TBPN - Weekly Recap: Apple Debuts iPhone 17, Einstein of Wall Street, YC Demo Day, Declining AI Adoption
Episode Date: September 13, 2025(00:00) - Intro (00:03) - Declining AI Adoption (16:03) - YC Demo Day (36:53) - Peter Tuchman (Einstein of Wall Street) (45:45) - Apple Debuts iPhone 17 (01:08:39) - How to think about t...he $300B OpenAI-Oracle TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comFal.AI - fal.aiFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive
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Today, there is a chart that is tearing up the internet about AI adoption potentially going down.
This is from the census.
The census says that the AI adoption rate by firm size, they do this poll every two weeks.
And Apollo, the giant private...
Apollo management?
Yeah, Apollo.
On their Apollo Academy blog.
has opposed AI adoption rate trending down for large companies.
The U.S. Census Bureau conducts a bi-weekly survey among 1.2 million firms,
and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning,
natural language processing, virtual agents, or voice recognition to help produce goods or services
in the past two weeks.
Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more
than 250 employees.
Is that good?
I mean, I think...
It's good for your job.
There are a bunch of different reads on this.
So I think it potentially could be good.
I don't know.
I'll walk through kind of my thinking on it.
But there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here.
So the chart's going viral because kind of everyone's been feeling that AI has been overhyped
and like the valuations are crazy.
And so people are hunting for top signals, as we have, you know, a month ago.
Top signal enjoys.
We put out, we put out, we got to play the video.
Oh, yeah, yeah, the hype cycle.
It's released.
Oh, it is.
It is.
Yeah, let's pull that up.
Yeah, so let's pull up the video.
The video that Tyler just posted, did you post it from the TVPN account?
Yes.
Of the hype cycle.
We'll play that.
But people have been hunting for bearish signals about AI because it feels too good to be true.
Everyone's getting rich and you aren't.
It has the same sort of.
economic trends as the crypto boom, as a few other booms.
And so people are hunting for data points,
and this is one of them.
But let's first review the Gartner hype cycle video
that we just put out.
I think Nvidia is underbarian.
It may not mean nothing to y'all,
but understand nothing was done for me.
So I don't plan on stopping at all.
I want this shit forever, mine, ever mind, ever mind.
I shut you shit down in the morning.
Yeah, so everyone's
She's the one for me
And I need no planning to call
I won't be shit for ever mine,
ever mine, ever mine
Yeah, so everyone's been hotly debating
Where we are in the Gartner hype cycle
It feels like...
Some people call it the TBPN hype cycle
Yes, but...
We'll give Gardner their credit for this one.
So people have been hunting for
for potentially bearish signals,
bearish data points.
There was that result for meter
that showed that developers that were using AI coding tools were actually less productive.
They thought they'd be 20% more productive.
And I saw something else.
I don't know if this was misinformation, fake news, somewhat real or just anecdotal,
but there was somebody that was saying developers are producing a lot more code,
but like an order of magnitude, more security vulnerabilities.
Yeah, it's something like they're producing twice as much code, but 10 times as many.
10 times as many security vulnerabilities.
And I know the posts you're going to talk about now.
It is in the stack, but it's deep.
There's a post.
I'm going to try to find it, but it's somebody searched like vibe coding cleanup specialist.
And there's people on LinkedIn now that are finding employment around cleaning up vibe
coated product.
This is their brand.
And so if you're worried about losing your job to vibe coding, pivot to vibe coding cleanup.
Yeah.
To bull market.
There's always a bull market somewhere.
Guys, can we pull up the chat on the TV, if possible?
Anyway, let me run through this.
So from the data, the chart is going viral because it's dropping off and it looks
bearish for AI and thus for tech, America, for humanity broadly.
Everyone is saying, please consult the Gartner hype cycle graph.
There is a question on where we are on the Gartner hype cycle.
I've been saying that maybe we still have a ways to go up.
I can't tell if I'm on the left side or the right side of the graph at this point.
I've kind of already been through the trough of disillusionment.
When is that for you?
That was probably 2024.
2024 was when it felt like everyone was that AI so insane.
You were going like this in the mirror like the Joker?
A little bit because.
You know, AI so insane.
But then, you know, you go back to the chat GPT moment.
That was 2023.
Waymo, you know, really, like, rolling out to general.
Okay.
That was 2023.
There wasn't as much, there was a lot of hype, but there wasn't as much, like, actual progress.
It felt like, I don't know.
So maybe now we're, now we're.
We didn't have 5,000 AI agents for blank.
I don't know.
Just as I processed the last few weeks, I feel like I'm climbing up the slope of enlightenment.
I don't feel like I'm falling down.
red posting and showing how he's getting value across the-
That feels like the plateau of productivity.
That feels like we're plateauing and we're very productive.
Exactly.
And even the narrative of always AI progress plateauing, that's not, is it going to crash?
That's not the trough of disillusionment.
That's the plateau of productivity.
So anyway, people love to give their takes anyway.
I think the real, an interesting study, I'm sure there'd be flaws with it.
But if you went to companies and you'd say, like, how much would I have to pay you to not use AI for the next 12 months across your entire company?
Yeah.
I think you could argue that, like, in engineering org specifically in terms of, like, things like fraud detection and areas that there's probably a lot of money.
But it's very possible that in certain organizations, but then you have the question of like, okay, does sales call transcription,
town as AI, right?
Well, I will tell you, Jordy, because
90% of American businesses
told the census that they do not
use AI at all, including
transcriptions. So they would take a lot
of money to... They would take a dollar.
They would take a dollar to... They would take any amount of money
because it's all net positive, but
there's a lot going on in this data that we should run through.
And I thought people didn't trust data
from...
The census?
Well, yeah, Aracrosian has a good take about the size of the data set and how spend and where AI is actually having an impact.
We'll run through that.
But so, first off, small firms haven't declined even by this metric.
So if you're a firm that has one to four employees, you're a very small firm, you're still increasing in AI adoption.
Should we switch over to these?
By the way, guys, we are testing some new microphones.
We're trying to make it.
We can walk around the old...
The boys wanted the mics back.
They're coming back hot.
Daniel said, we can't top
till Duar Kess ships his book.
He already shipped his book, I thought.
I got a preview.
It was, yeah, that doesn't make any sense.
I don't know.
Dwar Keshe's book?
It's released?
Oh, yeah.
That came out on straight press.
Like, we had him on the day.
It was like on sale, right?
Oh, maybe it hasn't shipped,
but I got an advanced copy.
I printed it out.
Maybe it hasn't fully.
like actually delivered. But the first time we had him on the show was because of his...
Yeah, it's still a pre-order. No problem, John. Still a pre-order on Amazon. Oh, still a pre-order.
Okay. It's going to be released on October 8th. Okay. So, um...
Yeah, market, NVIDIA, please don't nuke until, uh, until our cash can get the book out.
Yeah. Uh, so, uh, the main headline number in this census data set is that firms with over 250
employees are declining in their self-reported AI usage.
It's not a huge drop.
It goes from like 12%, 14% to 12%.
It's a little blip, but the chart does look scary.
We can pull it up.
It's like the third slide.
So I think what's going on here is the following.
Small firms see bottom up adoption of AI tools.
Like can I literally directly use chat GPT for this?
Like you run a two-person company at various times.
A lot of times you're just thinking, okay, I got a, I got a select an accountant or something.
like let me chat chappita, right?
And this kind of bottom-up adoption just happens very naturally.
Whereas if you're in a larger firm,
you're going to get sold on some crazy AI transformation plan,
needs a whole training program,
and is everyone up to speed at the same time?
You need a bunch of consultants,
and they sort of misunderstand what AI even is,
and they fall into a bunch of weird analogies.
Like, we'll hire 100 AI agents.
And, like, that's very different from just,
hey, Google exists, chat GPT exists.
We expect you to use both of this company.
And so this is where I thought the data was really, really weird, because if you look at
the data for chat GPT adoption, we're way off of what this 10% number is for business adoption
of AI tooling.
So this data says that about 10% of companies are using AI at all at work.
Which is crazy because there was a data point back in March that said 52% of U.S. adults use AI large language models like Chachip-T.
So think about what that means.
It means like out of 100 million Americans, there's 100 million Americans that are like, yeah, I use AI tools.
Like there's maybe 200 million adult Americans or something.
There's 340 total Americans.
But let's call it 100 million Americans that are using AI tools just like generally.
Chat Chhabit-T Americans.
Yeah, Chachy-T-M-A.
What kind of Americans?
the chat GPT Americans.
And then 80 million of those are just like, no, not at work, though.
That makes no sense.
That makes zero sense.
And so it doesn't work like that.
There's got to be something weird going on with this data.
And I think it's a matter of the definition.
And so the census defines AI is, like, it makes no sense that 10% of companies would fit this definition.
What did, what did, you said, ARA, that RAM was chiming in on this?
Yeah, yeah.
He has a post in the, in the deck.
Yeah.
So the definition.
Yeah, he says the sample.
Pumple sizes are extremely small for these large firm breakouts, extremely volatile survey to survey,
which is why he's using the six survey moving average.
Business AI adoption is back up in the most recent read.
So I feel like that's important.
Yeah, it's one of those things.
I feel like payments providers, like Ramp, right, would have better insight here.
Just like obviously Ramp is a sample of companies in the United States, but it's out of scale now where they could see like, okay, what percentage of companies are.
for any type of AI products.
Yep.
That's better than are you adopt,
are you using more or less AI than you were last time?
Yes, yes.
The question is like how power law distributed is it, right?
And then-
So the ramp estimate of share of U.S. businesses
with paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, and tools is 43%.
Forty-three percent.
The U.S. government's estimate is 8%.
This data is weird.
Right. Also, like, look at, listen to how broad this definition of like, are you using AI at your business?
It's anything in this list. If you're using any of these buzzwords, you count as an AI user.
So it should be very high based on this. Machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, predictive analytics, predictive analytics, literally just like a linear regression forecast of like, oh, we did one million, then two million, then four million. Looks like we're growing exponentially. Next year, we're predicting that we're going to do eight.
million. That counts as AI, which is ridiculous. There's a legend out there that doesn't,
that doesn't do any of that mumbo jumbo. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe they're just considering it,
they're doing it in their heads. It's like organic intelligence. So yeah, seriously. I mean,
it's in, you can do that in a spreadsheet. Machine vision, voice recognition, decision making
systems, data analytics. Just if you're using data analytics at your business, not even like
Julius.
No, no, that would be the next step.
Just if you're analyzing data, you count.
And the last one is image processing.
If you're processing images, that counts as AI.
And so that's basically any SaaS tool.
Like any consumer LLM product used by employees should count.
And it should be really easy to fulfill this definition.
I'm thinking of like, if you're using Ramp, obviously,
when you scan a picture of receipt that I uses image processing,
your business is technically using AI.
So you're telling me the people.
that are responsible for the Department of Motor Vehicles
are getting into measuring the usage of AI in the workplace.
And we should all...
This is incredibly botched.
It's incredibly botched.
It's incredibly botched.
But it, but it's, it is really funny because one post like this,
it's a timeline and you have people like Daniel,
just saying it's over.
Obviously, he's joking.
Yeah, yeah.
Runs me.
It's over.
But I am very interested to see the results of,
hype,
hype.
TbPN.com.
Go fill it out,
please.
Hype.
TbPN.
So I was trying to
dig into this more
and was wondering
like, is this chart
bearish?
And I don't think so.
I think that there's a big
shift that's going to happen.
The number of business owners
who pick up the call
from the census and actually say,
yes, I'm using AI.
That will go down,
but the real number
will actually go up.
So if you're using Stripe,
there's a machine learning,
there's machine learning running under the hood to do fraud detection.
So you are an AI user, but it's happening at a different layer in the stack.
If you use Ramp, our sponsor, save time and money.
go to ramp.com.
When you scan a photo of your receipt, that is processed using AI,
but you aren't thinking about yourself as like an AI user.
You're just using software that happens to be AI enabled.
And the same thing will happen with your email.
It doesn't matter what email client you use.
You could use Google apps.
You could use Outlook.
Like there's going to be AI baked in there.
You're going to be an AI user.
Even when you just go to Google, you're going to see search overviews that are LLM powered.
You're going to be using ChatGPT.
Like AI is going to be 100% used.
And yet everyone will say, no, I don't use AI at my company because I'm not an AI company.
And there's this weird distance.
I use SaaS.
Yeah, I use software, basically.
It's like, are you specifically a source?
software. And that's part of the way that people have been waking up recently being like,
wait, AI is SaaS? Yeah. And it's like has been. It's the same thing with like like nonrelational
databases or like in memory cache. AI had to become SaaS in order to destroy it. Really? Really did.
And so I think AI is going to seep into every crack of the small business data of small business
day to day operations. But the operator won't be proudly telling the census worker.
I'm all in on AI for much longer.
I think that trend will continue
and less and less people will be saying,
I have adopted AI, even though they will have.
Which is a weird dynamic, but it certainly tracks.
So I'm Bora, this is Jerry.
We're co-founders of Reacher and the outfits are
because we help brands reach more creators
and make viral content to help them reach more people.
How do you do that?
Like what is the actual product?
Yeah, so we build AI agents to help brands,
find the right creators, personalize the outreach, get them to respond, pay them, and then also generate scripts and hooks so that they can make viral content.
We have some lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur, what you got?
You can say anybody.
Yeah, I know. I was going to say Elon, but I think it's Jensen.
Jensen. There we go.
The first Jensen would start counting them up.
I'm Bruno. We're building Gauss, a personal AI investment analyst for retail investors. Oh, interesting.
There we go.
B2C, if you invest in stocks, you're welcome to join our platform. Okay.
Yeah, I mean, there's been a ton of moves in the retail world, tons of meme stocks going on.
Is this going to help me find the next great meme stock or avoid getting caught up in the meme stock?
Yeah.
Is it more for the retail investor who doesn't want to get burned or the retail investor has to go risk on?
Can I tell the app to not make mistakes?
Exactly.
That's actually our number one use case.
We want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes.
So right now we're focusing on thesis-driven investors, so not the meme stock buyers.
So you have a clear thesis, you want to monitor the market, but you're a business.
a professional, you don't have time to keep track of everything that's happening.
We can find opportunities, you know, you connect your portfolio to us, and we can start giving
tailored advice.
Favorite entrepreneur, we've been asking everyone who comes to mind throughout history?
I have to say, Davila is from NewBank.
He's an inspiration for me.
He challenged the most traditional industry in Brazil, big banks, and he managed to create
a generational company.
Fantastic.
I really like him.
Introduce yourselves.
Who are you?
What are you building?
Cool.
and Cornelius. This is Steve. Hey, what's up guys? Steve with Perseus defense.
What's that? And we're building 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. 16 inch missiles
to shoot down drones. Okay. What what would like do we not have 16
men? Do we not have 16 inch missiles in the arsenal currently? Is this something
that's like like you're familiar with like the Patriot and the bullet? How much do they
cost and how do you fire them? Yeah, it's a good question. So there are some existing
solutions for like the counter you a S problem. Right. We see walk through it. Well,
yeah, walk through the solutions.
For sure. So there's electronic warfare.
Yeah. So GPS jamming, there's unreliable, right?
There's easy ways to defeat them.
You could make a more advanced drone and this is what we see.
And then you have the fiber optic cable.
There's fiber optics.
So this is like already defeating some of those solutions that we have.
Yeah.
And then there's like the Death Star laser beam, which is very expensive,
immobile, very heavy, requires a lot of power.
There's AI machine guns.
So like there's a million solutions.
And we were-
Who's your buddy that does that?
ACS.
ACS, got on the truck.
Yeah.
And so there's some really good solutions.
there for different use cases and we need more yeah we need more and they all have
pros and cons and they have like a layered so some of them like ACS is very short
range some of them like a Patriot is very long range and so we looked at it
who's gonna fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend a 10
million dollar missile to shoot it at 10 miles away yeah but we also don't want it
to get so close to us that it's you know right on top of us so what's the
range it's a 16 inch missile half mile half mile okay lightning round
favorite entrepreneur who do you look to for advice or
or as a role model.
We're looking at Dino at Seronic right now
and trying to match that growth trajectory
that they're having a lot.
Introduce yourself for the stream.
Who are you? What are you building?
Yeah, I'm Pernav.
We're building Meteor and this is for Han.
The AI native browser that's gonna kill Google Chrome.
Oh, okay, we got the browser wars going.
Let's go.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, this one.
Browse are you guys going after a comment too?
Yeah, absolutely everyone, yeah.
Okay, okay.
Well, what's the plan?
I mean, everyone is in style.
called Chrome at this point. Everyone runs it. It's so hard to rip it out. How do you,
how do you create a solution that's 10x better? Yeah, well, I mean, we all spend
seven or eight hours every day on our browser. We spend, we do most of our work on the
browser. Yep. Right. Most of it is redundant work. Yep. We're saying we can automate
all of that away. Okay. We're saying we want AI, we want to spawn AI agents that work
with you as your co-pilot to the web that can do your work for you. So you don't
have to waste your seven, eight hours. Okay. But, but like, what does that look like as I
use the product? How do you pitch it to somebody who says,
Chrome works well enough for me.
Right. Chrome does work well enough for you if you're okay wasting many hours a day.
Okay.
Well, worst thing is we're going to be time savings.
It's sort of like people pay thousands of dollars for personal assistance.
Sure.
Right?
People pay thousands of dollars for employees to hire, like to create automations.
We're saying we want to create virtual employees.
Sure.
That run on your browser.
Yeah.
Right?
And that's media.
So like, let's say you want to handle your calendar.
Sure.
Right?
Just automate all like meeting creation, you know, based on your emails.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur?
It's got to be Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs.
Okay.
Introduce yourself in the company.
Cool.
I'm Has Hubble.
I'm the founder of Pali.
We're bringing every contact and every conversation from every platform into one place.
Okay.
And using AI to help you keep track.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur, who you're learning a lot from?
My favorite entrepreneur of all time.
Actually would be Richard Branson.
And here's a fun story.
So when I was, I dropped out of high school.
And I remember when I was like 14 to 15, speaking to my mom about this,
I pointed to him as someone who was successful who dropped out.
Yeah.
Did he drop out of high school though?
Yeah.
And then 10 years later, I was invited to spend a week on his island with him.
No way, Nekker Island. And so it was like a very cool full circle moment.
He's been a great, great mentor over the years.
That's amazing. That's amazing.
Introduce yourself. What do you do?
Yeah, my name is Pietro. I'm the CEO of MCPU.
We help people use MCP, of course.
It'll be an open source that have tools and infrastructure.
I was going to say, what's the open source strategy?
Yeah, open source, I mean, is a no-brain.
The strategy is to open source.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, everything is free.
Okay, everything's free.
and then there's probably a GitHub repo that's growing
and some measured by stars or something like that.
Yeah, 7K stars.
So there we are.
I know, let's hear it for 7K stars.
Congrats.
And then at some point, do you want to be more like Red Hat Linux?
Like who are you looking to in terms of well run?
Is a GitLab like?
Superbase.
Superbase.
Okay. Break down.
How will their business model look like yours?
Yeah, because they have a bottom up approach.
They get developers and then those developers introduced
inside the company, the tool.
Sure.
And I love it.
Who is your favorite entrepreneur or someone in business
that you look up to?
Yeah, Brian Chesky, I think.
Brian Chesky.
There we go.
Introduce yourself for the stream.
Who are you?
What do you do?
Hey, everyone.
I'm on well, I'm the CEO of Closera,
and we build AI agents for commercial real estate.
Ooh, okay.
Nice.
Big industry.
What part of the commercial real estate stack,
the actual transaction?
Do you sit on the buyer side, the seller side?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Administration.
There's so much in commercial real estate.
Exactly.
It's a huge industry.
So yeah, my co-founder and I, our families
actually grew up in the commercial real estate
space are both our families are developers. Cool. Thank you. Let's hear it for the
developer. Developers, developers. It's time to build.
First, we say that in a different context. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, we kind of did a
survey of the whole market and we realized actually the most insane amount of
manual TDS boring work that of course can be automated with AI agents is actually
done by brokerages and so that's where we decided to focus. Favorite entrepreneur,
someone you look up to. Yeah, I think you know, classic answer definitely Steve Jobs.
Like reading that biography in middle school is like, well, it got me to want to
move to the valley, you go to Stanford, do YC.
The Walter Isaacson book.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Introduce yourself for the stream.
Who are you?
What are you building?
How's that my day going?
Yeah.
Hi, do I look at you?
Whatever you want.
Okay, I'm gonna look at you.
Fantastic.
I'm Anson.
We're building normal and we're automating
hardware testing and compliance.
Hardware testing and compliance.
Any specific verticals?
Are we talking like semiconductors, rockets,
spaceships, cars?
Yeah, we're starting with like robotics and drones
and other, any electrical components
that have like a radio part to it.
So that's mostly it.
Who is your favorite entrepreneur,
someone you look up to?
Can be anyone?
Favorite founder?
Can I say,
Sir John A. McDonald.
Who's that?
First Prime Minister of Canada.
Okay.
Oh, wow.
Started a company.
Did he started Canada?
Did he started Canada?
Okay, let's go.
Okay, we don't have any buttons for Canada here.
Yeah, I just is someone on American.
I don't know if I can fully endorse it,
but it's outside the box and I appreciate it for that reason.
Introduce yourself.
What are you building?
So I'm Aiden the CTO of Ethigo.
We're doing the AI operating system for local governments, starting with a 311 in a box.
311. What do you, is that information hotline?
Yes, the informational counterport to 911.
Okay.
So interestingly, only around 2% of cities have a 311 line, even though every city has 911.
Yeah, yeah.
And what we're doing with our first product is creating a 24-7 call center that's available to anyone from, if you're in San Francisco.
or if you're in like a city of 10,000 in the middle of Iowa, like you should have the same level of service.
So you call through 101, it automatically routes you to your service. And then if I'm in my city, it'll give me information.
What are the, what's the, obviously everyone knows textbook 911 call. Someone's breaking into my house.
What's the textbook 311 call? Yeah, I think is this road open or when does it trash pick up come, stuff like that?
Stuff like that. It definitely varies a lot more city to city. So we're alive in Florida and we're taking calls about,
all alligators roaming around the city.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm sure you've set the system up so that you can route to 911 if you need to.
Absolutely.
Right to animal control.
Kind of sit above the rest of the stack of all the different city services.
Yeah, and that's kind of why we started with this is because it gives us a really great insight into what are the calls and services that the city's providing.
So now we can go down and actually handle these workflows end to end with our agents.
Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Someone you look to you for advice.
Um, Peter Thiel.
Oh, that's a good.
First person to say PT.
All right.
So yeah, why is this sitting here?
What do you do?
Introduce yourself.
Who are you?
Yes, my name is Zane, founder of Knox Metals,
and we cut metal.
So we're trying to build the most efficient metal service centers
in America to empower every factory in America
to work with better margins and to move faster.
Okay, there's a lot of ways to cut metal.
He's doing the meme.
He's doing the meme.
He's re-industrial.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur?
Alex Carp.
Of all time.
Alex Carp. We had him on the show last
week. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you building? Yeah, so hi, my name is
Vihar and we're building Orange Slice. We're basically AI search infra to help
you find customers that already want your product. Who is your favorite
entrepreneur of all time? Oh, that's a good one. I'm not, I don't actually know
that many entrepreneurs in general. Someone that you read a biography of or look up to
or maybe just saw a recent interview with and thought was, yeah, I could learn
something from them. He's Lissan Al-Gaibe of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need his blank slate.
doesn't need any influence.
Well, honestly, I don't think,
I don't draw that much inspiration
just because I think the biggest motivating factor
in this might be contrarian,
it's not actually inspiration,
but like the fear of mediocrity of it not working out
has been way bigger for us.
That's the biggest reason I don't have that much inspiration.
But Eric from the rant, my co-founder used to work at Ramp.
So, I mean, they are absolutely killing it.
Introduce yourself, who are you, what do you do?
My name is Arlen. I'm building Nazoio, which is an API that gives more context to agents.
Okay.
So if you're a cursor, you can pretty much just go to cursor, index any documentation or codebase, and give it as a context to an agent.
What exactly is happening? I know cursor does kind of roll-ups of what's happening. There's some rag infrastructure that's popular.
What else is going on in the actual product to unlock value?
Yeah, so the two reasons I build this is because I was so fucking pissed when I would like go to Google.
copy paste all the docs and paste them right into cursor.
We've all been there.
Yeah, the memory is not persistent.
So they will fucking forget that in like two seconds.
And second one is that you also pollute context window,
which like causes context fraud.
It's actually a study done by chroma,
which is like a company.
Oh yeah, we know Jeff.
Yeah, saying like post-4,000 tokens, I think,
like the performance of annual LLM's goes like this.
So that's like the reason I build this.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Yeah, who the fuck the most money, bro?
Like Elon Musk, yeah.
Yeah, he's the risk man, bro.
Yeah.
But otherwise, yeah, Brian Cheschi is my goat.
I love Brian Chesky.
Vineshiosky, Founder Mode.
Would you mind introducing yourself and your company?
Sure.
So, hi everyone, I'm Alessia.
Vibeflow is the all in one solution
to be production-ready apps in no code.
Okay.
We've seen a lot of news recently that there's now
a whole industry of vibe code cleanup specialist.
What's your reaction?
Can vibe coding ever make it to production?
No.
No.
Not now, at least.
All the solutions out there are really broken.
And they can give you this wow effect in the front end,
but on the back of the back
side, there is so much to do and there is a huge needs. People are, like, they have
hair and fire problems and they need to solve these problems. The market is huge. Who's your
favorite entrepreneur of all time? My favorite entrepreneur is Taylor Swift. I'm a big fan and she is
amazing. Introduce yourself for the stream. What are you building? Well, I'm Joshua March. I'm
the co-founder and CEO of Veritas agent. We build AI agents for the consumer lending industry.
Okay. So interfacing with borrowers to help help doing sales, servicing collections for like fintech, banks, credit unions, services, that kind of thing.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? So there's this guy Felix Dennis, who was a British entrepreneur.
And he wrote this book called How to Get Rich, which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship.
What you actually do. Yeah, my name is Kevin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the prompting company, and we help product get mentioned in chat GPT.
Okay.
Okay, not just another generative engine optimization tool.
Yeah, yeah.
How do you differentiate?
Yeah, for sure.
So we plan the infrastructure layer.
We're not just creating articles for you.
We create shadow sites for our companies to influence all.
Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history?
In history.
Anyone, alive or dead?
Dude, Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs.
That's a great answer.
Introduce yourself.
Who are you?
What are you doing?
Bob.
Hi, I'm Bob.
Welcome to the show, Bob.
Ct all been better.
We build coding agents of firmware.
Okay, coding agents for firmware?
What device are you embedded?
They said it could be done.
So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers.
So think about any microchroll you can think of, STM 32, ESP, TI, NXP, any manufacturing.
When did you learn you wanted to do agents for coding agents for firmware?
That's good good question.
So I did hardware all my life.
You started like, you know, started when I was full doing robots, moving to more professional stuff in high school.
In college, let's go.
In college, I built humanoid.
I built human rights and then went to a startup,
the MetTag stuff, and then went to Tesla
worked on Robotaxi.
So we kind of saw that, I saw this problem from like,
you know, a 10% research lab to a trillion-dollar company.
Yeah, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Oh, Elon, has to be Elon.
Introduce yourself, what do you do?
Hey, my name is Sion.
We're Kalinda.
That's a great name.
We're basically a deep research for class action law firms.
Okay, interesting.
Yeah, let's give it up for litigation.
What's the secret sauce?
Is it just the bad data in, bad data out?
You gotta get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall.
It's not scraped into the pre-training weights of GPT5.
And so you have some cornered resource in the data,
or is it something in the architecture or something at the UI level?
Like where's the interesting?
Kind of like most startups at YC,
like a lot of it sits on the application layer.
Sure.
Most of it for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things.
can have maybe 10 million pages for litigation.
Oh wow.
So with that kind of scale,
you can't obviously just toss them to check.
Yeah, be a hassle, just upload another PDF.
Upload another PDF, upload another PDF.
Upload another PDF.
And then the kind of second thing is like most of the data
sort of sits in silos and kind of aggregating it all
and making it sort of, you know, comprehensive
like human would is.
Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Sam Olman.
Sam Olman.
Just because I've met it twice, but he's, yeah.
He's a goat.
Introduce yourself.
We haven't pitched yet.
Who are you?
What do you do?
Ralph Garcia, founder of Kernel, were crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your AI agent.
The browser wars.
The browser wars are on.
But this is basically computer use.
So it's API to go and interact with the website.
Yeah.
So nowadays, a lot of AI agents, you want to hook them up to the exact same tools that humans use.
And the browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day-to-day basis.
And so we're powering automations in healthcare, fintech, QA, lots of different use cases that
AI is really good at.
Who is your favorite entrepreneur in history?
Who do you look to?
Favorite entrepreneur?
How far back are we going?
We can go live or dead.
Literally thousands of you want.
You can go, you can go Edison.
Somebody has mentioned Jesus Christ.
Somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at Ramp.
So I mean, I didn't make the comparison, but it was made today.
I mean, cliche, I'll have to go Steve Jobs.
I mean, I grew up reading.
That was George's answer too.
And studying Apple, like, that was my first computer as a kid, so.
Who are you?
What do you do?
Explain yourself.
My name's Adi.
I'm a co-founder of Agent Mill.
It's the first email provider built for AI agents.
The key distinction, there we're not AI for your email,
we're email for your AI.
Okay.
Whoa.
Oh, interesting, like browser use for agents.
Okay, I was wondering about this because I go to agent mode
and oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like,
okay, it should just email the person to actually kick off
that process and it can't do it.
Yeah.
How much money are you making?
How much money are we making?
Yeah.
Did you share a KPI at Demodad?
Did you share progress?
Yeah, what KPI should we focus on?
We did not, but we love our customers.
Okay, but customers plural.
So I know there's more than one.
Yes.
Okay, I'm learning, I'm learning.
There we go.
Okay, did you come in with this idea
or did you pivot to it?
So we were trying to get rich quick.
Is that somebody vlogging out there?
Is that someone else?
Yeah, exactly.
We're like, host stories.
You're doing that YouTube.
I know what question I'm asking you next.
So we wanted agents to go on the internet,
make us money.
Farm free trials.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
Exactly.
And we realized, okay, it's kind of hard to give agents their own inboxes.
But they should have them.
Sequoia's talking about them.
Langchay's talking about them.
Agents need their own email inboxes.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history of live or dead?
I like Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett.
Yeah.
Interesting.
I think he's one of those guys who's like actually humble.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, it's not like, okay, hey, I'm worth a hundred million.
Yeah.
I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game.
He does.
So hopefully one day, you know, I could be like that.
Who are you?
Who are you?
What do you do?
Hey, I'm Audit.
I'm building RIF, which is Cursor for music production.
Ooh, that's fun.
Are you sitting, so Cursor sits on top of an open source ID.
Are you sitting on top of Ableton or something?
That doesn't exist for music.
So we actually built everything from scratch.
Okay.
Train our own models.
Sure.
We have our own like editor.
It kind of looks like garage band, but you can use AI tools to generate sounds and mess around.
Interesting.
Do you bring your own like samples or do you plug into a sample library?
Like where, or is all the samples?
AI generated. Yeah, we have like a user community of samples. But we also like let you generate your own.
Cool. And also like lots of bells and whistles to make it easier. Like for example, you can
hum out a melody and we'll play it on an instrument for you. That's very cool. Favorite entrepreneur
in history, Libber dead. Dr. Dr. Dre. Dr. Dr. Dre. Let's go. I knew I had to ask you.
Anyway, thank you so much for that. Introduce yourself. Great to have you. Who are you? What are you
building? I'm John Ferrar. I'm building Juxa, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on Earth.
with no hardware.
I feel like I've seen this on X.
You might have seen our, we had a pretty cool launch video.
Very cool, yeah.
Okay, so how does it work?
There's some company that spun out of Google
that just sold that does something similar,
it's like magnetics, but what, what, how are you doing it?
Yeah, so we basically use simulated technology
to basically render any environment using satellite imagery
or indoor floor plans into 3D.
So you do a geodeser.
You could put it that way, yeah.
We should have the company that way.
Yeah, and then we simulate millions of people
or objects moving through space,
simulate their sensor measurements, like,
accelerometer gyroscopes and then train models on that and then basically deploy to software
and then we can leverage the IMUs which are like sensors that are already into every phone
and most other devices today to track you.
This is adjacent to that like I can see you through your website. Lots of people love this.
Yeah if you've seen that film in like the dark night there's like a scene where Batman
kind of yeah I know that's how you can envision.
Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history live or dead? Oh my god.
I would say I would say I know the riff guys just said Dr.
but I'll say Drake because he just came out that Amazon store and Drake's my favorite artist.
Oh, there we go. What Amazon store? I don't know. You haven't seen this. He's,
this is his actual plot to take over Amazon music as a distribution platform, but he's working
with Amazon to sell all of his merch and all of his goods through their storefront and basically
facilitate all their distribution through there. So that's my cop-out answer, but I just love Drake.
We have a special guest with us opening the show. Introduce yourself for the stream.
Hi, my name is Peter Tuckman. I'm known as the Einstein of Wall Street. I'm not that smart. I just
look at you. Who was the first person? Did you give yourself that? Aaron Burnett gave me that.
And I've had a show on her show now on CNN for the last four months, ever since the beginning of the
sort of mini crash that was sort of self-induced by our, our, the new leader, the new, the new sheriff in town.
But correct, she called me in. So she used to work on the floor with CNBC. And she nicknamed it probably 20 years ago and called me Einstein and that sort of picked up.
But your latest collaborator is not on TV, but on streaming, correct?
Correct.
So I had the fortunity of actually meeting I Show Speed, right?
Young 20-year-old kid who I got invited.
So there's a team that's doing his stream thing.
There's a young guy named Adam Faze.
We came to our event.
We were here about a month and a half ago.
He came to a party event.
So Adam is something special.
He found me about four years ago and asked me if I would let him shoot me every day
walking out of the stock exchange for 30 days and just do what I do.
And we did this whole TikTok thing called Einstein Elementary, went viral like me and like
marching bands from Brooklyn and walking around with a 50 pound Hershey's Kiss and doing all this
crazy stuff. So you called me last week asked if I could bring speed to the floor and it didn't
seem appropriate at the time. And he said, well, how can I get you to meet him? And I said,
come up with an idea. And he's an idea guy. So he called me on Thursday morning. He said,
we're going to be at the bowl. Yeah. He's going to be at the bowl. Would you come and welcome
him to Wall Street. I said, absolutely. So they gave me a police escort. I went down there and met
this young guy and talked about some of the schick I do, you know, investing in stocks and not stuff
and about, you know, the fact that, you know, that everything that his life is based on is
actually a publicly traded company. And then instead of, you know, buying the next iPhone,
he could probably buy a couple shares of Apple and that maybe, you know, he could invest in his
future besides the amazing future. How did you receive it? He received it. Totally.
He talked about it a couple days down the road, so I got the message across.
And I've blown up.
I've got literally 200.
So I have now, I came in at 260,000 followers on Thursday, and now I have 419 and it's counting.
And I've got 40 million views on some of my posts.
7,000 DMs.
7,000 DMs.
I actually just did a video to answer that.
Anyway.
What was the first stock you ever bought?
You know what?
I did not ever buy a share of stock until recently.
I went through most of my career because I'm a registered trader, a broker on the floor.
And I'm not allowed to be in a stock for a customer and for myself in a 30-day period.
And so I built a trading strategy 20 years ago trading the S&P 500 based on information that I have as a broker on the floor.
And I trade all 347 names in the S&P every day.
So basically I made a decision years ago.
And also, money does a funny thing.
If I'm in a stock for myself and I get an order for a customer,
it's going to impact the way I trade.
And I didn't want that to ever be the case.
So I do well enough here as a commission broker that I said,
you know what, I'll invest in my kids, I'll put them through college.
And they both graduated without any dead, and that's where my money went.
What about some of the first stocks that you were brokering?
First stocks that I broker, so we're here.
We're talking about IPOs, right?
And so, you know, I probably have traded more IPOs than anybody on earth.
I've been in the crowd on all of them.
I mean, the first IPO, I think I'd
traded was LinkedIn, right? It was priced at 30, it opened at 60, ran up to 180, same day.
And that was where I got the sense of how amazing the enthusiasm around an IPO, because it's
based on confidence. Nobody knows it. And then, and so one of, I've had so many fun experiences
in IPOs, Jack Ma, Alibaba IPO, which was one of the biggest that we've ever had here.
He and I bonded. We spent, so the IPOs here take probably four or five hours. We just
opened Klarna, right? And the process behind that, which we do,
better than anyone in the world is the price discovery process that what goes on it's kind of like
building a building the way you open a stock the way we open a stock it takes time because it's a matter
of the information going back and forth it's a public offering so the public has to understand what's
going on and so we go back and forth with our customer it's kind of like if you put the bricks in
the mortar in the right place and you the way a stock opens if it's built correctly is going to
purport the way it trades forever now it doesn't guarantee it's going up but it will have structure
and foundation. And you know, you go to NASDAQ, nothing against NASDAQ, but if you go to
NASDAQ, it's fully electronic. So it opens when the buyers and sellers meet in the electronic
marketplace. Here it's different. So then you're going to see what you see in NASA's. It'll go up,
it goes down. There's no, there's no guardrails, right? So here things are a lot different.
So Jack Ma and I spent four hours together in the IPO. He and are very short, so we bonded on the
fact that we were the shortest people in the crowd. We were on the same level, not not financially.
Because he became a very wealthy guy again on that day.
Someone on our team actually was here at that IPO as well.
Amazing time.
And then we've had, look, then, you know, the whole landscape has changed when we were completely blew up the whole IPO market.
And that affected.
Yeah, tell us that story because I remember the S1 going out, but then did they get out?
Well, what ended up happening?
Look, as I said, it's built on confidence.
And when, you know, everybody, it was huge money put into Wework.
He was lauded by, he came down to the floor many times.
And it wasn't until the night before everyone needs to know this, that on the end of the road show is when all the financials are given out to the public.
And it turned out that it was all smoke and mirrors and he had spent all the money on prostitutes and blow.
And that the company had no basis behind it.
And so it was aborted.
The deal was aborted.
And what that did was it changed amazingly enough that one stock could change the landscape of IPOs for years.
It literally everyone said.
So when you said, guys here windows closed.
That's what closed.
That's what closed.
And I remember Jim Kramer on Mad Money was saying,
we don't want this.
We don't want this.
Exactly.
Remember that quote.
And so to think that you know something about what's going on,
and we didn't know anything,
literally until the night before made such a huge impact on the market.
It literally has taken a couple of years to grow out of that.
Before that, we had had some really wonderful robust years in remax and a bunch of stock.
They would open, a huge premiums.
We were trading 10 IPOs a day.
Give us a quick history on Klarna, right?
Because Klarna has tried to get out a couple,
times. Okay, so I don't know the history about Klein. All I know is that I watched how it opened here.
So it did take a little while. It did open at 52, I think. And so it's not trading. You know what?
It's hard to know. So what's important about it is where the bids are, where the offers are, and how
the foundation looks. So where the bodies are buried within the stock when it opens, right? There was
enough stock at 52 bid on balance, which is what it's called. So stocks pair off that are priced accordingly.
So four point something million shares open, that means that they were market orders.
They had no limits to them and that's they, that was good.
They paired themselves off.
It was a 52 bid for 300,000 on balance meant that there was a stabilizing bid, whether it was
by the Goldman Sachs the company or the banker or not.
But that's what made it open at 52.
If there had been more to buy at the market, it would have opened higher or more to sell.
It would have opened lower.
It opened at 52.
It did trade up to 5720 on a small bit.
70,000 shares traded off.
and then it came in.
It's trading at a couple dollars lower,
which is reasonable.
It does not have the power and the impact
that Figma and Bullish did.
Figma and bullish.
So, but all three of these are relatively,
like, is there a specific strategy
that these IPOs have had in terms of like pricing
at a, at what feels like,
very reasonable, like.
So you know what, they're pricing it based on the reaction
to what the investment community is willing to give.
It is.
So the other ones got priced at 30.
There was oversupply, over demand at 30.
They opted to 32, 35.
That's how it will go.
So the last night when they go out to the road show
to give out allocations,
they will get a sense of where that valuation should be,
and then that's where they will give it up.
They left some talk on money on the table,
as did those other IPOs.
The other ones opened at 90 and went to 117.
That was bullish.
And Figma also traded a huge premium.
My gut is that the sectors that they were in, there's a lot of pressure on this sector right now.
Totally.
And so those sectors were more ICloud and AI-based, right?
And so I think that's why there was a little more pop to it.
Well, we know you have to get out of here.
Thank you so much for stopping by the show.
We'd love to back sometime.
Anytime.
I'm going to talk for another two hours.
Let's go.
So thank you so much.
Love it.
Let's go.
We need to dive into the Apple and the iPhone announcement briefly.
obviously there's been talked about.
It happened a couple days ago.
But the post that stuck out to me,
there were a few about the design,
but the big one was that the iPhone 17 Pro
now has more graphics power
than an M2 MacBook Air.
I have, this is a MacBook Air.
I don't know if this might be the M3 or M4 version.
Would have clocked you as an air guy?
I just went for it because I was like,
I'm traveling more, I'm less in workstation mode.
And so, like, let me give this one a try.
And let me see.
I have the M4.
So I think I have more power here than the iPhone 17 Pro.
But even just two years ago, it's crazy to think how quickly the chips are shifting from workstation, which is huge, you know, laptop to phone.
And so I wanted to talk about what the downstream implications of this are.
Did you see the camera functionality?
Apparently, if you take a, you can take a photo holding your phone vertically.
and it will give you the landscape.
Yeah, because again, I think it's a square sensor
that's maybe 48 megapixels.
Are you feeling about the orange?
Do you think this is Tim Cook signaling
that he's a BTC maxi?
Oh, I thought it was him giving a little nod to Gary Tan,
my combinator.
That's one or one of the other.
Clearly.
It had to be one of the other.
It is the colors, I like, I like orange.
I think it's an underrated color in general,
but still the color options.
were interesting.
Like, no,
Matt,
you would have thought
they would have done
a Matt Black.
They didn't do
Matt Black this year.
They just,
wow.
So they have a silver
and like a blue,
I think.
I like orange.
I think it's a cool,
bold color.
I think it's one of the ways
to stand out.
It's McLaren Orange.
It looks like F1.
Maybe it's a nod to that.
Who knows?
But they're having fun with it.
Hopefully next year,
the color I'm pulling for,
ramp yellow.
Can you imagine the ramp yellow iPhone?
It just might happen. Maybe we'll make it happen. But on the tech side, you know, people were pretty, like, there were a couple takes early that were pretty, like, bearish. Like, oh, like, nothing changed. Nothing changed. And Ben Thompson summed it up pretty well. Tim Cook.
I mean, you had a funny banger about this. I mean, Tim, Tim Cook posted, he did post the morning of. And he was, like, days like this make Apple. You know, like, like, basically, like hyped it up as though it was going to be this sort of dramatic.
announcement and I think people were pretty yeah pretty let down at this point they if it's not a
change in the overall form factor like you're going to folding phone it's not going to be as easy
just to talk about completely um but at the same time it has a bunch of it has a bunch of improvements
that I think will have downstream effects that might be interesting and might actually have kind
of these like viral moments and yeah I'll get into my thesis here so uh it has a vapor chamber
in it that allows it to cool.
So if you're in the sun or you're running,
you know, you're running some heavy duty
app, you're not going to get your,
your phone's not going to be as hot anymore.
50% more RAM, obviously that's important for AI.
And then they have a new chip that's designed
with the LLM transformer
architecture in mind.
So the Apple A series of chips,
they've always been somewhat AI optimized,
but more
for just broader machine learning tasks.
Now, they're doing the same thing
that Open AI is doing with,
Nvidia and Broadcom on ship design.
Same thing that Google DeepMind, TPU
team is doing over at Google,
and Anthropics working with Amazon
and Traneum. Here's my post. Introducing
iPhone 4,000, a
newer, better iPhone that's lighter, faster,
newer and better.
Where did this land?
How many likes did this wind up getting?
Six thousand.
Six thousand?
And the funny story here,
the little inside baseball,
Jordy posted this exact post like five minutes earlier.
Well, so, so I originally had this post as a draft.
Yeah.
And then I altered it.
Yep.
And I posted it and it completely, I had a different picture and I did iPhone 472.
And it was just completely flopping.
It got like one like on like 300 impressions.
Like people hated it.
Yeah.
The timeline hated it.
I just went back to this version, posted it.
And then it completely ripped.
So never give up.
Never give up.
Never give up.
You think you have a good bit.
But the,
The funny thing here, I mean, obviously it is funny that Apple always comes down.
It's like, it's our most powerful iPhone ever because it's like, well, if it was a less,
if you guys messed up and accidentally created a less powerful iPhone, you would just keep
selling the current one.
You're never going to come out and be like, this year we're selling one, the latest iPhone,
but it's less powerful because just sell the last one then.
Just be like no new iPhone because we couldn't make it any more powerful.
Yeah, yeah.
We actually made it.
We made it perfect.
We made it perfect.
Yeah, I mean, how are you feeling about the air?
I think that's going to sell incredibly well.
I don't know.
I'll need to, like, feel it and, and, uh, and try it.
I've never had any iPhone that's not just like the biggest and most of, like the biggest screen,
the maxed out one.
I've always gone for like the, the most power, the biggest one.
I've actually considered carrying an iPad mini just as a phone because I'm so big that my
pockets are big enough to carry an iPad mini.
Yeah.
No, no.
I was feeling it.
And I was like, you can get it with cell service.
And so I think you can get a phone number on there.
And so you can just have, like, pull out your giant iPad Mini.
But I never did that.
I've always just stuck to, like, the Pro Max, the big one, the big screen.
But it's easy.
The, I don't know, the interesting thing about the iPhone Air was this, you know,
the whole computer is in the camera bump now.
And basically everything that drops down is just battery and screen.
battery and screen all the way down.
And so people are wondering, like, you know,
they could clearly take out the battery in the screen,
maybe make, like, a pin.
Like, they're getting so good at miniaturizing,
like, what it means to be a computer,
that they can put that in all sorts of different things.
I would be, would have been really excited to have an iPhone
that doesn't, that will sit flat on a surface
without a case on it.
Yeah.
I haven't used cases in many years.
I just like the feeling of the phone.
It is crazy that they've never tried that.
It's so funny. That's just perpetually, like,
on, you know, just give me like a flat surface.
Like, I'm happy for the phone to be as thick as necessary to just give me a flat surface.
And it looked like they were going to do that with the iPhone pro because it has this wider notch.
So at least if you did, if you did the notch evenly all the way across.
I guess it might be nice if it's kind of like, yeah, that's fine, I guess.
I don't know.
But it's also so funny, the idea of like you have this incredible camera.
Yeah.
And then you're just like putting it on like, I really want you to buy a case.
Like, it's like a lot of the.
product design seems driven by
I don't think that's the real
I don't think that's the real reason.
I think it's, I think it's, I think it's genuinely
like people don't like heavy phones.
And so you have to balance like,
you need the optics of a camera,
the certain thickness,
and then you need the phone to be thin
so that people actually carried around
and aren't like, this thing's heavy.
Tinfoil hat, yes, it's the case.
I just don't think they,
I don't think they make that much money.
How much money do you think they make from cases?
I mean, they're adding,
what percentage of people do you think
when they go to that buy an iPhone buy an Apple case.
I would,
I would estimate that it's less than 1% of their overall revenue.
Cases, yeah.
Totally, but you're talking to the goat of profit maximization, Tim Cook.
There's just so many other ways.
I feel like you could sell 1% more iPhones if you,
if you actually choose this odd choice because people are like,
well, yeah, it's the lightest iPhone.
It's lighter than the Samsung one.
Yeah.
It's thinner.
It's lighter.
It looks great.
And then there might,
And then there might be something about like the notch kind of holding on your finger.
And so you can actually hold the phone easier with that as opposed to if it was just like fully, fully smooth.
Anyway.
But yeah, I mean, when you start thinking of when you start like the incremental sales from like design driven decisions like this.
Yep.
I do think it would be significant.
Anyway.
Anyway.
Huge keynote filmed on an iPhone, obviously.
a lot less graphics this time around.
My take on the iPhone Pro
was we're getting to the point
where you could run an LLM on device.
And even if it's not Apple intelligence,
you know, through that API,
just the ability to actually distill something
that's like GPT4 level
and have it be free.
Not even an API call that you need,
not even cheap on a per token basis,
but actually just have something
that you can direct,
basically drag and drop. Cost of the energy. Cost of the energy. And no one thinks about it because
they charge on the edge because they charge their phone every night anyway. So I was talking to
Tyler about this earlier. Try and put into context how powerful an LLM running on device could be
with this next iPhone. Because currently people have done it. I feel like people have distilled
models to the point where they can run locally on phones. But they're not fast or they're not smart.
but it feels like we might be at a point where you get to some sort of like touring,
touring test passing plus not waiting forever.
Chad is asking if it's Nika Rosberg.
It is.
It is. It is.
The former F-1 Formula One world champion.
And now a capital allocator.
Now a capital allocator.
So yeah, Tyler, what is your take as this gets into people's hands?
How solid do you think the actual interactions with LLMs could be on device?
Yeah, so I think it's 12 gigabytes now, up from 8.
Yep.
So you can probably run like a very solid like 7 billion parameter, like not super quantized model.
We've had those for a long time that are like very solid.
Like obviously they're going to pass turning tests, whatever.
Sure.
You're probably not going to be using it for like doing your hard physics homework.
Yeah.
But like most like things that you want from like a non-device model like,
helping look at your emails or like doing stuff that like you would think of like
like a really good Siri product would do yeah I think it's like totally capable of doing that
um I mean it's like I don't think that Apple intelligence was bad because the hardware was
lacking it was like like I mean you can it'll be a little bit slower probably to run on cloud
maybe um yeah I mean with my experience with Apple intelligence was it
was just just instantiated in very odd ways.
They didn't really have like a killer app there.
And it was like a bunch of different things that kind of piped in.
And you could like highlight text and then just say rewrite this.
All sort of like very incremental games.
Boughts summaries.
Yeah.
Oh, the summaries are botched.
But sometimes that might be the best feature actually.
Yeah.
It's hilarious.
It's a feature, not a bug.
We just saw, you just saw it in our group chat where I posted some fake news.
and Apple summarizes it.
Gabe says shouldn't be,
shouldn't Tyler be back in school?
Gabe, you must have missed the episode,
but Tyler is taking a gap semester.
He is riding with us.
Yeah. And so I think it's,
I think there's like,
there's something magical about getting
the ability to inference
a GPT4 level model
on the edge for free.
Like, you can,
you can quibble about the level of
intelligence that is, but it is
actually too cheap to meter because you won't even have to set up an API key. And so you can
vend in a GPT4 level model and then go viral and not have a bill show up and not need to think about
monetization, not need to think about anything that's a drag on your just pure virality. You can have
a free app that just grows and grows and grows and grows and figure out the monetization later.
And I feel like this sets us up for maybe something interesting to happen in consumer.
We haven't really had that moment of, you remember the lens of moment, the magic avatars, you upload your
picture and it turns you into Superman or something.
And then the studio Ghibli moment, we haven't had that many, like, viral apps that are purely based on
LLM interactions, like text interactions.
There's been a couple, like, there was one called like Generative Dungeon.
Do you remember this?
It was like a dungeon crawler, text thing.
So it would say, like, you walk up to the Dragon's Lail.
What do you want to do?
And you could just type, like, I brandish my sword.
And then it would say, like, the dragon.
That was like GPT, too.
Yeah, there was super low level, right?
So imagine that.
Plus, like, but you can do it on device at a reasonable level.
And you can bring in some other UI elements from the iPhone,
bringing the camera, bring in GPS,
bring in, you know, all the other tools that are available just in the iOS,
like, Swift, like, you know, developer kits, the SDKs.
I feel like there will be a ton of people that are just building cool, interesting things on the iPhone
that could potentially go viral and then become real businesses.
Yeah, I don't think this will be that, like, meaningful for, like, Apple Intelligence,
because it's not, like, that's, like, a product issue.
It's not, like, a hardware issue.
But, yeah, I definitely think for, like, third-party developers, this will be, like, pretty big.
You can do, like, if you make some random game, you can now have, like, avatars or whatever.
Yeah.
Like, if you make the SDK really easy where, like, it's very, very easy.
easy to inference an LM.
You don't have to figure out how to download and then do inference and all that stuff.
If they like abstract that away, I think it could be interesting.
And I just feel like we've seen so many, there's been so many companies.
We talked to some folks at Demo Day who are doing this where they were like,
we have this cool AI agent that like scrapes your emails and does this.
And it all is predicated on you installing a Mac app, which is a really, really hard thing to do.
Whereas like, yeah, how many Mac apps do you think you've installed this year?
Oh, it's super rare.
It's super rare.
You know, I got something to put the decks together.
Like, I literally have a Chrome.
Like, that's the one I installed.
I'm looking at my home row and it's like, it's just crumb.
And this is why everybody's obsessed with the browser.
Truly, truly, because if you can get people over there, then you're there.
But I have installed apps.
And I've installed little tiny apps.
We were talking about the workout tracking app strong.
That I saw my friend at the gym, he was using an app to track as well.
workouts. I said, what app is that? I went and download it. You went and downloaded it. It was very
easy for that app to like loosely go viral. And it's a free app. But it doesn't have any like AI.
It doesn't really need any AI. But you could imagine that the viral coefficient of, of someone
downloads an app. They have a magical experience with some twist on top of an LLM, something storytelling,
something, astrology. Who knows what it'll be? I can't predict it. It's as hard to predict as
Instagram or Uber, but it's unlocked by having this ability for free on the iPhone. And then
people are sharing screenshots of, oh, I had this hilarious interaction or this was incredible. Or I love
this app. They create some viral loop. They do some Nikita beer type stuff. And then everyone's
downloading the app. And then it gets actually really, really big. And I don't think it's
going to be a competent. I don't think it's going to compete with chat chappity. I think it's going to
be a completely different thing. And it's very hard to predict. But it feels like we might be seeing it.
Yeah. And it's going to require some, like, really, you know, cracked level of creativity,
like what we saw with Harry Potter, Valenciaga, where it's like the technology existed.
And then someone came up with the great idea to actually go, like, instantiate it.
So if you're going to be walking that app up, you're going to do it in figma.com.
Think bigger, build faster.
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You can get started for free.
The Wall Street Journal was also covering the Apple's iPhone Air.
they had a whole interview, they had really good coverage of the iPhone event. There was a few,
there was one thing in the reporting from the Wall Street Journal. I don't have this particular
article actually, but they did an article with the Wall Street Journal and Apple revealed that
I believe they said the majority of iPhones, 51% or more, that are shipping to America are going
to be made in India. And I'm not sure if it was this cycle, but it seemed like they were taking
the tariff stuff really seriously, moving the actual manufacturing capacity around. Obviously,
Foxcon, their manufacturer partners at Taiwanese company, and so they're worried about
geopolitical risk as well. And so just another, another data point around Tim Cook, he is not
loudly shouting like, America, I'm all in reindustrial. I.
but he is making moves.
What was the number he threw out at the dinner last week?
Wasn't it?
I don't know if he had a number.
Because who was it?
It was, Zuck had a number.
And did Apple have a number two?
That was $600 billion or something?
Apple has thrown out a number at one point.
You're completely right.
My point is that we've seen a few data points.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The number of thank you.
This is a lot.
But we've seen he's invested in some.
semi, some rare earth, uh, developments in the United States and starting to think about
manufacturing internationally. And, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
bullish bet on Tim Cook is that like, if he was able to set up this in China and he's the
reason he can set it up somewhere else, because he's the guy who did it. And so, uh, even though
he hasn't been really loud about his moves, because obviously if he says like, oh yeah, I'm not going to
be manufacturing in China anymore than like, like, like, uh, even though, uh, he hasn't been. And, like, he has been,
his important business partners over there are probably going to be like, well, yeah, like,
we're not going to take your business seriously anymore. There are a ton of different geopolitical
consideration. It's such an iconic line from the dinner. What is that? Hook says, I've always enjoyed
dinner and interacting. Yeah, if you're getting dinner this weekend with one of your boys, just tell
how to say something that like no one can cancel you for. It's like, I've always enjoyed
dinner and interacting. Two things I've enjoyed. He's a dinner and he's a dinner and he's a
He's not saying I've always enjoyed dinner with you.
Yep.
And interacting with you.
He's just saying, I've always enjoyed dinner.
Incredible.
He putting it on a claim.
I feel like for watching somebody,
like I was watching the Tucker Sam Altman interview,
and there's a certain level of polish that some of these CEOs have
when they get to a certain level of media training and public speaking experience where
I think of them more as like word rotators than word cells or shape rotators.
Like, they can, they can so quickly, like, shift a sentence to be like, like that.
Like, so perfectly balanced where you're like, wow, every word in that sentence was
calculated so that it's the rides this perfect line like, uh, like Sam was going back and forth
with Tucker and Tucker's, I didn't accuse you.
I didn't accuse you.
And you, and if you run back the transcript, you're like, yeah, technically, he didn't.
And it was not an accusation.
But then, you know, they're, they're rotating the sentences around to try and like,
paying each other. It's like watching a wrestling match. It's crazy. Tim Cook said they would be
investing $600 billion. 600 billion. Yeah. Okay, so Apple says the majority of iPhones shipped to the
US are now assembled in India, meaning they face no tariff. Yet Indian suppliers aren't yet
capable of delivering as many of the pro models that U.S. consumers demand. So most of those
still come from China. So this is the majority of iPhones in total because Apple makes a ton of those,
but they can't make the leading edge.
And then the other thing that everyone always talks about with this like assembled in India
is not the same as fully manufactured in India.
Obviously, the advantage to Chinese manufacturing prowess is that you'll walk across the street
and there's a CNC shop with 25,000 CNC machines that can just immediately make you any part
and make a million of those parts if you need.
So obviously it's going to be a long road for them to set up.
manufacturing anywhere other than uh other than china but uh it does see i would love to understand
tim's actual strategy here because i don't think he's saying i'm going to invest he's not going to be in a
huge hurry to invest that 600 billion right uh he may you know he may not actually believe it's
it's at all the right decision for apple and he's just feeling like he needs to yeah placate the admin
and then if in and then in 2028 comes around and you just you know can pull back or pull out there's also like
so much to eight 600 billion of capax over what five years or something like that like that like
that includes HQ that includes data centers for iCloud that need to be local uh if you're
streaming the f1 movie on apple tv plus you don't want that stream coming from a data center across the
world necessarily. It needs to be cash locally. So there are like so many different pieces of the
business building more Apple stores. Like that counts as Kappex if they build them and they, you know,
there. So 600 billion doesn't necessarily mean like, yes, like we're building like the one plant.
Because, you know, this is like a rainforest of complexity that actually delivers the,
the iPhone. It's not just like one iPhone factory, please. It's like a whole network of things.
Battery life appears to be a challenge for the air. Apple always says,
like all-day battery life, but people are like...
Allegedly.
What kind of all day are we talking?
Are we talking scrolling for 18 hours?
Are we talking a proper scroll?
Proper doom scroll?
Apple announced a few battery accessory that will attach to the air.
And obviously, that's no longer as thin.
The company added what it calls a plateau on the back of the air and pro models,
adding thickness at the top of the device to fit bigger and hotter chips.
Not a bump.
It's a plateau.
It's a plateau.
Yeah.
Oh,
they're rebranding.
Maybe they're signaling that we're,
maybe this is Gartner,
hype cycle coded.
The plateau,
productivity.
I mean,
they have plateaued in productivity for sure.
The hype cycle,
they've been through it.
They're like,
first hype cycle?
First hype cycle?
I've been here.
I'm plateauing.
I'm getting productive.
Open AI,
the nonprofit is going to control
its for-profit arm
and own equity valued
at $100 billion.
I believe this will make it
the most,
highly valued nonprofit or like the most profitable nonprofit in world history the best funded
nonprofit right uh and it is remarkable to think about what that will be like people have kind
of written off the nonprofit is like it's going away like it is not going away like it will
continue to be a big back it's it's it's incredibly back uh funded forever essentially to do
a ton of interesting things i think we're going to see interesting things about come out of that
organization. But anyway, the news, this is from the journal and we'll and we'll break this down,
but Nick has it summarized here. OpenAI LLC will be converted into a Delaware public benefit
corporation. OpenAI non-profit retains control of the new public benefit corporation. The
nonprofit will hold $100 billion plus of equity in the public benefit corporation. The PBC structure
enables raising large amounts of capital for the mission, which obviously they're already doing.
They're still aligned with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity.
That's good.
It also aligned with like your shareholders.
If you're just a normal C Corp, I know they're a public benefit corporation, but if you're just normal C corp, like shareholders are humans.
Let's make sure it benefits the shareholders.
That will by definition benefit humanity.
But specifically they're saying all of humanity.
Even if you're not a shareholder, AGI should still benefit you, which is a noble cause.
Open AI and Microsoft signed a non-binding MOU for the next phase.
is the partnership a definitive agreement is still being negotiated open a i says it's engaging
remember in delaware as it stands Microsoft gets 20% of open a i's revenue and for the big man
something like man satia something like that uh which it felt like a stretch to me that that that would be
sustainable given the uh looming costs that uh open a i needs to incur obviously they're ramping revenue
really quickly yeah but you have broadcom to pay you have oracle
to pay you have all these but it is kind of revenue you know it's not the same as being like
you're crazy fix yeah yeah yeah it's not figure out exactly um but yeah but still it's a lot of you know
the the there's these companies are under margin pressure already and and wasn't the original deal that
it would it would be 20% up until they paid a hundred billion dollars or something like that
there was something where like it eventually ran its course i believe it had an ending and i think
that's what's justifying a lot of the underwriting because the lesson from Google, the lesson from Facebook, the lesson from, you know, Microsoft and the rest of the hyperscalers was that you needed your DCF models to be 20 or 30 years into the future, right? Yeah. And so if you just, if you, if you, if you didn't take into account the third decade of growth, you were undervaluing it. It was originally reported 20% through 2030. Okay.
which still is.
I don't think a lot of investors are scared by thinking about value in 2035.
I think they're fine with that now.
I think they're saying like, yeah, I have a 10-year fund.
And realistically, all the best venture investments, SpaceX is still hanging out in the portfolio
20 years later.
They got continuation funds.
I think that a lot of investors are actually fine to say, yeah, this company is going
to be like, you know, maybe a financial mess for 10 years.
But if I'm super confident, it's going to be a money printing machine in 20, I'll do the deal
day. Yeah. I think that's a wrap. It's still insane to think that the deal ever got done in the first
place. Is it a Microsoft deal? Yeah, if you were if if if you talked to a founder and they were like,
yeah, I was running a fundraise and like, you know, ended up taking this deal. I got the valuation
I wanted, but ultimately it gave up 20% of revenue. Off the top too. So not 20% of like
profits, but like a 20% tax on gross revenue. Yeah. Just for the just still 2030.
And the founders like, well, it doesn't matter that much because I'm in this for like 20 years.
You're really, yeah.
Most, most companies do not get the pass on that.
Yeah, very few businesses, very few businesses in the world, especially like highly competitive, you know, categories can sustain a 20% tax off the top.
Yep.
And still really produce any profits or be functioning at all.
Obviously, I'll push you off.
What if your, what if your businesses, uh, mobile games in the app store?
You've been, in fact, even bang Apple with 20%, 30% tax off the top for everything.
There's a bunch of examples.
Like, Nvidia could do this too, right?
And they sort of are through the, yeah, yeah.
So I don't know.
I mean, I agree with you.
Like it is, it is a crazy, crazy deal,
unprecedented in a million ways, but everything about the entire Open AI story is unprecedented.
Yeah.
Unprecedented to start as a nonprofit.
Unprecedented to have, who are the co-founders?
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel.
Like you have like seven different co-founders who have, uh,
A bunch of co-founders have gone off and start direct competitors.
That doesn't happen very often.
Usually people are like, I got bags in the category.
I'm going to go work on something else.
Yeah.
There's a bunch of weird stuff.
