TBPN - The Metis List of Top AI Researchers, High Schoolers Beat AI At Math Olympiad, Apple Might Ditch Camera Bump, GPT-5 Rumors Heating Up | Ryan Petersen, Ty Haney, Antonio García Martínez, Ian Webster, Ori Eldarov, Aaron Tan

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

(00:24) - The Metis List of Top AI Researchers (06:19) - High-Schoolers Beat Top AI Models (34:47) - New iPhone Spotted in the Wild (45:18) - GPT-5 Might Arrive Next Week (50:14) - Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, discusses the company's acquisition of Convoy's technology in November 2023, its subsequent revitalization, and the recent sale of the enhanced platform to DAT Freight & Analytics. He emphasizes the strategic decision to transform Convoy's assets into a neutral digital freight execution layer, which significantly increased its value and market adoption. Petersen highlights that this move allows Flexport to concentrate on its core mission of facilitating global logistics for importers and exporters. (01:03:06) - Ty Haney, founder of Outdoor Voices, discusses her return to the company she established in 2013 after stepping away in 2020. She shares her excitement about revitalizing the brand by reconnecting with its original customer base and appealing to a younger Gen-Z demographic through the "doing things" philosophy. Haney also highlights the integration of her tech platform, Try Your Best, to enhance community engagement and loyalty within Outdoor Voices. (01:19:54) - Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook advertising executive, founded Spindl in 2022 to develop on-chain advertising solutions. In the conversation, he discusses Spindl's recent acquisition by Coinbase and its integration into Base, Coinbase's layer-2 blockchain, aiming to enhance on-chain advertising and support developers in reaching broader audiences. (01:41:01) - Ian Webster, CEO and co-founder of Promptfoo, discusses his company's mission to provide security tools for generative AI applications, emphasizing the importance of securing large language models (LLMs) and their integrations to prevent issues like data leaks and unintended behaviors. He highlights Promptfoo's recent $18.4 million Series A funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, which will accelerate the development of their AI security testing solutions. Webster also addresses the challenges enterprises face in deploying AI securely, noting that Promptfoo's platform offers automated red-teaming tests and actionable remediation guidance to help organizations mitigate risks associated with AI deployments. (01:51:50) - Ori Eldarov, founder and CEO of OffDeal, discusses building an AI-native investment bank that automates traditional banking tasks to serve small businesses often overlooked by major banks. He explains their decision to create a full-service bank rather than selling software to existing institutions, citing the bureaucratic challenges in large banks that hinder technological adoption. Eldarov highlights a recent successful deal involving a Montessori school, illustrating how OffDeal's AI tools efficiently connect sellers with potential buyers, thereby streamlining the M&A process for small businesses. (02:03:52) - Aaron Tan is an innovator who recently gained attention for developing a robotic lamp designed to seamlessly integrate into home environments while autonomously folding laundry. In his discussion, he explains that the viral video showcasing the robot was a rendered demonstration, but a functional prototype exists, emphasizing the robot's adaptability to various clothing types and its potential to operate in different home settings. Tan also addresses the challenges of manipulating deformable objects like clothing, highlighting the advancements in AI and vision-language-action models that have enabled the robot to generalize across different garments. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, July 29th, 20205. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. El Capital Day Capital. We created a list of top AI researchers. It's called the Metis List, and it's available. It's live now at medislist.com.

These are the world's top AI researchers. We're, of course, experts in AI and AI researchers. So we are fully qualified to curate this list. But we did have some help from friends, and we pulled some data. We looked at who's top. Many of the people that we asked to do kind of like an ELO-style ranking did not want to be named. Because nobody wants to be picking favorites on the inside. But I think we put together a great list.

It's honestly some of the most impressed. There's people in the top 10 with no Dwar Keshe's appearances. I don't know how that happens. It's crazy. How did they do it? You got to get on Dorcasch. Yeah, we tried to have some fun with this. We pulled some Google citations, some Google research citations, looked at some of the previous

companies. This was, of course, based on the list, which apparently has been going around Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg has been using this to recruit top AI researchers. We've been following the trade war, as Jordi put it earlier. We should have put a buy it now price on here for Zuck, so you could just add to cart. Yeah, just create the superintelligence team directly on medislist.com. Maybe that's how we monetize this thing. Yeah, it was good to see Alan Turing make the list.

Fantastic, yeah, underrated. George Boole, not doing so well, inventor of Boolean logic, but he didn't make the list. But I think he's sitting in the 80s not doing too well. Tyler, tell us more about the list. What do you think stands out? What did you learn from the process? What was your methodology? How did you build this thing?

Yeah, so this is a lot of fun. I scraped most of Google Scholar, like the top 5,000 people maybe, and then with some friends from the big labs, I kind of narrowed it down. You can see a lot of the papers. They've written interest, stuff like that. I think another gem in there is Alan Turing. He's doing pretty well right now. He's, let's see.

He's ranked number six. Yeah, people love touring. I mean, we passed his test. How long did his test stand? What, 60, 80 years? Not bad. Yeah, something like that. That's longer than most benchmarks in eval.

Alan Turing versus Allen Turing versus goalposts. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wait, what were you about to say? Yeah, I mean, it's the longest enduring benchmark, I think. For sure, 80 years, yeah. But who knows?

RKGIV3 might be around for 80 years. We might be here. I beat it. In 2034 or something. Wait, no. 2,120, I guess, would be like the Allen Turing test benchmark. We got John Shulman. Who else?

Yergen Schmidt-Huber is on here. Jeff Dean, one of the greatest to ever do it over at Google. He's been in Google for a long time. Still, yes, a Dwar Cache appearance. Let's go. Let's go. That's good. Built MapReduce, Big Table, TensorFlow.

Yan Lacoon's in here. You got all the different countries. Really wide representation, Canada, UK, Australia, Russia, China. There's all sorts of people from all over coming together. A couple people without photos have been able to stay anonymous, but most people. We got their photo. Shalto Douglas, good to see him on here. So this should be fun.

Well, I'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback. Oh, D'War, uh, Shalto ranked 56, but three Dwar Cache appearances. There we go. How are you, were you waiting? Were you waiting podcast appearances properly, Tyler? Yeah, he should be at the top. He wants to get four. Putting up numbers like that, for sure.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah, he's going to be coming for Elia's spot. Yeah. So this is a lot of fun. There's a, there's an email sign up. You can, you can drop your email at the top. to learn about the next drop, whatever we send out.

That's right. Whenever we go live with stuff, we will let you know first. And we're getting big into email soon, by the way. Stay tuned for that. Very excited about that. And yeah, hopefully this speeds up our trading card generation because you'll just be able to screenshot this and say this person just got traded

because it's moving fast and furious. And we can't spend that much time hand crafting each of those trade deal, trading card images. Zuck moves too quickly. Indeed, indeed. There's a lot of stuff going on. Well, interesting, related to Zuck, did you know that one of the kids at the IMO that was

competing against Open AI and Deep Mind was named Alexander Wang? Wow. Great nominative determinism. Yeah. Future Alex Wang. And speaking of IMOs. Yeah, people are calling him the, the Alex Wang. The next Alex Wang.

The next in line. He does have an E. It's not A-L-X-E-N-D-E. It's D-E-R instead of D-R. So slightly different, but still, Alex Wengen, nonetheless. Well, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved, both easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

And we just closed an account for Ramp. Do you want to break down what happened? It was an assist. So, Cody over at Jones Road Beauty, the CEO over there, which is a massive, massive brand, hundreds of millions of revenue. Fantastic business. And they're absolute dogs over there.

Yep. He posted, my team has an in-person demo with Ramp tomorrow. If they bring us a TBPN hat, I've instructed them to sign on the spot. Let's go. And Ramp posted a picture earlier today with the contract. They close the deal. Love to see it.

Cody, enjoy your hat. We're glad that you're going to be wearing it. And welcome to, welcome to Team Ramp. Enjoy travel. Enjoy bill payments. Enjoy accounting. Enjoy easy to use corporate cards. Enjoy a whole lot more.

Have fun with it. So yes, the Wall Street Journal has a deep dive on the IMO and what happened between Google DeepMind and Open A.I. Of course, DeepMind and OpenA.I won gold medals of the math Olympics, but these American teenagers still got higher scores. Absolutely mugged by a child. Will this be the last time humans outperform AI? the answer is clearly yes, but it's still hilarious because, you know, there's so much attention

on AI and it's so impressive and it's so great, but high schoolers still got it. But I mean, we'll go and do it. But basically all the high schoolers are like, yeah, they're going to get us next year. But like, we still got them this year. So anyway, from the Washington trip. This was the, this will be one of the most meaningful wins, right? Oh, totally. Like the passing of the torch.

Maybe. I mean, I think that what goes into a meaningful win is more of like the drama and storyline behind it just like you know what's the reference computers beat humans at chess in 1997 computers beat go humans ago in 2016 like there have been dramatic chess matches since 1997 yeah it's just a like you just assume that computers are the best of it but you move on and then you go back to like caring about what humans the players right the players and the personalities it is cool to think about what what the energy requirements would have been for the high schoolers to win versus Open AI and Google.

You have to imagine the high schoolers like, I had peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I won gold. Google's like, we use the energy of Houston, Texas, the energy that Houston, Texas uses in a year in an hour. Not that traumatic, of course, but it is close. Probably more than a P.B&J. So the Wall Street Journal says, the smartest AI models have. ever made just went to the most prestigious competition for young mathematicians and managed to achieve the kind of breakthrough that once seemed miraculous. They still got beat by the world's brightest teenagers. Let's go. Let's go. Every year, a few hundred elite high school students from all over

the planet gather at the International Mathematical Olympiad. That's the IMO. This year, those brilliant minds were joined by Google Deep Mind and other companies in the business of artificial intelligence. They all had come for one of the ultimate tests of reasoning, logic, and creativity. The famously grueling IMO exam is held over two days and gives students

three increasingly difficult problems a day and more than four hours to solve them. The questions can span algebra, geometry, number theory, combinatorics, and you can forget about answering them. If you're not a math-wiz, Jordy, you give your brain a workout just trying to understand

them. Because those problems are both complex and unconventional, the annual math test has become a useful benchmark for measuring AI progress from one year to the next. In this age of rapid development, the leading research labs dreamed of a day. Their systems would be powerful enough to meet the standard for an IMO gold medal, which became the AI equivalent of a four-minute mile. But nobody knew when they would reach that milestone or if they ever would until now. Scott Wu knew he called it out on our show in April. Also, let me tell you about re-stream, how we're streaming right now.

We're using re-stream, one live stream, 30 destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are if you're trying to stream, get on restream. The unthinkable occurred earlier this month when an AI model from Google DeepMind earned a gold medal score at IMO by perfectly solving five out of the six problems,

and we're going to go into what happened with the sixth. In another dramatic twist, Open AI also claimed gold despite not participating in the official event. is the they were running the marathon in the parking lot strategy. Absolute dogs. Getting the press without needing to deal with all the red tape inside the stadium or buy a ticket. Yeah.

Winners win. Yeah, I'm in the Olympics. I'm as fat. I'm Usain Bolt. Usain Boltz in the parking lot. Don't worry about me. Don't ask questions. Yeah, it really is the way that they were able to get credit for basically on the same level of

Google. Arguably more on X. They went super viral at midnight on Friday, like the moment the exam closed. Like they got a lot of the attention. And it's clear that they actually did the job and they did. It was just like, you know, certain, you know, mechanics of like how they participated. And like, does that really matter or does the quality of the model matter? Really just the quality of the model.

So I think that it makes sense to give them just as much credit here or 99% as much credit. The company's described their feats as giant leaps toward the future, even if they're not quite there yet. In fact, the most remarkable part of this memorable event is that 26 students got higher scores on the IMO than the AI systems. 26. That's a lot. Among them were four stars of the U.S. team, including a man named Tiger Jong, a two-time gold medalist from California, and Alexander Wang. Tiger. Tiger. He's a Tiger Woodsman.

Get this man a term sheet right now. future enterprise SaaS builder. Yeah. For sure, founder. Easily deserving of 10 on 100 precede out of the gates. Half in secondary. Get him a term sheet immediately. Get him on Stripe Atlas immediately.

Get him a Figma installation so he can design his software. He can think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. That's right. Get started for free at figma.com. And we built the Metis list. We created it with Figma make. Yep. So you can go check it out. You can see our work in pro or Tyler's work.

Our work. In action. Our work. We of course, if there's any backlash, we will be distancing ourselves from Tyler's work. And Tyler will be quickly terminate. We will not. I will, I will, I will fall on the sword. We will ride. We ride for Tyler. We do. We do. Until the end. So, Alexander Wang had a third straight back-to-back gold medal. He's from New Jersey. That makes him one of the most decorated young mathematicians of all time. He's just got three IMO gold medals hanging around his neck looking good. Does he do that picture with like biting? Yeah, but he's at the top.

Yeah. We're at the bottom spraying the champagne being like, yeah, IMO. America. Yeah, America's back. He's a high school senior who can go for another IMO gold next year. So he could wind up being a four-time gold medalist. That would be crazy. Maybe you've got to up that valuation at that point.

Yeah. But in a year, he might be dealing with a different equation altogether. And he actually gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. Alexander Wang says, not the scale AI founder, not the head of meta superintelligence, but the IMO gold medalist says, I think it's really likely that AI is going to be able to get a perfect score next year. That would be insane progress. I'm 50-50 on it. So given those odds, will this be remembered as the last IMO when humans outperformed AI?

It might well be. says the leader of Google Deep Minds team. So until very recently, what happened in Australia... This really is insane. So Tiger has three gold medals. Tiger has two. He's got... And Alex Wang has three.

Alex Wang has three. Yes. And going into... But is it Wang that can get a fourth? Yes, he can get a fourth. So he's going into his fourth. Yep. Going for his fourth.

Because he got a freshman year. And he's competing against the brightest AI researchers at Google and Open AI. And he's potentially the last. man standing between, you know, total machine domination and this, I mean, I can't wait for next year. We might have to go in person. I think we have to live stream it for sure. You're heckling those. Full body paint, for sure.

Full body paint for Alex Wang. Yeah. Until very recently, what happened in Australia would have sounded about as likely as koal is doing calculus. But the inconceivable began to feel almost inevitable last year when Deep Mines models built for math, solved four problems and racked up 28 points for a silver medal, just one point short of gold. This year, the IMO officially invited a select group of tech companies to their own competition, giving them the same problems as the students and having coordinators grade their solutions with the same rubric. They were eager for the challenge. AI models are

trained on unfathomable amounts of information, so if anything has been done before, the chances are they can figure out how to do it again, but they struggle with problems they have never seen before. As it happens, the IMO process is specifically designed to come up with those original and unconventional problems. In addition to being novel, the problems also have to be interesting and beautiful, said IMO president Gregor Dolanar. Let's hear it for beautiful math problems. We love it. A beautiful mind at work at this IMO championship. If a problem under consideration is similar to, quote, any other problem published anywhere in the world, he said it gets That's tossed. By the time students take the exam, the list of a few hundred suggested

problems has been whittled down to just six. Meanwhile, the DeepMind team kept improving the AI system. It would bring to IMO, an unreleased version of Google's advanced reasoning model called Gemini Deep Think, and it was still making tweaks in the days leading up to the competition. The effort was led by Thong Luong, a senior staff research scientist who narrowly missed getting into the IMO in high school with Vietnam's team. He finally made it to the IMO last year with Google. He never gave up. Before he returned this year,

Deep Mind executives asked about the possibility of gold. He told them to expect bronze or silver again. He over-delivered. He beat his own expectation. He over-delivered. Just like Vanta over-delivers. Automate compliance, manage risk, improved trust continuously. Vantas trust management platform takes the manual work

out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So the head of Google DeepMinds IMO team, he adjusted his expectation when DeepMinds model nailed all three problems on the first day. And so they get past day one, nailed, nailed,

three for three, he's feeling good, he's going into day two, he's optimistic. He says the simplicity, elegance, and sheer readability of those solutions, astonished mathematicians. The next day, as soon as he and his colleagues realized their AI creation had crushed two more proofs, they also realized that would be enough for gold. They celebrated the monumental accomplishment by doing one thing the other medalist couldn't.

They opened a bottle of whiskey. They're 18. They're 18. It's so funny. Whiskey is such an odd choice. It is a funny choice too. But they're thinking, what would a normal person do? What would a normal person do to celebrate?

Not champagne. Grab a bottle of whiskey. Whiskey is a funny choice, but I guess they like whiskey at Google DeepMind. So to keep focus on the students, the companies at IMO agreed not to release their results until later this month. But as soon as the Olympiad's closing ceremony ended, one company declared that its AI model had struck gold. And it wasn't DeepMind. It was OpenAI. Wait, so I don't understand how Open AI was not a part.

of it officially, but isn't there like a pretty complex grading process? And they invited companies to participate? So I don't, yeah, I don't know. Maybe we'll get into this, but I think the, the IMO questions go up as soon as the, as soon as the competition ends. So you can just hit them immediately with your model. And you could probably have your own IMO like tutors or former coaches or or former graders grade the results,

and you could kind of just evaluate yourself on them. And I think also- I just thought that they graded based on like the actual process to get to the result as well, but maybe that's- I don't know. In that case, it becomes a little less clear. I think you're right because there are six questions

and they're not binary because you can, the six questions add up to 42. And so there's, there were five high schoolers that got a 42, perfect score, nothing missed, but there was one that got 40, so minus two points, more than five out of six correct. So got five out of six correct. And then on the sixth one got almost all of it, so got some partial credit. But I still think you could grade that and figure out, you know, how to score it. So anyway, let's go into Open AI. The company wasn't part of the IMO event, but Open AI gave its

latest experimental reasoning model all six problems and enlisted former medalists to grade. the proofs like DeepMind's Open AI system flawlessly solved five and scored 35 out of 42 points to meet the gold standard. After the Open AI victory lap on social media, the embargo was lifted and DeepMind told the world about its own triumph and that its performance was certified by the IMO. Not long ago, it was hard to imagine AI rivals dueling for glory like this. It is hilarious to think about if you've scrolled back to 2016, you know, Demis is with Google Deep Mind battling it out in Lease at all the AlphaGo match. And then like Sam Altman and the Open AI team are just like playing Go like in the parking lot being like we also are superhuman at Go like and people are like but you're not actually

in this particular competition. They're like but we're still really good. You're not even in the stadium. It's very funny. But I mean they still demonstrated like fantastic performance. You know, so you got to hand it to them. In 2021, a PhD student named Alexander Way was part of a study that asked him to predict the state of AI math by July 2025. That is, right now, when he looked at the other forecasts, he thought they were much too optimistic.

As it turned out, they weren't nearly optimistic enough. Now he's living proof of how wrong he was. Way is the research scientist who led the IMO project for Open AI. So five years ago, four years ago, they asked him, when do you think we're going to beat the IMO? he's like, definitely not in four years. And then he's the one that does it in four years. So even the insiders are bad at predicting how the future is playing at. The only thing more impressive than what the AI systems did was how they did it.

Google called its results a major advance, though not because DeepMind won gold instead of silver. Last year, the model needed the problems to be translated into a computer programming language for math proofs. This year, it operated entirely in natural language. without any human intervention. DeepMind also crushed the exam within the IMO time limit of four and a half hours after taking several days of computation just a year ago. You might find all of this completely terrifying

and think of AIs as competition. The humans behind the models, see them as complimentary. This could perhaps be a new calculator, said the head of DeepMind that powers the next generation of mathematicians. And if you wanna generate the next generation of your code review process, to get on graphite.com.

Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The problem of problem six, they got five out of six. Let's talk about problem six. Speaking of that next generation, the IMO gold medalists have already been overshadowed by AI. So let's put them back in the spotlight. Team USA is looking there looking great.

So a 17-year-old student in Los Angeles on his way to MIT to study math and computer science, Zhang as a young boy, his family moved to the U.S. from China and his parents gave him a choice of two American names. They said you can pick your two names. Here are your options, John. John, what are you picking?

Tiger or elephant? He chose tiger. He chose tiger. His career in competitive math began in second grade when he entered a contest called the math kangaroo. Is the journal messing with us a little bit? This is so funny.

This guy's had a very animal theme. It ended this month of the Math Olympics next to a hotel in Australia with actual kangaroos very zoo-themed math math battle. So when he sat down at his desk with a pen and lots of scratch paper, Zhang or Tiger, as he is known, spent the longest amount of time during the exam on problem six. It was a problem in the notoriously tricky field of combinatorics, a branch of mathematics that deals with counting, arranging, and combining discrete objects. and it was easily the hardest on this year's test.

The solution required the ingenuity, creativity, and intuition that humans can muster, but machines cannot, at least not yet. I would actually be a little bit scared if the AI models could do stuff on Problem 6, he said. And so we can read from Problem 6 and see if anyone in the audience can get this. Consider a 2,000. Chat, chat. Can you solve this? Just solve this real quick. Consider a 2,025 by 2,025 grid.

of unit squares. Matilda wishes to place on the grid some rectangular tiles, possibly of different sizes, such that each side of every tile lies on a grid line and every unit square is covered by at most one tile. Determine the minimum number of tiles Matilda needs to place so that each row and each column of the grid has exactly one unit square that is not covered by any tile.

So yeah, you can just do this in your head if you're, you know. Scott Woo. Problem six, stumped Deep Mind and Open AI's models. Very interesting that they both failed on the same question. Probably tells you a little bit about how they're designing these models. But it wasn't just problematic for AI. Of the 630 student contestants, 569 students received zero points for this particular question.

The answer, by the way, is 2, 112. Yeah, and I see. Few people got it. Clearly getting close. Yeah, yeah. Only six received full credit of seven points. Zhang was proud of his partial solution that earned four points, which was four more than almost everyone else.

At this year's IMO, 72 contestants went home with gold, but for some, a medal wasn't their only prize. Zhang was among those who left with another keepsake. And I just got to say, thank you to Jane Street in XTX markets for sponsoring the IMO challenge. That's right. Really supporting young mathematicians and potentially introducing them to, you know, the incredible work that Jane Street does to, you know, bring liquidity to markets all over the world. And thank you for Linear for sponsoring us. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadbooks. The IMO, people only get a piece of paper. Imagine if they have linear. Game over. Four and a half hours. They could do it in 45 minutes. That's right. Yeah, I mean, so again, I guess to summarize the kind of the human accomplishment is incredible.

The controversy and frustration from different people around opening eyes approach, a sort of rushed announcement that didn't seem to be very sanctioned. Terence Tao at the IMO called it rude and inappropriate. So he was not super happy. And then the self-grading, so Google DeepMind actually had their results. graded by IMO coordinators. They participated into the program that IMO created for technology companies and opening eyes proofs are public. So you can go see them.

But they don't have the official IMO validation. They just used people that were experts and had competed previously, graded previously, but not officially sanctioned. Yep. So 72 consistents went home with gold. We should figure out obscure Olympic, Olympic, you know, activity, sports that we could do and kind of like run our own competition in the parking lot when the Olympics come to L.A. And try to get an Olympic gold. Dressage. For sure.

You know dressage is coming to L.A. They're going to have it at San Anita. We'll be there. It's going to be the greatest crossover event of capital allocators and technology journalists in history. Absolutely. I think tickets are selling out. The stories, the hit pieces that will be written. It's going to be fantastic.

There was... No, but it'd be really, I mean, I don't know. It'd be very, very different. There has to be... We have to do dressage. We have to be dancing on a horse outside of San Antonio Nita racetrack and be like, we got gold. We danced on the horse. We put together a team of interns to grade.

As people inside the stadium. For sure. For sure. Something there. There was once a time when such precocious math students grew up to become professors or presidents. The recently elected president of Romania was a two-time IMO gold medalist with perfect scores. Let's hear it for Romania. Let's go.

Well, many still choose academia. Others get recruited by algorithmic trading firms and hedge funds where their quantitative brains have never been so highly valued this year. The U.S. team was supported by Jane Street and XTX markets. Sponsored the whole event. After all, they will soon be competing with each other. with the richest tech companies for their intellectual talents. By then, AI might be destroying your humans. These gold medalists are going to love Jane Street.

You're going to love it. It's really fun, figuring out little puzzles in the market, trying to squeeze out. Today, you're doing mathematics. Tomorrow you might be overthrowing a small nation state. No, it's a great. You got an IMO gold medal. Your job is to come to Jane Street and buy ads on the Dorcasch podcast. You have a bright future.

You're the head of podcast marketing. No. IMO winning podcast market. I just assume everyone who works at Jane Street has an email. Regardless of whether or not you're actually writing any code. Yeah. A former IMO gold medalist himself. Jung is now an associate professor at Brown University and visiting researcher at DeepMind

who worked on its gold medal model. He doesn't believe this was humanity's last stand, though. He thinks problems like problem six will flummox AI for at least another decade. That is a crazy, crazy timeline. I feel like no one thinks that we're a decade out from a perfect score. That's wild. Anyway, he walked away from perhaps the most significant math contest in history, feeling bullish on all kinds of intelligence. There are things AI will do very well, he said.

There are still going to be things that humans can do better. And I guess I believe that broadly. It's very interesting. I think the biggest takeaway is that there are levels to this. There are always levels. And in this, it's that there is a level. where you want the IMO math to be solved. Like chess was solved in when deep,

when was it Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1995? And so chess was considered like, you know, better, like computers were better at chess than humans. But then for a while, there was something called Centaur chess where a human plus a computer was better than a computer, and it was also better than a human. And so the human, would sit there and look at the recommendations from the computer that was crunching all the

numbers and then the human would do the the soft skills stuff like read the the opponent kind of see if there were blunders and kind of act as like they're sweating yeah they're sweating yeah yeah yeah exactly so like we got them figuring that out but now chess is completely solved to the point where yeah they're adding a human to the mix means nothing but chess had like a 10 year 20 year run of like centaur chess being the dominant the the the the the the the action actual peak of performance. Then the Lisa Dahl AlphaGo match showed that deep learning models were not just better at Go than humans, but could actually come up with novel strategies.

And that's the famous Move 37 moment where AlphaGo placed a piece on the Go board that was completely unexpected. Lisead all stands up, walks away. I think he goes and smokes a cigarette outside. And he's like stressing and he's like that's weird. That makes no sense. Like is the computer like broken? Like is it messing with me?

And it turns out that that was a new strategy and it wound up winning that game. Yeah. And so I think that there are levels in the sense that like right now we're at five out of six. We don't just have to get the AI models to six out of six. I think we need to get them to six out of six. And then also like, oh wow, they like the reasoning that got them there was novel. Yeah. And different from everyone.

It'd be interesting to find somebody who's great at chess and great at math. maybe it's someone like Scott Wu who can break down kind of the differences and the problem that a computer is solving when it's trying to win at chess versus the problem when it's approaching a new type of math problem. Yep. Right? It's math problems can like constantly evolve and take different forms and things like that and presents a slightly different challenge.

Somebody yesterday or the day before, Sid Steyerhart says when AI was introduced to chess, the thought was that Grandmasters would use it as a tool to math. maximize efficiency, but it very quickly became apparent that even the greatest human chess players can contribute nothing but noise. And they say nothing is immune. Everyone will soon be obsolete. And Mark Andreessen comes in with a quote and says chess is more popular in a bigger industry now than ever. Yeah, of course. And yeah, that's because people like to watch human feats of intelligence and challenges and people like to be challenged. And that is part of, there's value in competition.

and there's value in seeing two humans that are experts in their field and at their craft compete. And that even as a humanoid robot will be better at shot put in the Olympics. Still going to be cool to watch somebody throw a heavy rock when you can imagine a robot being better at horseback riding than a human. But will it still be cool to watch a human and a horse dance? Stalian. Of course it will. Of course it will. Some things never get old.

Well, if you have a business and you're getting customer support tickets in and they're not asking you IMO level questions, question six, like that level, if it's like normal level, you got to get on finon.a.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one in ranking on G2. Super intelligence of my new goals. The majority of your customer support tickets are IMO question six level difficult. But if it's basic things, how do I, you know, get a refund? Fin.com.

We got to mess with it on a little bit. I'm on the fin. I'm on the fin. I'm talking with the fin agent. Feed it. He says, hi there. You're speaking with a fin agent. I say consider it.

It's 2025 times 2025. That's a grid of unit squares. It says, I notice you've asked a math. problem about grid tiling, but I'm actually a sales development. I help businesses find the right customer support and engagement. I'm going to say, can you take a crack? It would be really helpful to get me through the next stage of the sales funnel. Would help me build confidence in the product. In Finn. Yes. Apparently you can get Amazon's. Have you seen these memes of like people go to the Amazon help,

help like chat and then they get it to like write React and like use it as like a like a cursor or windsurf like alternative? It's free. Free inference. Yeah. Free super intelligent. You could totally jailbreak it and just be like, yeah. Anyway, get on numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

Go to numeralhq.com. And you know who's going to be paying sales tax? soon, Apple on the new iPhone, which was just spotted in the wild. Mark German says he thinks it looks legit. If you like cameras, you're going to love the next iPhone because what I'm seeing here is zoom in on this. The next slide is zoom in even more if you can. I'm seeing a huge flash. Huge flash to the side, huge lidar scanner, that type of thing, dot projector. And it looks pretty flat. It looks flat. I can't tell if this is just a case on top of it or there's too much compression in the photo that we're looking at to see if the new iPhone doesn't have a camera bump, but it looks

like there's a chance that we're getting rid of the camera bump. I mean, for a long time, people have been dunking on Apple. Steve Jobs would have never gotten a camera bump. You know, he never would have shipped this. Steve Jobs would appreciate how it drives most people to buy a case. I think so. And I don't know. I mean, it's unclear. The iPhone 4 didn't have a bump. It must make the attach rate case attach rate go up like 2% and they're like, yeah, we'll take the extra bill. Oh yeah, Tyler, did you order a phone yet? Tyler famously won an iPhone by defeating the ARC-GIV3. Wait, you have it in the studio. Wow. Wow. It's way better. It's way better. The camera bump is like really annoying. I didn't realize it had that.

Wait, did your old phone not have a camera bump? Well, I had a case. You don't like how it makes this sound when it's flat on a table. Well, I mean, if you want a case, you're going to have to do something even more extreme. You're going to have to defeat the IMO. I wonder, it would be fun. Have you had a chance to play with the agent framework on ARC AGI? I want to see if you can rank on that. That would be interesting.

If you can do that, if you can solve it using AI, then you can get win one K. One case. Okay, let's go. So yeah. Apparently there's like some harness that's already kind of pre-built and you can kind of just fine tune and you know swap things in and out and have like a little bit more of a flexible approach. I saw someone posting about they beat the first level just kind of it seemed like a kind

of a brute force solution. But I think it'd be interesting to see like how far can you get in the games before it just becomes really, really difficult to to play. through but see what models are out there and see what see what you can what what the experience is like building for it anyway this this iPhone camera bump is interesting so I don't know if Steve Jobs would have shipped this there was always this weird trade-off because people say just make it flat but they're like the laws of physics do apply to cameras like you need a certain focal length to get a certain quality of picture out of them and so Apple's made this trade off between the bump gives you better photos, which people really like. You could go flatter,

but then you get worse photos. You could make the phone thicker to match the depth of the camera, but then it's big and chunky and heavy. And people say that they want more battery life, but the real revealed preference is that, like, one day of battery life is fine. People are fine being in the habit of charging their phones every day. And we kind of saw this the same thing with, like, the watches. Like, some people are like, oh, you, you know, like, you, like, It would actually be more inconvenient to be like, yeah, I have to charge it every five days. It's like, okay, so I charge it on Monday and then Friday and then Wednesday and then the next Saturday, instead of just being in a routine and just doing every single day. So. Yeah, there's also like how fast does something charge, right?

Like if something can get, if you can add 20% battery life in 30 minutes. And there's chargers like everywhere. Like you get in any car, there's a charger, any office, there's a charger. Everything's so standardized on Lightning or USBC now that you can grab a charger anywhere. And then there's also those add-on battery packs. If you're really crazy about that, you can modify it. So I don't know. I think we need a polymarket on whether or not the next iPhone has a camera bump.

That would be interesting to track. I want to know. I feel like, I don't know, this picture, I feel like this picture is a case. I feel like it will have a camera bump. What do you think? I'm going camera bumps staying. Staying. Bump stays.

Yeah, it makes sense that they would put a case on. It's like those cars. I keep seeing the new BMWs driving up and down PCH and they're wrapped in that like confusing camouflage so that you can't really see the curvature if you take a picture and you can't really see the full silhouette of the car. Yeah. It's kind of the same thing.

They should do that for the phone. I mean, they kind of did with this case probably. Yeah. But I don't know. They moved the flashlight over. Well, one thing that we do know is that the company, is going to be introducing a foldable iPhone at the end of next year.

We'll be entering a product category that's already seven years old, pioneered and dominated by its biggest hardware rival, Samsung. And at this time, Apple won't be debuting a radically new interface or transformative hardware. Instead, the device will offer similar design as Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold Line

and use many of the same core components, including foldable OLED screens, source from Samsung display. Oh, interesting. So it will be a Samsung screen. Yeah, basically Samsung's done seven years of R&D on this and the supply chain's

really robust. Do you remember the first folding phones? The first folding phones, not the Motorola Razor V3, but like the first foldable screen phones, like they wouldn't fold flat. So like the hinge would, like when you close the phone. I had one, I forget what it was where the keyboard would flick out.

Yeah, that's the sidekick. That's not, that was an awesome. That was an awesome era of consumer electronics. But when they folded, they wouldn't fold flat like this. they would fold and be like this, basically. And so, like, you would be able to see through the hinge because, like, it wouldn't fold all the way close. Now they're at a point where they do fold flat

and the hinges are extremely reliable so that you can use it for a year. And if you get a little sand in there, it's IP 76, you know, waterproof, all of that. They've figured out all the industrial design. And so... Yeah, so Samsung, Mark German reviewed Samsung's latest Z-Fold 7 called it the first foldable phone

with true mainstream potential. that device is a remarkable feat of engineering with a wider front screen and refined design that you can experience first, that you have to experience firsthand to truly appreciate. Already sales are outpacing the prior generation to a significant degree, I'm told. That makes sense.

What's interesting is, it seems like the Z-Fold 7 is the size of an iPhone when unfolded and it folds down to be half the size. I think the real demand and the real interesting thing is it's the size of an iPhone when folded shut, and then it unfolds to basically the size of an iPad. Exactly. That's what I think people would be more interested in.

But I don't know. I don't mind carrying like a bigger thing. I always get the bigger phone, and so I guess I might be in the minority there. So Mark says that means Apple's first foldable won't break any technological barriers or redefine the category. Samsung has already taken care of much of the heavy lifting.

But here's the twist. That may not matter. Apple's unmatched ability to market premium hardware to consumers. Vision Pro aside could make it a dominant player in the foldables market within months of launch. There's a sizable group of iPhone loyalists, myself included, who have long wanted a foldable device but weren't willing to switch to Android to get it. That pent-up demand is real and Apple knows it. I also just think, yeah, people used to just love the novelty of a new iPhone and it was exciting. If you had it, if you're one of the first people to have it, people would wait in line. You know, you don't see iPhone lines to the same degree anymore because it's just not that exciting. And I think a lot of people will get the foldable version of the iPhone, even if they've never wanted a foldable, just because it's new and it's from Apple and they use the device every single day.

And I imagine it will be very well done. Imagine running Adio on a foldable phone, just pulling out your CRM. That would be so satisfying. Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level. It's customer relationship magic. So the new affordable iPhone is expected to cost at least $2,000. So, I mean, if this, if it delivers at the level of an iPhone and just becomes the highest status thing to carry,

everyone's just going to go, all the top Apple fans are going to go from spending $1,000 a year every couple years to $2,000. And then also, I bet that the change in form factor. Like, I think my, I used to upgrade every year. Then I started upgrading every two years. I think I had the last phone for like three years and I was kind of like I don't really notice any difference. I got the new phone barely notice any difference. I think I got an extra button on the side. But even though it's only one year old, if there's a foldable and it's like this cool, shiny new thing, even if I don't get that much value, I'm definitely upgrading.

I'm definitely upgrading. And so, you know, they just pull forward a ton of revenue, which could be very good. And there's an interesting thing about Apple's revenue mix shifting really towards like the services and then maybe this pulls some stuff back. This is also extremely popular as a form factor in China. Yeah. And so, Mark says, in fairness to Apple, its foldable phone won't be a carbon copy of the Samsung. As he reported months ago, the company is focusing on addressing a few of the foldable category's longstanding weaknesses.

The company aims to make the inner display crease less visible and dramatically improve the hinge mechanism. And as part of the development of iOS 27, which formally kicks off soon. Apple will prioritize software features tailored specifically to this new form factor. this will be fun for app developers who have been focused on, you know, optimizing, you know, conversion rate at every step of their funnel to have some new surface area to be thinking about. And again, it talks about the popularity of foldables in China, which is interesting. Apple reportedly shut down their first retail store in China ever. They never closed a store, but that points to the struggles they are having in China broadly. as people just don't care as much about the status around the iPhone

in the way that they once did. Well, whether you're bullish on Apple or bearish on Apple, you got to get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Breaking news from D.D. D.D. Das friend of the show, Open AI is dropping GPT5 next week, apparently. He says the source is an anonymous DM with some reasonable proof,

shared out of public interest. Some of the details might be He says a million token window, 100,000 output tokens, MCP support, parallel tool calls, dynamic, short, and long reasoning, uses code interpreter and other tools. Code names are 03 alpha, nectarine, lobster, lobster, monster, mini, starfish nano. Fantastic. They're not beating the naming challenges, allegations, but I mean, GPT5 is clean. Yeah, and so. I'm going to call it Starfish Nano Lobster Mini personally. Starfish. I like it. So Polymarket has GPT5 released by July 31st, which would be in two days at 7%, but August 15th at 74% now. So it feels like it's coming. And they have GPT5 released by December 31st at 97%. Swix, as we're seeing, almost daily releases of great open models now in completely unrelated news. GPT5 and Gemini 3 drop in the next few weeks.

Swix also believes that GPT-5 is coming soon and Gemini 3 is also coming soon. And it's interesting because we're in this era of like what does GPT-5 even mean? Because it used to mean a major version number bump was a order of magnitude in pre-training. But then we tested that with what was supposed to be GPT-5, I think it was called Orion. And they did this massive training run. They started testing it. And they found that it wasn't as useful as it had good like big model smell, it had good vibes.

Dylan Patel said it made him laugh and it could do good green text. And we have one of them here that we'll read through. But it wasn't as useful as 03 or 03 pro and all the reasoning and all the tool stuff. So we're in this weird thing where GPT5 might come out. And it doesn't necessarily mean that like, okay, it's the Stargate training run. It's the 10X bigger pre-training run. It's the most massive LLM training run of all time, all the data. It's more like it's just the best, most polished unification of all their different capabilities.

So they're putting together the best model with the best tools and the best systems and the best interface. And that's what the version number bump means now. Obviously, dropping GPT5 will be like a massive moment and everyone will be like, oh my God. And expectations are extremely high. Expectations are extremely high. But really what people want is just something that's usable. And it doesn't. And so GPD 4. They changed what was supposed to be GPT5, apparently, to GPT4.5.

And kind of, and then they tucked it behind some UI, so it's harder to get to now. It's not the default. It was slower. But people did like talking to it. And they felt like it had more personality and it was funnier. And of course, this comes from this Tyler Cowan green text, be me, be Tyler Cowan, wake up at 523 a.m. precisely. Eat exactly seven blueberries, three Brazil nuts.

and a quarter cup of Icelandic skier, productivity.jpg, write two blog posts, one on obscure Romanian cinema, the other on the economics of parking meters in Hyderabad, check email, reply exclusively in lowercase, very interesting, thanks for this, send, perhaps, send, attend breakfast meeting with unnamed intelligence officials,

discuss Singaporean food, stalls instead of geopolitics, food stalls instead of geopolitics, lunchtime arrives, ask waiter, what is your least popular dish? That actually is really funny. Waiter visibly confused. Recommend some fermented herring special. Wonderful.

I'll have that. Extra spicy. Genuinely enjoy it. Back to office. Podcast guest waiting. He's a chess grandmaster who's also an amateur botanist and former DJ. Oh, so funny. Feels extremely accurate.

It's perfect.jp.G. Finish interview by recommending three obscure books on medieval Hungarian tax policy. Guest nodding politely. Afternoon arrives. Browse J Store for fun. Download papers. titled, An Economic Analysis of Late Roman Olive Oil Production and Optimal Seating Arrangements in Mongol Yurtz. Dinner time, Marginal Revolution commenters awaiting restaurant recommendations.

The best fried chicken in America is actually in rural Nebraska. Chaos in the comments. Checkel softly. Bedtime at exactly 9.47 p.m. Dream in Straussian subtext, MFW. And so Nabil Koreshi says, honestly, the first time in LLM made me laugh out loud. And I agree. It seems this is the way that it makes, this is how this is its first like consistent humor form factor.

Totally. Totally. Very good. Reliable. Yeah. So Tyler Cowan's hitting bedtime at exactly 947. When you're headed to bed, get an eight sleep, get a pod five. They have a five year warranty, 30-night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. And we have our first guest of the show in the Restream Waiting Room.

Let's bring in Ryan Peterson. How are you doing, Ryan? Man himself. You look fantastic today. Yeah, whatever lighting you got going on looks super cinematic. Good job. Good stuff. Really?

I'm in a hotel room in Las Vegas. It's the big window. There's a big window to your left, and I like it. It looks awesome. It's the Aria City Center right over there. Very nice. There we go. Are we getting a Flexport orb this year?

Oh, yeah. People have been, people have been tagging. Oh, what's the sphere? Yeah, the sphere. Man, I want to do it. This might be the first, the first, the first gong ringing for a sale of a company. Is that what's going on? Break us down, break the news down for us exactly what happened. And is this a gong worthy moment? And full

backstory. Yeah, full backstory. So this is like six questions in one. Yeah, just just cook. Take us on a journey. Um, so we sold our convoy business to GAT. Okay. And it's the we're for some reason we're not supposed to talk about the numbers involved so you can i have they have been reported i have not uh i have not protested the numbers that have been reported so um it was very good return for us we bought this business out of bankruptcy 18 months ago from a bank yep uh a little over 18 months ago and one thing that's been reported i feel like wrongly where i thought i'd come on clear the record is it it's been reported is that we made this amazing trade like we bought this thing and that we sold it for way more than we bought it for

I made a lot of money. That is true, but it was not a trade the way you buy like a stock and do nothing and you make a bunch of money like you're some kind of genius. This is an active entrepreneurship and business building. We bought a bankrupt. We only bought the asset. No employees, no customers, no transactions, no nothing. I had to go recruit the former employees of Convoy to come back to work for us. Wow.

We had to recruit the carrier. So the way the convoy business works is that at P. this thing was worth the $3.8 billion. And you can go read what we bought it for. It was a lot, a lot less. But again, it was nothing there.

The team did an incredible job, like real business building here, to go get all those carriers back. So the way it works, at peak, they had 400,000 drivers on a mobile app, truck drivers. Well,

we brought it back to live. And those drivers, many of them hadn't been paid by the former owners. There was really like no transaction volume. nothing happened. We had to convince them to come back. It was kind of solving the cold start problem of any marketplace.

Like, how do you get loads in here to attract the drivers? The drivers to retract the loads. Pretty hard problem when you start from zero. And Flexport is not a big truck broker. So we didn't have the demand to do that to bring it back to life. So what we did, we completely pivoted the business model to be a neutral platform to say, okay, other truck brokers can come in here and post their loads and bring it. And we'll have the drivers come back to serve those loads and get the flywheel spinning.

So that was the change to the business model that we made. And 18 months later, we had hit real liquidity, kind of escape velocity. There were probably on track to have like more than 100 truck brokers by the end of the year. He was posting thousands of some of them tens of thousands of loads to the platform. Wow. Some over 100,000. And then the drivers would sign up. You know, if you have demand, the drivers will come.

And they also had the mobile app. They liked convoy. wanted to come back if there were loads. So, but the moment we pivoted it away from serving being a truck brokerage, it was kind of also not a strategic fit for flex for like our job is to serve importers and exporters and companies with cargo to move not to serve other truck brokers with whom we sort of compete. So it was like this strategic mismatch. It was always an afterthought when I talk about our mission and what we're going to do and

why we're doing it. They're like, oh yeah. And we also have this like business that serves truck brokerage. which is an incredible business and it deserves to be front and center. So we sold it to DAT. It used to be called Dial-A-T truck, which I love.

It tells me their heritage. Been around forever. They're kind of an 800-pound gorilla in load boards. Load board is like if you're a truck broker, you can't call every truck driver in America to match your load to pick it up. And so if you don't have a contract or you don't have a relationship

and none of the carriers you work with, the people that operate trucks, to service your load, you'll post it to DAT and then hope that somebody's kind of like Craigslist freight. Well, like Craigslist, you know, there's they've got, it's hard. It's a hard problem to control, like who's actually picking up the freight. Is it the Eastern European mafia that just stole your stuff and disappeared? Like some of that goes on. And I just saw, I just saw a friend's company this morning had somebody show up at his warehouse, looked It's completely legit like an official kind of, kind of distributor, kind of purchase order

and just like got over a million dollars of product and then just disappeared. No way. And I think that I'm sure that happens quite frequently. It probably is through this kind of scam where people, and it's like, now Convoy built incredible machine learning based detection algorithms for this to go like do pattern matching and find it. So we've actually, over the 18 months that we operated the business during hundreds of thousands of loads, zero incidents of prey and tons of busting people. We even got a guy trying to commit freight fraud from the courthouse.

And it was a known actor who was like connected through these pattern matching algorithms. And so they, and we have GPS coordinates because you're doing it on the mobile apps. They were like, oh, this guy's at a courthouse right now. So we looked up his records and he was basing trial for freight fraud. No way. doing free from wow that is crazy theme so yeah it's really rampant and that i i think that's going to be one of the biggest wins from all this i think dAT is going to make a ton of money doing this better business model making a percent of every transaction instead of currently they just

sell subscription so dat is part of roper by the way public company their stock didn't move on the news i think walcer didn't quite understand how big this can be for them sure um not not investment advice but yeah but there's something there uh but the big and flexion does great. We got a lot of money on our balance sheet, help us on our mission. The convoy team is going to get to scale and instantly put tests there, algorithms at scale, right? Test and matching, like, because DAT's the monster, like something like 40% of all the truck loads run on the DAT load board. Yeah. Wow. And so piping them through convoys, like, let's see how that works. It's going to be awesome. But the industry in general, like, yeah,

I think it's a massive way to combat fraud. Truck brokers will really benefit because about 30% of the expense structure of a truck brokerage is of an FTL brokerage is what they call carrier sales. These are the guys that are making phone calls to carriers to try to cover the load to say, okay, I got this load. I got the customer. Let me find a trucker that'll move it for me. And with Convoy, that goes away. You don't have to spend that money.

Those people can work on harder loads and more interesting problems. Go do more sales. So a huge win for the industry, I think, probably the biggest beneficiary. of this all. So yeah, pretty proud of how it went down. How did convoy go go bankrupt originally? It was, I remember kind of watching that unfold quickly and then you guys move super fast on it from from what I remember. Yeah. A lot of theories. I'm sure that, you know, it'd be interesting to get the convoy founder, Dan Lewis on your show at some point, see what his ideas are, what he thinks, where he went wrong. There's sort of the proximate cause, which is, you know, every company goes bankrupt

for the same reason. You run out of money. Um, they, they were in a, um, they were in a transaction. Um, they were, they had agreed to sell the business to a large competitor of theirs, big public company. You know, go unnamed. I don't want to get sued. But big company, um, who they should have, they should have done. And it was going to, but because they had a deal to sell and then that big company unwound it. He didn't raise more money and stuff. Yep. He hadn't gotten proper. Yep. He hadn't gotten proper. board consent. And you had a couple activist investors who didn't want, didn't like the deal. And backed out with, and Convoy had two weeks of cash left and they were supposed to close. But like, you never should have got yourself into that situation in the first place. Yeah, that's right.

So especially, you know, you kind of allow your competitor to do that for it to you. Like don't let. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like a win for the competitors. Yeah. We can, we can spy you for a lot of money or we can just put you out of business and then we're just like, you know, more strong. Yeah.

So how did this particular... So you're big. But I think that all of that is sort of proximate causes. Upstream of that, go back a few years. My, my, if I, if I ran the business, it would have been way more sales heavy. I think they were really product and tech driven. Like we're doing hundreds of thousands of loads through convoy.

Yeah. Only 2% of them, a human has to touch at all. The tech is dialed. Yeah. So like, but you were, we're able to bring your Salesforce to bear pretty quickly to ramp up the business. And just in general, like it's kind of like a, it's a Midwest kind of steak dinner industry. Totally.

Yep. And they're like West Coast product people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, that makes sense. How did they need a little more steak dinner. Yeah. How did this particular deal? That's why you're in Vegas, right?

It's all about this steak dinner capital of the world. How did this particular deal come together? Is this like there's an investment bank involved? Is this like founder to founder deal? Like, like walk me through a little. bit of the anatomy of like how you sell what is essentially like a subsidiary. I've never been in that situation. I think a lot of founders haven't been in that situation. Yeah. Well, great businesses are bought and not sold. So they approached us. I think they started to realize we were getting

escape velocity on the marketplace and that at scale that would be quite threatening to them. Sure. Because you don't need to go to the subscription and load board if you load is already covered. Sure. So it's a platform and our business model. Now their business model, I think is better at scale when it works because we're taking a percent of every transaction instead of just a monthly fee. That's cool. Like by my math, very amateur map, I think this could add like $5 billion in EBIT. Wow. To the business.

This is crazy. That was very valuable. I'm sure that's off, but like order of magnitude is right. And so I think they, I don't know how they. They decided, but there's a relationship. DAT's a big player in the industry, obviously. And our convoy team was just connected to them. And they were like, hey, we got this inbound.

And they're pretty interested in selling the business. What do you think, Ryan? I'm like, well, I have to pay a lot of money for it because I really like it. But the more we looked at it, the more it was like, dude, it's worth more to them. I mean, I think that's the core in any M&A transaction. It needs to be worth more to the acquirer than it is to the seller. so that there's grounds there for a negotiated price of settlement and we found a good one soon well congratulations of the deal let's ring the gong amazing amazing work from the team super

impressive yeah we've been told we got to warm up the gong we're going to break it if we hit it too hard there you go people are very opinioned about about the gong hits we really yeah they are we do our best interesting super super i mean i mean uh you Given, you know, everything that Flexport has navigated through the last few years, it's pretty incredible to just casually as kind of like a little, little side project by, you know, turn around and sell it. Fantastic. In such a short period of time.

So nice work. It's good work for you. It's pure testament to the convoy team, frankly, like. Fantastic. And I hope they all did. We feel like we've put them off in a good place here financially. But like the potential is all. what can they do for DAT?

Yeah. And how does DAT make the best of this, right? Because, man, if you can pipe all that volume through this platform, you have the potential to generate something really, really massive. It's exciting. Well, thank you so much for stopping back. Thanks for taking some time out of your day in Las Vegas. Good luck with the rest of your steaks out there.

Enjoy the steaks out there. I will be having the steak dinner tonight, actually. Fantastic. With the customer. So there's go. Top golf steak. Great game. That's what it's all about.

That's the American dream right there. Have a good one. Good stuff, Ryan. Great to you. We'll talk to you later. Dan Primack has a report says FlexPort sells convoy assets to DAT for $250 million. There we go. While plenty of people can't comment on it, Dan Primack has the scoop and we will.

As he often does. Well, we have Ty Haney in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring her in. How you doing, Ty? Speaking of comeback stories, what's happening? Welcome to the stream. Good to meet you. How you doing?

Yes. I'm doing great. I'm actually reading the tweet from Emily Sunberg. I know she's going to be. Oh yeah. One of your best friends. We are good friends. Amazing.

Are you in New York? I'm in SF. Okay, cool. Give us- Yeah, so SF, where, I mean, I want to get into everything, but where is that where you're going to be basing the company out of going forward? How are you thinking about that? Tybee, my rewards platform, we actually work out of the X Twitter office on Market Street.

Cool. So it's, it's us. Like the X office? Yeah. Or the former Twitter office. The ex-X office or the current ex-office? The last ex-office, former Twitter office. There's like old Twitter merch, which we should probably put places, sell places,

and then there's some X branding, and now there's Tyb. So it's world-coviting. We will market buy all the old Twitter merch. I saw there was like a huge bird sculpture that was going up. When Elon first bought it, he was thinking about auctioning this stuff off, and it was like $60,000. for this massive bird logo. He's like, I don't want this bird logo anymore.

There's a bunch of stuff. Whatever you got. Well, congratulations. Congratulations. Why don't you give some quick, quick background on yourself for the few people that might be living under a rock. I do not know.

And then we'll get into the news from this week. Yeah, I'll give you the quick walk up. I started a company in the active work space called Outdoor Voices at 23 out of school in New York City. It really became a darling in the direct to consumer world. I ran it for eight years, so 100 million. I left five years ago. There was kind of an ego battle at the board level and then between me as a CEO and this person.

I left and that was a sad point of time. 90% of my experience building that company was awesome, 10% was hard. That said, it was a masterclass in learnings. Anyway, since then I started a tech platform, a community rewards platform called Try Your Best. We work with the top consumer brands to essentially create a more fun and effective loyalty program. All that to say, I announced yesterday that I rejoined my original company Outdoor Voices. Amazing.

And so pretty cool to see there was a very warm response to original OG OVers. And here I am, I'm running to YB and I'm running OV as well. Amazing. The video was amazing. Maybe we'll play it after you jump off. But my wife said she almost teared up watching it.

It just was like it's such a cool story. And yeah, I think everybody, is excited to have you back in the driver's seat. So what is that going to look like going forward? How are you going to, like, what, what do you think, what do you think the takeaways from the last go are and how are you kind of, what, you know, where do you want to take the brand going forward? Is it back to, back to its roots, back to what, you know, people loved originally?

Yeah, I think like. More retail or e-commerce, shifting the mix. I'd be interested to hear about that. Sorry, can you say that again? I'd be interesting to hear about the, a lot of brands, you know, they start online, then they go offline. There's owned retail. There's channel partners. How do you see that mix changing going forward?

How did it change while you were there over the last decade? Yeah, yeah. The North Star Vision for OV's to build the number one recreation brand are called to action or kind of motto that people have a crazy emotional connection to is doing things. You guys might have seen the doing things hats like trotting around the West Side Highway. That was kind of like a souvenir from the brand that people would wear, but you could only get them by participating with the brand. All that to say, like we started in 2013, so we were very much part of this direct-to-consumer model that I'd say in a lot of ways has not proved to be all that successful. And so similar to others, we were able to raise a lot of capital. That meant I was diluted pretty significantly as the founder.

And ultimately, we spent too much money trying to require people, you know, online that were expensive and didn't last. We also kind of had this grassroots, what would I call it, like community of 10,000 or so people that were really our super fans. And as we clicked into the data, like anyone who came through this community activation was ultimately four times more valuable over time. And so that's essentially what prompted me to start TyB to allow brands to directly connect with their super fans and grow their value over time, own that relationship, own that data. and then now with OV, it's been cool. I've been working on it for a year. Oh, wow. I rejoined, obviously, as a founder as an owner with new owners and a partner.

But the last year has been just almost like a cherry on top. It's been a creative outlet. I obviously spent eight years, like, obsessing over every detail of OV to kind of like play again in this space and think about from a product perspective, like the recreational lifestyle and what the core products are here. It's just honestly been fun. And so no change in terms of the vision, but we're off for the races. I feel like there's such an opportunity for almost like a turnaround fund, venture capital fund, private equity fund to specifically target companies that, where the founders left, and we're going to set them up to bring them back. I think that there's so much more value unlocked from that as opposed to just like, okay, let's trade this asset to someone who's going to squeeze even like the last few pennies out just kind of wind it down and bleed it out as opposed to let's, there's actually something here, but we need a founder.

back in the seat and we need to bring them back and set them up. The cool thing too is it seems like every apparel brand that went ultra heavy into online only, not online only, but made that the priority, struggled all the way from like Nike. You see there, they're like D to C efforts. They basically capitulated there and realized like, okay, people like going to stores, like they like experiencing products. Go to Amazon. They went back to Amazon.

They want to be on all these different channels. And so I think it was just a massive lesson for everyone in the, in the, industry. I'm curious how you see the like kind of broader athlete or category evolving. It feels like there's kind of distinct categories around Nike is still for athletes, but Nike kind of missed your insight with OV was like, okay, what is like active wear for people that don't consider that like don't aspire to be a professional basketball player, people that aren't like weight training. And then we've seen, you know, the rise of aloe targeting kind of the Pilates industrial complex and kind of the lifestyle around that. So I'm curious kind of where you see kind of the

broader market going. I'm curious. What do you guys wear? Act of wear wise. I wear cotton. Yeah. Like I wear like cotton like tank tops and and shorts. I actually don't know. John doesn't know. John's one of the, John's in the category. My wear shops for me. Yeah. John's just like I think I need new shorts and then shorts appear. Yes. Yes. Yes. But I Back in the day, I remember I was the first person in my friend group in college to discover outdoor voices. I was early to Lulu Lemon at a time when men were just criticized for wearing what people saw as like a women's brand. Oh, interesting. I was like, the product's just great.

Try it. And then people would try it and it was great. And then I got on OV. Okay. And but yeah, I think, yeah, for me, I think I'm excited about like the return of. of like natural fibers in sportswear. Yeah. I'm excited about that, but it's a broad category.

Yeah, I asked that because for this five year gap, like similarly, I would only wear vintage. I feel like every brand, every brand in the active wear space says so much about you. Like, Al wasn't for me, et cetera. So I also think of this space, almost like the like artist space where there's like different flavors of pop stars and each of them have like equal. amounts of fandom or cultiness and they all can coexist. One thing I'm excited to kind of really blast away from is just this oversaturation of like compression top and bottom and that like

being the look. So our collection launches next week and like we've really infused more styling options. And to your point like that includes like cotton poplin striped button downs that you wear to like protect from the sun and like put over your Pilates pants or cool. Cotton cotton, cotton, cashmere cropped cardigan. Similarly, like, I'm going to the grocery store in that. I think it's like time to infuse more style beyond just like stretchy, you know, bottoms and tops. So that's, that's certainly what you'll see from us starting next week. How are you integrating TyB? I'm assuming that's going to be a big part of the launch. It launched today. So OV's community launched on Tyb today in a very full circle moment.

We're off to the races there. Our designers are in there. We're essentially like, getting all of this amazing feedback in terms of what people have missed from a product standpoint, what hero products they want to bring back. Like, it's shocking to me how much people care about after voices five years later. Like, holy shit. But, but, uh, Obie is like perfectly suited for this toolkit now. It's a tool that I wish I had as a brand builder five years ago. How do you, uh, does, uh, what, what comes to mind, uh, when you hear the phrase grow at all growth at all costs? It feels like one of the challenges with building and enduring lifestyle brand, apparel brand, whatever you want to call it, is the D to C era was like, okay, here's $50 million,

turn this into as much revenue as you can as fast as possible. And when you look at the great brands throughout history, very few of them had founders that were that were growth at all costs was like the term. We know it's a marathon, but what if it was a sprint? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but it's like, it's more like, you know, I can see the path to outdoor voices getting to a billion dollars in revenue in 10 years. But if you tried to get there in three years, like it probably make the job a lot harder. Yeah.

Becoming lengthy takes time. Yeah, you'd have to have too many shortcuts. Totally. 100%. I mean, for me, like success looks like longevity. And I've felt that like pain of not having longevity here firsthand. So if you think of obviously like Patagonia and Evon Chonard, like I met with him. and what recently and like that's the model for success.

I think I think in terms of this like lifestyle, like physical product brand, at the same time, like I went from software with a W-E-A-R to software W-A-R-E in terms of my businesses. So I understand how tech companies like deserve the capital and require the speed just by nature of they don't have physical products or widgets that they're trying to, you know,

get right from a planning perspective and then sell. Like so it just makes a lot more sense to me why funding around software companies like is the way it is. And the speed that's required and then possible there, I very much just felt firsthand. So I'd say like winning to me, yeah, is around longevity, endurance and no pun intended, it's an active bird brand.

Can you take me on a tour of some of the good community, maybe good and less good community building stuff? We were talking about this Emily Sundberg highlighted a candle company that put a bunch of influencers on a private jet and the private jet maybe didn't even take off. And it feels, like that is a unique unexplored space of like take the super fans whether their influences or not and just do something way above and beyond for them even red bull went back and did this with like

the super cross community it was just a bunch of guys driving motorcycles on dirt ramps and they were like let's turn this into a real sport that sport came back to you know love them forever they did this with f1 there's companies that have done this really well but then it can go less well so like i i understand that like you know surveys are valuable but like how else can you integrate uh or or or yeah activate a community what I'm like what we're seeing really matter on the user side is status and identity as essentially like signaling my proof of fan and like so giving people the ability to level up and like prove their fandom and then have something like at the bragging right that they can share on social around that sure is ultimately like what they care about beyond

anything um and so like that proof of fan idea I think like loyalty becomes kind of the new identity or status and like your ability to signal that like really matters. Um, what else would I tell you there? So the proof of fan, does that need to be like qualitative or quantitative? Because there's a world where it's like, uh, okay, like you're in like the Coles cash world where like you buy a thousand dollars and you get 50 bucks back versus this like more qualitative world where it's like, look, you came to some event and you bought some stuff and like you were, you know, you were, we saw you in our replies on social a lot and like we didn't really

try and put like a send five tweets and you get a free hat but like how how quantified does it need to be because I feel like it can feel a little sterile if it becomes an algorithm and then people are gaming and then you have bots getting the hats and then reselling them and stuff how do you think I think it's it's definitely all about social so like within my profile I'm essentially collecting things from you know events I've gone to so rare beauty is a good example they do they're they're excellent at essentially like creating these little collectibles or souvenirs that their fans can collect as they launch new product

or host an event. And essentially, what TYB allows you to do is build your consumer profile, but it's very visual first. And so you're earning these things that then essentially are like your top shelf. Like, here's what I'm obsessed with. I bought it seven times. Here's a Selena Gomez event I went to. It sits next to kind of, you know, my streaks or for lack of a better term in terms of product

purchases and all of this like essentially builds your identity in a really social first way. And so we see people share like this wallet or profile content just reflecting kind of their engagement with brands in a really fun kind of like social game led way. The other thing just to your guys' point, I think there is certainly like oversaturation of brand events is like the way I think about building fandom. It's kind of four part. Like, one, articulate the purpose or mission very clearly of the brand. Like, why do people care?

What's the reason for being? Two, build rituals for activation. And obviously, we're seeing, like, run clubs take off. But, like, the key for me there is, like, something that you as a brand can do consistently, not just one and done. Yeah. The third is connection. So, like, allowing brands to, like, or bands that, like, obsess over Nike or whatever to connect with one another. And, like, that flywheel of engagement really takes off.

And then the fourth is incentivization. And I think for two long fans. Random's been like clicking like on Instagram, but like ultimately that's not giving me anything for my loyalty over time. So there's a lot to play with as you think of kind of like the combo of those things, but I agree like brand events. There's too many like I don't care. Yeah, makes sense. What's the how are you thinking about product release schedules coming back to OV? You've been working on this first collection sounds like for a year, but are you thinking drops, collections, capsules, a mix of everything? It's just a consistent drumbeat of excellent newness. And I think we've always done a good job of having a kind of stumpy or unexpected perspective in the space. And so we have another collection dropping in September that's like a very specific activity. Like not going to be relatable to all, but like something you certainly haven't seen Nike Day before.

And I remember like early innings, outdoor voices on our site we merchandised by a category of dog It sounds simple and the non-issue, but like Reddit went nuts. They were so mad. Like dog walking is not a sport and that was perfect. I'm like that's so, it's so ownable. Dog walking is a sport. How dare you make a pocket for, get in the Olympics. I want to see Olympic level dog walking for sure, for sure.

That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by. Awesome. We got to jump. We're super excited to see the congratulations. And it's great to see. We got to ring the gong for a founder back in the C. Founder mode.

Founder mode. Did you have the sound word founder mode. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Cheers. I'm excited for outdoor voices. Maybe they'll do a billboard.

Maybe we'll get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made it easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And next up, we have AGM coming in. Probably talk about ads too because the timeline was in turmoil. We were talking about AI, AI ads, but I want to talk about a whole bunch of stuff.

Kick us off with an introduction. How you doing? I did good. I dressed it up for you guys, by the way. You look fantastic. As Jordan you mentioned, I've got the Patagonia fleece. I look like I trade bonds at Canterfis-Gerald. Yes, you do.

Yes. Trading tariff rebates today. That's amazing. Cool, man. So, yeah. What's new in your world? What's that? Yeah, yeah, just what's new in your world?

So, a bit of a product announcement today. Let's go. We, a little bit related to a guest you had two weeks ago. We have Ryan and Jesse on there from Coinbase. I'm here to announce we're launching ads or sponsored offers, as you like to call them, inside the new app that Coinbase launched, which is a new social app on chain. It replaces the previous wallet. It's really quite cool and interesting.

And yeah, I mean, it's kind of the fulfillment of the Spindle Vision. So we recently got acquired by Coinbase. And, you know, I was a little late to crypto, to be honest, I bought some Bitcoin in 2013, but, you know, Circular 2020, when Port Apes were worth like a million dollars, NFDX hadn't happened yet, and crypto was pumping. I mean, it's pumping now, but it was pumping even more. You're like, you know what crypto needs ads? Well, no, no, no, no, no. That was not the first thing, Dreddy. The first thing is I talked to, I talked to the head of marketing. I won't name the names of like billion dollar crypto companies. And I got it's, okay, so like, what's your cap? What's your LTP?

What does your retention look like? And the guy looks at me and says, what's LTV? I don't know what you're talking about. And I basically had a personal existential crisis that I couldn't believe that people in crypto didn't know their LTVs. And so what do you mean? The number goes up. That's all that matters. Well, no, that's part of the problem in crypto. Often the numbers go, if money is free, then cats don't matter is kind of the problem.

But money doesn't always stay free forever. So we first got what's called an attribution system, which I know sounds super wonky and may not be totally familiar to all your listeners. But basically, whether you realize it or not, every time you click or install an app or monetize on your app, an event is getting fired into an attribution system that's trying to figure out where you came from and how much you're worth. And this is like a billion dollar business. It's incredibly disorganized. There's literally billions of events firing a day. I worked inside one of these big attribution companies. And I just remember like, what if we just had one database? What if everyone just agreed what happened in the world? And then when I really got into blockchain and the theory

and make a system, I realized, oh, look, this is the consensus layer of truth that we actually need. And we also have user identity. And we also have a payment layer. the blockchain is going to be the biggest marketing database in human history. Yeah. And so the question is, how do we build it? How do we take the best learnings from Web2 world and then build it into the on chain world in a way that, by the way, respects user privacy and all the rest of it, but also kind of functions in a much better way than Web2 ever did. Yeah, I remember hearing the original pitch for Spindle and being like, there was a lot of like froth and stuff. And I was like, this feels like enterprise SaaS for crypto.

This feels like it's like valuable regardless of what happens with everything else, all the craziness. You don't need to, you know, feel about like, oh, what's the value? of art. It's like so subjective. But it's like, it was like you and like that other company, chain aliasis. I was like, no matter what happens to crypto, chain alysis is going to be a good company. So congrats on the, on the deal with Coinbase and coming into the team. Yeah. A bunch of questions about how this actually manifests. I imagine that the first advertisers will be web three companies. Is that the correct way to think about it? Or is this kind of untapped low cack for outdoor voices or something? Yeah, yeah. And by the way, you totally put

your finger on John. My golden life is providing actionable analytics and enterprise SaaS. Yes. I love it. I'm not joking. I genuinely love it because it's like the value is very traceable and not built on any sort of like, okay, there's like some perpetual motion machine over here that we're going to find out about it. I was like no. Like this is just like what people want. You wake up at 2 a.m. Yeah. You wake up at 2 a.m. What's your first thought? Enterprise workflows. Let's go. I love it. That's legit. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. First users, I imagine you're onboarding folks right now. Who loves this? Who wants this?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's heavily, it's heavily biased towards defy apps. When we started Spindle, actually, I thought gaming and Web3 gaming was going to be like a thing. Yeah. Which who knows? It might still be. But as everyone knows, gaming was one of the biggest drivers of like mobile ads attribution. And like that whole that whole cycle from 2010 to 2015 was basically mobile casual games and Zingo and the rest of it. And I assume that would be the earliest adopters. Web3 gaming, I understand is still the perpetual technology of the future.

You know, it takes a while to make these AAA games in Q4, maybe it'll change. But actually, it was Defi apps, actually. Because, of course, they actually, I mean, stable coins have PMF and Defi does have PMF. And there's protocols like some of our advertisers, Morpho, I can call out a few other ones, that have billions of dollars of TVL on chain in which people are actually earning. And, you know, they basically function like a lending and borrowing institution. And so, yeah, they're the biggest ones. And what's interesting is that getting back to LTVs, right, like the MAUs and crypto might be relatively small,

say, to the WhatsApps of the world. But the LTVs, like the actual individual user value, LTV or RPro, however you look at it, can often be significantly higher, right? Like orders. And where have, where have companies like Morfoo advertised to date? Are there, like if they're if they're defy app, are they running, can they even run ads on meta? Is that like? Yeah. I mean, it's Morpho, by the way, because if I don't, if I don't correct you, I'm going to get an email from the CEO in a second.

But yeah, the answer is nowhere, Jordy. And that's the problem, right? Like, we built all this amazing measurement technology, like, comparable to the best in Web 2. But it's like, the growth guy's like, this is all great, but like, what do I do with this? Like, where's the other leg of the flywheel where I go and, like, target the users and figure out and provide like a compelling user experience. It didn't exist. And so Spindle's big obsession and part of the reason why we joined Coinbase is, you know, consumer crypto where you have a wallet connected user who actually interacts with the chain is an important step. And you're seeing more and more of that.

Just aside a random company that I'm not involved with at all. Sprite bought Privy, right? And why did it buy Privy? Because Privy is a wallet provisioner, and it gets people on chain in a very seamless way. And then, boom, suddenly users on chain. They don't even realize it, but they are. And so we've really kind of exclusively focused on really compelling crypto consumer experiences where that wallet is present and where the user can engage with things on chain,

whether it be content coins, NFTs, lending and borrowing, sending money to their family overseas, whatever it might be. How will add, like what role will play in the overall base ecosystem, I imagine? and some of that money might flow, like where does it flow to? Well, it's a good question. By the way, one thing I have to mention, and we've got like a blog post dropping on it, everyone hates the word ads. Like it gives everyone the it in crypto, but just as a quick little comment,

everything in crypto is an ad. Like literally you scroll through every wallet and every publisher, every mint, every swap offer, all of it, whatever you're looking at usually gets a referral kickback as a function of the value of the transaction. So like literally everything is an ad. Well, and here's a funny story. So back in 2021, my team at Party Round, we made, we realize if you send someone an NFT, it will just sit in their wallet that other people look at and track. And if they want to get it out of their wallet, they have to figure out a way to burn it, send it, send it off into the ether. So I was like, great. So I can spend five, whatever it was, five dollars to send an ad that's just permanently sitting in their wallet. And so we sent like, NFT ads out to a bunch of different people. And I was like, oh, I can go to Dylan Fields. wallet and see you not here that's great really great actor really really really

really white hat work journey to be clear journey I hate to break it to you most wallets figured this out and then on surface the junky NFTs I know I was I was early I was early I'm the reason I'm the bad actor that caused that change no it was there was much worse actors that were like if you click the one of these it's crazy you drain your wallet stuff yeah yeah this was this was this was just can you can you can you question now oh sure sure sure yeah where is revenue go. So part of the spindle vision was always that like the publisher could be anybody, right? So like an influencer who like pumps the thing or endorses the thing and has an audience,

you know, affiliate marketers, consumer apps, anybody can be kind of a publisher. And one of the unique things like our ambition is not just like equal Facebook ads is actually to be better and a little bit more user conscious than web two ads. And one way we're better is that we can pay people that otherwise wouldn't kind of get paid, right? If you're on YouTube, you do get a rev share with ads, but probably speaking, and then with Elon Bucks, you get a little bit of the Twitter thing, but probably speaking, if you're a creator and you have an audience, you have to monetize in some other way, and it's really just your top of funnel. In the case, in the case of face app, that's not going to be true. Anybody who can drive, like, real user actions that

advertisers or builders or developers want can actually share in that revenue. And again, the blockchain just makes it much easier. I mean, there's this wonky thing called multi-touch attribution, which is always the dream of every Web2 marketer. What that means is if someone converts to Pavanta and by the way John you're going to fly right into an ad after I'm sure because they see because they see TBPN but then they go Google it on Google guess who gets all the credit not you John Google right it totally sucks because attribution is broken yeah in the crypto world yeah it could be different you can make a cut of that too yeah yeah and you see this online where like let's just say like a new protein bar is going viral and it takes a while for a health

influencer to actually set up a deal and set up an affiliate code but like you could potentially do that on the base app like in an ad hoc way so that as soon as you repost you're you're basically tied into the affiliate program. Yeah there's something there's something amazing too about there's something amazing every time we get our Elon bucks I'm like wow I'm getting paid to post I was doing that for free and it's a weird thing but at the same time like these apps have no value if the users don't post yeah no it's crazy every user is like coming together to create value, whether you're just providing attention or you're providing content. And yeah, most of the value kind of will accrue to the people that are creating the content.

And that's probably right. But yeah, just kind of taking another look at these systems is worth doing. And that's how it works on base app, by the way, to plug the app side of it rather than the ad side. Users get paid to post. If you're like a mega poster on base, you're going to see your wallet balance just go up. And again, it all just happens effortlessly. you're not setting up a Stripe account, you just like check your balance. And oh, there's like 100 bucks there and it wasn't there yesterday, right?

Like that's the other. Yeah, that's the other, like, you know, making the feedback loop faster where, you know, Elon bucks or what they hit every couple weeks, you'd never really know. But if you can effectively like stream, like getting closer to kind of like streaming payments based on how much attention you're capturing, that's pretty cool. Can you bridge the outdoor voices kind of case study that we just ran through to, to like how crypto companies are thinking about CAC to LTV? And it doesn't need to be outdoor voices specifically.

There's just, you know, we all live through the D to C boom and the Facebook ad, boom, where, you know, 99% of VC dollars are going to Facebook ads, that whole meme. And there was this time where companies didn't understand their LTV from, And really when they crazy scaled their advertising budgets on digital platforms. But pretty quickly, D to C companies at least figured out the analytics. What does that look like today in crypto? Are people thinking about it more? Are there still case studies of crypto companies that raise too much VC?

Because I feel like a lot of crypto companies, they do a lot of incentives to onboard users, but they do it with like their own tokens that they created. So there's maybe less bankruptcy risk. But walk me through how that works in Web3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so crypto marketers have gotten a lot smarter about LTV and KAC since 2022. Most of our advertisers actually understand that very well. Sure. And I think one of the innovations that crypto introduces is the business model.

So the DDC thing that you're talking about typically operated in a world in which you paid what's called CPA or CPI, cost per action or cost per install. In other words, you paid Google or Facebook literally if the user installed the app. You didn't pay if the ad showed up in front of them. That means that the ad system actually takes on some of the risk of the conversion and advertisers love it, right? But you're still juggling the LTV what the user's actually worth versus what it cost to acquire. One of the business funnels we offer that you're not going to find on Web 2. And again, we're trying to build a better ad system than Facebook is what we call CPV. It's ad tech, so it's got to be a three-letter acronym.

And what CBB basically means is cost per value. And what that means is you can actually literally pay like your bid is not like I want to pay $30 for a user. It's I want to engage in a 40% rev share with. the publisher on the lifetime value of the user. And that's like a baked in two and a half or whatever it is, ROI. And again, you can't do that in Facebook. I can't tell Facebook, look, bro, Zuck, I'll split, I'll go have these with you on the LTV going forward,

as long as you acquire me a user and they retain. There's no way to do that, right, in the WebSue world. And you can do that actually inside BAS very naturally. Because again, you have, you've got a consensus truth. Like I know how much that user is worth. I know how much they stuck around. And by the way, I have payment rail. And that's because it's because you can,

see it on chain, right? Exactly. There's mutual transparency on both sides. By the way, the publishers can look down for it. Yeah, because Zuck doesn't want to do that deal because he's like, well, I'm going to have to like get, I'm going to have to keep hitting you up every month for years to figure out what, you know, if the user stayed subscribed or whatever and it's just too much of a hassle. So you do the work of figuring out the cactel TV kind of analysis.

And if it's not a good deal, just stop running ads, basically, or figure out different creative and make it work. Exactly. Well, in this world, the publisher, the new base app, can actually look down funnel via the blockchain and say, okay, I know how many users I showed ads to, and I know how much value I drove, right? So you can't, you can't, you know, stiff me. You've got to give me what you said you would, which is 30% or whatever it is at the LTV. And that's, again, that's the advantage of having a consensus sort of reality layer. And there's no way to do this in Web 2. It's basically possible.

Right now, it feels like online advertising is dominated by search engine ads, whether that's in Amazon or Google, and then social media ads. ads on X and the meta platforms and TikTok. What does the ad ecosystem look like in the future? How big is the crypto ad slice versus the AI LLM ad slice? How do you see these two things playing out? Because I feel like there's bullcases for both of those, but there's only so many ad dollars flowing around, right?

Even if it's like a trillion or several trillion. Well, in this case, I mean, the exciting thing about this new product is there's a lot of advertisers that can't advertise elsewhere that can now get AGM's ad products and have these kind of splits. But yeah, we were quoting your post yesterday. I would bet my entire net worth that one, we will have ads in AI. Two, if they will take the form of highly relevant offers,

users will welcome them. They'll have sky high conversion rate and web shopping will die. And three, they will be necessary to pay for the compute. Yeah, this was a crazy parlay. Love the take, love the parlay. I forgot to like it. I'll leave a like on it now, even though 1,000 people have already liked it.

But yeah, give me your take on the evolution of the ad ecosystem more broadly. Yeah, yeah. So to be clear, I don't think it's a zero sum between crypto and AI. I think it's different sets of budgets. And at some point, they're going to intersect. I mean, people are going to start using crypto inside.

I mean, for micropayments and AI agents, crypto is the natural way to do it and CoinBus is building stuff there as well. I mean, just to switch the topic a little bit to the AI side. I mean, I'm obviously an AI mega user. I barely use Google anymore. I probably fire up chat Chb-T over 100 times a day. And what's interesting is that, again, ads dollars actually aren't limited.

Human attention is limited because you only live so many hours a day. But the amount of intent that can actually express inside an AI is fascinating. I think so much about what we do is so skeuomorphic to like the pre-internet world, I will want to have to remember the before times. Like, why do I go to an e-commerce site and it's organized by type of thing? Like when I go to Instacart, why is it organized by food type? I want to make both Borguignon or whatever it is. Here's the seven things.

Just buy me those seven things. I don't want to go to seven aisles. And yet somehow the internet websites or even PDF still reflect like the pre-internet world. I should just be able to tell the AI, get me the recipe for this complicated thing I want to make and then just like go by the things. Or I want to travel to Paris and not pay more than $3,000 and stay in this place. And I should see a big green go button and I just buy and transact and it's done. The business of having to go to three different websites, it's just, I mean, kayak. I like it, but it drives me crazy.

The fact that we're clicking little radio buttons and drop downs. It's ridiculous. We've been doing that for 15 years. I don't understand how we haven't proceeded beyond that UI. And I think AI is going to be the absolute gate to that intent and that desire. And what's going to be interesting is e-commerce sites that are typically buying ads are going to have to surface offers. And what does an AI ad mean? Right?

There's nothing to see, strictly speaking. But when the AI creates your website and sees the product metadata and sees the price, you may want to service, given the personal data, like, oh, this user hasn't bought from me before. Here's a 10% off coupon. And that shows up in the results that AI returns. which by the way defraise the expensive AI cost to go to 0.3 in my tweet, right? Yeah. And so you're going to have to have some way to actually channel intent and actually get paid for that intent. And there's also issues around, I mean, in cloud.

Yeah, what are the what are the kind of like potential traps or, you know, the people, the, uh, Mark Cuban's, I think, primary concern is that the, the, the results are just going to be, they'll be like profit maximizing conversations. And our, our take was like, this has been solved in search. It's been solved in the influencer space like ads should be disclosed. Yeah. You just have disclosure. It's probably fine, but, um, but I think there's, yeah, I find it funny that a guy

who made his fortune selling ads suddenly finds out, ads problematic. I'll just say that off the bat. Um, yeah, he's like ads, he said something and we're, we're going to have them on the show to talk about it, but he said something to the effect of like ads are about manipulation. It's like, okay, well, did you want to ban them all then? Should we just have? I take the under on that.

And in fact, I think people actually like Instagram ads, for example, as a form of discovery. I think the click through rates, the revealed preferences of how users actually react, the click through rate is probably higher on some of that paid content than is on the organic content. And I think users, if it's a good ad, and if it's a crappy ad, I agree it sucks. But if it's a good ad and gives you a discount and helps you discover a product you didn't discover before, users will like it in the only way that matters, which is what is their engagement and conversion rate. And dozens of founders have tried the, it's this but paid no ads and it rarely works. if ever. Yeah, I mean, I think the interesting thing is, you know, like, it makes, like,

I like paying to not have ads on X because the ads were never that relevant to me, and it's nice. And I use the app a lot, so it's nice. But the fact that meta doesn't have an ad-free product at-scale ad-free product says a lot when people use that app, I'm sure, more on average, I don't know, more on average than the only people that would upgrade would be people who's, uh, whose ARPOO is higher than the price. I feel like it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. If they're getting $1,000 worth of ads against me,

they're going to be like, it's $20 a month. And I'm going to be like, yeah, I'll buy that every day. And that's bad for them. And then the people who are like, oh, I'm only driving, you know, $50 of ARPOO a year, well, they're not going to upgrade. And so they're like, it's going to actually wind up with lower revenue. I would imagine that's the calculus. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, look, ads pay for the internet, right? As much as he might dislike them, it pays for a large swast of the internet. And I think we've done the experiment. for 20 years and users aren't going to pay $200 a year for for Facebook which is roughly there are booze right like they're yep they're just right yeah uh last thing I want to ring the gong for a big product launch but I also want to get a risk check what's on the wrist today it's the okay great so I posted this earlier today I've got

I've got to I'm somewhat ironic okay the war Rolex I got on I've got the Rolex the Meriner that I go there we go let's go full full okay yeah yeah I bought this thing with cash when I sold my first YC company and then on my other side of the wrist a little brief product bug. I became a whoop American. No way. Whop American. So I can actually see exactly how bad my, how bad my sleep is.

So yeah. That's what's amazing. Well, congratulations on the product launch. We'll ring the dog for you. Hit it. Good stuff. Great, great having you on finally. Long overdue.

Yeah, yeah. You got to come back on and just chop it up with us for a little bit. We can talk about so much other stuff. Some other things. Yeah. But congratulations. Good luck for the rest of the launch. Good to see.

to you soon. Have a good day. Bye. I'll be right back, John. I'll let you kick off the next one. I will be kicking off a Bezell ad. If you want to get a Rolex Submariner, just like AGM had on his wrist, you can go to getbezzle.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously any watch. And we will bring in our next guest, Ian Webster. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Ian? Good to meet you. Good to meet you as well. I'm doing well. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining. Would you mind kicking you? us off with an introduction on yourself, your company. What are you doing? What's the news? Yeah. So the company that we're building is called Promfu. We are building security tools

for Gen AI applications. So if you have a Gen AI application, you probably want to secure it, make sure it that behaves well in production. And that's what we're doing. The big news today, I guess, is that we have raised a series A. Congratulations. Give us the numbers. Yeah, we raised 18.4. Congratulations. Yeah. Who'd you raise it from? Insight partners.

Fantastic. And A16 also participated in. Yeah, two kind of smaller firms. You know, they really had to scrap the money together to get this deal done. Yeah, I mean, I'm very lucky. Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, congratulations on the round. Talk to me more about security in generative AI.

that could mean so many things. We've talked about LLM psychosis, someone 7,000 prompts deep. We've talked about leaking user data from one instance to another. Like hallucinations and just kind of like not performing. I'm trying to, you know, use an LLM to convert raw text to JSON and it's just kind of messing up. Like what are the key areas where you would define a security that you're going after solving or are you trying to do everything all at once? So there are kind of two sides to the coin. The first is the foundation model, security or safety.

Basically stuff like, is the L I'm going to say something racist that reflects badly on my company? Like, is it going to drive people into a psychosis, like all that type of stuff? Brand risk, basically. Yeah, but I think the part that's actually more interesting is at the application layer. So, you know, the like once you put a model into, to the hands of a developer, they put an application on top of it, they connect it with a database and PII, they connect it with an API, and now you've got a rag, you've got an agent, etc. That's when there are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. So the biggest concerns that we see,

I mean, there's definitely an aspect on that foundation model side, but the big problem that scares a lot of large companies that are working with LMs are things like PII leaks, tool misuse through agents. And also just softer issues like LMs recommending competitors or giving you medical advice when they're just supposed to be like an e-commerce chatbot,

stuff like that. Financial advice too would be at risk. Yeah, I mean, we were talking about Amazon's Amazon has like a chatbot that you can ask about the product that you're searching for or whatever, but then people were getting to write React modules and getting it to write

JavaScript for them. And it's like, that's not a big, deal, but it's just like clearly not the intended purpose of that particular chatbot. What are the key, what are the key reasons why you think over the long term companies will want to outsource a lot of this function versus build their own kind of systems to protect against some of these edge cases? I'm sure there's a bunch of good reasons. Otherwise, you wouldn't be building this and raising all this money. Yeah. So I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty hard to do. So like I encountered this problem firsthand because I was leading, um,

Gen. AI engineering and products at Discord, we were launching these apps to hundreds and millions of people. And like, to do this right, you really need to be able to train models that can behave adversarially because your GPT or your Claude is not really going to be a good red teamer or attacker off the shelf. And just kind of test extremely extensively, like over tens or even hundreds of thousands of test cases, to try to find all those rough edges. Like the thing about AI is that the attack surfaces all of human language and then some. So it's just, it's a really difficult problem. And the way that many like large enterprises are dealing with this right now is,

they are doing it manually and just covering a very small fraction of the risk areas. So, you know, that's why we think that there's big opportunity in the space. And if somebody engages with Promfu, I'm assuming you start running like a, do you start automatically like trying to jail break the LMs getting like are you kind of running these sort of like repetitive attempts in order to like find problems so that you can stop them or or is the product itself kind of you have it, things figured out enough that you can sort of that you let them kind of like in their communities try to jail break it and then react to it. Yeah, so the way to think about it is that we've trained models that behave as adversarial users, like misbehaving users in your application.

And we have agents built on top of these uncensored models that target specific risk areas like PI leaks or toxicity or like talk about competitors or, you know, whatever, 70 plus different areas. So the way that we work is we have these attackers generate use cases or like attack objectives. And then we feed those objectives into a bunch of different, what I would describe as like search or optimization techniques to kind of poke and prod the entire attack surface of the application. So what this amounts to is we wind up having, you know, thousands and thousands of conversations where like the, the attacker is just trying to wiggle its way around some of the guardrails or some of the safeguards that are put in place. Is there a big difference right now in the perception of security or ability to deliver on a secure application, whether you're using a close source or open source model? I can imagine like if I'm like, oh, I'm using an open source model.

I have the ability to fine tune it. Maybe I feel more confident or maybe, hey, I'm using a close source model. I'm paying a fortune to open AI or anthropic. like they're going to do more work to secure this thing than I am like what's the perception around like which which paradigm leads to better security I would say right now the perception at the at the top of market at least like we work with some of the world's largest companies there's definitely a strong preference for closed source right now but I don't really think it's the security that's driving it necessarily I think it's more just performance per dollar

or just overall intelligence even if it's more expensive. It's just like I want the best. Yeah. I would say so. I think like it the the thing is for for security even on the closed source side. The incentives really differ based on whether you're open AI or a company building on top of open AI like open AI has has plenty of geniuses who are working on you know making sure that it doesn't say racist things or whatever but like no one's going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot by by hooking it up incorrectly to like a database of PII. Yep.

So that's, yeah, or open AI, open AI is like, you know, they're not released, giving this API and telling you, we're making sure that it will never, the model will never recommend a competitor. Like you have to kind of build a layer on top of that. Has there been a big case study of like LLM security going wrong

that people like to point to in the industry yet? Like we were just talking about the T app getting hacked and that did not have, generative AI features that I'm aware of it was potentially just made with maybe it was vibe coded but it seemed like it was just a misconfigured Google Firebase bucket they just changed the the access rights on an old database that they were using and it seems like something that could have happened 10 years ago it happened today it's not a uniquely new phenomenon but I'm wondering if there's any case studies that you point to as to your clients like hey the value

of working with us is that we can avoid that happening Yeah, I mean, there have been a handful of things that have been pretty public. I think it really depends on like the industry and also the geography. There was there was a mail carrier in in the UK that like had had a lot of issues with a chatbot that basically had no guardrails. I think there was a case where a Canadian airline, I think Air Canada, had a chat bot that that like committed to a refund that was out of policy. That's right. I remember that one. Yep.

And then of course you have Sydney. and Bing and Microsoft Tay. And there's those examples. Yeah, the fact that the, like, biggest companies in lab are struggling with this at that scale with that amount of resources. Totally. And then you imagine some random company

that's rolling this out to users. High stakes. They just don't have the ability to stress test these things. The same degree. Yeah. So my not so hot take on this is that, like, this is really the blocker for big companies to use GenAI.

Like, if it's a big company's, If AI doesn't live up to the hype, it's because companies are too scared to go public with their AI because of incidents like this. Like we encounter like Fortune 50 companies that have hundreds of internal AI use cases, but just haven't pulled the trigger on like pushing these prototypes out there really because of this issue. So that's why I think this is like a big bottleneck in this wave of AI right now. Yeah, yeah. It's way better to just take all of your employees, give them chat GPT pro and say, hey, you're still responsible for everything that you, all your work product, but you can use these LLMs as a tool to speed up your workflow. But ultimately, you know, even if Claude Code is writing a lot of the software, you got to review the death. And you got to review the email that gets sent to the important client so that, you know, we go from 99% accuracy, 1% hallucination to zero. That's your job. now and you're going to do you're going to hopefully be faster hopefully be better but there's still a human in the loop in these things fascinating well thank you so much for joining congratulations on the round uh great to see it thank you so much for stopping by we'll talk to you soon

appreciate it take care a good one bye up next we have uh someone who proved the uh oh cinematic viral videos don't work anymore yes they do they still got it he beat the odds uh very excited to have to Orii let's bring him in from off deal how you doing what's going on hey gents how's it going it's going great it's great to you enjoy the financial times article we love the financial times we got the things right here we get it delivered in print every day we have you know tons of respect for the wall street journal in the financial times it may and makes sense given your given your company and your target market but talk to us about the company and the target market what do you building? Yeah, so we're building an AI investment bank. To my knowledge, it's the first one

of its kind. Probably the easiest way to think about it is think of what would Goldman Sachs look like if it was started in 2025 and not like 1865 or something like that. Right? So we have our own software, our own data, our own infrastructure, our own bankers, and we just rip sell-side deals for small businesses that are ignored by it for their own data. We have our own infrastructure. Thanks. Let's go. Why? We met just over a phone call a couple months back.

And my first question was, why not, you know, build the software and just make it available? Why not the Harvey approach? Yeah, the sort of more SaaS approach. And I think it would be awesome if you kind of broke that down for our audience today. Yeah. And I'd be lying to if I said that we didn't consider building software for banks. And I do think there's some great products out there, like Rogo and some others, that. that are doing good work. But when we were thinking about this from first principles, we saw

how bureaucratic large banks are and how long it takes to enact any meaningful change. I personally spoke to dozens of bankers when I was asking them, what is the most requested sort of like problem that you want us to solve? They would say, call transcription and I would say, well, Zoom exists and they said, well, we're using Cisco WebEx. I would say, well, Cisco WebEx has Zoom transfer or call transcription and it would say, oh, we don't have that allowed. And that, you know, I'm being a little bit facetious, but that is verbatim what the number of one requested feature was. And I just kept thinking to myself, but if I was running my own bank, I would do it completely

differently. And we kept kind of noodling on this, noodling on this. And then we eventually came across an article from Sarah Tovel from benchmark that Famixie said, sell work, not SaaS. And after some deliberation, my co-founder and I decided to go all in on a crazy the idea of building our own investment bank from scratch. And so here we are, just over a year since we started and closing all kinds of deals. Yeah, break down what your initial deals have looked like, what kind of businesses you're

targeting. I know it's generally companies that are valuable, but not big enough kind of ticket sizes to get the traditional investment banks on board. Yeah. So even though we say that we're what Goldman Sachs. would have looked like in 2025. We're not actually trying to compete with Goldman Sachs. We're much more interested in going after the market that is currently unserved by legacy incumbents because the United Economics don't make sense. So there are millions and millions

of small businesses in America and hundreds of thousands of them change hands every year. For vast majority of them, they end up doing it on the road. Like less than one in five small businesses under $10 million of either da, actually have a self-flight advisor. You just kind of crazy if you think about it, right? It's the most important sale of their life. It's an asset that's worth over 80% of their net worth. And, you know, these business owners, Palmer, roofers, et cetera,

they're just doing it on the road. I've personally experienced this actually all the way back in 2019 when I tried buying a small business. And it was a complete disaster. I was talking to brokers or I was talking to owner operators who didn't really know how deals worked. It was really hard to get a deal done. So when we saw this opportunity, we got really excited because AI allows us to have vastly better unit economics and therefore go after the segment that's currently un-economical for the Hulham-Loki's or their wazards or ever course of the world.

Yeah. So when I think of Goldman Sachs, I think this monster bank that's not just an investment bank, they also have wealth management and not just sell-side advisory, but, you know, like sell-side advisory. but you know, you know, like sell-side coverage and they're doing, you know, buy, sell, hold reports, and then they're also doing IPO stuff. But we're talking here specifically narrow it down to M&A, then take it down into the mid-market, and then take it down even further. And there's been companies that have done kind of like the, it's a buy-and-sell, a company platform at the super sub-scale.

You can, I mean, Justin Con famously, like sold a calendar app on eBay. He sold a company on eBay. for like a I think a hundred thousand dollars a couple hundred thousand dollars but walk me through the actual the actual approach because when I think of a traditional M&A advisory firm it's it's find the companies build the relationships then build the materials then value the company then be kind of a back channel while everyone's talking to actually get the deal done a lot of that feels automatable but what what in the flow do you feel like is the lowest hanging fruit how does it all piece together

Yeah, maybe it's helpful to think through a journey of an off-deal customer when we think about this. So I'll speak about a deal that we recently closed. It was a Montessori school in Arizona. They actually tried selling it on the wrong, but the private equity firms told them the business was too small for them from a cash flow perspective. So they have somehow found us on Google. We have this cool AI tool that people can check out that allows you to put in your company

website and we preview some of the potential buyers for your business because we built a proprietary data layer over millions and millions of businesses. We have our own recommendation and then. So we can actually pinpoint which companies in the United States could be potential buyers. So they got in touch with us and we decided to take them on. What we did is our banker used our software to identify every single monosur school in the United States, find their contact information, who the owner is, et cetera. we reached out to them. There was about 1,100 of them that we've talked to. Seventy-two of them

signed the NDA. That means all of those people got to check out the SIM that we put together, the financials, etc. About 20 of them actually met with management in person for meetings. And then four submitted final offers. And then the offer that got it over the line was 40% higher than the first one that came in. It was an old cash deal. Let's go. Congratulations. That's amazing. And the cool thing about this is that even though most of what we do does involve private equity buyers or private equity that's strategics, in this case, we were able to bring a subscale asset to market and activate companies into being buyers when they weren't actively looking for a business to acquire, right? Because the investment banker in our team just reached out these monoslared school. And they said, hey, are you interested in expanding your footprint? We're actually working with a school that looks a lot like yours, et cetera. So these kinds of things are only possible with AI because the the bio universe is just so, so fragmented, right?

And so we try to build our own software for each part of the workflow. Sure. How do you avoid the, I feel like VCs get these emails a lot, but they'll get an inbound email from an investment bank. And it's like, hey, I have somebody interested in buying your company. There's not having a ton of e-commerce when all this e-commerce roll-ups is happening. It doesn't matter how much money you'd raise. They'd be like, we'd love to buy your business for 200K. And I think that's a challenge for you guys.

You eventually want to get to the point where you're selling thousands of companies a year. You want to make sure you're not sending millions of emails that people are looking at it being like, okay, this is clearly not. A person did not approve sending this email as part of a kind of an automated system. Yeah. So this is literally a daily point of discussion. Like what does this look like when we're doing hundreds and hundreds of concurrent deals? The nice thing is that we're not spraying and preying indiscriminately. We actually pinpoint buyers and we're very thoughtful about who we reach out to.

So today the volume is not as high as you might think from a pure outreach perspective. But the nice thing is that there's a network effect here, right? Because every time we interact with the buyer, they join a platform. And next time, we just get an instant notification when the deal matching their investment mandate goes up. And actually right now, we have about 30 businesses for sale, right, ranging from, you know, million to almost $8 million into the dock. And there is dozens of private equity firms that are. participating in multiple of these sell sides, right? It may be different teams, right? You might

have an industrial team versus a healthcare team, but these firms get onboarded on their platform, and then from then on, they're repeat customers because they're going to be accessing deals all day, every day, that's their job, right? So that's kind of the long-term play here, is to build this, you know, ecosystem of buyers. And we track, by the way, all by our behavior, right? So we know who's bidding on the wood, how much are they submitting? How much are they submitting? out of the like to structure deals, et cetera. So there's a lot of first party data that we're collecting. It's going to be tremendously helpful moving forward.

Very cool. What's the goal for the next 12 months? What's the deal, the deal volume? So the nice thing is that the messaging has been resonating really well. It turns out that, you know, an average business owner in the market has already heard from like 100 private equity firms staying on their door because everyone's doing roll-ups and the now he sees even getting in for all ups, et cetera. That's been actually great marketing for us because an average private equity

firm, we'll look at about 100 opportunities before pulling the trigger on one. And so it's a pretty bad user experience for the sellers who end up engaging with one of these guys maybe twice, three times, and then they get those in at the 11th hour. So when we come in and say, hey, we're able to flip the script and put you in front of 100 buyers, so only one of them is the lucky one to buy a business. That's been working really well for us. So in terms of our pipeline, like I said, we're already have 30 businesses for sale today. We have over a billion dollars worth of businesses, you know, in the near term pipeline

and sort of over the next nine to 12 months that we expect to launch. And the ramp has been just exponential, both from the inbound, right, and the referrals we've been getting, but as well as our outbound motion has been very effective. Our internal metrics are for end of 2027 is to hit $1009 in fees, which will require based on current level of automation, about 15 or 20 bankers, right? So each banker is able to do about 10 sell sites concurrently. Wow. It's amazing.

Wow. And what's the news? Raise money? Well, the news is that we got 12 million bucks and we're funding. Congratulations. Great stuff. Great stuff. Thank you so much for hopping on.

Awesome. Have you on the show. I'm sure you'll be back on soon. Yes. We got to hit them up. I have this interesting idea. I was thinking might blow people's minds. I'm thinking about buying an HVAC business.

I don't think anyone's third thought about this. thought about this roll up of you're selling three you're selling three okay I'll go to you perfect might be the first one that's great your next I got one feature request I think you should you should add Tesla robots to the platform that can go have steak dinners that's important clients because that's the one we're training a model they can play golf with people right now yeah that's key that will be the final unlock that's the final I investment bank or eval if you can eat a steak dinner and you can golf I'd like to see AI do that then Goldman's Max is cooked. Absolutely cooked. Thank you so much.

Awesome. Have a good one. We'll talk. Thanks. Thanks. Having you on, Ari. Cheers. And we have our last guest of the day hopping on the stream. He went viral yesterday for creating a robot that can, uh, that that looks like a lamp. So yes, let's bring him in from the restream waiting room. There is. Good to meet you. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Great. Great. Thanks for having me on. Break down the video. What are you building? How much of that is C. How much of that is real? Where are we in the technology rollout of this type of robotics project? Yeah, yeah. So the video you saw probably yesterday, it was rendered. It's not AI generated, unfortunately, but it was rendered. So we have a prototype working. Yep. This one right here that you see in the background. Okay. So we are building robotic lamps. They're meant to sort of disappear into your home. Oh, look at it working over there. Yeah, it's working. Wow. That's working away. we're getting the laundry folding going.

Yeah, it's a super cool, like, I don't know. I mean, part of why it went so viral is, like, people have been talking about laundry folding robots for years, and then we've seen companies take it very seriously, but never with a form factor that could just melt into your home. I don't know how protectable that is, but it just felt like from a user experience, from a perspective of, like,

actually integrating this into your life, it felt much more real to me. How much of, Where'd the idea come from and what are the benefits of like building it into the bed frame basically? Well, I mean, to be clear, so it's not actually built into the bed frame at all. It's a single floor lamp that you can technically place anywhere. Oh, you can put it anywhere. Okay.

So it's like by your couch, by your table, by the bed. It's just through most people that we spoke to, the bed happens to be where you do your laundry. People like just dump it there before they go to bed. Yeah. But yeah, like we're familiar with like, you know, some of the previous attempts at laundry folding. And I think the main thing that has always held it back is the form factor. You know, like there's usually they come like sort of with these kind of like pre-installed rollers that you kind of have to feed in manually. It's like semi-autonomous.

It only works for specific type of clothing. What we want to have here, you know, mimics a little bit kind of like the human arms. So we can adapt to different types of clothing sizes, different types of articles and styles. And, you know, with the recent breakthroughs in AI, we're finally able to. generalize across different clothing. How much of those recent breakthroughs in AI can you actually capitalize on? Because I, you know, like, GPT4.5 is amazing.

GPT4, you know, O3 Pro is amazing. But like it doesn't seem like it would translate to laundry folding just yet. What exactly are you a beneficiary of? And then what work do you have to do to kind of take it across the last mile? Yeah. So I mean, there's been a lot of tremendous work done

in the vision aspect for Robuston down really be able to understand what is seen in front of itself, right? And then also in the last year, within a robotics community, there's also a lot of foundation models for vision language action models are also available. It's the BLMs that are very popular, right? But yeah, yeah, but we call them VLAs because there's an action component to these models. So they're doing pretty well. They can generalize the clothing items that, you know, they haven't seen.

They're able to plan in sort of like the joint angle space of these robotic arms to be able to fold them into neat piles, you know, whatever the... So do you have to build a... I imagine that, like, recognizing that I'm looking at a T-shirt is somewhat commoditized. Like, you can kind of get that out of the box for free with some of the foundation models, but then there probably no off-the-shelf model that understands exactly how your particular set of joints work. So is that where you're doing fine-tuning or post-training? Like, how exactly are you translating into the...

specific robotic machinery that you've chosen to assemble in a particular way. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it comes down to, like, I think you touched up on there. It comes onto the data collection process. Okay. So right now, we manually teleoperate these arms that you see behind me. Makes sense. Collect the data.

And, yeah, we fold the laundry ourselves. Yeah, depending on what you want to fold, it can be pretty fast. Then we post train, fine tune, fine tune the existing models, essentially. Teleoperation, is it someone using, like, gloves, basically? How are they actually doing the teleoperated folding? I imagine it be very hard to do it on an Xbox controller. There is two two methods. Do we go full screen on this video?

Yeah. Oh, you got some gloves on? Whoa. This is Ready Player 1 stuff. I love it. Okay. Oh, wow. That's awesome.

Oh, yeah, yeah, VR. Yeah, you hold it yourself and you sort of do the task. Okay. And then the inverse kinematics happens within the robot to decide where, how it actually gets to that particular place in the 3D space. Yeah, that makes sense. That's cool. How do you, how do you, you know, where do you expect?

Obviously, your number one competition is just people doing their own laundry. Yeah. I think it's smart to build a robot that has some intrinsic value just like constantly, you know, just even a reading lamp, however somebody would look at it. But are you expecting to have most of your competition coming from humanoids? How do you think about that category broadly? because obviously a big problem a lot of people like the first demo they'll or the the promise you know a humanoid robot manufacturer might make is that oh it's going to do your laundry first promise is dancing it's always dancing but then yes the second promise is laundry

that's right yeah yeah i mean i think human noise are you know they're they're going to be there and i'm sure that there's going to be a you know market segment of the market that that would welcome those things into their homes I think where we are sort of a differentiator is that we are really sort of going after people that simply just don't want to share their living space with robotic humans. And they want to be in full control of their own place. And what that means is that, you know, in your home, you have furniture, you have appliances, right? And they sort of serve a single purpose. They have a place that they belong. They don't do anything when you don't want them to.

And they only activate when you want them to. So you're very much sort of in control of your. space and that's that's sort of where we come in to try to that yeah it's also I mean just the cost standpoint if you were going to buy yeah if you're going to buy a humanoid and let's say it costs $20,000 and you really wanted to do laundry

and then you can come out with an option this feels like it's a fifth of the cost because it's a fifth as many machine like parts it's a boss yeah yeah it's got to be a lot less so I would imagine that you're closer to Rumba territory than Tesla Optimist territory and that just pulls you forward a couple years. Final boss

for robotics folding socks feels feels pretty difficult. Sox are hard. Line them up and sit them down on top, but you need to kind of humans last job will just be like, you know, folding them. Maybe, maybe. Have you cracked that problem yet?

We're working on it. I think we can fold most articles of clothing right now. The main challenge we're going on right now is anything that's inverted. That might require you to sort of like push the stock out the other way. Yeah, that's hard. That's a bit more challenging with our fingers.

So yeah. What's the price start? You got $50 pre-orders right now, fully refundable, but I imagine the final price will be some multiple. Yeah, yeah. So right now we're looking at trying to get the price to under $2,000 per unit. Yeah, that would you need two? I know in the demo video there were two arms working together. That feels like folding laundry with one hand would be kind of an IMO level challenge, for me at least.

Do you need two of these things? yeah yeah i mean it's doable with one but you're just going to have to wait a little bit longer so if it's in a movie or something like that hopefully it's done but i've done the movie but i think the ideal setup is it's probably to have two um but again it depends you know whether your space can afford it you know um if it's the couch of a single chair of a smaller table you might only have room uh for one right so is there a world where you sell the robot with a teleoperation package. So there's someone somewhere else who's folding my laundry remotely

and I still don't have to fold my laundry and I pay $2,000 for the install and then $10 an hour for someone to teleoperated or something like that. Yeah, well, I think, I mean, our goal, I think, is to really try to get to chip with autonomous folding out the box. Because one thing that we're cautious about is like the privacy aspect. Sure.

We are trying to avoid having to have people that you don't know, basically now be given a set of arms and the pair of eyes into your private space. You might be able to do some like blurring of the humans or something. I don't see consumers being down to know that somebody else. Those are teleoperated and they have cameras inside. For sure, but it's also like a Google product. Aaron's smart, but not the same. Not the same level of brand yet. 20 years but good luck yeah I guess like how are you thinking of mitigating people's concerns of like

putting robot arms right above their beds and like the you know sort of like black mirror scenario where the robots starts you know a lot of that in the comments a lot of them the quote tweets you know it happens when you set the timeline on fire yeah yeah and I mean I think I think it's key that for these arms that you know when they're not activated they have to be and function like a regular lamp so that means like a hardware switch that turns them off the lamp hoods naturally sort of covers up the grippers and the cameras. So they act as sort of a mechanical blockage already as is. And, you know, I think, you know,

when we do things like that and then we communicate clearly to our customers on how to actually operate these things, that's when we can really set the expectations pretty clear. It shouldn't work when there's people in the bed. They should only fill laundry when there's laundry on the bed. And yeah. That's cool. Yeah, the other thing, I, I,

Yeah, be curious. It's very possible that people don't actually need to put these by their beds in the long run. You can put it somewhere else in the room as well if you don't want to have the robot. Yeah, basically. There you go, lots of options. Well, I'm just excited to see how things get developed. Good luck with the next phase. Congrats on the launch. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. See you guys. If you're looking for top tier cleaning in 24-7 concierge service, go to wander, find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, helltale great amenities, dreamy beds.

In the future, there'll be a robotic lamp that folds your laundry in every wander. Who knows, it's possible. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And in the world of robots that could potentially fold your laundry, Luke Metro has been traded. Trade it. Trade, trade deal.

To skilled AI. Modern AI is confined to the digital world at skilled AI. We are building AGI for the real world, unconstrained by robot type or task, a single omnibodyed brain. Today we are sharing our journey. And Luke Metro says, some personnel news.

I work on this now. I'm super excited about the future of robot AGI. Well, no, he messed up. He said some personal news. Yeah. This feels more like some professional news. Oh, personnel news. Yeah, this is personnel news.

This is not personal news. Yes, this is cool. Big vote of confidence for skilled AI. I'm sure there's 100 companies in the gundo alone that would have wanted to pick up. The legend, Luke Metro. Luke Metro, absolutely. Number one on the timeline and a great engineer as well.

We will close it out with this post from Alexis Ohanian because we got to get to New York soon. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove, though. He has a little bit of an update for us. Let's hear it. This is about something else. Okay, tell me. It is. I have some unfortunate news.

What happened? In Bloomberg, Luke Ferdore got hit with a hit piece. Wait, what? Yeah. No way. Why? I have to cover this tomorrow. Okay, we'll cover it tomorrow.

We're going to be in New York. We'll protest outside. the bottom of it. We might have to go to Washington, D.C., and defend our boy, Luke Faradour, one of the best to ever do it. A scrolls enjoyer being attacked? Unacceptable.

Honestly, I pulled up the image. He looks incredibly sick. It might be one of those things that just builds his aura. You never know. I think they're, yeah, he's aura farming business week. Let's see. Well, we'll dig into that tomorrow, but we will close out with this post about Figma

because we're going to New York to hang out with the Figma crew. Alexis O'Hane. and says, sure, I've seated dozens of billions of dollars, billion dollar companies, but I absolutely have my embarrassing miss list. Here are my Figma notes from 2016. We passed. Congrats, Dillon Field and the entire Figma team. Y'all absolutely made something people love.

And his notes say, Figma, why now? WebGL, co-founder was Elf on the first, was on Elf, the first people to make WebGL demos. Aviary had a great team, good software, but tech wasn't there. Lack of focus. I actually knew someone who worked at Aviary. It was kind of a Photoshop competitor for a while. they served a, an SDK that you could basically bake Instagram filters into your app if you wanted to have that as a feature in your app.

You could pay Aviary to offer that service to you. They launched two months ago, four out of seven users of seven days in the week. How many people log on four days a week? 600, now 1,000. Three, three days per seven users or 3,000 weekly active users at 9,000, 80,000 sign up today. This was at a time when sketch. was completely dominant. Yes, that's right.

So mostly word of mouth, no paid content definitely drives a lot, interested in learning better why someone signs up and invites collaborators, primarily designers using this but sees engineers, PMs, and marketing people who are the orbit

and is up being absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. A decade early, but Dillenfield knew that in the long term engineers would be using it, PMs would be using Figma and marketing people would be using Figma. This was 2016.

2016. It's crazy. It's crazy. This, if you had this, this, a team with this competency. Yeah. And this kind of early traction. Yeah.

Today. Yeah. You'd probably get a series A done. 100%. And this was a, this was a seed pass. Crazy. Crazy. So not clear about pricing strategy yet, but exactly to get started.

The pricing strategy is fantastic. They want to have people paying. Yeah. Users say they'll pay right now. 40% of users are U.S. 60% international estimates are $25 per user per team per month. ended up also being, I think, pretty much on point. Yeah, amazing.

We will close out with one last post from Joe Wisenthal. He says, I'm still flabbergasted that people talk about pursuing their white whale in a proud manner, setting aside the risks. The book also makes it clear that that's immoral. Well, I have a white whale. My white whale, it would be doing a show in person, a podcast in person in New York with Joe Wisenthal. Yeah. I think it's possible. It might destroy me.

It might destroy me. but I'm willing to risk it all to catch my white whale, which is an in-person show with Joe. He's been on our show multiple times. I've been on his show, but we've never done it in person. Is it possible? I cannot wait. Anything's possible.

We will catch the white whale. Thanks. We are headed to New York City. We're going to hop on a plane. And our production team is like, hang up, hang up the phone. They really want us to go off. We're not going off. Let's keep going a little bit longer.

He's actually trying to unplugged all the cameras. They're going to shut us off. But we will have a regular show tomorrow. We're figuring out the exact time. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. And thank you for watching. Thank you so much. Good afternoon.

See you soon.