TBPN - Who Is Soham Parekh? Erebor News Leaks, Microsoft Scales Back AI Chip Plans and Cuts 9,000 Jobs, Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching | Deedy Das, Emily Sundberg, Mert Mumtaz, Zak Kukoff, John Kim, Amit Jain

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

(01:35) - Top Stories (38:42) - Crypto Bank Erebor Rises from SVB Ashes (46:12) - Microsoft Scales Back AI Chip Plans (54:11) - Sam Altman Slams Meta (57:40) - Deedy Das, a principal at Menlo Ventures, has a background in engineering and product leadership, including roles at Google and Facebook, and was a founding team member at Glean. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from engineering to venture capital, emphasizing the value of technical expertise in investing, and highlights his focus on early-stage investments in AI/ML, next-generation infrastructure, and enterprise software. (01:28:56) - Emily Sundberg is a New York-based writer and director, best known for her daily business newsletter, *Feed Me*, which has garnered a dedicated readership of around 60,000 subscribers. In the conversation, she discusses her journey from launching *Feed Me* during the COVID-19 pandemic to its current success, emphasizing the importance of authentic storytelling and community building in the digital age. She also highlights the evolving media landscape, noting how independent creators are reshaping traditional journalism by fostering direct engagement with their audiences. (02:01:28) - Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs and a prominent advocate for Solana, discusses the emergence of tokenized private company shares on blockchain platforms, highlighting initiatives by Republic and Robinhood. He notes that Republic's offering involves mirrored assets with a $5,000 investment cap and a one-year lock-up period, while Robinhood plans to launch on Arbitrum before transitioning to its own optimized chain, emphasizing the importance of regulatory compliance and the potential for increased competition in the space. Mumtaz also addresses the challenges of integrating real-world assets on-chain, underscoring the need for clear regulatory frameworks and the ability to implement controls within decentralized finance to manage market risks effectively. (02:18:19) - Zak Kukoff, Chair of the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates, has a background in venture capital and entrepreneurship, including founding and selling an education technology company. In the conversation, he discusses his Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso watch, a gift from his family for his 30th birthday, highlighting its significance during a period when he and his wife were in different time zones. He also provides insights into recent political developments in Washington, D.C., focusing on the challenges faced by Congress due to a major storm that disrupted travel, affecting members' ability to vote on critical legislation. (02:27:23) - John Kim, co-founder and CEO of Paraform, a recruiting platform, discusses the company's recent $20 million Series A funding led by Felicis, bringing their total funding to $25 million. He explains that Paraform connects companies with specialized recruiters to fill critical roles, emphasizing the increasing importance of recruiters in the evolving tech landscape. Kim also highlights the growing demand for forward-deployed engineers and the role of AI in enhancing, rather than replacing, human recruiters. (02:43:19) - Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Luma AI, discusses the development of multimodal models that integrate audio, video, language, and images to advance beyond current large language models. He highlights Luma's video generation models, which are being utilized by Hollywood, advertising agencies, and individual creators, serving tens of millions of users. Jain also addresses the transformative impact of AI on industries like Hollywood and advertising, emphasizing the need for adaptation to rapidly evolving AI technologies. (03:10:58) - Who Is Soham Parekh? Timeline in Turmoil! 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.devFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Welcome to the show. The current thing has come in hot off the presses. It's Aribor, a new crypto bank, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Anderall founder, Palmer Lucky, are launching Aribor, a digital bank built for crypto and tech startups. You know what I'm saying, John? What do you say?

of the century was going back and buying up all the all the Tolkien domain.coms you would have become a billionaire yourself if you just bought all the dot com. There was a lot of debate over whether or not the the the the Tolkien the Lord of the Rings naming scheme had kind of run its course. Right? Because people were knocking it off. Non-founders fund companies were starting to use the names. Not going to say any names. Oh. That is just. That is insane. That is insane. I can't believe no one's ever said that.

I'm not going to dig into that anymore because we'll let you dig into it for yourself. But we have news from Zach Kukoff on the show yesterday. He's coming back on the show today. He's our Washington correspondent. He says, this is great news about the new, the new Lord of the Rings themed bank, Aribor. Zach Kukov says, this is great news. J.P. Morgan, HSBC, etc.

haven't fully filled the gap that SVB and First Republic left an insider run risk forward tech bank is much needed backers include Palmer Lucky Founders Fund Peter Thiel Joe Lonsdale etc I think Lux is in this too I don't know if that's public yet then we'll have to figure that out Scoop but there obviously the Silicon Valley elite are rallying around we love to see it this this new project so they're calling it the next SVB for hard tech the filing says says Arabor wants to be the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stable coin transactions, an unusual boast meant to soothe OCC examiners while still holding stable coins on its own balance sheet. That's right. Who it serves and why Columbus. It's start, this is, this bank's going to be in Ohio. Target customers are AI, crypto, defense tech, and advanced manufacturing startups. A digital only model will be legally headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with a satellite office in New York to tap Wall Street.

The capital of capital. The capital of capital. Very exciting. So yeah, we'll have to dig into this. We're having Paul. We're lucky on the show soon. We'd love to hear more about the plan here. And I agree.

SBB was a special, special institution. It was very sad when it went away. There's been a gap in the founder dinner market. They were a huge funder of founder dinners. That and also mortgages. That's right. Big on the mortgage front. I mean, it really was a crazy failure where you could have like $40 million

but illiquid and be making not get a $200,000. And you couldn't buy a house. And it's just like, okay. And then you're strapped with this question of like, okay, do you raise your salary and start raising burn just to get a mortgage and stuff? Or do you put it on the balance sheet of the company? That's been done before.

Yeah, it's crazy that within whatever a month, we lost SVB and First Republic, the two funds that really served our industry. So it makes sense to build back. It is funny that Zach said, we need to. risk forward tech bank because it was risky well yeah what's interesting is they didn't get burned on the on the startup stuff yeah they got burned on treasuries the least risky thing ever but you know no one was expecting a duration mismatch yeah the duration mismatch anyway in other news Microsoft scales back ambitions for AI

chips to overcome delays as the information and Neo Margana here is asking Grock what were what were they trying to do with their chip ambitions and Brock says Microsoft chip ambitions aimed to reduce reliance on suppliers like Nvidia optimize for performance for Azure AI and co-pilot at lower costs. They develop chips like the Azure Maya AI accelerator for AI tasks and Azure Cobalt CPU for cloud workloads. However, delays such as the Maya 200 chip postponed to 2026 and design challenges led to scaled back plans.

So Google has the TPU, Amazon has inferential, Apple has the M1, an M2 M3 chip, all the hyperscalers are getting in on the custom silicon action. What was the name of the quantum chip that Sautier was teasing on? That's Majorana. Majorana. Majorana. But that's still in the works. That's still in the works, but that's a completely separate thing.

And that, you know, that is such a different fork in the tech tree that you're not going to be writing, you're not going to be like, oh yeah, we have some Kuda code that's inferencing some, you know, large language model. And let's just run it on quantum. It's like you have to rebuild the entire, the entire system. to run on quantum, and that's very far out. But people are optimistic. Sharp people that I talk to are saying,

like, quantum is, all the companies right now aren't delivering products that are in use, but there's no, like the physics, the science is solid. It just might be 10 or 20 years until this is really in production. So it's all about TSM fab capacity right now. So Microsoft Scales Back Ambitions for in-house AI Silicon, Maya, aka Braga Chips, slip for a full year. WAMT, you hate to see it.

We love it. We love custom silicon here. We want it to arrive as fast as possible. I hate when timelines extend. I hate it. I hate it. It does happen, though. So, I mean, we are big tech defenders here, and we are very sad to report this.

The delayed part is expected to trail NVIDIA's Blackwell accelerators once it finally ships and undermining Satya's goal of cutting GPU spend. And that's going to be hard because the new blackwells are going to come up. They're going to be amazing. He's going to need some. You don't want to be GPU poor right now. Not right now. You can be a leaser, but you can't be GPU poor.

That's right. And so while Microsoft pauses, Amazon is planning Traneum 3 for late 2025, and Google already has a 7th gen TPU in production, leaving Azure the slowest of the big three to deploy second generation custom AI software. And in other Microsoft news, they are reorging this entire company right now. They are announcing that they're cutting 9,000 workers in a second wave of major layoffs. We already reported on this. We talked about this, but they have 4,712 applications for APB so far.

How many full-time employees does Microsoft have? Isn't it in the hundreds of thousands? I like that Tyler's wearing the bezel hat today. It's a good one. Just throw on the team. Tyler clearly doesn't have Cluley app. No. He really should be running that during the show.

Let me think for a second. Approximately 228,000. That's right. 228,000. So this is what 4%. They're cutting 9,000 employees. It's 4% of the 4% of the. 4% of the head count.

This is the second cut in 60 days. The July round follows 6,000 job losses in May and hits sales, gaming and engineering. Flattening the org chart management layers are being removed to raise the coder to manager ratio. Love that. You know, I mean, it really is this world where the line between coding and managing is blending and programmers can do a lot more and act like PMs because there's AI tools and they can roll out stuff. So you're not in this cycle anymore of like the manager decided that we need to implement a function. Go take a month to build that. Go take a week to build that.

It's like, okay, I built it. Now what's next? You got the afternoon. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So that higher throughput engineering should come through in a de-layering of the organization. And in general, these big companies, they often get really huge. And then they need to kind of de-layer and streamline this. the company.

Anyway, it seems like we have some technical difficulties. We will sort that out while I can still hear you. Okay, great. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all trimmed VPs and middle managers this year. Redmond is citing dynamic market conditions rather than performance. Interesting.

Anyway, in other news, China hosted the first fully autonomous AI robot soccer game. I'm hoping we can pull this video up. Ian Bremmer says they've still a ways to go. I want your review you haven't seen this video yet yet okay first time reaction we're reacting to it live on the stream um China's been working on this for a while and the reason I'm bringing this up is because there's a story in the journal about uh China is rapidly eroding America's lead in the

global AI race uh deep seek and alibaba's open source quen are now running inside hs bc Saudi ramco and even on AWS and Azure forcing western vendors to justify higher close source pricing Very interesting development. We'll see what happens with the new Lama models, whether those can catch up to Deep Seek and Quinn, unseat them. We're also going to have the founder of Mistral on the show soon. Anyway, this is the latest robot soccer game out of China. How do you think they did?

It's not bad. They're not flopping enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they don't understand the medig. Oh, they know showbiz. Yeah, that's good TV. That's good showbiz. So if you watch the beginning of this.

video. The beginning shows one of the robots falling down. Look at this guy. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. He's down. Okay. He's down. He's down. Okay. Then we got a whistle for that. China knows how to pump up attention on AI. They got the robot marathons. They got a variety of stuff going on to draw attention to AI. It's certainly, it's the hottest industry. They got the hedge fund folks moving over. They love robots. And they love robots. And we're seeing all those displays. of drone shows, like the drone light show, that is going to inspire our generation to go want to work in drones, right? And so in same thing with- To work in killer SPV-Dron. Maybe.

Maybe. No, there is, remember when we covered DGI in detail earlier this year, DJI puts on challenges where they, people can compete to make killer robots. So they don't even hide the fact that these robots can be used as death machines. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're going to see a lot more of this. But the government is fueling a scale up of AI over there. Beijing is pouring subsidies into cost-efficient domain-specific AI, while Washington chases AGI, widening a practical capability gap despite U.S. chip controls. U.S. officials worry Chinese guardrails bake censorship into exported systems.

The fractured ecosystem could undercut global security cooperation and U.S. influence over AI norms. And so, yeah, this is what we've been talking to about Aaron Gin. He'll be on the show tomorrow. We're also talking to Chris Miller, the author of Chip War tomorrow, and we will dig into the area. If the U.S. allows millions of humanoid robots controlled by Chinese companies

to be sold in to the United States, it will be a colossal failure. Yeah, I was listening to Dylan Patel's presentation at AI Engineer on YouTube on the drive-in today. And the number of... H-100 equivalents that Huawei was able to fab at TSMC, but like in the midst of the chip controls was crazy. He breaks it all down and it's fascinating.

So first off, there was a company that was basically a front for Huawei that was like, yeah, we want a ton of chips. TSMC and TSM was like, sure, you're not based in China. We'd be happy to sell these to you. But they sold them like a million chips or something like that. So the latest Huawei Ascend, is crazy. Then they have a Cloud Matrix 384 or something like that, which is like 34 chips all network together. Specifically, instead of, so there's two different types of wires

that can wire the chips together, basically. There's copper, and then there's fiber optic. And fiber optic is NVLink. That's what Nvidia touts as like when you get a rack of servers and they talk to each other really, really fast. That allows for better training and inference too. But it's very important. It's basically like you're taking a bunch of different chips and you're making them all work as one. So it's super valuable. Apparently, Nvidia tried to do a rack scale, I think it was

64 chips all networked together with optical cables and they couldn't get it to work. Like they couldn't get it out. And Huawei actually figured it out. And so even though their chips aren't as solid as Nvidia, like on the networking side, they're outperforming there, according to Dylan Patel.

And then the other interesting thing is that like the chip controls don't just affect like TSM. And video like obviously you can't just go by H-100s or H-200s if you're in China anymore but you can go to TSM through a shell company but then you also need high bandwidth memory and that comes from Hynex SK Hynix in South Korea that's also controlled so what they would do if they had another company they would say like yeah like we definitely want like all the best HBM high band with

memory in like this device that we're making like just build it for us and install it and then they would ship it and then they would disassemble the device the memory out and then put it on a GPU ship. Yeah. It's crazy, crazy, crazy. So here's a bunch of good details. We can dig into that a little bit more later.

But DeepSeek was built in a cave with scraps. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, James Cameron has been talking about AI copyright fears. He says, fears are overblown. Humans aren't original either. A lot of hesitation in Hollywood and entertainment in general are issues of the source material for the training data and copyright protection. I think people are looking at it all wrong.

anybody that's a human being is a model. You've got three and a half pound meat computer. That's the brain. Let's hear for three and a half pound meat computers. As a screenwriter, you have a kind of built-in ethical filter that says, I know my sources. I know what I liked. I know what I'm emulating.

I know how I'm hallucinating. I also know that I have to move it far enough away that it's my own independent creation. This is the great artist steel. you know instead of copying what's the difference between stealing an idea transforming it turning into your own and just copying something derivative and we'll and we'll go into that in a little bit so I think the whole thing needs to be managed from a legal perspective is what is what is what's the output like is the output transformative and so the reason I want to talk about

this is because the Wall Street Journal is covering the fact that studios artists and tech giants are clashing over a copyright in Washington the Algos yeah it's a big one Mehta recently scored a courtroom win. Judge Vince Cabria tossed author's claims, but warned, you are dramatically changing, even obliterating the market for that person's work, signaling more litigation ahead. I don't know if I agree with that, right? You've used, maybe you've used ChatGBT to summarize the key takeaways from a book, where you really going to buy, and, you know, does that stop you from wanting, is it,

How different is that from, you know, reviewing, you know, reading a book review or things in that. So with regard to existing intellectual property, like I have gone to Chad GPT and said, hey, I'm trying to tell a story, a bedtime story to a four-year-old. Let's throw Mickey Mouse in there. And then why don't we mix it up with Batman? Oh, wait. They are owned by two different companies. One's owned by Warner. One's owned by Disney.

How will ChatGPT handle it? Well, it tells me a story with both of them. It's fine. this could never happen in the real world because of the IP is owned by different companies, but it does it on chat chbtee. But is it, is it truly a substitute? Or does it actually just make my four-year-old beg for more Batman and Mickey Mouse toys? Like I think it's probably net positive to the brand.

Exactly. It's probably net positive, probably not fully a substitute. We're still buying and running. Probably more likely to want to go to Disneyland. I agree. And also Universal Studios. Go see the Batman ride. But the other interesting thing, I guess Warner, so it would be six flags, anyway, correction.

Correction. But the interesting thing is that what about new intellectual property? Like there are people that are saying I'm going to build a new intellectual property on, you know, and I'm going to use crypto rails like Pudgy Penguins. Like they're going to try and use that technology to accelerate the develop of a new franchise, new IP that they own. There are also folks who are saying I'm going to use artificial intelligence to create new IP we saw this early with little Michaela yeah now we're seeing

there's a community owned IP creation what is the um what is it the Italian I don't tell you're talking about the Italian slop lords or whatever the brain rot yeah Italian brain rot yeah Italian brain rot where like someone probably owns some portion of the IP there and I don't even know it feels like a free-for-all yeah I mean all this stuff is is changing is changing really quickly but I think at the end of the day all that matters is that like everyone gets a stake at some point and everyone gets a slice of the actual like economic profit and it's somewhat fair and so that's why the courts exist they will sort this out meanwhile over on capital

hill a proposed 10-year federal ban on state AI laws was stripped from Trump's big beautiful bill after creatives and child safety hawks blasted it as a big tech giveaway we heard from Zach Kukoff yesterday that this was a win effectively a win for anthropophorpe who was interested in seeing this get blocked. The issue is that states like California have so much influence that if California passes AI-related laws, that they'll likely lead to widespread compliance. So there's pressure from both flanks.

Tech lobbyists argue mass scraping is essential to US AI leadership. That makes sense. I mean, DeepSeek is not certainly scraping the entire Chinese internet, and so you're going to get left behind. And the entire Western. Yeah, everything and YouTube probably. We'll take the whole thing. While Writers Guild and Sag Aftera are pushing for compulsory licensing and outright data mining bans, leading studios caught in the middle.

Anyway, we will dig into that more in a little bit. There's more news about the trade deals. So Japan is saying we're not going to do a deal or we're going to push back. They're calling Trump's bluff. We'll see it's heating up. Trump on Japan. I will write them a letter saying, we thank you very much. We know you can't do the kind of things that we need,

and therefore you'll pay 30%, 30%, 35%, or whatever number that we determine, because we also have a very big trade deficit with Japan. Let's go to the video from Donald Trump, the president. And we say we thank you very much. And we know you can't do the kind of things that we need, and therefore you'll pay 30%, 35%, or whatever the numbers that we determine

because we also have a very big trade deficit with Japan, as you know. And it's very unfair to the American people. So they maybe we'll be happy, they maybe won't be happy. But some countries we won't even allow to trade. But for the most part, we're going to determine a number just very simply right. On an ice ladder, probably one page or a page and a half at the most. And it's going to be essentially congratulations. It's going to be an honor to allow you to go and do business in the United States of America,

because it really is an honor to be able to do that. But we never viewed it that way in this country. Yeah. He's wearing the Gulf of America hat, you know. Mount Fuji's right there might want to turn it into a different name. That's part of the trade deal. Maybe that could be a chip, you know,

that bargaining chip. Yeah. Naming rights to Mountain Fuji. Yeah, you can keep the name of your own mountain named Mount Fuji. So a lot of this is going about cars, obviously, NSX is the top of mind. everyone the Accura.

Yeah, remember when Sam, when they dropped deep research, Sam said he used deep research to find like a one of one. Yeah, NSX. Yeah, these are important. Anyways, I like the hat. Unclear. Where this goes.

Where this goes. And I think, I feel like we've just had such a good thing going with Japan. Yeah. They should be a logical humanoid robot partner. You know, they got Asimow. Honda's been building robots for, two decades. Yeah. I was really hoping that something would happen there. We never comment on

politics, but I would I would like to see United States leaning more into that partnership and figuring out how we can make a lot of things together. So what else here? Tokyo refuses any pact that preserves Trump's 25% car tariff negotiator Akazawa fears electoral blowback if rice and autos are conceded. Trump has threatened fresh duties and rejected deadline extensions, unnerving allies wary of U.S. tariff volatility, and its Apache scorecard. To date, the administration boasts only a limited U.K. accord, a Vietnam mini-deal and a China truce. Canada, South Korea, and the EU remain stalled amid tariff threats. And so we're still in that pause. But staying on Capitol Hill, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick says, today I called on the

president to address my serious concern regarding reports that the United States of withholding critical defense material pledged to Ukraine. This comes as Russia launches the largest aerial assault since the war began firing over 500 weapons at civilian targets in a single week. Ukrainian forces are not only safeguarding their homeland. They are holding the front line of freedom itself. There can be no half measures in the defense of liberty.

We must, as we always have, stand for peace through strength. I have formally requested an emergency briefing from the White House and the DOD to clarify these reports, review our nation's weapons and munitions stockpiles, and ensure the United States remains fully. committed to providing Ukraine with the resources it urgently needs to defend its people and preserve the cause of freedom high level what happened here we basically opened a new front to this like broader global conflict right we had Ukraine then we added Iran we didn't and and don't have the munition

stockpiles to sustain two proxy wars or in the case of Iran an actual conflict I remember reading in the journal the day this came like the day Ukraine the Ukraine War broke out people were saying like okay we are out of javelins like the shoulder mouth's right no there's people like drouva Rehendra from deterrence who we've had on the show at least I think a couple times close friend and partner and then Aaron Slodov yeah who have been talking on multiple occasions about how some of the some of the weapon systems that that are critical to, you know, the U.S.'s overall strategy. We'll have, like, yeah, we have like 500 of those.

And then you use them and then they're out and then remaking them. They're just not ready to be like, yeah, because like in peacetime, why would you be like, yes, I need to produce a million drones that are just going to get blown up. Like the industrial capacity just isn't there. So Patriot missiles have paused deliveries of Patriot Interceptors, air-to-air missiles and artillery shills have been redirected to replenish U.S. stocks. Pentagon officials confirm. The shift reflects a re-ranking of threats from China and the Middle East above Ukraine despite earlier White House signals of patriot transfers.

And Ukrainian officials and U.S. lawmakers say the delay could translate into more civilian casualties as Russia steps up aerial assaults. They're talking about aerial assault. Russia is taking advantage of this period where they know that Ukraine doesn't have the supplies to either get aggressive or defensive. Yeah. And I mean it makes sense that Russia is going back on the offensive because of Operation Spider-Web. There's a very aggressive Ukrainian offensive to destroy a bunch of Russian airborne assets. Now they're saying, you know, hey, we're bringing the fight back to you. And so that continues.

In other news, Tesla, global deliveries plunge 3.5% in Q2 2025. But I saw a lot of posts on X saying that this was not that big of a decline. So omit says deliveries were 384,000 versus 389 expected. Analyst thought it would actually be 350. Where's the brand damage, Lull? This guy's a fan of Tesla, obviously. But there are some, there is some data here. So for the Model 3, Model Y, they produced 396,000, almost 397,000,

and delivered 373,000. And so the consensus was 394K, marking the second straight double-digit quarterly drop. And so the question is like how much of this is about just EV cost or perception or the cars? How much, Tyler, what were how much were Q1 sales down? Because if you do two back-to-back double-digit drops, that's pretty meaningful. that feels like brand damage, but it's also a very competitive market, right? Every major manufacturer now has EVs in the market. And again, we've talked about this before, the biggest thing.

It's possible one of the biggest drivers here is that the lack of meaningful refreshes of the Model 3 and the Model Y. And the cyber truck is just selling seemingly well, selling in beautiful Los Angeles, but not selling very well. But it's hard at that price point to break through to the real truck market. I'm pretty sure the Ford Maverick, the F-150. I mean, the number one convertible in the United States is Jeep Wrangler. Tesla doesn't have a convertible.

They don't have anything that competes with a Wrangler, right? Tyler, you got some numbers for us? Yeah, so it looks like it's down 13.5% sales. That's this quarter. Yes. What about Q1? Yeah, how was Q1? So year-to-date, Tesla's Europe sales are down 28% in May,

and then in China they sank 7.6%. So there's a whole bunch of different narratives around like there's a lot of pressure internationally, but that's more about like trade. And then internally there's people that stopped buying them for political reasons. But then there's people who started buying them for political reasons. I think there's a big contingent in Europe that that cares about the politics as well. The China problem is just the fact that you have Xiaomi and all these other players coming in with great cars undercutting the market. They got a Thai con knockoff. They got a refusional way knock off.

They got it. They got a model S knockoff. Yeah. I mean, they're not exactly innovating on the silhouette. Yep. But they are innovating in the, you know, sort of internal computing systems, features. There are some crazy, crazy Chinese cars out there. Yeah, so Q1 was down 20%.

20%. Yeah. So, I don't know. So, so, uh, let's pull up the, uh, where's the brand damage is, uh, the mag seven. I want to see how they're ranking. Uh, here we go. We have our mag seven leaderboard and Tesla's at the bottom.

$984 billion in market cap trading at 172 price to earnings ratio. So they're seventh. But if the cyber cab stuff plays out. The most magnificent things about the company is that the e-ratio. Yeah. It's absolutely fantastic. So but if the cyber cab plays out, that is a significant. I mean, you look at what is the, what is the market for, you know, all the different

Robotaxy drives, right? probably in the tens of billions of dollars that Americans would spend. And so I think a lot of people are expecting that to hit and that to work. And the fact that the cyber cab is at that 30K price point instead of the 300K price point for Waymo being a durable advantage, the fact that they can produce. I mean, the fact that they even make 400,000 cars in a quarter, it's 100,000 cars a month, 3,000 cars a day. That's a lot of industrial capacity.

And so that has to have some value and some leverage if the AI catches up and the cyber cab becomes down. The battle between Waymo and Tesla is just getting started. Oh, yeah. And then a lot of people are buying the stock on the promise of humanoid robots. It is like it does feel early. Optimist does not feel ready for your production or ready to buy or ready to go out on the manufacturing line. But what other stock in the Mag 7 would you buy to get exposure to humanoid robotics if you think that's an important thesis? Like there's not really that much.

Yeah. And even in the and even in the smaller like mid-cap or small-cap stocks, there really aren't that many pure play humanoid robotic companies that are out. Yeah. So there's not really anything that's sucking up that demand in the market. Anyway, speaking of the market, Tesla, Figma has dropped their S-1. The numbers are strong. 821 million dollars in the last 12 months revenue 46% year-over-year growth 18% non-gap operating margin they turn profitable 1.5 billion dollars in cash zero debt 91% gross

margins best in class for SAS 132% net dollar retention sticky AF says Jason Lumpkin 7 78% of the Forbes 2000 use Figma 76% used 2 plus products platform expansion for massive losses to 18% operating margins. This is how you prep for an IPO trading under dollar fig on New York Stock Exchange soon. So absolutely absolutely incredible. Obviously Figma is a sponsor and partner of ours, but this story is really incredible. The other thing that Jason missed here that I think is interesting is Figma holds BTC on the balance sheet, which I think that retail is going to be excited by. There's also a really really exciting AI story here. Figma Make.

It's known almost $70 million in Bitcoin ETFs and was approved to buy 30 more million in BTC. Zach says this is the first company we've seen this cycle that's buying Bitcoin and isn't bad. That's pretty notable. He used a different word. And Tane says, Figma has $1.54 billion in cash on hand, but only raised $749 million in primary capital in its history.

It will go public with a negative net burn over its lifetime of $791 million, thanks to their efficiency and the $1 billion breakup fee received from Adobe. Wow. That's remarkable. Things are working out. Yeah. I remember, I mean, you know, they obviously getting shot down by the Europeans on an acquisition that I think was exciting for everybody involved from Dylan to Scott to the capital. table and the team and you know Adobe broadly was I think disappointing for everyone but I think this is going to be you know in hindsight I think people look back and say this was this

was actually the right thing totally and I think the markets are going to love another founder-led you know company yeah Christine had a good post here I the first thing I appreciate in Figma S-1 everyone said the S-1 was the best designed S-1 ever which makes sense But it was right at the start of Dylan's letter. When Evan and I started Figma, too often companies write departed founders out of a company's story. Dylan did the opposite and that says a lot. I love it. Very classy.

So you can go to Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. And you can check out Figma Make. You can vibe code whatever you want. Tyler is in the midst of vibe coding a new product that we're going to release a data product in the next couple weeks for free, and I'm excited to share that. Otherwise, I wanted to pull up, let's pull up the Polly Market for the reconciliation

bill. Zach Kukoff is going to be coming on the show later today to give us the update. Things are trending down across the board. The getting it done by July 4th is sitting at a 61% chance, down 6% over the last 24 hours. So we will follow the this one and I'm excited to get the update. It's funny, a big bill like this with this deadline of the 4th of July because there is this like overall incentive. I think people would like to enjoy their 4th of July versus, you know, angrily debating a bunch of small details. I think the debt ceiling always comes up during the summer. I remember years ago it being a topic during summer and it feels like a very weird thing that you have like this ultra high pressure.

sure DC narrative during like the slowest time of the year for everyone else. Yeah. Yeah. It's very American. We grind it out here. We grind it out. Anyway, you don't need be grinding on bill payments accounting and a whole lot more. You can go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments and accounting in a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. We need to tell people about, sorry. I was going to say our new ad that we ship for Wander. We shipped this 35 minutes ago. We should show us off.

Live on location at a Wander, and I would encourage people to just go watch it. Can we pull it up on the screen? Let's pull up a few seconds. Let's give a little, a little tease. I think we can watch the whole thing. Yeah, it's only 45 seconds. Let's pull it up. Let's pull it up and watch it.

We went full golden retriever mode for this one, folks. Do we go full screen on this? Is that possible? Go full screen? Well, we pull that up. Such a fun shoot. If you're a GQ fan, you probably notice that we were heavily inspired, maybe even you could call it a shot-for-shot remake of the GQ video with George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

But, I mean, fantastic inspiration from those folks. It's pretty funny. We showed a preview that to a few people and they'd go, is that a wander? We're like, yes, obviously. But still, this is a property in Malibu that you can rent this summer. Yeah. And it is absolutely fantastic. Anyway, we got to tell folks about the TBPN derivative works clause.

So if you're watching the show, if you're writing about the show, engaging with the show, you should know that we have terms of conditions, terms of conditions, terms of use. We don't ask for much, but there is one rule that we take very, very seriously. And our lawyers have been very serious serious about, which is that if you, watch the show, if you engage with the show, if you write about the show, and then you go and create a derivative work, so a copycat, a live stream, a daily technology show, a clone, yeah, a clone. We don't ask for financial compensation. We don't ask you to stop doing what you're doing, but you are legally required to drink one glass of municipal tap water on the stream.

Just one. Every time you do the show. Every time you do the show, if you were to copy us and do a daily show you would have to drink one glass of tap water. Municipal tap. Yeah. And so a lot of people have been fighting this. They copy us and then they and then they refuse to drink the tap water. But this is legally. It's only a matter time until they tap out. They got to tap out.

This is called tapping out. Tapping out is when you admit that yes, you did copy TVPN and so you're tapping out, you're drinking the tap water and it's legally binding. So just if you're thinking about doing it, just Be prepared to drink. And we wanted, we wanted this policy to be fair, right?

Yeah. It doesn't cost you anything. No. Maybe your health a little bit. Maybe. But yeah, so feel free to copy us as long as you tap out. As long as you tap out. Always tap out.

And we'll be, you know, if you launch a derivative work, copycat, clone, whatever, we'll remind you. Yeah. Yeah. In the comments. Everyone will remind you. Yeah. A lot of people say like, oh, how will I know if what I'm doing is truly derivative? like, you know, is this, or is there a definition?

It's like, don't worry, you'll know. You'll know. You will definitely know if you have to drink the tap water. Like, we're going to make it apparent. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vantas' trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation,

whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I was talking with Buddy yesterday. He was walking by one of our billboards in New York. He sent it to me. And he said that he signed up for Vanta on Friday because he signed a massive logo that I can't say for startup. And they said, you're going to need sock two before we can dance. Wow. On Vanta now.

That's amazing. And I'd love to see it. So shout out to Vant. Sorry, shout out to Grant and Vant up. Granta. For cooking. Let's go a little bit deeper into Aribor. This is certainly the hottest story in our world today.

It appears at the Financial Times. I think what happened here is that they found the like a filing and then put the story together. So there's a lot of no comments in here, but there's still some interesting facts that we'll go through. So Peter Thiel joins tech billionaires backing new lender, Aribor to rival Silicon Valley Bank. And people have been talking about this new bank and the name and stuff. And so it had been out there, but it had not been in the press yet. named after the Dragon's Mountain and Lord of the Rings. So a group of tech billionaires led by Palmer Lucky,

co-founder of military contractor, Anderl, is preparing to launch a US bank intended to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank serving startups, including cryptocurrency businesses. To be named Aribor, the bank would be backed by high-profile including Joe Lonsdale from ABC, and he's a co-founder of Palantir, according to people familiar with the matter. Teal's venture capital firm,

Founders Fund would also be among the investors, according to two people, like Anderner, and Palantiral. Aribor's name is a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Aribor is the lonely mountain whose treasures are reclaimed from the dragon smog. Lucky and Lonsdale, who were big donors to Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, want the bank to take over the niche once occupied by SVB as the go-to lender for riskier companies and cryptocurrency players that traditional banks

might reject. We were talking a lot about like founder liquidity, but there really was a time when you raise a $10 million series A, and SVB would almost always underwrite that if it was with a tier one to the tune of like a $2 million, a $2 million debt line. So you just get an extra 20% as venture debt and use that to fund CAPEX or an inventory line or anything. Venture debt would always get a lot of heat because it can be used poorly. Yeah, and there were a lot of aggressive lenders, but SVB was kind of one of the cleaner ones, I thought. Yeah. So Aribor has applied for a national.

bank charter in the United States, a license that allows a financial institution to operate as a bank. The bank will be a national bank, providing traditional banking products, as well as virtual currency-related products and services for businesses and individuals, according to the application, which was made public this week. Target market would be businesses that were part of the U.S. innovation economy, in particular tech companies focused on virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defense and manufacturing, who would also serve individuals who work for or invest in these companies. It's also planned to work with non-U.S. companies seeking access to the U.S. banking system. Air Force co-founders first discussed launching a bank after the collapse of SVB in

23, according to a person familiar with the matter. SVB has been the main bank for U.S. startups and their venture capital backers. Its assets were first told to its first citizens. So SVB is still operational in effectively name only. It's owned by first citizens. What's interesting is that it is it is like owned like the brand is owned and the corporate structure changed hands, but different pieces of the firm got split off. I'm pretty sure like Morgan Stanley wound up with like the venture debt group or something like that.

Like different desks went to different places and they kind of parceled stuff up. Some of it was sold. Some of it was just like, hey, this person would rather be doing X, Y, or Z at a different firm. And so maybe Goldman or Morgan Stanley is trying to get into a particular market and they're like, hey, SVB has some great guys over there. It was kind of like a free-for-all for a little bit. So there's not too much in here.

There's a little bit about who's running this company. So Lucky and Lonsdale were not expected to be involved in the day-to-day management of the bank, according to people familiar with their plans. It will be run by co-CEO's Jacob Hirschman, who previously worked as an advisor at Crypto Group Circle and Owen Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of digital asset software, Air Compliance. Mike Haggardorn, former senior executive vice president at New Jersey-based Valley National. Let's give it up for senior executive vice presidents. For sure.

We'll be the bank's president. And so they're going to have co-CEOs and a president on day one. What a stack lineup. Yeah, PT, Palmer Lucky, Lonsdale in the boardroom. And then you got co-CEOs and a president. This is a stack lineup. I think we're working on a graphic. I've been pitching it the starting lineup for this new.

team is looking pretty good it can feel like sports but there's not the same kind of rules right you know you can put as many people on your team as you want there's no salary caps that's right most importantly joan was joan was uh was posting he was like we're going to see salary caps yeah and i hope not because that would imply well mom donnie's trying to do that right he wants the salary cap to be like 999 million dollars like he wants a billion there's burning too also wants salary caps in business and and and net worth caps Net worth caps, yeah. Much like a salary cap.

Imagine there was a net worth cap in the NBA. It's like, yeah, like, okay, you've made enough money. Like, you have to apply for free now. Its head office will be in Columbus, Ohio, which we talked about. Part of the application was submitted confidentially and has not been made public, such as details related to its shareholders, equity structure, and business plan. Lucky did not respond for requests for comment. Lonsdale confirmed he was a financial backer, but declined to comment further.

and the other folks did not reply. Anyway, I'm sure they're going to be building some projects, and you know what they're going to need. They're going to need 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. XAI, Greg Yang, great poster.

J. Kowse says, another great account, says, visiting the XA office really humbled me, and it's just tons of tents around a, around desktops. Is this actually the XAI office? I'm so confused. And then Greg Yang, who actually works at XAI says, that's not our office. We have way more tents. So I have no idea where these original pictures came from, but it does look like a lot of tents in a inside of a office. The internet's a tough place these days. You never know what's real, right? They could have just put up tents in a tech office. It could have been a prompt. But I do know that the

XAI team, I have it on good authority that they did. There are tents in the office. sleep in the office. Okay. Not necessarily like every day. Someone else was giving them a little, was chirping at them because they were saying, if you stay up coding until three, four, a. Yeah.

But then you sleep in. Doesn't really count. You're just nocturnal. It's like, what's impressive is like actually working really hard for like 12 hours, taking a break, having some rest time, and then getting a full eight hours of sleep. And it doesn't really matter what cycle that happens on. I guess the benefit of like the nocturnal programmer is that there's just less going on

in the world. So there's less distractions. It's knowing that you're grinding while your competitors are sleeping. That's priceless. I guess. But I mean truly, truly there is like email is quieter during the night. Right. And get more done. The news is quieter. So you know, it's like there's just less opportunity to get distracted by like the Elon Trump blow up. That happened when they were sleeping. Apparently. So like yeah, they, they woke up and they were like. like, okay, I guess something happened with our boss and the president, but, you know, the story is kind of over. So let's get to work.

Anyway, if you work at XAI, you're going to have to sell this to big companies. You're going to need Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company in the next level, get started for free. Anyway, we can go deeper into Microsoft. They are scaling back their ambitions for AI chips to overcome delays. Microsoft is focusing on less ambitious chip designs through 2028. They hope by scaling back some of the designs and pushing out the schedule for other AI chips, it's already working on, it can develop them more easily.

The hope is that when these chips are released over the next three years, they will still remain competitive with Nvidia's AI chips. The decision follows delays in-house chip development. This is from a report in the information. Microsoft wants to reduce reliance on Nvidia for AI computing. But if we pull up the mag 7 chart, NVIDIA doesn't seem to be affected. They're still at the top of that baby at $3.8 trillion.

But Microsoft's coming for them at $3.6 trillion. And so it's neck and neck. If Microsoft can fab their own chips, TSM, design their own chips, rip out NVIDIA, that might be enough for a flippinging. Yeah. You're going to track on a polymarket. Matthew from Cloudflare yesterday

is that every time we've seen this type of scale up on the silicon side. It's a glut. There's been ended up. being a glut. So we'll see. Praying that this time it's different. Yep.

Would hate, would hate, love bubbles, hate the crash. Well, we have a funny post here from Zach, quote tweeting someone says, you attract what you fear. And Zach says, ah, I'm so scared of $3 billion and drunk cigarettes with her. I love that you put this in here.

It's like, Zach's been on a roll. Anyway. If you're selling anything, including cigarettes, you're going to need to pay sales tax, and you're going to need Numeral. Go to Numeralhq.com. Also, don't sell cigarettes. It's bad. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes. Says the nicotine. Says the nicotine. Very different product. No, it is very different. It's been less than five minutes per month on sales tax. And we use Numeral to sell nicotine. It is the sales tax automation tool of choice for Ridge, Grunes, Graza. The list goes on.

Go check it out. That's great. We have a post here from... Someone put us in the truth zone. Andy. Yeah, two cents. He's running two cents. We got to have them on some time to talk about his.

He's, have you seen the screenshots from his app? Yeah. It's like Twitter, but it's anonymous. It's just your network. Plad and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But anyway, he has a post here.

He says, he's putting... Imagine that this would result in a social network around your net worth? It's like, no. It's the magic of building infrastructure. I just wanted to make things a little bit smoother. Anyways, he was putting Kylie in the, Kylie Robinson from Wired in the True Zone. It says claims to be wired wearing AirPods, question mark.

It's good question, Kylie. You've got to answer some stuff. This is big. I am a firm believer in wired headphones. Try them out. I thought you're going to say wired the newspaper or the magazine. If I, it's terrible to say, but if I could only have one, I would take wired headphones. Yep.

Oh, well. Well, she should get wired headphones because that would be very, that would be very on brand for wired. Anyway, we have, we have announcement. We're using Fin AI now for customer support. We've gotten a lot of questions coming into our customer support line, people asking, you know, Are you guys normal heights? And Finn can just immediately chime in. Of course, both of them are normal heights.

What are you talking about? No, we need to set up a support at tbPN.com. For sure. Running on Finn to answer these pressing questions. There aren't enough ads. Can I get a bespoke ad? And it will just automatically generate an ad for you. Yep.

That would be what is you already 5-1? Do you guys really, would you really take a bullet for big tech? It's like, absolutely. It's like, Finn, we were joking about. Relax. Relax. No. Finn is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one in

ranking on G2. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. Go to fin. com. In other news, Microsoft's laying off 9,000 workers. This is a short article, but we've already covered this, but it's interesting to track. What's interesting is like, is Microsoft the only one that's doing these big riffs right now? It feels like they normally happen all the same time.

This is what scares me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does Satya see? There's so many top signals right now. Just everywhere you look, top signal, top signal, top signal. I want to believe that this time it's different, but our industry goes through cycles naturally. Satya is a seasoned operator.

He has incredible traction in generative AI. He's getting 20% off the top of whatever Open AI makes. You would think that he would be. going on a spending frenzy, yet he's conducting routine layoffs. He's giving up, you know, data centers. He's saying, yep, you know, you guys, you know, I don't need it. Yep. Even though, yes, they're, you know, so I just think he's being, he's playing it, he's

simultaneously being, he was being really aggressive like two years ago and now he's starting to play it a little bit safer. Yep. And I think in some ways, you know, some of these riffs are just practical, right? He's realizing, yes, AI is making us more efficient, so we should need less people to do more work. People were putting Benioff in the Truth Zone last week because he was saying,

AI is now doing 30 to 40% of the work at Salesforce, and yet his head count has just been ticking up steadily. And so, yeah, this Satya getting hyper-practical scares me. I mean, he's, I'm pretty sure he, He joined Microsoft in the 90s. Yeah. So he's been there.

It's literally, it's not like he's just lived through the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis. He worked at the same company and saw how Microsoft handled those two crises. I think Microsoft handled both of them pretty well. But he can totally pattern match. Maybe he's wrong. But if he's still, if he's wrong and there's no pullback, there's no glut of chips, like the AI continues to progress, he's still set up pretty well for it. Right?

He's like, he's still, you know, major Cappex, serious hyperscaler, huge, huge bet on like the best horse in the race, basically, the best independent horse hitched to Open AI. Even as that relationship gets more and more complicated, it feels like he has a deeper connection to Open AI than, say, Google does with another startup in the Foundation Model Lab or Amazon or, you know, any of these companies, because they've all kind of like,

Anthropic has deals with Amazon and Google, and they're starting to kind of warm up to being dance partners, but they're not, Google's not getting 20% of Anthropics top line. You know, it's just not that, the deals aren't structured that way. So he has not only the leading lab, but the most dominant stake of any hyperscaler

in a lab period. So incredibly well set up. So we will continue to track it, But whether you think it's a top signal or a bottom signal, you've got to head over public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And they have a triple IRA match.

3%. 1%, 1%, 1%. Check it out. In other news. The talent wars continue to rage on. Sam Altman slams meta AIs, talent poaching spree. Missionaries will beat mercenaries. He says, quote,

what meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very, deep cultural problems, said Sam Altman in leaked memo sent to open AI researchers. So big, big question. Paula says, with all the AI labs and SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries? Oh, wow, this is an old post, yeah, from over six months ago. And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from the new meta-superintelligence team, D.D., who's coming on the show, right?

in like three minutes. Okay. Wow. Yeah, we've highlighted a lot of his posts. Every single one of the 11 meta-super intelligence hires is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. Seven from China, one from India, one from Australia, one from UK, one from South Africa. Eight are PhDs or PhD dropouts in the U.S.

Immigration is key to U.S. AI innovation. Jeff, Beth Jaisos has a hilarious post here. The foreshadowing here was insane. And it's Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark Zuckerberg says, the thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring. This is an incredible series, the startup school series that Sam did while he was at YC. He interviewed Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks and got these really definitive

interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation, like right as they were kind of on the biggest moment in their up why are you laughing it's just I love I love this business you're like tearing up looking how happy no it's just it's watching this great power conflict play out in real time is is wildly entertaining it's entertaining and the consumer is going to be the net winner I was about to say that and also America yeah it's extremely this is a pressure cooker of the highest. It's so competitive. But the good thing is that at the end, don't, like, we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone gets, you know, like goes to the gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up. Like,

this is, this is, you know, the difference between being a, having $10 billion or $100 billion. It's like, it's kind of all fake, but it's all, it's all like, it's super high stakes, but it's still capitalism and it's still like the consolation prize. is still being able to build something cool, even if you get beaten. But the end result is that we have this hyper competitive race to build the best thing with kind of a safety cushion so that you're not, like, it's not like the government's

putting a gun to your head, which I love. It's greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market, in this talent pool. And many of them are getting maxed out contracts. I'm sure both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are losing sleeper. right now over the talent wars they got to get on eight sleep go to eightsleep.com slash tbpn get a new pod five ultra sam get a new pod five ultra mark um they got a five year warranty

30 night risk retrial free returns and free shipping so go check it out i'm back in the game today i got an 89 i got massively dinged on my consistency which has just been all over the place 90 minutes of deep sleep two and a half hours of REM sleep go into this uh i mean you won by by default because I slept in Malibu. I'm moving the eight sleep after work. So I don't have anything to act because I was occasional. Yes,

congratulations, Georgie. You deserve it. All right. Well, without further ado, let's bring in D.D. Hey,

there is. What's going on? Hey, guys, how's it going? Great to have you on the show finally. I feel like we've reacted to almost every one of your posts. You're very, very helpful in terms of,

contextualizing and just like summarizing everything that's going on giving breakdowns. It's really helped the show, honestly. So thanks for being here. Totally. Thank you for being a core contributor. I'm a big, big fan of the show. I've seen all of your episodes, I think. Wow. So you guys are great. You guys are great. I'm so happy for what you are doing. Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. And did you join all in? What's this in the background? Oh, yeah. This message has really been overloaded since the podcast. But no, that's just our, our venture, uh, message. I mean, this is what Medlo, uh, Melo's slogan is. You were using that slogan before 2020? It was. No way. They, they, they stole your,

they stole your line. They just steamrolled you. This has happened a few times. Uh, what, what was it? Oh, Gemini. Uh, I thought, I thought, I thought of it for years as the Winkle Voss back crypto trading app. exchange. Now Google comes out and they're like, we'd like that brand actually over here. And so now Gemini, I think of as the Google product. They went from Bard. Yep. They barred it up. They barred it up. No one was, no one was competing for Bard. Bard. Bard was clean space, but they had to go Gemini. And so good luck to the Winklewurst Twins. Anyway, why do you kick us off with like a little bit of background and kind of what you do just to kind of get everyone familiar? Absolutely. Well, my background, I'm in venture now, but my background has been somewhat non- traditional for venture. I spend most of my career as an engineer and a product person. So four years. If you say non-traditional, I expect, I expect warlord. I expect blackwater. Arms dealer.

A kite surfer or like someone who's like wing surfing or rock climbing. I actually thought you were joking for a second because I thought you're going to say my, you know, non-traditional background adventure. I went to HBS. I was a product manager. You know, I just found my way. I let you get away with that. You would be hard pressed to find an actual person who's done engineering at a big company and a startup from the very beginning. Not like a strategy and ops rule for two years. In venture, I actually don't know that many people like that.

I do know it's a meme, though. You were in the trenches. You were in the trenches. You were in the technology trenches. Okay. Okay. We'll give it to you. Yeah.

Okay. So, yeah. How do you land at Menlo? Were you doing investing before Angel Investors? What did that look like? No, I actually had no business being in venture. I never wanted to be in venture. I wanted to build stuff.

But after Glean, I thought, you know, I was exploring building something new and then I was talking to a bunch of these venture firms just get their thoughts on it. And I was kind of roped in and I thought, hey, it's kind of strange that there's not as many people who are technical and really care about engineering stuff in venture. And it would be nice to have that. Because whenever I would speak to people, they'd be like, look, man, I don't really understand this technical stuff,

but is this a big market? You know, like, is this gonna actually work as an idea? And that's kind of the ethos of why I wanted to join a venture firm in the first place. Like, I think it'd be valuable for technical people to talk to other people who really care and nerd out about the actual idea. So doing that for a year and a half.

And it's been more fun than you think. You know, venture has a lot of connotations on what the job involves, whether it's a sexy job, job or not. And I don't know. It's just very different for very different people I'd like to believe. What's been your strategy the last year and a half has it been trying to find and lead deals yourself, support a mix of both? What is the what is the check buyer the CEO? Take over.

Unfortunately, no. Everyone's founder friendly now. You got to differentiate by being a round. unfriendly. Very founder unfriendly. If you're non-technical, then you're going to have problems. No, I'm kidding. No, there's two things we do. I have led deals and also co-led deals with some of my partners here.

We've done about four, three of them are announced. One is not in terms of series A's. But mostly, like, I got brought in to help lead the Anthology Fund, which is our $100 million fund with Anthropic. And that's been a lot of fun because it gives you a lot of leeway on the kind of deal that you can have. Not your traditional, like, hey, high ownership, necessarily series A's and B's and C's. It's more early, more, hey, how do we help the ecosystem? How do we just get into ideas? Very, very early and just meet founders so you don't have a two-week process where you're trying to

fall in love with the founder for the first time. So, interesting. Yeah, the other thing, I'm sure it's been massively helpful because one of the challenge, if you go from operating and then you join a fund and you're only able to do a few deals a year, It's like how do you build up that, those frameworks, how do you really learn the craft of investing and learn what not to do? And I think one of the, you know, there's plenty of stories in the valley of people that our friend Justin Maers, I think like these first two companies he ever angel invested in were unicorns. And there's a bunch of other stories like that from my personal experience that, like the average deal that I've done has just gotten better and better across the 60 plus companies that I've invested in. And so that can be a really big challenge. If you're thrown into a big firm, you're having to make big investments in it,

you're only able to exercise the actual check writing a couple times a year. How is it, how is the anthology fund going? Are you guys, you must have. Specifically, I want to talk about, you said like non-traditional deal structures. And when I think of that, I think you can come to someone with say, hey, we'll do a $10 million series A, but we'll also give you $10 million in credits. We've seen Nvidia do some of these deals. We've seen obviously the Microsoft or the Microsoft Open AI deal was kind of structured

as some sort of cloud credits and all this different stuff. And that can be really valuable. Is that what we're talking about here? Or is there something else? Are cloud credits even relevant in like traditional deal structures these days for AI companies that are building on top of foundation models? We do offer a bunch of cloud credits. So we go up to like 30 to 100K in cloud credits.

I honestly don't think that's the main draw. It's like a nice to have. have for these companies, all these good companies can figure out how to get credits or how to spend money on this. I think what's more interesting is, you know, even when I was like angel investing prior to being in venture, that's a different art. Like it's much easier to get into deals as you guys probably know when you're angel investing because you just know the person.

You're like, hey man, I'm going to throw in 10K. Can I get a 10K allocation? They're like, yeah, you seem like a good guy. You can be helpful. Here's here's a 10- The bar is just so much lower. The bar is very low. And then you then you go to a venture.

from and the same companies and you tell them, hey, I want to lead you around and they're like, good luck, buddy. Like, here's a line. Get to the back of it. So that's what becomes really challenging. But to the question of anthology specifically, I think probably the biggest draw from what the founders tell us is, hey, we just love to know what the labs are up to, how to work with them, how to plan for the future, because we have no visibility into that. And for us, it really helps because you can form a relationship with people and actually figure out, hey, you're an awesome founder,

and I don't know that because more than just the three-week process that you've pitched to me. I know that for a good six to eight months now. So we've deployed about 30 odd checks to anthology. I would say in the beginning, it was a little bit of calibration needed to figure out, hey, what was the right kind of company? And we don't only do early.

We do some mid-stage companies that are interesting to us for a future round as well. and the two of them have graduated into full Series A leads. So that's, you know, what was our success metric going in, which is are these actually good deals that will graduate to real ownership checks or not? And so we had Goodfire and then OpenRouter sort of be those companies that graduated. Very different companies. Yeah, Alex is legit. Fantastic.

We had Alex on from OpenRouter and neither of us, I guess, realized that they were announcing like this massive Series B. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had him on for like a full 15 minutes on the day of his fundraiser. So I know his, I know I'm an OpenC and I know how good OpenRouter is, but I didn't realize it was like, somehow the news got lost that it was like, oh wow, it's like a massive, massive fundraising day. I'm interested in know more about corporations or large scale ups, partnering with venture firms. We've seen a bunch of different, I mean, going back to like the Slack fund, I remember Slack was investing in startups. And there's this question of like for a lot of founders it can be fun to have you know on balance sheet investment vehicle a lot of founders have our scouts at VC firms

or they invest off their own balance sheet why would have big company come to Menlo to do the fund like all the it seems like you're offering like a lot of the work and and is that the right model like should we see more of that versus the fully in-house effort that's staffed. I think Stripe's done some stuff in-house. Perplexity has a fun now. And I'm wondering if you have an opinion on best practices or what works or what doesn't or when something

would work on balance sheet or directly within the org versus outside. I think it's just definitely like, yeah, I think I mean, personal opinion is you need a fortress balance sheet and you probably should be like a public company to be making balance sheet investments purely because of the duration. You mean like Google Ventures?

If you lead or participate in a series A and then don't see a return, you're not gonna see a return from that for maybe a decade or hopefully less. I mean, Bloomberg Beta has some other stuff like that. There's just so many fascinating different, different paths to it. And then it also is this weird,

but I like this from Anthropic because it's like, hey, this is non-core to what we're doing, but it's important to the ecosystem we're building. Let's make it so that it's not job to deploy this capital, but we still get a lot of the benefits. Totally. So yeah, give us your take on all that. I think of, look, we did a lot of analysis on what a corporate fund structures look like and what kind of investments they do in the past.

And these are all gross generalizations. But generally, if you run a corporate fund, A, you're not compensated on carry, really. So the incentives are not really aligned to deliver returns. The incentives are pure ecosystem bets. So if you look at a bunch of the investments that the Slack fund have made, look at there's Slack apps, a lot of them, and that's good for the ecosystem. But are they real companies? Are they real businesses? A lot of them aren't. And when the more you look at corporate venture, like they don't spend a whole bunch of time out on the road, sourcing really like, you know, balls to the walls, going to all of these people and trying to figure out what the good companies are. The reason we wanted this structure was a, so we didn't

have that incentive problem. We could focus on real returns while also invests. in companies that benefit the ecosystem, but not purely that. So a lot of the anthology companies, they don't even necessarily only use Anthropic or use Anthropic at all or necessarily even call LLMs. They are generally companies that are beneficial for the AI ecosystem. That's one. And then number two, I think the bigger thing is most companies have no business running a venture firm.

This is just not, like you said, it's not their core business, not their forte, it's not what they do, it's not something they care about. So it's really nice where you're like, okay, you guys care about it. We care about the ecosystem benefits. Why don't you help us run this fund? And then it works for everybody. And I think the one exception case to that is probably Open AI. Open AI startup fund is done very well, but, you know, not in small part due to Sam being.

Yeah, Sam's kind of a good picture. Potentially a generational VC if he was doing that full time. Yeah, yeah. What about the competitive dynamic? like would GV, I mean, Google Ventures kind of spun out so much, but like, it would be crazy to think about like GV investing in perplexity or Bloomberg beta investing in perplexity. Even if it's not actually that much of a threat and the CEO's confident, like, hey, I'm not going to get disrupted by this. It's like, you have a portfolio CEO who's out there tweeting every single day, like, I'm coming for you, Bloomberg. Let's look at how much money they make.

I'm going to disrupt you. Like that just might be like awkward. And so has there been any dynamic around that where you where you have like either a mandate to like, hey, let's stay away from pre-training because that's on Anthropics roadmap or like even with the clog code cursor thing, like you want to stay away from coding agents because Anthropics really, really, really pro that. Like how do you think about like you want to be close enough that there's a benefit but not too close where your competitors?

Is that a real dynamic or how do you think about that? It very rarely has happened. I mean, Dario is actually exceptionally missionary. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Like, he really does care about what these companies are doing. I mean, look at Goodfire. Like, they have an interpretability lab. They're like, look, another one is good for the world.

We'll do it. So there have been certain cases where companies, you know, some of them haven't been announced yet, but one of these companies has alternate approaches to doing a bunch of different model stuff. And we asked Dario, we're like, hey, is this bad? Like, are you okay with this? he's like completely cool with it. If it's not something that we have a very strong bet on, that they're going extremely head on and have a bunch of capital to go head on right now, it's just not something we'd care about. So we do try to tread carefully. Obviously,

you don't want to bite that hand, but it's not been an issue at all so far. We've never run into a conflict. How are you broadly advising companies that are working with labs, but also fear that they might end up competing with them at the product layer over time. And I know you were at Glein, the founding team there, and that feels like something that in the long run, obviously, you know, someone like an OpenAI might want to compete there. So I'm curious how you think about that dynamic. I think the reality is, look, like it's a free market

and competition's going to happen one way or the other. whether or not Anthropic backs or Anthology backs you and then Anthropic decides to compete at a future point. I don't think anybody... I'm not even talking. I'm not talking about anthology as much as just generally portfolio companies. Let's say you're doing code gen or something like that and you're working with a lab. And we had Sarah Guo was on the show probably a month and a half ago at this point talking about like it's not impossible to figure out what's important to each of the lab. and the things that they might do over time.

And you should, as a founder, be under, you should be well aware, but that what you're doing might be on the path at some point. Yeah, I think that's a question we get all the time. And I think the reality is, I, my guidance usually has been, and this was how we thought about it at Glein, too, is what is something that is a pie that is very valuable to you, but not at the scale that it's valuable to any of these big companies, until it is, you know, like you're really the bet you're making is, hey, this pie is maybe $50 million

in revenue and nobody, no big company will care about that. But once you capture that pie, it's actually way bigger than that. And if you do, then you can reach breakout escape velocity before anybody else is at your heels. And hopefully you've built off enough of a, you know, no, I hesitate to say moat, but you've built enough tech that it's not easy to replicate overnight. And if you have a little bit of that, there are odds that you can have a breakout business. And I think today's climate is actually way better than a year or two before because the truth is labs have a huge revenue pressure. So they're not going to be investing in random crap. Like they're going to be investing in stuff where they're like, okay, that's a billion dollars in revenue.

That's $500 million in revenue. I'm not going after this $10 million opportunity. It's just not. Yeah, Anthropic one to $4 billion run rate in the first half of this year to justify a lot more research. sources, you have to be able to make a dent in that somehow or show that you can make a dent. I mean, it's kind of like the Google problem with like, but at one order magnitude smaller, where like if you're running a business at Google that's making $500 million, it's like, okay, time to wrap it up.

Let's move on to something bigger. This is not really relevant. And you're like, this could be a public company. This was actually the entire premise of lien. Yeah. I don't know if you guys know this, but like, we can start it. Google had Google Cloud search. And the reason we weren't worried about it is because we knew the team there and we're like,

this doesn't make a dent on cloud. The fact is like Google Cloud doesn't care about this. And now, you know, sort of they sort of change their mind and they care about it again. But that's kind of what the sweet spot. You want to do something boring and seemingly small enough that nobody else cares. Can you talk to me more about Gleen? There's been some reporting about like the Data Wars. this question of what, how sharp elbowed will

Salesforce be or Google? If I'm a business owner, I've, you know, we just started TBPN as a company and it's a greenfield. So you're like, this time I'm gonna get it right. This time, I'll just have, I'll just, I'll just have one suite of tools that'll all work together. And then, and then, you know, three weeks later, it's like, okay, I have Slack and Gmail and a bunch of other services

and they're not really talking to each other the way I want. And as a business owner, I'm very strong about like, that's my data. You have to let me have my data. And not through this export button that takes two weeks to go. And I want an API that I can immediately send over to Open AI or Anthropic or Glean. But the companies always find a way to kind of like have sharp elbows. And we saw this during the rise of Google and Facebook. There was a pitch.

John Patel, the founder of Wired, was art. arguing that Google, you should be able to go to Google and say, give my Google search results to Facebook. And Facebook, you should say, give my social graph data to Google just so I get better ads. And both companies hated that idea and they would not let you do that. It's a little bit different in the B2B context, but how do you see the data wars playing out? How do you see the competitive pressure where a lot of the B2B SaaS providers also want to offer some sort of enterprise search experience?

Well, there's a couple ways to look at this. I think number one is, yeah, the reliance on, O'Glean's reliance on just Salesforce is a small percentage of the many, many connectors we offer and the many, many other things that we end up having to integrate with for especially Fortune 500 clients. They often don't even use a lot of the SaaS tools that are household names in the Valley. So the net impact is somewhat limited because of that. But I think the more important point here is the reason why it seems like the reason why people like Salesforce want to cut off connector access is like what you said to sell a competing product. In practice, I think it's actually a pretty synergistic relationship otherwise.

That's why we work together so well for so long because you don't sell less seats because people use glean. You actually sell more seats because people use glean because now there are people who weren't on slagliang. weren't on Salesforce who are now discovering that information and going there and then reading the reading the content so your daily active users actually increase not decrease when they use Glean in fact like if you don't have licenses on Salesforce to a certain set of users they don't even see Salesforce results so it's not like you can also sell 10 licenses connect to Glean and then half the thousand people in the company view those Salesforce state that Salesforce data we don't do

that we don't even offer that as an option because we want to stay true to the permissions of the source data source. So net net, I think this is a situation that Glean will have to work out with all of these partners, but I think there's a good out. I mean, I don't think there's a reason other than them wanting to offer a competitive product that they care about this access. And the companies too, like you said, like if you were running TBPN and you want to connect to Glean, you should own your data. You should own your Slack and Salesforce data.

They don't shouldn't own it. So you have every right to give away that API access, but that's going to be a conversation that Glean's going to have to have with a bunch of the partners. Where are you most excited about agents right now in terms of actual products in market, delivering value for customers outside of coding? Okay, so this is the one I talk to all my friends about. So not like a venture, venture thing. It's just really a product I just have fallen in love with in the past week or so.

You guys all use it. It's called, and I'm not a paid shield. This is like just me loving a product. It's 19 pine. AI. It's super elegantly designed, simple chat interface, your typical stuff. But what it does is it just goes and makes phone calls for you,

but can coordinate very interesting things. So for example, just the other day, I was like, man, my insurance on my car is just way too high. I need to get this down. Can you figure out how to get it down? And it goes in it, like these are no phone calls nobody wants to make. goes and makes a phone call to my insurance, stays on hold for three hours, and then gets them on the

phone, calls Geico, calls State Farm, gets quotes, comes back and goes and negotiates, and then it brings my insurance down. I did nothing. And the payment model is so, so nice, because you don't pay a subscription for this. You pay a percentage of what you save, which is the people to everybody. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you would do that deal all day long with like a, yeah, just call this person for me. if you save me like $1,000, I'll give you like a few hundred bucks, something like that.

But yeah, I'm looking, I have the website pulled up. They got to get a better domain name. This is absolutely brutal. What's the domain name? 19.19. pine. com. But they can call the IRS for you, cancel your AT&T plan, talk to the DMV, get a refund from an airline. I'm going to use this.

I literally have an old internet line in our old office that I need to cancel. And I can only call during business hours. And I just happen to be live on TV during business. hours every day. So I just haven't done it. And I'm just getting billed for Spectrum every month. And it's so annoying. So 19 pines coming for you, Spectrum. You're on notice. Anyway, I want to get your reaction. No, but any other, like this feels awesome as a consumer agent that is solving real problems. And they have the economic model that people have been excited about of like selling, selling results. Anything else in the enterprise, like sales agents,

anything like that that you're seeing that it's actually working? Well, there's a bunch of interesting companies and the revenue is inflecting, but, you know, that's just not like, it's good. Like, there's good businesses that are working. I think the things that that excite me more at a more meta level is the technology powering what agents can do. And like, I think the elephant in the room is all of these, all of the new custom RL stacks that are helping agents use custom software is actually going to be a huge unlock.

Like, computer use hasn't really worked yet. It's not a thing that people use, but there is a world where, you know, just like 19 Pine, you could genuinely automate the work of people if you give computers access to your computer in a fast way. And I don't think we've seen that yet because the models aren't capable of doing that. We've seen early versions of that with Claude Code, which is, hey, what happens if you take a model and then RL it to be very good at agentic work and call a bunch of tools well? O3 is similar.

What if you apply that to very specific domains of like, hey, man, like I have a gazillion enterprise SaaS apps that I don't even want to use and I don't even know how to use or touch. Figure out how to use them so we can just throw these agents at this stuff that a human was doing because a lot of the glue work is still not solved by agents. Like a lot of the glue work is humans in the loop. Go click this button. Go review this text.

If we want to fully cross the chasm of like 95% of the work to 100% of the work, I think that's super exciting at a meta level. And all of these little agent apps and sometimes big agent apps are going to benefit from things like that. So that's one of the broader themes I'm super, super excited about. I want to get your reaction to how the AI talent wars are affecting venture specifically. Will Minitis, friend of the show, has a post here. He says, Citadel's Law, any industry with sufficiently high stakes will end up mirroring the culture of hedge funds, Massive cash comp for the top performers, bid away dynamics where entire teams walk together,

extreme litigation of non-competes, hard-o-work 24-7 culture. But then he says he ends with this at the margin, I think, makes the capital environment for funding independent big AI things much worse, not worth underwriting a team if you know they can do R&D on your dollar and then walk. In the same way, my sense is fun, staking terms got worse, not better post pod shops. So he's talking about how in, yeah, like if you are betting on a founder and then they get some massive, massive aqua hire offer, is that going to distort the early stage venture market? Oh, I mean, I think like absolutely. I've read that post.

I love that post. Great, great commentary. I think the thing I would say is this isn't new. I mean, there were always, startups never paid well, right? Like you're still getting paid like 170, 200k on average. and you know Google and Facebook are right there to pay you like a 500k salary so it's not like it's new that big companies can can you know throw out their wallets and give you more money usually even at I glee we had this policy where we're like look we're just not going to negotiate somebody who only cares about comp if we lose that person that's because they're a mercenary and that's okay we're not judgmental just you do what you think is best for you we really want people as missionary as you can be about like V2B sass but we want people who are you know more Extremely- Incentivized to do the thing that we're doing here.

So, but does $10 million a year paychecks affect that? 100%. Thankfully, it's just a few people who are privy to that. But if there's more of that happening, it becomes a risk. I mean, absolutely. The one thing that I do the most when I do diligence is, aside from the typical venture stuff, is I really need to have confidence that this founder, no matter what wants to work on this problem for the next five years.

To the extent that you can get that confidence, that's what I'm looking for, but you can't solve for it. It's definitely worse. People are always on the spectrum from missionary and mercenary. And if the dollars go up, the spectrum shifts. So there's fewer people who can afford to be missionary if you're getting paid 10 million a year. Yep. Last question from me, and then we'll let you go.

Do you think the AI talent wars spill over into the rest of the MAG 7? I'm you know Mark Zuckerberg is a founder mode CEO with a massive business throwing off billions of dollars in cash he took you know he's spending 20 billion dollars in the Metaverse was able to just slide some of that over put some crazy offers on the table we we keep joking that some of these meta AI super intelligence offers are more than Tim Cook's annual salary so that might be a culture clash even if Apple says hey we want our own super intelligence team and we've earmarked 5 billion dollars to do it because they could meta or Apple has produced almost a trillion dollars in dividends or like free cash for their investors over the past decade or something like that 13 years and so the logical thing would be okay maybe we will see similar bidding wars talent wars continue at Amazon Microsoft Apple but maybe there's or it just forces Apple to effectively outsource the R&D by paying open AI or anthropic billions of dollars so yeah how do you think think that shakes out? I don't think more firms, more Mac 7 companies are going to compete like that.

I think Zuck has a particular style and he always has. I mean, if you look at like you said, like Oculus, yeah, he's very happy to pour billions and billions of dollars into something with the hope that it will one day work. Most other of a Mac 7 companies don't usually operate like that. And they can get talent in many cases for way cheaper. I just don't think it's also not, Apple might be able to do it on their balance sheet, but it's not just something that everybody can afford to do. It causes a lot of cultural rift within the company. If you talk to the other day,

I was scrolling meta's blind through a friend. I mean, people are upset, you know? People get upset when you just hear that you can recruit somebody as an engineer and pay them $25 million a year. That's not a good thing for the culture of the company. They also check out mentally inside because they're like, what is the point? Why am I doing this?

And so I think, Yeah, there's one frame where it's like, oh, wow, we hired a 100 X engineer. And there's another one which is like, so I'm a one-100th X engineer? Maybe I should do one-one-hundredthix the work. I mean, you know, the right way to look at that. You have some, you know, top 25 AI researcher in the world joins your firm. You should be excited because you're already compensated really well. And it will probably increase the value of the company and the fullness of time,

which directly benefits you. But, of course, if you're making, if you're only making 80K a month, you know, not even hitting that, you know, seven figure mark. Yeah.

That could be a little bit, a little bit frustrating. Anyway, this is fantastic. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Three K more.

They could be in that. The fact that you know the MRR number is like the back of your hand is hilarious. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by. This is super fun. Thank you for joining. Let's do it again soon.

soon. And John, thank you guys for having me. Love it. See you guys. Yeah. Talk to you later. Cheers. You might have seen our billboards are tearing up New York City.

We have our New York City correspondent joining right now. But if you want to run a billboard in New York City, get on adquick. Out of Home AdQuick made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology. We went from the West Coast to the East Coast. Emily should take over the West Coast. Oh, feed me billboards in L.A.

We will ask her about it. But first, we have to sing her a song, Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Emily, we're hitting the size gone for you. Congratulations. It was yesterday.

It was yesterday. July 1st. She didn't come on the show yesterday. Welcome. I would have come on yesterday if you asked. We should have. We should have. We could have had a cake.

What did you do for your birthday? I had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA. It was empty, which was nice. And then my husband took me to dinner. Oh, that's nice. YMCA, underrated? Your, a lot of people are... This New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning. Oh, interesting. What is the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment. Lifetimes making moves. Lifetimes making moves. So I kind of do a high-low thing.

I live in Park Slope, so the YMCA makes a lot of sense for me. But I'm also a member at a club called Casa Chifriani, which is really nice. Small members club. Yep. That's fun. The high-low. The high-low. John's in favor of that, too.

We just started going to a new gym. But John is like actively wants to be kicked out so you can go back to goals. Which I'm like, no, we can't do this. There aren't, there don't seem to be as many YMCFRIMC. CAs on the West Coast. No, no, not that many. Lots of 24-hour fitness. Lots of gold's gyms.

I mean, Gold's gym, it's the staple of Venice. It's where Arnold Schwarzenegger works out. You know, RFK's out there. It's a good crew. John thought Equinox was like a $75 a month gym while we were actively going there for a brief period. And I just loved how out of touch you are. It felt like premium, you know, but that ultra premium. It's not the besties all in tequila level.

Yeah, the location. matters a lot. Yeah. What else is new in your world? Yeah, give us a, give us a Hampton's update. People were assume no one's in the city right now. Well, yeah, I got out here this morning. I don't want to brag. I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather to 2006 Camry. Okay. Very nice. iconic era of really great vintage. Very reliable. Yeah, awesome. So I drove out here today. It's crowded. It's really crowded. I'm hoping that this sort of level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that I rented a house out here.

But we'll see. What else is new since two weeks ago? Is there crazy? Broadly, people a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year over year. Does it feel that way? Yeah. I don't know how much of that was because of weather or people. people's finances. I think some people were less motivated to like make the move on booking a house

because we had really bad weather the past few months in New York. It was really rainy and gross. It was sort of a late start to summer. But I'm sure people's financial situation. There was also a trade war that's still ongoing. And if your portfolio is down tremendously, you're not exactly saying, yeah, I'd love to spend, you know, 100K for two weeks. Yeah, I had a friend who was dating a Wall Street like hedge fund guy and she was like yeah it's going so great like it's amazing and then like a couple weeks later she's like yeah he's just like really weird like I don't think it's going to work out and I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like so his emotions perfectly mapped to the 10% sell-off that we just saw you're telling me that this guy his entire

his entire personality is derived from the state of the market the state of the market and she was like oh this makes so much more sense now okay yeah I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations. I'm sure. I'm sure the kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene. Is that crazy white party going on? That's a Hampton's thing. Is that a July 4th thing or is that canceled?

I thought Michael Rubin was like pulling back from that because it was like maybe too flashy. Is there an update thing? Yeah, I will see. Is that supposed to be 4th of July? She's like wearing, she's like a white party. What are you talking about? Yeah, I was like the did you. Can't comment.

No, not the diddy one. Oh, yeah. I think that might have been a factor in pulling back for that. But I always see like everyone's like spying the watches, spying like, you know, what cars people showed up in, all this stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of paparazzi. There's a lot of TikTokers. Okay.

See everything happening in real time. Interesting. Nobody can really like leave with another man's wife anymore. Like there's so much coverage of these events now. It really takes away the summer. The mystique. Somebody might. What's up with what's up this with this place drugstore?

You were covering it. Oh, yeah, this is awful. Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a few movie. A smoothie pop-up chain from like a Jay-Z-invested celebrity chef. And these like very Instagramable smoothies, which obviously Aeroon started. But now there's a lot of places that are kind of hopping on the bandwagon of treating like smoothies. as a billboard, like brands can collab with them and then whoever's serving these smoothies is like making extra money from an advertising business, which is crazy. Like I think to get an

heroin smoothie for your brand, it's like 200K for a month or something. We have to do this. Yeah, we're we've been working on it. You say that's crazy. You guys don't have to do this. Every penny for the TBPN Feed Me Airwan smoothie. You're telling me that's not going to net out. No, you could do a drink at like the U.S. Open or something. Like get, don't do the smoothie. Don't do the smoothie. It's played out. Yeah, it's probably played out. Okay. Didn't everyone have a collab with like Volkswagen or something or some really funny like car company they did? Yeah, you're right. They did do a car company. I think they also do like beauty brands like sunscreen and stuff. Like it's not. Yeah, Chevrolet. They did Chevrolet drink collab. And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the ZR1 like the really crazy Chevy sports car. But they did the 2025 Equinox EV.

So you're drinking. According to the manufacturer, the collaboration between it combines Chevy's commitment to a mission-free vehicles and Airwans' mission to promote sustainability as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products. The drink called the electric juice consists of Choo-choo-ch-cho? I don't even know what this is.

Which is the most protein-rich plant source and blue spirulina, the superfood, that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color. The drinks ingredients are designed to energize and recharge consumers according to Chevrolet. The winner here was the ad agency that got paid half a million dollars to set this up. I don't know. I feel like everyone's getting the Haley Beaver smoothie. I'm about to rock the Equinox EV smoothie. I think it has a certain badge value. They're like 70 grams of sugar. It's like four coax. I'm long I'm long sugar though. Four coax is a lot. That is a lot. But I'm going long.

I'm going long sugar from here. I did, I did an experiment. My wife was very afraid of the worst experiment. I continue. Yeah, but anyways, people,

people are very afraid of sugar. I, to prove a point, I drank a soda every single day. I drank a Coke every single day for six months straight. I know that's not the... You're young and you work out every day. It's like a million ways to offset that.

It wouldn't be good. No, a lot of people think, no, no, I agree. It is overblood. People think like a single Coca-Cola is terrible.

Yeah, of course, of course. Everything is in the dose is the poison with all of this stuff. Yeah. What about so this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars, how basically AI researchers are being comped, almost like pro athletes and sort of like, you know, these sort of nine, nine figure massive offers.

The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the media landscape and we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic. I imagine that he's already like run rating well, well beyond. I don't know what his metrics are. But I would imagine he's already. He's catching up to me. Oh, really? Yeah.

Go subscribe to feed me right now and help help win the race. But I was curious if you, it feels like if legacy media companies, I won't call anyone out want to want real attention, not just the sort of attention. that comes from their logo to some degree in the prestige, but like actually quality content, at some point they'll have to like kind of reevaluate their comp structures. I think the Atlantic was like 300K was being reported as like the kind of range. And when you can go on substack as a superstar writer and immediately be making

somewhere in the seven figure range at some point or another, it just becomes really difficult. I see traditional media company is more likely to start doing like handshakes with substack writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff. So like syndication or like, I mean, I've talked to so many editors from traditional magazines and papers who are like trying to figure out how they can work with FeedMe. Is it like a co-publishing thing? Is it like creating a podcast together? And it's been very interesting to experience firsthand to, like, talk to these people because I don't, I don't really need that. Like, Derek doesn't need the Atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him, not the whole surrounding.

Yeah, I mean, just to set the table for the folks who might be listening, when Emily comes on the show, we pay her $100,000 for her appearance. So just to kind of set the bar. And it ramps up. Yeah, yeah, it obviously ramps up. But, but yes, I am interested in like the dynamic of. of like you can still go and publish in traditional media. Is that just like freelance? What is the difference you can be coming back?

What do you mean like when I write for GQ? Yeah, exactly. Are you a columnist? There's no reason that I'm doing that besides that I adore my editor there. And I think that it's just like it's working like a different part of my brain. Like I don't, it's like a gift to get to be edited by GQ's editors. That's cool. Yeah.

Do you, so are, are you a columnist over there? or are you a contributor? Like, what's the actual shape? Do you get assigned things? Like, I've had reporters reach out to me and be like, I was assigned a story on nicotine, so I need to talk to you as an expert or whatever. So with GQ specifically, my editor, Dan,

when I wrote the Zinn story and when I wrote a story about members clubs last year, both were because I had written about both of those topics in my newsletter. And he was like, I think it would be interesting for you to expand upon this in like a larger feature in a print issue. And that's how that's happened. I don't really, but like, I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I want to write, like it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to the Times or to New York Magazine because I can get it done faster on FeedMe. Sure.

I can outsource an editor if I need that. I can outsource legal services if I need that. And it's better for me to get to be like breaking those sorts of stories, you know? Yeah, yeah. I just have like a good thing going in GQ. It's kind of fun. That's cool. I want to bounce an idea off you.

There is this narrative that like when you go direct, when you're on substack, like it has a different texture, a different, different vibe, different, maybe more objective, maybe more pro tech or pro, you know, creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered. I think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more. about the economics that essentially when you're in legacy media, you basically have a salary cap. And when you're outside of it, you have no salary cap. And that actually defines the economic terms shape the type of content more than than anything else. Do you think that's reasonable? Do you disagree? How would you wrestle with that? Can you keep like expanding on that? I want it. So, so, uh, I think that there's, there's something where if you, if you're working,

working at a particular outlet and there's some sort of like salary cap. It's like imagine if there were two NBA teams playing against each other and one had a salary cap of $300,000 per player and the other had no salary cap. Who would you expect to produce better basketball? Who would you expect to produce better content when you have one that where a person can make 10 million or Joe Rogan can make 100 million? just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the yeah extremely ambitious yeah and they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they

work if they work a little bit harder and they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece it could not it doesn't mean oh here you got a five thousand dollar Christmas bonus it means Spotify signed you to a hundred million dollar contract and it's the difference between like when lebron james shows up at midnight to shoot more three free free throws like that could be the difference between like a 50 million dollar contract and a hundred million dollar contract so i think you're right extra thing produces like better content yeah it's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists you know give sub stack a shot and like they just plateau yes but i'm like i'm an animal like when my eyes

are open i'm working like this letter goes out every day it's i'm marketing it i'm editing it i'm pitching stories but i've always had a really high tall for being told no, like when I was getting paid 60K at a job and when I'm making like 10 times that now, right? Like so I think that substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing, also attract personality types that are had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work. And then when people who don't think like that think that they can find the same success, like they get disappointed or confused or think that it's rigged or something like that. Um, when really they're just getting outcomputed. I mean, going going above and beyond for a job where the cap might be like, what did that New York magazine story say about the Atlantic 300 K?

That's what they were paying their journalists. Like, okay. So like you're, you're going to go as hard as you can to make 300k and get those benefits and whatever. But the other thing that I'll say like is you have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to, you know, have, have months where you're, you're not having. having like the support of a team. And it's just like a very specific type of personality. But I think you're totally onto something.

Like I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a at a magazine or newspaper. Yeah. Yeah. Also the insurance thing is real, but it's also a problem that is very quickly overcome. And you can quit your job and say, I'm going to pay out of pocket for insurance for two years. and if this doesn't work out, then I'll get a rollback. I'm curious, you were commenting on Vogue partnering with the NutraGrain bars, and I'm curious if you think as people are so used to influencer,

creator-led advertising, like if you were to partner with a brand and people are like, wait, like what? Like, why did she partner? That makes no sense. like that's clearly a cash grab. That feels like, it seems like legacy media brands could get away with that kind of thing for a long time, even though we're saying, you know, why is... NutraGrain needs better marketing because the first thing I think about with Notre grain...

I think they can shut down. Yeah, I always think about the, I think that Nature Valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere. I don't know if you've seen that one. But that's not NutraGrain. And so my biggest association... Long big Newton. Yeah, they got to work on that. Yeah, it's like, is it a fig Newton?

Is it the crumbic one? Like, I just know it's not good. So they got to step it up. But yeah, the Vogue audience. I mean, what, do you think that there was ever a pitch where it's like, okay, we're going to go after the moms that read Vogue and get them to buy it for the kids? And so it's some sort of like bank shot strategy. For me, what stopped me in my tracks was it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter.

It wasn't like one of those, it wasn't like somebody writing about, uh, their wellness routine sponsored by NutraGrain. It was a produced video of a stylist sort of like gallivanting through the streets of New York City. And I really like this girl, Michelle. And I saw her post it and I saw that it was between Vogue and NutraGrain. Like there was two, who was in the room? Who sold this ad and how much was it for and how much did Michelle get and how much did Vogue get? Like it was very confusing to me because there were there were other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense. And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation, but unfortunately. The conversation was started. Yeah. There's so many media reporters, but I didn't

pick up on it. Somebody else would have. But I think that Kande Nast overall right now is on life support. Like we had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor. Unfortunately, like it's happening immediately right after that with this new, this new Vogue editor. It's a lot of, it's a lot of pressure for like, I don't know what, like a few more years of running this magazine. It just doesn't really seem like how it doesn't, Vogue doesn't seem, I don't know what I would look to Vogue for right now. Yeah, yeah. It kind of goes back to that idea of like the, the independent media creator versus the legacy media creator. Like, we just released an ad for Wander that we said they asked us. They barely even asked us to make it.

And we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, like, edited it. We just did everything. We sent them the final thing. And they were like, yeah, cool. And so I think the brand carried through. There was like a second that they asked for a tweak. Yeah, they were like, actually our font is this one instead of that one. I loved it.

And so, and so like that is the type of like, you know, entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on, where they actually starred in the commercial would bring to a partnership and select and and coordinated with a brand that was actually aligned, but there were just like too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day. And so it just wound up being very odd. I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at bar stool and like have them talk about like how this is like the bar like the hangover snack? Like that I think would have moved the needle more. Totally. I don't know. Are the, when I think of logical vote partnerships, I think of like luxury brands or luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership.

Have you seen anything there? What are the innovative things that you're seeing from like the really top tier brands out there? Have you seen anything cool? You know what I saw today? Do you know those David bars? Like the metallic. Yeah, we had him on the show. I love them.

I saw that Valencia at their show this week. Somebody posted a photo of like Valenciauga bars. Like it's the same sort of metallic. Okay. Metallic label. I took a photo of it. I'll send it to you guys after this. That's very cool. So, I mean, like, is that going to move their, their hoodies?

I don't know. But, like, those sort of fun, weird moments are more exciting to me if we're talking about nutrition bars. I mean, it certainly shows that, like, Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because, like, Peter Rahal, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer package goods world and a little bit intact. And some people know the story of RX Bar and then David Barr with the revenue ramp. Like the business is doing well, but it's still like a complete insider industry story. Like the average person on the street doesn't know that.

So Valencia is kind of signaling a little bit to that. Yeah. Hey, what's true with the new business community? And I'm sure that that took them like a couple thousand bucks like put together. Like, you know, it's not difficult. As far as what luxury brands are doing, I think it's a lot of events now. Like, they're putting a lot of money into events. Like, I was just at a Chanel event.

They do a lot of programming with Tribeca Film Festival, which is cool because everybody's in the city anyway. So they throw events and make sure the people show up to that. I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is dominated by brand events. It just seems to be what's moving the needle because people go and they get photos of themselves and they post it. And it's like the brand is the background. So you end up being like New York just feels like a billboard every time you go out now because everything is a brand event. It's like dominating how people are organizing their social calendars. I don't go to events. I don't go outside. I just stream. What makes for a good brand event? Like is this just a happy hour? Is that we're talking about? Is there dancing? It's actually interesting that the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB. Oh, yeah. They would they would throw dinners that. Sure. Like there's an entire founder dinner. industrial complex that are just like financial or you know companies that that throw these dinners the

funny thing is that within tech the company has historically failed to make them social moments so it'd be like it'll say the name it'll say SVB on the menu and people aren't like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures so I think what the luxury brands do well is you're saying hey we're going to invite 200 people into the space photographer and you're not going to be able if you post any photos at all we're going to be getting exposure we're going to have a moment yeah um i i threw a brand dinner or i feed me dinner with my friend paul from the infatuation last year and Andrew ross sork and was sitting next to me and i gave him a feed me keychain that was my brand moment um that's a great moment so that's another thing like

at those dinners are yeah how are brands being creative are we seeing like ice sculptures or step and repeats How can brands stand out with one of those? Like the worst possible brand event is a DJ and free drinks. Like just people standing in front of like a 22 year old DJ with like free drinks. And then more innovative things are like, I think when you give people an activity to do, like if you are doing like bowling or and making it like glamorous or like, you know, now brands are, if they're doing a collab with like an athletic brand, they'll take a bunch of women to like tennis courts or a golf club in Connecticut. And like, that's a photo op for everybody involved. So like these mini expeditions or like Jay crew last year took a bunch of

people on a gorgeous sailboat in the Hudson River off of like the seaport. It's basically like take your customers on a date. Right. On an extravagant adventurous date. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then if you level up, then you're going to start talking about like brand trips. Like Hermes took people to Aspen last summer. And yeah. I mean, a ton of VC firms do that all the time. It could come with us and we'll do a track day or movie night or we'll go out to, you know, some, you know, some ranch and like shoot shotguns and have dinners and it's a whole weekend. Where's my call? I want to do that. They should get you on the calls. We'll introduce you some folks.

post-mortem on the Democratic primary, but just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of coverage of Zoron's basically film, you know, vertical video-making abilities that seems to have played a key role in the campaign. I'm curious. Are you talking to any, like, TikTokers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians? That would be interesting. Yeah, I had a friend who I used to.

actually used to work with at Condi Nast, who worked in the White House for Biden. And I think that she helped out with Zoran's campaign. Like, there are people who know, I think, like, you have to be excellent at that job if you're working for a political campaign, especially in the White House because the turnaround times are insane and the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy, as they should be. So I think there's like a mini network. I mean, there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram. Like, they were recruited straight from meta. So that's definitely a thing.

But I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work. And part of that is digitally now. Like, and Zoran did that really well. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election. And then this primary felt like the short form election. and that sort of it makes sense especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters. Yeah. I mean, his team invited me to start covering his campaign back in February.

Like I was I was at a party, I think, in March for him. But he's, he also went on like throwing fits and a few other podcasts. And he did like a Q&A with me for Feed Me. So he, his team knew where to where to advocate. That's good. We've been talking a ton about, uh, The AI talent wars, there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley making $100 million for in signing bonuses. Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money. New York famously good at spending money. What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have $100 million burning a hole in their pocket? They want to get in the game.

They want to step up their fashion, their cars, their houses. What would you recommend? It's funny that you go to fashion and cars because I think there's a real a Louis Mangione situation on our hands here with this kind of job. So I feel like you need a security guard. Okay. Security guard. For sure. Yep.

Plain clothes security guard, which means like those tight lacost polos, you know. Okay. Maybe they should be carrying too. Maybe they should, you know, if you got the, you got to be everyday carry now. If you're making $100 million. California's gotten more lenient. Yeah. Yeah.

So I feel like you have to staff up in a position like this. Like you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't going to like leak your information, a personal trainer. Okay. Who's trustworthy, a feed me subscription. Of course. There we go. And then I think it's like removing friction from areas of your life with with like

staffing up like that. I recently learned that on this neighborhood in the Hamptons called Sagaponic is a, a micro climate and I'm I feel like that's a good place to invest your money um wait break that down a little bit but a little bit more it's just it's just on an average day it's nicer there I think it's not necessarily nicer I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas like I am in a different neighborhood than that and if you were there right now it would feel different than here even though it's not that far away yeah like like you can be like Long Island as a whole is today but Sagapana could could have a different weather report because it's this micro subclimates

you need your own and the tides and the trees there's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic yeah I mean isn't San Francisco like that too yes famously that's why in the summer it'll still be it'll still be foggy and stuff but then it's really warm later in the year right yeah so I feel like investing in a microclimate is a good way to spend your that just sounds wise yeah they're not making any more of them And then I think that you'd need to use your money to start taking some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes. There's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for like trendy items.

So I would try to hang out with like, do you guys know the watch dealer Mike Nouveau? Like somebody like him or like, you know, like take him out to dinner and talk to him and and get some advice. I bought a watch from him last year and he seems like he knows his stuff. Would you pick up? I got my husband a nice watch. Okay. Let's go.

Let's hear it for the husband. Two size gongs, one of you. That's how you know it's a good one. A birthday and a gift. And maybe like befriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise, consult on the closet. Can you get us Chris Black on the show? because I, the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released, where it was the cease and desist from the New York Times.

Because they like copied the cover art and they just printed, made a shirt, sold it. That's great. It was a work of art. Chris would definitely come on. I'll connect you guys. Yeah, I think that the biggest mistake that people who come into a lot of money quickly make is just, you know, doing that automatic Apple pay on while they're shopping. you end up with stuff that doesn't fit you or it looks horrible or something.

Yeah, so stylists, tech. Stilist, but a lot of technologists. You know, take people out to dinner, host parties, like keep them around, you know. Do you think it's good to surround yourself with yes men? What do you, how do you? So if you surround yourself with yes men, then whatever ideas you have, all your yes, men, I'll just tell you, yes, that's the best idea ever. A lot of people say don't do it.

But maybe it sounds good. I would not do that. Everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea. No, I would not. That's not good. Okay. So stay away from the yes man. Yeah.

You want yes people on your team where you say, I want to do the impossible and they just say yes. Yes, we're gonna do it. But there's a line, you know, you don't wanna cross it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. Thanks guys. Yeah, just send us the invoice for the 100K appearance fee

and we'll look forward to doing it soon. Yeah, send the next. few too. Happy Fourth of July. Yeah, happy for it. Have fun. We'll talk soon. Bye. Up next, we have Mert from Helius here to talk about stable coins, talk about crypto, talk about NFT. We're doing it all this show. Very excited to talk to Mert. He put on an absolute clinic during the last show. He might be having some technical legal difficulty. So let's go back to the timeline. Daniel, growing Daniel, says Open AI is super nice for giving everyone the week off for interviews at Meta and Elon Musk is crying,

imagine laughing, absolutely brutal. You saw the wander ad, but you can still find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service, it's a vacation home but better. Vittorio says, I used to pray for the day, nerds would be treated like athletes, the day is finally here and it's glorious and it's our post put up by Tyler Cosgrove, the intern, Tyler got 25,000, thousand likes. Vittorio quote tweets it get 50k you love to see it anyway we have Mert in the studio welcome to the stream how are you doing I am having some

technical difficulties can you hear me yeah you know you look good the only thing is maybe rotate the camera if you're on your phone so we can go horizontal but other than that there we go fantastic looking good thanks so much for taking the time I know you're really you know a you know a set at heart all over the world. But very excited to talk to you. There's a ton of stuff going on in the crypto world that we wanted to talk about. Should we start with the idea of private companies on chain? Is that a good place to start? Yeah, sure. So there's a few versions of this that have just been announced, one by Republic and one by Robin Hood.

Yeah. Do you want to just go over both or? Yeah, I let's start there. And then I basically want to cover public and privates, but we can start with privates. Sure. Yeah. I mean, so the details on these are a little fuzzy just because I think at least the name of the game for some of them seems to be regulatory arbitrage. But so for example, in the case of Robin Hood, they just announced that they're going to have it. And they didn't really give any specific details other than it would be on their own optimized chain, block chain for RWA's. For Republic, they basically said, and by the way, people thought this was for trading

these private equity, like these private shares, but they're actually just for buying them and then holding them. And then you actually get, in Republic's case, you're locked up for about a year. And I believe the maximum size you can do is actually only $5,000. So I think they're basically just trying to test the waters and see how the regulars would react is my reading of it. Yeah, the 5K limit is interesting. The lack of immediate liquidity is interesting too.

I mean, it's clearly a product for retail. The other thing that I was thinking about is, you know, if you, if you just released, you know, SpaceX shares on chain, there's almost going to be infinite demand for them. And so the limit could also just be, hey, we want as many people to be able to access these as possible. or it just gets bit up and bit up, but it sounds like it'll be fixed price. Any reaction to Robin Hood setting up their own chain to do this? And then it's also Europe only, from what I could tell.

Right. Yeah. And by the way, just on the Republic private shares thing, it's actually, I looked into this, it's a mirrored asset. So it's purely mimicking the performance of the price of the shares. and then it's a note on the upside in the event of a liquidity event. So it's not like you're actually owning the stock by any means, obviously. For Robin Hood, yeah, I mean, so it seems like they decided to launch on Arbitrum,

the L2, to start with, with the eventual understanding that they will launch it on their own optimized chain. I think, you know, Robin Hood has always been like a vertically integrated company that wants full control over the design, the user experience, the abstractions. And so I think building your own chain for this makes sense because, I mean, they obviously already have the liquidity, the users, and the distribution. So I think it makes sense, provided that, you know, they can hire, you know, Vlad can go full Zuck mode and hire some crypto talent. to run the blockchain because that's hard work. Run the blockchain. Break down the, what's happened. I've seen enough screenshots this week so far.

I think you were sharing some of them of people, you know, swapping something, you know, an esteemed asset like fart coin for, for some Tesla shares. What is actually happening there? Are they, is it just a, is there actually, are the X Tesla or whatever these are, are they tied to any real underlying? asset, is it entirely vibes? What's actually going on? Yes. So as sophisticated investors, we've been swapping Farkpoint into the Tesla and Nenvidia stock and even meta now.

And so these shares actually are backed one by fully backed by the custodian. It's quite fascinating how it works actually. And these are only available in Europe, by the way, both in the case of of Robin Hood and Cracken and this company called BACTS that's actually doing the regulatory stuff. So what happens is there's some KYC at the beginning of the process where you actually have to buy from the primary market. But then once it's withdrawn to the blockchain,

it's basically there's like this loophole where they're tree like certificates. And so you can, as long as you say that these aren't supposed to be allowed for USA investors, as long as you basically just say that and you know, you put the fine print there. Once you do that, they're just three like digital assets. And so when you do trade, you know, you know, share coin 3000 into Nvidia stock, it actually is like you're getting something that's a back one to one.

However, it's the same with the private stocks where there's like a pretty big limitation on the the liquidity. Like, I think, you know, 100 million is like the max that can be issued at this point. And they're doing like several tens of millions in volume. So nothing crazy yet. But how are they trade? Are they trade? Are they, they're not stable, right? No, no. Yeah. So there's a. So they can trade at a premium. Yeah, no, they're not. This isn't, it's, it's, it's, it's, Not like a micro strategy play. We can talk about the Treasury companies as well, but the prices are supposed to be indexed one-to-one. And what's interesting is like you can now obviously compose this with other applications

in Defi, right? So you can literally buy Tesla stock and then take out a loan against it and then maybe 8FarC point at that point. Like you can do all sorts of different things. And you can just like hold it in your wallet. But it's pretty cool, but like it's just, it's very, very early. So I wouldn't make any opinions. But it feels pretty monumental, right? Is this not what what people have been excited about for the, for the last decade? Two decades.

Peter Thiel was saying that he wanted a cryptocurrency that was backed by a basket of every financial asset. And like we're gone the cusp of it. It feels like that you could have like a token that owns a slice of the S&P, a slice of the S&P, a slice of physical gold, a slice of real estate, and it'd be kind of like the most stable asset, even more stable than the dollar potentially. That was like the original pieces. But I guess the question is actually, by the way, that video.

Yeah. Yeah, you actually service that video. That video is predicted in 1999. But yeah, I mean, it is huge, right? Like it's gotten a lot of attention. And it's very exciting that you can just basically start to like actually modernize, the financial rails. Pat, Patrick Collison from Stripe had a really good way of describing stablecoins,

which was like, these are, this is like dollars on like superconductor rails, right? Where there's now no friction and you can just compose with any other financial instruments, obviously that's on the blockchain. And it's just, it's got, it's taken so much work to actually get here and clear all these regulatory hurdles. But, you know, it's, it's really just beginning. I think there's going to be, once Robin Hood, that's in and everybody else starts getting it. I think Coinbase will also start pretty soon, right? They also have their own blockchain. So I think it's going to start getting very competitive.

Okay, I was talking to a retail investor who would be like so excited about- 150 IQ? It would be so excited to be able to buy private company shares on chain, be able to buy all sorts of stuff on chain. But he was particularly actually very upset and still held a grudge. from the GameStop rally where there was no buy button, there was only a sell button, and he felt like betrayed by the platform. Now, when I dug into it, it seemed like the situation with Robin Hood was much more nuanced than that,

and there was actually some liquidity constraints, and there were a lot of reasons why they chose the whole narrative of like, oh, they, Ken Griffin called them and told them to, you know, save some hedge fund. I didn't really buy into that. But anyway, I think the more important question is when you put something on chain, the idea is like the code is decentralized. No one has the button to turn something off. But the downside of that is that you could maybe get into some situation where the, like, if there's a reinforcing feedback loop of cell pressure or buy pressure, you could really, really distort the market.

And so I'm wondering, like, you know, I'm thinking about the Terra Luna situation or any of these situations where there was like this perfect perpetual motion machine, but then the fact that it was actually that someone couldn't step in and just pump the brakes was actually a bug, not a feature at that moment of time. And I'm wondering if there are potential risks to having real world assets on chain that where everything is in code. Does that make any sense? I'm asking any sort of reasonable question here. Can you just move on that a little bit? It's certainly a very valid point. And it's also why the Genius Act for stable coins was pretty monumental.

Because, like, you know, Tara Luna also had some very funky concepts around their stable coins and they're, you know, not actually being backed by anything, right? Yeah. And with the new Stablecoin Act, which, like, puts very or, you know, much more clear framework on, like, how often should these things be audited, how should they be backed, who can do this, whatever. And with this new regulatory approach, consumers and users actually have like way better benefits and way better guarantees, right? And it's also, right, like, it's obviously decentralized finance, but it's also programmable finance, right? So in the case of an L2, for example,

you know, Robin Hood can add, again, the same types of rules that to enact some sort of control. and like maybe freeze something. USC can already do this today, by the way, right? USC can actually freeze the USC per on a wallet, on a per wallet basis. And even on Salana, you can do this, right? The smart contracts have certain hooks depending on how the issuer of the token actually encodes these. So you can actually still program these to get like the compliance, you know, flavor that you want. The difference is that it's extremely transparent, right?

You can read the code and you can be like, okay, this is what can happen in this situation and this is what they did. And so you can actually audit it and it's very, verifiable. I have a question about error bore, this story kind of leaked out today in the Financial Times about Palmer Lucky, Peter Thiel and some other folks, Joe Lonsdale, working on something that sounds like a stable coin bank. I would love to hear about the problems that crypto companies run into with banks. What might they solve if you were imagining the list of to-dos?

And then had there any, I mean, there's been a few crypto-friendly banks, but if I have it correct, like Robin Hood isn't a bank, Coinbase isn't a bank, Circle's not a bank, Stripe isn't a bank, or maybe you can correct me there, but just kind of take me through the, the, the problem that banks solve and then in the current in the current structure and then what problems are do stable coin companies still face with the traditional banking system right yeah so um i think actually uh mike uh from pirate wires and nick carter uh did a really good job on operation choke point where they kind of go in detail into the debanking of of of these industries um i have like a much more uh trivial example which is my co-founder uh He's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's like, and then, uh, he looked at where he worked, which is helius, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the company that we run. Uh, and they said it was, uh,

you're in crypto, even though we don't have like a token, we're basically a cloud provider. Uh, and they said, it's too high risk of an industry and they actually, he couldn't get a mortgage. Wow. Um, well, and, and, and, And like, this is Canada. And so, like, in terms of problems, you know, there's a lot of, maybe there's two dimensions to this. One is just the interoperability, right? Like being able to off-ramp, on-ramp, compose. Like if you're earning money, USC on-chain,

how exactly are you transferring that? How are you doing payroll? All sorts of things, like just the tech side of it. And then just like being able to get access has been historical. especially I think this is changing especially with the president of the free world and actually the first lady both being the founders of various shit coins I think it's certainly changing but yeah we saw that what was the the announcement are you talking about the the social media founder the

founder of truth social he has a coin right unicorn social media entrepreneur it's very rare that a that a that a founder of a social media company as big as true social has a side hustle as demanding as being the president of the United States. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. And there was also there was also the news that I'm forgetting the governing body, but they were advising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start looking at crypto assets in the mortgage process. The federal housing. Yeah. Yeah. So there's progress. Right. Yeah. So Yeah, so that one's super interesting where you can actually, I believe the exact rule is something like the assets that you have on a centralized exchange like a Coinbase and soon to be, I guess, Robin Hood. You can actually take out a mortgage using those assets as collateral.

And I believe they actually, I don't know if this was real news. I didn't look too into it, but I believe they were actually looking at it like if Farkoin is viable to use as mortgage collateral. because like it obviously needs to have some certain properties but yeah that that can be very interesting um i'm not sure how it'll go uh you know the devil's always in the details for these things um but there's a lot of progress right um like two years ago with gair gensler uh at let's say being the eye of sar on uh you could not even imagine like you cannot even think this you you would arrest you in your sleep. So, and then everybody left the States as a result and now they're coming back. Yeah. Well, the eye of Saran is closed and the mountain of Arabour is born.

So, well, we'll have to have you back on soon to talk more. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for calling in. I'm sure it's late wherever you are and we really appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, great to catch up. We'll talk you soon. You always catch me up. Have a good one. So many zingers. No, vernacular is just undefeated. But you heard Emily Sundberg mention it earlier. She bought her husband a watch. You can buy your husband or wife a watch on Bezell.

Go to getbezzle.com. Your Bezell concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And our next guest has an absolute hitter. I saw him in D.C. Reverso. Not to docks your watch, but it's a fantastic piece. walks dotch. Great. Now he's got a higher security.

And on the way, look at this. Oh, he's got it on. Oh, I love a reversal. Let's go. The uno reversal. Beautiful. It's a beautiful watch. It's fantastic. It has a great story. It was a beautiful watch. It was actually, it was a gift from my wife for my 30th birthday. So a beautiful watch for my family for my 30th birthday. So I'm thrilled to have it. Yeah. And if I remember the story correctly, it was different time zones for a while. That's right. So that's right. No better watch. watch than the reverseo to represent where you are physically and where your future wife is. That's right. JLC sponsor the pod. We're ready. Really? We are so ready. Until then, getbezzled.com. Was lovely having you on yesterday. A lot tends to happen in 24 hours these days. What's new? Give us the

update. Yeah, it's a big 24 hours. First of all, has anyone ever done the two day in a row? Back to back. Delian. Delian did once, kind of by accident he came on he was scheduled uh every other thursday and he happened to stop by our yc demo day stream for a very different thing we hit him with the confetti cannon it was a lot of fun that's all right all right we love delian that's fine big 24 hours in washington in fact it started right after i hung up with you guys i don't know if you saw this in the background of my shot yesterday you had this beautiful vista over downtown dc and as we were talking there was a huge storm cloud starting to come in and completely reigning on top of all of DC.

So you guys know this. I think people probably know in Congress. There is no remote voting. You are either voting in person or if you are not there, you do not get a say in what happens. And right now, the big beautiful bill, which is in the hands of the house, is on the precipice. It could go either way. It might pass. It may not pass.

But every single vote is necessary. And I kid you not, there was a ground stop in the morning at DCA. And there were multiple members who were stopped prevented from coming back into town to vote because of the huge storm in Washington last night. So I just give you a sense of how quickly things move. It's a biblical metaphor for sure. It is. It is biblical. I don't always see divine providence in politics.

In fact, I just about never see it. But it's pretty hard to argue with a full grand stuff in DC. So does this make JD Vance's vote more important, less important? What's the read on Vance's role here? So Vance is the president of the Senate when there's a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which is what happened yesterday. His vote is the most crucial vote. And that's why, by the way, if you are any Dem, Governor Shapiro, AOC, whomever running in 2028, it is now a phenomenal gift to you that you can go and Badger D-Dadey Vance about his vote yesterday. But the bill is in the House today.

So there's no Vance vote. There's no tiebreaker. There is no. In fact, the GOP basically has eight votes, or sorry, four votes. they could lose. There were eight people who didn't show up this morning. There are four votes they could lose and still get the vote passed. And so all day, there's been this series starting in the morning of procedural votes as a way of checking just who from the conference is even in town to begin with before they get to the actual vote itself. This is like literally a roll call. It's a roll call.

It is literally a goal call. My mom was a teacher for a while. My grandmother was a teacher her whole career, there is zero difference between my grandmother teaching a special ed class doing roll call and what's happening today in Congress, maybe a slight difference, but basically no difference. All right, so there's a couple of factions. You guys talked about yesterday the menu of different people within the GOP. The big challenge today is picking up votes where the GOP can, where the Republican Party can, in the menu of factions. The two big ones to keep an eye on are the House Republican moderates and the House Freedom Caucus, which are the sort of more extreme further ideologically opposed folks.

If you're a moderate, you don't like it for one simple reason, which is this has a bunch of Medicaid cuts. In fact, there are far more Medicaid cuts in the Senate version of the bill, which is what you're being asked to vote on and the House version of the bill that you passed a couple weeks ago. And you don't want to hang that around your neck when you go back home. Remember, if you're in the house, you are always in campaign mode. You're running every two years.

That's why you were out of town to begin with. Because anytime there's a weekend, you're flying home to your district to go pick up a couple extra dollars, right? So the moderates don't like it because of the Medicaid cuts, huge Medicaid cuts. The conservatives don't like it. The far conservatives and the Freedom Caucus don't like it because it actually blows up a framework, a balanced budget or close to balanced budget framework that they passed in the House last time. So they got to basically a compromise agreement with spending cuts and with tax cuts that the Senate completely ignored.

So that's much harder for them. And part of Trump's success, if this bill gets passed, will be because he convinces people, from the Freedom Caucus in particular to flip and become supporters of the big beautiful bill. So wrapping up on JD Vance, if the vote goes through in the House, then people will hang on him. What happens if the bill passes, does the other bill automatically die? Is there some sort of trigger there? So if the House passes the bill today, the House is looking at the Senate's version of the bill. Yeah. The House passes that bill today. It goes right to the President's desk, for signature. That is the plan A scenario. If you're in the admin, what you're hoping happens

is it gets past, it goes through. Plan B or plan C even is the House says we want to reopen the bill and add a bunch of different amendments because we don't like the Medicaid cuts or we don't like the deficit expansion or whatever. And then it goes back to the Senate where, by the way, the Republican Party may or may not have the votes to get it done. And suddenly J.D. Vance gets into that spotlight again. Got it. Okay. So the, so, yeah, so the House can't change anything in the Senate bill right now, they just have to decide yay or nay. That's exactly right. If they reopen, if they make any changes, which by the way, a lot of people in the House want them to do, then the Senate has to go through the entire procedure of passing it again, which is a huge risk

factor for them. Is there any chance that the House tries to add back in that AI, state level AI legislation ban? Or is that even not even in the conversation? I think it's fairly unlikely, right? Given the overwhelming, I mean, listen, given it was a 99, nine to one, uh, peudiation of a rebuke, rebuke of the AI moratorium. I think it's unlikely the house added it back in because that's a signal from the Senate saying, look, if you put this back into the bill, all that's going to happen is we're going to lose even more procedural time, getting it out of the bill again when it comes back to us the next number of days. But the only way this passes before the July 4th deadline in my view is if the house basically swallows the Senate

version as is today. Yeah. So you, you, you, you, kind of define some of the the attack lines on the right with the moderates going after the Medicaid cuts and the and the farther right Freedom Caucus is that right saying that they want more of a balanced bill have any particular attack lines been opened on the left that you've seen oh yeah yeah I mean the left looks at this this is Christmas if you're on the left right you get basically to say wow the Republicans voted to take away your Medicaid which is a huge bludgeon. You guys remember back in the OGT party, all those signs, keep your government hands off my Medicare, keep your government hands off my Medicaid, right? This is a horseshoe

issue. Or people on the left and on the right are equally impacted by it. And the net result of that is that it's a great campaign line, no matter what side of the aisle you're on. So, here's an example. North Carolina, we talked yesterday about Senator Tillis from North Carolina who's not running for reelection and who ultimately voted against the big, beautiful bill passage. Tillis has a group of folks in the House who, are predominantly from his state delegation, who he has some influence, some relationship with, right? Many of whom have signaled, many of whom are moderates

and many of whom has signaled, I have some reluctance to vote for the bill. Part of the reluctance is because the Democratic governor of North Carolina wrote a letter where he basically said, look, if you vote for the bill, I am going to make sure that these Medicaid cuts become a big issue in the next campaign. Because they massively impact his state budget.

Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania did the same thing, where he said, look, if you vote for the bill, you should know that you will be impacting the Medicaid of Pennsylvanians and I will use that politically against you. The last part is implied. This has been really, really helpful. I've genuinely learned a lot. So thank you for talking about this is great. You may not have been the first person to go back to back to back, but I have a feeling it will be the first to go back to back to back. This is very, very helpful. Thank you for breaking it down for us. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it as always. I can't see my Kairon. Yeah, exactly. I can't

see the Kairon, but I'm hoping it says Washington correspondent. That'll be my We will definitely update it tomorrow. Thank you. The Vice President of Washington. Yeah, great. I'll see you guys tomorrow, I'm sure. Cheers. Cheers, thanks.

Thank you. Up next, we have our lightning round beginning with John from Paraform. Welcome to the stream. John, how are you doing? Good to meet you. What's happening? Good, guys. Thanks for having me.

What's the latest? Can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? Jordi's getting the hammer ready. What's the latest news? Do you have any good numbers for us? We love big numbers, hopefully with lots of zeros. Yeah. Hey, everyone.

Yeah, great to meet you guys. I'm one of the founders and CEO of a company called Paraform. We just announced our 20 million Series A, led by Felis and an incredible group of founders. Congratulations. I like what Jordy does it because he goes in the camera feed. It's great. Congratulations. Congratulations.

20 million bucks. That's amazing. Tell us what the company does, the inciting concept, the idea, how big you are, the scale of the business right now, that type of stuff. Let me guess you're going to hire one fifth of an AI researcher. Use of funds. Yeah, yeah, we're getting one day a week. Yeah, fractional. Fractional.

Yeah, fractional AI researcher. Oh, I saw that. And also like the founding engineer who, you know, four different companies, I think his name was Soong. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. But for those of you know, Paraform is a marketplace where we help the world's most important companies hire top talent by connecting them with expert recruiters who actually act more like

sports agents than talent sources. And, you know, I've actually seen your post recently about the meta super intelligence team. Like you guys framed it as like traded. Internally, we've been talking about this for over a year. And it's really cool to see that sort of trend, sort of playing out live, but also it's happening a lot sooner than we thought. It's really interesting to dive deeper into like the trend of like just recruiting in general. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we've been talking about this a lot because it's good content. It's interesting. And I think what the surprising thing that we learned this week, I think is that we put up that traded graphic for the meta-AI researcher and it got millions of views, like millions of views. And it's funny. And there's an element that can go broader. But it really does speak to the fact that tech has gone.

mainstream. The question that we've been mulling is where does this go next? Because when you look at the goat debate between LeBron James and Michael Jordan, you're looking at points per game. You're looking at lifetime career points. Number of MVP's one. Number of championships one. What metrics are you interested in looking at? Is LinkedIn still relevant? Is GitHub still relevant? Are you quantifying these things? What are you doing to try and match these folks together? You imagine that AI can be very useful. There's a whole bunch of different ways that I can imagine this working,

but you probably have to do some filtering on both sides to understand who's a good recruiter and who's a good, who's good talent. For sure. Yeah, I think like, you know, the trend that you guys picked up, it's like you're onto something and it's like very similar to what we think. It's like, I don't think that important tech company hiring, let's say the best marketing person, will be too, similar to the Lakers announcing that, you know, LeBron joined or the Dodgers getting Otani.

I think how we think about it is as AI sort of, you know, rapidly advances and it automates a lot of the mundane work, I think humans sort of focus on more like higher order functions, right? And one person will be able to do a lot more. Obviously, the GDP will accelerate, so the average salaries will go up. We've always internally talked about how the age of like a seven-figure salary is rapidly approaching. It already is for certain industries. But I think it will be a lot more mainstream. So yeah, I think like there's going to be more scarcity towards good talent. It's going to get even more competitive.

And when there's that scarcity, usually the value of a broker goes up. And we actually see recruiters, you know, kind of turning into almost one of the most important roles in tech, where essentially they're like brokering this human capital between the most important companies and making sure they represent the best talent. In terms of metrics, I think very similar to maybe like the MBA or the MLB, like, Obviously, they'll measure the company's performance. I think a lot of people commented on how it's ridiculous to pay $100 million or whatever. But really, these companies, they're smart.

They're doing that because the return on that is greater, right? Like, I mean, solving AGI, I think, is like an important enough problem where you do that, right? So I think, you know, that's one thing that you're going to measure, right? Like, how well are companies going to perform and achieve their objectives? I think there's other, like, key KPIs, like, you know, I'd imagine it's just like the North Star metrics for different teams. I wonder if there's going to be universal things like points, assists, and, you know, minutes played. But yeah, I think it's something interesting to think about. Yeah, I mean, we kind of already do this at a little, at like a smaller level when someone says, like, I was early at Stripe.

What that really means is that, like, you were there for the creation of like the first 50 billion of market cap or something. And so if you were one of 20 on that team, yeah, we might give you, you know, $50 million in points, right? essentially. So yeah, what else is going on with the top of funnel? Where are candidates percolating up into the paraform system these days? Yeah, so one of the fastest growing roles we see are forward deployed engineers. Like obviously Palantir, they're one of our customers too. They coined this term and really do a good job at it. Shamsankar, the OG, the first ever do it. The first forward deployed engineer. He's been on the show. Exactly. Yeah. I think I think, you know, obviously, you know, you guys know this too, but I think the biggest

bottleneck in AI is quickly becoming implementation, right? Where, you know, we already have very good LMs. We have already very good technology. It's just a matter of getting them into the hands of everyday people and the broader industry. And I think, you know, go-to-market motions are evolving to, like, actually fit this this forward-deployed engineer role or basically you have to, like, customize your AI solutions to, you know, everyday, everyday customers. So I think forward-deployed engineers is where a lot of really good.

talent will converge and at paraform what we're seeing is not only companies like Palantir but also you know companies your traditional companies like you know that they're also like looking to hire for deployed engineers so that's one trend we see emerging very quickly yeah any commentary you mentioned Soham Parak the Indian engineer who works at three to four startups at the same time he Suhail says he's been praying on YC companies multiple people are hidden in the timeline now saying that they fired this guy. That feels like something where we need almost like an inverse LinkedIn because clearly he can pull jobs off of his LinkedIn and say he just worked at one place at a time.

But do we need some sort of reputation score? Could that be abused? How does that evolve? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's also interesting to think about like the kind of remote work versus in person. Like this obviously wouldn't have happened if it was in person and you have to validate things. But I think there's a really a lot of interesting things there.

For example, you know, I think with AI, like I think AI can be incredibly helpful in the recruiting process, making it more efficient, but there's also going to be a lot more spam. There's a lot, like, recruiting is always driven by like this power law where unfortunately there's only a small amount of very good people and a large amount of, you know, sort of it's like a long tail, right? And I think with AI, I think that trend will like even accelerate. So I actually think that having a human in the loop to vet these things out. And not only just these things, but like think about like culture fit, interpersonal dynamics. Do I like you? Like these kind of things are actually like very much like what recruiters are effective at. So I think, you know, I think Paraform can help, you know, basically prevent these situations. Yeah. Yeah, one question just getting into, I'm sure this question came up in various pitch meetings and throughout building the whole company. There's back in the early internet days, the dot com era, every CEO said, hey, we're going to need way less people. And people are saying that again right now.

how would you answer that question? You're obviously building a talent platform. Is like, you know, and I'm sure people, you know, might say, well, what happens in a year if the hiring market gets racked? How is that going to impact your business? But I'm curious how you, you know, see that market evolving. Yeah, I think fundamentally in terms of value creation, if you think about it from that perspective, like I remember seeing a story where when cursor, windsurf, these tools became so mainstream. you know, like these Fortune 500s, you know, they were asked, hey, are you going to hire less engineers because, you know, can one person do more? And they actually said, no, because of these tools, we're going to hire even more engineers who can use this to be even more effective, right?

I think at the end of the day, like, there is a ton of value to be created. There's a lot more innovation to, you know, continue to happen. So I think that actually we're always going to need people. It's just that each person will be more effective. So I think we actually have a very optimistic view when it comes to like the human and AI collaboration. And I think another thing is, yeah, like we talked about like the sports Asian analogy, I think each talent will, you know, become more and more valuable. So, you know, maybe the frequency of higher may decrease, but the value of each higher increases. And when

it comes to sort of like a success-based model like Paraform, I think the value we capture is sort of actually increasing even more with this trend. So yeah, I guess like not too worried there. Yeah, talk to us about where the value is occurring and where it's landed historically and where it's going forward. Like when I've hired engineers through recruiting agencies, typically the company pays like one month or two months of salary. So it's like a percentage. And then there's some sort of clawback if they don't make it after three months.

Sarah Gwell was talking about how some folks are helping AI researchers negotiate and they're taking a cut of the pay. And it seems like they're taking it from the researcher. Because if I can get you five more, five percent more, that could be millions of dollars. You're fine paying me a million. bucks for that negotiation. Then there's platforms. So do you see that economic equation shifting from the company paying to the employee

paying to platform getting comped? How does that evolving? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's our go examples also like exactly like what that's what sports agents. And even in the music industry, I think that's what they kind of do. But yeah, yeah, to answer your question, I think where we are creating value is actually while keeping quality, you know, consistent and maybe even better, we're actually reducing the time to hire significantly. So, you know, like every customer cares. The number one thing they care about

is, you know, the best candidates fast, right? So the metric we look at is time to hire. And Paraform is making revenue by filling the most difficult roles in the world. And we, our average time to hire is under one month. And I think when it comes to efficiency, I think, we're what happens is at every step of the procurement process or the recruiting funnel, we're making it really, really efficient. I think we're basically decreasing downtime. For example, if you want to work with a recruiting agency, you're relying on word of mouth, you never know whether they're good or not before you work with them. And there's a ton of these little things that waste your time and obviously cost. But at Paraform, based on what our customers are looking for, we're able to match them

with the best possible recruiters, based on their track record, their candidate network. We have so much data on them that we're able to do like an instant good match of like best recruiter for the best role. So that already saves like weeks. And most customers find the candidate that they want, they end up hiring within the first week or two of posting on Paraform. And these are like director of engineering at, you know, high touch. Like these are like very, very difficult roles. So I think that's where we create value. It's, you know, reducing the time to hire while maintaining an improving quality. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. I think we had a, I'm coming back to me now.

I think we had a call maybe in 2023 early on. So it's amazing, amazing to see your progress. And congratulations on the new round. Decided to, excited to follow along. We'll talk to you soon. How much of your day. Really quickly, let me tell you about graphite. Graphite.

Dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub's ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. We had, we had a $52 million series B from Not too long ago. The Anthropics Anthology Fund with Menlo Ventures. We had breakfast with a friend of the show Bailey Barrow this morning. And he honestly wouldn't stop talking about graphite.

He's absolutely obsessed. He really was stoked about it. Graphite fanboy. He said he's running the TBPN stack. He's got all of our sponsors. Linear graphite goes down the left. It's all good stuff. Harvey, Asana, ramp, Replit.

They basically got every logo. They got every logo. They got every logo. But head over to graphite.dev and check it out yourself. Who do we got next? Well, we have some more timeline posts. So Mike Knoop, he's been on the show before talking about ARC AGI. Arc AGI 3 was just announced, the AI benchmark from Francois Chalet and Mike Noop.

And this came as unexpected. Aren't people still? They're still struggling with ARC AGI 2. That's right. But the goal for ARC V2 was to endure 12 to 18 months. The goal for the B3 is over three years. And so he's talked about this before. When you design a benchmark, you have to assume that if the current models are scoring 50% right now in your benchmark, they are going to solve it in weeks.

Like it's going to be days. People won't even bother with it. We were talking about this with the IMO with some folks from cognition. You know, it's like the IMO is so close to being solved that people aren't even really focused on it anymore because they're like, of course we can do that. Let's not bother with it. And so the team was saying when you're designing a benchmark, you need to target not only will it get 1%. It'll get 0%. You need to imagine a benchmark that in a year, the AI will still be scoring like negative 100%.

Like it will get every question like so wrong that it's actually. deducting even more points. Exactly. Like you need to you need to really think through the philosophy of what makes a really, really hard benchmark. And they've done it at Arc AGI and we're really happy to support the team over there. So if you're building a foundation model, head over and give it your best shot. And if you're a human, go try and solve one of these prizes. It's pretty fun. They're pretty fun. More breaking news. Quinton Farmer, one of the co-founders of Tollins has announced a Series A led by Ribo. Over. Coastal Ventures. Congratulations. They launched just a few months ago. They have three million downloads, $12 million run rate, and now adding this $20 million series A. Wait, is this that? This is the one they're using fun like, it's like Tomogachi almost. I think it's like purple, right, purple dino things. No, purple aliens. Yeah. Alien best friend. Yep. So brilliant. Absolutely ripping. 76,000 reviews on the iOS App Store, 4.8. Wow. Incredible. An alien best friend. Very cool.

And somehow less dystopian than the AI boyfriend. Yeah, Wired has an article today that just came out, what could an healthy AI companion look like? So if you're looking for a healthy AI companion. I love it. Why don't you bring the gong for them and then we'll bring in our next guest? Let's do it. Let's do it.

Hit that gong, Jordy for tolin. Congratulations. To the team over there, you're welcome to come on the show. And you're welcome to send one of your alien friends over to the show to do the interview for you. Send him on. Send him on. Anyway, we have our next guest, A.I., coming on the stream. How are you doing?

Good to meet you. Doing very well. Great to meet you as well, and thanks for having me. Of course. Welcome to the stream. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company? Any breaking news for us? Awesome.

So my name is Amet. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Luma. At Luma, we are building basically what we consider to be the future of multimodal intelligence. That includes what comes after that. What comes after LLMs, building multi-modal models that learn from audio, video, language, image, all together. Our first product is video generation models that are able to generate video, audio, altogether. And currently we are working with Hollywood. We are working with advertising agencies.

We are working with also a lot of individual creators. And we have about multiple tens of millions of users. We just don't talk about the exact number of users. Sure, sure, sure. what explained to me multimodal models like are you trying to tokenize everything into some sort of standard format so that a an image a video code text it all appears as as tokens in the same kind of stream or are you creating a system that can kind of shift gears between one and the next that's that's great And this is basically the core differentiation. So right now, most people are doing the latter. Most of the AI labs that have large language models.

They're using those as backbones and trying to like, you know, teach them how to read image and video as token. But the problem with that approach is that, like, you know, the output is very, very subpar. And even on the most basic tasks, second generation deep learning models, which are like, you know, your convolution networks outperform on most VLM tasks, right? this is the first approach, which is you create a joint latent space where all of this information is in the same representation.

And then when you learn on it, it is quite analogous to how brain learns, like, you know, human brain. It's a bit, right? Audio, video, image, they're not really terribly different for us. Like, these are all just signals. And when we think of an event, like, let's say, dropping a glass, right? We can hear it in our head. We can see in our head and we also can predict, like, oh, if it's a piece of glass, it might break. So currently, this disparate approach of training a language model and a video model and an image model, things like that, this is going to get old very quickly because on language model side, like, we're kind of running out of data, right? Like, you know, as you're seeing the GPD5, or the previous thing that was called GPD5, 10 times more compute, 10 times larger model, but like the performance isn't much better than GPD4.

So it was retrogressively renamed to 4.5. On image and video model side, like, even the models we make today are kind of dumb. They're basically translators. They take text, right, like, you know, or prompt, and translate them into video, which is interesting, but that doesn't solve someone's problem. And the problem being, like, you know, hey, explain to me how something works. Or tell me this story, right? Or here is a, like, you know, here's the script, make me the whole thing. That needs a level of reasoning and understanding that these models don't have.

So when you combine them all together, then one, you solve the data problem. because you know just immense amount of image audio video data in the world and two you're able to build intelligence that goes beyond what our lens are able to do today talk to me about images in chat chbett do you think that there are multiple layers going on there i was shocked by the quality of text and then the quality of the studio gibbley moment the style it feels like style transfer on steroids yeah but i was particularly surprised they could do both and it felt like it felt almost like um two different layers running and I was trying to do some tests where I would have generate some text and then have a snake weave through in front and behind the text and it was kind of struggling with that and it was making me feel like maybe there was like a second pass here is that a reasonable theory and also I'm not saying that as like a knock on anything because if I went to a human and asked how a human would would design a birthday card with a you know, a dinosaur in the background and then happy birthday text on top, they would draw the

dinosaur and then they would use type setting or they would draw the text on top. And so I don't necessarily think that it's like the wrong path. I'm not knocking the strategy. I'm just curious about what is actually going on in that model because it was remarkable. But it raised a bunch of questions for me. Absolutely. So to the best of our understanding, basically they're doing like, you know, auto-regressive image generation as the first pass, right? That produces a blurry low-resolution image or somewhat high-resolution image, but you're missing sort of high-frequency details, and then you do a diffusion pass on it

to get to a decent quality image representation. So text is one thing, but I believe text actually, text rendering in image models, especially like the latest image models, and then what we're seeing in our next photon 2 model, that's actually getting very good. So that is not the problem.

You know what's really interesting, though, is structure. So when you do image rendering with just a diffusion model, like stable diffusion or like, name you a pick, there's really, like, you rely on the text encoder of the model to kind of tell you about the semantics of what the person is asking about. And then you just rely on the diffusion model to do all the intelligence. Let's say you're asking it, hey, what is 2 plus 2? If there's nothing in front of it, like an LLM that is able to say,

like, oh, users asking 2 plus 2, so let me draw equals to 4. If you don't have that, then these models have ridiculously zero understanding of whatever you're trying to say, right? It will just render 2 plus 2 equals 2 and stop doing it, right? That's what I mean, zero understanding. But when you have an LLM in, like, you know, generating it, or a thing that has good understanding of language and it's unified, so they call it the 4-0 Omni, right? Then, in language space, especially within the model, you can reason about.

it that like oh two plus two should be four and let me render that now to what i believe though gpt four o is is still a system rather than just a model sure right so then you type something it still goes through gpt right uh they do all the prompt enhancement and and reasoning about it in language space and then give it to the model and it does a very good job of rendering it but when you ask for like you know complex layouts then i think that that strength starts to show But of course you gave an example of like, you know, the snake coming in and out. So this is again the question of prompt alignment. And valid is good.

It's not perfect yet. Do you have any reaction to in the Wall Street Journal today, there's Hollywood wants AI protection. There's a lot of back and forth there. I was particularly shocked that there's been a number of- Save us. Save us. I mean, there's been a number of interesting moments in AI imagery and AI video. Obviously, like the narrative, the general narrative is like the technologists are like, this is amazing.

we've created this amazing algorithm and I agree with that and then the backlash is like we don't want all the you know the the photographers to be put out of business but the more interesting stories that have emerged are like V-O3 and Google seem to be able to generate Disney IP with perfect accuracy no problems and maybe that's because they have some deal with YouTube and then when the Ghibli moment happened I was like wait like like GPD images and chat GPD would reject different things for for safety reasons, but also for intellectual property reasons, but not Studio Ghibli, which is a style, but it's also intellectual property. And it's not exactly like the cleanest thing. So, but maybe there's a deal behind the scene. So how do you think, how do you think like the, the,

the interplay between the startups and the technologists and the legacy media, Hollywood, Washington, D.C.? Like, what stories are you tracking? How is that evolving? Right. So there's two axes that you're talking about. One is basically the adoption and job losses and things like that, right? That is a narrative. And the second is the IP itself and how do you think about that, right? So on the first one, it's actually at this point a foregone conclusion that unless Hollywood and the traditional way of producing media changes, they are on a path to extinction. There is really no two ways about it. And of course, there are arguments like, oh, but it can't do this, it can't do this, it can't do this. The thing is, like, you know, we spent last year, 2024, building out this infrastructure for training these really large, really capable models.

And, like, you know, it trains on petabytes and petabytes of data and much more complex than LLM. So because LLM's like, you know, of course, they're complicated to train. But you still have, like, very little data. The amount of engineering that is required to train multimodal models is insane. Anyway, now that the infrastructure exists, the rate. of progress is very, very fast. We saw the same thing in language, right? Initially, everyone had to build from 0 to 1,

but once you have 0 to 1, they're like, you know, turning out models takes a quarter, sometimes less, right? So anything that they think, oh, it can't do today, yet like, you know, oh, can't do 4K, well, tomorrow's kind of, like, we already do 4K. Oh, it's not able to let me control, like, you know,

exactly the pose I do. We launched this thing called Modify Video where you can give it your camera feed as a prompt. And you can control exactly any camera movement, any pose, anything that you want, right? So we work with some of our great partners in Hollywood, and like, you know, some of them are very forward. Some of them are very much not there today.

But when you think about what a studio is, right, like a studio is two parts, a financial institution that is responsible for like, you know, green lighting things and managing like, okay, this is there, we do go and this is there, we don't go, and all these kind of things. And a production part, right? The production part largely works by contracting other smaller production houses, but generally that's the structure. AI, especially generative media,

changes the economics so wildly from like $100,000 a minute and to sometimes a million dollars a minute all the way down to like, you know, $10 a minute, $100 a minute. When that is the level of economic change and you follow the money, there's just no scenario in which you don't come out thinking that like, okay, the old way of doing is not going to work.

Yeah, an interesting thing I've been thinking about is if the cost of production drops by an order of magnitude, just by being able to shoot some, maybe you're shooting some scenes with regular actors and cameras and union crews, but then you're able to create certain scenes or moments. It seems like the Internet has this insatiable demand for content, and it feels like when you look at some parts of the sort of entertainment production stack, writer, like great writers might be more in demand than ever because they'll have to write more.

Like, but sort of like, you know, you can imagine a world where HBO is putting out, you know, an iconic, you know, potentially iconic new property or franchise or like shipping them monthly, right? When historically maybe they only had one. one big, you know, one or two massive releases a year, like a Game of Thrones. And so I actually think that the consumer is going to win in the industry, the people that adapt within the industry and say, I'm going to lean into using this tool so I can write better, I can produce, or even the idea that I'm sure you're, I'm curious if scripts are now, certain scripts are now being encouraged.

Like, bring your script with kind of an idea of what this world looks and feels like so that it's not just like this static, you know, text-based concept, right? Show me, give me the pilot, basically. And it's top of mind because today we release an ad that we handmade, farm-to-table content for one of our partners Wander. And there's like a few scenes in there that you probably could have AI generated. We didn't, but they cost us real money, right? Like that we could have potentially stripped out.

And it feels like we're so close. Yeah. So here's the over and under on that, actually. The demand for video is absolutely absurd. You're right. So average person is watching about three and a half hours of video on their phones every day. I don't know if it's good, but it's a big number. We're certainly, you know, might be contributing to that. But it's true. And the thinking about that is very simple that people don't like to read. If they could watch an explanation, watch how to do something, watch a piece of news, whatever have you, they would do that over reading it or reading about it, right?

Like all day, all night. So that means for entertainment, yes, like, generally entertainment, we think about it, like, okay, you make it once and then millions of people will watch it again and again, all these kind of things. But when you think about, like, news and you think about question and answer and you think about explanations and all these kind of things,

that's ridiculous, right? Like, you know, you can't generate a video for every explanation for every scenario on every planet. It has to be done dynamically. It has to be done automatically, and it has to be done with AI. Now, the number I track is, okay, for every person on the planet,

like, you know, out of that 3.5 hours that they watch, if we can generate at least an hour of video a day, that is what the success metric looks like for us. So that is, looks like about 6 billion hours of video per day. Generate it. One, there is no human capacity that can actually generate that kind of video, right? Editors can do that. And two, there's no computer in the universe at the moment to be able to actually do that.

So, but that is what to track towards because video is now the substrate of information on the internet. There's two things happening to the internet, right? One, it's becoming zero-click, which is like, you know, you don't hunt around in websites and try to like, oh, this answer, this answer. No, you just ask an LLM or now Google also has AI mode. If you're in the labs experiment, then you just get the damn answer. And second thing that is happening is the substrate of information is changing from from text to video. This is what people do. So if you just extrapolate from this trend, video production has to change.

Entertainment has to change and people who don't come along, like, you know, it's going to be a very hard journey for that. Advertising on the other, like we can talk about advertising for about an hour. And like, you know, Ken was very illuminating for me in that way about, like, how people are thinking about it. Yeah, I want to get the full update from Khan. Is this your first time going? Break us down. Yes.

Well, yeah, this is the Khan Film Festival, right? I mean, one of the exciting things about what you're doing is when you look at the cost structures of consumer brands, which we both have exposure to, so much. Oftentimes consumer brands are held back because they don't have net new ad creative. And so not only is it a cost, it just takes a long time to produce. And so you have these gaps where a brand will see lower performance, you know, slowing growth, etc. And it's really just because they don't have access to net new ad creative that can drive new demand. And so that's an entire area that I don't think that's not being fully priced in yet, how the great brands will actually be able to grow faster because of just being able to day by day generate net new.

you add creative. Yeah. Give us the full con recap. Sorry, answer that question and then I want the con recap. Yeah. I think the answer to that question and can is almost the same. So yes, it was my first time. Beautiful place, to be honest with you.

But really interesting. Like, you know, one, everybody, I mean, it's not an AI event. It's not an AI conference. But literally, every conversation was about AI. Every conversation. But what's really interesting is that maybe 1% of the people knew what the hell they were talking about. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, everybody's excited. Yes, but I got blisters in my years hearing the word agent.

All these, like, you know, agent really? Yeah. All these agency people pitching, right, like, oh, we have AI agents to do this and we have AI agents. We are building this to do this. In fact, like, you know, Adobe was there, and their salespeople were trying to pitch non-existent AI agents to people and trying to log them into three-year contracts, right? It was palpable, the level of desperation. Shots fired.

It's insane. And when you go and ask, like, okay, what do you mean? Right? We talk to everyone. And what is it? It's a prompt box where you can say. select a bunch of models. That's it. That is not an AI agent. That doesn't do anything. Senator, that's SaaS.

That is SaaS. Exactly. And the issue is that basically, like, you know, a lot of people are thinking, like, okay, well, you know, developing this is basically like, you know, nothing. And we'll just, like, produce the models and it's going to happen. Developing models, developing agents in creative space, in visual space is very difficult work. Right. Like, you know, you need new kinds of models, the kinds we are training. Because think about it, Gemini is the best VLM that is out there right now, and it is barely able to meet about 3% of our benchmark

of visual, like, iteration. Let's say you're talking about brands. So we met quite a few, including our partners like Coca-Cola and others, right? If you want to make an ad, and then let's not think about a Super Bowl ad, if you just want to make creatives, like, you know, say 100 ads for different markets,

getting them to be right, getting them to be on brand, getting them to look exactly like you know how they should look like that's a hard job like current image and video models as I was telling you like are dumb they will just like you know make whatever they have no idea and then when you use BLMs to critique them the outputs are barely any good so it's you need a new kinds of you need like the next thing after LLMs the next kind of models that are able to understand visual information instructions and and what makes something engaging that level of information is what you need like

LMs are getting there, right, like, for stories. When you write text, LMs are now making things that are very engaging. Now we need that next jump in models. So that was my overall impression in Canada. The second thing I felt like, you know, by next year, this place is going to look very, very different. Like, you know, fortunes are going to change significantly because when you talk to some of the most senior folks in, like, various agencies, you know, whatever have you, the writing is on the wall for them. Like, they employ hundreds of thousands of artists and, like, you know, people. And they are asking us, like, oh, how do we actually do this more efficiently?

And the thing is, like, that's incorrect way of thinking about it. So, long and short, like, it was not an AI conference, but it ended up being an AI conference where nobody knew what the hell actually the AI is, and consequently nobody knew what is coming. What areas do you think are safe from disruption? We talked to a photographer who does stuff in CPG and he was saying there actually could be a situation where if you're McDonald's, you can't generate AI images of your burger because it could be... There are already FTC rules around you have to use the real burger because there were all these like the false advertising lawsuits where they show the perfect cinematography burger that was perfectly made. and looked amazing and then you'd go expectation versus reality and those those memes went viral enough and the the flat disgusting burger bubbled up and eventually I guess there was a lawsuit and so now you know and even in if you're selling a phone you have to say screen images simulated or if you're driving on a track you have to say close course professional driver that's for safety reasons obviously drink responsibly if it's an alcoholic so the FTC has a bunch of rules do we think there'll be anything there on the

I said. I think those rules will change too. Yeah. Basically. So currently, like, so the burger example, right? The problem is you are over-representing the product you're selling. Yes. Right.

It is not the problem of the tooling you used to make it with. You could have made it how the thing actually is. I mean, that would look very disappointing in the ads. But you could have made it closer to how the thing actually is, since that, like, you know, people aren't misleading, thinking like, oh, I'm going to get this big giant thing, which is very fluffy. and then you get in like, oof, this is the thing, right?

So it's really not about the tool you used. It is about the intention of what you have behind it. You clearly wanted to mislead. So I think the FTC rule is right. But the rules should not be, oh, they should not be created with CGI or with AI or whatever have you. The rules should be, don't misrepresent your product.

And for me, basically, the singular thing to think about is follow the money. Right. So when you're, actually in advertising, the point you were making is really, really salient, which is advertising is all about stats, right? And something that performs well, something doesn't perform well, it's very hard to predict. How quickly can you replace the thing that is not performing well? And in the gradient of the things that are performing well, that will lead to the best

output. Today, that cannot be done automatically at all in any visual form of advertising. That is done for text advertising. It has been algorithmic for a very long time now, and that results in very, very good outputs. So when companies actually are faced with the idea like, okay, well, like, you know, on our other products where we can do this, it performs so well. And on these products, no, the regulations, they will lobby for the regulations to change on this kind of thing. And I think the regulation should be, don't misrepresent your product. Now, don't use AI. Yeah. Last question for me. What about more narrow AI use cases in Hollywood?

I'm interested in like just just like in the VFX pipeline there are one second let's do sorry I'm scheduling someone we're doing it live so my question now we're gonna cut this so it doesn't matter my question is more narrow VFX use cases like is there a single company that's just doing amazing green screen rotoscoping I've seen runway do that in like kind of the prosumer arena. But there's so many different pieces of the pipeline that I think artists would be much less jostled by if it's just, hey, I have to track a camera all the time in 3D. You know, there's there there's services that do this using traditional like CPU-based pipelines

and solvers. There's IMUs that measure the movement of the camera. No one really cares about that particular. role it's kind of just a hassle that they have to deal with. Right. And so all sorts of different more minor vertical AI use cases, those feel like point solutions that could be deployed right now. People could go and get a foothold.

Maybe they expand to, oh, prompt to movie. But just in the meantime, like, how about we just speed up the rotoscoping? Yeah. I mean, why not? Right. So, for instance, like, you know, we released this thing. It's called refram. So what it does is you give it.

video in any aspect ratio and it's able to generate like you know any aspect ratio out of it without cropping so like it will generate like you know if you if you give it a 16 to 9 a vertical video and now you want to share it on on youtube for instance where like vertical videos don't perform well you want something like you know that is horizontal 16 or 16 to 9 ideally you can like you know generate any of these variants any number of these variants all you want and it's now point solution doesn't matter how the original video was made you could have totally created that clip using any traditional methods or whatever have you. So I think this is, so here's something interesting, right?

This is not what you asked me, but I promise I'll lead to the answer you're talking about. So at least in my life, since I've been conscious about it, there's been like, you know, two really big changes before AI. One was mobile. And mobile was a very large consumer side change, right? You know, people change their behaviors drastically. Like, you know, not overnight, obviously, but it looked like overnight, to be honest with you. And then the second one happened about a few years later, which was cloud. And cloud, consumers didn't really, it didn't affect them too much, right?

Maybe enterprises, yeah. But it affected companies. And companies were done inside out. Things they used to do on paper, things they used to do on print, things they used to do, like, you know. So these were two very radical transformations. But they happened to different segments of the world. AI is for the first time, at least. in my memory, a transformation that is happening on consumer and enterprise levels.

It's basically reviring companies from the inside, and it is changing consumer behavior like nothing else before, right? So coming back to your point now, you can take the slow route. You can say, like, okay, well, like, you know, let's do aeroscoping. But the tiny studio down the street, like, you know, that used to probably just like, you know, create frames for you up until last year, is now going to start releasing stuff that, like, you know, looks, kind of as good as yours.

And now what they can do, like, you know, at a fast clip, and they're releasing, like, weekly episodes and then iterating on it. And how long will it take before their IPs actually bigger than yours? Yeah, right? That's a good question. We have seen this happen on YouTube again and again and again and again.

Cocoa, right? Yeah. Like, it started from nothing and look at this now. So bigger than a lot of Disney IPs, right? And Disney, I think Disney bought them, Disney tried to buy them, something happened there. Yeah. So this is basically the difference.

You can do, like, you know, and there's nothing wrong with it, you should do the small things. But if you are in the business of producing content, if you are in the business of thinking about advertising, if you're in the business of touching pixels, the world is not the same as it was two years ago. And not in a small way, in a very, very deep way. While it might not solve the whole thing for you at the moment, but you have to start really thinking about what, would the economics look like a year from now, two years from now and five years from now? And what should the business be like exactly? It's great. Well, this has been great.

We would love to have you back on to there's so many different topics we can cover. And I appreciate how freely that you're willing to speak on so many different topics. That's the only way? That's the only way. You just got to be yourself. Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon. Thanks so much for having on. Cheers. See you guys. And we have some breaking news from. Tbpn let's go to the printer cam which I believe the timeline here it goes printer cams ready terminal I see it spinning up we got some breaking news we got some breaking news what is this he's wanted he's wanted he's wanted timeline is in

turmoil special segments starting now I love this because it's so Hampurik just became famous in the last few hours not for the reasons that he would necessarily to be famous. No, no. Is this a real picture of him? Do we know? I don't know. But this is from Var Epsilon. Says breaking meta, open AI, anthropic and Google have signed Soham Parikh as fractional chief AI officer. Obviously a joke, but he's been on the timeline all day because apparently he's been working at multiple YC companies, multiple companies at the same time. What's funny is that we were working on a, during the show, we were working on a post. We couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of Soham. And some

fan just did it for us and nailed it and got a thousand likes. So thank you. So Matt Parker's from anti-metal was actually so-hom was their first engineering hire in 2022. Really smart and likable, enjoyed working with him. We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go. I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table. Matt says hiring So-Hum is a new right of passage, DBAH. Any great company should go through.

So Sue Hale was the first person to call this out. He said this morning, or actually it was last night. So this has been building. PSA, there's a guy named Soham Parikh in India who works at three or four startups at the same time. He's been praying on YC companies and more. Gary is not going to be happy about this. You do not. You don't want to put up the bat.

You don't want Gary people to put up the Gary sign. Nope. You don't want to go up against it. But apparently he's been praying on YC companies. I fired this guy in his first. first week and told them to stop lying, scamming people. Oh, this is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratica Meta? Tyler put this in that you want to read this one for us? He's been all over the place. Roy said I interviewed this guy yesterday. No way. That's amazing. Tyler, break it down for us.

What is Pratica have to say? Okay. So apparently, I mean, this is still unconfirmed. I've actually, I've sent him an email. Okay. I've attained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one. We'll see. But he says the dude clears interviews. He's good with that. After clearing, he has junior people doing all the work. And he has around 20 employees and interns, basically a small dev shop. Wow. So he's just figured out the economics of like, hey, if I'm making 200k or 300k, he's basically signing people do a 20K a month retainer.

He knows he's going to have some churn. Yep. But it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity. This is fascinating. This is fascinating. I wonder if he's vested. I wonder if he's vested at some shares on the balance sheet at any of these companies.

This is crazy. Ken Watanah says, Sohan Parik is the Bonnie Blue of YC. very vulgar. SAR says all recruiting must stop until we get Soham on TBPN to figure out what is going on. Well, open invite to Sohom. We'll talk to them. Santiago says so hum on TBPN when.

Daniel, growing Daniel says Microsoft just laid out, here we go. laid off 9,000 workers, all of them. Soham parique. If you're CEO, if he doesn't have a Soham Parique email in their inbox, it's time to start polishing your resume

because he hasn't reached out. It means he's not. how bullish on you. Austin Allred says must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that Soham Perik has been hired 79 times in the past four years. And then Matthew Berman says, are you think AI is killing software jobs? Tell that to Soham Perik. Signal says, not now, honey. There is a Soham gate happening on X. It is really funny. It's basically say, I'm going to build a dev shop, but it's going to be my name and I'm you know he he probably no he probably could have had a just very successful dev shop yeah yeah but but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops you want to hire

founding engineers like you know the title matters and the idea like okay we have a full-time employee we got somebody who's delivering they're a high performer our team is cracked we don't have to outsource the whole thing with Uber remember uber's initial buildout was all outsourced and it was like it was like a mark on the company obviously didn't affect them. They went on a generational run. It was fantastic. But there's this there's this idea of like if you're building a startup, you need the founders need to be coding, the employees need to be coding. It needs to be handcrafted. You can't outsource. True. You know, he's proven us all wrong, I guess. True. So we're working on getting him live. We got another post here from growing Daniel. Has he gotten back to you, Tyler, on email? It seems like

he might not come on today, but maybe we can pitch him and get him on. Hasn't got back. I sent it 20 minutes go okay um yeah no he doesn't he doesn't have he's sorry he needs to come out and say he's sorry yeah and he needs to say and this is the right time to launch uh his his dev shop yeah yeah and it should be called the dev shop of soham parique yes because i mean i don't know maybe he's delivering but uh growing daniel has a post here chief of staff brings list of applicants really likes this one indian guy asked if it's a rune or soham she doesn't understand pull out illustrated diet explaining the difference between Rooms. And so she laughs and says,

it's a good engineer, sir. It's a so-hom. Oh, that's a wild pest. That's great. Oh, this is great. Anyway, anything else that we need to cover from the news today, apparently crumble cookies have 62%

of your daily calorie allowance, Nick Carter says. Saying on So-HOM, Gabby Goldberg says, I'm at the intersection of So-Hom, Perik, and Worker 17. Oh yeah, Worker 17. Oh, we got another one. Growing Daniel's going on an absolute terror.

We're just going to keep these coming. Pull this up in the chat. Posting. So-Hum-Pereek, new CS grads. Yeah, So-Hum-Perex really soaking up the jobs. The job market. It's the power long. He'd been sitting over this post being like,

the job market is actually fine. You guys are just bad at interviewing. Yeah. Jacob Postel says introducing our newest products. Soham, the AI coding agent that can work for anyone, any code-based 24-7. We've been testing in stealth for a while, and results are looking excellent. Please reach out. I wonder, yeah, I wonder if he's a cursor user or what he's got.

Maybe he's got Devin under the hood. Maybe he's got Claude code. Who knows? We definitely need to know So-Hom's tech stack for sure. That is interesting. Ryan Peterson says So-Hom never even applied to Flexport, sad face emoji. Ryan, Ryan would have caught him. Delete that.

Don't say that out of love. Wow. Adam over at Warp, CTO has a few. He got to a round two. Soham got to a round two over at Warp. Sounds like he didn't make a hire. So. It's fascinating.

Daniel says, Worker 17's name, Sohan Parique. Antonio says he was marked safe from Sohan Parique today. He did tear up the valley today. Completely. completely anything else we should cover in the timeline we have a someone in the House of Representatives is coming out against car headlights they're saying they're too bright and I'm gonna do something about this brightness has doubled in

the last decade but manufacturing standards haven't budged in 40 years drivers and oncoming traffic deserve visibility it matters for seniors in rural roads are you anti bright lights I am I think we could tone them down a bit yeah I think we've down a bit. Interesting. I don't drive at night much. But when I do, I'm reminded that lights kind of peaked probably in the early 2000s. They were solid.

Yeah. We didn't have to keep improving. They also got bluer because they went to LED. I think it will lead to tungsten. Widespread blindness. I would say if you're driving a car, just light a candle and hold out a lantern. Like on a fishing rod almost in front of your car? Yeah, no, no, no, just while you're driving like this.

Yeah, just hold out the candle, the candle lantern. That's great. We got a highlight signal before we head out. Signal Labs is unapologetically a rapper company. We use state-of-the-art models made by others and give credit where credits do. Our first product is so simple. When you see it, you'll probably say, wait, that's it. That's really the point.

That's our ideal reaction. I've been using it for two weeks and genuinely can't imagine life without it at this point. We don't have any evals, no real QA other than our own intuition. but it surprises you and makes you feel something. Hopefully everyone enjoys as much as I do. So very excited for Signal. Signal. Get us an invite.

Yeah. Send the invite. We'd love to test drive it. And we'd love to have you on the show when you launch. Can't wait. Anything else worth covering before we hop off? I mean, there's so much news. There's so much news, John.

You're living. This Flo actually hired. Flo Crivellia? Yeah, he hired him a week ago, fired him this morning. No way. After seeing Sue Hale's post. It's just funny that the guy wouldn't kind of mix up the name. You know, it's a small industry.

Stuff's going to get around. But anyway. It is crazy. Yeah, you'd think different names, different GitHub profiles, different LinkedIn's. Like, that wouldn't be that hard. Actually, actually, like, the best way to run this, like, scheme would be to set up a number of different folks. and instead of having one person with 20 junior devs underneath, have five people each with three underneath.

So you're still doing the subcontracting, but there's only one face per client, essentially. And this is basically what market... You don't want to give them too many ideas, John. This is basically what marketing, like you go to, like, RGA or Wyden, they'll be like, here's your killer, you know, Don Draper. Like, this is your account representative.

They'll be coming up with the ideas. And they come in, once a quarter, give you a presentation on you should do the Super Bowl ad. And investment banks do the same thing. Hey, we'd love to do a private placement. We'd love to take you public. Here's this 200-page deck on why your business is amazing and how much money we can get for it.

Who built that deck? A bunch of analysts working 100-hour weeks. That's right. For sure. Well, the next 24 hours matter a lot for Soham. Perique. We will be watching. We'll hopefully get him on the show tomorrow.

Do you think he's going to raise money? he might he i i definitely saw somebody joking around saying that he uh raised a series a from uh some friends of ours that's year one that's year one yeah it's totally possible um but but but do you think it would the greatest the greatest irony would be is he's like sorry guys i've you know what that guy was joking about a few minutes ago of saying like yeah i've actually been building a coding agent I named it after myself. This was the best way to test if it works. It's not as good as a one-X engineer right now,

but it's good enough to keep a job for a few months. Yep. And so anyways, we will be watching his response. Big narrative violation on Soham. It is really dominating the timeline. Sohomb gate. Oh, yeah, you posted it at Timeline and Turmoil, buy markets and turmoil, sell timeline and turmoil.

Then I'm seeing pictures from our billboard. Yeah, it's funny. You just refresh and you just get pure soham. Everyone's having fun. I love a good current thing. You know, we started the show with the current thing. It was Erebor, the new crypto bank. We ended the show.

We lived through it. We experienced the transition. The old current thing is out. The new current thing is Soham Parique. Fantastic. I wonder, we, we, we, we, we, Got to get his tech stack, and I want to know how much he's actually pulling in. How much do you think he is?

I would expect it. I would expect if people are triangulating now that he was maybe had three to four jobs at once, I'm going to make the bold bet that he's actually has, like, I could see him having 20, 30. You think so? Just imagining a really hardworking guy running a death shop. And a lot of companies aren't posting publicly about it. And he could be just finding some random SaaS companies. in the middle of nowhere.

Not a lot of management oversight. Companies aren't in founder mode. He ships a few PRs a day. And he's just chugging along. Over under top line, 2 million. I'm going over. Over. The challenge would be daily standups, right?

Yep. It's like. You've got to see him. But then again. But he's kind of on the precipice of this video AI models. could have other versions of itself voice modulation and AI generated images. So you can have his employees. The thing you can do is you can puppeteer the image.

So you have a different person, real humans joining, real human. He just needs this video that he loops and it plays at the right time. It says, nothing from my end. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody's going to post that. That's definitely a banger.

Like so Humpharek when he says, nothing from my end. Thanks. This is the, we're going to go through all of the. All the current thing memes. The honey, how did you get, how did our family get so rich? Oh, my, your father. Your father had. Work did seven different jobs with a team of junior engineers.

This was kind of, I mean, this was happening more in 2021 where somebody would have a big tech job, but and they were kind of, they were kind of just, they weren't working too hard. And they would get, they would just start moonlighting at a startup. That was a common thing during. And I expected a company to start that actually enabled anonymous work. Right? Didn't, it was very much like, it's typically a top signal when people start moonlighting too hard. Yeah, probably. So you've been on it.

You've been close to calling the top, toying with it. I've been toying with calling the top. We'll see. After the Sohams saga, pretty sure every few, pretty sure very few YC companies will hire remote Indians. Classic case of one guy exploiting high trust society, which leads to downfall of the others around him says Varanom Goresh from Warp, I think you already read this, but Gary Tan chimed in, he said, if this is true, it would be sad.

The Sohom Saga doesn't seem widespread to me. He seems like a five standard deviation above the mean kind of fraud. Decent startup idea in here though, there's probably a space for remote employee certification. Interesting. Yeah, I was thinking about it like the, you should be able to have an AI that looks over the GitHub.

The GitHub, when I first heard about this, I thought he was directly moonlighting. Like, it was like from, from, you know, you get a job on the East Coast. You get a job in Chicago. You get a job in Denver and you get a job in San Francisco. And then, yeah, you're just going from one stand up to the next. And then you work three hours at one job, three hours of the next job, three hours of the next job, three hours of the next job. And I thought it was just him.

I didn't realize that he had teams under him. But in that, in that scenario, you would think she should be able to see, oh, well, like all the, all the poll requests come in at the same time every day. and he's not doing like, he's, he's not sending Slack messages randomly throughout the day. He sends them only in this two-hour block. But that's not true if he's sending, like, no, there's actually two or three people that are dedicated to your account basically like all day long, right? So I don't know how you, I don't know how you do remote certification. You need to have like the camera on. We need World Coin.

This is a World Coin application. Atlas says breaking. Sohan Parik closes a $15 million round led by A16D, 2000, likes. This is great. Reed Hoffman says. Reed Hoffman's chiming in? Yeah. So do you think Soham Perich's LinkedIn?

What do you think Sohan Parikh's LinkedIn header is? This is hilarious. The founder of LinkedIn chiming in. It's great. Opens timeline. It's all Sohan. The timeline's in terminal, baby. You would think that this would be something that Bookface would have solved, right?

One of the issues here is that when people, make a poor hire. They don't exactly want to go tell a bunch of other people that they messed up. And so you can imagine people just experiencing this and not wanting to talk about it. And now it's becoming a meme to talk about it. There's a guy. I think this account was just created. So hum.

Well, it was created in February. He says, I think he's just joking around. He must have just changed the name. I was fired from being a founding engineer, principal engineer, back end engineer in front end engineer today. If anyone is hiring for all four. This is crazy.

This is clearly a fake account. He says, I make more than 99% of YC startups. This is the real reason they're mad. This is really funny. Everyone asks, where is so humperic? Nobody asks, how is so pomperique. I'm glad we found this account. Whoever's writing is great.

Elon can work at nine startups. Jamie Diamond can be on the board of multiple companies. but when you do it, it's scam. Oh, this is going to be a good account to follow. Everyone should follow this. Phantom thread underscore D. This is definitely not. I mean, if this is actually him and he's a great poster too,

that's a quadruple threat, quintuple threat. We'd love to see it. Aiden over at OpenAI said, Hey, sorry, was out this morning. Who's Soham Perique must be a pretty popular name because I think my accountant and front-end contractor have the same name. Wild. I think the next move from here prediction

clearly gives Soham a maxed-out contract. For sure. It's just too good of a meme. Trade deal in the works. Get him to America. Shoot a viral video. This is a no-brainer. There's got to be a viral video in here somewhere.

We are actively monitoring the situation for sure. for sure we are yeah bobby says looking back through our engineering applicants and soham never applied chat am i cooked yeah everyone shirts their email right now for soham it's amazing okay anyways i think that's a good place to wrap it has been a fun show today hopefully more breaking news on soham if you find him send him we'll talk to you soon leave us five stars on apple podcast and spotify and we will talk to you tomorrow have a great day bye Thank you.