TBPN - Week in Review | Neuralink Raises $600M at $9B Valuation, Judge Considers Curbs for Google in AI Arms Race, Jensen Huang Shifts Approach to U.S. Politics & More

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

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You're watching TVPN. Today's Friday, May 30th, 20205. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. It's a remote show. I am traveling. How are you doing? I'm good.

I miss you. Yeah, me too. We feel so close, but so far. It's brutal. Sleeping without an eight sleep. It's the punishment worse than death. It's a true torture. It really is.

It's the worst. It's the worst. Anyway, exciting week, short week with the Memorial Day holiday, but I feel like we did a good job making up for the lack of major tech news, the lack of major announcements from AI companies, although WWDC is coming up next week, which should be interesting. And that's where I want to start, because John Gruber has been writing about Apple for years at Daring Fireball.

He has a show called, talk show that he does at WWC. And it's very interesting because he was one of the first people to do a talk show and interview show in the Vision Pro with in VR. They bring the pro cameras and you can stream it and you can watch it in the Vision Pro. He went all in. He's been writing positively about Apple for a long time. Of course, a couple months ago, he wrote something is rotten in the state of Cupertino talking about the the difficulties with the rollout of Apple. intelligence and they, they didn't completely rug him, but they didn't sign up fully. So last year, the talk show live from WWC, 2024 had Craig Federigi, Greg, Jaws, and John

G. Andrea, Apple's head of machine learning and AI. And this year, he invited them all and they said, no, we don't want to participate. No way. Yeah. No way. Which is right. They took it. They took the rotten post personally. They took it personally. It hurts. And so, I mean, I was just reflecting on like what this means, obviously we want to, we want to, you know, interview these folks. And so I just kind of had this realization that truly Apple intelligence is one of the most underrated products of all time. Totally. Totally. And people are critical of it because it's Apple and they're, they always achieve perfection. But I think they did. I think they did. It's a product. that we use and love daily, right? Exactly. When you text me, John, you text me this, a couple paragraphs, right?

Yeah. Cool idea. I actually like that Apple botches the summary because it inspires me to think, what would John think in this circumstance? Exactly, exactly. What would John want me to think that he was saying before Apple kind of stepped, you know, stepped in? And so I think you're totally right.

I think Apple intelligence, criminally underrated. I agree. I agree. Honestly, John, I would take it a step further. Please. Just eliminate all original, all the original text of every message and I message and only provide back and forth sort of ping pong summaries, kind of like a game of telephone in some way. Yeah. And just let Apple intermediate everything.

100%. You know, if, yeah. And I think a lot of people were critical of the Gen Moji campaign, but as someone who's sponsored by AdQuick, we love out-of-home campaigns. And I think that that was also something. that with the long arc of history we'll look back on as as an iconic campaign exactly it was it was contrarian up there with 1984 i agree um and and so many of these other you know the ipod campaign right so so these type of iconic yeah and we spent a lot of time talking about the gen moji campaign right

and we did and many people would say all attention you know even though we we had some critiques but yeah but all attention is good attention and and um yeah when you think that's part of of the show is like, yes, you could say we were critiquing, but a lot of the show is humorous. And so I would now, my message to Apple is like, those critiques, those were the jokes. This is the serious part. Yeah. Now I'm serious. I'm saying they've never done anything wrong.

Everything's perfect. And I want to interview. So let's make it happen. But you know, the funny thing is that I was actually, obviously we're kidding around a little bit, but I was reflecting on the fact that I am actually more bullish on Apple than John Gruber right now because after the state of Cooper Tino came out, me and you were talking, and I was taking the position that, like, Tim Cook, because of how he handled the supply chain and the tariff stuff,

that was actually... He made it all back in one trade. He made it all back in one trade. And so, you know, I think that, yeah, the Apple Intelligence thing, it hasn't gone perfectly, but the execution, I mean, it's still a massive company, and they're doing great, and I think that there's a world where they land this in a very interesting way with partnerships and they open things up, and there's some really, really interesting outcomes that could have.

happens. So yeah, the question is for grubber, uh, how much angrier does he get at Apple as he gets less and less access, right? Did they, do they awaken, you know, a monster? Yeah, yeah. You'd think that you'd want to, you'd want to have him come on and, and kind of ask the hard questions and, and make your case and win him over. You know, they have a longstanding relationship. Also, did you say grubber? It's definitely gruber. Gruber, sorry. I like grubber though. That's great. But yeah, he was talking to Ben Thompson and saying like he's kind of relieved because this was going to be one of the harder interviews because the expectation would be that he

asks like the hard questions, right? And that he actually pushes them because he has been a, although he's obviously been very, it's easy to be pro Apple over the course of his career because Apple's been on an absolute tear. And so if you're like the correct analysis of Apple at every point in the last. two decades has been the stock's about to rip. And if you just kept saying that, you were right again and again and again. It sounded like you were glazing or being shilling, but like you were also correct. Yeah, people look back and they're like, yeah, that's good journalism. Buffett bought

Apple when it was already the most valuable public, valuable company in the world. Exactly. Exactly. It was not a, you know, there were people making that same trade. Yeah. just thinking, oh, I should just buy the biggest company. And Buffett was basically making the bet that it was undervalued at that point, massively. Great. Well, really quickly, we're going to do some ads. We're going to tell you about Ramp.

Time is Money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. A whole lot more. We love Ramp. I'm going to get to see the Ramp founders this weekend. It should be a lot of fun. Anyway, let's rip through some news.

I want to give a little update on like what did happen this week because there were a bunch of small stories. Nothing really big that became the current thing. But we should rip through this. So Elon Musk's Neurrelink raised $600 million and $9 billion valuation. This feels like old news to me. I don't know if that's just because I've been hearing through this through the rumor mill, but very excited for what they're building. We talked to Ashley Vance a little bit about Neurrelink in the progress.

And it's kind of underrated because the first time it happens, it's like a miracle with that one Neurlink patient, but there's been a few, and Ashley Vance has actually gone and interviewed others, and everything that I've seen is that this project moves slowly, like many, like SpaceX, where there's regulatory concerns and FDA approvals, but the foot is not off the gas, and it just continues to grow. The thing that stood out to me here is Neurlink raised $43 million in November, 2023. Yeah.

Like the fact that there was an Elon company with this much potential in the private markets being valued at $5 billion, you know, roughly two years ago, is actually crazy. Granted, the round was effectively like an additional tranche that had been part of an earlier FF round. But still, you know, not a bad bet. Yeah. But just like insane concentration talent. I mean, we talked to the Tiel fellow who was working at NERLINK.

And like, that's the DMA at that company. And it's pretty remarkable to see. Like, obviously all the focus is on like super long-term brain computer interfaces. But when you talk to the neuralink team, they're much more grounded in the immediate effects of what the technology can do, which is like there are a lot of people who are paraplegic. It's actually a lot of people that get in pretty horrific accidents. Like they're doing like cliff jumping or skydiving or something. and something goes terribly wrong. They break their neck, essentially, like sever their spinal cord,

and then they just cannot access their limbs. But they're alive and they're going to live out their life. And you give them the access to play video games, which is the most beautiful gift you can give someone, in my opinion. And so, yeah, it's always super inspiring. And I'm sure we should talk to some of the neuralink folks at some point. We should have, call in. What was the name of the Teal Fellow who was at Neurlink?

Do you remember? I don't we. I mean, we interviewed 25 people that day. But that was that was one of my favorite moments of the week. Oh, yeah. His philosophy of. So funny. I'm just trying to get two times cooler over and over and over. And you stack a few two X, you know, wins like that back to back.

Starting to get pretty cool. Yeah. I thought that was an amazing philosophy of life and he was just skill maxing. Yeah. I mean, also his definition of cool, I kept, I kept expecting it to be like, and then I hit the gym. And then I learned to race a car. Now he's like building a trumpet from first principles.

It's extremely cool. It's genuinely cool. Yeah. Yeah, anyone can, anyone can hit the gym and learn to do a kickflip. Yeah. He'll get to that. Those are those are there. Down the road.

For sure. Down the road. Anyway, other fundraising news, Rillit raised $25 million from Sequoia to automate general ledger systems using AI for accounting departments. Sequoia has been big on this application layer, value accrual in AI in the application layer. Obviously, they have Harvey. They're in some of the foundation models, but they're also looking for bets in kind of every

vertical SaaS category now. So this kind of makes sense. The partner at Sequoia that did the deal said, the general ledger is the beating heart of the finance function. And so asking a company to remove it is kind of open heart surgery. So interesting to see how this actually interfaces with some of the other Sequoia bets, because they're in ramp and they're in other companies, but there's certainly more stuff to do inside the enterprise

and there's a bunch of different places. So a $25 million bet makes sense there. What else is going on? Horizon 3A.I raised $100 million from NEA. and a $750 million valuation. AI startup chalk. Yeah, lots of size gongs this week, honestly. A Databricks competitor raised a $50 million series A from Felicitis.

at a $500 million valuation. There's a bunch of other stuff going on. Databricks, we've talked about the neon deal, but it's becoming more and more finalized at this point. There's some venture fun news. There's also Clark, led by Brad Menzese. The first AI agent to build internal enterprise apps, raised $60 million, which I think we may have covered,

but I wanted to get Brad a shout out because I wanted to get him on the show this week. We didn't end up having the time, but shout out to Brad and the whole team. Yep. So the big news in the technology world in the Wall Street Journal this week is this Google lawsuit

that's been going on for a while. Judge considers curbs for Google in AI arms race. And this is kind of interesting because this started around Google search monopoly, which has been well documented. Obviously they own like 90% of the search market. They own Chrome and they're the default on Apple and they have that, you know, very lucrative deal for Apple where they pay, I think, over $10 billion to be the default search in Safari.

Isn't it 20 billion? Yeah, it's a lot. And it's just pure profit for Apple. It's pretty awesome. So lawyers are making closing arguments Friday and landmark antitrust base. 20 billion in 2022. So it may have ticked out from there. Let's go.

Size gong, major size gong. every is gone. Let's hear for the Apple shareholders. Yeah, you love it. And this is why, this is why you can't critique Apple. There's just nothing to critique because they're printing. They're absolutely printing. They mean, truly, they set themselves up with the perfect platform.

And so whatever happens next, they make money. Like, they didn't need to be in search. It's crazy. Yeah, they have the $20 billion search deal with Google. And because of that, they can offer Gen Moji for free out of the box. Incredible. It's just that incredible consumer. or surplus that they're able to, you know, deliver.

So U.S. district judge, Amit Mehta, on Friday, questioned how far he should go to limit Google's monopoly in Internet search, including putting curves on how it competes in artificial intelligence. That his query came at the beginning of closing arguments in the final phase of the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google. The judge questioned how questions underscore how much rivals such as OpenAI have already changed how people access information on the Internet. that earlier found that Google is a monopolist in search and that it abused its power to maintain dominance.

But the government's proposals for improving competition include curbing ability, Google's ability to promote Gemini, its AI product that competes with ChachyPT. I wonder if that's part of the story around Gemini being hard to find. There's this constant critique on X that Google has incredible models, incredible products, but they're just not distributing or surfacing them the well. And I wonder if it's less of a product management mistake, like the product manager made the wrong decision, or the lawyers came in and said,

hey, I know that the product management best practices would be to roll this in. But if you do that, we're at antitrust risk. So we have to make it harder for you to sign up. Yeah, but I mean, this proposal from Judge Meadows is a proposal. It isn't, wouldn't the strategic thing to do as Google is to just say, like, well, we're going to promote this as much as we can until we're told we can't, right? No. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, I mean, the Nvidia idea of like, the speed limit 60, you go 59.

But I think internally at some of these companies that have been really scarred by antitrust and legal battles, sometimes the legal department says the speed limit 60, product managers, everyone's going 45. because we are actively being tailed by a cop. They don't have their lights on yet, but they could turn those lights on. You know how people start going five under, 10 under, when there's a cop behind them. I think that might be a little bit of a dynamic at some of the big tech companies.

I think Bill Gates talked about this at Microsoft, how part of the reason why he transitioned out and Balmer came in was just he got so tied up at antitrust legislation and antitrust fights, that it became like a soul-sucking job. And he couldn't do the thing that he wanted to do, which was just like build computers. And so there's this interesting dynamic

where you could imagine a lawyer saying like, I'm gonna get fired if we get a massive lawsuit or something like that. And so to protect this, I'm okay with us growing a little bit slower. I'm okay with these new products being, and it's because they're not comped on, did you deal with the innovator's dilemma

and find the big next wave, right? They're comped on how bad are things in the courts right now. And also, if you're a product manager and a lawyer on the team comes to you and says, like, legally, I'm recommending that we don't do this, it's very hard to push back on that. It's not the same as the dynamic between a designer and an engineer where the engineer might say, oh, this is like, you know, maybe better from an engineering perspective. And it's more of a discussion. I feel like when the legal team shows up, it's usually like they are issuing a, they're dictating what will happen. And most people are just saying, okay, well, legal said we have to do it this way, so we're going to do it this way. Yeah.

But I don't know. The interesting dynamic here is around, like, the case specifically is not directly shaping how Google deals with generative AI and their new products. But it could have knock on effects because they are proposing the forced sale of the Chrome browser and preventing Google from being able to pay Apple to be its default. search engine and requiring it to share data with competitors. And now, this is obviously bad for a number of reasons, but the interesting thing in the context of AI is that they, like all the data that goes into Chrome and Google search from these extra search, it's not just about running more ads. Obviously, it is. Obviously, if they're paying Apple 20 billion, they're probably

making 40 billion in ads off of those searches or something like that, right? But that's also really, really valuable data that they're going to be using to train the next generation of Gemini. And so if they lose a little bit of that edge in the flywheel to something like ChachypT, where people are going back and forth and the data flywheel is spinning up faster at OpenAI, that could actually put them at a place where the data is compounding slower. And so they're not able to stay on that Pareto frontier of the best model at every single price that they've been so happy with. The interesting thing to me is, have you heard the story of how Google originally built the algorithm for auto-complete?

This is interesting, by the way. Yeah. I don't think this would be the case for our audience, but Safari apparently has 90% of the browser market share on iPhone. I imagine a lot of people listening have Chrome installed and prefer that. but i use safari on iphone safari guy yeah i use safari it just feels like it's the it's the default i've tried to use chrome and the iPhone keeps pump like pumping me back oh do you want to open this in safari and i've noticed that with the cookies if you're logged in in safari and then you're on the x app and you open a

link that will open a safari web view it doesn't open a chrome web view and so the safari WebView, it's like an iOS code module, if you're logged in in Safari, that will stay logged in, even when you're in the Safari WebView inside of Instagram or inside of X. And so that extra benefit is enough for me to use a second browser, even though on my desktop I use Chrome. And like, I'm losing that connection. It's like, I want the mobile experience to be really cohesive. So I don't know if that's just like boomer mode, but it seems to be working for me. We need a boomer sound effect.

So anyways, going back, you said the Justice Department, which brought the case against Google in 2020, has proposed forcing the sale of its Chrome browser, preventing Google from being able to pay Apple to be its default search engine. The department says the uncommonly harsh remedies are supported by a legal standard created when the U.S. government tried to break up Microsoft over 20 years ago. All three of the DOJ's major remedies are aimed at helping generative AI providers take share from Google. says Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for TD Cowan. The government has met the standard of proof for obtaining such drastic remedies. Google's lawyer, John Schmidt-Lean argued Friday. The Justice Department didn't prove that Google's exclusive contracts with device makers such as Apple

were the primary cause of maintaining its monopoly. Yeah. You've got to be happy if you're Sam or, you're, you're, Sam, or, uh, Arvin from perplexity right now, given that the DOJ is explicitly stating, we are trying to help generative AI providers take care from Google. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. The data flywheel is interesting. I got to tell the story of the original Google autocomplete algorithm. This was prior to transformer-based language models, but they needed a way to auto-complete on Google search as you type, it fills it in. And what they found to be the most effective data set was, let's say you're

searching for something like how to take the train from SFO to San Francisco and you type it incorrectly, you misspell San Francisco or you misspell SFO or something. What they found is the best way to generate a massive data set of auto-completions is just look at when someone types one thing and then they type a similar query immediately after within the next one minute. Because if Google fails and doesn't understand the query, you'll typically, the human will go and correct the query and be like, oh, I misspelled San Francisco. I need to spell it correctly.

I will go spell it correctly. But how do you send that signal to Google that what is the correct way to spell San Francisco? Or what is the correct search term? What is the right way to phrase this question? Well, they were able to create this massive data set just by looking at like one query A, query B. And then and then just telling you, are you sure you don't want to just do the next query immediately? So it's the same kind of predictive text. But when you're at Google scale, that has incredible value.

And you can imagine that having a big data flywheel potential at Google as they scale up generative AI. So anyway, Judge Meta said he expects to issue a ruling in August, Google, which has roughly 90%. market share of online searches proposed a narrow set of remedies that would modify its exclusive agreements with Apple as well as Mozilla and Android to allow for more competition. It has said it would appeal the judge's ruling sounds like whatever which whichever way it shakes out. Yeah there's so there's so many different things going on. Here's the interesting thing too. So Google's already paying Samsung and Motorola to pre-install Gemini on devices which is interesting. So potentially a counterpoint to what you were saying earlier around, you know, wanting to be, if the speed limit's 60, stay at 45.

This feels like, you know, basically being like, hey, if the speed limit is 60 here, but it's 80 over here. Let's go 80. Yeah, I'm surprised they even have to pay them because like Samsung and Motorola build off of Android. So you would think it would just come pre-install as like a default Android app. But I'm sure that there's a debate because Samsung probably has their own foundation model and could auction that off. And so it's kind of up for debate. But that certainly wasn't the case with like the other stock features of Android. And there's so now with the new ones, they got to figure out the deal.

But yeah, there's so many interesting things going on with Google with like absolute dominance in video generation, absolute dominance on YouTube. Like the YouTube model just seems like stronger than ever and compounding and like, not going anywhere, like just the absolute best business model. And then some weakness in search, which is obviously huge on overall our name. Well, the funny thing is you could imagine, you could imagine search is getting more competitive naturally, right? As people use LLMs to do things that they would traditionally use regular search engine for. And you can imagine two years from now at the Department of Justice taking this massive victory lap of being like,

you know, we created competition in this market, you know, we did our job. And it ultimately was just from the creation of new technology that Google itself has played a big role in creating. So I'm much more in favor of letting the best technology win and the best teams win. And it's unclear to me right now if there really needs to be any meaningful intervention. Well, if you have the best technology, you need the best design tool. Go to figma.com. think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams

build great products together. Go to Figma. I've been seeing a bunch of people starting to use Figma make and realizing how powerful it is. Starting to take hold. I will try to pull. I have the post in here somewhere. Yeah, we'll get to it later, but it's very cool to see.

Yeah, and Angela Luce is H-O-L-Y-S-H-I-T, which we will not say. not say that word friendly uh just got in just got access to figma make beta on our team account and i'm totally mind blown these are mocks that we one shot prompted and it's interactive buttons tabs prototype works all and all the react code is there to copy and paste into an application that's very exciting congratulations to the team um very very cool that they're getting this out into the world um anyway uh other deals that are going on uh the ray band maker uh how do you I just know it is Luxotica.

Luxotica. I didn't know. I never had seen Esselaer slag in the beginning. SLOOR Luxottica is buying Optegra in a medical AI push. So Luxottica partnered with Zuck on the meta ray bands, and they're getting more into AI and smart glasses. Interesting to see the going in. Optegra operates eye hospitals in the UK, Czech Republic, Poland,

and the Netherlands. So interesting. You think of Luxottica as a. you know, consumer product company, but, but this is a very different kind of business to integrate. Yeah, it's such an interesting, it's such a different approach to the meta ray bands. Like the, the, the reason it made so much sense for Luxottica to partner with, with meta on the meta ray bands, because it's a fashion item. Like, you put it on your face and. Meta doesn't need to recreate an iconic silhouette. It's really, really hard. Yeah, iconic silhouette, for sure. And, and meta, I mean,

the quest looks okay, but it has not reached anywhere near the kind of final form factor that the iPod had or the iPhone had, like the silhouette, as you mentioned. And so to jump into, and it's on your face. So it's not even something that's like, oh yeah, it's a little bit of an awkward device. Like it looks like a wallet, but I put up with it because I'm only using it when I pull it out. It's like, no, these are going to be on your face all the time. They need to look good. And the RayBans are so iconic. It made a ton of sense of partner. And they're able to draft off of Raybans' marketing and brand.

And they have ASAP Rocky. Is their creative director? There's real momentum there. They don't need to reinvent fashion while they try to create a new technology platform. Yeah, yeah. But it's a little bit different when you're talking about, like, medical AI, where I think you would think that like a branded product would be a little bit less important. But I guess Optegra operates a network of over 70 eye hospitals and diagnostic facilities across the UK, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

It's offering comprises ophthalmic treatments and effective vision correction procedures supported by artificial intelligence in the pre and post-op phases. The transaction details were not disclosed. You want to know something interesting. So since doing the show, my eyesight has actually gotten better. Really? And I think it's because we spend a lot of time looking at scorn. screens, which probably isn't good, but typically it's screens that are far away.

Yeah, efficient is actually getting better. Narrative violation, but. I didn't even realize you could, I thought your eyes only got worse. I didn't realize you could get your eyes better. He's like going to the gym for your eyes basically. You can, you can, yeah, you can effectively work out your eyes. It's just a lot of people get it. A lot of people get into routines where they're either looking at their phone computer.

Sure. And there's not a lot of like, you know, intensive exercise at other sort of consistent ranges, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, report from the information says every VC backed IPO in the past 12 months has been a down round.

A moment of silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by ad quick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Anyways, back to the news. But there's an interesting wrinkle here. So there's some good data in this article by Corey Weinberg in the information. And there's also some good news, which we'll get to. So when banking app Chime goes public next month, it will mark the eighth straight venture capital-backed IPO in the last 12 months that has been valued less than it was in private fundraising rounds.

Chime was valued at $25 billion in 2021, but its bankers have been discussing pricing its shares at roughly an $11 billion valuation. That's a pretty significant down round, less than more than 50% off. Start-evaluations are far lower than several years ago. So a lot of these companies, they raised big rounds during the ZERP era. Now they've got to get out, got to get liquidity. they're willing to take a little bit of a haircut in trade for actually being able to do some distributions because even though the most recent backer might be taking a little bit of a haircut, a lot of the early backers are still like, well, yeah, I invested at 10 million. I'm happy with

an $11 billion. Yeah, so an example is like the founders are happy. The employees are happy. Fourrunner did the seed round. They probably invested in a bunch of other rounds. Yep. But their entry is so low that I imagine they're going to do fine. Totally. if it gets priced at 11. Kristen Green's on the minus list for that specific deal. Yep. Among others. But, yeah.

Many investors are facing losses when companies go public at lower valuations. Yes, but, like, again, these are later stage investors that might, where even the LPs might have the, the assumption that they'll hold a little bit longer. And that's what this article gets into. So quickly, let's go through some of the IPOs that have gone out and where they're, where they're pricing. So chime with 69 bucks a share in 2021. Upcoming, we know that it's about down, it's down about 50%.

Circle last private round was at $42. The IPO is predicted to be at $26. So down 38%. Hinge Health went from 77 in September of 2022 to 32, down 59%. That's a pretty steep haircut. MNTN, which was actually faired a little bit better, just down 30% from peak. Yeah. E Toro, 66%.

Core weave down 15% all over. I feel like Corweave has lifted. Service tightened down 16%. Tempest, down 35%. Now, there are a couple. Ibata and Rubrik did pop after the IPO, or at least price higher than the previous round. So let's hear it for Rubrik and Ivada.

But what's interesting is that the information shares some data on companies that went public at discounts to the last fundraising tended to perform strongly in the public markets. And so Reddit went out at a lower valuation than their previous private market round, but then they went up 221% since IPO. Same thing with Corweave,

went out at a slight haircut to the last private valuation and is now up 164%. MNTN is also up 63%, service tighten up 59%, Tempice up 47%, Hinch Health up 22%, ETOA up 19%. And so it's not all bad news, and there might be some sort of narrative where, you know, there's been this,

there's been this story of the ZERP era that the private markets went crazy, that the valuations were super, super high, like crazy revenue multiples. And so you go out to the market, you talk to your banker, and you go do your IPO roadshow, and you say, hey, look, we're taking our medicine. We are going out at a price that is a discount to our last private valuation, but we've grown so much. It's been three years. The business was sound.

These businesses weren't frauds. They weren't bankrupt. They weren't like no users. They were just a little hotly valued for a while. And they say, hey, retail or whoever's buying in the IPO, we're giving you a discount to what the investors paid in the last round. And then that sets them up for an actually like new, new, new resets the valuation, gets them into a like a liquid position where they can actually grow and build up earnings,

beat earnings a couple times and then go on an absolute tear, a generational run potentially. run. Yeah, it's good. It's good. We, uh, a, you know, having a number of, of IPOs, uh, end up, you know, you want the, the, the retail or institutions coming in to, to not get host every single time. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And if you, yeah, I mean, that was the other story, the ZERP was that, like, there were a lot of SPACs that went out where that went way down. And so it's almost better to, to go out at a discount and then build back up, especially, especially if there's a hold period, lockups for various investors, like you want to be growing in the public markets. You don't just want to get out a super high evaluation.

You know an example. A company that went out in December 11th of 2020, Airbnb, is actually, if you just bought the day that it went out, you'd be down 8% after five years. So again, priced very efficiently. It did pop. Yeah. But then it's just been effectively flat to down since then. Yeah. Well, if you're thinking about taking your company public anytime soon, you got to get on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk. Prove trust, management platform, takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation,

whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. They make compliance joy, John. They make it a joy. They used to be painful. Now it's joyful. It's joyful. Go to VANTA.

Another big read in the information about Jensen Wong. He used to delegate politics until Trump's return. We've been talking about Jensen, going on an absolute tear, going to all these different conferences. His picture is pretty much everyone. He's been relying on Rilago visits and a budding relationship with President Donald Trump to reopen a path to China, which demands his attention to. So big, big questions about how NVIDIA can maintain some position in China, while obviously there is a decoupling going on. Yeah, it's interesting to see. I was too fixated on this image, which is iconic.

I'll be it a bit silly. Yeah, since the start of this year, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, has been thrust into an unexpected new role, cheap lobbyist for his company, forcing him to carry its hope, suggestions, and pleas directly to President Donald Trump. Many of Huang's conversations with Trump have happened at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's residence in private club in South Florida. And Huang has made far more visits there than have been publicly reported, according to, a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Indeed, these, I don't even know how to say that. But the next line is interesting. NVIDIA executive to remark on Wong's absence from the company, we see a lot less of Jensen.

He's been traveling to Florida a lot. But I mean, this is what we were commenting on even a few weeks ago of just, I mean, this guy's conference schedule alone, ignore the lobbying is. you know, feels like a couple a week, sometimes more. Yeah. And it makes sense because like, like, as we saw with how Tim Cook handled the tariff situation with Apple, even if there is going to be a decoupling, having insight into how that will unfold and what the speed limit will be in one month, in six months, in 12 months.

Like, we know Jensen's going to go one under, but what is the speed limit going to be so you don't get caught with buying a car that goes 200 miles an hour and the speed and the speed limit 65. So I'm sure it's, I'm sure it's top of mind for him. But it also seems like there's there's the flip side of this. Like this, this is this story is being told in the perspective of like the bare case of like China going wrong for Nvidia. But there's also the flip side, which is like Trump is clearly reopening relationships with new countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar potentially.

And those are new markets. as the diffusion rule gets ral, gets phased out. And those are major, major drivers of GPU buying. And if there's a Stargate in every new country that Trump visits and opens up diplomatic relations with, you know, rolls out some trade deal. That's hugely incremental to end up. Yeah, the other thing is Jensen is continuing to embrace,

and NVIDIA are continuing to embrace China. I mean, they're setting up new, they're investing more in this facility in, in Sean. Shanghai more into on the ground R&D. So it doesn't feel like while Jensen is having to sort of massage the relationship with the White House, he's not pulling back from China in any meaningful way that I can see. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is like we were talking to Aaron Ginn about this idea of standardizing on the American AI stack. And we were only talking about.

the jumpball countries, right? It's like Saudi Arabia is going to want GPUs. Those are either going to be from Huawei, ascend chips, or Nvidia. There's really no one else in the conversation. They're either going to be running Lama or OpenAI code or Deepseek and Manus, right? Yeah. What's interesting is like, is there a world where standardizing on the American AI stack in China is the right move? That's a very controversial thing to say or even explore, I think.

I probably default against it. But I wonder if there's some sort of good ending there where keeping China reliant on American technology is actually better than them developing their own tech tree, like out competing, out competing Huawei in. a free market could work. I'm like 1% on that, but I want to, I want to hear from other people. Yeah, I mean, Jensen is finessing the situation. I'm looking right now at the polymarket largest company end of 2025. And Vida is actually in the lead right now at a 37% chance with Microsoft at a 36% chance. Wow. So pretty people believe in the leather jacket man. Anyway, let's take a quick second to tell you about linear.

Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to linear.com. John asked me this week if we could also use linear to plan and track our workouts. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. I didn't ask you for permission.

I told you what's going to happen. But, you know, using, you know, bodybuilding is, you know, potentially, I'm sure Linear would say, you know, that's not a core focus for us. Small market. Small market. But, you know, I think we can show them that that bodybuilding is, you know, potentially, you know, an entirely new opportunity. Yeah, it's the next big Tam Expander for them, especially when you think about how

Linger has agents. You're going to have an agent constantly going out there, finding the next trend in science-based lifting, figuring out exactly what workout you should be doing, building. that into your linear plan. Then you show up to the gym, just open your linear app, start checking off the issues. Oh, put in a ticket. Oh, my delts aren't 3D. My traps aren't in my head. Carrie is going to text us and be like, guys, guys, I know it's funny, but please don't tell the market that we're getting into bodybuilding. But we can use, it's an open-ended tool. And we're going to push it to the limits. Yeah. Other news and the information, VC,

are for sale at a discount. We were talking about this a little bit. 2025 was supposed to be a year of cash windfall for venture capital backers as companies that had delayed going public finally made the leap. We were tracking some big decoorns that had hired CFOs that had previously taken companies public. The IPO window was supposed to be opening up. The market was ripping. Then we had the tariffs news and the and the IPO window kind of shut a little bit. Now it's opening again. But there's still more demand than ever for liquidity. And so it looks like some funds are trying to sell. The taco meme is really putting, you know, putting us in a precarious position that Trump always chickens out.

Whoever, whichever journalist asked Trump about that to his face, you know, potentially could be responsible for another freeze in the IPO markets, but hopefully not. Yeah. So. So the information writes that hasn't happened with a roller coaster stock market delaying many anticipated IPOs. LPs and VC funds have been finding new ways to cash out of their stakes in private tech firms. Some are selling their ownership of VC funds. The VC funds in turn have been putting their own startup stakes up for sale. That means ownership of hot startups like Stripe and Databricks are sometimes up for grabs. The takeaway, Nokia pension plan plans to sell. Nokia pension plans sells VCNs. fund stakes, Lee Fixel's family office sells dozens of early stage fund stakes, buyers hunt for fund stakes at steep discounts. And so this is kind of like a macro version of what Jeremy Gaffon is doing, right, instead of targeting a single company, targeting the actual fund stake. And we also heard a little bit about maybe there would be pressure on some of the, some of the educational higher ed LPs, like if they're under pressure, like nonprofit, for profit conversion,

like Harvard is kind of going to war with the Trump administration, would that lead to them needing to pull back from BC? We haven't really heard that or seen that, but it would be interesting to see these changing hands. And I wonder what the final holder will be. You could see someone creating kind of a roll-ups back, or you could see someone creating a new fund, but these ideas of a continuation vehicles are not entirely new.

Yeah, I mean, it's not, I mean, it's, it's, totally normal and healthy for people that hold certain assets to be willing to sell them at a discount to what they believe the future value or the terminal value of them will be and i don't think this is necessarily a bad thing it just historically wasn't as common in venture because it wasn't as mature of an asset class and there was you know faster timelines to liquidity um but to me all this is normal it would be more concerning if if you know um you know i'm sure there's funds out there that or LPs that would love to sell stakes in funds that don't ultimate where there's no actual ultimate buyer but but if you're in quality funds there's always going to be some ultimate value

for the for the LP stake and so it's just good to see yeah I want to talk to someone who's running a company that's that has a material stake from VC fund from an early vintage that's well beyond the 10 to 12 year hold period because I remember talking to a founder who had sold a number of businesses and he was very successful in kind of telling me this, this nightmare scenario where you raise in 2010, your company is doing fine, but you're not IPOing, and then the venture fund that you raised from needs to distribute shares. And so all of a sudden you wind up with like 500 different individuals or LPs on your cap table because the funds, because the shares have been distributed, and then you have to go public or that changes the way you're seen by the SEC.

And I've never heard of that actually happening. It's always just been this hypothetical nightmare scenario. But I wonder if there is something real to it, if there was ever a real problem, if it was instantly solved by roll-up vehicles and kind of continuation vehicles or something like that. But I'd love to dig into that more. I don't know if you've ever run into that. Yeah, I mean, that's one solution. They can always sit in a single entity. But yeah.

Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Sarah Guo is highlighting some possible topics for the AI engineer keynote, which I think we'll be covering next week. I thought there's an interesting overview of what is the, what the hot topics are in AI right now because we've moved past kind of the AGI Doom scenario and we're getting into like the next era of discussions. And we've been talking a lot of these. We're kind of putting together an informal AI day next Thursday,

trying to book more people around AI that day, but we will be having an official TBPN AI day soon that we will announce. But here are some interesting possible topics. AI native UX, not chat skins, vertical AI surge, healthcare pharma. We're certainly seeing that as Sequoia. Multimodal Frontier Video, 3D Audio, obviously V-O-3, driving a lot of that. Retrieval and long-term memory. I saw a funny take that somebody was like,

We've switched from retrieval augmented generation to agents. And the person was just like, no, like you're still augmenting the retrieval with text. Like it's the same buzzword, but it's like you gave it a new buzzword. And there's a lot of like this buzzword recycling going on. Synthetic data fly wheels obviously super important robotics. As we talked to Rob Taves about yesterday, will be interesting to see if there are hard caps on how far synthetic data takes you in different. scenarios. Closing the autonomy gap, robust, agentic workflows. We're certainly seeing that with some of these agents that seem super promising, but don't quite get there. But at the same time,

we've seen major breakthroughs with deep research is, I think, the first real breakthrough agent. What's your takeaway? I had a funny experience last night. As I was going to bed, I turned on my matic robot. Oh, yeah. I was telling it to mop and vacuum and mop. And I turned it on. And I turned it on. And it was like 17 hours remaining because it needed to like basically vacuum the whole house and then like figure out which areas to mop. I was like, this thing is just going to run all night. I was like honestly, I feel I feel like I should pay you or something, Maddoch. It's kind of weird that doing all this work. And then I actually, I woke up in the middle of the night to the noise.

It was outside my bedroom. And I was like, okay, I'm actually. and then I actually went and turned it off. But it was interesting to think, you know, we've had people on the show talking about this concept of like 10-minute AGI right now where you can like, you know, have an agent do an incredible amount of work for 10 minutes. But, you know, getting to this point where you can give an agent a task

and then have it be so robust that it can just operate autonomously for hours and hours and hours and hours and, you know, even days. And I think that's where things are going to get really exciting on the, you know, purely digital side. Yeah, yeah, I saw that video that the team sent of thematic robot cleaning our studio, and I was very proud. It was handling the cables pretty well. I was surprised by that.

That usually would throw them on. You think that the cables would defeat it, but no way. Yeah. Cell, scale, digital twins, and programmable biology, excited to hear more about. Yeah, still seems a little bit early from the folks we're talking to, but obviously exciting. and the the the Jacob from New Limit had a pretty well had a pretty solid case for for some of this stuff and sort of their edge on the data side yeah compute geopolitics world models we're having someone next Thursday talking about world models and

fefei Lee is also working on world models which is very interesting and then rl environments that generally that actually generalize all cool stuff and you know what else is cool numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes for a month on sales tax compliance benchmark series a benchmark series a we just had somebody sent us a cold email earlier i didn't get quite a chance to look at it but they included they said they typed a sentence and then said benchmark series a that's amazing good way good way to signal that uh they actually listen to the show we got a post here from mattie pally uh i threw this in this morning uh in this morning uh 30 years, I'll probably be up to some boomer stuff like, no son of mine is marrying an

LLM. Marriage is between two humans only. And my kids will be like, oh, m.g, dad, you're so robophobic. This is 17K. Crazy real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, um, it's funny that even, even, uh, the kids that are being born today will very likely have conversations like this, which is absolutely wild yeah i like this uh homies in the chat will be dropping nice aigf no robo ridiculous anyway speaking of all their robo robo nonsense mike salana because we were supposed to have flying cars and his recent his recent calls is just robo callers getting spanned it's like it's like six calls in the span of five minutes it's so brutal brutal i i there is a

There is a service. I don't know if I should directly plug them. No more Robo. There's a couple apps that you can install. And there's also the iOS functionality to reduce. If you go into like the phone app, you can tell it like, hey, I like really want to screen calls. And then also I think I have my phone and do not disturb all the time. And you can only get through to me and actually like ring the phone if you're in my contacts list.

Otherwise you have to text me first. And so like there's a whole bunch of things that you need to do. to kind of prevent this from being annoying, but it's still just, like, ridiculous. My take was we really need to come up with a new phone number system that's like a, like a crypto address, like a hash, where, because there's only, what, like 10 billion phone numbers. And so you can just robocall them all, and it's not that expensive to do if every call is one cent or whatever. You can just call every human and just test them all, and I'll test every number. but if you had like this really complex hash where there's now like quintillion possible phone numbers,

it's like, yeah, it's probably going to be hard to remember. But once I give you my number, you're going to be able to call me and I'm not just going to be able, and people are going to be able to randomly guess my phone number. So I don't know. We need something because it's bad. What's your take? Yeah, I just don't pick up the phone unless it's somebody I want to talk to. And then I pick up as fast as I can.

This ad went pretty viral from Zohan, Mom, Donnie. He's running for mayor of New York. And he's got a bold pitch, freezing the rent. Price controls. Price controls. You love it. I saw somebody compare this to somebody running for student body president or whatever, and they're just like free lunch, free lunch for everybody.

I know people say there's no free lunch, but we're doing free lunch. If I'm elected, free lunch. Yeah, yeah. So tech was pretty against this. Patrick Collison posted just a really quick screenshot of chat GPT. It says AI is getting pretty good. He says, does rent control tend to help or hurt cities? Summarize your answer in one objective pithy and blunt, 280 character assessment. And the response is rent control is a short-term shield for incumbent tenants and a long-term poison for cities. Caps freeze rents for the lucky few but choke new construction, shrink supply, jack-up market rents.

misallocate housing and shift costs onto everyone else, good politics, bad economics. And so this is kind of the general consensus that like rent controls are bad. I wanted to offer some some bull case for this. So first off, people are saying, oh, prices are going to go up. There won't be any new construction. Housing prices are going to go up. But if price controls really spread and then there's a kind of cultural revolution type like mass famine and the population declines by like 90% because everyone's,

dying, well, then there might be so much housing that the price of housing falls for the remaining that made it through the famine. Even below the original cap. Price's fault. Yeah, exactly. And so counterintuitively, it could be an interesting way to drop prices if you're okay with everyone dying of famine. Yeah, Zoran just might be thinking in decades while everyone else is, you know, thinking more immediately. Exactly. And then the other bull case is, the other bull case is if you hate New York and you're pro California, pro-L-A. Like, we're pro-Hollywood. I don't really care about New York City,

so I might be donating a ton of money to this guy to try and destroy New York City so that everyone, all the best people in New York have to move to Hollywood and hang out with me. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if you have SFCs and New York VCs sort of, you know, basically funding the politician that they think is most going to damage that startup market

to try to get themselves a little edge. I actually like, I like, I like this guy, Nikita Beer I saw in the comments on Zoran's post saying that, you know, he said that housing should be free, you capitalist pig. That's true. And so didn't go far enough. Yeah, didn't. Zoran really got mugged by Nikita.

That was rough. And the silence from Zoron on Nikita's response has been deafening to say the least. Yeah. Anyway, so silly. Anyway, we've got to tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-lead yields, trusted by millions. Let's go to Delian. He says, as a private pilot, my favorite part of this season of the rehearsal is that while it's an objectively a hilarious show,

Nathan Fielder is also pointing out an incredibly critical pilot training issue that seems to be a regular contributing case to crashes, caused to crashes, including the DCA crash. And Christoph asked him what the pilot training issue was. And Delian said, first officers not being comfortable with pushing back against a captain, they think is making a mistake. I think this is funny because I was watching the show, the first couple episodes, I haven't finished it. But he identifies this, and he's like half joking, half serious.

But Delian's just like, no, it is real. It's real. And so it's this interesting way where I actually could. see this comedy show having an effect on FAA regulation and like actually increasing safety. Like he's doing he's doing good for the world through his comedy. It's amazing. It is uh everybody should go and watch it. It is it is some of the most entertaining, uh, probably the best show I've seen this year. Yeah, I was watching a little bit of the original first season of Nathan for you last night and I was crying, laughing about when he goes into that interview and he has the comedian

telling him what to say. And he's like, oh yeah, like my mom passed away and the guy asks him like, how? And he just says like, in the war, like, in what war? Like the Iraq war? And he's like, what branch of the service was she in? And then he has to say he was, his mom was fighting for the Iraqis in Saddam's army. It's just like, absolutely. I went back and watched. I don't remember what season or episode it was, but there was the bit where he's helping, he's giving advice to a woman who has a pet shop,

who wants to increase business. So he goes and helps, and he basically gives the advice to the woman that, you know, what's the right moment to try to get in front of a future pet owner or somebody that's about to, you know, buy a new pet? And his idea is to go to a pet.

cemetery and get the biggest possible tombstone and so he works out a deal with the the owner of the pet cemetery but he basically gets the guy to agree that for like a thousand dollars like one-time payment he can erect like you know a like six foot by four foot uh you know tombstone and so it's just like this pet cemetery it's like we're sorry for your loss like this tombstone is brought to you by you know whatever. Very, very on brand for us. Pro advertising for sure. Yeah. It's great. Yeah, it's a classic show. Go, go watch all of me. Yeah, the other show, now that we're talking about it, Mountain Head releases, I believe, on Saturday around 5 p.m. It's by Jesse Armstrong, who obviously created Succession. Mountain Head is, seems to be based on the all-in podcast, or loosely, but it's a group of billionaire friends

get together against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis. So I'm looking forward to, I'm looking forward to watching this over the weekend. Sounds amazing. Let's go to this post from Kevin Kwok. He says, when exactly did the flip happen that all announcements have to be videos? That flipped really fast. What do you think? It was the, it was us? Did we do it? Can we take a victory lap? I mean, we've been doing video announcements for, for years. Party route. Yeah, we use these heavily in 2021, but I also feel like they were popular then. I also still think there's incredible alpha in just creating an amazing text post.

You can get the same. It doesn't give you the level of depth to really deliver brand, I think, in the same way that a video does. But I honestly think an extremely well-written text post, assuming you can even, there's potentially a hack to just include a lot of M-Dashes. so you get a bunch of comments from people being like, you use chat GPT for this, and then that will actually boost the post and the algorithm. So there's potentially alpha in plain text, you know,

write it yourself, but make it look like it was fully AI generated. But these things flip back and forth. I definitely see videos now where I'm like, okay, this is based on like the 2020-3 launch meta. Yeah. And yeah, I'm excited to see what comes down the line.

Yeah, I think the new meta, that, like that comedy video from that YC company, I just saw, I just thought of it. That was fantastic. But the other one that was really good was from Zipline where it didn't have the same like hard tech, insane like free bird kind of like vibe real with American flags. It was this like sun drenched high saturation. It felt like it was out of a link later film. And it was just this beautiful pastoral illustration of what life could be with Zipline.

And I thought it was really beautiful. Yeah. I think where I would like to see video goes is go are if you don't have any, if you're not trying to make people feel something, just explain really clearly what you're doing in a text post. Yeah. Don't try to make this like vibe real. If you're trying to entertain, inspire, et cetera, like if that really is your goal,

then video can be the right form factor. And we saw that with that sort of humorous video from the YC company. And then there was another company called Spahn that went super viral a while back for basically saying that like they took the team and just like lived in Europe for a few months. And that was one where I couldn't really quite tell if they were being serious or joking. And that's part of maybe what made it. go so viral. And then you have the Clue Leet where you can go make, you know, you can go make half a million dollars a year making videos.

So yeah, great, great opportunity. Potentially clickbait, who knows if that's real, but certainly entertaining. I think the question of like the vibe real is like it worked for us early on because we were trying to create a brand specifically. And I think a lot of companies, obviously like a brand is important to every company but like I would say like most B2B SaaS companies are not necessarily brand led or they're not exclusively brands versus if you are building a fashion or media or nutrition company or something that has like badge value that like expressing the brand and building the brand world we have this example of like you know

you know it's a brand when you can immediately say like what is the car associated with that brand. The classic example is like if Nike built a hotel, you would know exactly what that hotel would look like. It would have posters of Michael Jordan on the wall. The gym would be insane. Like, you know, you could buy the shoes there. It would feel Nike branded. Now, if Hilton made a shoe, you'd be like, what does that mean, right? And so. Hilton 100s. But like, does Hilton really need a brand as big as Nike or as clearly defined as Nike? And so for it, it's kind of like, if you're building a product that's not necessarily needs to be brand led forever, you don't necessarily need to ape into,

let's do a brand vibe real to really tell people what our brand is if it's going to be just like, just a software company and the value prop is what the value prop is. Yeah, totally. Anyway, nothing has a clearer value prop than eight sleep. I've been missing mine while I'm on the road. It's pain, but you can get yours at eightsleep.com.

They have a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. How did you sleep last night? Jordan? I was. Historic numbers? Historic numbers. Eight hours, 18 minutes. What? 99. Huge. Huge.

Congratulations. Yeah, that was despite being moderately interrupted because I let mymatic work too hard overnight. But I did that to myself. Oh, well. Well, we have a post from AdQuick. Then we'll give you an ad read for AdQuick. AdQuick, they have a new AdQuick co-pilot. You can generate AI. ideas for your out-of-home campaigns. Yeah, so what's interesting about this to me is ad-quick obviously has a, you know, you can go into their application and figure out how you basically build a campaign off of that.

But a lot of my experience with out-of-home is like you want it to be conversational. It's like, okay, here's the general areas where we want to be. What inventory is available these dates? Okay, what does that inventory actually look like? What are some examples? And so you can build a campaign in a sort of conversational way, which makes a lot of sense. So go check it out.

Even if you're not ready to run a campaign, it's a good idea to get a sense of what these will actually look like, what budgets will look like, and all that kind of thing. Yeah, and like just strategically, this is like the classic AI cherry on top business. They're not pivoting to AI. They're just giving people a different way to interface with their proprietary data set, right?

Because this is something that you can't just go to chat for because they have accords. So home advertising made easy and measurable. Go to adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. We need a passive size gonged, Jordan for Michael Dell. An absolute dog. One of the greatest

to ever do it. In Q1, we received $12.1 billion in AI orders surpassing the total shipments for all of fiscal year 2025 and leaving us with a backlog of $14.4 billion. If John, if you were here, I'd be

hitting the size gong but i'm just hitting it uh in the air here uh pretty amazing interesting story i didn't realize that michael dell was back in the is he oh yeah is he back in the weeds oh he's see i didn't how did i not realize it you gotta do a whole whole take private go public again he's been he's been an absolute tear wow wow dark horse dark horse it's so cool on his lincoln uh it says Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, 41 years, four months. It started when he was like 18 or something. 19.

So good. Incredible. Anyways, congrats to the Dell team on the milestone. Congrats. Yeah, and makes sense. I mean, they don't fabricate GPUs. They're not in the energy side, but obviously they're building large racks and servers for AI.

There's a boom, and they're taking advantage of it. So it makes sense. And we're seeing that with like Cisco, too. Remember we were talking to Kevin Wheel about how Cisco plays a really interesting, unique role in the AI boom. It's a company that you haven't heard about for a while, but networking gear is obviously extremely important in AI context as you're networking together, all these data centers. And so Cisco is also a beneficiary of the AI boom. So diving in, revisiting these companies that are so historically significant is fascinating. There's a great founder's episode on Michael Dell that you should go check out if you want to hear about Michael Dell's approach to entrepreneurship.

So check that out. I don't know if we can sing. I think singing over Zoom just doesn't work. So we're just going to have to say, wander, find your happy place. Booker Wander, with inspiring views, hotel-girated amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. We'll be back on Monday with a song, a full rendition.

We have to go hit the track with John Andrew to. Oh, for sure. I want to see how he performs. Laguna Seika, you think? He's an absolute dog. He's an absolute dog. I think he keeps his track cars in Texas. okay correctly but anyways that will be a great story when the time comes we got a wander in

texas go visit him racing uh we got a post from chris uh how he's chris pike pike pike um he has a new post he dropped the end of software on may 31st 2024 yep he's got a new post called the dawn of infinite code and i mean he's plays x on built different i was about to say he posts the link and he and he and he's got a new post and it works every time. Still does numbers. So he has a new article, The Dawn of Infinite Code, all started off. It says Sam Mateo 2005, three founders add an upload button to their video hosting website

in an office that smells faintly of pepperoni. Everywhere in 2025, a person types an idea presses enter and a network of agent. Agents compiles, tests, and executes in the end of software, I posited that large language models would drive the marginal cost of software. toward zero, just as the internet did with content. A year later, that forecast is playing out. Code is beyond trivial to generate. The question now is how we deal with the oncoming flood. The pattern is familiar when YouTube launched in 2005, its first video, Me at the Zoo, seemed immaterial. This was the harbinger of Doom for the media industry, but that was a point. It proved that content

had become too cheap to meter. Now the dam has broken with code. Prompts produce prototypes that once required a team in a sprint. As transformative, as broadening. from your bedroom was anyone can now ship their ideas and you know what immediately comes to mind is we have somebody visiting us at the studio today that built an entire app based on TVPN yesterday just randomly had the idea and sent it to us this morning I think it's it's at tbpn guests.com yeah that's right tbpnguess.com is a made amazing cool looking website that ranks every single guest that we've had,

including gives you timestamps and breaks down the topics that it covers. So very cool, this was built yesterday, extremely impressive and probably wouldn't have been possible to build something as cool and beautiful. It would take a lot longer for sure. Yeah. So anyways, continuing Chris Pike's post,

he said, Web 2.0 gave everyone a single verb, upload, and it vaporized newsrooms everywhere. AI gives us a new one, describe and the 500 person single feature company goes poof. The work shifts from syntax to intent. Instead of writing software line by line, we define what it should and let models handle the show. And what about distribution? Don't software companies have robust sales and marketing teams? Yes, as newspapers with paper routes and circulation numbers, when free competes with free for distribution, paid distribution loses badly. At first, these models will rely on a set of default

environment and stacks determined by a legacy training set but defaults change as options multiply the decision of where and how code runs will be handled by algorithms we already accept this logic elsewhere tick-tock decides what we watch Spotify decides what we hear the system is opaque the results are good so we scroll when the flood of code arrives we won't ask for explanations will reward speed convenience will outrank transparency the systems that earn our trust through response will hold the power once reserved for operating systems. As cost curves come down, we chase scarcity up the stack. It starts with compute, still mostly centralized, but already seeping to the edge,

as local models take up residents on laptops and phones. Above that lies context, the habits, preferences, and history that let a model anticipate us better than any public corpus ever could. And finally, trust, credibility earned over time determines whether an agent has the right to choose on our behalf. once we arrive at full trust, active choice becomes a burden. Do you want to continue? After 2010, I've never opened a newspaper, so they may never open applications.

History shows the vessel always fades once the payload can flow without it. Newspapers yielded to website, CDs to streaming software in its current uncircumcised form is circumscribed form is the next container on the chopping block when logic can be summoned and stitched together on demand, the container evaporates and only capability remains. That's the real end of software, not the death of code, but the moment the container dissolves. Utility unboxed everywhere, and all at once, and all at once infinite capability, infinite code.

And very interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's a fun narrative. I wonder where if there will be, there's a big question about discovery, how will people discover these vibe-coded apps? Distribution seems to be king. We saw that with Levels I.O., like he was able to vibe code.

He had a very different outcome from the random vibe coder who wants to share a link on X, unless you're Chris Pike, apparently, and you're not shadow ban from posting links. I mean, good links will break through, of course. And, of course, you can always do a viral video that announces your website and pitches it and then gets people to go there, even if they have to open up a new tab. but distribution will be king. So get ready to optimize. And the value of the prompt will be important,

like the value of actually coming up with unique ideas and it creates value, even if the instantiation of that value happens very quickly via vibe coding. Anyway, let's tell you about Bezell. Go to getbezzle.com. Your Bezzle concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

Check it out. And I want to close out with this post from Guillermo, Rao, the founder of Versaille, who's been on the show. The only durable moat in technology is relentless execution. And we got Molly O'Shea in the comments, or violent execution. I like that. But this relates to the previous Chris Pike post, right? That as the barriers to entry come down, the winner is the one who executes relentlessly, right?

Yeah. And we see this all over the place. And I would put an image in people's minds, relentless execution. is like a golden retriever chasing a tennis ball, right? That's a good metaphor. No matter what is in their way, no matter what, you know, gets in their path or presents challenges to getting that tennis ball, they're going to relentlessly charge at it until they get it and bring it back to you.

And that is kind of like, I think, the right framework to be, to approach life with, right? A golden retriever is not, you know, rabid, foaming at the mouth, you know, being, a poor sport. They're just joyful, and relentlessly chasing that tennis ball. And so I hope everybody brings that energy to the rest of their work week. I agree. I agree. Go have a golden retriever weekend, everyone.

This has been a fantastic show. Thanks for tuning in. Are you going to miss you? We'll see you on Monday. We have a whole bunch more guests. We're doing a bunch more of these special days. And we'll have a whole bunch more ads for you. Of course. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. please and stay tuned for the next one. Thank you. Cheers.