:19 let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, flex away. Whoa. There we go. Whoa. Oh,

Starting point is 03:24:26 nice down by the way. I got a, got a homie from China built to make it for me. And so basically space, space, what was it? Space,

Starting point is 03:24:35 I don't even remember. It's all, space I, is, LOM provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Okay. Space K is Gemini 2.5.

Starting point is 03:24:44 And it all renders in a single markdown file. Okay. And I've created commands for these models. So basically like depending on the fence, so three, three apostrophes. And then there's going to be the command name. So like edit file. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:24:56 It can give, basically give it into syntax to edit a file for me. And then I actually manually. Is this open source? Like, you know, people put their dot files up. Like, like can I install your, your setup? So no, it's not open source. Mostly because people are going to start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them. Okay.

Starting point is 03:25:13 So I'm just going to do it for myself. I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. Like I'm, you know, I know how much this is. If it's not a resource, you got a raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here. It is a cursor and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it, but I'm not going to sell for money. I think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it,

Starting point is 03:25:31 they're going to have ideas of their own and then you're going to build it for themselves. Okay. Like the whole point of, so it's a NeoVin plugin kind of. It's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of, I'm going to talk for. So part of the problem is with, uh, So NeoVim is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So like the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself.

Starting point is 03:25:56 Is there something annoys you? You can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to write my own frameworks. Cursor, I'm sure is a great product. But I like, I'm just so particular about certain things. Like for example, like I want to like implement tree sitter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a file, which has a bunch of file paths. And those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by like literally

Starting point is 03:26:19 going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the AST. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, fuck man. Like what about, you're going to make any products in the parenting space? Oh, yeah. So actually I have an idea. I had an idea. So I used an e-ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update the software and I never write anything private on it. So I'm going to put it public. So I have an E-Nc reader slash tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write. Instead of texting him, I want to make

Starting point is 03:26:57 like a kind of like a radio e-ink display, kind of like an etch and sketch, which you can write on, but it synced to your parents' etching sketch. So my wife, I will have one. I will have one and my kid will have one. Yeah. And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over, over distances, right? I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably going to build that.

Starting point is 03:27:14 If you wanted to make like a gillian dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it. Like literally just go do it. Like it's not that hard. It's actually not, get a 3D printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stop putting shorts because there's so many great videos we can learn.

Starting point is 03:27:31 Stop with the shorts. Get ready. This is going to be a YouTube short. We're going to edit. Yeah. Yeah. This will be on TikTok, maybe. Yeah, Microsoft.

Starting point is 03:27:40 Yeah, Minecraft speed run. Yeah, we'll put subway surfers over you, anything. AI slop. How many kids do you want to have? So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God. And yeah, that's how many kids. Good answer.

Starting point is 03:27:54 That's great. What else do you have to say to the people while you're here? Thanks for doing this podcast, guys. I know how hard. I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And like they're doing live and stuff. Like it's a pain in the ass.

Starting point is 03:28:09 So keep it up guys. I know like. Thank you. And and the live, the live, the video team at X are like generational talents. Like super, super good people. Like so like just like find someone to like find a way to reach out to them. So when you have any issues and like actually talk. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:28:24 I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been great. Come come back on whenever you want to talk about your project. I love to just hang out and chat. Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate you guys. And yeah, so keep it up.

Starting point is 03:28:39 Thanks. We're excited and I'm excited to be ding maxing. Just offer a premium tier like, I don't know, like 10 grand a month or something like that. And maybe we become, you know. Oh, I mean, if you guys want to add space, I'll sell you right now, like spit handshake. If you want to put an ad on dingboard, your podcast, let's say 12 grand. 12 grand. I mean, I was making a million dollars.

Starting point is 03:29:02 We'll talk to our, we'll talk to our CFO. All right. And our CFO. Our CFO. Our CFO. Our CFO. We'll talk to your CFO. But can we get the semi-analysis deal where it's perpetual?

Starting point is 03:29:11 It's 12 grade once and we get it forever? Because what if you sell this to a billion in AUM? Is it a one-time or? It's a great option. There's a lot of upside here. It depends on how good your podcast is. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 03:29:22 Okay. Well, we're going to keep working on it. Hopefully Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together. Yeah, absolutely. We're excited to follow up. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Godspeed.

Starting point is 03:29:32 Have a good one. Bye. Next up, we have to talk to you. You about Wander, find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and a 24-7 concierge service. Yep, obscene should get a Wander. He should.

Starting point is 03:29:47 He's going to be traveling around interviewing at all the top companies. Wander would be a great choice for him. We have had a great show. We were going to play you an interview that we did earlier today with Shervin Peshavar, but there are some security issues, unfortunately. And so we're working to potentially blur the background, and we will get you that interview as soon as we possibly can, but security comes first. It comes first.

Starting point is 03:30:11 And so we will obviously realize some of the key takeaways. And honestly, it's such a developing story. I feel like already the story has moved and we should just have him back on again soon from a more secure location and make sure that everything is above board. But thank you so much for watching. We made a lot of fun. And we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a good day.

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