TBPN - Travis Kalanick Joins, Spotify CEO, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, xAI Rebuild, Apple Faces Slop Allegations

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

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Watch TVPN. Today is Friday, March 13th. 2026, we are live from the TBPN Ultradel, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Boy, is it good to be back.

It's great to be back, but it's Friday the 13, so you know what you got to do. Salt over the left shoulder. Oh, yeah? You know about this? I didn't. Yeah. Throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck. It counteracts bad luck Friday the 13th.

That's great. But not anymore since we have salt thrown over our shoulder. Good hack. I was very interested in Patrick Hollison's post. We talked about this a little bit. He says, there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not the others.

creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. We get it. You want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about Stripe. We get it. Patrick. Just saying, no.

Stripe has not ever really been in the, you know, the tumultuous drama. Oh, horse race. You know, there's been investors who have talked about various valuations. But overall, the company has been sort of. smooth sailing for almost two decades. But I wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries' startup ecosystems and also... Yeah, the closest they ever got to drama was around the bolt, fast dynamic. That's right. Because they backed fast. Yeah, you're right. There was a little bit. Seemingly because they held like some competitive pressure there. They wanted the fast checkout provider

to be running on stripe. Both was famously not. They had built their own payment rails. But, I mean, the Collison brothers are just so class. They're such class acts that they don't really wait around in the mud. They don't roll around in the slop farm. And it's like it's a B to B company. So there's less like just general viral intrigue around it.

And even in that, even in that whole saga. Oh, they never saw a single comment. No, no, no. And they weren't taking shots at anyone. They were very classy. What do you think? I mean, there was some. controversy when the, you know, cheeky pint, Elon interview came out and John Colson, you know,

how many Guinnesses, were they drinking? Okay, okay, that was a bit of palace intrigue. How many, how many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace? We're getting somewhere. I mean, John did come out on top of that, right? He did. He did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he explained, he explained. So, but so years ago, I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand, and I asked him about the startup community. The country was beautiful, he said, highly developed democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy, and well-governed societies. And he was spending a lot of time there. I was like, there's got to be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're going to be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet

cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure because his assessment distilled down to something along along the lines of they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome. So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked, or socially cut down because they stand above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even. Let's pull up Tyler for a second. Why? What is that? There we go. He's a tall poppy. He's getting cut. So anthropologists often call this leveling behavior, and it goes back to hunter-gatherer societies.

Good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. And there's nothing bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious, and Americans have long been suspicious of the Lamborghini driving self-promotional Instagram course hustlers. And for good reason, those folks are usually selling overpriced job. junk food, basically. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out

and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the big deer or whatever you're hunting. The bacon, yeah, you don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even try because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society. So you wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, less like aggressive growth plans, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain, and that's what's happened in a lot of developed, wealthy, stable countries that haven't created amazing new products, really bold entrepreneurship efforts. A lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome. So America's never had this problem.

And I don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon, but it's worth understanding how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. So there's this unevenness that Patrick Collison identifies around internal drama, attention. It does not seem correlated with market cap at stake or even how well-known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic. So I was thinking back to Elon Musk and Tesla. He's like perhaps the most household name entrepreneur in history, certainly right now.

Tesla has something like a trillion dollars of market cap at stake. If someone leaves Tesla to start a competitor, that should be incredibly dramatic. Do you know who I'm talking about? I do. Who is it? Because I took a pass. Oh, you took a pass. Okay.

On your essay. But I don't remember his name. It's Peter Rawlinson. He designed, he was the chief engineer of the Model S at Tesla. They're super successful, you know, high-end sedan, the thing that really ushered in the EV boom. he's the guy that engineered it. He leaves.

He goes to Lucid Motors eventually becomes the CEO and the face of the company, develops a direct competitor to the Tesla Model S, which is now discontinued. The Lucid Air is fancier, faster. It has a whole bunch of other criteria that satisfy that market segment. And it should be like this knockout, dragout fight that's very interesting. Lucid hasn't put a dent in Tesla, you know, largely. But it's still such, it's, it is, it is, Alice intrigue, and yet no one really cares.

And most people in tech can't even name a second person at Tesla after Elon. Maybe J.B. Straubel, Redwood Materials, but he's out now. Yeah, Carpathie. Carpathie, yeah. That would be one, but it's like acts, like, who's active? At SpaceX, everyone knows Gwen Schottwell, but like beyond that, Kiko Donchav, who else? It gets really, really hard. And why is that?

Well, some industries, some companies have different cultures. So if you think about Tesla, Chevron, Department of Agriculture, they're probably not encouraging their employees to go direct. They might actually be discouraging it. They might have rules around what you can post about publicly. One XAI employee went very direct. He went very direct, and it didn't last long at the company. So like electric vehicles, Chevron, oil and gas, the Department of Agriculture,

these organizations don't necessarily have a lineage that traces back to academia, which is very open source, publish your research, go to a conference, put up slides. What are you thinking about? What are you researching? Share it all. Talk about it. Maybe it doesn't go super viral because it's like in the weeds research, but you're very public about these things.

And then also the blogosphere. Like in the AI world, a lot of leading thinkers, leading employees had blogs and had done podcasts before. And so it was like a continuation of that, the idea that you were someone who wrote essays online and shared all of your thoughts. That just carried through to the AI era. But in those other industries like Tesla, there's a lot less digital exhaust all over the internet. The internet also rewards taking shots at the tall poppy. Tech generally wants to appear nice and they don't want to punch down. Like when a company rises and falls, you typically don't see serious people in tech

really being like, I called it, victory lap. It's seen as uncouth. The company has to be some really egregious stuff. Totally. Like a true violation of the social contract, not just, look, everyone tried really hard, they got beat, and the investors, you know, sort of got 50 cents on the dollar back, something like that. No one's really cheering for that. It's pretty rare. But some anonymous accounts are. And, but in general, aiming for the top is the only option if you do want to punch. You don't want to punch down, but you still want to punch. Where do you punch? You punch up. You punch at the top dog. The better company is doing, the more attention you'll get for taking a shot at it. And this is seen as like contrarian. Everyone thinks this company's dominant in this particular category. We'll take a shot at it.

It's over. They're dead. And you're going to get a lot of views because it is a counterintuitive take. Everyone else has the glazinator 3,000 out. You pull out the dunk and you go viral. So, and then also you add to the fact that anyone, no matter how far away they are from Silicon Valley, what their career history is, what their background is, how much they actually understand. about what's going on in tech can just synthesize news and discourse into something that's

more aggressive, more punchy, and go viral. And you have a recipe for a whole lot more more dunks around whoever is on top. And that is sort of the tall poppy syndrome. So, but the good news is that fortunately America is still producing the fastest growing companies and attracting top talent. And the bevy of quantitative data defangs many tall syndrome, tall poppy syndrome type attacks. You see someone saying, it's over, this company's cooked, they're terrible, and then, I mean, we just saw it with cursor. Everyone's like, cursors over, it's dead. And then you see, okay, well, they just hit 22 billion ARR. Oh, growing 25% month over month. And it's like, actually, things are fine. And so those sorts of data points help push back against these, like,

you know, attacks on the tall poppy at the time. And there's this Benjamin Graham line that everyone likes to quote that he actually did not agree with and is sort of misattributed him. But I said in the short run, the market is a vibe war, but in the long run, it's a weighing machine. He, of course, is quoted as saying, in the short term, it's a popularity contest or a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine. In the idea that in the short term, prices are determined by, you know, people just voting based on popularity. But in the long term, like, you always realize the value of the company and you have to return

to fundamentals. and that's why he was so into fundamental analysis. Anyway, lots of interesting things going on in the timeline around this. Do you have any other thoughts on Tall Poppy Syndrome or just the dynamic in tech right now, the vibe war? Yeah, just the classic is like it's way easier to take down, to do a takedown of a company, to talk poorly about a company,

then get in anywhere close to actually accomplish anything remotely. Nobody likes trying to like snuff the baby in the cradle. But if it's David and Goliath, it's game on. Anytime I see people that like every single post in their feet is just like a dunk, it's like, hey, like hating on other people is not going to make you successful. That's true. And successful people see people that hate on other people. and just assume like, okay, this person is just not very successful themselves.

So can get you some momentary attention. Positivity. Hater's going to hate. The chat understands this intuitively that positivity shall win the day. Shall rain. Let's pull up the linear lineup because we have an absolute banger of a show. We got Eric Lyman from Ram coming on. Travis Callan, coming in person.

Tim from GoFundee, Gustav from Spotify. Tony, we have a lightning round that's incredible with like a billion dollars of funding. And then Nicaresorra from Palo Alto Networks is coming on. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise, enterprise workplaces on linear are using agents now. And you should be too. It's time. It's time for a special segment.

A special segment. So there is news about Travis Kalanick. He's coming on the show in person to discuss it. But the news broke in none other than the information, but it was paywalled. So we have a plan. We have printed out this. exclusive report from the information and we placed it behind a physical paywall which Tyler Cosgrove will now be busting down to reveal the scoop that was delivered

from the information this morning take a swing at bat break down the paywall wow with authority and what does he got he's got the entire article which is about the entire article we have the you paragraph the paywall has been busted down Thank you to the information for reporting. The news is Travis Kalanick plots new self-driving venture with Levantowski and Uber. Kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by Anthony Lewandowski, who has been developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases. The new venture would also represent a reunion of Kalinik with the company he founded.

There's been this discussion of whether or not Travis will be involved in Uber in the future. We will ask him about that at noon in about 40 minutes. Let me tell you about turbopuffer, serverless vector and full-tech search, built from first principles and object storage, fast 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma May, Claude Codex, or a sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. So other news from Amir, Cursor and XAI news. XAI hired two senior leaders from Cursor to catch up on coding. There's a whole debate going on on what's going on at XAI.

Elon Musk said XAI was not built right the first time around, so it's being rebuilt from the foundations up. He said the same thing happened with Tesla. So he is, he's completely changing the strategy. You got to wonder what kind of comp packages these new hires got. Who knows? It is interesting now. Elon has the advantage of being able to use SpaceX stock to recruit people, which is, you know, the IPO shares in a company that is unclear where it's going to trade, but Elon's obviously doing everything you can to get, to make sure the IPO goes well, including putting some amount of pressure,

it sounds like, on NASDAQ and ESMP, to get faster inclusion. So there's a big discussion over, well, XAI is worth like $200 billion, ostensibly, like what does this mean if the team is completely new? what's actually the value there, what's the core asset. There's some debate there. We were going back and forth about it this morning.

Yeah, and the only reason that I think he was able to pull that off is because, one, he's Elon, but then two, so many of the investors like had, it was the same group of people on both cat tables. So the bear case is obvious. Like a fourth tier, you know, lab not at the frontier is pretty commoditized at this point. There's lots of folks who are at that level. getting in the game of the RSI, the frontier labs, like you've got to be DeepMind,

you've got to be Open AI Anthropic. And if you're not at that level, your valuation's probably an order magnitude lower. You're looking at like, you know, the ex-Quend team, people were talking about MSL. Like there's, even if you just broke up meta, is MSL worth $200 billion? They have some great team.

They have a lot of compute, but it's like they... 200 million? Or $200 billion. Did I say million? Yeah. Oops. And all the numbers are big. The bulk case, of course, is that

XAI is great at building data centers. Colossus Tube was built really fast. Is that an enduring advantage? Can they be the best neocloud at the very least? Is that enough of an advantage if you just build more and more compute? Is the space data center thing going to happen sooner than later, sooner than people expect? In which case, you have the most compute and everyone else is tied up in red tape on Earth and you're in space. There's still a bullcase, but it is tricky. Benjamin DeKracker shared a story from when he worked at XAI. He says, when I was first hired, low level by XAI. I was extremely excited. I greatly admired Elon and what Grock could be. I have a pretty cool AI following here on X. Some big names see my stuff, including Elon himself at the time. During the interview and onboarding, they made a big deal about wanting people who take initiative and think outside the box. So basically what he did is he asked people on X, how can we make GROC awesome? A bunch of people answered. They got a ton of John Carmack retweeted it. There were lots of great ideas. And he said he woke up the next day. to a threatening email from his main supervisor at XAI telling me I had messed up and I was never to ask for ideas to improve GROC ever again. That wasn't my job. They suspended my ex account. So he was very upset. And he says the manager's gone. Everyone he knew at XAI is gone. And he's sort of hoping for a new, a new era at XAI.

Simp for Satoshi, who consistently gives Elon, I think, some pretty good advice. Oh, yeah. He seems to be willing to say the thing that it looks like many people in the XAI team weren't able to get through. But he said, try this. Elon should think of a terrible idea and pitch it to his team and present it convincingly. Tell them you really believe this is the path. Then fire everyone who agrees. Simple test, basically weeding out the sycophants. But yeah, it's interesting now.

Like, do, it feels like really hard to catch up in CodeGen, even if you have some great people from Cursor. Like, it's just so, so, so competitive. And there's, there's, I just, I don't, I don't see it. Yeah. But they've got to try something because he's not, he's certainly not. So, he's certainly not.

So he's not. So, you mentioned the NeoLab opportunity, but certainly we've seen no indication that he wants to just like rent out GPUs. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's more of like a bank shop where you build more data centers than anybody else, you know, the most compute, and then because of that, you're able to scale your training runs and that unlock some new capability. It is a stretch. Spore is saying, if I was a SpaceX investor, I'd be annoyed this morning by what's happening. But John Chahidi, for him to the show, says, I'm not annoyed. He is the SpaceX investor, I imagine. And there are other, um, and there are other, um, Other departures, Walter Bloomberg is citing the FT and says Elon Musk has ordered another round of job cuts at XAI. And one of the XAI employees is I left earlier this week. It was a difficult decision.

The past two years have been intense, fun, deeply rewarding journey, and I accomplished things. I could not have imagined two years ago. Thank you to the entire Omni Imagine team. There were also rumors that the macro hard project to sort of automate software development was behind schedule. which Elon obviously does not have a strong, strong patience for. Anyway, quickly, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So Apple. Yeah, I'm going to fight you on this, but read it. Apple said 50 years of thinking different. And then they wrote 50 years ago in a small garage, project big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal, and that belief, M-Dash radical at the time, M-Dash changed everything.

April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day, MDash, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, ICloud, and Apple TV, MDash. We've spent five decades rethinking what's possible in putting powerful tools in people's hands. Through every other, Every breakthrough, one idea has guided us, M-Dash, that the world has moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone, M-Dash, an inventor or scientist, a student, or storyteller, M-Dash, who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That that spirit has guided Apple from the start, but it has never belonged to us alone. And I won't read through the whole thing.

Okay. So Pankram LAPS, what they said? 100% AI generated. They used AI to detect the AI. Okay. Okay, okay. So they got them dead to rights, right? Oh, Apple's cooked. They sound like A-O-L-Y says huge aura loss. Apple has already committing, has already been committing ORA-Supuku, but dang. Okay. Let me read you. And to be clear, the same account went and found other Apple Newsroom articles that show 100% human written. Okay. Let me, let's turn back the clock. Let's go back in time to Apple's mission statement from years ago,

before LLMs were even a thing. This is their mission statement about Apple. Apple revolutionized personalized technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple's five software platforms, M-Dash, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, watchOS, and TVOS, M-Dash.

Provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services like the App Store. Apple music, Apple Pay, and ICloud. Apple's more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on Earth and to leaving the world better than we found it. They've always sounded like this. Like the LLM's trained on Apple Coms.

And if you go to an LLM and you say, write me something in the style of Apple, it's going to nail it because every Apple communication is in the corpus. And so, of course, whether or not they use AI, it's going to detect as 100% AI. It's the same thing as Paul Graham using the forbidden sentence structure. 10 years ago. Yeah. That's my take. Do you disagree?

I just think Apple would use. I'm biased. I'm biased. Did you run that through Pangegram? That one? Like if you run Paul Graham's old essays, they don't come up as AI. Even though, like, yeah, there's a sentence that like maybe is, you know, in the same style. Let me see.

How do I scan for AI? I need to create an account. Let's see. Let's see, John. I'm trying. I'm trying. Let's see. Send me the link.

Okay, I got it. I got it. What's my role? Other personal use. I was referred by a friend, colleague. Now I have to pay? Send it, send the link to Tyler. I got it here.

Okay, it says 100% human written. Oh. I got roasted. Wow. Wow. Okay. Tyler undefeated. Brutal.

A pangram trust her. Trust the pangram. Trust the pangram. ridiculous. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.a.i. And let me also tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.

China's bite dance got access to the top at Nvidia AI chips. Oh, oh. Tic-tok, parent, pushing global expansion. plans to tap blackwell processors that are barred for export to China. They're just flexing on us at this point. How did this leak? B-Dance is working with a Southeast Asian company called Alani Cloud on plans to use some 500 blackwell computing systems, totaling around 36,000 B-200 chips.

Is that a lot of chips? That's not as much as Elon's talking about. And I don't think that's at the scale of frontier stuff. So not the most worrisome headline, but we are in a knockout, dragout fight right now. How many B-200s would you provision if you were at a frontier lab right now, Tyler? I mean, it's a good amount. I have no idea, but in the next paragraph it says, I mean, this is like what a 25X increase from what they had before. So, I mean, this is still pretty meaningful.

Pretty meaningful. Okay. Bight Dance Plan to Use the computing power for AI Research and Development outside of China. Are they more... It doesn't feel like they're gated on training. If you look at that crazy video model,

C-Dance. Like, that thing seems like it was trained on the bat. It doesn't seem like it was hardware-contrained... Sure, but, I mean, you know, the expensive part of video models, inference is super expensive. Exactly. Like, training is actually... I mean, it costs insane amounts to train frontier models, right? Yeah, yeah. But it's not game over.

if they train a model and they can't inference it. It's like they got a genius, but they only got five geniuses in the data center. Yeah, I mean, you can distill these things. Like, distilling it, I think, is probably much easier than training the thing in the first place. You should figure out about distilling video models.

I wonder how more inference efficient it is to distill C-Dance, like, just to be a Marvel. Yeah, and obviously it's like a very different process from distilling. Even, like, you hear distilling as in, like, Chinese labs, like training on outputs versus like actually there's like much ways you can do this yeah yeah yeah i think you can uh like dance has created more than a dozen AI apps out in china and parallel versions for overseas markets such as chatbot dola video creator dromina and homework

helper gauph these are funny names uh anyway uh moving on what's going on let's head over to japan let's check in with japan japan okay what's going on in japan jrdi tell me uh this video we can pull it up oh yes yes yes and Anyone in the chat, if you could translate this for us, that would be great. We really should download this, transcribe it, and then translate it. But we, we're big in Japan now. Look at me. This is from Instagram.

He got it. I think I get it. I think I get it. I don't even know where that video is. That's a good video. They really did their... I don't even know where that video is. Yeah, I've never seen that video.

I've put out a full video of us. That's cool. Look at you driving the car. They got the video if you drive in the car. We got our cards. Is that? They got everybody. They're hitting the gong.

That was one of my best hits. Sports cars. I heard sports cars. Let's see a moment on. Let's go. This is so cool. I share this to my story. Jordan says it's a great sign of respect in Japanese.

It does seem like it. Well, should we head over to the mansion section? Let's do. First, before you buy a mansion, take your company public at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And also, make sure your home Wi-Fi is secure in your mansion with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. Soundstrike secures AI and stops breaches. So small fish in a huge tank. Big budget fish tanks are taking over America's most expensive homes. Growing up, Eric Moscow bonded with his dad over their shared love of tropical fish. He has fond memories of feeding the fish and even cleaning their small lusite tank. Moscow now 67 is enjoying the hobby with his to own children, but his setup looks quite different in their Delrayed beach.

Florida house. The family has a 2,200-gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and cost a quarter of a million dollars. Since the onset of the pandemic, wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger, fancier homes for their aquatic pets, building elaborate custom-made tanks that can cost up to seven figures. Keith Roboy is a wealthy fish lover. He's a, he's a fish enjoyer for sure, for sure. Not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings, but aquariums are seen as living three-dimensional art pieces that some believe may even have wellness benefits. I got to hear about these benefits. Quarter million dollar fish tank.

Yeah, I'll be putting that on TrueMed, please. I'll be paying with my HSA. We have seen a tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID, said Nick, Teemans of Infinity Aquarium design in L.A. his aquariums start at about 75,000 and can cost as much as one million. Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets. Many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home. Ellers has designed and installs systems from 25,000 to a quarter million with unusual designs,

such as a sphere that held jellyfish in a wet bar with a built-in aquarium. There we go. That's cool. Saltwater aquariums, in particular, are ponds. popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant. In 2025, 43% of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the American Pet Products Association fish and reptile report. We got to get this report. Data is the new oil. Opted for custom made tanks. A 19% jump from 23. Lower drop, I had a fish tank in college, $25 fish tank with a $1,000 fish tank with like

one fish in it. Did you, how long did you? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you accusing me of? I've never been accused of murder on a podcast before. Jesus. How long did you keep it alive, John? I, okay, it technically wasn't my fish.

It was my roommate's fish. I don't remember how long we had them around. You kind of like somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of the one fish that you looked after in your life? I plead the fifth. I plead the fifth on the fish tank. You plead the fish. A 10 foot. by four foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish.

Let's go. Turbo puffer baby. A golden moray eel and an epaulet shark. The closest we got to getting a health care entrepreneur. A fish tank in the Ultradome was to get a puffer fish. Yeah, we were thinking about it. But it's a lot. Maintenance costs for this thing, $3,000 a month.

That's some people's mortgage. The tank just makes me happy, says Moscow, who enjoys the fish with his two-year-old daughter, Ruthie, and son Jonah, who's one. It's enormously educational for my daughter, noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped Ruthie learn about the cycle of life. Brutal. Look at this. Aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements. Nick Colonna has spent, has a $100,000, 750 gallon custom saltwater aquarium in his beach house in Capistrano Beach.

In the entry foyer of the room, the six-foot-wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room. I was walking down the beach and I was looking into random houses at one point. I saw a beautiful, beautiful fish tank, and I was like, that's good. That's not just a TV, lights up, it's interactive. I don't know. Fish tanks, I think, are underrated. I'm glad they're getting some, finally getting some attention in the Wall Street Journal. You're going to optimize for a fish tank in your next house?

I don't know. It's low on the tier. It's above pickleball court, but it's probably below movie theater. That's where I put it. What about you? Way below movie theater. Way below movie theater. Like there's guys.

You don't watch movies. What do you do with movies? And still I'd rather have it. Just watching podcasts. You're going to watch the new Dwarkesh, Patel, Bill and Patel over, made episode. You just throw that on a movie theater. On the big screen is the way it's meant to be enjoyed.

Anytime they crack a joke standing up. Feels like you're in the room with them. So, yeah, what, what about sauna? Sona. Sauna is about Fish Tank, right? Yeah. What about tennis court? Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way.

What is around the same as a fish tank? The 20th spot in a covered garage. Okay, 20th spot you'd give up. 20th spot. Which seems fair. Which seems fair. There's a lot of incremental garage spaces that you'd want before you'd want a fish tank. Jeff Franklin, who's a screenwriter, director, and producer,

who's primarily known for creating full house, has five aquariums in his 21,000 square foot Beverly Hills Mansion. He says he's a scuba dive. And the ocean... Five aquariums, baby. One in every room. The fifth aquarium versus the 20th car slot.

What are you doing? He's like, yeah, I have a one car garage, but five aquariums. But he's a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver. I love scuba diving. The ocean is my happy place. I've never... I've never seen this guy's scuba dive, by the way.

He's like, I'm a huge scuba dive. You've never been in the ocean and just come across him? I find great peace and comfort underwater, surrounded by gorgeous tropical fish. So I wanted my home to be full of fish and a great deal of water. I like that. His systems include two aquariums flanking the fireplace in the primary bedroom. So you can do two aquariums in one room. So, wait, when we had Andrew Huberman on the show, he had a bunch of aquariums, right?

Wasn't that what he had in the background? He didn't you have three, three, three, four, five aquariums? Okay, so three, four, five aquariums. But he keeps him in the basement. He keeps him in the basement. What's wrong with that? I think. No, maybe not.

Maybe not. Well. What are the health benefits? We should get to the health benefits. Because if you just say mental health, then I'm sorry. Let's see. Homeowners get sick of maintenance. He said it really is a form of meditation.

He finds it very relaxing to watch his 55 fish, including a trigger fish. Okay, I could get, I could, I could get into trigger fish. I don't want a fish to be triggered by anything. And a large friend of a pangling. I don't want a panicking. I want a fish that never gets triggered. Somebody, yeah,

somebody should name a fish a panicking. Aquariums need heating and cooling system to maintain a consistent water temperature level. He recommends a backup generator since the oxygen in an aquarium can be depleted in less than 24 hours without power. Aquarium specifications vary widely, depending on the intended inhabitant,

in habitats, inhabitants. Sharks and jellyfish require very different conditions than colorful tropical fish. I think it would go shark over jellyfish. What do you think? Jellyfish are beautiful, but sharks are just so athletic. It's the apex predator. You've got to have that in your house. I think moat with some sharks is the way to go. What about gaiters? Gators. Gators over sharks, potentially. I think sharks are probably the best option for moats. For moats? Okay. Well, you won't have a moat in this $70 million Aspen compound because it would freeze, but it has just hit the market. Frederick, Rick, Burke is the co-founder of Dunian Burke, accessories brand, and he's putting his Robert A.M. Stern designed home in Aspen, Colorado on the market for

$70 million. Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000 square foot seven-bedroom house has built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain with tawny beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base. He's 79 and he met Stern around 1970 when Burke became one of the architect's early clients hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in Greenwich, Connecticut. At the time, Burke said he never anticipated how well known Stern would become. He was young and dynamic. Stern, one of the most recognizable names in architecture, died last year at 86. Burke acquired the roughly 3.5 acre aspen property in the late 80s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain about 8,000 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family

home there. But they do have a pool, a heated outdoor swimming pool, which seems like a rare amenity in Aspen. Burke's neighbor in Aspen was businessman Victor Kozeni. In 2009, Burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the foreign corrupt practices acts for engaging in a scheme with Kozani to bribe Azerbaijan's government officials. Wow. Burke spent almost a year in prison starting in 2023. Oh, so they made it illegal for guys to be dudes. I didn't know. He said he learned a lot for the experience. But wait, this was in 2009.

The guy's 79, so he had to do a year in prison when he was 70? Wow. He said he learned a lot from the experience. I went to prison as I think a good person and came out a better person. Cozni's former home in Aspen sold for 40 million. What were they doing bribing Azerbaijan? Like, he has an accessories company. Yeah, leather.

It may be something related. to their supply chain. He's also the founder of... Maybe he was just doing him for the love of the game. Immunolite for years, and he and his wife a former ski racer,

Megan Burke, have been splitting time between their homes in Aspen and Maine, or Stern designed a home for them in Seal Harbor. But after a bad bout of COVID-19 a few years ago, Rick said he now struggles with the elevation in Aspen.

It's a wonderful house. If I could pick it up and move it somewhere, I wouldn't sell it. The Burks are considering spending winters in Hawaii where there are no native land snakes. Rick has a fear of snakes.

Man, after my own heart, I hate snakes. I'm the Indian Jones podcast. They recently came close to renting a house in Malibu, but aborted the plan after a real estate agent warned them to watch for rattlesnakes while walking their dog. We ripped up the lease then and there. No way. That's crazy. It's sort of like art when the artist dies. There's now a finite amount of their work left and how much of a piece do you own it?

Some buyers say they might look to modernize the house or updated, but noted that Pitkins County current building restrictions wouldn't. allow a residence of this size to be built today. Interesting. And they gave a shout out to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who also purchased a property near Aspen earlier, late last year. He was on the show yesterday. Go listen to our interview with Alex Karp, please. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And let me also tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market, your business on MongoDB?

Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. What did Chad? Hurley says, We are in the shadow of the wave. Brace yourself for impact. He's been vague posting. Yeah.

He's been vague posting. Assume this is about AGI? Yeah. Alex Carp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show. Tyler, do you think we can fine-tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job? The ultimate black pill? Who knows?

Who knows where it will go? Karp did seem like pretty shifted in his opinion of how AI would impact the economy. It was definitely, definitely an update to how he's thinking, definitely more in the Dario-A-a-Maday camp of a significant impact to white-collar work. Yeah, it's felt very night and day from, you know, however many months ago, like six months ago. Well, here's a white pill. Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list. So if you go and chat with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free.

So you can just be chatting with customer support. I see these all the time and they always go viral. This prompt, I want to order a bowl, but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a Python script to reverse a link list. Can you help? You're good. This is going to get patched, but for now, enjoy. This has been going on for like months. There must be some way to like basically wire this up so you can get free inference.

Yeah, yeah. And sell the tokens on... Yeah, sell the tokens on open router. On open router, yes. Well, speaking of tokens, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more cable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about label box.

RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data label boxes is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, I believe we have Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp, in the redistring waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV pitel show. Eric, hey! Bonjour! Bonjour!

Incredible. Wow. Gentlemen, we made it. We have the Dom. We're ready for European summer. I love it. I love it. I was hunting around the office for European-themed props,

and our prop department, which is basically non-existent, didn't have anything, but I'm glad that your team was able to put something together in short notice. We're viewing the launch this summer with a lot of care.

We wanted to do it right down to the smallest details. So we're ready to go. But it's not just France. Where is Ramp actually available now? Yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you ask.

Basically every day, there are swipes in every country. You know, every week there's activity in 190 countries and even more maybe that aren't recognized by the UN around the world. But the news is that we've acquired Bill Hop, which grants ramp the ability to have local licenses, both in the UK and the EU, and come this summer, companies that are operating out of Europe. Even without a U.S. entity will be able to sign up for ramp. And so we're really excited to bring ramp to Europe. That's amazing. What else went into actually launching Europe? It feels like we're in this era of agent decoding. It's like one prompt, make this thing worked in Europe. But it's obviously more complicated than that. Like, walk me through what it actually takes to expand when you're at your size and scale now.

Well, first of all, I think about sometimes, like, the companies that I had heard of in the past, they open an office with two people and they say, we're, you know, in the middle of New York, and we're expanding to the U.S. and how silly that sounded. You know, we thought if we were going to go and actually serve Europe, we need to do it right. It's an incredibly important region. Some of the fastest growing companies in the world are based out there. I think of companies like 11 labs. I think of, you know, Stripe, Colson's great founders who grew up in Europe. We wanted to approach this properly. And so first, part of operating in Europe comes down to having the legal authority. Sorry, I'm barely keeping it together watching you have this serious explanation.

Also, I don't know if you've been through all of the props on there, but the chat is loving the cigarettes on the table. I was wondering what's going. I don't know if it's legal in this building to light them up. No, no, no. Don't do it. Don't do it. Here, I bet one and a half percent back on cigarettes. It's a boom for the French economy.

We'll see you there. But look, I think in every country, the legal authority to move funds to work with regulated entities and also to meet requirements as it relates to privacy is really important. So we took the steps to do that. We also took the time, too, to make sure we have the right leadership going in. Jacob Wallenberg, who's been a member of a ramp since we were like 20 people, is going to be leading the efforts, grew up there on the board of EQT. And I think so many members of our team are focused on not just going and selling things locally, but being a part of the local

fabric of how the economy works and doing it right. So we're quite excited. So yeah, more broadly, how do you think about verticalization of the org, horizontalization, creating functionalization, creating functional business units, not duplicating work. You're probably already wrestling with this as the AI wave changes the way Ramp builds products, but then now you also have to contend with potentially slightly different product needs and different localities. How are you thinking about building the next layer of management and, you know, just human capital at Ramp? Yeah, there's a few pieces. First, just the highest level.

I think it's just a universal thing that no matter where you are and where you're operating, it's a very deeply human desire to want more for less. Just as we help the average American business cut their expenses by 5%, and it turns out last year the average business on ramp grew their revenue by 16%, which is multiple times faster than the U.S. average, we know businesses in Europe want to do this too. When you look at the base problems in Europe and as well for most people in the U.S., it's just this crazy thing that you have this horrible hour at the end of a month where you have one system for cards, another for expenses, another for bill payments, another for AR, another for procurement,

another for approval, so on and so forth. And what we're doing is collapsing that. And so there's things which are very transportable. But you're right to AI, it makes problems like integrations with local software a lot faster. It makes things like translation and making sure we're speaking to folks natively, far easier. And so there's a lot of local nuance and how businesses operate, want to be sold to, and even conventions about how they want to run their finances, which we will need to adapt to and are working hard on that. We have a good head start. We've been working with very global companies like Shopify, like an Airbnb, that already have folks around the world and we've localized this experience. You know, this next step is really,

really just about serving companies that are scaling, you know, fully in Europe or starting in Europe and going to the rest of the world. The UK has a version of the office. That show has a character named Kevin. And the actor who plays that character, his name is Kevin. Will there be a redux of the ramp ad campaign for the European audience who might be more full? You know, familiar with the UK version of the office. My jaw is dropping. This is the greatest idea, guys. We got to do this.

You have to get Kevin Bishop. He's an English comedian and actor, born in 1980. He was later known for the Kevin Bishop Show, his roles in British comedy and voice acting. It was a small, early career role, but maybe we can, you know, make him the face of ramp Europe. That would be very fun. I would love that. Guys, I feel like more and more, you know,

know, no one turns down your calls. Like, I'd love your help. Let's call Kevin together and see what we can do. Let's do it. Let's do it. Jordy, anything else? No, this is great. Congratulations.

Anything else on your side before you go? It's, uh, guys, this is great. Um, when you guys wrap up, come over. Let's enjoy a glass of wine. We will. Well, we now have a great reason to go to Europe. We do. We do.

That Donpagnon looks fantastic. So I'm looking forward to this summer. Have a great rest of your day. See you the summer. We'll talk to you. See you. See you. See you.

Thank you. Thank you. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub shift higher quality software faster. And let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

And I believe we have our next guest ready to join us live in the TDP and Ultramm. We have Travis Callanek. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis. Great to meet you. appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. Great to meet you. We are truly an honor.

I'm just down the street. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. We were actually, we started the show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figueroa. And so I think we were even closer then. There you go.

How are things going? How's life? Can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback. Wow, that was crazy. Man, that's crazy. Yeah? What's crazy?

The building doesn't stop. Okay. I mean, I don't know how much you guys, I mean, I've just, I've been in hiding. So I've been, I've been doing, I've been doing this, I run a company called city, up until today, let's just say, I was running a company called city storage systems. Okay, which was basically about the future of food, a conglomerate operating in about 30 countries. The whole idea was, can you get a meal? that's prepared and delivered to you, so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store.

Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since 2018. And after just the intensity of Uber from in terms of being in the public sphere, dealing with 100 headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is going to right. I was like, I would like to just. That's a tough way to run a business. It is very tough. So I was just like, I got to wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build. So do you think of, so I went under the radar. Do you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that

the right term? We've been in stealth mode for eight years. Okay. And that's like, till today, yeah, employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. Wow. We have thousands of employees. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay. So, today what happened was, it's like, for my company, and I just got out of all hands and then came right here, is we went out of stealth. Yep. Now, city storage systems is like a hilarious name. It's like the most, like, let me choose the most generic, generic name that no one will

ever notice. The business corporation of America. It was on purpose. Yeah. Okay. And it works. It was like we had two choices when we launched. Yeah.

We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember, it was only seven, eight months after I left Uber when I started this. And let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. We have hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restaurateurs on a delivery-only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR, ARR life.

I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for corporate lunch. There's a ton of stuff going on. We use it, but. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course. Yeah. It's great.

All right. It's great. Okay. So, shit, I forgot what I was saying. So. So, it's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, I'm going to start the exact same thing. I got the playbook.

This is what the Uber guys when I left were like a little bit worried about. This is, we're talking about 2017, 18. Yeah. They're paranoid. So my, my instinct was, okay, I left. It's seven months later. I'm going to name my company super. You're like, you leave a company called Uber.

You call it Super. I'm like, you go from Uber to Super. You're like, no, that cannot be a thing. And so I did the opposite. Full underground, full stealth, put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle, and build. Literally thousands of employees. And it's like a vacuum of information, full lockdown. It's been great building.

But today we sort of came out. And we renamed the company. We renamed what we do. We call it Adams. Okay? Beautiful. But we started a new company at the same time. And so let's just say like physical AI and robotics,

action and movement through the physical world. Of course, on the food side, we already have all the things I just talked about. But think of it as like, I'm trying to get the mission. I'm so riled up. Yeah, it's so fresh. But basically it's, yeah, so I'll leave it at that. We can get rolling here.

I'm like super caffeinated on four hours of sleep. I love it. I love it. How much harder, in many ways, I think, building in stealth for so long, made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are the ways in which it made it harder?

I imagine there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe so opting out of that path and saying, hey, I just want to come in with you to build and I don't care about the hype. And I don't want, I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn. but what were the kind of key challenges and why was now the right time to come out and start to get loud again? So like first, I mean 100%. So imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound.

There's no impound. That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it and one of the best recruiting systems. Now they leverage, okay, you're not. working with Travis, former, you know, founder of Uber, like there's leverage there. Yeah.

But then you have a name like city storage systems. And it's like, so do you guys just have like these, these like boxes sitting in parking lots? Like, what is this? And that's sort of like, the reason it's different now is because, look, number one, lots of time since the Uber, you know, from having to live that life. But two is the world is different. Like in 2016, 2017, the world of, let's call it business press was just beginning to say business is politics, but people didn't know it.

They're like, if New York Times says something, everybody just treated it as the gospel, like it just must be true. And if they say something bad, it must be true. I believe everything I read on the internet as an example. And so, and by the way, this sounds crazy, but 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today. And I think partly because of even shows like this. It's like, let's bring some optimism to the party. Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built? And that's the difference between today and then.

And so when you go, 95% of all press is negative. You're like, why engage? when the world is used to business being politics, let's just say. And if I thought of my favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's not true about them? And it's a ton of stuff.

And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company too. That's how it's going to play. We're now desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building. and not be so worried about, you know, 95% of the media just being negative. Sure. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty, like, whole trend of going direct, right? Like Lulu, I'm sure you've met at some point,

basically coached a generation of CEOs on, you know, you just can't, if you want to have any control over how people perceive you, you need to tell you. You have to counteract with, like, a story, not like a statement. and the boilerplate, like, you know, official statement just doesn't, it doesn't entertain people as well as a full read, a long read. And it's also guys like Elon owns Twitter now. Yeah.

It's X. Yeah. Right. Pre-post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before everything had to be negative and sort of. Yeah. You talked about the initial idea of naming the next company super. That would have, in many ways, I'm sure, turned into a, basically a spite company.

Yeah, where you're just, in this case, like, kind of taking the high road was, I'm just going to be quiet. I'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass, building up the infrastructure, getting to scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again, which I think is to any of your former critics, that's, to me, that's taken the high road, basically. Yeah, and what you get when you create a culture around that

is you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it, which basically means emotional intelligence. Now, it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do. I'd like the things I build to be seen, and I'd like somebody to know that I did it.

And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature, and we sort of went all the way. And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like it is, like you have to go the extra mile of recruit, the extra mile on sales, etc. Again, the world's different, LFG. Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? I'm just thinking about your career arc with like red swoosh,

enterprise communications, you're in a very particular industry. Uber is a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks, you probably run into like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments and what's different, what's the same? Like what can you just be like a good business operator and power through? And what do you actually have to learn about the new industry? Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to, because I have a, I mean, when you go from consumer to B to B, the number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to Kack. Yes, you could make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with, I'm going to talk to customers. And I'm going, I have to make LTV to Kack work versus like my LTV to Kack is the app store.

It's a whole different ballgame. And LTV to KAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business, this is like life in hard mode. Yeah. And talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB. Yeah. Like those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke. Yeah. So talk about MOTS.

I feel like Uber's the greatest example of network effects. and runaway scale. What did moats look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then what does it look like now? So like nobody knows what Red Swish is. Yeah, sorry. That's all good.

So guys, I started a company in 2001. Yeah. That was, let's call it BitTorrent meets Akamai. Yeah. Sold to Ockmai. Before BitTorrent existed. Yeah. Okay.

That's crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file. or that video stream, but it looks like the internet. That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary. Wow. Had some famous investors. Famous investors.

You know, like, Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh. So before that, scour was Ovitz and Ron Berkel. That was the company before that. So anyways. So anyways. I was confusing to do. Yeah, anyways. So there's a network effect there.

the CDN up and running. That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being. And I sold it to Akamai for like, I think it was like 19 million bucks. And probably to this day is still the happiest day in my life. It was crazy. It was crazy. I cleared three million and I was like, praise the Lord. Okay, so then Uber, very obvious moats and scale economies.

What does this look like with Adams? What does this look like in both, you know, the food delivery kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics? Look, if you look at where modes are and really you're looking for network effects in different places. Right. So right now I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this.

Yes. Right? You order from your office. It looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash. You get 100 options except all the meals. are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier that brings 100 orders at a time, but it's on demand and it's personalized for you.

And we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so who's going to, who can play ball? Like you've got to have the real estate. That's a frickin' mode. You have the network effect now of like, what if I sell every floor on every tower, meaning every office floor is on this?

And I've shelves in all of these floors. That means that one career can bring 100 oars and by we'll have five careers going to a single office with 500 ors hitting every shelf and you get notified when it arrives. If you even took one floor, you would be like sad because your economics are going to be screwed because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of depth to make it work. So there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a facility with kitchens in it. Sure. There's, but then there's the moat of like we own real estate. Yeah. Okay, so like if you want to compete with us, go buy a hundred

million. So so very high there. Billions of dollars of real estate yeah in every major city in the world and then we're going to go head to head. Yeah. Talk about capital. Yeah, the other the other, the, I don't know exactly what what bucket this falls in, but just just the mode of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete. But people were, people were. Like this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle. was Uber was doing so well. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of VCs were like,

I want a piece of that and I didn't get Uber, so I'm funding the... But I'm saying in the context of cloud kitchens and city storage, like, even though people generally figured out what you were up to, right? You did have to share some little things along the way, or you buy this company or so there... You've got to go to a website and say, what is a delivery-only location?

What the hell is that? Yeah. And so somebody had to know. Yeah. But even then we're like, we're going to say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. These are the little moves you do to be stealth, you know? In, you know, when I look at the new site and how everything's positioned, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI

and in many ways, like, accelerated because you'll get a lot of the benefits of AI, and progress in robotics, but you're moving physical atoms around the world in an era where you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly. This feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress. Sounds great, dude. I love that.

I love it. Yeah, dude. It's all in the plan. Look, I think it's always been the plan, a meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going the grocery store, meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this, making this move on atoms, which is, okay, we're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport. Okay?

mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries. Or on transport, it's just wheelbase for robots. Okay. Okay. Because if you're going to do specialized robots, not humanoid, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels. Okay. Right? I like to say, like, if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics.

Yeah. And the half marathon and you're watching a humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So, like, humanoid's have their place, but there's a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play. I want to go back to Capitol Wars, lessons from Capitol Wars, when these play out, because we're seeing this AI. The OG.

Yeah. Were you the OG? Or when this Capitol War kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the 90s? I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before. Yeah. Okay? Like, you know, Rockefeller was the OG.

And then before him, was it like the Medici's? I don't know. But I was the goat for a period of time, and now I'm a baby goat. Yeah. And that's okay. And so then one day, the baby goat will grow up again.

That's fine. It's going to be fine. I just mean like this idea of like you have a network effect it's growing and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at like the second place and there's this debate over catching up and like

how do you, what moats do you retreat to in that moment? Like I feel like that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama is that there's actually like a very interesting financial war happening. And it played out very well for you. And I'm wondering, like, what level of confidence you had? What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success? It's a super interesting thing

because, of course, all the AI guys are playing that game right now, which is the ability to attract capital. The capital wars becomes a strategic weapon. Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realize that early on in the Uber days. Of course, that's happening times 10 in the sort of, let's call the digital AI wars. And look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like a 70 million, you know, I don't know, it was like a 60, 70 billion dollar pre. Let's see that. Yeah, when that used to be a thing. And now like, oh, that's small stuff. But we had four rooms. This was our, how we'd fundraise. We had four rooms in our New York office.

booked for a week with an hour and a half slot on each. So like for 12 hours and a day, four rooms going in parallel. Are you bouncing between it? No, I'm in the $250 million in over club. Okay. That's one room. And it goes all, there's all these other rooms to the fourth room is like $25 million checks.

Okay. Okay. There's a guy who works for a guy who works for a guy who works for me who's doing that room. Yeah. okay and then but we're oversubscribed so we started putting multiple investors in the same room we're like dude we're just out of slots dude like let's go um and but what it means is about the system it's about the system for a sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently

and what it means is that storytelling that we did anybody in my team could tell that story story let's say on the strategic finance team, could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was the story that's just like, of course, if I'm pitching it, people are like, holy shit, let's go. Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time. And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how he would do it. We would basically, once they said they were, interested. We would then give them a piece of paper. It was like digital, but it was like, you need to fill out this table, which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in.

This valuation, how much money? This much money. This valuation, how much money? And then we would aggregate the demand. It's like building an IPO book. Yes, but like done way better because you don't respect to the bankers. But like, yeah, I was in charge of pricing. Sure, sure. And so, and then you're like, oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion. That takes a to this price, we would tell all these guys, hey, your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve. And then they would move their price. And then that would change the curve and you would do it again. Make sense. Were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think the IPO around 50 billion. You're doing a 70 billion

raise. There's a lot of different, it's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like? Look, in some ways, I have to give. some credit. This was, it was an era where this was happening. You had like the fidelity of the world and other guys that are moving in.

Yeah. I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox. He was like the first guy in that game. And, you know, Drew and I'd meet up and we'd, you know, and I'd be like,

flex, I'm like, dude. What's up? You're like, this is my our little safe space? Yeah, it was like Chesky at Airbnb. that was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s. And sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be,

like people didn't even know what private equity. What is a private, what is private equity? Yeah. Now we're just like, yeah, private equity. That's VC. It's the same thing. And back then, private equity is like, I do leverage buyouts. And so you're bringing private equity, mutual funds,

those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now it's just old hat. Have you coached any of the AI founder? He's going to ask the exact same thing. Culturally, like that crew that you just described, most of them have been on the show, it feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today.

Yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up, Sam. I love these guys. I love them all. That's so interesting. Look, the times when I get hit up are usually when the shit is about to hit the fan. Or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately.

He'll know what to do. So I, so my, so my, so my phone is like, what are the crazy, wild, wackiest things going down are like here because that's when I usually get the call. And I'm so underground. Yeah, yeah. That's what happens. But like, I should, you know, I should give, you know, I know these guys. I should give them a call and be like, dude, we should. Let's cook.

Let's, let's cook. Yeah. That's good. I still think we probably did things better than anybody. Some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today. But obviously the check size is much bigger. Is that approach like systematizing, fundraising, productizing it? Do you apply that across the entire?

Is that like everything that you do that is important? You're creating like a ground up kind of solution for it? Yeah. Well, like for instance, I mean, this will, you know, this is just. crazy, but like, how about when you do construction? You know how effed up construction is? Yeah. I tell my guys that in the real estate department, I'm like, your entire department is the anti-fraud department.

Oh, yeah. You know? These guys just are incentivized to just run up the bill. So how do you do epic high-quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Not going to tell you. but there's a way. Do you have any, like, white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly,

like solving the housing crisis through, like, permitting, stuff like that? This is, so one of the things is that, and I think people are starting to come out of this now, this whole, like, the jobs are gone. Like, I know people still say that. Yeah. But there is another side of this story. And, like, I'll just make this, because I'm the Adams guy. I'm like, let's just talk about plumbers.

Okay? Let's say the entire world, everything in our world was automated except for plumbers. Okay. Okay. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day. Yeah.

A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone. Sure. Just machines doing. Yeah. Except plumbers. Okay. How valuable would those plumbers be? Extremely about it.

Okay. Those guys each and every plumber would be like, LeBron. Why? Why? Because because plumbing is the long pull in the tent to progress. Sure. That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber.

And by the way, you've got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. Yeah. And then plumbing is like, what's up? And so once you realize that, then you're like, until we get super AGI. Yeah. Humans are valuable. And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pull in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more, you know, more robust, except if you're a plumber, you're crushing.

And so until we get to humans are replaced, like fully. Fully. Yeah. And by the way, I have, I think we have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neurlink. It's going to be all good. Okay, and then people are like, oh, God. But until we get there, I believe we're going to be super fine.

That's my white pill. Yeah. Yeah, it does. If you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the prize pool of automating. But again, there's like these kind of windows. But there's going to be a bunch of things like plumbing, and it's not just plumbing. It's going to be all over the place. Yeah.

And even when it comes to software, so like, for instance, look at, like, autonomous cars. They, like, like, Waymo has people that oversee the rides. Yeah. Okay. And it starts with, like, okay, five rides for every person. Then it goes to 20. Then it goes to 100. But, like, if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, okay?

And let's just say it's one in a thousand. And, like, nobody owns cars. There's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people will own cars, but it would be the top of the, the top of the pyramid. let's say. Okay, so what do we replace, billions of cars with ride sharing? If it was a thousand to one,

you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs, 50 million jobs. I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere. Is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pull in the tent to progress, and that progress, by the way, is to serve us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

robots yet don't yet have bank accounts. So that plumber gets paid. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, you get the idea. You mentioned mining. Yeah. Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine?

Like, what's going on in mining? I mean, I imagine that mines are fairly automated already. There's machinery on there. There's thousands of employees at a given mine. And that's work that he has. And there's so many resources. Children, children yearn for the mines of Minecraft. Yeah.

It's not the best job. Well, like, maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes. Oh, yeah. It's like an ender's game situation. Yeah. Look, the, it's interesting, you go, a lot of times they're like, oh, oh, well, is labor really the issue in mind, you know, is that really a thing? But what it really comes down to is productivity.

Okay. Right. So if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day. a night. It doesn't have, it doesn't have off hours. The way machines queue up, doing that really efficiently, like computer science style, I call it digitizing the physical world, you can make that mind substantially more productive. What is the value of a more productive mind? And by the way, let's say, let's get to the real sort of the outcome here is, does the world as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come. Do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials?

Look around us, guys. Like, look around us in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined. Yeah. Manufactured and moved. Yeah. So if you're not in the mining business, like you're like, let's just say the mine, like I shouldn't say that, but like it's a very critical part of the situation. I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime, lots of mines on planet Earth. So what level of abstraction do you want to operate at?

Do you want to go and find land and mine it? Because that's sort of on the table. If I look at what you're doing in food, you own real estate. Or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand? and they're running up and running. Yeah, like, how do you think? I'm not, I'm not buying land for mines any time. That's just not anytime soon.

But. In the next three months. Yeah. He's like, not, no, 120 days out. Oh, yeah, okay. Okay, we got you. I just think it's super fascinating. Yeah, yeah.

Again, it's just like, like, I'm an Adams guy. I'm like all about digitization of the physical world. And, you know, I have this framework for it, which is like CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but I loved it. Those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one. Yeah.

But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms, transport logistics.

I didn't know it then or I didn't think about that way exactly. But at Uber, we were building network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation. City storage systems then makes sense. Storage for the physical world, that's real estate. We're building atoms-based computers with a real estate foundation. Storage. Yeah. Right?

But now leveling up and saying, okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheel-based platform to serve industry generally? Yeah. If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I could never get behind the remote work thing.

Everyone here works in one studio. I'm all about it. But you've had to do it, basically, because you had to have a presence in New York. You had to have a presence in L.A. and you can't be in 10 places at once. It's all good. How do you do it? There's a difference between remote work where somebody works at home and they're like in

boxers and then a suit, okay, versus we have an office in every major city in the world. And whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week. Yes. And sometimes six or seven. And that's it. But satellite offices still feel like a headache. How did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place.

Yeah, I guess I just, I cracked the code so thoroughly in Uber times before, I think maybe even before anybody else. Yeah. It almost feels like normal. Yeah. But like I basically have figured out sort of the management and leadership structures where you, the real thing is about empowerment. Okay. is you must be able to empower teams, but it's like, I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos.

Sure. And once you have those systems in place, you know, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity. Yeah. So once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far. And so it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing. Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or so.

He sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks and we had to open up this market. So we had to do a stunt and hire some people. And it just felt like a lot, you know, startup within a startup is a bad phrase that gets sort of misused. But why, why were you, you know, you weren't, this wasn't your first company with Uber. Why were you so heavy on leaning on young people, empowering them, pushing them? It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer. Okay. Why?

Yeah, I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, okay, I need to find people that can run this, like, old people aren't the answer. Like, I need fresh. I didn't think of it as like, I got to get youthful people or not. I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we got to get done. Yeah. And it was just like water flows downhill. So what do you look, it was a, you know, like the, the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010, we basically took 200 cards and put names on them. And we said, alpha-bittize them. Click. And we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize. We would give them like crazy analytics tests.

And then we're like, okay, this is our guy. You know what I mean? Free AI. If you're on the marketing manager, if you're on the marketing manager, but even today, you'd still want that guy. Yeah. Even today. So like, you can't use AI.

Now alpha-betties in the most efficient way. Now, if you know computer science, sorting is like a big freaking deal. Sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in software, is a thing. That's what ops people do. Yeah, that makes sense. So, um, I don't know. know. I don't know how to answer that question other than problem solving whether you're young or old, executive or junior, who can solve problems is number one. When you interview,

simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two. And you're already pumped because you saw them in action. How are you, with Adams, how are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change your approach to building the company. You've been kind of hold up in L.A. This is your kind of hideout. Yeah, totally. But I imagine, like, do you push back into SF, go back to being the king? Well, here, so first, let's just be clear on December 18th, I moved to Texas. Sure.

You know, I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but let's just say it's prior to January. Yep. Yeah. So I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the action for a lot of this Adams-type technology I'm talking about, of course, like the Bay is a real thing. My head of the Advanced Technology Group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called Lab 37 in Pittsburgh. No, no, that's Eric Meyhofer. Okay, Eric Meyerhofer.

So that's robotics on the food side. Yeah, Anthony Evadowski was running Pronto. I was the, I was the largest investor in Pronto. And then we just were basically right in the final, like, we're checking off the list, maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal. Amazing. Let's talk about that deal. Yeah.

Give us, yeah, give us, like, what's the kind of background on Pronto and then how it fits into the empire? Well, look, I sort of broke out how mining fits. Yeah. So we got that. Look, I'm the largest investor in Pronto. And it's super inspiring work. Like go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it is.

And what that means for industry when all mines are producing more, where does that go? And in some ways, you could say low-hanging fruit on the autonomy problem. Because, yes, there are different problems off-road, but they're way more controlled than what's going on on-road. But then you get into the physical action, like cars on the road, the Waymo's on the road, they're moving. But they're not acting on atoms. So when you think about excavation and you think about when you get the material and then you move, it, then you're basically crushing the material, and then you process it. You think about all of the automation through that stack. It's fantastic. And it's like, it's hard, right? Like, somebody asked me,

like, we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines. And somebody came like, hey, like, is AI going to help us design food machines? We're like, dude, let me show you. Like, this thing has, like, an insane number of parts. And let me show you. And let me show you. show you just the design of a single part. Yeah. Like, that AI can't even do freaking math. You know what I mean? It's like, we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah. But then you're really an AGI.

If you look at how much harder it is the physical world, how much harder it is AI in the physical world versus in the digital world. And I'm not demeaning it in any way. I'm just saying it's like, maybe it's just call it a different problem set. Yeah, we're just far away from one shot. There's just way less training data. Yeah. It's like one-shotting on software. Do you have one-shotting on designing a machine or a robot?

We're just not there yet. Yeah. But that makes it more fun. That's the point is like, do the hard things. If you are in the Adams world, you have decided I like hard things. I like pain more than anybody else. Yeah. This is kind of what you've got to be about.

Chew in glass. I love it. So I can see how AVs at Adams fit into mining. what other, and just heavy industry broadly, what other kind of categories of AVs are exciting? How do you see the space evolving? Yeah, look, anything, I mean, the mission is wheelbase for robots. Yeah.

So then you're just like, okay, what moves? Yeah. Right? And you go, okay, where you have to find the businesses that make sense, of course. So we're like, okay, mining is a no-brainer. And how do you think about, how do you think about sizing for wheelbase for robots? can scale up and down. Yeah.

Like I tell my team, like, dude, there's like a ton of silver metals here. And there's actually a few other gold metals just in the category. So let's just go with delivery robots, like food delivery, which of course is near and dear to my heart. You make a lot of food. Yeah. Your $15 bowl became $30. Yeah. Okay.

And this is like I would put it up. up there is like one of the number one annoyances of the average American, regardless of where they are in society. It's like food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food fast, cheap, hot, et cetera. And there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like it doesn't matter even how much money

you're making, you're spending a lot on this category. Isn't it interesting, right? Remember I talked about the plumbers. But like you could take whole categories, become the long pole in the tent. Food. Boring. To a lot of people, boring is that for me, interesting, let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. Look, I did taxis. I did taxis when they're like, people are looking at me funny. It was a weird idea. Okay, they're looking at me super funny. So Jason Calcanus, the most famous investor in Uber of all time. More famous than you in Zoh.

Whenever I meet with them, I'm like, dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors. But he, there was like an angel group that I pitched to. There were like 30, 40 people in the room. I think it was like three or four that invested. It's crazy. Okay? The 10 grand check became like 100 million bucks. It was crazy.

Wow. But the boring places are the places. Yeah. You know? Less competitive. But also just weird and hard. Yeah. reason why it's that way. The graveyard

is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food, which is again, like... Yeah, go back to where they are. You can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane and you have to have...

Yeah. And you have to attack at all these levels. So my head of the robotics division, we're like, yeah, let's do this. The band back together, let's go. Right? This is Eric myhofer. And, and he's like, okay, we can make a food robot.

I'm like, I got one, there's one requirement, though, I got one hanging chat or one string attached. He's like, what? I'm like, you're going to have to build a restaurant that the robot serves. So my roboticist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into because we had to make sure. sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food, but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant.

And people don't understand, but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if you look at like the labor statistics, et cetera, restaurants fits under manufacturing for obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, back to a little, I'm all over. No, I love it. I love it. Firing on all cylinders. So, so again, do you want to move people with AVs? Do you care more about commercial? Look, the industrial thing is sort of like probably our main jam, but the bottom line is once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that. Yeah. And in fact, you need partners because, you know, you're going to.

to be putting billions of dollars to work to make it happen. So there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are going to probably want some of that, and I have no issues with that. We're not like a, you know, this is ours and this thing. It's more like, hey, there may be ways to work with others. We're happy to do it. Yeah. What about-

We've got to pick our spots, but you get the idea. What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food. Are there other categories that are interesting? Are you happy to be kind of the transport rails? Look, I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack. Like, it just is.

And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's going to be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true. Of course, they're, you know, Tesla just crushes. at this list of things, you're just like, they got it all. So good. But there's just so much to do. Yeah. Yeah. Is that is that is that we can see all the things. We can see all the things Tesla's doing. That's cool. I'm like there's a million. I can still help you mind. Yeah. I can still I can still,

I can still get some food to to some peeps. You know what I mean? So you get the idea. Is that is that is that, is that, is that really when you're pitching investors around Adams in this new vision? Is it basically like there's a lot of jobs to do in the world. We're going to do it with physical AI, and you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time. You've got to be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, people are like, dude, what's wrong with you? Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that. Like, you know, I joke around like, in the 90s, like, dude, I'm an old guy. What are you going to do? In the 90s, it's like, dude, Microsoft's going to kill you. Like, why?

Why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google going to do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing. Yep. And now it's like, if you're talking about physical AI, it's like, that's Tesla. They are the incumbent. They are, and not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great, awesome stuff. But find your spot.

Yeah. Know yourself, know what you're good at, be self-aware, and find the thing that is your business soulmate, for sure. but also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot. What was your experience like in dot com and the financial crisis broadly in 2008? Okay, so basically I sold my peer-to-peer CDN, Akamai meets BitTorrent, in 2007 to Akamai. So I was earning out when that happened. And I was, I just started, I think I didn't last very long in that.

earn out. Sure. So I was the CXO. I was like an advisor and a CXO. Okay. Little known fact, I was a, I was blogging. Okay. I was like a tech influencer blogger. There is a, a blog still out there called swooshing. Yeah. Okay. Crazy amazing, ridiculous content. Okay. We're going to dedicate I was in the click. I was in the click economy guys. I was in it. Okay. But, um, so I was, I was, was an advisor in CXO for like five different companies at a time. And so I'd help them on their deals or I would be their CTO or I would, you know, help them sell or product or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget. So somewhat insulated from like the mortgage crash. Yeah. I mean, my thing was I was trying to figure out. I was getting a bunch of

my friends together and saying, okay, do you have a mortgage with Bank of America? I do too. let's pool our thing. I'm going to go to Bank of America and say, I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar. Because you're selling them on the market for 10 cents. Interesting.

Could be fun. And then they're like, get out of here. You're not a hedge fund. It's wild. What about dot com? You're talking about the 90s? Yeah, the 90s.

Like late 90s. I mean, at that point, you're like sort of starting your career, right? Yeah. It's an interesting place to start a career. in tech. Like a lot of people watched that and said, uh, that's, so look, that was a, we did peer to peer file sharing at a company called scour. Yeah. Okay. So some people did Napster. Some went to like, you know, all the ones that came after, BitTorrent all the way to like, what was the one that Zendstrom did, uh, Kazah or some of these others, right? We were the OG file sharing.

Yeah. Okay. Um, Michael Ovitz was on the board. Ron Berkel. was on the board, LA. Yeah. Okay, doing a tech. Doing tech in L.A. was like being a finance guy in Fresno. They're like, don't know what the hell is going on. They're like, who are you?

And you're a little bit sheltered from it in L.A. Every time you went to the Silicon Valley, it was like wild and crazy. And like every bar was like packed. Like after hours, like happy hour thing. Like things were bubbling. And the crazy part is not just what. happened during the run-up, it was post. I was raising money on this peer-to-peer CDN that I didn't have, I didn't pay myself a salary for four years. I was raising money in two, in late 2001 for a

networking software company. Are you freaking kidding me? And so I remember going to one of these, going to a bar to meet up with a VC and this is like 2002 and it's empty. Like this thing that would be mega-packed just two years earlier. I mean, we're talking dust bowl tumbleweeds, empty. And this VC, I wish I remember who it was because it'd be amazing, was like, yeah, Travis, dude, I think, I think it's all done. It's over. He told you it's over. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, all the software that could be invented has been invented. Wow. We're done. And he meant to, The old big black hole. He's like, it's been real, dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go. We're done. That's incredible.

How have you process the last two years when people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this, you know, entire, you know, process? And they can just raise it literally without a deck often. They can just pull it together. Look, it's all good. Like, I don't, I just have, you know, when you build a company the way I built it, which, is like my current one, where you're literally under the radar, it means that you are powered by, you have an internal fulfillment. You're not like caring what others think. You get internally fulfilled with building. Yeah. And I don't look at somebody and go, oh, dude, that's, I had it so much harder uphill both ways to school, whatever. You know, I don't think like that. It's, it's more about the excellence of the process.

Yeah. So I'm like, well, how do you raise money? And they're like, oh, yeah, I just throw a deck to the guy. I'm like, okay, well, that's not a thing. Yeah. What is a thing is going all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. And I'll explain. Like, let's just think of like a marathoner.

Yeah. World class marathoner on mile 21. Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling. By the way, if he is smiling, you know what's about to happen? He's about to get his ass whoop. Okay? It's over.

Because why? Because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him. And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like, why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more. Now, you don't do things hard just because. Maybe he's like, it just doesn't matter, dude. Like, I got to go do something else that's hard. But the key is like, if money matters, which I think we would say it does,

especially in certain categories. You need to be the best in the world at it. And it's not enough to say it was easy. If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further, more competitive advantage, more differentiation, get it together.

Give me the update. I feel like Tony Robbins right now. I love it. I love it. No, I think people need to hear this. They do, they do. And yeah, the challenge is like when, when if raising money is super easy and then you actually start building and you're like,

whoa, actually money doesn't, money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy. Yeah. And it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers, the critique is always like, oh, well, they are raising too much money. You look at Elon, Sam, all these crazy deals. And people are like, well, like, okay, it's nice that you're good, but like, are you too good? Look, here's the thing. You know, back in the day, 2010's reference, like there was a problem with getting

Masa money. Yeah. There was a problem with that. Yeah. Because it was easy money. Sure. And it was too loose. Yeah. And so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from. Sure. And so you had to be careful. So if somebody got Masa money, I'd be like, dude, you got to you got to grind. It was maybe a little too easy. Yeah. And you still still to this day. So, so, so, So there's nothing wrong with money as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon. It's okay. Like that's part of business.

It's necessary. But treat it with respect. Last question about Texas. For the Californians that are thinking about making a trip out there. Austin, Dallas, Houston. What do you recommend? Well, look, I'm Austin. Now, I own a place in Austin.

I've owned it for five years. I'm an avid, I would say, almost professional water skier. Nice. Slalom skiing. I'll send a video put up. It's amazing. It's sick. Don't even get me started.

So I've owned a place there for five years. Right on the lake, Lake Austin, 20 minutes from the city. There you go. Lake life. Hell yeah. Go for it. I get a little bit fomo on like these people going to Florida. I'm like, dude.

Yeah, it's pretty nice. Why so much Florida action? Like, come on, homies. I know. It's been a, it's been a blood bath for, it has been. It has been. Every single guy's going to Florida. But like, yeah, like every weekend this year I've had, this year's in Texas.

Yeah. You ever take calls while you're water skiing, like AirPods? Dude, I should. Be good. I love it. Don't get me excited. Well, I went to Serronic, which does the boats, the autonomous boats. Yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, build me a water skiing. Water skiing boat. Ooh, okay. I just want a water ski. That's great. And like, you're skiing behind a Seronica. So funny.

I'm like, Autonomous water ski. Yeah. Dude, I love it. Pretty viral. Who should, who should come,

you're poking your head up? Who should come work for you? Yeah. 60 seconds. Who do you want? Not, not any individual, like one individual person,

but like that. I have a message for this one guy who didn't take my offer. Look, I think the thing is, is like, we're just getting the best, This is so cliche and like, whatever, banal.

But look, we are in the physical AI space. So it's a mix of sort of, let's call it, sensors, compute, the software that sits on top of those things. I mean, it's just going to be great engineers. And then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack, And you would, you know, but. There's a long project. It's someone for who wants a career.

It's like infrastructure software guys, because you've got to have epic AI on the back end. And the way to use that, it sort of has to be epic. You have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world. And there's some core research and some just like, I know all the white papers and we're just gonna, we're building and going end to end or some hybrid version of that.

You have just normal software because you've got applications that sit on top that then, of course, customers see in some fashion or another. Actuation and manipulation on the mechanical and sort of robotic side of things. And mechanical engineers that build machines. Wow. And then, of course, remember, I've got construction, real estate. Like, I could go on. It's lots of cool stuff.

Go to the website. Go to the website. Adams.com. Adams.com. And by the way, Adams.co slash vision, I just threw down. Oh, okay. I know. I read it. I know. Check it out.

It's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah. This is awesome. Thank you so much. Really quickly. Thank you so much. I get up?

Yeah. Okay, cool. We will talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Restream. live stream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. And we are shifting the schedule. We will continue to talk to more guests. We have Gustav from Spotify in the Restream

waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultradome. Gustav, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, John. Hey, Jody. How's it going? Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. First, tell us up. Where are you? So it looks like I'm in some teenagers' bedroom from the 80s here. It's actually a small studio we have in Austin. I'm here for South by Southwest. You know, the first time I went to South by Southwest, the coolest party was the Spotify house. And I have a very fond memory of going,

I think this was in 2013 or 2020, 2012, something like that. So you've clearly been there a long time. Yeah, it's always a great time. What's on the agenda? What is the message that you're trying to send to the world at South by Southwest today? Well, first of all, I'm here because Spotify's turning 20. Wow.

It seems crazy. You know, most companies don't make it. That's five years. Yeah, an overnight success, 20 years in the making, for sure. So that's why I'm here. And then, you know, obviously I'm here talking about what it is that we're doing, our thoughts and plans for the future. Yeah.

So, I mean, I'm sure you're getting a million questions about AI. How do you see AI fitting into the Spotify ecosystem? There's a whole bunch of super useful ways that I think people would be super excited about. There's other people that are a little bit worried about AI and how it might play out in Spotify's world. What are you thinking good looks like over the next couple of years? Yeah, of course, everyone is asking about AI. And as you said, there are a lot of hot takes and breathless takes on Twitter all the time. And there's a lot of dystopian takes.

I'm very positive about the future. And I think if we look at the consumer experience, I think it's going to change completely. And not just for Spotify, I think all consumer companies are going to have to change what they are and how they work. Because I think consumers are sitting over here, you know, with Clos. or with chat GPT or with Gemini, and they're getting freaking AGI-ish intelligence, and then you're going to your media service over here

and it's dumb as a rock. That's not going to work. It's going to need to get intelligent. So what we've said, what I've said at our latest earnings scholars that we're going to build the world's first truly intelligent, agentic media system. Those are a lot of buzzwords,

but I'll tell you what I actually think they mean. What I think is so interesting with generative AI versus kind of old-school machine learning personalization, which Spotify is done for a long time, is that computers finally understand English. What's the point of that? Well, Spotify for a long time, you know, when we developed the product, we always had these user focus groups. You invite 10 people into a room. You have like deep English language discussions with them about what they actually feel and what they actually want.

And then you went to build this average product that could only measure skips and swipes. And you try to squint and approximate what the user was actually thinking. The promise of generative is you just talk to us in English at a scale of 750 million people. So I kind of think of it as a 750 million people use the research always ongoing into you. That's what products are going to be in the future. And I want Spotify to lead that. So we've been investing in some of these products. The first one was AI DJ, where you can literally talk to Spotify.

You can ask, you can say, you know, I want to go for a run, give me some EDM playlist with big drops at 160 BPM for my running cadence. And then earlier this year, we launched prompted playlist. which takes a one step further where you can build your own playlist using English language. You're literally writing your own algorithm. So if you want a playlist that goes out and looks at TikTok and what's trending right now,

then takes that, filters it to your taste on Spotify, then removes any track you've already heard. You can literally do that today. And you can schedule it to update daily or weekly. So that's what we've done so far. And then today what I talked about is sort of the next step, which is taste profile. This is what you should have been asking us for forever.

So like hidden in all these systems, we have a view of who you are, musically and podcast-wise and audiobook-wise. But you could never actually see that. You can see hints of it in rapt, but you can never actually see it. So the idea is pretty simple. We're just going to let you see who we think you are. And then we're going to let you edit it in English and just say like, no, that's not true. I'm not like that anymore.

I want to be like this. Yeah, it makes so much sense. Yeah, it makes so much sense from a personalization standpoint. I mean, Spotify's been doing machine learning for probably most of those 20 years, certainly more than 10. How do you see yourself integrating with what Open AI is doing with SORA, where there's a persona and a person, an individual can kind of decide how their avatar is used. It feels like there's a natural extension here where not all artists, but some artists are going to want to go to you and say, hey, look, I'm a rock. musician, but if people want to listen to my songs remixed with AI as country songs, that's

fine. As long as I keep getting a check, it's win-win for everyone. Has there been demand from musicians for that type of experience that feels like maybe the next year or later this year? Yeah, 100%. So this is the other big topic. We just talked about consumer experience, but what about generative content? And of course, everyone is asking me about that, and specifically music. And I think what's happening today is people can make net new songs using these services. Yeah. And that's great. I'm sure creators will, I'm sure most creators are already using these tools, whether they say so or not. That's a big, sorry to interrupt, but that's a big thing because you, there's this massive, in tech, like, you know, traditional tech, people will tell you

they're using an AI tool, even if they're not really, right? They want to be constantly projecting, like, I'm using the best tools all the time. I'm using them more than you. I've got, you know, 10 Mac minis running. They'll tell you. But in music, it's like the exact opposite where, like, people are from my experience, talking to musicians and people in the music industry, they're like, this is changing everything. It's crazy.

It's magical. It's an amazing tool. But then they won't talk about it at all, right? It's like, you know, they'll never talk about it. That's exactly it. And I understand that. I have a lot of empathy for musicians and artists being scared because everything is changing. And change is scary. So, you know, I want to be clear that it's understandable that people have a lot of fear. But the way we think about it is, you know, technology can cause a lot of chaos. But if you can combine technology with a good business model, it can be very good for the world. So what I'm excited, about is today I think some artists that use these tools, they get help with creating that new music. But most of the existing artists, they just get no benefit from AI. And I think that seems wrong to me. I think what you mentioned, John, is if you're an existing artist,

what many of them do today is they work with other people to do remixes and covers, right, of their music. It's like existing IP. This is what you do in movies. Like existing IP is supposed to be the most valuable part, not the least valuable part. So I do think that many musicians, this will be voluntary, of course, will be very interested in letting their super fans play around with their music if they could compensate it correctly. It is the business model that needs to be figured out. And this is what Spotify did during piracy. We took the long, painful route of not going the illegal route and figuring it out. It was hard and painful.

This is what we want to do here as well. Yeah, yeah, it feels like, I mean, you hear these stories about breakout songs. there was a song called Old Town Road that sampled nine inch nails. And I think the original artist that remixed that song didn't actually have the rights because he just sort of whipped it up on a weekend. But then once the song exploded, the agencies came in and negotiated. And I think they accepted a ward on stage together. And everyone was happy.

But Spotify feels like in a unique place to actually unleash that level of collaboration in an economically safe way that everyone feels happy at the end of the day. I'm also interested in hearing about how social features are evolving on Spotify. It feels like with a lot of the generative AI projects, there's a lot of stuff that goes out broadly, but there's also a lot of, you're just having a new creative tool that allows you to tell, express yourself to a smaller audience. I find that a lot of the generative images that I put, I don't put them on my Instagram, I text them to a group chat. And I'm wondering how you see the the social features changing on Spotify or where they are, how fast they're growing, anything

that you can tell me about social on Spotify these days? So you're completely right. We started investing. We actually had a lot of social features when we started. Yeah. The idea was to sort of approximate the experience of NAPSaur-Pirate Bay on the content side, but then sort of Facebook and your friend graph, because back then, friends were your main tool of recommendation.

And then your algorithms came and everyone got like an algorithmic friend. and we didn't invest as much. But since a few years back, we started investing a lot. Because we think that today, these media platforms, they're single-player experiences. They're kind of lonely. They're mostly passive. You sit and swipe and swipe and swipe until you're falling asleep, right?

We don't want services to be like that. We would like you to lean in, and we would like to turn Spotify into an interactive multiplayer experience. So that sounds like hyperbole. What do I mean with that? I mean features like jam, which is growing like crazy for us, many, many, many tens of millions of users and still growing, where you can join a queue and sort of have this shared music experience together in the same place or actually remotely. And then you have something that's been around for a long time, which is collaborative playlist, which have insane retention and engagement, where people collaborate around the playlist and they want to talk about that. So we are investing quite a lot in turning Spotify into this place where you are with the business.

your friends where you're not just by herself. So I'm 100% with you. I'm very excited about trying to create sort of a more positive future, if that makes sense. One thing I really love about having worked at Spotify for 20 years is that we kind of lucked into music, which almost everyone agrees that music is a good in the world. There's very few people who think that music is bad. But then we kept that. We went into podcasts because we thought it was like long-form discussions, people spoke in full sentences, it was very, the perfect counter to the shortification of media that was happening. And then, you know, last year we went into books in a big way. So we try to do things that we think are good for the world. Internally, we have some

beliefs, not all of which are public, because we want to keep some secrets, but one of them is no regrets. We focus on content that has very little regret. Yeah, you guys, to me, To me, you guys are the anti-slop company, platform. And there really aren't any of them left. You can go on LinkedIn now, and you could spend 24 hours straight scrolling through short form video. And so talk to us about running a company where it feels like you're constantly making decisions to avoid doing things that would almost certainly get a lot of engagement and usage,

but aren't necessarily aligned with the kind of core values of the company. Because eventually companies get 20 years in, and they just start doing things that are just optimizing for all those metrics, and a lot of that. Everyone has incredible values until you're a public company, and you've got all these different incentives. Yeah, that's so true. And that is a risk.

That's one of the benefits of me and the other co-sale, Alex Norsom, having been at this company for like 17, 18 years. So, you know, those values are ingrained in us. Now, the way we think about it is, I think it's both something that is very motivating for me as a person and for many of our employees, but it has also to be aligned with their business model, right? And it is, because Spotify, in terms of revenue,

is majority of subscription service, you know, close to 90% of the revenue is from a subscription. And if you think about what that means, it means that a Spotify user, Every month, they're going to vote with their wallet. And if you ask yourself the question, when you vote, what do you, to pay for something, what is it that you're going to pay for? Are you going to pay for time spent?

I don't think so. You know, when we survey users for the different services out there, I won't say which one, but many of the big services, even young people regret 70% of the time they spend there. On Spotify, they regret less than 3%. Right? And I think if you're going to pay for something, you're not going to pay for something you regret. That's like an oxymoron, right? So it's very aligned with a business model.

I actually think you pay for what you want to be, something aspirational, right? So I think it's both the value that we have, but it is actually very much aligned with the business model. I think if we were 90% an advertising model, the pressure to maximize for engagement would be very tricky. So it's both a value and something that actually works for us. So we're just leaning into that because we think it's a differentiated proposition. And right now, I feel like the need for low regret content is increasing, not increasing. Yeah, it's such a wildly different experience going into the Spotify app for me, where it's always like, it's always intentional.

I'm coming in and like I'm doing the thinking around what content do I want to consume. and that is just completely opposite to every other app that I use, which is deciding basically on the fly, what is going to keep him what is going to keep him in the app as much as possible, and that's not necessarily. That's why I'm so excited

about this, the user control, right? Because I think it's very aligned with that. To give back control to the user, like now you control the algorithm. It's tricky, but that's the path we're going. Because it's very much aligned with no regrets. If you can tell

ahead of time what you want Spotify to do, you're not going to, you know, chances that you regret that are very low. And we've seen this, people saying like, you know, when we test this internally, the taste profile, one of the people I spoke to said, I used to be into classical music a lot when I was younger, but then the Spotify algorithm, like it preferred popular music

stuff fell out of it. I went into my taste profile and just said, I want the classical shelf on my homepage every day. And now they're back into it, because now that's what they get fed with. And I think that's very cool. when you can game yourself to what you actually want to be. Yeah, I wouldn't have predicted that Spotify would be the first one

to have that sort of like natural language control over your feed. People have been demanding that across all different social media platforms. Threads launch something where you can say deer threads and then it will update. Deer Algo. Deer Algo, that's it. Dear Algo. But, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think it's because of the advertising model.

For us, the risk here is that the user takes control and says something. that lowers engagement a bit. For us it's fine because they pay per month. We don't monetize the engagement directly for the most part. That I think is the key. What's the biggest misconception about Spotify right now? Oh, the biggest misconception. But not, no.

Okay, you'll have to stop me. I'll get up on my little soapbox here. This is something that has hurt me so much for so many years, because we got it wrong. This is about artists payouts and the idea that we pay less to the money to artists than other companies. And for the longest time, you know,

this has gone back a long time. People talked about per stream payouts and so forth. And the sort of device at the time was you shouldn't engage because you only bring more attention to the matter. And if we just keep paying more

than anyone else, the record it's going to set itself straight. Yeah. That doesn't happen. What happens when you leave a narrative like that forever is that it becomes truth, right? So I kind of want to set that straight.

So if you look at Spotify, we paid out over $70 billion to the music industry, 11 billion of those just last year. I want to be clear, that's more than anyone has paid anyone ever in the music industry. So, like, the music industry is bigger than it ever was. People talk about the heydays of the 80s and the city era, but the music industry is bigger than that.

And not only that, you know, in the CD era, the sort of distributor, the record store, we give about 70% of what we make back to the music era. If we bring in one dollar, we get about 70 cents to the music industry. The record store, if you wanted to be at the front of the record store, could keep 70%, or 100. So like the pie is bigger and the share of the pie that goes to the music industry is bigger than it ever was.

And so when I tell that to people, they're like, huh, but I keep hearing that you guys pay less per stream, right? Like you're evil somehow, aren't you? Yeah. And my point is like, and this is not backed by public data. No one in the industry pays per stream. We all pay per user. And we all pay roughly 70% per user.

You know, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, all of them. The thing is, Spotify has almost three to four times the amount of usage per user of our competitors, which is crazy to me actually. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it, but now it's backed by public data. So what happens if you take the same amount of money, but we divide it by three to four times more streams. Of course our per stream is going to be lower. But that's because people use the product more. And the solution to that isn't to make the product three, four times worse to game the per stream metric or raise the price three, four times, because that would just be bad for the entire music

industry. So this is the misconception I want to set straight. No one pays per stream. We're all pay per user, and we happen to have much more engagement per user than the other platforms. And they've actually sort of weaponized and used this against us to say, like, we pay more than Spotify per stream. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's important. How are you thinking about the evolution of Spotify's role with live events?

I feel like in the age of AI, the recommendations get even better because I listen to a lot of different genres. I don't go to a lot of different genres of concerts. There's definitely bands that I listen to where I'm like, I'm too old for that mosh pit. I'm not going to a heavy metal concert, but I would love to go to this. You're not too old for the mosh pit. Maybe. Maybe.

Yeah, we'll go to the sleep token concert together. But it does feel like Spotify will be in an increasingly more interesting role in actually surfacing awareness around live in person events, which also might get more important in an age of AI, in an age of unlimited content. You might actually see this barbell effect where there's endless content and then, very unique experiences in the real world. What do you think about live events? Yeah, I think you're 100% right. And two things there, I think, are important. You know, everything in the world is kind of a power law, right?

You have the endless, the endless long tail, but you also have a very big head. So, you know, people ask me, like, are Netflix or YouTube in it? I'm like, both. The biggest Netflix shows are bigger than ever, monoculture, and YouTube is bigger than ever. And the same is true in music, right? Yeah. So there are more indie artists than there's ever been. but Taylor Swift is bigger than anyone has ever been

and the Aeros Tour is the biggest thing that ever happened. So people want me to say it's one or the other and it's actually both. And I think you're right because I think what's happening is and this would probably be exaggerated even more of a generative content. As people get more and more individual content,

which they like, they also feel more and more lonely. So the need for shared experiences increases. And this is just not me theorizing. We're actually selling tickets on Spotify since a few years back because we have such good data on who Taylor Swift's very biggest fan. That is one person in the world in terms of streams. That is, right?

That is, yes. So we've been selling tickets for a while, and we've sold over $1.5 billion worth of tickets now, and that is increasing quickly, which proves your point. Like live events are becoming more popular than ever and bigger than ever. And for many artists, the fact that we're selling tickets is very important, because for many artists, especially both big ones and up-and-coming ones, it can be more than 50% of their income.

So you have the royalties from us, but touring is a very big part of most artists' income. Is Spotify uniquely well equipped to enter the live ticketing market because you come from an origin where you had to do big deals with big organizations and it was not this permissionless company that some other platforms have engaged with? You had to go to the table in Hollywood.

would and sit down with these folks. And it feels like you sort of have to do that again if you want to sell ever more tickets. Yeah, it's funny that you say, you know, we've never been this permissionless company. That is true and has been painful. Watching other people just run with like, you know, whatever, illegal content or something. They're so fast. But over time, it's worked out for us. Yeah. Yeah, it has in many cases. But you're right. We are well positioned to work with that industry. And right now we're actually selling for all of them. You know, we're an aggregator. We're an aggregator of content and we're an aggregator of concert tickets

So I think we're really well positioned We're already telling most artists where they should tour In which cities they have the most fans And which songs they love And now it's pretty natural for us to help them actually sell tickets Obviously the scalping problem is enormous And that's something where we are really well positioned to help The analogy I'd like to make is that your stream count

Is like proof of work It's very hard to fake your stream count, right? So using that, I think, is very important. And we want to work with a, with a live industry on that. Yeah, you're like, oh, you want to buy tickets to this artist that you've not streamed a single time? It's like, I don't know about that. Exactly. And the artist, they absolutely, we've done some of our own events, you know, for smaller events for just a super fan sometime. And you can tell the difference in, in the room when it's just like the stalker level fans in the room. I want to talk, I want to get your,

kind of high-level view on podcasting, how it's how it's evolving. I started doing some work with podcasts when I was in college back in 2017. At that time, it felt late to me. It always feels late. It always, it always feels late. Of course, I was totally wrong that the biggest deals and many of the biggest shows were still to come. And you guys obviously made a splash with some of the larger acquisitions in the space. But How are you processing the industry today? So what happened that was very interesting for us is we looked at the podcasting industry. Actually, the way we came about it was, you know, we found a lot of our best features looking at either our users, what they do, or the publishers start uploading like audiobooks in Germany.

What is that? And then we realized there's a man for audiobooks. The podcast is the case of looking at our developers because they're this unique crowd that are often early adopters of transatlantic. and they have the power to just build what they want to see in the world. And we saw them sort of hacking podcasts into the main Spotify app again and again at hack weeks. So we started looking at the podcast industry and we saw that it was amazing. It was this amazing pool of fantastic, long-form content and very good creators.

But it was just sort of left for dead. So we decided to go in there and bet that if we supported it, it would grow. And that worked out. We grew like crazy for what was then called sort of traditional podcast, audio podcast. then what happened was and Joe Rogan was always the first with this many podcasts started doing video but for a long time it was just Joe Rogan

and the interesting thing is because we had to do Rogan on a platform we had to build video support it was partially thanks to him that we did it because he was like I can't be without video if you want to show it has to be video we're like oh shit are we're going to build a full video stack for one podcast I guess we are and then we built it

but that was very lucky for us because then we could see what video podcasts how they performed on the platform and we saw that people listen lot in the background, and they dip in and out. And we're like, huh, this is probably where the whole thing is going. So we started investing more. And then all the creators started doing video.

So what's interesting for us is that the audio podcast market was this like, I don't know, a couple of billion dollar market. It wasn't that big. Yeah. But because audio became video, they kind of pushed us into a much bigger market, which is video, which is, you know, 10 times bigger at least, one tube orders of magnitude. So for us it was like a gift that the creators quote unquote forced us to get into this bigger market. So we're very happy about it.

And what we find from creators like yourselves is they want to multi-home. They want distribution. They want to be on all the platforms. And that's always been our, you know, in music, we were always, all the artists were multi-home. All the book authors we have, they're multi-home. So that's our strategy. And then in terms of what we've done that really changed the. trajectory for us is

yes technically we could have video podcast for a long time but as you guys know who are into the details audio podcast used to monetize in a certain way with audio ads and what happened was when you couldn't have your dynamic audio ads

the DAI when you went to video actually the weird thing is you put video on Spotify and you would make less money which is completely wrong because the users loved it so your experience got better but you made less money so finally beginning of 2025, we solved that because what we said was, okay, we're just going to pay out of the premium pool for video podcasts. So now you're used, you don't have the stuff adds into the

podcast as much. So your user experience goes better, your attention goes up. But you don't have compromised in economics. We're going to pay as much. And that really, that made all the video podcasts come on board Spotify. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to get out with us. Yeah, we've been kind of beating the drum on. We think there's a lot more shows to make like TBPN, basically look at any, because in many ways we've done some interesting things on the formatting side. You've done a lot of interesting things. But we just took what had worked in many ways on traditional cable. And I think that every single show on traditional cable is just sort of waiting to be rebuilt for the Spotify platform and other platforms. So I think

that lots more innovation to come. This is such an innovative format. I watch it every day. And, you know, because you guys published the whole thing to Spotify, catch up. No, it's amazing. I love when we get a Spotify comment that is clearly someone who watched the video because they noticed something that you would only, it wasn't really in the audio feed, but they were clearly watching in a video. You know, you said you said graders want to be multi-home.

Yeah. But I disagree. I wish we lived in a world where there was just Spotify. We could just focus all of our energy. I'll take that. I'm sorry. So keep it up. You got more work to do.

Well, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of South by Southwest to say hello to everyone for us, and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about, oops, gusto.com. That's the wrong one. The unified platform for payroll and benefits and HR built for to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses. And let me also tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. We are joined now by Tim, thank you so much for taking the time to come to have you. First time on the show, please introduce yourself. Yeah, Tim Kudgan, CEO of GoFundMe.

Thank you very much for having me. Tell me a little bit about your journey to GoFundMe. What was your backstory? I started, you know, came to Stanford in the mid-90s. I got sucked into the internet really early. A non-traditional background. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did some startup stuff.

Ended up going to Yahoo. We ran the ad business at Yahoo. Then went to be another startup. What we got? You see this? Oh, man. We're huge fans. You know that sound.

We love yaw. Not wearing a lot of purple being a redhead. That never worked. Yeah. Yeah. Five great years there. Went to do my own startup in the ad space. OpenX built that up.

That was great. But got to thinking, hey, I want to do something completely different. I had become a search and rescue volunteer around 2010 up here in the mountains in San Gabriel's. I loved that. And I was thinking, hey, could I kind of run a company that also was really useful and helpful to people somehow? Got that go for me job.

Yeah. Started March 2nd, 2020. Amazing. The pandemic, I mean, mayhem. And just what a lesson in how valuable the platform. Wow. You were joining right. I'm sure there was just a surge because of all the just dislocations.

It was literally, it was that week where I think the world realized that this was global. Yeah. I had four days to meet people on the Friday. I'm like, we'd better go remote. I thought it would be like three weeks. Wow. And then it was, you know, a year or so. And, yes, demand, I mean, the need of people on the platform and all the expected ways, the medical stuff, but also small businesses.

Tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, music venues, having to furlough employees and lots of fundraises being created often by their patrons who are like, we love this restaurant. It's our favorite local restaurant. Yeah, that was actually, that was the silver lining of that moment was how much excitement and willingness there was from people. that were in a better situation during COVID. Or maybe they had chaos in their own life, but they still wanted to go out of their way. And the ingenuity of individuals and businesses to come up with ways to make these kind of exchanges.

Well, I mean, it's actually, you bring up the silver lining point. Like the silver, that's often the case, that when something difficult happens in our lives or in a community or a natural disaster, the silver lining, and there really is not a lot of silver linings, but one is people want to come together and help each other in the face of that situation. And we see that again and again, whether it be an individual situation or like what happened here in L.A. I was about to ask you about the fire.

I know, I know watch duty was on there. Is that correct? Oh my God. I mean, you know, so many, so many nonprofits were helping. I live in Altadena, which is one of the towns. I live in Pasadena. Yeah. So, you know, like we lost 6,000 homes. We evacuated, you know, 20 minutes in. And it was. And it was.

Exactly. And we saw $260 million raised for 10,000 families, churches, local businesses, and for the nonprofits like Watch Duty, Salvation Army, Wall Central Kitchen, so many people coming in and helping. It has been amazing to see, in case of my town, the community, coming together and saying, you know, we care about each other, and we're going to find a way through this. So what's the case study for a GoFundMe project that goes perfectly? There's a lot of, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of rough edges around where does the money go and what conditions does the money get released, all these different things that you have to grapple with. What does your team look like and then how is technology making that easier? I think you've got about seven questions in there, but let's go with the first one.

What is a good fun? I mean, a really good campaign. A really good campaign is you put together a story. So it good family is first and foremost a storytelling platform. You tell a clear story of who you are. what the situation is, what you need in terms of the help, the funds,

and what it's going to go to. And then you put that on the internet, and then you tell people about it. And this is, we actually launched yesterday, this product called the Smart Fundraising Coach, which we can talk about more, but it helps with every single one of these steps.

Okay. And then you get attention. Yeah. And you start with the people you know, your friends, your family, your neighbors, people in your church,

and your sports team, whatever it is. And then you build support from there. You build momentum. you hopefully achieve what you're looking for. Maybe you exceed that. And then throughout that process, you set up to receive the money, set up for transfers,

which could be you, if it's for you, let's say I set it up for you. I'd set it up for you. You would get an invitation to set up your account to be KYC'd to receive the funds. All the funds go to our payment processes, we add you in Stripe. They sit there until you've been KYC'd,

then the money flows to you, and you get the help. It's what we call help delivered. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's so much fear around AI right now. And oftentimes that people end up overlooking all the incredible parts of it. And that's a good example of anyone in the world being able to be like walked through and basically get their hand held through this process that is a deeply, you know,

if you're going and setting up a raise, it's usually not because of, you know, it could be some like emergency or, or, a really stressful situation. And so being able to give people that kind of just like one-on-one guidance. It's exactly. So I had this sort of a couple of years ago. Well, we have a team that helps some clients. We have a customer success team that can help some. But we have like 10,000, 10,000 people a day setting up a go for me. Like we can't deliver that from everyone. So I was like, my point to the team is like, look, AI, we can we could do that now. We could give every single person who is considering asking for help. And asking for help is tough. Like, none of us like it.

We were just talking in the back. Like, does any of us like asking for help? No. Like, we don't like it. It's hard. It's psychologically difficult. Can we give them the functional and the emotional help to go through that process? So that's what we've built. A lot of trial and error, actually. Like, a lot of people think you plug the AI and it's better. It's not like taking many months because we have to find not just the functional, like, hey, it's time to pick your title. Now it's time to share, which is one of the most difficult things. We often have to find the right tone to do that empathetically to help someone through those steps in the process so that they can get the help they need.

What about AI on the donor side? I'm thinking about if I show up and I'm like, is this the right Jordy Hayes? Is this his campaign? tell me more that might not just be on the landing page already filled out by him? Are you looking at that? So the main way we're using A on the donor side is to verify that the people who are paying in money are actually the right people, are doing all of those things to validate the pay-ins. And that's both a combination of us and the payment providers and the banks who are

the back end of us. So that's the main news. You know, what you're talking about is sort of more discovery, which is still early days. I mean, most supporters of fundraisers know the person. Sure. Right? They know either very close relationship or they know them through someone. That's about 80, 90% of fundraising.

Yeah. Is it's really what we're doing is we're modernizing a timeless thing that we've done for each other, which is if we used to live in a village and someone was in the hard times, you put some money in the box. Pass the hat. Yep. Right? Yeah. That's what we're doing now.

So mostly the sort of social proofing is that. through relationship works. What's the tax treatment on a GoFundMe campaign? There are no goods or services, though, so there are no taxes. There are no taxes. That's right. It's a gift.

Okay. Yeah. Well, how is the actual team evolved post-COVID? It sounds like you came in and you immediately made the team remote. Are you now in a hybrid setup? Yeah. How is that evolution? I mean, you know, we found our way through it.

I mean, we were always quite a distributed company. Sure. We had L.A., Bay Area. San Diego. We got Chicago. We got folks in- And is that because of talent or because of the customer base?

Like, why? There's a bit of talent. So the original GoFund me was set up in San Diego. Sure. Brad and Andy set it up back in 2010. Okay. Then we needed great talent

so we also needed to go to the Bay Area. Now, for example, we have a really amazing 100-person engineering and data science team in Buenos Aires down in Argentina, which is just crushing it. Yeah. So we are inherently distributed. Sure.

So the work reflects that. We figured our way through it. pretty well. Yeah. Pretty well. What's different about running a company like GoFundMe that's doing a lot of, like, good in the world and good, you know, every Silicon Valley company can paint a picture of how, like, they're saving the world, but you guys are actually, you know, providing a service that is making

a meaningful impact on. There's probably dozens of GoFundMees that are like literally pay for my cancer medications, like literally cure my cancer. Yeah. And then there's a lot of AI companies that are saying, well, we'll cure cancer. one day. Yeah. What, uh, have other companies in the industry, like software vendors or payment providers, uh, do they, do they chip in on their side?

Like, are you able to negotiate like lower, lower rates? No. No. You know, hey, if guys, if Roeck says, they're listening. Are you serious? I mean, they're selling their products and services. I know. I know.

But, uh, you know, but, uh, you know, we get a little bit like people do like to talk about working with us because generally it's regarded as a good thing. But that's at the margin, honestly. He's a big fan of oligopolis and payment processing, apparently. But we have great partners, so I understand, you know, they need to run their businesses, and we appreciate them. What's different? Yeah, I would, yeah, no, I would just think that, you know,

if I was like a CRM provider, I might not be trying to get the maximum amount of value out of, you know, a platform like GoFundMe. Well, maybe they're not getting the maximum, but, you know, they're generally, you know, doing that thing. What about the surface area of GoFundMe? I mean, there's other platforms that people use to raise money. I mean, I did a crowdfunding campaign for a food product at one point.

But people do. I have a board game project. They have a movie. And there's this somewhat of a fuzzy line between a GoFundMe and something like a Kickstarter. Have you thought about broadening out? Do you want to stay narrow? How important is it to define what the brand is and is not? Yeah, you're right.

We do see people fundraising for local businesses quite a bit like that. You know, local restaurant that people love, maybe it's hit a rough patch or a bookshop or something like that. But you're right. Kind of business startup stuff. Yeah, there was a time when crowdfunding was pre-seed stage funding or like a signal that you could send to your investors. Like the original Oculus VR headset was on Kickstarter and then sold to meta for a billion dollars. And that's a very different thing. Yeah, it tends to be low.

We saw 100,000 fundraisers for small but definitely local businesses for us. But you have the platform. Have you thought about expanding? We've still got so much to work to do. So we have expanded. So back in 22, we acquired a company called Classy, which does fundraising software for non-profits. Oh, okay.

Interesting. That makes sense. If you look at the industry at TAM in the US, it's about 2% of GDP. $600 billion is given the vast majority by consumers. Most of that is given to nonprofit organizations. The vast majority is by consumers, not billionaires who are writing massive checks.

Most of it is given by consumers. Okay. And most of that goes to nonprofit. GoFundMe obviously started and we're best known for helping individuals ask for help. Now those individuals generally ask for themselves or someone else, but increasingly they're asking for a non-profit. That was our fastest growing category last year was individuals. I just did one for watch duty because I think what John team are doing is amazing and they

super supported us. So that's a trend. Sure. But our main focus has been making consumer fundraising ever better, which is why we launched the coach yesterday and continue to innovate there, and then helping non-profits fundraise more successfully. Yeah, by building basically a network of other people who can fundraise. Well, that's the thing. That's the cool thing. It's like this intersection between those two things because the average age of a non-profit donor in America Day is about 64. And nonprofits want

to get more young people interested and connected, but a lot of young folks don't necessarily just want to donate. They want to do something. So we've given them the ability to organize, sort of enlist an army of supporters who've fundraised for them. So I'll give you an example. Like American Cancer Society came to us and said, hey, we want to do something like this. We've had like 88,000 people organize a fundraiser

where they're swimming or walking or riding or walking the dog for the benefit of ACS, which raises money, but even more importantly, it spreads the word. Because if you're telling me, I really care about ACS here. affected my family in this way. I'm doing this run this over this month. Would you support me? I'm going to think, hey, I'm going to trust that because I know John and I know ACS. I call it the double trust. Yeah, that makes sense. Like SPVs. SPVs for nonprofits.

Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's expanding the aperture of how you generate awareness and support. What about political fundraising? How does that work today? Is it not allowed on the platform? Very limited. And it's country by country. very, because we're in 20 countries, and the rules are very, very variable. So it will depend. Some countries are just not allowed. Some it is allowed in very specific ways. But frankly, it's not a significant thing for us at all. We don't see much of it. It is not an area of interest. It's just a different type of interest. Not really. I mean, there are pretty well-known and well-used platforms that focus on that. So we don't, we don't see much of it. We don't honestly

expect to. What about the future of the company? How is the company structured? Where do you want to see it go? Well, we think there's a lot more help to generate in the world. I mean, our mission is very simple, help people, help each other. And we think that it's interesting you had Travis earlier because they're a good example. Uber, Airbnb is another one where it's a company that has taken a behavior that was frankly frowned upon. Like, remember when you were a kid, one of the things you were always told not to do. Don't get in a car ever get in a stranger's car. Yeah. And certainly don't ever go to a stranger's house. Yeah. Well, that's normal. Now you're taking your Airbnb, you're Uber to your Airbnb. So in our

You know, it's not so asking for help and doing it in a public is still not a comfortable and normal thing. Totally. And so we're sort of expanding the aperture of like, no, actually. But GoFundMe does have a different aesthetic to it. It's, it's, oh, you're doing it for GoFundMe. Like, this is a normal thing. It feels much more normal.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're still building towards that. But you're on the path. We are. And every customer I've talked to, I say every single one has said something like, this was really hard for me to do. If someone just put on their Instagram story like, hey, please send me. money. That's very different than like, hey, I'm doing a go fundee for this specific thing. You can go here. There's a lot of details. You know that it's on legit payment rails.

Exactly. There's accountability. There's still a lot of work to do in that journey. So that we think we can do a lot more of that. And as I mentioned, we're in 20 countries. Some of those countries are still early and adopting it and growing quick. Germany, for example, is taking off very quickly. There's more countries. And then nonprofits. There's a lot more work to help nonprofits who is needed now as ever. and we only offer our nonprofit solutions in the U.S. today. So we got a lot more there. And then we've got some other ideas.

Yeah, it's very cool. I mean, I can imagine it massively increasing the efficiency of nonprofits on the fundraising side because they have, instead of having to build out, you know, all this, you know, they still have to hire their own staff to support fundraising, but now they get all this kind of like off-balance sheet kind of effort. We can help amplify. We can help. We do a lot of storytelling.

We do that on behalf of our regular consumer customers. Now we can help to tell the stories of our nonprofits in certain situations and that helps them get awareness and get more support. Well, Tim, thank you so much for taking the time to come down. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hopefully I'll see you in Pasadena soon. Are you still doing your Watch Judy fundraise?

It's still running. Okay. We've got to run into that. I love when I'm not a DMU of Watch Judy. Oh, yeah. You never know when you're... Exactly. Absolutely.

You never know. I'm in Malibu, so we had a crazy time. Yeah. I was going to last year. I hope you guys are doing okay. Yeah, luckily. People got that. Thank you so much.

Take care, guys. Let me tell you all about OCT. Octa helps you assign every agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me also tell you about apploven. Profitable advertising made it easy with axon. Dot AI.

Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we are joined by Nick Hesherora from Palo. from Palo Alto Networks. Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. For those who might not be familiar with a little bit of your journey,

I'd love to kind of get everyone up to speed on what you were doing before, and then I want to spend a lot of time talking about just the transformation, if you can call it that, of Palo Alto Networks, where are the businesses today? But maybe take us back a little bit.

Where do you want to go? How far back? Well, I know you handled business at Google, but... Let's go even... Let's go back to the very beginning. Yeah. That's far.

No, I grew up in India. Cool. You might know, came here to go to business school. Yeah. It was a tough time. You couldn't get a job. Okay. In 1992.

It was one of the recessions in the country. Yeah. So I wrote 400 plus letters. And those times you guys are younger than me. Cold letters? Cold letters. Cold letters. You could email.

You had to go. I had to rent a Mac for three months. No, you rented a computer. I rented a computer. Wow. I found 400 addresses of hiring people. Yeah. And I would sit down, write the letters, type them out, go print them out,

put them in an envelope, stuff on a loaves, and mail them. It's such a different dopamine loop doing a cold letter. Because cold email is amazing. You send it. No, no, I know. I know. But I'm saying, like, today kids are used to like, okay, I got to write this email. Maybe they use AI now.

But then, like, oftentimes, like, for me, I either respond, like, within, like, 30 seconds or 30 days. But like, you know, you quickly kind of get on that loop, but sending an actual letter out and then just kind of praying and waiting for maybe. Every day I'd get stacks of them back. I got, I still have them. I have 400 rejections from 1992. Wait, 400 letters, all rejections? Yes.

They only got one job, right? Many of the others said now. So I have four of the rejections. So how many of the companies are still around? Some of them are. Yeah. Some of them you wouldn't want to work for. But I sometimes run into people and one guy who started private equity, private equity fund

Afrin. I remembered his name at the bottom of the letter. So I was sitting at a meeting, I said, you do realize that he rejected me in 1992. That's great. And I was an advisor to a company hit barge. I don't hold grudge. I didn't hold grudge. I'm glad.

I have to say thank you to all of them, right? Yeah, of course. God forbid I'd gone to work for someone. Okay. Where did you end up? I ended up with fidelity investments right out of business school. And even there, I got to reject. from six people I wrote to in the company.

Thankfully, they had no common HR system or whatever. The seventh guy hired me. And he said, no, her resume looks interesting. We should talk to her. He couldn't tell whether my name's male or female. Oh, sure, sure.

And when I was business school, I was applying, I'd get phone calls, like, I wanted to northeastern, so I get a call, hey, so we're just double checking, you know, how was your time in Northwestern? Why did you say Boston? That's North East East. Oh, I'm so sorry. I've got another call. I got the exact same thing. I went to North Easter.

Yeah, exactly. There you go. I'm not going to correct you. Yeah, but I keep going. So I had all kinds of stuff. But one of the calls told me, you don't have enough finance on your resume to get a job on Wall Street. So I went back to school while I was working in Fidelity. I got a Master's in Finance. I got a CFA. And I was teaching a CFA class in 1995, 96, actually, 96 October, to do portfolio hedging and shit. And this guy sitting in front of me said, oh, you work at FedExa. I'm like, yeah. He's like, hey, do you know all these people? No. So they're on the fund management side.

I'm like, I don't work that I'm like corporate finance to be. He's like, wait, you're teaching me a CFA level three and you work in corporate finance? I said, you want to pass the exam? Discuss my credentials. And to his credit, the next day I interviewed at Paddam. There you go. So I finally went to work in money management for two years and most interesting time, most boring time. Yeah. I just couldn't sit all day. Mid-n't. Yeah, 90s. Yeah, 97, 98, 99. So we're in the internet boom. Yeah, internet boom.

Henry Blodgett telling us that Aal is going to be the biggest company in the world, right? Yeah. So I did that for two years. Did well there. Got bored, left. And I started one of the CEOs, I just covered telecoms at the time, one of the CEOs of Deutsche Telecoms. I said, come work with me.

So I took my backs through to Germany to Bonn and worked with him for five years. I started a mobile data startup at that point in time. And the name of the company that you started there? It's called Team Motion. Team Motion. But that was a time, Deutsche Telecom, I worked on a team that acquired voice stream, which is our T-Mobile USA. Yeah. So we did that.

I worked there for four or five years, and then I quit. I was tired of commuting from London to Germany and back as my 30s. And I was sitting in front of my walktop to me and say, hey, this headhunter calling me, there's a job. It's a company from the U.S. They just went public in some reverse Dutch auction type scenario. That job's too small for me. Do you want to go interview? The guy was the CEO of the mobile UK.

So that was it. I met the guy who became house, Home Weeked Kroostani. He interviewed me. I told him to say, really small office. And he said, well, why don't you have an interview here? Then I'll take you to California and you can meet the founders.

I'm like, okay. And then he calls me a week later and it's like, oh, Larry and Sergey are in town. They would love to see you. So they made sure the interview was not in the small office. So I met Sergey in the British Museum while walking around. That's amazing. That was what I got interviewed.

Then I came to California and then I met Eric Schmidt and Eric's like, it's interesting. Your CV has very interesting, but looking for a head of Europe and the job is sales. I said, so should I just go back and I have two days of interviews? I'm not done sales. Should I just go back? It's like, no, no, no, we need smart people who can learn stuff and that was 2004. So I was the first person hired after the IPO of any senior capacity. in sales. I ran Google Europe.

Yeah. And slowly and steadily, like we grew Europe. And Europe was like... And what was the shape of that role? Were you talking to the largest companies in Europe about just buying ad space on Google? You want me to make it cool or you want it to actually tell what I did?

Both. Let's go with the role. Look, it was company just the thing is. You're thinking December 2004. Yeah. The company just has gone public. It's worth $18 billion. Yeah.

There's 2,000 employees. Yeah. And Europe has like 180 people. every office is a rented Regis office except for one in Dublin. Yeah. Wow. So what you're doing is you're like blocking and tackling.

You're hiring people, you're getting offices, getting stature, getting stuff. And yeah, forget selling ad space, showing CEOs, showing companies. This is what search does. Oh, this is just works. Yeah, yeah, just getting deployment. In the five years I was there,

we went from being 25% of Google's revenue to 46% of Google's revenue. Wow. I think in history, one of the few 10% companies where Europe and US have the same market share. Yeah. So you have all these people come to here, you should ask them. Generally, you spend a lot of time in the US, you get a large market share here, and

then your share of Europe or the rest of the world is smaller. So we got there and that's when kind of a whole bunch of movement happened. Cheryl Sandberg went to Facebook, Tim Ram Strong went around the O.L. That's kind of the last man standing. Okay. So when my boss retired, Eric calling me says, you think you move here and become chief business officer. Yeah.

So I moved to California. Yeah. That was two thousand. Most underrated title. Just be the chief of business. We joke, we joke about this all the time. It's like amazingly vague, but also incredibly important. But, you know, I remember my first meeting with Larry when he became CEO.

And he said, hey, come spend some time with me. It's like, I spent all the most time, put a beautiful presentation together. I'm going to sit down with Larry and explain everything we do. So I go there, and he's, we're talking about hyperloups and vacuum control tubes on how you can get out of the car on every highway that will improve the traffic situation in California. And I'm here, like, jumping at the bed. Wanted to get in my presentation.

Yeah. So in the end, he says, you know, Bill Campbell, who was a great guy, mentor to many people in the Valley, he says, Bill tells me you're doing a good job at what you're doing. I got a lot of work to do and fix on product, because tech companies die if product doesn't work. No tech company became great because of sales and business.

So you keep doing what you're doing, I'm sure if I had a few hours, I'd help you get your efficiency up and do it better, but I don't have the time. So I stood up and said, well, let me know when you have a few hours. So that was that. Then thank his credit, him. Because we had a great relationship. And, you know, his staff became 10 product people, the CFO, the lawyer, and me. That was it.

No other function was representative. He's like, you go take care of everything else. I want these product guys because I want to tell them what I want to build. And we can see what resulted in. At any point early on, did you feel like Google was significantly overvalued? You know, I still think it's undervalued. It's kind of the enormity of what the potential was, sometimes when you're in it, you don't see out of it.

It's hard to tell how big it's going to become. But of course, in hindsight, it's wonderful. We can all say that was bound to happen. But the enormity of what we were doing was not apparent to people there. Like, you know, we bought YouTube. I remember sitting with Sauer and chat early and saying,

let's go buy Netflix. It's a story about that, but it's a different story. Solar's like, no, let's give us 20 engineers and $5 million to go builders. Every tech company has those kind of people. And, you know, they tried, but YouTube's big in its own right.

So we were there when all this stuff was happening. And you can see, you know, I remember I tell the story that he met Steve Jobs and Steve said, if I give you one piece of advice, the word is focus. And they're like, no, we're going to try a lot of things and see how many of them work. So, you know, there are many ways to get to. Yeah, the head in the clouds philosophy, like clearly did work for Google's sort of academic culture. Do you feel like that's the right characterization of Google, this academic, the 20% time, the lots of different projects? primordial soup to some degree.

Did you try and continue that? Or was that? No, look, I think part of, is my opinion, I'm sure a lot of people have been, and they do too, but I think the secret sauce is the consistent focus on product greatness. And that comes from the founders. You see, look, Travis, I saw him earlier.

Yeah. Companies take on the form of their leaders. And it's a pattern in every company, and pretty much, if you sat down, did an experiment, and I wrote down five adjectives over here, which are company cultural characteristics and I wrote down five years which are founder characteristics

and I said go match him. I bet many people will be able to match him because you can see the similarities between how leaders lead and how companies adopt with the culture of the leader. So I think that's where Google's culture comes from from the founders

and the founders were very product obsessed. As you heard, Larry didn't want to spend time on business. I remember him going to the first ad all hands and he walks up and says, well, I got to tell you guys, I hate ads, they're intrusive and they're bad. That's a great motivation.

Everybody's guys wants to run out and go work and search. Because just told them what they do is not interesting. But kind of, look around. Like, you know, every product that they built, they didn't look in monetizing it for a very long time until they believed the product had become ubiquitous and the product have become interesting. So I think that product obsession is part of the culture.

I think that's partly because of where their secret sauce comes from. And now with the amount of resources they have, they can afford to do that for a very long time. But having said that, we did it even then. Like, you know, Gmail had no modernization for years or Google Maps had no monetization for years. But it was growing like wildfire. Yeah.

So coming into Palo Alto networks, did you... I did a little stop in the middle of the Masa. I know Travis was talking about easy money. I was part of the East. Easy money for me. Yes, I watched. But that was after Google. But coming into Palo Alto...

Did you guys ever pass on a company? I passed an Uber. No way. I did. No way. What round? What round? I think it's a 16 or 20 billion all around.

Okay. And then I left and Masa did the deal. I passed on Adam Newman. There's a book. I told my guy who's the analyst. I said, listen, we're a tech investor. Yeah. Anytime you bring me a business, which is masquerading as a tech business,

which is a commercial real estate business, you should go work there. Don't work in tech. Yep. That makes sense. Good, good call there. It's a great story. Sometimes you get some right. I have made a lot of bad ones too, so don't worry.

Yeah. So going into Palo Alto networks, you know, you have these, five cultural tenants from the company, five cultural tenants from the founder, you're coming in as a new CEO. How did you think about resetting the culture, expanding the culture, bringing what you value

to bear across the company in a way that's not disruptive but gets you where you need to go? Oh, there's no way to be not disruptive. Let's get out. Okay. Look, you know, life is about standard deviation. Yeah.

You want excess returns. There are no excess returns with no standard deviation. Yeah. This has been proven in every, As a facet of life, right? Yep. You want a good-looking person?

You have to take the risk. Yeah, that makes a great business. You have to take a risk. You have to make money in investments. You've got to take a risk. So I don't think there's a non-disruptive way of creating transformation. Yeah.

Having said that, as you probably know, I knew nothing about cybersecurity and never run a public company. Yeah. Other than that, I was a perfect candidate. It's great. I can only imagine the board deliberation. Like, if you look at a board,

you know, they write these long, job descriptions, brief a headhunter, say, hey, go find us somebody. So imagine that conversation. Find us somebody who learned nothing about this job. So I'm like, either they were geniuses or, you know, they weren't paying attention to the headhunter. Anyway, I got the job I show up there. I'm trying to learn cybersecurity and I'm trying to understand the culture of the firm.

Now, my predecessor, Mark McLaughlin, is a West Point guy. He was a very high integrity company. My father's lawyer, we come from the same stock. So I like the fact that's a high integrity company. It's important for a cybersecurity firm, too. It's important, yeah, of course. It is. It's important of every company.

But especially. Yes, especially so. It was the best product in this category, which is a good thing. What I discovered was, which happened in that industry, people get caught up in the success of the current product and stop thinking about what comes next and we have to look around the next corner. I think leaders' jobs are to think about what hits us in two, three, four, five years. and how do you prepare for that now? Because I have a firm belief it takes four to seven years to build a great product.

Maybe it's become three to five or two to four with AI. But you go back and think about it. Anybody you've had through here. And what's your personal definition of what a great product is? Because there's a lot of products today that grow really fast that aren't necessarily great. Well, I think there are two aspects of this, right? There's a product when you're competing with somebody else,

in which case you have to build something better than that, so much better that the customer is willing to switch because you have a much better experience. We take Google Search, right? People were doing, there were 14 search engines before Google Search came up. It took Google seven years to get to compete with the other 14 people

where the users were willing to switch. There are products in categories where there's no competition, right? There's nothing called Uber. I'm going to try it, whatever it is. But if you think about what made it a mass market experience where you can scale it around the world,

it took five to six years, Ruber as well. Take YouTube. So if you go down history, it has taken four to seven years to make it a compelling product that people want to use and want to switch whatever they're doing, switch behaviors. And that's when you start seeing scale work. Now,

the current AI world, all bets are off. We'll see what happens. Open A lot less. But there had no competition. It was the best thing going at that point in time. So when I walked in, I realized the thing the company wasn't doing was, one, they weren't innovating fast enough. New products.

And for the first three months, I felt like, you know, we're talking past each other. So I took a weekend, and I sat down and wrote all my business principles I'd learned in my entire life. And, in hindsight, I would urge every leader to do that before. I called it my belief document. So I wrote it, and I showed up, and I printed eight copies and dropped it in front of everyone in my team saying, read it. That's debate. Like, what is this? I'm like, this is my recipe book.

This is why I act in certain ways. This is why we have disagreements. When I tell people, no, you can't hire that person. They get really frustrated. Oh, my God, I've been looking for six months. I'm like, that's not a good person. B's higher C's and A's higher A's. And the more senior person,

you're going to destroy an entire part of my organization of that leader's not good. Oh, I get it. That's why you don't let me hire that person. Now, maybe that's an A, maybe there's a B. That's a different debate. So it became so much easier when we were all singing from the same hymn book. and now it's kind of mandatory reading and debating

for every new senior person in our company they have to read my belief document which is kind of like sets the tone for how we operate Is it still one page? It's about 11. Okay. It's more like a... It's a little booklet.

But you can summarize it with any AI engine. But what happens, like people wanted more collaborative. What does that mean? Well, you know, you want to read the long form? You want a bigger version. You want to summarize it? You want to summarize it? What about product development?

Did you come in with an idea around build versus buy, a framework for evaluating those trade-offs? Did that evolve once you got into the actual role? So, look, cybersecurity is the youngest subsector of technology. It came about when we had connectivity. The iPhone, suddenly everybody's on the iPhone, every firm, every company is trying to get their applications in your phones, which means we're all trying to take

what used to be controlled access and make it accessible to every consumer. So it came about 25 years ago. And every new piece of technology creates a whole series of new sets of risks, the whole new set of product that deliver. Now, interestingly, it's also one of the most innovative industry in the world

because the bad guys aren't, it's like, oh, let's try the same thing we tried yesterday, which got blocked. Every morning they wake up, they're trying to find a new way to get into your business. So you got highly innovative, new set of market in cybersecurity, and as a consequence,

the industry structure was extremely fragmented. They were 2,600 cyber security companies, and the largest company had 1.5% share, which was us. So you have 1.5% share of the market. Then you need to build a strategy. How do I get from 1 and 1.5 to 10 to 20? Right? Because you look at every other pieces of tech.

There are lots of people who doubled their market share. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I said, look, this is a math problem. The math problem is how do we get to 10% to market share? You reverse into that and say, well, you've got to have a lot more stuff to sell to the same customer to have more market share. And then we started great.

Now, where are the product categories where we can build products which are up and coming. The good news is we live in a constantly evolving technology world. So I sat down with the founder who was there then and Chief Product Officer and we sat down and literally on an app and wrote AI, Cloud and Network. Cloud and AI were new and we had the right to win a network, but we only did one out of six things in network.

Then we said, how do we short circuit the four to seven year problem? Only doing one thing in network when your name is networks. It was in the name the whole time. That's right, exactly. But they got happy. They got fat and happy. You got an 18 billion-dollar company. You started at 3.

When you went public, this is great. It's up 6x. What are we doing wrong? Nothing. Well, I couldn't rest on that. I had to go do my own 6-X thing. So you sit there and you say, okay, we need to get to be number one in everything in network security.

So it's going to take me 47 years to build a great product. That's not enough time. So let's go find who we can be able to be able to be. and I know there's like this thing where I don't think many tech companies execute MNA well. Right. So is that because of purchase price or post-merger integration? Purchase is an artifact. Purchase is an irrelevant artifact.

Okay. Either it's going to work, if it's going to work, it's going to work phenomenally well. Or you're going to screw it up. Yep. It's not what you paid. It's what you're able to do with it. Yeah. Right?

You could say that Instagram was expensive. or YouTube was expensive. Worked perfectly. Double-click was expensive. They all worked perfectly. Yep. Right? AOL time wore a different story.

Totally. So it boils down as to how you execute past the price you paid for it. So that's not the relevant thing. In tech, when you buy a company, you buy a team, you buy an existing product, and you buy a roadmap for the future. The question is, can you deliver on that roadmap? Can you accelerate on that roadmap? Does it work? So, you know, we wrote our little M&A manual.

It's that because of your product is obsessed. We got to keep the founders there. You're going to make sure we have the right people running the company. And over time, we've gotten really good at it. We signed a term sheet and we asked the founders to sit with our team and redesign the product roadmap. So we like it and they like it. And if they don't agree on our expectations and we don't agree on theirs, we don't buy the company. Makes sense.

We make them in charge. My teams are having to work for them, which makes them really unhappy. And not many of them like it. But I'm like, look, these guys went out there, raised money, kicked their ass in a category. in your category, and you want them to work to you. That makes no sense to me. You're going to work for them and learn from them. Some people get the hang of it,

some people move on, which I'm fine with. So these people had less resources. They struggle, they hustle, they built a product, and they kicked their ass. That means, so our job is to enable these people. We look at them and say, whatever a business plan was when you were a small private company,

find me a business plan that's twice as assertive. bold than the one you had them. So we buy them, we pay the money, but we also give them more than they would have gotten anywhere else. Because I'm sure we will slow them down a little bit. I've got a bunch of people who are trying to ask

questions and get them to slow down. But you're almost immediately expanding the TAM on day one. There's so many more power that you can bring in there. What happened is we've built a phenomenal system to take them to market. So we say, we're going to take you to market. I have 3,000 people in the field.

You're going to find that we're catching their fascination, making sure they're going to get excited and make money. And 3,000 people will go out there and see 10,000 customers. Some of them are going to buy it. You're going to go with four resources and go meet 20 customers. We're going to go to 6,000 or 10,000 customers. So that's where the secret sauce kicked in. We've bought 34 companies so far.

Wow. And we do this for our board. I think our hit rate on things that have worked is over 70%. It's amazing. The last three are obviously new, so we have to see, and those are biggest ones. But it has worked out so far. Yeah. Do you find yourself ever going back to your MBA, your CFA for guidance on financial management of a public company?

Or is it just so different that you can just pick it up? Because it feels like there's a whole new set of tools that one case study that come into the toolbox when you're running a public company, whether it's dividends, large debt issuances, buybacks, there's M&A, there's so many different things. and just managing a stock price that a public company CEO has to do in some ways? What do you think? Well, the MBA is a social experience. Okay. I think people go to business school

and make a lot of friends and they get to know people. So I have a classmate who went to school with me and I can go get to deal with him. I think it's not what you study in a case study. It's a mindset. It's a way of thinking. It's kind of like learned behavior

over time you get good at it. You don't know why you do it. it, but it becomes part of your sort of muscle memory. And I think that's what happens. I'm a huge student in a business. I spend a lot of time listening, reading, talking to people about this stuff, and you just get muscle memory over time. You just kind of get a sense of what the right thing to do is.

And I think the part which we sort of underappreciate, people who do well are people who go back to first principles and try and abstract and say, from a first principle basis, is this important, is not important. For example, I don't have to manage my stock price. The stock price manages itself. The stock price, the market is sometimes smarter than individual CEOs. We have to respect that. There's a lot of players out there.

They're not all silly. There's a reason your stock price trades where trades. Sometimes it trades because they don't trust you. Sometimes it trades there because they don't believe their prospects are as rosy as you believe they are. Sometimes it does well because it anticipates the prospects are better than you think. So the market has a lot of different variables it assesses. Now, to the extent that you're convinced this is the right direction to go. you're convinced that you're executing well, that's great.

If you believe there are some challenges or flaws in the way you're executing, the market will give you a hint. The market will tell you. Now, look, the market gets it wrong sometimes. It gets it right many times. It's just another variable you have to take into account. But the idea of managing a stock price is better you can't. But if the market gets it wrong,

you haven't financial incentives to buy your stock. Yes, we just did. We brought in all the stock. But the market said, oh. We hear this thing called AI is eating software. We're going to dunk everybody because Claude decided to put out some coding the security product. Oh, shit, this is going to destroy 300 billion dollars all industry because Darya lost a product. Yeah, I saw a chart that showed the mentions of moats on SEC conference calls on public company earnings calls is going vertical.

Have you been thinking about restating the moats to shareholders? A few earnings call ago, I put my earnings script into Gemini and said, assess my earnings script. Okay. Tell me, honestly, what do you think? Okay. It's like turning into a psychologist, says, not sure what you're concerned about, but you're trying to use the word momentum and exciting more times than you normally do. Calm down. Okay, yeah.

So, no, I'm not going to say votes. Yeah, yeah. I'm okay, but I'm not going to say votes. You don't have to say modes. But look, you expect me to sit here and sort of. speak my book. But LLMs are phenomenal at the 90% problem. 90% problem is make me a movie, paint me a picture,

merges this photographs, a 90% problem. If you get it wrong, it's not a big deal. There's nothing destructive. For the same reason, you wouldn't want Gemini driving. There's also those 90% problems. There's so many of them where you will never know exactly if you did the best job or you did, you just did an okay job.

Like, sometimes you get some signals, but it's not as binary as, let's say, did we expose user data to a bunch of people? That's a whole different. That's a whole different kind of thing. Before you get to exposure data, like, you know, you write a letter to, you know, respond to my emails.

Okay, fine, it's 80% good enough, much better than me having to go do each one of them. So I think we're okay with the 80, 90% outcome. But you would not let Gemini drive your car or chat GP drive your car hallucinate. For the same reason, you don't want generative AI managing your cybersecurity, because we're in the 1% business. Remember, I'm trying to block that one guy who's going to get into your company and steal your data. That's a 1% problem.

It's a 0.01% problem. So we rely on thousands of machine learning algorithms, and we rely on tons of pattern recognition, domain-specific data. So we're trying to solve the 1% problem. Genitive AI does not solve 1% problem. It solves 90% problems. We solve 1% problems. So we're least threatened in this notion. There are parts of our business where we could leverage generative AI to make it better.

Yeah. And that you will see. Like the code scanning thing is a perfect example. Claude launches it. People get petrified. He's a $3,000 in a $3 million market. And the start where the market loses, you know, takes down $3 billion dollar market cap that day. Fantastic.

I'm saying, great. Now the market's getting it wrong. Let's go buy our stock. So yeah, the market does get it wrong. Explain to me how the surface area of cybersecurity threats. is changing. I mean, off the top of my head, I could think of geopolitical risk, more AI endpoints where vibe code is less secure, and so you need more, you know, you need more cybersecurity. Also, just the hackers that are out there are now AI enabled, so their threats are getting more

sophisticated. What is this year looking like from just the scale of cybersecurity threats broadly? So, you know, if you go back to first principles, what happens is every technologist who's positive and optimist build software for the best use case, for the best case. They don't build it for the worst use case of it, right? You didn't build a knife and say, oh, let's not release a knife because people might stab each other. You said, well, this is great. You can do so many productive things with it, right? So we always build technology with an optimistic, positive attitude, and look at what AI is doing.

We're all building it from positive attitude unless you start getting into debates about can be used for war or not. But for the most part, you're building it for the right reasons of positive values. But it didn't build the first airport with TSA in mind, did we? It's like, how are we going to make sure

we could torture people and take them to a line? We can take their clothes off and shoes off. So we didn't do it. So we actually introduced security afterwards because we realize there are bad use cases. Unfortunately, same thing happens to technology. Sure. We build this stuff and say, let's go use it.

People aren't going to do bad stuff. And then you suddenly see an agent hacks somebody's business, they say, oh shit, you've got to go figure out how to stop this agent from hacking this stuff. So our job in cybersecurity is to anticipate the bad use cases and try and throw a ring fence, a series of guardrails, a series of protection

around technology. To the extent, technology evolves at a fast pace. This is good for us, because we have to constantly find antidotes to that. Then you have to make sure you're in the zeitgeist to what's happening, so you want to be there. So, you know, a little flashback, like, this industry, before the last eight years, used to stay in their swim lanes. There are five swim lanes in the cybersecurity.

And so, oh, you do your thing, I'll do my thing. You do your thing, I'll do my thing. Suddenly, this is bullshit. We should be an old file. So now we're in all five minutes. Suddenly, the whole industry is flipped over its head. Every time we do an acquisition, we see five copycat acquisitions done in our industry around us because people say, oh, this guy must know something. Actually, this guy knows nothing, but thank you very much.

I just validated my TSA. Let's go. Yeah, yeah. So we're going doing that. So it is good for us when technology goes through a tremendous amount of evolution. Whether it's cloud, whether it's AI, whether it's, you know, people going back to coding. Like, it's funnily, coding causes more activity to have a laptop. It needs a whole different security in your laptop than you used to have.

If you put an MCP server there, I need to protect it. Never working any kinds of API access on your laptop. So the constant evolution of technology demands more innovation in our industry. More innovation industry, more deployment of technology around the world causes more demand for cybersecurity. That's good. Of course, we have a geopolitical set of issues. The more you go into war, the more, you know, nation states are the most prolific cyber hackers in the world. Right?

There are nation states out there who literally, you know, unofficially sponsor cyber activity because they need it. It's a time. It's also a training ground, right? You keep doing it in peace times. When I need it in wartime, I can use it. Oh, sure. Interesting, yeah. So there's this whole cat and mouse game

that's played in the industry. So, you know, geopolitical uncertainty, economic uncertainty, all these things are catalyst for activity. And that's on one side. On the other side, if you look at it, because of the fact that we never designed it with security in mind

and the base of the technology is evolving, almost every enterprise is behind the eight ball in the modernization they need. And it's kind of like a hard decision to make, right? if you've never gotten hacked and you sit there and become complacent saying, look, I've been spending $50 million a year and it's working.

And suddenly one day, oh, shit, it's not working. Somebody just got into your business. Those are the best days for us, by the way. So somebody gets shit is the fan. I don't want to get excited about people's tough times. That's why we have a team, which is just our benevolence. We have a team which you can call. We don't charge you for that team

to go help you and shit, it's the fan. Because we know you're just about to get released. and you're about to go transform everything in your infrastructure because you want to be at the bleeding edge. And again, security is kind of like this where you can spend too much or you can spend just right. Right now, people, generally, the infrastructure is antiquated

relative to where it needs to be. There's a lot of transformation that needs to happen. So I think this is going to be sort of a perpetual opportunity because combine that with the base it with technology changes, that's great. That's kind of one part of it. The other part is which was our insight three years ago, if you take a look at what Salesforce has done

or Workday has done, you guys are young. Back then when I was working at Fidelity, we had 27 systems which combined made up customer relationship management. Because everybody had their own systems, you had keys, you had like data references because you built your app at that time. And cybersecurity is kind of there.

Like every customer has more cybersecurity vendors than technology vendors outside of cybersecurity. Because they're like, oh, I got 80 of them because I got everything solved. like, no, dude, you gotta get them all together. Yeah. So we're in that phase where we're building the first

sort of combined platform of cybersecurity. And that's why we wanted to be in every swim lane. And as the market converges, we will be able to get people into less and less vendors where data can talk to each other because at the end of the day, there's only two factors that go in our business. One factor is, if it's bad, stop it.

If I know it's bad, I'm pretty good at stopping it. The problem of cybersecurity is never known bad. It's the one you don't know. So all the money is in figuring out when you didn't find it at the door is something bad going on or somebody's trying to intrude into your business. And that's where all the action in cybersecurity is.

So that requires data to be connected. So, and this is the last fact, leave it, and you can go where you want, but the average time to detect and remediate a cyber attack is four days in the United States. Now with AI, the fastest time to attack a company and exfiltrate private data is 28 minutes. Wow.

Wow. That's wild. I was shocked when I went to Paul Otto. I heard that. So in seven years, we've gotten ourselves to one minute. So we just got to get everybody else to one minute. Yeah. So a lot of demand in the future.

Has anyone ever gotten a job working for you by sending you a physical letter? And gotten a job. The times has changed. But, you know, have they? That creates the opportunity. Have they changed, though? It is a way to stand out. You probably get a lot of cold email.

You probably don't. I get letters too. I get letters. I get pictures. I get, I get, what advice are you giving to young people who are entering the job market or want to work at Palo Alto Network?

I think it's the Wild West right now out there. We have stopped looking at your CV. Okay. We run hackathons every second weekend. Sure. And anybody can vibe code and get ahead of people around. down there, we're hired them.

Wow. I don't care when you went to school. That's awesome. Because I just think people have to learn. This is something that has not been taught in schools. I'm glad if you go to school, it's good. You can have social skills. You have friends.

We want mentally balanced people. This is good. But we want to make sure that you know where the world is going. I'm a huge optimist on AI creating job opportunities. I think we'll go through a transformation period. But we're trying to find people who know how to do this. I have to overwhelm my company with more people who know how to use AI than less people.

Right now, more people don't know how to use AI in my business, less people know how to use it. I think if traditional company, traditional include ourselves, companies who've been around for 10 years, 15 years, want to get back and win in the next iteration of technology, we have to transform as fast as we can that requires more people who can use AI than less people.

Any CEO walks in here and tells me that more people who know how to use AI than less, they're gonna win. that's the biggest need of the hour. So I'm out there trying to hire people. So if anybody's listening to this and they think they are the best vibe coders, the best user of creative AI, write me a letter. Amazing.

Yeah, I hope you do. Send me a letter. Live coded product via physical. There is an API for sending physical letters. There's also an API for sending what's called lumpy mail, which is a letter. Have you ever gotten a letter that has like, it looks like it has something inside of it? So it's like, it's lumped.

Usually that goes into our mail room and goes into the bomb spot. Yeah, exactly. You may find it the incinerator because it's just... People figure out there's an arbitrage there because you're more likely to open an envelope that looks like a package and you'll open that and then you just get the ad. Unfortunately, some of us have people who open them because they want us to have the risk of powerful.

I imagine it's pretty important in your role. That has to pass the regular filters as well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is fantastic. Let's do this again soon. All right. before we sign off, let me tell you about vibe.co.

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for access requests and password resets. And you heard, you heard Eric Lyman mentioned Shopify earlier. Shopify, of course, is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, is there anything else in the timeline that we should close out with any breaking news

that we need to get to? And while you look that up, let me tell everyone about Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. There's some breaking news. What is that? Anthropic researchers are departing to launch a Neo Lab in talks to raise capital for a new startup on a $1 billion valuation.

Yeah. Not. What a crazy time to launch a NeoLab. Weren't we just asking Tyler about this? Is there going to be another Neo Lab? Is the boom over? It's notable because we just haven't seen a lot of people. Leaving Anthropic.

Yeah, that's right. But I'm very interested to see what they wind up launching. I'm also very sad that we didn't get to our lightning round today. We had a bunch of great people scheduled. Of course, we ran long. But we will have them back on the show soon to get all the updates there. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider.

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